3 results
2 - Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
-
- By Lucy Mazdon
- Edited by Louis Bayman, University of Southampton, Natalia Pinazza, University of Exeter
-
- Book:
- Journeys on Screen
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2018, pp 36-49
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Writing in The Guardian in 2010 David Thomson questioned a recent poll which had named David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) the best movie romance of all times:
In how many other countries would a poll pick Brief Encounter as the best movie romance of all time? Even in Britain, I wonder how many people born since, say, 1975 would rate it so highly. But for a generation that remembers when the trains ran on time and station buffets were as tidy and inviting as the one in this movie, Brief Encounter is etched in nostalgia for an era when trapped middle-class lives contemplated adultery but set the disturbing thought aside. (Thomson 2010)
Thomson's invocation of nostalgia is revealing. As I shall suggest later in this chapter, Lean's film is very much of its time, its narrative of selfsacrifice and decency deeply rooted in the culture and mood of post-war Britain. As Thomson intimates, its charm and appeal for many spectators of the twenty-first century would to a large extent be connected to nostalgic fantasies of an earlier, less complicated society. Brief Encounter depicts a middle-class Britain on the cusp of change, a Britain irrevocably altered by the experience of the Second World War but still clinging to long-held ‘British’ values and behaviours, a deeply reassuring vision, it would seem, to both contemporary audiences and modern-day viewers.
Lean's film is of course famously set in and around a railway station. Lean had originally intended to film in London but due to the ongoing air raid risk relocated to Carnforth in north Lancashire, where the lights from filming were less of a danger. As I shall go on to discuss later in this chapter, the railway station is much more than a location or backdrop for the film's narrative of lost love. Rather it provides a crucial structuring framework for the binaries of arrival and departure, movement and stasis, intimacy and public appearance, adventure and everyday duty which lie at the heart of the film. Milford Junction, the railway station created from Carnforth in Brief Encounter, is itself a place of both movement and adventure and containment and sacrifice. While it brings the film's lovers together, it also contains and ultimately curtails their love affair, returning them to family, duty and respectability.
Cinéma-monde as a Call to Arms
-
- By Lucy Mazdon
- Edited by Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati, Thibaut Schilt, College of the Holy Cross
-
- Book:
- Cinema-monde
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 January 2018, pp 336-340
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The 2017 Academy Awards’ ceremony will indubitably be best remembered for the confusion over the Oscar for best film. As the team behind Damian Chazelle's La La Land (2016, USA/Hong Kong) began their acceptance speeches for the award, they were interrupted to be told that the Oscar should in fact have gone to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016, USA). The first Oscars’ ceremony of the Trump presidency was always going to be a turbulent occasion as Hollywood's stars used their moment on the global stage to air their opposition to the new administration. However, the embarrassment caused by Faye Dunaway's reading out of the wrong envelope caused quite unexpected levels of consternation, not least as some commentators felt that Moonlight, a film about African- American life with an African-American director, had been robbed of its chance to fully celebrate its success. After 2016's ‘Oscars so white’ protests the award to Moonlight was of particular significance so it was not surprising that some saw the mix up over the prize as yet another curtailment of diversity and difference.
Rather less high profile, but extremely significant nevertheless, was another Oscar acceptance speech that similarly played into questions of diversity and difference. The Oscar for best foreign language film went to Asghar Farhadi's Franco-Iranian co-production Forushande/The Salesman (2016). Farhadi had initially intended to travel to Los Angeles for the ceremony in order to highlight ‘the unjust circumstances that have arisen for the immigrants and travellers of several countries to the United States’ (Shoard 2017). However, he ultimately decided against attending the ceremony saying that, following Trump's recent attempts to block entry to the US for the citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, the conditions that would be attached to a potential entry visa were unacceptable. The award was collected instead by Iranian-American engineer Anousheh Ansari who read out a statement on Farhadi's behalf:
I’m sorry I’m not with you tonight, my absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US. Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear.
1 - Disrupting the Remake: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
- from PART I - GENRES AND TRADITIONS
-
- By Lucy Mazdon, Chair in Film Studies at the University of Southampton
- Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
-
- Book:
- Transnational Film Remakes
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 22 December 2017
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2017, pp 21-35
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
A key feature of the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century has been the global success of so-called ‘Nordic Noir’. Indeed, it was this very global success which led both to the ‘foreignising’ remake which this chapter will discuss and to the controversy it provoked. In the words of the website which is devoted to and named after the genre and which organises London's annual ‘Nordicana’ festival, ‘With its roots in the ground-breaking TV dramas The Killing, Borgen, Wallander and The Bridge, Nordic Noir has become a genre in its own right, influencing screenwriters far beyond the Scandinavian Peninsula’ (Nordic Noir and Beyond n.d.). While to non-Scandinavian eyes this wealth of successful crime fiction might seem like a new phenomenon, this is far from true. As Kerstin Bergman illustrates in her overview of Swedish crime fiction (2014), the Scandinavian countries, in particular Sweden, have a long and fascinating tradition of crime literature. Crime novels have attracted large domestic readerships since the early twentieth century. However, it was the growing awareness of social injustice and political corruption in Sweden of the 1960s and the increasing politicisation of intellectual and public spheres which arguably led to a form of crime fiction (Bergman 2014: 21), the police procedural featuring a critique of wider social issues, which would dominate for years to come, notably in the form of the so-called ‘Nordic Noir’. At the forefront of this sub-genre were the husband and wife writing pair, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. From 1965 to 1975 Sjowall and Wahloo published a series of novels, beginning with Roseanna (1965) and ending with Terroristerna (1975), all featuring Inspector Martin Beck. Set in contemporary Stockholm, the novels feature both physical and psychological realism embodied in the thoughtful but flawed central figure of Beck. As Bergman points out, what really made these novels stand out from their predecessors, and what made them so influential in terms of the ongoing development of the genre, was their ‘conscious inclusion of a critical perspective on Swedish society’, their politicisation of the police procedural genre (22).
Despite this long and extremely rich history, it was not until Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy that Scandinavian, or more precisely Swedish, crime fiction achieved true global prominence.