British Rural Landscapes on Film

This is the first book to deal exclusively with cinematic representations of the British countryside. It offers original insights into how rural areas in Britain have been represented on film, from the silent era, through both world wars and on into the twenty-first century. It balances new scholarly articles with interviews with two key contemporary British filmmakers (Patrick Keiller and Gideon Koppel). The contributors to this book demonstrate that the countryside has provided Britain and its constituent nations and regions with a dense range of spaces in which contested cultural identities have been, and continue to be, worked through. The diverse and varied essays draw on a range of popular and alternative films and genres in order to demonstrate how far film representations come to shape - and be shaped by - the material and embodied circumstances of what we might think of as 'lived' rural experience. They also show how representations of British rural landscapes in films often drawn on tropes previously seen in literature and art. This collection focuses on questions of modernity versus tradition, nationhood, and the relationship between the global and the local. It will be of interest to scholars of British cinema history, British film, cultural geography and rural studies in particular, as well as the general reader.