Bibliography
Adonis, Andrew and Pollard, Stephen, A Class Act: the Myth of Britain’s Classless Society (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1997).
Ashby, Justine and Higson, Andrew (eds.), British Cinema: Past and Present (London, Routledge, 2000).
Bourke, Joanna, Working Class Cultures in Britain 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, Routledge, 1994).
Danel, Isabelle, ‘Mon nom est Peter !’, Télérama n° 2544 (1998), p. 32.
Davidson, Alex, Looks and Smiles, 2003-2014, available at <http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/492562/index.html>.
Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil or the Two Nations (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1954 [1845]).
Frodon, Jean-Michel, La Projection nationale (Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998).
Higson, Andrew, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995).
Hill, John, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999).
Hjort, Mette and Petrie, Duncan (eds.), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Iannone, Pasquale, 10 Great Films Set in Glasgow, 17 February 2015, available at <http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-films-set-glasgow>.
Ide, Wendy, Interview Shane Meadows: The Vision Thing, 8 March 1998, <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/interview-shane-meadows-the-vision-thing-1148920.html>.
Lacey, Stephen, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context (1956-1965) (London, Routledge, 1995).
Laing, Stuart, Representations of Working Class Life 1957-1964 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986).
Lawrence, D.H., Selected Essays (London, Penguin, 1960 [1950]).
Leach, Jim, British Film (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Marin-Lamellet, Anne-Lise, ‘Le Working Class Hero ou la figure ouvrière à travers le cinéma britannique de 1956 à nos jours’, (PhD dissertation, University of Grenoble, 2011).
Maschler, Tom (ed.), Declaration (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1957).
McKnight, George (ed.), Agent of Challenge and Defiance, The Films of Ken Loach (Westport, Praeger, 1997).
Media Monkey, Kelvin risks northern boycott of Sun, The Guardian, 14 August 2008, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2008/aug/14/kelvinmackenzierisksnorther>.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart and Seed John (eds.), Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London, Routledge, 1992).
Morgan-James, Annie, ‘Myth and Reality: Filmic Images of Scotland’, Revue française de civilisation britannique XI-2 (2001), pp. 29-40.
Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, Penguin, 1967 [1937]).
Petrie, Duncan (ed.), New Questions of British Cinema (London, British Film Institute, 1992).
Petrie, Duncan, Screening Scotland (London, BFI Publishing, 2000).
Richards, Jeffrey, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997).
Russell, Dave, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004).
Watt, Nicholas, Tories’ favourite think-tank brands northern cities failures, The Guardian, 13 August 2008, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/aug/13/conservatives.regeneration>.
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Notes
For further details on the cycle of films made between 1959 and 1963 which focused on the lives of northern working-class people, see for example, Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context (1956-1965) (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 163-189, and Jim Leach, British Film (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 52-58.
“Screen” is understood herein as feature films since, of course, there have been short newsreels or documentaries set in the North since 1896.
Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push’ in Tom Maschler (ed.), Declaration (London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), pp. 157-160.
Stuart Laing, Representations of Working Class Life 1957-1964 (Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1986), p. 89.
The hyphenless expression is a tribute to John Lennon who invented the compound in his eponymous song. For a comprehensive definition of the phrase in the context of British cinema, see Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet, ‘Le Working Class Hero ou la figure ouvrière à travers le cinéma britannique de 1956 à nos jours’ (PhD dissertation, University of Grenoble, 2011), pp. 19-33.
See Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 24.
The fact that these nations have had difficulties in maintaining a domestic film industry may partly explain their blending in with the rest of the British film production, which is evidently dominated by English finance as well as artistic and technical staff and thus tends to offer a metropolitan view of the country. For more details about Northern Irish and Scottish cinema, see Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds.), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 60-92, and Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London, BFI Publishing, 2000), pp. 1-31.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, Penguin, 1967 [1937]), p. 101, had noticed that, whatever the evolution of the region that may make its image anachronistic, “traditions are never killed by facts”. Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, A Class Act: the Myth of Britain’s Classless Society (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1997), pp. 184-185, mention the impact of the heritage industry that seeks to maintain the working-class history of the North and may thus explain the outdated or stereotypical image the South has about it.
