Charles Barr

If you want an intelligent and informed short overview of British cinema, you would be hard pressed to find anything better than Barr's book. It is not about 'films' as such but about a broader cultural phenomenon covering not just production but distribution and the role of film in British society.

To tell the story of British cinema over a century or more and be complete is impossible in one of OUP's 'very short introduction' series but Barr does surprisingly well by cherry-picking key show more films, events and dates to produce a rounded and yet personal picture of the field.

It cannot be definitive but what we get is a coherent story that, until we reach the more ideologically contested twenty first century, is plauaible and even revisionist. He is certainly determined to recover film as 'teamwork' against the extremes of 'auteur' theory.

He frequently shows how relationships between figures on the creative and production side of cinema created generations of film maker who were partly at the right place and at the right time but mostly co-creators, collaborators, in making films happen that related perfectly to their environment.

As to the history, although a pioneer of film technique, a declining empire had not the will, culture or capitalist structures necessary to build a viable creative industry to match that of Hollywood. Indeed, in the 1930s, Hollywood was actually defining British imperial culture from overseas.

The high point of British cinema is undoubtedly the 1940s. Barr is excellent at demonstrating that what we had was largely an English cinema, with the 'Northern' (set in the North of England and occasionally in Scotland) playing the outsider role of the 'Western' in American cinema.

We see a cinema built on waves of creative team work sponsored by Government or foreign money interspersed with dead periods when Government support declined and foreign capital walked away. There are national capitalists involved, of course, but they are generally secondary to 'progress'.

At times, British cinema is truly dreadful. At times, it reaches considerable artistic heights. Some auteurs definitely do emerge albeit with teams around them. For much of its history, there is a dialectic with Hollywood - the latter draining talent but also arriving with funds for major projects.

There is a call and response here without any deliberate guiding hand. The market is at work. Talent emerges out of a creative advanced culture, moves to Hollywood, Hollywood accumulates capital that helps talent to flourish and then drains it again as its collective mind wanders on to new projects.

Barr's broader cinematic approach linking audience, capital and production gives us three ages. The first is the 'repertory' age when mass audiences visited specific locations for transitory experiences that existed only in the memory after a few weeks. It ended with television's emergence.

Cinema as an art form depended on the emergence of even more specific locations and libraries that catered to the few ('cineastes' and professionals) who could revisit material that the public had no access to until television revived classics or lengthened the time a film might be seen with 'repeats'.

This moves to an 'armchair' age with television and then various technologies enabling film to be seen at home, albeit at fixed times which might have to be planned. The dialectic between state-sponsored television (BBC and later Channel 4) and cinema would eventually enable new production.

We are now in an age of remarkable choice - a streaming age. There is almost no historical film that you cannot find somewhere, often for free on the internet, and, if not entirely free, on low cost streaming services or the continuation of 'armchair' DVD technologies.

From a transitory medium creating memories of national events collectively experienced in dark rooms (and often creating false memories at that), cinema has shifted to personal experiences of imagery that may come from anywhere in the world and where the choices are repeatable.

The relationship between this 'cinema' and the nation is interesting. This is where Barr is at his best, teasing out that relationship in terms of the creation of national mythologies and political change. He is almost (unlike most academics today but see below) non-ideological in his analytical review.

We are now getting a better idea of the 1920s not quite being the fallow period that we think it was but it was not a remarkable one compared to what was happening in the US and Germany. Hitchcock was a bright spark yet he owed something to his junior assistant role watching Murnau on set.

Where things get interesting is how a decaying and exhausted empire, never larger and never more vulnerable, found itself being defined in the 1930s by Hollywood's sympathetic portrayals of British imperialism, literature and history. They may have been travesties but they were very well made ones.

It is no surprise that British talent would migrate westwards with Britons playing a major role alongside German Jews in the construction of the cultural language of America's Golden Age. We have only to think of James Whale's re-thinking of the story of Frankenstein at Universal.

Hitchcock's move to Hollywood was a coda. His genius must be recognised despite Barr's attempts to downplay his 'auteur' status. But things were changing and the challenge of war created a dynamic relationship between cinema and propaganda that produced an era of genius specific to the country.

The impression we get is that from the great wartime movies, with Powell & Pressburger at the top of the creative tree, through to the Ealing comedies of the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a genuine relationship between film and the 'matter of Britain'.

