Picture Perfect

Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930

By (author) Bryony Dixon, Laraine Porter Contributions by Ivo Blom, Simon Brown, Alan Burton, Ian Christie, Jude Cowan, Bryony Dixon, Michael Eaton, Tony Fletcher, Christine Gledhill, Patrick Keiller, Judith McLaren, Paul Moody, Laraine Porter, Amy Sargeant

Publication date:

16 March 2007

Length of book:

160 pages

Publisher

The Exeter Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781905816002

The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation.

The fifth in a series of volumes from the annual British Silent Cinema Festival held in Nottingham (and the first to be published by Exeter), this collective study offers an original treatment of the relationship between pre-1930 cinema and landscape. The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists – practitioners, academics and individual researchers – who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.

Contents: Notes on Contributors; Introduction; Alan Burton and Laraine Porter; Location, Location, Location: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema Before 1930; Bryony Dixon (Curator of Silent Film at the BFI's National Film and Television Archive); On Location in Edwardian Britain: Urban and Rural Violence; Tony Fletcher (founder member of The Cinema Museum in London); The Marketing of Landscapes in Silent British Cinema; Paul Moody (lecturer in Media Studies at Uxbridge College); Narrative and Pictorialism in Post-Pioneer Hepworth Films; Simon Brown (senior lecturer in Film Studies at Kingston University); Pastoral Transformations in 1920s British Cinema; Christine Gledhill (Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland); "The Plucky Girl" and the "Pigeon to Pluck": Characters, Locations and Entertainment Forms in Rogues of London; Judith Cowan (archive researcher at the ITN archive working on the Reuters Collection); Trainers and Temptresses: The British Racing Drama; Judith McLaren (teacher of English at St Paul's School in London); The First Cameraman in Iceland: Travel Film and Travel Literature; Ivo Blom (lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Comparative Arts Studies of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam); The Anglo-Boer War in North London: A Micro-Study; Ian Christie (Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College London); Everyone's Doing the Riviera Because It's So Much Nicer in Nice; Amy Sargeant (Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art and Architecture); The City of the Future; Patrick Keiller (films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997); research fellow at the Royal College of Art in London); Co-operation and the Contestation of Public Space; Alan Burton (teacher at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria); Billy Merson's Monologue: Blighted My Life; Mick Eaton (recent TV work includes 'Shipman', a factual drama about Britain's most prolific serial murderer); Index.

‘Virtually everything in this admirable volume deserves to be noticed.’ (Screening the Past, Issue 22, Jan. 2008) ‘It is the first of these proceedings to be published by the University of Exeter Press, which offers a new and more attractive design, and the contributons themselves are equally good’ (Early Popular Visual Culture: 6,3. November 2008)