David Forrest

Shane Meadows and the British New Wave: Britain's hidden art cinema

Abstract This article seeks to highlight the textual parallels of the British New Wave and the films of Shane Meadows, supported by the Bordwellian definition of art cinema. In so doing, I will encourage a reassessment of British social realism within the wider framework of art cinema, demonstrating how a focus on the aesthetic, formal and stylistic characteristics of the mode offers us new points of departure in our analysis of British realism. To this end, Andrew Higsons and John Hills sociologically inclined readings of the New Wave cycle are evoked to reflect the dominant critical discourses that have inhibited broader engagements with the films. Hills and Higsons class-based interpretations of the New Waves problematic aesthetic issues are reapplied to the recent films of Shane Meadows, highlighting the manner in which similar aesthetic compositions occur across British social realist films, from the middle-class gaze of the New Wave to the apparently authentic approach of Meadows. By illuminating the narrow boundaries of these socio-political reading strategies, I advance a case for an understanding of British realism based on authorship and the pursuit of self-consciously disseminated lyricism.

A Poetics of the North: Visual and Literary Geographies

In this chapter we explore different media in our approaches to the North, including a pair of linked television plays presented under the title The Price of Coal (Ken Loach, 1977), written by Barry Hines; these are alongside two literary texts, Philip Hensher’s 2008 novel, A Northern Clemency, and David Peace’s GB84 of 2004. We argue that a dynamic poetics of the North emerges as both an aesthetic trend and a critical tool when viewed within such cross-medium understandings of region. The notion of a poetics of the North might appear to be a contradictory one, given critical assumptions about the region’s associations with a realist form and its accompanying bleak social and political content. However, as Katherine Cockin has argued, the North ‘generates oxymoron or paradox, a tension between desolation and depth, defying the literal and logical and intimating the poetic powers of the unconscious’ (Cockin, 2012: 5–6). Here, we use the apparently archetypal examples of television drama and fiction, which centre on representations of the mining industry in the South Yorkshire region in order to argue against such a polarised view.

The Narrative Nightclub

This chapter brings together expertise in film and cultural studies to analyse representations of nightclub dancefloors in British cinema. Our focus is on club culture films: Human Traffic (Justin Kerrigan, 1999), Sorted (Alexander Jovy, 2000), Soul Boy (Shimmy Marcus, 2010), Everywhere and Nowhere (Menhaj Huda, 2011), Northern Soul (Elaine Constantine, 2014) and Eden (Mia Hansen-Love, 2015), a contrasting example from France. We propose that British film tends to use the dancefloor as a narrative device that occludes or disturbs notions of youth culture, turning it into a problem to be solved. We perform our analysis by linking academic writing on dance music and nightclub cultures with textual interpretation of the films. In doing so the chapter captures a sense of the wider discourse surrounding nightclubs and especially the dancefloors that often form their focus, on- and off-screen.

Introduction. Filmurbia: Cinema and the Suburbs

This volume is devoted to discussions, debates and analyses of the cinematic suburb—the outer city, the urban edge field, the margins of metropolitan activity and existence that international film has mapped, defined, celebrated and denigrated across the full spectrum of realist, narrative, formalist, artistic, dramatic and documentary film. While film’s unrivalled capability in the rendition of photographic reality might suggest the potential for socio-historical recording of the suburb’s post-war development, the strength of its contribution lies more constructively within the socio-cultural construction and interpretation of the concept and experience of suburbia. Therefore the essays in this collection reflect not only the moving image’s ability and responsibility to document and portray the burgeoning of outer city life since the mid-twentieth century: it also acknowledges and revels in cinema’s capacity to interrogate, theorize and construct the suburb as a filmic and wider popular cultural concept—a filmurbia.

Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain

This collection is a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary British television drama and its representations of social class. Through early studio-set plays, soap operas and period drama, the volume demonstrates how class provides a bridge across multiple genres and traditions of television drama. The authors trace this thematic emphasis into the present day, offering fascinating new insights into the national conversation around class and identity in Britain today. The chapters engage with a range of topics including authorial explorations of Stephen Poliakoff and Jimmy McGovern, case studies of television performers Maxine Peake and Jimmy Nail, and discussions of the sitcom genre and animation form. This book offers new perspectives on popular British television shows such as Goodnight Sweetheart and Footballers’ Wives, and analysis of more recent series such as Peaky Blinders and This is England.

Jimmy McGovern’s The Street and the Politics of Everyday Life

This chapter examines Jimmy McGovern’s The Street (BBC1 2006–09) as a text which draws upon familiar and recurring iconographic tropes of Northern identity to inculcate fixed regional and socio-political narratives of class representation. Central to this analysis is the titular ‘street’ itself, which is positioned as a critical symbolic mechanism in the series’ mythologising of everyday life.

Mike Leigh and the Poetics of English Suburbia

One of the most distinctive features of Mike Leigh’s forty-five year career has been his sustained interest in suburban life. His films, from Bleak Moments (1971), to High Hopes (1988), Life is Sweet (1991), Secrets and Lies (1996), Happy Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010) and television plays such as, famously, Abigail’s Party (1971), Grown-Ups (1980), Home Sweet Home (1982) and Meantime (1983) all feature suburban spaces, locations and characters. These films all attempt to explore the relationship between suburban place and the dynamics of emotional, social and cultural identity, and they have much to say about how we imagine and construct meaning through the English suburb.

Screening South Yorkshire: The Gamekeeper and Looks and Smiles

In Barry Hines’s final two films with Ken Loach, The Gamekeeper (1980) and Looks and Smiles (1981), the spaces of South Yorkshire, photographed by Chris Menges, are constructed with what seem to be the social-realist or even documentary techniques of long shots of rural and urban landscapes alternating with close-ups, filmed using natural lighting and black-and-white footage respectively. Yet the intertwining of thematic and regional concerns in these films is artfully constructed to symbolic effect, acknowledging the specificity of South Yorkshire’s history and landscape in the act of using it to reveal injustice in a broader sense. This chapter explores these key works primarily through the lens of Hines’s authorship, drawing on archival material to make the case for the writer’s distinctive approach to northern place.

Locating and building knowledges outside of the academy: approaches to engaged teaching at the University of Sheffield

This article draws on three case studies, which illuminate a number of practical, ethical and intellectual issues that arise from ‘engaged’ teaching activities within the curriculum. Projects from the disciplines of Architecture, English and Journalism Studies illustrate the possibilities offered by learning and teaching projects which emphasise public facing, co-produced knowledge as central components. It is argued that such approaches enable dynamic forms of learning to emerge, which work to expand the parameters of subject-specific knowledge while enabling the development of citizenship attributes and employability skills amongst students in ways that deepen, rather than dilute, intellectual rigour. The article locates these practical pedagogical reflections within theoretical frameworks offered by those working (largely in North America) on publicly engaged approaches to scholarship and seeks to draw connections with contemporary developments in learning and teaching in the UK.

The films of Joanna Hogg: new British realism and class

This article explores the work the British director Joanna Hogg. It uses Hogg’s first two films, Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) to argue that, despite her focus on exclusively middle-class characters and locations, Hogg should be understood within an increasingly diverse realist tradition that no longer relies on social class as its default thematic emphasis. As such, both films are read and analysed closely around their approach to aspects of everyday routines and practices, with Hogg’s interest in the bourgeois quotidian identified as the central mechanism for her subtly potent narratives of isolation and emotional claustrophobia. This focus on the mundane is therefore used as a means of broadening and complicating existing critical definitions of realism, moving beyond those which emphasis predominantly sociological components of the mode. The article finds in Mike Leigh a middle-class realist antecedent for Hogg, and develops a comparative analysis of both directors use of the everyday as a narrative device.