(xiv) Film and society 1946-69: the remaking of national identities

This Themes and Sources examines the history of cinema in Britain and France from its prime in the late 1940s and 1950s through to its relative decline in the late 1960s. It does so in order to assess, in comparative perspective, the many different ways in which film reflected, reinforced, promoted and created social mores and stereotypes and reshaped different perceptions of national character.

The period is one of extraordinary transformation in British and western European society, marked by national contrasts and by trans-national cultural resistances and contradictions. Film was established as an integral and important part of the mass media.

Constituent classes are arranged around themes each with two or three set film sources per class. The themes are designed to contribute to an understanding of national identities in a post-war, decolonising, and socially complex Britain and France. Some sources investigate comparative perspectives from press, radio, theatre, television and music history. Themes are also presented in an order which generally builds chronologically. The source films are British and French but American and Indian films (with a historical nationalist perspective) are also available to offer a further comparative viewpoint – and one apparent at the time, given their popular and critical British and French reception.

In particular, questions will be posed about the extent to which film reflected or imposed dominant ideologies, how social norms were enforced and deviance isolated, whether messages were unwitting or deliberate, and how all of these might be explored through the study of writers, producers, studios, and actors, the business history of the cinema, official censorship, and audience responses and newspaper and magazine criticism.

The themes are as follows: war and memory; deference and subversion; class and work; gender and sexuality; race and decolonisation; crime and authority; family and society; youth and education.