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Post-war British Cinema: Constructing an Imagined Community Through National Cinema
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Abstract
Benedict Anderson’s masterpiece Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has influenced the discipline of national cinema greatly since its publication . This paper aims to decode British national cinema from the late 1940s to early 1960s to rediscover the situation of British society at that time through Anderson’s conception of “imagined communities”. Through reading closely on two representative British films A Matter of Life and Death (Emeric Pressburge, 1946) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), the paper portrays the great changes happened in Britain from the end of the the Second World War to the beginning of the 1960s.
Keywords
Anglo-American Culture, Post-war Britain, National Cinema
[1]. Powell, Michael and Pressburger, Emeric. A Matter of Life and Death. The Archers, 1946.
[2]. Reisz, Karel. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Woodfall Film Production, 1960.
[3]. Higson, Andrew. Waving the Flag. Clarendon Press, 1995.
[4]. Moor, Andrew. Powell&Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005.
[5]. Hill, John. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963. Palgrave Macmillan, 1986.
[6]. Joannou, Maroula. ‘Powell, Pressburger, and Englishness’. European Journal of English Studies, 8:2, 2004, 189-203.
[7]. Ellis, John. ‘Watching Death at Work: An Analysis of A Matter of Life and Death’. Powell Pressburger and Others, edited by Ian Christie, BFI, 2007, pp.79-104.
[8]. Lay, Samantha. British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit. Wallflower Press, 2002.
Cite this article
Gegen,G. (2021). Post-war British Cinema: Constructing an Imagined Community Through National Cinema. Advances in Humanities Research,1,6-10.
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