John Hill,
British Cinema in the 1980s.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0-19-874256 (pb)
261 pp
US$24.95 (pb)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

The cover of John Hill’s solid, informed account of English film in the 1980s tells you a lot about who and what is important to its author: Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton, a still from The Last of England(1987). That may not be the most representative English film of the period, but it is certainly representative of the mental world of this book. There is Tilda doing what she does best – looming, even or especially while sitting down – in the midst of a scene of devastation implicitly labeled (by Hill as well as Jarman) “Thatcher’s Britain”. Fires – implicitly labeled “racism”, “homophobia”, “AIDs epidemic” – are burning out of control behind her. Tilda, the artist in the wasteland of Tory policy, is looking, as usual, devastated.

Hill’s book may not have a hero (though Jarman and Isaac Julien come close), but it certainly has a villain: that half-forgotten creature, the Iron Lady. It begins with a 28-page introduction – which, frankly, made me feel ancient but which will undoubtedly be of use to contemporary students – to Thatcherism, its media policies and its purported embodiment in Chariots of Fire(1981). If you’ve read the cover before starting the book, you won’t be surprised to find that Hill regards The Lady and her works as an entirely unmitigated economic, political, social, cultural and moral disaster, which all decent filmmakers are presumed to have spent the decade opposing or at least deploring. If you are a spoilsport like me, you are likely to concede the general truth of this picture while wanting to go out and buy a copy of the Telegraph in protest. If you already are a Torygraph reader, this book will probably confirm your sense of the leftwing conformity of the British cultural establishment.

Hill is in most ways a scrupulously fair-minded critic, but he writes from within a strict Labour-left ideology and is very given to rating films by their degree of political correctness. The blandness of tone, a function of his commendable desire to survey and incorporate all the available criticism, contrasts oddly with the polemical nature of the project. In this history, nearly everyone is presumed to be anti-Thatcher, but only a select few of the Dereks and Isaacs are anti-Thatcher enough. Whole forests must have been cut down to provide the litmus paper for Hill’s research. All too often, cogent critical analysis – for example, of the disjunction in Mike Leigh films between realism of setting and stylization of acting – gives way to a search for the scandal of closet conservatism: “High Hopes(1988) ends up conforming to a conservative ideology of ‘familialism’ that is little different from that associated with Thatcherism” .(198) The “‘state-of-the-nation’ films were characterized by a shared animosity towards Thatcherism . . . but lacked an alternative, or more affirmative, vision of social being”. (165) At moments like these, Hill reminds me of the woman in a recent New Yorker cartoon who asks a bookshop clerk, “Where’s your section of books that tell you simple things you already know?”

I have no wish to deny Hill his political views and aims. I just wish they were a little less predictable and that they did not – here and there – interfere with his good sense. His account of both ‘heritage’ and ‘Empire’ films suffers from an inability to divest himself of the belief that filming the past at all is somehow escapist and reactionary, especially if you fail to make it look ugly. In fact, most of the period films he discusses under both categories are impeccably progressive in ideology. What do Merchant-Ivory ever make movies about if not the emergence of the modern woman from the shackles of Victorianism, Edwardianism, the Enlightenment or whatever? The problem seems to be that many of these films are based on books by Dead White Males like E. M. Forster and are thus likely to contain politically incorrect characterizations of the working class such as Leonard Bast (in Howard’s End(1992)) and elitist cultural appeals such as the use of Puccini and Uccello in Room With a View(1986). Hill knows that you occasionally have to accept the past on its own terms, but he’s not happy with the knowledge. However, when you find yourself (as Hill does on pp. 89-91) blaming “Room” for elitism because it assumes a certain, minimal cultural literacy in its audience and quoting Pauline Kael at her fake-populist worst in your support, you should perhaps rethink your position. The spectrum of defensible political ideas in history is, in fact, a bit wider than that represented by the British Labour party.

That objection aside, however, this is an easy book to recommend. Hill is widely and thoughtfully read. He knows the criticism, including the obscurely situated items, on a very wide range of films. His skill at interpolating concise and lucid explanations of basic critical and political terms – from “CHC” to “Militant Tendency” – makes the book a blessing for students. As someone who habitually thinks he knows more about the industrial side of the movie industry than he does, I was also grateful for Hill’s lucid and informed account of the changes in film financing and regulation during the ’80s and the impact of television, especially the involvement of Channel Four, on film sponsorship and distribution. The book’s non-political faults – too many potted summaries, too much reliance on categories like ‘art house’ and ‘heritage’ – are mostly those endemic to the genre of the historical survey. These are more than balanced by detailed, generally observant accounts of most of the important English films of the period: A Passage to India(1984); Maurice(1987); Dance With a Stranger(1985); The Ploughman’s Lunch(1983); The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover(1989); High Hopes; Riff-Raff(1990); Looking for Langston(1988); and, yes, The Last of England. In many ways, this is the kind of book that is likely to give film scholarship a good name.

One final demurrer, however: the title to the contrary, this book is about Engish cinema, not British. Scottish and Welsh films are virtually ignored, aside from an apologetic note in the final chapter accompanied by a couple of pages on Gregory’s Girl(1981). (242-44) Bill Forsyth, the director of that splendid little film, doesn’t even make Hill’s index. Why Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, which occupies pride of place in the penultimate chapter of this book, should be considered more important, more representative or more concerned with the state of Britain than, say, Forsyth’s Local Hero(1983) or Comfort and Joy(1984) – both virtually ignored here – escapes me, unless the answer is simply that Black and gay strike Hill as automatically more important than Celtic and straight. And who, in the present climate of critical opinion, would say him nay? I would not hesitate to assign this book to my students, but I would remind them of its biases while doing so.

Arthur Lindley