ABSTRACT
British cinema of the late 1940s and early 1950s often turned to the theme of amnesia to portray questions of identity. The theme of amnesia in many of the films of the post-war period allows for explorations of forgetting the self and flirting with other potential identities and sexual attachments, unimaginable in the realm of realist cinema or the depiction of both male and female sexuality in war propaganda and the press. This chapter will examine amnesia and awakening in four melodramas, exploring how the depictions of psychological ailment differ along gendered lines. The chapter, first, looks at examples of male amnesiacs in the Gainsborough melodrama Caravan (1946) and Roy Ward Baker’s crime film The October Man (1947), and, second, looks at female amnesiacs in Arthur Crabtree’s Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil (1945). This chapter investigates the significance of both individual and collective remembering and forgetting in the construction of the nation and individual identities.
