Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave

Dave, Paul

doi:10.1057/9780230306387_2

British Social Realism in the Arts Since 1940 2011

DOI: 10.1057/9780230306387_2

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Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave

Paul Dave¹

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Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…1. Higson actually distinguishes between what he calls ‘the realist tradition’ and the ‘melodrama of everyday life’, but the fusion that he points to between the ‘documentary idea’ of the 1930s and narrative cinema, a fusion which occurred in the 1940s, is more usually referred to as British social realism (Hallam and Marshment, 2000; Lay, 2002; Dave, 2011). …”

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‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

Thornham

2019

Feminist Theory

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This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal.

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‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

Thornham

2019

Feminist Theory

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“…Reviews have tended to place Arnold's films in a British tradition of social realism; see, for example, Fuller (2010). For an academic study which places Arnold's films in this tradition, see Dave (2011).…”

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‘Not a country at all’: Landscape andWuthering Heights

Thornham¹

2016

Journal of British Cinema and Television

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Abstract:This article explores the issue of women's representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnold's 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of 'alternative landscapes': of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobus' notion of intertextual 'correspondence' between women's texts, and taking Arnold's film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements -the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings -that link Andrea Arnold's film to Emily Brontë's original novel.Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape -her use of 'unframed' landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail -it points to correspondences in other women's writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnold's adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy.

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Displaced masculinity and global homelessness inRefuge England(Robert Vas, 1959)

Kalmár

2018

Studies in European Cinema

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Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave

Cited by 7 publications

References 6 publications

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

‘Not a country at all’: Landscape andWuthering Heights

Displaced masculinity and global homelessness inRefuge England(Robert Vas, 1959)

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