Churchill's interest in film is important here but also his refusal to behave like Stalin and kill off what he did not like. Although the British war film eventually declined into 1950s posturing, again with Hollywood myth-making added, British film in the war and after was genuine high art for the people.

It sloughed off imperial myth-making and spoke of the nation, often critically although always within a particular soft establishment structure, liberal and open-minded, although very English at core. It is part of a reality that the British remain to this day dominated by southern English culture.

Barr is happy to be part of the revisionist movement that has included 'The Wicked Lady' and Gainsborough in this flourishing as a contribution to a national myth that rejuvenated the country only to become sclerotic later as the country further declined.

If there are violent culture clashes today, it is in part because this body of work in the 1940s still defines the psyches of many Britons who are older and those of even younger traditionalists but it is a lost world. The history of cinema helps indicate how lost we as a 'nation' were to become over time.

The dearth of interesting material in the 1950s (bearing in mind that the 'quota quickie' era lasted from 1927 to 1960 based on counterproductive protectionist legislation) was partly a reflection of a loss of any national will to use cinema as Churchill and Stalin (and Hitler) had done.

There is another surge of creativity in the 1960s alongside 'swinging London' with an orientation towards 'realism' and working class culture as well as social critique. Barr does not need to mention that London was also becoming a way station between European and US cinema (Polanski, Antonioni).

American money was again attracted into London during this period until problems with recession and local responses to television forced it back home again in the early 1970s. Franchises like Hammer and the Carry On films and their copies maintained some presence for cinemas.

Creatively, Hollywood was also learning in the 1970s how to create the B-Movie Blockbusters that relied entirely on domestic film school talent. This had a lively commercial sense and an understanding of a highly exportable American popular culture.

There is thus another dead period before another surge of British one-off blockbusters and talent in the 1980s although my own view is that 'Chariots of Fire', 'Ghandhi' and so forth may have sold well at the time but will be hard put to last into this century as 'great works'.

A classically British national popular cinema was largely dead by then although British talent and production was far from being so. Quite the contrary, British actors and creative talent play a disproportionate role in American-led international cinema today.

Similarly, at the 'art level', Britain has produced a large number of excellent Directors producing distinctive work in a sustained way and managing to cobble together sufficient funding to keep going from a syndicated approach that can be called private/public partnership - pure Blairismo!

But most of what is produced is globally financed for global markets and has caught a diversity bug that effectively makes London the mirror of the world rather than of the nation. Cosmopolitanism is essential both commercially and ideologically - and the two modes are manipulated into one.

Part of this arises from the role of state-backed television which has a symbiotic relationship with film. The BBC and Channel 4 have become the prime vectors for lower budget but still very well produced material that is only briefly shown in cinemas and then becomes part of streaming.

Both BBC and Channel 4 lost interest in the nation as we saw in the hysterical reaction to Brexit. Indeed, even Barr, generally reliably detached, suddenly goes a bit potty with a rather peculiar 'Brexit' analysis of the Ealing comedies as if he needed to let off steam. We will pass over this in silence.

What they became interested in was diversity, cosmopolitanism, liberal values and so on and so forth - certainly required up to an important point. Giving space to female and ethnic talent was good. Unfortunately it became indulgent. It failed to link these talents to the national question or questions.

Instead of looking outwards in order to present a proportionate view inclusive of new voices but geared to national realities, the new voices were allowed to spin off into projects that affirmed their own identities within a universalist liberal ideology that spoke to increasingly few people.

For the last three decades, funds have poured into somewhat manipulative projects designed to 'project' ideology outwards from a relatively small urban coterie of technically highly proficient people, extremely competitive for resources, but looking outwards to Europe or New York.

Part of this was political not in the sense of ideology but as part of the drive to make British creative industries world important. This was a major Blairite mission. It has, to a large extent, succeeded. The export services drive triumphed over any interest in national cohesion.

Barr does not critique any of this because it is clear that he belongs sympathetically to the world of an ideology which now needs some radical correction in age of populism, riots, liberal and identity narcissism and national infrastructural collapse but it is hard to know how this can now be done.

Certainly we seem to have the wrong government to take this in hand - a liberal-left Government with the allegiance of only one third of voters (one quarter of all possible voters) seems to be precisely the wrong sort to take on anxious Southern liberal intellectuals in defence of the nation.

