From James Bond to the Beatles, the New Wave to Swinging London, the sixties is seen as a period of creative vitality and international success in British cinema. But while the creative process was being enriched by the emergence of a new generation of practitioners, the British film industry continued to be dominated by vertically integrated duopoly of Rank and Associated British, while established filmmakers (like David Lean, Carol Reed, Anthony Asquith and the Boulting Brothers) and their styles of cinemas continued to endure.
Transformation and Tradition in Sixties British Cinema (or ‘The 1960s Project’ for short) is a three-year AHRC-funded project, in partnership with the British film institute, which takes this tension between novelty and continuity as its central focus. Making substantial use of underexploited collections held by key institutions and archives, we hope to address this underrepresented period in British cinema.
There are three major strands to our project, which is based between the Universities of York and East Anglia. Firstly, the team at York, led by Professor Duncan Petrie, will focus on the economics that underpinned the resurgence of British film in the 1960s. The team will examine the new opportunities created by Hollywood finance for the development of the independent production sector, as well as considering the role of state funding and the nature of existing relationships between independent producers and major studios.
Secondly, the team at UEA will look at the creative process of filmmaking in the sixties, researching developments in production practices and the contributions of creative personnel (beyond the usual focus on the director or writer). The team are also looking at the influence of other cultural forms and industries, such as advertising, fashion, and television, and how these intersected with cinema in this era.
Finally, both teams will work on the third strand of the project, which will involve a critical analysis of how British films were framed by promotion and marketing at home and abroad, looking particularly at how discourses of Britishness functioned to ‘brand’ films during a period in which Britain was considered to be a cultural epicentre.
So far the York team has researched the importance of state funding for film production, the relationships between independent producers and major studios and the death of the British ‘B’ movie and its consequences for the industry. The UEA team have looked at the role of the costume designer (through a case study of Oscar-winning designer Julie Harris) and the significance of the use of colour in cinema, as well as investigating the creative relationship between film and advertising in the 1960s. This work has fed to a number of forthcoming journal articles and book chapters.
Another key highlight of our work so far has been the building of a database which includes exhaustive cast, crew, financing, distribution, box office and reception data for the 991 British films released between 1960 and 1969, effectively providing us with a statistical map of the decade and a quantitative basis for our research, as well as allowing us to chart important historical trends.
Other outputs will include journal articles, an edited book, a monograph and a major conference, while our partnership with the BFI will take our research to an audience beyond the purely academic.
We regularly showcase our research through our project blog, whilst also inviting contributions from other researchers working in related areas. This can be found at: https://60sbritishcinema.wordpress.com/. You can also follow us on twitter (@1960sProject) and facebook (https://www.facebook.com/1960sproject).