Review: The British Working Class in Postwar Film * Review: British Cinema of the 1950s: the Decline of Deference

Screen ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-451
Author(s):  
R. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Film Review ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The 1950S

Punk, class, and taste in Desert Island Discs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Webb
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Economic Hardship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Uk

This chapter attempts to use popular music as a way of connecting a number of castaways who shared a similar love of punk and post-punk and who described certain experiences that their appreciation of that music had resonance with. The music is used as a starting point to trace the experiences of the castaways to wider sets of social, cultural, and political histories of the UK. Among the castaways chosen are Kathy Burke, Ian Rankin, Ricky Gervais, and Hanif Kureshi. Each of these had a working-class upbringing and Kureshi grew up in a working-class area with parents who had been well off in India before moving to the UK. The choice of music intertwines with their descriptions of economic hardship, domestic violence, and racism but also a developed sense of community, sensitivity, and humanism that illustrates a sector of British life in the 1950s through to the 1980s.

Working Girls

2014 ◽  
pp. 93-114
Author(s):  
Paul Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Male Prostitution ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Public Views

This chapter focuses on how prostitution is figured in popular British cinema. Like many areas of crime cinema, prostitution provides a fairly accurate barometer of how the British public views itself. If the cinematic gangster offers insights into the nature of masculinity and the heist movie gives insights into greed and economics, then the prostitute film sheds light on the changing face of sexual morality The chapter is divided into three main periods — the 1950s, the 1980s, and the 1990s — and traces how the working girl was presented in each of these. The picture that emerges from this exercise is one of slow change; from the paternalism of the 1950s, through the permissiveness of the 1960s, on to the politicisation of the 1980s. Representations of prostitution are also ineluctably tied to gender politics and the concomitant power relationships of socio-economics. Films about prostitution are almost always written, directed, and produced by men but most often feature women; films that depict male prostitution are few and far between and contain radically different socio-politics as those that feature female sex-workers. This means that any study of cinematic prostitution must always consider the means of production, its context, and its consumption.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 370-382
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The conclusion looks at the implications of the failure to organize southern workers for the United States today and asks how successful southern organizing might have led to different outcomes. Foremost is the possibility that the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would have been much more powerful if more white working-class support had been enlisted. This possibility, which the book asserts was real, had the potential to make the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States vastly different.

Everyday Life in the First Hungarian Socialist City

2005 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sándor Horváth
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Early State ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Insight Into

This paper examines the official discourses that shaped the parameters of everyday life and the reactions of socialist citizens to them in Hungary's first socialist city, Sztálinváros, during the 1950s. Concentrating especially on the regulation of working-class leisure, it argues that the authorities sought to frame social conflict in terms of a struggle between the civilized and the backward, the rural and the urban. In so doing it provides an insight into the nature of early state socialism as a project of cultural transformation.

A ‘New Wave’ in British Television Drama

2005 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lez Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
American Television ◽  
The World ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Queer As Folk ◽  
The 1960S

In recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment.

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