As Barr points out, film is only part of 'cinema'. We now have a 'cinema' that is a self-reinforcing and rather narcissistic industry imposing ideology on a nation rather than either reflecting it or reflecting on it. It wants to change minds and not conditions. No wonder there is incoherent push-back.

The link between cinema and riots may seem tenuous but the link between the films of the 1940s and the war effort and building the welfare state and the link between the films of the 1960s (notably Ken Loach) and social reform were far from tenuous. It is not reasonable to deny a link with society today.

Cinema is powerful because, while it does not dictate culture, it gives power advantage to one part of culture over another - against appeasement or against conservatism in the past. It is closely linked to political decisions affecting culture and to capitalism with all attendant internal contradictions.

Contemporary British cinema 'reflects' the ideology of educated urban middle class 'bien-pensants', cherry-picking feminist or ethnic talent to taste and providing them with the necessary resources to buy their way into the market through tax-payer subsidy. That bit is a racket.

Barr is perhaps surprisingly blind to the link between cinema and society in the twenty-first century given his acute understanding of it in the last century. I can only believe it is because it would be inconvenient to question a world which he has placed himself on the side of his angels.

Certainly, I would argue that the positive commitment to diversity of Jeremy Isaacs and other has deteriorated as absurdly as the genuinely moving war cinema of the 1940s had degenerated into the schlock stiff upper lip falsification of war by the late 1950s.

Having noted this, the book is excellent and much recommended. It is not all there is to say on the subject. Barr is open in admitting this but the reader will get something more than a list of films to watch. He or she will get an insight into what it is to be British and even why Britain is troubled today.

For Britain has lived a number of lies noble and ignoble through cinema - an imported cod-imperialism in the 1930s, the noble lies of community and heroism in the 1940s, the lie of actually mattering as a nation and now the lie that pushing diversity is solving issues of national cohesion.

Perhaps understanding this history will, at best, encourage a cinema that challenges its status as an advanced form of lying (if we are Platonic in analysis) or, at worst and more likely, create a lie that actually works in reflecting the national society in which it embedded. If not, we are stuffed. show less

Barr has written a cold and analytical dissection of a cold and analytical film. That's a little bit of a suprise, when other BFI Classics entries are sometimes given over to a more personal appeal to the reader, but Barr's approach works because it challenges us to separate from our subjective opinion of Vertigo and just focus on Hitchcock's mastery. Of particular interest is the way Barr breaks down major sequences from the film, shot for shot, comparing the perspectives of the camera, the show more symmetry of the screenplay's structure, and even balance of the shot durations. Barr's argument is that these are all completely intentional on Hitchcock's part, and his evidence is convincing. Anyone who has ever dismissed Vertigo as "slow" or "boring" will surely be impressed by the sheer magnitude of Hitchcock's control over the passive viewer, and it might even convince them to give the film a second look. For my part, as someone teaching Vertigo to a class for the first time, I've gone from feeling reticent to actually excited by the challenge. That's not a bad result for such a slim volume. show less

One of the great things about the BFI series is that contributing authors each approach their works from different schools of criticism. While Charles Barr does go into the historical and collaborative efforts behind the film Vertigo - including debates on the contributions of the multiple writers involved - but the majority of Charles Barr's analysis focuses on textual deconstructionism, as he examines Hitchcock's film frame by frame, shot by shot, delving not only into what individual show more images or sequences communicate to the audience, but also how removing the tacked-on ending or the expository middle sequence that Hitchcock tried to remove alter the narrative and it's influence on the audience's emotional investment in the film. While Barr's methodical breakdown of screen time dedicated to silence or POV shots - complete with charts - might come off as needlessly ponderous, the book as a whole provides great insight into one of Hitchcock's most beloved and studied films. Yet another indispensable BFI Film Classics volume. show less

Written, produced, and directed by Robert Youngson.
* Narrated by Jay Jackson.
* Features clips from Thicker than Water (1935), 45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926), Sugar Daddies (1927), The Second Hundred Years (1927), Call of the Cuckoo (1927), Putting Pants on Philip (1927), The Battle of the Century (1927), Leave 'Em Laughing (1928), The Finishing Touch (1928), From Soup to Nuts (1928), You're Darn Tootin' (1928), Two Tars (1928), Habeas Corpus (1928), We Faw Down (1928), Liberty (1929), show more Wrong Again (1929), and Double Whoopee (1929). show less