ABSTRACT
Hollywood was, of course, partly a European invention, thanks initially to the arrival of eastern European migrants at the turn of the century, and the successive waves of immigration in the dark years of the 1930s. Where Britain’s own relationship to the intercultural circulation of the cinema is concerned, a number of key cycles provide the framework in the postwar period – the war film, the horror film, the comedy and the post-colonial films that deal with Africa and India. Looking at the cinema’s repertory of national iconography leads back, inevitably, to its representation of the ‘national’ itself, in this case its accounts of Britain and of Britishness. The films’ intercultural trajectories fall into different registers. In Chariots, the journey undertaken by the protagonists extends from the genteel environs of London, Cambridge and the Scottish Highlands as far as the Olympic stadium in Paris.
