ABSTRACT
For several decades after its emergence within universities during the 1960s, the scholarly study of cinema remained firmly under the spell of textual analysis. In its infancy, while still seeking to justify and substantiate its claim to being a valid scholarly discipline, the field adopted almost exclusively the methodological approaches deployed within the English departments from which it sprang. There was, and in some rare instances still is, a “persistent ambivalence towards anything that exists outside the text and beyond the edges of the screen” (Allen 2006: 15). While drawing explicitly from the intellectual lineage of literary studies certainly provided a relatively safe harbor from the derision of those who saw film as disposable entertainment unworthy of serious consideration, this beguilement with films themselves prevented other useful lines of enquiry from emerging. However, as the field has matured and the need to defend it reduced, more recent decades have been characterized by a broadening of the discipline’s methodological horizons. Since the mid-1980s, film studies has become highly interdisciplinary, benefitting from “contributors from different points on the disciplinary compass, including history, geography, cultural studies, economics, sociology and anthropology” (Maltby 2001: 3). In turn, this has dispelled the primacy of the text and refocused attention on other matters, such as film-goers, the flow of capital in the film industry and cinema buildings. This will be, of course, a reasonably familiar story for many, but my purpose here is not to revisit the history of film studies per se but rather to draw attention to ways in which the vanishing hegemony of the text produced a space for the history of national cinemas, including Britain’s, to be reconsidered through a range of lenses, including that of memory.
