Monday, December 21, 2009

Robin Wood 1931-2009

As a tribute to one of the key influences on my writing about film to date and the major source of inspiration for my next project I want to say something about Robin Wood. Rather than write a lengthy post I simply want to list a few words that I will always associate with the man and his writing:

Responsibility - Critic - Explore - Value - Personal - Experience - Engagement - Vital - Contact - Questioning - Response




Friday, July 17, 2009

Drill, Thrills, Myths and Migrants: Pete Walker's Cool It Carol! Pt. 2
















Released in 1970 Cool It Carol! was written off as just another grubby film from a particularly repellent genre. Dick Richards, for example, writing in the Daily Mirror suggested that it was ‘a depressingly sleazy film, which is as near pornography as makes no odds.’ [xi] Alexander Walker was even more succinct, declaring the film to be ‘An orgy of trash.’ [xii] It was Dilys Powell, however, writing in the Sunday Times who clearly felt the most soiled. For her, watching what she called ‘a patch of untreated effluent’ was a ‘generally repulsive experience’.[xiii]

The film tells the story of a young man bored with the smallness of his provincial life who becomes convinced that moving to London will help him become the person he really wants to be. He even invents a story about a job waiting for him in the capital but actually appears strangely reluctant to make the break. A more mature and pragmatic female friend, aware of the fact that actions will always speak louder than words, challenges him to join her on the train. This is just a simple summary of the plot. The film’s strengths, however, can be found in the complexity of themes it explores and the way in which these themes find their cinematic expression. Walker uses the streets of London as the site for his exploration of the spaces between the poles of the permissive and the repressive and between the hypocritical and the hedonistic. In this way, following Fujiwara, the streets become Walker’s very own ‘special territory’. Additionally, and this is where the film’s particular complexity can be found, Walker uses this same territory to explore further thematic oppositions that exist between social mobility and stasis, experience and immaturity, personal fantasy and harsh reality, as well as questioning one’s desire for re-imagining one’s own identity. Like this Cool It Carol! stands as (an unintentional) companion-piece to John Schlesinger’s exploration of the same oppositions in his 1963 film Billy Liar.

Walker’s film also explicitly considers the significance of sexual desire and the problems that accompany its expression or repression. That this exploration of desire and its problems is based on the relationship between a seemingly fragile masculinity and a more dominant and therefore active femininity is another way in which Cool It Carol! shares a common purpose with Billy Liar. This time, however, instead of Tom Courtenay and the wonderful Julie Christie – the stars of Schlesinger’s film – Walker’s film couples Robin Askwith with Janet Lynn. Though at first glance these pairings might appear to be poles apart, there is still sufficient interest to be found in this second couple to warrant a closer examination of not only their presence within the frames of the film but also within the history of British cinema more generally. Indeed, as Leon Hunt suggests, Askwith ‘drew together most of what was left of a domestically oriented cinema’, including sexploitation, horror, sitcom movies, Carry On films, as well as the Children’s Film Foundation and also finding time to work with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lindsay Anderson.’ [xiv]

Much like Billy Fisher before him, Joe believes that moving to London will somehow complete him as a person. If not complete him – and perhaps this is too strong a desire to be overtly explicit in Walker’s film – it will at least represent a step in the right direction. Indeed, as the film opens and we see just how humdrum Joe’s life really is, it is fair to say that taking a step in any direction as long as it leads away from where he currently is would be a significant one. Nevertheless, Joe has settled on heading for the capital. It is clear that he perceives London to be a place of opportunity and stimulation. Again like Billy Fisher, Joe has an alleged reason to move – to hook up with a Jazz musician he ‘met’ previously called Benny Gray. According to the tale he tells, Benny – Joe’s Danny Boon - is Joe’s passport to urban pleasure.

