1 research outputs found
'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved
British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The
buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and
'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British
context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the
cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film
and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two
comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly
period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated
boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations
which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and
historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this
journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that
'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of
the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium
specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the
historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both
the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific
than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some
of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual
level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)