36 research outputs found
Come to Daddy? Claiming Chris Cunningham for British Art Cinema
Twenty years after he came to prominence via a series of provocative, ground-breaking music videos, Chris Cunningham remains a troubling, elusive figure within British visual culture. His output â which includes short films, advertisements, art gallery commissions, installations, music production and a touring multi-screen live performance â is relatively slim, and his seemingly slow work rate (and tendency to leave projects uncompleted or unreleased) has been a frustration for fans and commentators, particularly those who hoped he would channel his interests and talents into a full-length âfeatureâ film project. There has been a diverse critical response to his musical sensitivity, his associations with UK electronica culture â and the Warp label in particular â his working relationship with Aphex Twin, his importance within the history of the pop video and his deployment of transgressive, suggestive imagery involving mutated, traumatised or robotic bodies. However, this article makes a claim for placing Cunningham within discourses of British art cinema. It proposes that the many contradictions that define and animate Cunningham's work â narrative versus abstraction, political engagement versus surrealism, sincerity versus provocation, commerce versus experimentation, art versus craft, a âBritishâ sensibility versus a transnational one â are also those that typify a particular terrain of British film culture that falls awkwardly between populism and experimentalism
'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 â possibly over-familiar â 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)
Working Title Films and Universal : The Integration of a British Production Company into a Hollywood Studio
Working Title Films is arguably the most successful and well-known production company in Britain today. For over 30 years, it has produced a diverse range of critically and commercially successful British films including romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Bridget Jonesâs Diary (2001), family films like Bean (1997) and Nanny McPhee (2005) and dramas including Atonement (2007) and The Theory of Everything (2014). For the majority of its history, however, Working Title has been defined in business terms by its status as a subsidiary of one of two multinational media conglomerates, PolyGram (1992â8) and Universal (1998âpresent). The transition between the two began when PolyGram, and its film studio, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE), was sold to Seagram, the parent company of Universal. This article examines Working Titleâs integration into Universal and the evolving media ecology which shaped the processes of development, green-lighting, production, marketing and distribution at play within and between both companies between 1998 and 2006. In these respects, Working Titleâs transition between parent companies is a narrative of both continuity and change. Significantly, three key stages of gatekeeping remained common to both the PFE and Universal eras: development, green-lighting and distribution. The institutional perimeters within which these points of decision-making occurred, however, changed considerably. The article concludes by considering the impact of such structures and processes on the films which Working Title produced, particularly their various representations of Britain and âBritishnessâ
A topography of the British social realist film : troublesome bodies and gendered spaces from the new wave to the present
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