Carol (Janet Lynn), on the other hand, really does have a reason to move. She recently won a beauty contest and was told that she might have a future in the industry. She is keen to move to London to pursue her dream. Like Julie Christie’s Liz, Carol is determined and capable and will be going anyway – it is just a case of whether or not Joe will come with her. Joe takes some persuading but unlike Billy – about whom I would argue we can never really be certain – Joe does get on the train with Carol. As they head towards London it is the fantasy of their expectations that buoys them. On arrival, however, as this sequence is about to demonstrate, the reality of the London they discover is a fragmented and frenetic one, a far cry from the seamless hedonistic fantasy they imagined. Here, then, as they try to find their bearings, this sequence becomes an introductory exploration of the specific space that exists between the thematic poles of fantasy and reality.



Carol is thrilled to finally be in the capital and this is evident in her response to the new sights and sounds. Joe, on the other hand, is not so thrilled. Faced with the reality of a situation that had only really existed as fantasy, Joe is uncomfortable, uncertain, overawed and hesitant. Unlike Billy Fisher, who managed to avoid the moment when his tall tales about a job in London were fully exposed for the nonsense that they were, Joe is now facing the prospect of being found out. Already, Carol is looking to draw upon his ‘experience’ and it perhaps only her excitement that prevents her from actually realising the truth about Joe and his relationship with London. For someone seemingly so au fait with London life Joe finds it very difficult to assert the alleged extent of his relationship. Straightaway Carol asks him about meeting Benny and manages to sidestep the issue by declaring that they can’t burst in on him.

At the hotel Joe starts to unpack. ‘What are you doing?’ asks Carol, still under the impression that Joe has been telling her the truth. Carol wants to see the sites and so the couple head straight out again. Once back on the streets the tone of the sequence shifts slightly. The images were are presented with are of fast-moving traffic. These images are neatly contrasted with Joe’s attempts to move through these new spaces. Joe manages to fall from a bus and then finds himself unable to cross a road. Once again we are witnessing another way in which the fantasy of there being a place for him here in these spaces is undermined by the reality of his inability to find his feet. For Carol, however, her orientation is made easier here by her more realistic expectations. This is what she thought it would be like, she exclaims wide-eyed and enthusiastically. As Carol attempts to share her delight the tight framing of the couple results in a wonderful contrast by placing a perfect emphasis on Joe’s uncertainty and unhappiness.

A similar contrast here is evident in the tight framing of Billy while he is on the train with Liz at the end of Billy Liar. Liz, like Carol, is bouyed and positive about the prospects is what is to come. Billy, like Joe, is not quite so thrilled. Indeed, and despite the fact that there is a clear difference in tone between the two sequences, a similar sense of disquiet and discomfort is evident on both of their faces. Whether common purpose or (unintentional) companion piece, it is the facts of the framing of expressions in these examples from both of these films that offers an opportunity for further discussons of style, intention, composition and, perhaps most importantly, achievement to continue.

Endnotes
[xi] Dick Richards, Daily Mirror, 19-11-1970.
[xii] Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 19-11-1970.
[xiii] Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 22-11-1970.
[xiv] Hunt, p. 118. Furthermore, Askwith’s presence in Cool It Carol! is also interesting for the way in which he straddles the two types of investigation called for by Bruce Babington in his introduction to British Stars and Stardom. As Babington writes:

As regards future work on British stars, two kinds of investigations are vital. On the one hand (1) an attempt to understand, in close relation to the socio-historical complexities of British society, the underlying typologies of stars that the British cinema has produced; on the other hand, (2) studies of the individuals within those genres, their differences and similarities.

British Stars and Stardom: from Alma Taylor to Sean Connery (ed.) Bruce Babington (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 20.

Work of this kind has been underway for some time. In 2003, for example, Andrew Spicer published a detailed study of the representation of masculinity in popular British cinema. Though Spicer’s book goes to great lengths to chronicle the changing face of types of masculinity, as well as scrutinising the performances of particular stars, Robin Askwith is only mentioned in a very brief discussion.
Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London, I.B Taurus, 2001), p. 192.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Drills, Thrills, Myths and Migrants: Pete Walker's Cool It Carol! (1970) Pt. 1
















Beginning in 1967 with the wonderfully-titled I Like Birds and concluding with 1983's House of the Long Shadows, starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, the films of Pete Walker have made a fascinating if often overlooked contribution to the history of British cinema. Other notable titles in Walker's oeuvre include 1972's The Four Dimensions of Greta, the first (and last, sadly) three-dimensional sexploitation-detective-gangster-thriller and 1974's Frightmare. This film tells the story of a family bedevilled by guilt, madness and cannibalism. Along the way Frightmare also explores the failure of psychiatry as well as the way in good intentions do not always guarantee results. Finally, as the following trailer for the film demonstrates, the film also includes some fascinating performances, most notably from the glorious Sheila Keith. 



