ABSTRACT
British cinema’s eclectic base engendered a number of key genres which displayed considerable internal differences and emphases over the decades. While eclecticism was mostly founded on economic insecurity, it did, however, produce a variety of product which makes generic analysis a particularly useful way to assess the various representations of Britishness which competed for audiences’ attention. While popular cinema is by no means the entire corpus of a nation’s output, its ability to generate certain images at a mass level, particularly when cinema-going was at its peak in the 1940s, enables us to relate films to their political and cultural context. As we have already seen, particular genres represented notions of Britishness differently: while comedy was centred mostly on figures from outside London, historical films stuck very much to famous figures from history or on the expansion of Britishness under imperialism. To take the examination further, the following two chapters will assess the dominant and less dominant generic trends over the last half century of British cinema.
