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                Joe Brooker

        England's Screening





_Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema_
Edited by Andrew Higson
London: Cassell, 1996
ISBN 0-304-33528-2
264 pp.

There are those for whom 'British Cinema' has always been an oxymoron.
Francois Truffaut's judgement of 'a certain incompatibility between the
terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'' was already so widely-cited as to be
'tediously familiar' to Charles Barr, introducing the volume _All Our
Yesterdays_ in 1986. [1] Barr added a slew of other comments to the same
effect from both British and non-British observers, and his anthology set
out to combat the amnesia behind this 'quasi-racist' line. It seems fair to
say that ten years on, with the publication of Andrew Higson's _Dissolving
Views_ in 1996, a good start had been made at addressing the problem.
Courses in British Cinema were more widespread in Higher Education -- not
least at the University of East Anglia where both Barr and Higson continue
to be based. And British cinema would now appear to be a major area of
writing and research, as _Dissolving Views_ seeks to demonstrate. Higson
writes that the book was originally intended to collect 'a number of
important discussions of British cinema history that had already been
published elsewhere' (iv), but for some reason it became a mixture of old
and new work. The most venerable essay, John Ellis's survey of mid-century
British film criticism, is now over 20 years old, but, like several others,
has been revised for inclusion; meanwhile there are five previously
unpublished essays.

Higson admits in the Introduction that a collection like this must be
selective, but he has selected contributions that cover the field with
admirable comprehensiveness. There are useful narrative surveys of
experimental film and Black British cinema, and contributions which manage
to cover the important bases of Hitchcock, 1930s documentary, kitchen sink
or 'New Wave' films, and recent heritage cinema. Specific areas of
discussion include the role of German film technicians in Britain in the
1930s (Tim Bergfelder argues that the notion of a coherent 'Expressionist
influence' is something of a myth); the variable treatment of gender in the
uncertain years immediately after World War II; and the 'woman's film' in
the 1980s. All of the essays contain useful information, and at their best
provoke thought and argument about cinema and -- a major emphasis of the
book -- the surrounding culture which cinema inhabits and influences. This
even extends to contemporary Europe, in a wide-ranging essay by Colin
MacCabe. MacCabe's reflections on the possibility of a European culture,
and of the persistence of national cultures within it, become doubly potent
when one considers that these questions were already implicit within his
influential work in the 1970s, on continental theory and on the Irish
European James Joyce.

But the book's subtitle is slightly questionable on two counts. First, and
most importantly, are these really writings on 'British' cinema? National
identity is understandably to the fore in this collection -- whether in
relation to Grierson and the documentary movement, to critics of the 1940s,
to the films of Derek Jarman, or to the heritage cinema of Merchant-Ivory
-- but the one major omission (with the possible and partial exception of
the documentary movement) is any reflection on the nations other than
England within the United Kingdom. Perhaps Welsh, Scottish and Northern
Irish film deserve their own volumes. But I wonder why _Dissolving Views_
was not conceived and sold as a collection specifically on the diversity of
*English* cinema -- which, in effect, it is. Could it be that 'England'
retains a charge, a compound of connotations -- of empire and monarchy,
gentlemen and players, beef, bulldogs and battleships -- which is thought
of as best left alone? Certainly it seems a more emotionally resonant term
than 'Britain', which is apt to call to mind immigration officers and
athletics teams rather than Stratford and Nobby Stiles. But if so, a chance
to engage with such associations and inhibitions has perhaps been missed in
opting for the misleadingly capacious 'Britain'.

Secondly, and less importantly, 'Key Writings' is a hard tag to live up to
at the best of times, but harder still when you've only just written your
chapter. Of the fourteen essays here, John Ellis's 'The Quality Film
Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942-1948' probably qualifies
best as a 'Key Writing'. It has been around long enough (since 1978) to
have had some influence, and deals with a large body of texts (the British
Film Institute's collection of periodical material) authoritatively and
usefully. Ellis takes as his raw material the journalistic output of such
critics as Simon Harcourt-Smith, Joan Lester and Dilys Powell,
'recombining' their scattered statements into a kind of continuous body of
thought. Ellis quotes liberally and succinctly, usually without naming the
particular source (although these are given in the endnotes -- of which he
has ten times as many as anyone else in _Dissolving Views_). In effect, the
penchants of particular journalists are melted down into an impersonal
'discourse': Michel Foucault is surely the unnamed presiding spirit of
Ellis's venture. The gain of Ellis's method -- 'a kind of attentive
listening, trying to transcribe the various random comments and remarks of
different individuals into the complete systematization that they were
never given' (68) -- is to achieve a new totalization of what may indeed
have appeared random, discovering the unrealized intellectual coherence of
a period among its seemingly spontaneous voices. The concomitant risk is
clearly that the specificity of particular critics, and the possibility of
dispute between them, are dissolved in the name of a homogeneity
over-zealously imagined. I don't know whether this accusation has been
levelled at Ellis's article in the two decades since its first appearance,
but if so, he has stuck to his guns: this 'carefully revised' version makes
no concessions to critical individuality.

