French film culture and British cinema
pp. 154-186
in: Ceri Crossley, Ian Small (eds), Studies in Anglo-French cultural relations, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
By the end of the 1950s it was a truth as widely acknowledged in Britain as in France that British cinema was moribund, and it was from that time onwards that film culture in Britain began to take its lead from France. The French influence was felt on film criticism, film theory and, to a degree, on film exhibition and production. It was partial at first but, thanks to the activities of the journals Movie and Screen, it had become widespread by the middle of the 1970s and was no longer confined to the cinema but embraced the fields of politics, literary criticism and education. However, the French influence was always felt selectively and usually used polemically: as frequently seems to have been the case in Britain,3 groups of intellectuals exploited France and the French tradition to point up what they most disliked about their own culture and what changes they wished to bring about. This means that the impact of French film culture in Britain cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of the British cinema in the immediate post-war years.4