Seventies British Cinema (Innbundet (stive permer))

The Editor: Robert Shail is Head of the Department of Film and Media at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is the author of Stanley Baker: A Life in Film (2008) and British Film Directors: A Critical Guide (2007).

Seventies British Cinema provides a comprehensive re-evaluation of British film in the 1970s. The decade has long been written off in critical discussions as a 'doldrums' period in British cinema, perhaps because the industry, facing near economic collapse, turned to 'unacceptable' low culture genres such as sexploitation comedies or extreme horror. The contributors to this new collection argue that 1970s cinema is ripe for reappraisal: giving serious critical attention to populist genre films, they also consider the development of a British art cinema in the work of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, and the beginnings of an independent sector fostered by the BFI Production Board and producers like Don Boyd. A host of highly individual directors managed to produce interesting and cinematically innovative work against the odds, from Nicolas Roeg to Ken Russell to Mike Hodges.As well as providing a historical and cinematic context for understanding Seventies cinema, the volume also features chapters addressing Hammer horror, the Carry On films, Bond films of the Roger Moore period, Jubilee and other films that responded to Punk rock; heritage cinema and case studies of key seventies films such as The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs. In all, the book provides the final missing piece in the rediscovery of British cinema's complex and protean history. Contributors: Ruth Barton, James Chapman, Ian Conrich, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Christophe Dupin, Steve Gerrard, Sheldon Hall I. Q. Hunter, James Leggott, Claire Monk, Paul Newland, Dan North, Robert Shail, Justin Smith and Sarah Street.

Ruth Barton lectures in film studies at Trinity College, Dublin. She has written widely on Irish and other national cinemas. Her books include Acting Irish in Hollywood (2006), Irish National Cinema (2004) and Jim Sheridan: Framing the Nation (2002). James Chapman is Professor of Film at the University of Leicester. He has wide-ranging research interests in the history of British popular culture, especially film and television, and his recent books include Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (2005), Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of 'Doctor Who' -- A Cultural History (2006) and Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (1999; second edition 2007). Ian Conrich is Director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. He is an editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and an advisory board member of The Journal of Horror Studies. He has written for Sight and Sound and the BBC. The author of the forthcoming book New Zealand Cinema, he is an editor or co-editor of eleven books including The Technique of Terror: The Cinema of John Carpenter (2004) and the forthcoming Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema. Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He has written widely on British horror films and his latest books include Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (2006), American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (2006) and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (2005). Christophe Dupin is Post-doctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC History of the British Film Institute Research Project at Queen Mary, University of London. He previously worked for the BFI while writing a PhD on the history of its Experimental Film Fund and Production Board. Recent publications include essays for Screen and the Journal of Media Practice. He is currently researching the relationship between the National Film Archive and the Cinematheque Francaise. Steve Gerrard is currently completing his PhD thesis examining the cultural impact of the Carry On films on British society at the University of Wales, Lampeter where he is also a part-time lecturer. He has given a number of conference papers on 1970s British film comedy and written an entry on Carry On up the Khyber for Routledge's Fifty Key British Films. Sheldon Hall is a former film journalist and is currently Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It - The Making of the Epic Movie (2005), the co-author (with Steve Neale) of Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (forthcoming), and the co-editor (with John Belton and Steve Neale) of Widescreen Worldwide (forthcoming). He has contributed articles on British cinema to a number of other publications, including The British Cinema Book (ed. Robert Murphy, third edition, forthcoming). I. Q. Hunter is Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader in Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He edited British Science Fiction Cinema (1999) and co-edited Pulping Fictions (1996), Trash Aesthetics (1997), Sisterhoods (1998), Alien Identities (1999), Classics (2000), Retrovisions (2001) and Brit-Invaders! (2005). He has published widely on exploitation, horror and cult films and is currently writing a British Film Guide to A Clockwork Orange for I. B. Tauris. James Leggott lectures in film and television studies at Northumbria University. His PhD was concerned with traditions of realism in British Cinema and he has published articles on aspects of realist practice. His research interests also include the work of the Amber Film Collective and the representation of children in contemporary film and television. Claire Monk is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, and a critic and writer who contributed regularly to Sight & Sound in the 1990s. She has written widely on cultural politics and film in post-1970s Britain, is co-editor of British Historical Cinema (2002) and has completed a study of British audiences for period films focusing on the debate around 'heritage cinema'. Her interest in Derek Jarman's Jubilee dates from the 1980s when she was the writer and publisher of the fanzine Psychotic Snark. Paul Newland is an AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Film in the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter. He is currently working on Gavrik Losey's career in British film production from the 1960s to the 1980s. Dan North is a lecturer in film in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, where he was responsible for archiving the Don Boyd papers at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture. He is the editor of Sights Unseen, a collection of essays on unfinished British films, and the author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor. Robert Shail lectures in film studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He has written widely on masculinity and stardom in cinema, and on aspects of British film history. His recent publications include British Film Directors: A Critical Guide (2007) and Stanley Baker: A Life in Film (2008). Justin Smith is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth. A cultural historian with a specialism in British cinema, his research interests cover film fandom, reception and exhibition, identity and memory. He has published journal articles on the advent of the multiplex in Britain and the cult films Withnail & I and The Wicker Man. His essay 'British Cult Cinema' will appear in the third edition of Robert Murphy's British Cinema Book (forthcoming, 2008). Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol. Her publications include British National Cinema (1997), British Cinema in Documents (2000), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002) and Black Narcissus (2005). Her latest book is Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, co-authored with Tim Bergfelder and Sue Harris (2007). She is currently researching the introduction of colour to British cinema, with a particular interest in British Technicolor.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Cinema in the Era of 'Trouble and Strife' PART I: POPULAR GENRES Take an Easy Ride: Sexploitation in the 1970s; I.Q.Hunter The End of Hammer; W.W.Dixon The Divergence and Mutation of British Horror Cinema; I.Conrich What a Carry On! The Decline and Fall of a Great British Institution; S.Gerrard When the Chickens Came Home to Roost: British Thrillers of the 1970s; R.Barton From Amicus to Atlantis: The Lost Worlds of 1970s British Cinema; J. Chapman PART II: CONTEXTS AND STYLES Glam, Spam and Uncle Sam: Funding Diversity in British Film Production during the 1970s; J.Smith 'Now, what are we going to call you? Scum! ! Scum! That's commercial! It's all they deserve!': Jubilee, Punk and British Film in the Late 1970s; C.Monk Nothing to do Around Here: British Realist Cinema in the 1970s; J.Leggott Heritage Crime: The Case of Agatha Christie; S.Street PART III: FILMS AND FILM-MAKERS Folksploitation: Charting the Horrors of the British Folk Music Tradition in 'The Wicker Man'; P.Newland Under Siege: The Double Rape of Straw Dogs; S.Hall Don Boyd: The Accidental Producer; D.North 'More, Much More ! Roger Moore': A New Bond for a New Decade; R.Shail The BFI and British Independent Cinema in the 1970s; C.Dupin Select Bibliography Index