Writing in Making Mischief: The Films of Pete Walker Steve Chibnall makes the following observation:
There is nothing everyday or ordinary about Frightmare […] It owes a considerable debt toPsycho in its atmosphere, execution and camp morticians’ humour, but it goes beyond Hitchcock in the depth of its scepticism towards psychiatry, and the irredeemable pessimism of its vision. It exudes precisely the mood Paul Schrader attributed to classic film noir, a sense of ‘all-enveloping hopelessness’ (Schrader, 1972). Its themes are violence, insanity, fate and the matriarchal family and it pursues them like Leatherface with a chainsaw. [i]
1974 also saw the release of what is arguably Walker’s most famous film, House of Whipcord Whipcord tells the story of a private prison whose aged governors are appalled by the moral laxity they see taking hold of British society and decide to impose their own sentences on ‘prisoners’ they consider tobe guilty of permissiveness and promiscuity. Despite its apparent pandering to the most obvious of all exploitation film-making concerns, sex and violence, the film is actually far more significant. As a brief aside, it is worth noting that the so-called exploitation film tends to encompass a number of generic strands that would obviously include horror, sex and science fiction. This would be the standard view and British exploitation films tend to have horror and sex as their primary motivations but the history of exploitation cinema also includes other categories such as blaxploitation, kung fu films, biker movies and women-in-prison films, to name but a few.Obviously British blaxploitation films were non-existent but many of these other categories were very much alive during this period. Don Sharp’s Psychomania (1971), for example, tells the tale of a gang of British bikers who get their kicks selling their souls to the Devil, committing suicide and coming back from the dead to terrorise shopping precincts in the Home Counties.


