Film England : Culturally English Filmmaking Since The 1990s by Andrew Higson (Published by I.B. Taurus, 2011)
Andrew Higson is professor of film and television at the University of York in England.
His writings on British cinema are rightly praised for being illuminating and thorough. His excellent book ‘Waving The Flag’ examined how national cinema was constructed in Britain through a detailed analysis of film texts from the early 1920s to the 1940s. With ‘Film England’ he updates this concept by examining UK film production in the 1990s and 2000s.
Higson says that the tension “between the cultural dynamics of national cinema and the global economy of film production is the defining characteristic of what I am exploring in this book.”
Not surprisingly, one of his main findings is that “the bigger the budget, in broad terms, the more conventional and conservative the ideologies of Englishness on display; smaller budgets by contrast tended to lend themselves much more readily to innovative representations of a more extensive range of social types.”
Since the English market alone is not big enough to support an independent film industry, funding must come from other countries. The dependence on Hollywood is profound and this leads to “the creation of transnational products addressed to audiences that are defined not by national allegiance but by taste and sensibility.”
The UK government’s Cultural Test, introduced in 2007, was designed to give financial assistance to films that promote cultural values of the nation. Higson notes,however, that the government made “little effort is made to identify or define Britishness itself” but he compounds this failure by making no attempt to give his own definition. He merely concedes weakly that national identity is a “slippery concept” . This we know!
Literary source material does not help clarify this question although, by choosing to devote two of the eight chapters to the Jane Austen screen franchise, Higson seeks to explore what aspects of her classic novels are so appealing to global producers. In doing so he concludes somewhat bleakly that “precise cultural provenance is an irrelevance in the film business, so long as a market can be identified.” For example, any class-bound details that are part of Austen’s novels tend to downplayed or glossed over so as to not to compromise or confuse world-wide audiences.
Global capitalism thus functions through a hegemonic construction of indigenous Englishness so that diluted forms of hybrid national interests are appropriated, standardised and commodified. In this way, Englishness, or Britishness, is reduced to a brand image. The ironing out of differences or perceived sources of conflict in films help promote the UK as a safe travel destination to become “one of the commodities one buys through heritage tourism.”
Higson’s arguments on production values are detailed but he falls short when it comes to analysis of the British films over the two decades from 1990 – 2010. Too much of the book is taken up with lists of films in various categories with little or no attempt to provide any deeper insights . He describes the “strangeness” of Sally Potter’s ‘Orlando’ and the “highly mannered performances” in this film without offering his view on how this strangeness enhances or diminishes the movie as a whole.
When taking a broader position, he tends to make bland catchall statements that offer no insights whatsoever. Take these two examples:
“Different films offer different sorts of pleasures to different audiences. Different sorts of productions rely on stereotypes in different ways”
“Different types of production was intended for different markets and addressed to different audiences”
An editor worth his/her salt would have suggested to the author that he ought to find a synonym to replace ‘different’ as the adjective.
Although Higson suggests in his conclusion that American investment has contributed to diverse representations of Englishness, it is plain from his own analysis that U.S. “corporately-dispersed” business model has mostly led to conservative and stereotypical presentations of national identity.
