Great Expectations

It is not an inflated statement to say that among Western European national cinemas, British cinema of the studio era remains one of the least explored internationally. A cinema that was once critically celebrated, consistently presented at international film festivals, and widely distributed – from the best cinemas in Paris to Tehran – epitomised a “golden age” that weakened and fell out of fashion with the arrival of later movements, such as the British New Wave. While recent academic studies of the period in question have been astonishingly rich, the actual act of screening these films has been rare and far between.This book, accompanying a British postwar cinema retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival, features nearly forty essays on the distinctive voices of British cinema, mapping the phoenix-like rise of a nation from the ashes of the Second World War and following its bumpy road to national reconstruction and cinematic innovation.Great Expectations focuses on British cinema’s studio years, its major classics, as well as the rich tradition of genre films. In addition to essays on the role of women behind the camera, children in front of it, the critical reception of the films, and British cinema’s exchanges with Hollywood, this book features vivid critical profiles of thirty major directors from a period whose diversity and range of styles, subjects, and talents remain unmatched in British cinema history.