Going slightly further afield, Hammer Studios sought to rejuvenate their standing in the domestic market by joining forces with the famous Shaw Brothers studio from Hong Kong and releasing in 1974 the glorious The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Returning to House of Whipcord, Walker’s contribution to the women-in-prison sub-genre, Steve Chibnall continues his discussion by suggesting that the film is permeated ‘with the same stench of moral decay as the public life of its time’ and as he continues:
When exploitation film-makers claim redeeming social value for their product it is usually a sign of bogus posturing, a self-interested ploy to escape the censor’s knife. Only a few of these films actively seek to change the conditions from which they profit, but almost all represent, in some way, the world in which they were made. Only the rarest of them capture an essence of their age with the allegorical precision of House of Whipcord.[ii]
As is perhaps evident from the tone of Chibnall’s claim, the process of re-evaluating Walker’s films has already begun. Yet, his importance to the history of British cinema is still considerably underestimated. Leon Hunt, for example, includes Walker’s films in his examination of the period but detailed discussions of the film themselves are understandably limited by Hunt’s more pressing desire to contextualise them within what he calls new ‘understandings of class, sexuality and ‘Britishness’ through a variety of critically disdained texts.’ In this way, Walker’s films are bound up in a broader discussion of Richard Allen’s Skinhead novels, Benny Hill and Glam-Rock.[iii] 
The work of Chibnall and Hunt is significant, however, because other more exhaustive accounts of British cinema from the same period tend to completely overlook the director. Alexander Walker, for instance, in his two books on the British film industry during this period, Hollywood, England and National Heroes, completely ignores Walker.[iv] The same thing happens with Amy Sargeant’s recent critical history of British cinema, published in 2005. In the case of Sargeant this is particularly disappointing because, as she claims
What this book is not is a history of box-office hits. […] I am more concerned here with interpreting and resuscitating the films themselves than with reiterating the sometimes ossifying academic debates which have accrued around them. I want to convey a sense of why – or, sometimes, why not – British audiences valued and enjoyed them (what they looked like, sounded like and felt like), of the circumstances in which they were experienced and why they continue to be worth watching now. [v]
Though I am disappointed by Sargeant’s omission of Walker’s films from her history I do share her concern for interpretation and resuscitation and in this way I now want to consider why I consider Walker's films to be so interesting.
Interviewed in 1997 Pete Walker professed a love for the films of Jacques Tourneur. He also admitted to enjoying the showmanship of Alfred Hitchcock and suggested that the films of Luis Buñuel had also had an influence on his work. Here, however, I want to concentrate on the relationship between Walker and Tourneur.[vi] At first glance there appears to be very little to be gained from comparing the finest of Tourneur’s films – 1942’s Cat People, for example, 1947’s Out of the Past, or 1957’s Night of the Demon – with the finest of Walker’s. Nevertheless, there are some interesting parallels evident between the two directors, especially in the areas of product differentiation, critical reception as well as certain similarities in viewpoint and approach. Like Walker, Tourneur’s career covered a variety of generic forms and this tended to result in his obvious ability being overlooked. As Chris Fujiwara suggests, in a sentiment that is equally applicable to both directors, this has led to Tourneur’s directorial achievements remaining, for the most part, underappreciated and misunderstood. The result of this has been the usual tendency to praise Tourneur’s films as ‘quintessential genre pieces rather than as personal works.’[vii] This last point is debatable but it is certainly interesting because this same tendency has come to characterise the reception of Walker’s films, albeit in a usually more derogatory way. However, the comparison between the two directors extends further than just in terms of their critical reception. Walker and Tourneur also share certain basic thematic concerns that help to influence the style and content of their films. As Fujiwara continues:
Tourneur’s ‘themes’ are conceptual oppositions between whose terms his characters seek to define themselves, boundaries that are simultaneously or fluctuatingly real, imaginary, and symbolic: the boundaries between […] living and dead, between health/sanity and sickness/insanity, […] between law and crime […], between male and female.[viii] 
Of course, such a list of oppositions is not simply the sole preserve of Tourneur and his films. Nevertheless, as Fujiwara interestingly suggests, in a statement that is equally applicable to Walker, ‘Tourneur’s special territory is the space between these poles’ and we might understand this space in the following ways:
1. This space becomes the site for a persistent exploration of the antagonisms and misunderstandings aroused by cultural difference.
2. Characters located within this space become embroiled ‘in doubt, guilt and moral ambiguity’.
3. This space also becomes the place where conflict and anguish are experienced having been generated by the reaction between two seemingly different cultures. [ix]
Extending the logic of this argument to the films of Pete Walker allows us to develop a sense of the ‘special territory’ Walker can be said to explore in his films. For example, his horror films persistently explore the boundaries between health/sanity and sickness/insanity, as well as between law and crime. Also, and perhaps more obviously, Walker’s films also explore the boundaries between male and female. Furthermore, and making this idea of opposition even more attractive as a basis for further discussion, Chibnall makes the following observation:
Walker’s films of the early 1970s contain a growing sense of cultural crisis and disunity […] They obsessively refer to the threat posed to new permissive lifestyles by a vindictive and morally bankrupt older order and its repressive institutions, but they are far from being political tracts advocating free love and the counterculture. Instead Walker almost gleefully depicts his times as an age of moral dissolution in which hypocrisy is challenged by a hedonism which is only slightly less repellent. [x]
This idea of a ‘special territory’ to be found between conceptual boundaries becomes the perfect template for a fresh and fruitful investigation of Walker’s films, beginning with Cool It Carol!. 
Endnotes 
[i] Steve Chibnall, Making Mischief: The Films of Pete Walker (Guildford, FAB Press, 1998), p. 143.

[ii] Chibnall, p. 119.

[iii] Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London, Routledge, 1998), p. 2. In the revised edition of his seminal survey of British horror David Pirie does include Walker but limits his discussion to two of Walker’s films – House of Whipcord and Frightmare – and cannot find the room to do much more than offer the suggestion that they might be better understood as satires rather than horror films. David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema (London, I.B. Tauris, 2008), pp. 199-200.

