Ealing Studios (1977)
Published in the mid-1970s, Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios was a key text in the development of British film studies, but also embodied the declinist zeitgeist of that seemingly troubled decade.
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Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios is fascinating as much for what it says about when it was written, as as an analysis of its subject. Taught by filmmaker-turned-professor Thorold Dickinson at Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s, Barr became a key figure in the UK’s nascent academic film studies field, joining the University of East Anglia in 1976, in a post originally sponsored by the British Film Institute, and spending the next 30 years working there. Like many of his contemporaries, much of his work – though far from all – was concerned with the historical development of a British national cinema. This includes (as editor) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (1986), English Hitchcock (1999), and British Film: A Very Short Introduction (2022).
First published by Charles and Tayleur in 1977, Ealing Studios illustrates how the development of a notion of a British film canon was bound up with the cultural and political context of the 1970s. While British studios had long struggled to capture a larger share of the country’s domestic audience from their Hollywood competitors, the size of that total audience shrank drastically from 193 million admissions in 1970 to 110 million in 1980.1 At the same time, British television channels were also beginning to screen older films, as well as documentaries about film history. Such circumstances were conducive to the work of Barr and his peers, encouraging a view of film not as instant, disposable, mass entertainment, but as of artistic merit, with validating traditions, to be watched selectively. Moreover, given their links with the worlds of film and television, their interpretation was far from simply academic. The publication of Ealing Studios, for example, was taken as an opportunity by the makers of Arena: Cinema on BBC Two to do a special episode on Ealing, to which Barr was a contributor – illustrating the role of film studies scholars in shaping wider ideas about British film history.
Furthermore, Ealing Studios is notable for the way Barr viewed Ealing’s wartime and post-war ideals from the jaded perspective of the 1970s. This was a decade marked by high inflation, uneven economic growth, rising unemployment, and industrial unrest – when many of the policy levers wielded by the government no longer seemed to work as effectively, and many of the preconceptions underpinning those levers no longer seemed to hold. Taken in conjunction with its loss of empire and its secondary role within the Cold War, the idea Britain was in inexorable decline enjoyed widening purchase. Such narratives were deeply misleading: these economic indicators are better understood as signifying a transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and the 1970s was also a period of declining inequality and of significant gains for anti-racist, feminist, and gay liberationist social movements.2 Those achievements unsurprisingly cut little ice with the developing New Right, who led the charge to dismantle post-war social democracy, but ostensibly left-of-centre commentators were also prone to declinist interpretations of contemporary Britain. Barr’s reading of Ealing films accordingly found in many of them a kernel of the cultural malaise that now seemed to have set badly in.
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Ealing Studios
Barr had an article on Ealing published in Screen in 1974, which he later identified as laying the groundwork for the first edition of his book.3 Ealing Studios began with Barr setting out a brief history of the studio’s establishment and early leadership of producer Sir Michael Balcon and a broad overview of the studio’s approach in his first chapter, before detailing the evolution of its filmmaking style in the context of the Second World War in its second, the establishment of its core filmmaking team in the third, and the pattern and character of production at Ealing during the late 1940s in the fourth. Subsequent chapters dealt with the Ealing films written by T. E. B. Clarke, and then the comedies Whisky Galore! (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and The Man in the White Suit (1951) respectively. The final chapters at the book were concerned with the ‘stagnation’ of Ealing’s productions in the 1950s, the mixed-calibre cohort of later comedies produced at the studio, and the end of filmmaking by the studio at the end of the decade, before concluding with an epilogue.
Ealing Studios was dominated by extensive analysis of the films themselves, with intertextual references to other works, but also located them within a characterisation of the studio’s own relatively non-hierarchical and collective approach to filmmaking. This picture of Ealing’s inner workings was reconstructed with the aid of interviews with several of its key personnel, including Balcon himself, writer and producer Monja Danichewsky, screenwriter Diana Morgan, and Barr’s former mentor Dickinson.
A second edition of the book was published in 1993 by Studio Vista. Adjoined to the original text was a new chapter, ‘Retrospect 1993’, which slightly reassessed Ealing’s legacy following the dismantlement of the post-war settlement that the studio’s films seemed close in spirit too. This chapter, Barr explained, had been informed by later discussions in the intervening years with other important Ealing personnel, including T. E. B. Clarke, director Harry Watt, editor and producer Sidney Cole, and art director and producer Michael Relph. University of California Press published a third edition in 1998, this time with an additional chapter on ‘Balcon after Ealing’, based on an essay Barr had originally published in a German book on Balcon’s work in the early 1980s.
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