Andrew Higson writes that Ellis's piece has been 'very influential' (4),
and it may get a new lease of influence through its reappearance here. In a
sense, the 'discourse' that Ellis seeks to discern is also a target for a
number of other contributors, whose essays inveigh against what is
perceived as a prevailing 'consensus' about British cinema. Considering
this will bring us to a theme which runs persistently through the book, and
on which I shall concentrate here: the association of British cinema with
realism. This association was cogently explored, in fact, in Andrew
Higson's own contribution to _All Our Yesterdays_, which takes as its
starting point the prevailing view that documentary and realism together
form the closest thing to a native tradition in film. [2] In a sense,
therefore, it is not surprising that some of the contributors to
_Dissolving Views_ beg to differ, and seek to put the association in
question. [3]

Pam Cook's essay covers a similar period to Ellis, and the interface of
their arguments typifies the effective way in which the book's chapters
frequently seem to speak to and support each other. According to Cook,

'discussion of national identity in wartime British cinema has tended to
focus on what might be called the consensus films -- that is, those on
which an uneasy alliance of opinion between producers and critics (mainly
from the quality press) and official bodies . . . conferred the status of
quality British cinema' (52).

The consensual aesthetic, avers Cook, 'was defined in terms of opposition
to Hollywood spectacle in favour of an austere realism. Visual and acting
styles were to be restrained, the emphasis was to be on ordinary people in
ordinary settings' (53). Realism was also at the heart of the notion of the
'quality film', according to John Ellis: 'the moral imperative for the
quality film is that of representing the world correctly' (79). Indeed,
Ellis identifies no fewer than three levels of realism to which the quality
film might aspire: a surface level of background 'duplication'; a deeper
'authenticity'; and a rather mysterious 'faithfulness to the very spirit of
the real' (84).

It is against such an aesthetic that Cook asserts the value of Gainsborough
costume drama of the 1940s, as a form which has suffered critical neglect
and condescension. With their spectacular, but surprisingly cost-effective
use of costume and setting, and their blithely eclectic, pick-and-mix
attitude to the iconography of the past, films like _Madonna of the Seven
Moons_ (1944) and _The Wicked Lady_ (1945) offended the sensibilities of
'quality' British film culture, whose predilection for realism was
overdetermined and amplified by wartime austerity. Yet Cook argues that the
Gainsborough films 'are central to any discussion of national identity in
1940s British cinema' (64). She is not the only one to speak up for them.
Sue Harper likewise claims that they were 'oriented towards women and the
working class' (facts which seem, in this context, to bear a value),
'offered a powerful form of identification to their female viewers', and
'contained heroines who engaged actively in their own destinies' (104). And
Justine King, in a discussion of the contemporary 'woman's picture', argues
that Gainsborough films offered a 'liminal space' for women (230).

The revaluation of Gainsborough thus exemplifies the revisionist tendency
of _Dissolving Views_, as a putative national aesthetic of mimesis and
moderation is challenged by spectacle and show. Sue Harper frowns on the
post-war development of Gainsborough studios, whose new heads of production
were 'convinced that realist methods were more appropriate'. After 1946,
'there is an almost exclusive interest in contemporary life', and the
effect is a shift 'from being a studio which celebrated female desire to
one which repressed it' (104-5). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are
unusual in emerging well out of Harper's post-war picture, in a brief but
convincing analysis. They 'proposed a different sexual politics' in which
woman was granted a 'high place in the chivalric order' (109-10), and their
_Black Narcissus_ (1948) 'argued that elite groups which outlawed desire
could not survive' (110). Pam Cook proposes an honourable lineage for her
evaluation of Gainsborough, which applies as well if not even better to the
Archers:

'the documentary-realist option is not necessarily the most obvious or
natural route to take in defining a quality British cinema. There are rich
traditions of fantasy in British culture, manifest in our Gothic
literature, for example; and decorative and anti-realist traditions in
British architecture, painting and theatre.' (54)

Charles Barr's essay on Hitchcock, first written in 1980, hints at a
parallel case. The 'critical attitude', he writes,

'that uses the words dreamlike, fantastic, escapist, romantic, unrealistic,
fabricated, as terms of dispraise, putting them *ipso facto* lower than
'realistic' stories and films with a 'documentary' base, has . . . been
overturned' (11).