[iv] See Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London, Harrap, 1974) and Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London, Harrap, 1985). 

[v] As Amy Sargeant claims in her introduction:
I am disposed to regard the integration of British cinema in a larger cultural map as one of its strengths and an enormously fruitful area for enquiry. The hybridity and eclecticism of British cinema should be deemed a virtue rather than a vice.
Amy Sargeant, British cinema: a critical history (London, BFI Publishing, 2005), pp. viii – ix.

[vi] Chibnall, pp. 24-26.

[vii] Chris Fujiwara, 
Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 1-2.

[viii] Fujiwara, p. 3.

[ix] Fujiwara, p. 6.

[x] Chibnall, p. 10.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

From Robin Wood to Robin Askwith













My own reluctance to confront the British cinema is simply attributable to my sense that its achievement is so limited and so much less interesting than that of other countries. 
Robin Wood [i]

Most actors preparing for a film would spend their time discussing with their producer and director the style and nuance of their character. I seemed to have spent most of my time discussing whether I should have my arse waxed or not.  
Robin Askwith [ii]

Writing in 1976 and responding to calls to formulate his critical position Robin Wood declared that he was a critic not a theorist. For Wood, the practice of a critic was to explore works whilst the purpose of a theorist was to construct systems. Though he acknowledged that practice and purpose occasionally overlapped here with each offering partial sustenance to the other, Wood is led to conclude that criticism and practice are two different disciplines. To illustrate this further Wood continues:
For the theorist, questions of value will be determined by reference to a previously elaborated system; for the critic, a sense of values arises from placing this experience beside that experience in an endless and flexible empiricism.[iii]
In part, Wood’s declaration was a response to earlier discussions raised about the validity of his approach. In 1969, for example, Wood submitted a defence of his position to the British journal Screen, a journal that became synonymous with the kind of erected theoretical systems Wood saw himself to be somehow apart from. Indeed, as Wood reflects in the introduction to his recently re-released Personal Views: Explorations in Film, this was the start of a period when the practice of film criticism was considered by many to be if not ‘eccentric’ then wholly ‘superfluous’. [iv]
Wood’s 1969 defence was prompted by suspicions surrounding the validity of his personal engagement with the films he chose to write about, in this case the films of Howard Hawks. Responding to the claim that his criticism lacked a structural framework, Wood began with the following quote from the novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence:
Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. […] All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing […] in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.[v]
Admittedly, as Wood notes, Lawrence’s claims require modifying, not least in the light of the necessity to consider ideas of style and form when it comes to the cinema. Nevertheless, a concern for the ‘pseudo-scientific’ and the jargon that accompanies it is as relevant today as it was in 1969. Finally, as Wood himself claims, in a sentiment that helps motivate my own desire to write about British cinema:
My aim has been to write always from my own personal contact with the films. […] In criticism there can be no clear borderline between subjective and objective. One writes every time a sort of personal testament out of one’s sense of vital contact with a director’s work, one’s sympathy and recoil: this is what the films mean to me. At the same time, one tries to respond to the films as they are, avoiding temptations to produce one’s own versions and talk about them.
Furthermore, as he concludes:
A critic can only write with a deep sense of responsibility to his readers, towards art, and towards his own feeling of what matters, but his truth will still be about his own personal responses. It follows that this truth must always be provisional, subject to continual questioning both by himself and others.[vi]
That this continual questioning is significant is demonstrated by Wood’s introduction to his study of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, published in 2003. Here, for example, is Wood reflecting on the development of his response in the light of thirty-odd years of film writing:
The age in which we live is dominated by science and technology, hence by the assumption that everything worth saying can and must be susceptible to ‘proof’: you can prove that a cerrtain motif recurs through a dozen films noirs; you cannot prove, in any fixed, definitive way, that Out of the Past is superior to Double Indemnity, or why. A value judgement cannot, by its very nature, be proven. But that is its strength, not a weakness: a value judgement is there precisely to stimulate thought, debate, argument, to be discussed, modified, rejected; it leads to dialogue, not to the sense that ‘Well, we know that now, let’s pass onto the next’. [vii]
