Unpiecing the Jigsaw: Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Class System ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
Sexual Murder ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

This article explores the discursive intersections of masculinity, class and heterosexual desire in the still undervalued British police procedural film, Jigsaw. It considers the film both as an example of a new style of cinematic crime narrative and as a significant conjectural text in which ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and marriage, especially in their post-war and mid-century forms, are re-articulated, here as compulsive heterosexuality: a masculine drive that can ultimately lead to sexual murder. The film's low-key naturalistic style owes much to the newly realist television drama of the period, while its identification of middle-class masculinity as the locus of transgression carries cultural resonances well beyond the ostensible project of the film's narrative. Released in 1962, Jigsaw was in effect squeezed between, on the one hand, the British New Wave and, on the other, the pop musicals and London-focused films that dominated cinema in the UK in the mid-1960s. However, the casting of dependable Jack Warner as the investigating detective and its Brighton setting mark it out as an important text situated on the cusp between older versions of the crime film and the new permissiveness. Jigsaw's interrogation of the problematic sexual behaviour of two ostensibly middle-class, middle-aged men is therefore particularly interesting, especially when placed within the context of the cultural anxieties about marriage, the increasingly fluid class system of the early 1960s and an emergent youth culture.

scholarly journals Mid-century Modern Jazz: Music and Design in the Postwar Home

Popular Music ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-74
Author(s):  
Tom Perchard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Modern Jazz ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cover Art

AbstractThis article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse asIdeal Homein the UK andPlayboyin the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

Biopics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Brown ◽  
Belén Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Digital Culture ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Common Term ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

“Biopic” (sometimes spelled “bio-pic”) is the most common term used to refer to films representing any aspect of the lives of famous people from the past or the present. Of unclear origins, the term seems to have originated in the trade papers and then penetrated the consciousness of producers and critics. Its widespread use has replaced the more formal “biographical picture.” Originally associated with the prestige pictures produced by the Hollywood studios during the classic era, the term has also become naturalized in the domain of British cinema (particularly with the consolidation of studies on heritage cinema). “Biopic” has also entered (not without certain resistance) the vocabulary of the study of other national cinemas, such as the French cinema. While George Custen’s 1992 study of the studio biopic established the foundations for its study as a Hollywood genre, the debates about the biopic have pursued several lines of inquiry from the start. On the one hand, the genre was perceived as a belated offspring of popular biographical formats at a time (the early 20th century) when literary biography was moving to new and experimental forms of life writing. On the other, the biopic began to be studied as a form of historical cinema, and as such it could become the target of historians’ concerns about fidelity and (mis-)representation, agency, and the ideological subtexts underpinning the retelling of history as well as the reconstruction of national narratives. The genre’s unabated popularity throughout the history of cinema has spawned attempts to classify and analyze its recurrent iconography in terms of types of biographical subjects and social worlds represented in the biopic. Likewise, the biopic’s showcase of film performance and its star-making capabilities have proved particularly fertile field of debate. So too has its biased fetishization of the great white man as the agent of history been much discussed from gender-informed perspectives. In our era of media convergence and the explosion of celebrity culture, the biopic is at the center of a new wave of scholarly interest in transmedia formats (such as the biopic/docudrama hybrids) and the possibilities opened up by a new digital culture obsessed with the self.

‘It was good to get out into the fresh air after seeing this film’: Horror, Realism and Censorship in Post-Second World War Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Paul Frith
Keyword(s):  
Social Issue ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

Existing research on British cinema during the 1940s has often assumed an opposition between realism and fantasy or, as it is also known, ‘realism and tinsel’. However, through an analysis of contemporary critical reception and censorship discourses, it becomes apparent that this division was nowhere near as clearly defined as is often argued. While the ‘quality’ realist film of the 1940s demonstrates a concern with verisimilitude and the reproduction of the surface appearances of reality, when confronting the darker aspects of reality, realism was deemed to be far more closely associated with the horrific. Following a number of decisions made by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) which were heavily criticised by the local authorities and the press, the Board became increasingly wary of these horrific confrontations with the everyday. The release of The Snake Pit (1948) in the UK sparked a series of debates in the press, with one side questioning the suitability of a film dealing with the particularly sensitive subject matter of mental illness for the purpose of shocking and horrifying audiences, and the other side championing the maturity shown by Hollywood when dealing with an important social issue. This article therefore looks beyond traditional perceptions of 1940s British cinema in order to demonstrate a shift in the role played by both realism and horror in the post-war period.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Researching (with) Major Food Retailers

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Evans
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Major Food ◽  
Food Retailers ◽  
Food Retailer ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opening Up

This paper considers the relationship between social science and the food industry, and it suggests that collaboration can be intellectually productive and morally rewarding. It explores the middle ground that exists between paid consultancy models of collaboration on the one hand and a principled stance of nonengagement on the other. Drawing on recent experiences of researching with a major food retailer in the UK, I discuss the ways in which collaborating with retailers can open up opportunities for accessing data that might not otherwise be available to social scientists. Additionally, I put forward the argument that researchers with an interest in the sustainability—ecological or otherwise—of food systems, especially those of a critical persuasion, ought to be empirically engaging with food businesses. I suggest that this is important in terms of generating better understandings of the objectionable arrangements that they seek to critique, and in terms of opening up conduits through which to affect positive changes. Cutting across these points is the claim that while resistance to commercial engagement might be misguided, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the power-geometries of collaboration and to find ways of leveling and/or leveraging them. To conclude, I suggest that universities have an important institutional role to play in defining the terms of engagement as well as maintaining the boundaries between scholarship and consultancy—a line that can otherwise become quite fuzzy when the worlds of commerce and academic research collide.