He accordingly offers a reading of early Hitchcock in which dream and
trance are dominant metaphors. 'Hypnagogia' is the term which Barr proposes
to describe the British Hitchcock: 'the state *between* sleeping and
waking', in which images are 'seen in a heightened trance-like state' (14).

For Cook, Harper, and Barr (in their different ways) an oppressively
normative realist aesthetic is to be challenged or circumvented, by the
appeal to a neglected strain in British culture -- cinematic or otherwise.
Fantasy, spectacle, trance, masquerade are the watchwords of this
alternative canon. In a related move, Kathryn Dodd and Philip Dodd argue
that the documentary movement of which John Grierson was the leading
theorist and practitioner can be understood as a defensive reaction to the
'feminization' of English culture between the wars. The documentarists'
search for the working class in the North of England can be understood as a
quest for a British masculinity losing its grip on the culture of the
South. The authors stress that they intend no 'simple condescension'
towards the documentary movement (50), but their historical resituation of
the project nonetheless seems to undercut and render suspicious its claims.
If realism and documentary are associated with masculinity, then their
cinematic alternatives -- fantasy, display, and so on -- might by
association be seen as feminine, or even proto-feminist, forms.

The recovery and revaluation of neglected strands in film history can
contribute to a more pluralistic and open conception of national cinema. In
Andrew Higson's words, 'the indigenous is actually forever in flux. There
is no core identity to British cinema -- it is far too diverse, far too
rich to be reduced to a fixed essence' (2). Few could begrudge the generous
pluralism announced here, unless perhaps they be Scottish nationalists out
to establish the even more diverse and rich flux of their own national
cinema. Yet the sense lingers of a hierarchy being reversed, with
Gainsborough replacing Grierson at the top of the aesthetic pile. Terry
Lovell makes this explicit in her essay on the British New Wave, when she
reflects on the changes in academic taste which took place in the 1980s.
While the New Wave and other forms of realism were dismantled and
distrusted, Lovell notes,

'Popular forms which had been dismissed within orthodox criticism, such as
the Hammer horror, Gainsborough melodramas, or even the ubiquitous _Carry
On_ comedies, and the quirky idiosyncrasies of Powell and Pressburger,
fared rather better in this critical reassessment of British cinema.' (169)

This is well observed, and indicates the diversity of the new consensus
which -- I begin to suspect -- has been displacing the old one. Clearly one
might not willingly sign up to every item in this package: the Archers
devotee might not be so enamoured of Hammer. Personally, I am delighted to
report that, despite the presence of Andy Medhurst, there is no essay on
the _Carry On_ films in _Dissolving Views_. (Medhurst's contribution is, in
fact, another of those which might earn the epithet 'key', as an early
foray into gay or queer film study. His contextualization of _Victim_ in
the sexual climate of the early 1960s remains punchy and convincing, and is
one of the most readable essays in the collection.) For the most part,
though, the book does not belie Lovell's sense that film studies' centres
of value have shifted.

But could it not be that these new evaluations, as much as the older ones
of documentary and 'quality film', have their own historical roots? For one
thing, the suspicion of cinematic realism is surely related to a
far-reaching scepticism about realism in general, in both its aesthetic and
epistemological branches. Few fields of the academic Humanities have been
untouched by the philosophical anti-realism associated with the 'linguistic
turn', and with post-structuralism in particular. The discipline of
historiography, for instance, has been one of the more robust redoubts of
an older empiricism, but even among historians there is now less faith in
the self-evident legibility of texts and objects, and a greater sense of
the formative power of narrative, metaphor, the observer's own
contextualizing role, and so on. Pam Cook, who applauds Pierre Sorlin for
'challenging the authority of history as 'truth'' (56), implicitly situates
her reading of Gainsborough in this context with her flamboyant, not to say
melodramatic, assertion that the melodramas 'are an uncomfortable reminder
that history is always masquerade' (57). In literary studies, the arrival
of 'theory' has long since made such precepts into virtual articles of
faith in their own right. And such academic developments occur in the
context of a wider culture which sometimes seems to be becoming less
'realistic' by the day. From special effects and drama-documentary to spin
doctors and virtual reality, the incessant consciousness of mediation and
simulation which already seemed to be terminal in the 1980s can hardly be
said to have diminished through the 1990s. The over-familiar catchword for
all this is, of course, postmodernism.