“The recurrent image of steam trains, cobbled backstreets, gasometers and railway viaducts gave the films the feeling of taking place at the fag-end of the nineteenth century” according to Jeffrey Richards in Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed (eds.), Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 220. Russell, Looking North, pp. 5 and 269, points out the fact that this traditional view of the North dates back to historians’ observations of the mid to late 19th century. He stresses the constancy of the representation of the North as “urban and industrial, grim and bleak, harsh and uncultured” over 150 years which is “remarkably similar to the pattern that was in place by about 1840”.
Many specialists have vainly tried to delimit the North. See Dave Russell, op.cit., p. xii, and Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, op.cit., p. 183.
See Lindsay Anderson’s aforementioned quote and George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 98.
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or the Two Nations (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1954 [1845]), pp. 72-73.
This does not mean there are no strong northern women but films with a female lead role are quite rare (A Taste of Honey, Smashing Time, Letter to Brezhnev, Ladybird, Ladybird, Red Road, Wild Rose).
George Orwell, op.cit., p. 98.
One recent exception is God’s Own Country that introduces a rugged homosexual Yorkshire farmer.
Orwell explains: “The cult is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves”. Ibid., p. 99. That may explain this mythical construction of the North on screen since most directors in the British New Wave were Southerners.
This symbol was used by Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie in 2008 following the release of a report by the Policy Exchange think-tank about the difficulties of Northern cities to regenerate. “If it were up to me I’d get those Israeli builders to make a wall from The Wash to Bristol. They’d have it up in a jiffy”, he explained so that the South could be protected from a region seen as a subsidy junkie. Media Monkey, Kelvin risks northern boycott of Sun, 14 August 2008, <https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2008/aug/14/kelvinmackenzierisksnorther> [8 November 2016].
For a detailed analysis of the South’s fascination for the North, see Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet, op.cit., pp. 448-450.
Because it is a powerful mode of representation, many scholars have analysed and pondered over the role of cinema vis-à-vis national identity as part of the way media not only reflect but also interact with the society of which they are the product. According to Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. xii and 25-26, “cinema and latterly television have played a vital role in defining, mythifying and disseminating national identity [having] functioned as propagators of the national image, both in reflecting widely held views and constructing, extending, interrogating and perpetuating dominant cultural myths”. Based on the reflections of Thomas Elsaesser, “Images for Sale: The “New British Cinema” in Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema & Thatcherism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.59-69, the North can be seen as a myth of the nation and even a mytheme on which cinema feeds. For detailed discussions about the role of cinema in shaping, sustaining or challenging cultural identity or national myths, see Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 4-9, 272-279; Andrew Higson, ‘The Instability of the National’ in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, (eds.), British Cinema: Past and Present (London, Routledge, 2000), pp. 35-47; Jean-Michel Frodon, La Projection nationale (Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998), pp. 19-20, 137-145; John Hill, ‘The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Production’ in Duncan Petrie (ed.), New Questions of British Cinema (London, British Film Institute, 1992), pp. 10-21, and Jim Leach, British Film (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1-17.
Joanna Bourke, Working Class Cultures in Britain 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 155-156, recalls the number of rebuilding campaigns between 1945 and 1964. Adonis and Pollard, A Class Act, op.cit., pp. 200-202, list the various promises made about slum clearance throughout the 20th century. However, there were still over 1.5 million insalubrious houses left in the mid-1990s.
In My Name is Joe, the used location was G12, which was initially meant to be the film title, a destitute area in Glasgow where life expectancy never exceeds 50 according to its lead actor Peter Mullan. Danel, Isabelle, ‘Mon nom est Peter !’, Télérama n° 2544 (1998), p. 32.
The phrase was coined by famous architectural historian and conservationist James Lees-Milne in his Diaries, 1942-1954 (London, John Murray, 2006), although he used it in a rather disparaging way, conservation not being synonymous with freezing time. The deliberate choice to shoot a film in black and white today can obviously be interpreted in several ways but it always makes a political or aesthetic point. The homage to earlier films or the distancing effect immediately gives a vintage or even historical aspect to the photography. Ken Loach who directed Looks and Smiles said he wanted something simple, more truthful, not pretty and strong but now thinks of it as too arty (McKnight, George (ed.), Agent of Challenge and Defiance, The Films of Ken Loach (Westport, Praeger, 1997), p.162) while critics praise it for its romanticising effect “transforming bleak industrial backdrops into a hauntingly lyrical cityscape” (Davidson, Alex, Looks and Smiles, 2003-2014, <http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/492562/index.html> [5 March 2018]). Shane Meadows who directed TwentyfourSeven insisted on the timeless quality of black and white photography (Ide, Wendy, Interview Shane Meadows: The Vision Thing, 8 March 1998, <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/interview-shane-meadows-the-vision-thing-1148920.html> [5 March 2018]) thereby reaching a mythic level of eternity and thus contributing to the museumisation of the North.
