ABSTRACT
The UK Film Council, the Government-sponsored body responsible for allocating public funds to film-making, declared in 2006 that ‘Cinema is an immensely powerful medium at the heart of the UK’s creative industries and the global economy. Cinema entertains, inspires, challenges and informs audiences. It helps shape the way we see and understand ourselves and the world’. Yet the task of examining the extent to which British cinema encourages us to ‘see and understand ourselves and the world’ is not entirely straightforward, since as this book demonstrates, British cinema is, and always has been, a complex site of representation. Additionally, the cinema audience for British films is relatively small since as noted in Chapter 1, US films continue to dominate the box-office and DVD sales; many British films do not get released or only reach art-house audiences, while some are broadcast on television. There is also the complicating issue of classification which persists in spite of the ‘cultural test’ for films to qualify for tax credit. Indeed, as we have seen, most analyses tend to begin with a preamble about how difficult it is to define a British film, especially since much of current production is funded by a variety of sources originating from several countries. The debate generally considers the amount of British ‘cultural content’ which may or may not be reflected in its personnel, locations and subjectmatter. Yet it is clear that many films engage with the multifarious aspects of living in Britain and that, as John Hill (in Vitali and Willemen, 2006: 11011) has observed, ‘while British cinema may depend upon international finance and audiences for its viability this may actually strengthen its ability to probe national questions’. Indeed, the need to differentiate products in the global market provides an economic rationale for displaying ‘British’ themes and identities on screen in an attempt to carve a niche in territories such as the United States, a market that is particularly difficult for foreign films to access. In addition, as the films discussed in this chapter demonstrate, the increasingly trans-national production context for British films
can sharpen their critical perspective on many aspects of British life and culture.