If we ponder the history of film studies and its privileged aesthetics, it
is clear that, in some influential quarters at least, 'realism' was already
becoming a dirty word in the early 1970s. British film studies was among
the first academic domains outside France to receive and disseminate the
claims of Parisian theory, and one of the results was a sometimes strident
denunciation of the invisible conventions of Hollywood and of popular
narrative cinema in general. It is widely agreed -- by Andrew Higson here,
for instance (238) -- that the aesthetic offspring of what is now dubbed
'_Screen_ Theory' was a kind of *modernism*, in which narrative,
representation, and illusion were eschewed in favour of a sometimes austere
commitment to 'the specifically filmic' (238). Michael O'Pray's useful
essay on avant-garde and art cinema reminds us of the prominence in the
1970s both of the Godardian 'counter-cinema' of Peter Wollen and Laura
Mulvey, and of the so-called structural-materialist cinema of Peter Gidal
and Malcolm LeGrice, which 'sought to avoid what it saw as the illusionism
of films which attempted in whatever way to represent or document something
outside the filmic process itself' (181). O'Pray does well to point out the
existence of other kinds of alternative cinema in Britain in this period,
but these strands were nonetheless among the main aesthetic corollaries of
the strenuous theorizing of the 1970s. What is striking in the present
context is that such filmic modernism seems at once profoundly to agree and
disagree with the turn to spectacle and fantasy that I have extrapolated
from some of the essays in _Dissolving Views_. On one hand, both moments
affirm a dissatisfaction with traditional claims to visual realism. Faith
in the capacity of the camera to record the pro-filmic event -- housing
problems, holiday camps, kitchen sinks -- for undistorted posterity is
supplanted by a self-consciousness about the process of representation. On
the other hand, the avant-gardes of the 1970s betray an earnestness about
this project which is absent from, for instance, the contemporary
celebration of Gainsborough, let alone the melodramas themselves. The
former case involves an attack on 'illusionism' in the name of a
confrontation with something more profoundly real: 'the flatness of the
filmic image, grain, light, movement, and so on' (182). As Peter Wollen
pointed out in 'The Two Avant-Gardes', an essay of 1975, the Gidalian brand
of anti-realism could actually be seen as a kind of hyper-realism:

'Ironically, anti-illusionist, anti-realist film has ended up sharing many
preoccupations in common with its worst enemies. A theorist like Andre
Bazin, for instance, committed to realism and representationalism, based
his commitment on an argument about cinematic ontology and essence that he
saw in the photographic reproduction of the natural world. We now have, so
to speak, both an extroverted and an introverted ontology of film, one
seeking the soul of cinema in the nature of the pro-filmic event, the other
in the nature of the cinematic process, the cone of light or the grain of
silver.' [4]

Despite the distinction that Wollen drew between Gidal and Godard, an
analogous anti-illusionism can clearly be discerned in the political wing
of the avant-garde, as Wollen himself acutely pointed out in 1972. [5] The
anti-realism of the 1990s, on the other hand, seems to have renounced or
forgotten this paradoxical desire for a realism beyond realism, a
subversion of 'realism' in the name of the *real*. The taste for spectacle
and fantasy which I mentioned earlier appears, in a complex movement, to
reject *both* an initial drive to documentary or to what Ellis identifies
as 'the very spirit of the real' (84), *and* the frequently ascetic quest
for a reality beyond 'realism' which characterized the avant-garde(s). The
latest renunciation of realism results in a new relaxation about
representation, in which a mimetic if historically implausible melodrama
displaces the anguished anti-mimeticism of 'pure film'. Indeed this
corresponds convincingly enough with the trajectory of art cinema which
Michael O'Pray traces, in which 'minority' or hitherto under-represented
(female, gay, non-white) film cultures eventually break up the
institutional homogeneity of the 1970s avant-garde. At the culmination of
this process, with Derek Jarman directing videos for pop hits, O'Pray
observes, 'few of the distinctions . . . any longer seemed meaningful, with
the avant-garde itself barely recognizable' (181). The dialectic might thus
be sketched in three stages: documentary and classical realism (denounced
as illusionistic); avant-garde anti-realism (actually seeking a purer
fidelity to the real); post-realist eclecticism (in which mimesis is so
discredited as to be harmlessly re-incorporated, and the ultra-realist
ambitions of the avant-garde are likewise dispelled).

