Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror

by James Leggott

Overview

This volume offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of British film culture from 1997 to the present. Using a wide range of films from the Blair era and beyond as case studies—from from Notting Hill (1999) and Billy Elliot (2000) to 28 Days Later (2002) and The Queen (2006)—it examines the ways in which recent British filmmaking might be regarded as distinctive, relevant and successful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781905674718
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/25/2008
Series:	Short Cuts
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James Leggott is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University. He has published on various aspects of British film and television culture, and is a contributor to The Trouble With Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (2004).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Definitions and approaches 5

2 Industry and culture 15

3 Genre and british cinema 53

4 Representing contemporary britain 83

Conclusion 111

Notes 115

Filmography 117

Bibliography 132

Index 143

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Spicer

A lucidly written and informative overview of recent British cinema that will serve as an excellent introduction to its subject. It ranges widely over what is a complex and heterogeneous terrain (over 400 films are mentioned) and provides a judicious and thoughtful summary of the issues and debates that circulate around British cinema including genre, funding, the politics of representation, nationality and the perennial problem of the cultural value (or not) of the British film industry.

Robert Shail

This is a comprehensive, detailed survey of British cinema in the Blair era. The scholarship is exemplary, having both range and depth of coverage. Everything is here, from popular genres to art cinema, from independent filmmaking to Lottery-funded cinema. Above all, this book dispels the myth that recent British films have been largely predictable. What emerges is a sense of the complex and contradictory forces at work, and of how this has produced the rich and varied terrain that is contemporary British cinema.

Andrew Spicer

A lucidly written and informative overview of recent British cinema that will serve as an excellent introduction to its subject. It ranges widely over what is a complex and heterogeneous terrain (over 400 films are mentioned) and provides a judicious and thoughtful summary of the issues and debates that circulate around British cinema including genre, funding, the politics of representation, nationality and the perennial problem of the cultural value (or not) of the British film industry.

— Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England

Editorial Reviews

An informative, discursive and wide-ranging survey of home-produced cinema of the Blair and Brown eras.

Time Out London