This is extremely relevant because as Amy Sargeant outlines in her recent critical history of British cinema, issues of value can be linked to broader ideas of what she calls ‘critical segregation’. For her, ‘the hybridity and eclecticism of British cinema should be deemed a virtue rather than a vice.’ Furthermore, as she continues, there is always a continual movement between different types of film appealing to different types of audience. Inevitably, Sargeant defines this movement as occurring between ‘high-brow’, ‘low-brow’ and ‘middle-brow’ but does express the desire to ‘question the critical usefulness of the inherited categories and vocabulary’. Indeed, as she outlines, in a sentiment that will mirrored by this book:
What this book is not is a history of box-office hits. […] I am more concerned here with interpreting and resuscitating the films themselves than with reiterating the sometimes ossifying academic debates which have accrued around them. I want to convey a sense of why – or, sometimes, why not – British audiences valued and enjoyed them (what they looked like, sounded like and felt like), of the circumstances in which they were experienced and why they continue to be worth watching now. [viii]
Like Sargeant, I have a desire to interpret and (sometimes) resuscitate and these twin aims help to explain the films I have chosen to discuss. Indeed, and like Sargeant again – and after this next point our positions will begin to diverge considerably – I am keen to avoid the perennial problem of critical segregation that occurs when a variety of films are considered together. It is simply the case that nowadays rigid distinctions of ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ (when it comes to taste) and inherited categories (inherited from the history of writing about British cinema) carry far less authority than perhaps had previously been the case.
Jim Leach attends to this very notion in his recent consideration of British film. For Leach, critics telling the story of British cinema have always tended to privilege certain kinds of discourses, myths and stories at the expense of others. Indeed, as he declares at the start of his survey of British film:
Popular cinema is an art form as well as an industry, art films may become popular, and many films include signicant elements from both models. The boundaries between popular and art cinema were never as clearly drawn as critics sometimes try to make them seem, and these distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred everywhere.[ix]
With distinctions becoming increasingly blurred it is still essential to maintain a clarity of purpose. This is especially true when it comes to responding to what Andrew Klevan calls the ‘variations and permutations’, the ‘intricacies and richness’ evident in the close study of films.[x] It is necessary to note here that these ideas have a further and more reflexive sense as well, a sense where intricacies and richness, for example, are also prone to variations and permutations of their own as we move from film to film. Indeed, when faced with this as a prospect it is perhaps as well to adopt the kind of ‘inquiring tentativeness’ described by Peter Harcourt. As he reflects:
My own critical approach is to begin with questions that elicit descriptive answers, reflecting the need to know before we decide. I am continually asking ‘What is going on here? What does this moment in the film seem to be communicating? What is it celebrating? What do I really feel about it? What do you feel? [xi]
For me, then, Wood becomes a beguiling [if reluctant] figure to adopt as a guide for an exploration of the sights and sounds of British cinema at the end of the 1960s. One way to make Wood’s adoption appear more critically suitable is to let him be accompanied by someone whose presence and prominence in the British films of the period in question is somewhat comparable to Wood’s presence and prominence in film criticism from the same period – Robin Askwith.

Endnotes
[i] Robin Wood quoted in an interview with Framework, Issue 1 (Warwick University, 1974), reprinted in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (ed.) Charles Barr (London, BFI Publishing, 1986), p. 3.
[ii] Robin Askwith, The Confessions of Robin Askwith (London, Ebury Press, 1999), p. 2.
[iii] Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London, Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 10.
[iv] Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film - Revised Edition (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 4.
[v] D.H. Lawrence quoted in Robin Wood, ‘Ghostly Paradigm and H.C.F.: An Answer to Alan Lovell’, Screen Vol. 10, No. 3 May/June 1969, p. 33.
[vi] Wood, pp. 34-35.
[vii] Robin Wood, Rio Bravo (London, BFI Publishing, 2003), p. 8.
[viii] Amy Sargeant, British cinema: a critical history (London, BFI Publishing, 2005), pp. vii-ix.
[ix] Jim Leach, British Film (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 3.
[x] Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London, Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 7.
[xi] Peter Harcourt, Six European Directors (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1974), p. 18.