My suggestion is simply that the aversion to realism has a history, can be
differentially periodized, and is liable to have certain historical roots
beyond film studies or the cinema itself. It seems plausible to surmise --
as an empirical observation rather than an inevitable logical consequence
-- that the surge of theoretical and practical interest in spectacle,
melodrama, costume and fantasy have corresponded to the greater importance
and prominence of 'social movements' or 'liberation' politics -- feminism,
gay rights, anti-racism -- in the 1980s and 1990s, as against the
visibility and plausibility of class discourses and politics in the 1970s
and earlier. One wonders, indeed, whether there is something inherently
anti-spectacular in class politics, which -- in contrast to the alternative
political struggles just mentioned -- are so frequently identified with
naturalism, documentary forms, or (at the most adventurous) Godardian
counter-cinema.

We have seen that realism, its variants and its alternatives form a central
line of concern in _Dissolving Views_. In fact, perhaps the two most
interesting contributions to the question are those of Higson and Lovell on
one particular brand and moment of realism: the New Wave films of the early
1960s. What marks the essays out is the slightly unpredictable or
unorthodox ways in which they approach the films. Higson not only returns
to their initial reception but offers a close textual analysis of certain
types of shot which recur across these films -- notably what one
commentator called 'That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill' (133). Such
close analysis is fairly rare in _Dissolving Views_, perhaps because of the
tendency to focus on a broader 'film culture'. But Higson's sense of the
shot-by-shot texture of the New Wave films, like Charles Barr's of early
Hitchcock (12-13), finds a level of significance which might otherwise be
missed. Higson demonstrates that the New Wave's 'realism' was a fissured
and contradictory entity, an amalgam of different styles and intentions.
For instance, it differed from classical cinema not only in its depiction
of industrial landscapes but in a kind of narrative inertia, with 'weak
enigmas' and 'episodic structure' standing in for the well-oiled
storytelling machines of Hollywood (149, 154). At the heart of the New Wave
and the texts that informed it, Higson also reveals a certain romanticism,
somewhat submerged by the reputation of true documentary grit. The
cinematographer Walter Lassally remarked that the films' key feature was
not their realism but their 'romantic atmosphere' and 'poetic view' of
Northern life (133). Central to this attempt at visual poetry is the
panoramic shot of the town. But this shot is found to imply a different
class perspective from the rest of the New Wave film:

'It is only from a class position outside the city that the city can appear
beautiful . . . pictorialism can only really be achieved by placing the
camera in the room at the top of the hill; that is, in the house which
belongs to the factory owner' (151).

This is a trenchant point, but questionable. Working-class characters do,
as Higson himself shows, scale to the vista of 'Our Town', in a kind of
liminal space between country and city. An example that's not mentioned
here is Billy Fisher on Stradhoughton Moor, who in Keith Waterhouse's novel
explains:

'I enjoyed walking here. Given a quiet day I could always talk to myself,
and it was easy to picture the clifflike, craggy boundaries of the Moor as
the borders of Ambrosia. The sun was still out, in a watery sort of way,
and there was a hard, grey-metal shine on the afternoon. The faint waves of
shouting, and all other noises, sounded remote and not very real, as though
heard through a sheet of glass.' [6]

To an extent, of course, Waterhouse is looking back in the languor of
nostalgia. But he points us to the possibility of a kind of
aestheticization of the everyday which might just occur in Dewsbury as well
as Bloomsbury. _Billy Liar_ marks one place where the distinction between
workaday realism and extravagant fantasy starts to flicker and blur.