EVALUATION OF THE UNITED KINGDOM NATIONAL EXTERNAL QUALITY ASSESSMENT SERVICE 2008 (UK NEQAS 2008) GUIDELINES FOR THE DIAGNOSIS OF SUBARACHNOID HEMORRHAGE USING SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC XANTHOCHROMIA: A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (6S) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
A Gangloff ◽  
L Nadeau
Keyword(s):  
Subarachnoid Hemorrhage ◽  
Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy ◽  
Viral Encephalitis ◽  
Objective Evaluation ◽  
Final Diagnosis ◽  
Amyloid Angiopathy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Cerebral Amyloid ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

Objective: Evaluation of the UK NEQAS 2008 guidelines for the interpretation of spectrophotometric xanthochromia. Method: A search of the laboratory database for all the xanthochromia test results between May 1st 2008 and May 1st 2009 was performed. Medical charts were reviewed for patients of Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus (HEJ) that had at least one detectable pigment (bilirubin, oxyhemoglobin, or methemoglobin). Xanthochromia results obtained with 4 different criteria (Chalmers original, Modified Chalmers, Duiser and UK NEQAS 2008) were compared. Results: We reviewed 41 medical charts (2 patients with duplicate lumbar punctures (LP) for a total of 43 LP). For these 41 patients there were 11 positive xanthochromia results, 5 of which were in concordance with a final diagnosis of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The diagnosis of the 6 other positive xanthochromia results were as follow: meningeal spread of a lymphoma, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, exertional headache, viral encephalitis with a possibility of petechiaes on the cerebral CT and second LP. Interpretation (negative/positive) of 40/43 LP was identical for the 4 methods. 2 LP were positive with Duiser and UK NEQAS 2008 but negative with Chalmers approaches (final diagnosis: SAH and cerebral amyloid angiopathy). 1 LP was positive only by the Duiser method (viral encephalitis). Conclusions: UK NEQAS 2008 guidelines identified all SAH but are sensitive to traumatic and pathologic meningeal lesions. Except for a case of viral encephalitis with a suspicion of cerebral petechiaes on CT, UK NEQAS 2008 gave xanthochromia results similar to the one in use at HEJ (Duiser). Chalmers original and Modified Chalmers methods missed one of the five SAH.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post War

In the conclusion to The Musical Gift, Jim Sykes discusses Sri Lankan versions of viral music videos over the past decade, particularly Pharrell Williams’ video “Happy.” Sykes notes that several people filming themselves dancing to Williams’ song were stopped by the police, who could not comprehend why people were singing and dancing in public outside of the bounds of an official concert. The Sri Lankan “Happy” videos have also been criticized as depicting upper- and middle-class Sri Lankans and thus obscuring the fact that happiness has not been achieved for many Sri Lankans, including those who suffered greatly from the war. Returning to the concept of “the musical gift,” Sykes argues the promotion of public song and dance from and between various communities has a role to play in forging post-war reconciliation and building a “happiness” that emerges from Sri Lankan aesthetics.

Comedy, Class, and Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Tew
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Cultural Commodification ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Post War ◽  
Recurrent Motifs

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.

scholarly journals Public governance, agility and pandemics: a case study of the UK response to COVID-19

2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232098340
Author(s):  
Paul Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Role ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Public Governance ◽  
Local Initiative ◽  
Government Response ◽  
Local Resources ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

The UK government’s leaders initially believed that it was among the best-prepared governments for a pandemic. By June 2020, the outcome of the collision between the government’s initial confidence, on the one hand, and the aggressiveness and virulence of COVID-19, on the other, was evident. The UK had one of the worst COVID-19 mortality rates in the world. This article explores the UK government’s response to COVID-19 from a public administration and governance perspective. Using factual information and statistical data, it considers the government’s preparedness and strategic decisions, the delivery of the government response, and public confidence in the government. Points for practitioners Possible lessons for testing through application include: Use the precautionary principle to set planning assumptions in government strategies to create the possibility of government agility during a pandemic. Use central government’s leadership role to facilitate and enable local initiative and operational responses, as well as to take advantage of local resources and assets. Choose smart government responses that address tensions between the goal of saving lives and other government goals, and beware choices that are unsatisfactory compromises.

scholarly journals Solidarity with disabled people in times of crisis: A comparative analysis of Italy and the UK

2021 ◽  
pp. 026858092199450
Author(s):  
Nicola Maggini ◽  
Tom Montgomery ◽  
Simone Baglioni
Keyword(s):  
Social Trust ◽  
Important Determinant ◽  
Social Embeddedness ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Active Nature ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

Against the background of crisis and cuts, citizens can express solidarity with groups in various ways. Using novel survey data this article explores the attitudes and behaviours of citizens in their expressions of solidarity with disabled people and in doing so illuminates the differences and similarities across two European contexts: Italy and the UK. The findings reveal pools of solidarity with disabled people across both countries that have on the one hand similar foundations such as the social embeddedness and social trust of citizens, while on the other hand contain some differences, such as the more direct and active nature of solidarity in Italy compared to the UK and the role of religiosity as an important determinant, particularly in Italy. Across both countries the role of ‘deservingness’ was key to understanding solidarity, and the study’s conclusions raise questions about a solidarity embedded by a degree of paternalism and even religious piety.

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