ABSTRACT
The study of British cinema has flourished since the 1990s. From being the “unknown cinema”, as Alan Lovell called it (1972), British cinema is now detailed encyclopaedically in such publications as Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (Higson 1996), British National Cinema (Street 1997), Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Richards 1997), British Cinema: Past and Present (Ashby and Higson 2000), British Cinema in Documents (Street 2001), British Cinema: A Critical History (Sargeant 2005), The British Cinema Book (Murphy 2009, now in its third edition) and The Journal of British Cinema and Television. Much of this new research has assiduously mapped what Julian Petley (1986) dubbed the “lost continent”, revised and updated the canon of British cinema, and overturned such received ideas as that the 1970s produced little of interest (Shail 2008; Harper and Smith 2012) and that popular British cinema does not repay analysis. Particular attention has been paid to genres, such as the costume film (Harper 1994; Cook 1996; Higson 2003), the historical film (Sargeant and Monk 2002; Chapman 2005), the horror film (Chibnall and Petley 2002; Rigby 2004; Walker 2015), the crime film (Chibnall and Murphy 1999) and comedies (Sutton 2000; Mather 2006; Hunter and Porter 2012). There has been notable work too on early cinema and the 1930s (Low 1979; Higson 2002), film during the Second World War (Gledhill 1996; Chapman 1998) and the 1950s (Geraghty 2000; Harper and Porter 2003). No less important than simply filling in gaps, however, has been a new emphasis on the national cinema’s industrial and institutional contexts.