Something similar might be said of _A Taste of Honey_, the key text for
Terry Lovell. Her opening conjugation of Hoggart, Sillitoe and _Coronation
Street_ feels familiar enough, but she adds a twist by focusing on the
place of women in such texts, and particularly in Tony Richardson's film.
Lovell deftly draws out the way in which the young female protagonist, and
the off-beat environments through which she moves, make the film a kitchen
sinker with a difference. Visually, for instance, 'the pleasures of
spectacle -- townscapes made picturesque, squalor aestheticized' -- are
found to take up a lot of screen time (170). And the film's characters
stand askew from the usual New Wave cast: a teenage girl, her flamboyant,
immature single mother, a black cook and a gay art student. The potency of
_A Taste of Honey_ perhaps lies in the way it inhabits yet inverts the New
Wave cycle. Inside yet outside the kitchen sink mode, it seems even now to
signal an alternative tradition shadowing the male bravado of one vision of
the North. That much was corroborated in the 1980s by the play's appeal to
the singer Morrissey, whose early work borrowed from the text so blithely
that one half-expected to see Shelagh Delaney involved in the recent court
battle over The Smiths' royalties. [7]

What both Higson and Lovell alert us to, then, is the complexity and
diversity of the 'realist' canon itself. In the end, the pluralism avowed
by Higson seems the best prospect, in which we might try to avoid promoting
'one or other aspect as the truly national cinema' and marginalizing 'those
other traditions which least fit the model' (2). Whatever one might think
of the anti-realist thrust of some contemporary film studies, we are all
indebted to those critics who have taken up the cudgels for _A Matter of
Life and Death_ or _Yellow Submarine_, against the Blue Meanies of a
consensus too rigidly policed. Still, as the reader may have guessed, I
finished _Dissolving Views_ feeling slightly less, not more, sceptical
about realism in British cinema. 'Realism', Bertolt Brecht once wrote, 'is
not a pure question of form' [8] -- but rather a kind of cognitive attitude
which could turn up in many guises. In this sense it is far from clear that
the realist project is all washed up, in British or any other cinema. The
last few years have provided two examples on British screens -- one
cinematic, one televisual -- both of which in their different ways make use
of a documentary style. But the vigour, originality and political charge of
BBC2's _The Cops_ (1998) and Patrick Keiller's _London_ (1993) and
_Robinson in Space_ (1996) suggest that the conventions of documentary
still represent an outstanding resource for visual culture. Like any other,
however, this resource needs to be deployed with craft and intelligence.
One more docusoap and even the ghost of John Grierson might, well, give up
the ghost.

Birkbeck College, London
February 1999


Footnotes

1. Charles Barr, 'Introduction: Amnesia and Schizophrenia', in _All Our
Yesterdays_, p. 1.

2. Andrew Higson, ''Britain's Outstanding Contribution to the Film': The
Documentary-Realist Tradition', in _All Our Yesterdays_, pp. 72-97.

3. A venture adumbrated with some relish by Julian Petley's essay in _All
Our Yesterdays_, which immediately followed Higson's (pp. 98-119).

4. Peter Wollen, 'The Two Avant-Gardes', in _Readings and Writings_, p. 97.

5. Wollen, 'Godard's Counter-Cinema: _Vent d'Est_', in _Readings and
Writings_, pp. 89-90.

6. Keith Waterhouse, _Billy Liar_, pp. 86-7.

7. See Johnny Rogan, _Morrissey and Marr_, p. 176.

8. Bertolt Brecht, 'The Popular and the Realistic', in _Brecht on Theatre_,
p. 110.


Bibliography

Barr, Charles, ed., _All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema_
(London: British Film Institute, 1986).

Brecht, Bertolt, _Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic_, ed.
John Willett (London: Methuen, 1986; first pub. 1964).

Higson, Andrew, ''Britain's Outstanding Contribution to the Film': The
Documentary-Realist Tradition', in _All Our Yesterdays_, pp. 72-97.

Petley, Julian, 'The Lost Continent', in _All Our Yesterdays_, pp. 98-119.

Rogan, Johnny, _Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance_ (London: Omnibus,
1992).

Waterhouse, Keith, _Billy Liar_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962; first pub.
1959).

Wollen, Peter, _Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies_
(London: Verso, 1982).


Filmography

_Billy Liar_ (1963) dir. John Schlesinger.
_Black Narcissus_ (1947) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
_London_ (1993) dir. Patrick Keiller.
_Madonna of the Seven Moons_ (1944) dir. Arthur Crabtree.
_A Matter of Life and Death_ (1946) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
_Robinson in Space_ (1996) dir. Patrick Keiller.
_A Taste of Honey_ (1961) dir. Tony Richardson.
_The Wicked Lady_ (1945) dir. Leslie Arliss.
_Victim_ (1961) dir. Basil Dearden.
_Yellow Submarine_ (1968) dir. George Dunning.


© _Film-Philosophy: Electronic Salon_ 1999

Joe Brooker, 'England's Screening', _Film-Philosophy: Electronic Salon_, 6
March 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/brooker.html>.

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