2 - Change in the Village: Filming Rural Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
Summary
The village has served as a longstanding model for British national identity. Changes to the village are ways of discussing the broader changes that shape the nation, and – in the interwar period – the seeming stability of traditional village life served as a counter-narrative to the disruptions brought about by modernity. In their critique of contemporary life in Britain, Culture and Environment: A Training in Critical Awareness (1933), F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson turned to the work of George Bourne (a pseudonym of George Sturt), a writer who documented the changes he saw in village life a generation earlier in his books Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright's Shop (1923). Leavis and Thompson bring in these examples as evidence of the social changes they want to emphasise, but Bourne's work is more nuanced than they let on. As the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain demonstrates, Bourne was one of many commentators that saw village populations neither as completely resistant to (or even ignorant of) the opportunities brought about by modernity nor as receptacles for the ideas espoused by mostly urban-based commentators uncomfortable with the changes they saw around them. This chapter brings amateur film-makers to these discussions and considers what moving images of rural Britain from the 1920s and 1930s can tell us about the changes faced by these communities and the ways in which film featured as a response to them. It focuses on films that depict village life in different parts of Britain, made by men and women who used the technology of cinema to take stock of the activities occurring around them. They document the ‘change in the village’ that Bourne and others describe and capture the rituals that continued – or were revitalised – during a period that saw shifts in village economies, infrastructure and social interactions. These films overlap with interwar fiction and non-fiction, but they also offer access to places and exchanges otherwise absent from these familiar depictions. As social documents they present a complex portrait of rural life and provide rich material for studies of social history, interwar literature and amateur cinema, a growing field in film, media and cultural studies.
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- Information
- Rural Modernity in BritainA Critical Intervention, pp. 33 - 49Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018