This book is intended to provide a survey of three centuries of film production, distribution and exhibition in Britain. It is also concerned with the larger institution of cinema. It outlines the reception of films by various audiences and various critics (in the trade press, the regular press and journals) and refers to spaces of film viewing (from the fairground to the fleapit, from the dream palace to the multiplex, from home-viewing to amateur and workplace societies, to video-hire, the internet and the gallery). The book mostly covers a selection of films that were actually made and released, although the vicissitudes of intervention from government and other funding and regulatory authorities, to aid and abet this process, are also brought into the discussion.
Like most histories, this one is organised chronologically but a number of notions are reiterated across its chapters: the relationship with Europe (the movement of people, ideas and the nature of the marketplace); the relationship with America; certain themes, character types and recurrent models of society (including lodging houses, schools, prisons, hospitals, ships, city streets, villages and the country house). Equally pervasive are certain representations of the social and physical landscape of Britain itself: the town versus the countryside; the country and the coast; the metropolis; the suburbs; the highlands and islands; old industry and new money; regional and class mobility. Consequently, I am as much concerned with a shared imaginative history as with the peculiarities of British life witnessed at any particular point in time. This broader perspective informs the selection of the case studies at the end of each chapter.
https://www.amazon.com/British-Cinema-Critical-Interpretive-History-ebook/dp/B08HVLFW49/
Although I have been coming across some excellent dictionaries and encyclopaedias of British film and film in general, I have also been hoping for some discursive histories of British film and the other day Amy Sargeant’s British Cinema: A Critical and Interpretive History published by the British Film Institute in 2005 with a more Kindle edition appearing in 2019 turned up in some search results.
Although, in the style of many film historians, Sargeant skims over the crucial contribution Directors of Photography like Robert Krasker, BSC make to feature filmmaking, his name is mentioned in connection with Brief Encounter, Odd Man Out and The Third Man, the trio of black-and-white films that established his fame early in his career:
Odd Man Out, photographed by Robert Krasker, cinematographer on The Third Man (1949) and Brief Encounter, opens in the manner of London Belongs to Me and Night and the City with an aerial shot locating its action. …
… reinforced for modern audiences by the often oblique framing and cast shadows of Robert Krasker’s monochrome cinematography (matching the night sequences of Odd Man Out [1947] – see Chapter 7) and by references (backwards) to Fritz Lang’s tell-tale children and a balloon-seller in M (Germany, 1931) …
The Robert Krasker Project 