Richard Farmer – författare

The introduction of rationing in January 1940 ensured that food became a central concern for the British people during the Second World War. The food companions investigates the cinema of this period and demonstrates the cultural impact that rationing and food control had on both government propaganda and commercial feature films.Combining archival research, detailed film analysis, and the extensive use of contemporary documents and resources, this book is the first to fully address the extensive propaganda work of the Ministry of Food both inside and outside the cinema. It also explores the tensions contained in images of communal dining, investigating the role that food played in Gainsborough’s narratives of excess and identifying and analysing a cycle of black-market feature films. Lively and illuminating, The food companions will be welcomed by film scholars, historians, students, and anyone who has ever wondered about the important contribution that tea made during the war to shaping ideas of Britishness.

During the Second World War, the popularity and importance of the cinema in Britain was at its peak. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Farmer provides a social and cultural history of cinemas and cinemagoing in Britain between 1939 and 1945, and explores the impact that the war had on the places in which British people watched films. Although promising the possibility of escape from the hardships and terrors of wartime life, the cinema was so intimately woven into the fabric of British society that it could not itself escape the war. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, and on the memories of wartime cinemagoers, Cinemagoing in wartime Britain, 1939-45 is the first book to offer an in-depth exploration of the impact that phenomena such as the black out, the blitz, food rationing, evacuation and conscription had on both the exhibition industry and the experiences of the picturegoers themselves.

Over half a century on, the 1960s continue to generate strong intellectual and emotional responses – both positive and negative – and this is no less true in the arena of film. Making substantial use of new and underexplored archive resources that provide a wealth of information and insight on the period in question, this book offers a fresh perspective on the major resurgence of creativity and international appeal experienced by British cinema in that dramatic decade. Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema is the first scholarly volume on this period of British cinema for more than twenty-five years. It provides a major reconsideration of the period by focusing on the central tensions and contradiction between novelty/revolution and continuity/tradition during what remains a highly contentious period of cultural production and consumption.

Over half a century on, the 1960s continue to generate strong intellectual and emotional responses – both positive and negative – and this is no less true in the arena of film. Making substantial use of new and underexplored archive resources that provide a wealth of information and insight on the period in question, this book offers a fresh perspective on the major resurgence of creativity and international appeal experienced by British cinema in that dramatic decade. Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema is the first scholarly volume on this period of British cinema for more than twenty-five years. It provides a major reconsideration of the period by focusing on the central tensions and contradiction between novelty/revolution and continuity/tradition during what remains a highly contentious period of cultural production and consumption.

This open access book investigates film studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy between the 1930s and 1960s. During this time, studios faces unprecedented challenges including wartime disruptions, post-war fragmentation, movement of labour and the introduction of new technologies. While the study of film studios has been dominated by the centralized Hollywood ‘studio system’, the authors present new research about the often very different histories of Europe’s film studios, comparing their geographic locations, architectures and infrastructural development. They explore a number of well-known studios including Pinewood, Joinville, Babelsberg and Cinecittà, as well as lesser-known production sites such as Manchester, Victorine, post-war West German studios and Tirrenia as diverse creative and economic infrastructures. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, photographs, films, aerial maps and visualizations, the book charts how artistic practices responded to transnational flows in film studio expertise, as studios constituted formative, materially based ‘spaces of the imagination’ that produced some of cinema’s most influential films. How studios worked in the past as dynamic, creative working environments that were profoundly influenced by their locations, architectures and personnel, is foregrounded as the authors produce new understandings of how the collaborative and material environments of studio spaces and technologies shaped film production and cultures.The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.