Russell, Looking North, p. 286, speaks about the “greening” of the North after its deindustrialisation. Apparently, the Sheffield city council did not really like the publicity generated by the success of The Full Monty since the city entered the international imagination as a sort of giant industrial wasteland. Hallam, Julia, ‘Film, class and national identity: re-imagining communities in the age of devolution’ in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds.), British Cinema: Past and Present, pp. 262-263, 270, explains that producing films about the North is also a way to attract investors so that they finance various regeneration projects.
One can think of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) set in the imaginary region of Darkshire, the onomastics of which echoes William Blake’s dark, satanic mills mentioned in Jerusalem (1804). Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 95, 100-101, calls Sheffield “the ugliest town in the Old World”. He dates the origin of the North/South divide back to the Industrial Revolution.
Lawrence, D.H., Selected Essays (London, Penguin, 1960 [1950]), p. 121, was already complaining about the British landscape that he thought had been ravaged by these new buildings. They were not cities but endlessly sprawling suburbs, like Nottingham “an amorphous agglomeration”. This town planning scheme had an impact on people’s minds: “They are all suburban, pseudo-cottagy, and not one of them knows how to be truly urban”.
Adonis and Pollard, A Class Act, pp. 188-189, beyond a Southernification of the North, mention the Americanisation of the UK that imitates its urban sprawl model.
For more details about how the evolution of housing has reflected and symbolised the working class hero’s embourgeoisement or proletarisation over sixty years, see Marin-Lamellet, Anne-Lise, op.cit., pp. 438, 480-505.
Adonis and Pollard, A Class Act, p. 183, concur about the stereotypical image of a purely working-class North.
See Morgan-James, Annie, ‘Myth and Reality: Filmic Images of Scotland’, Revue française de civilisation britannique XI-2 (2001), p. 30.
The commercial success of that film has generated a whole batch of more or less inspired imitations, a type of formulaic cinema based on a “new sophisticated urban aesthetic, the combination of a young cast, edgy subject-matter, vibrant colours, visual pyrotechnics and a pounding soundtrack”. For more details, see Petrie, Duncan, Screening Scotland, pp. 196-199.
The fact that Glasgow was chosen as a city double by several Hollywood majors in films such as Cloud Atlas (2012), World War Z (2013) and Fast & Furious 6 (2013) seems to corroborate its new status. Iannone, Pasquale, 10 Great Films Set in Glasgow, 17 February 2015, <http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-films-set-glasgow> [8 November 2016]. “Madchester” is compared to “Renaissance Florence” in 24 Hour Party People.
Southerners’ journeys north, whether intentional or not, are rarer and often prove tragic (White Settlers, I, Daniel Blake).
This sort of brain drain shows that Northerners in films apply a highly controversial recommendation made in the Cities Unlimited: Making Urban Regeneration Work report by think-tank Policy Exchange that stated that many Northern cities being “beyond salvation” their inhabitants should be encouraged to move South. Watt, Nicholas, Tories’ favourite think-tank brands northern cities failures, 13 August 2008, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/aug/13/conservatives.regeneration> [8 November 2016]. The vision of London as a second chance is often present in films although the plan to go there is not always actualised (Looks and Smiles, The Angels’ Share). When it is, the vision given is biting.
Luckett, Moya, ‘Travel and mobility: femininity and national identity in Swinging London films’ in Ashby and Higson (eds.), British Cinema: Past and Present, p. 235, writes: “The heroines of the Swinging London films […] relegate local rivalries (like the North/South divide) to a now redundant male-controlled past […]. London is represented as the seat of feminine power, while masculine rule is consigned to history”.
See Russell, Looking North, p. 187.
Hill, John, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 173, confirms: “In Naked, the return to the north appears to hold out the possibility of a certain form of identity and inter-connection which is absent from the film’s portrait of London as a city of lonely and alienated people”.
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