Is there a case for seeing cinema as a contest between ‘romantics’ and ‘modernists’? Yes and no. If there is a clash between romanticism and modernism in what is called ‘British’ cinema – strictly UK cinema if we include Anglo-Irish production in Northern Ireland – it is as much internal as external. There are clusters of romantics and modernists (external): but there are also internal struggles of the soul between romantic and modernist forms of feeling that affect nearly every important filmmaker. Romantic and modernist aesthetics are contrary impulses which inhere in most directors in varying degrees, so that no absolute division between them ever emerges. Instead the coexistence of contrary impulses can be highly fertile. Most great directors are romantics to some degree and modernists to another. There is no fixed ratio but most do come down on one side or the other. We can with some poetic licence slot great names under one of the bipolar categories as we shall now do: Hitchcock, Lean, Powell, Reed and Hamer as romantics; Losey, Polanski, Antonioni, Kubrick and Skolmowski as modernists. And following the lead of Peter Wollen, we can also speak of ‘neo-romantics’ like Nicholas Roeg, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Derek Jarman as a second, more self-conscious generation that grew out of 1960s modernist style and Pop Art (Wollen 1993: 43–4), but endowed it with a new romantic sensibility, a sensibility which culminated, I would argue, in the very different memory-cinema of Terence Davies at the end of the 1980s.