Resistance through realism: Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain

Abstract

Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect the concerns articulated by British cultural studies during the same period. This article looks at how the social realist films of the 1970s and early 1980s similarly reflect the concerns of British cultural studies scholarship produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s. It argues that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ approach to stylised working-class youth subcultures is echoed in the portrayal of youth subcultures in the social realist films Pressure (1976), Bloody Kids (1979), Babylon (1980) and Made in Britain (1982). This article explores the ways in which these films show us both the strengths and weaknesses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ work on subcultures.

The biographical approach in (post-) subcultural studies: Exploring punk in China

“…Moreover, while exploring the meaning of style is important for understanding cultural practices, a problem with Hebdige’s work can be found in the absence of the lived experience of punks and their own interpretations of the meanings of their style. The CCCS approach, which treats subcultures as static, class-based formations, has been widely criticised as overly rigid (Weiner, 2015), but it is open to criticism also for its empirical flaws arising on account of dependence on second-hand research (Cohen, 1980; Muggleton, 2000).…”