ABSTRACT
As the above quotation indicates, the question of national cinema is complex and contentious. On the one hand, there is a British film industry with relatively clearly defined economic boundaries and methods of classification, producing films which may not necessarily involve British themes or preoccupations, often including financial and labour participation from other countries. On the other hand, there is the cultural conception of what we mean by British films: the extent to which they participate in establishing nationhood as a distinct, familiar sense of belonging which is shared by people from different social and regional backgrounds. We have inherited a dominant conception of what it is to be British, a collective consciousness about nationhood which has, in part, been constructed by cultural referents, including cinema. Nationhood as the expression of a collective consciousness, rather than the sole product of militaristic conquest, is an idea derived from Benedict Anderson (1983) who argues that mass communication assists in the complex process of creating an ‘imagined community’ which differentiates itself from others. As Andrew Higson has pointed out, the achievement of this is often at the expense of representing the diversity of British society: ‘This imaginative process must be able to resolve the actual history of conflict and negotiation in the experience of community. It must be able to hold in place-or specifically to exclude-any number of other experiences of belonging’ (1995:6). Until relatively recently the diversity of Britishness referred to by Hill and Higson has not been fully represented on screen. With some notable exceptions, until the 1960s the dominant construction involved films which reflected a limited, often privileged experience of the class system, starring actors and actresses with BBC English
accents and set in metropolitan locations. While audiences may well have read against the grain, the ideological construction of most pre-1960 British films encouraged acceptance of the status quo.
