Beyond the Council Estate

Deirdre O’Neill is a Senior Lecturer in Film Theory and Practice at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of Film as a Radical Pedagogical Tool and the co-ordinator of the Inside Film Project. She is the founding and principle editor of the Journal of Class and Culture and has co-directed (with Mike Wayne) three films, Listen to Venezuela (2008), Condition of the Working Class (2012) and The Acting Class (2017), which was the winner of the National Feature Documentary Award at the 2017 Labour Film Festival. Katerina Flint-Nicol is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She is a founding member of the British Popular Cultures Research Network and has published on the gothic in musical performance and television adaptation. Her PhD, Men, Manors and Monsters: The British Hoodie Horror and the Cinema of Alterity addressed the horrorisation of the working-class in British cinema in the early 2000s.

• IntroductionKaterina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O’Neil1. ‘Tough Blokes, Tough Buildings’: The Significance of Brutalist Architecture in Constructing Working-Class Masculinity in Post-War British CinemaJohny Smith2. Moving beyond ‘That Hill’: Shelagh Delaney, David Storey, and a new class topography of the British New WaveDavid Forrest3. Loss, impasse, and the myth of class transcendence: Shelagh Delaney’s Charlie Bubbles (1968)Thirza Wakefield 4. Back ‘Up The Junction’: Nell Dunn’s Working Class Women’s Lives on FilmMary Irwin5. The Aimless Class Wanderers – Psychogeography in My Childhood Trilogy and RatcatcherKyle Barret6. ‘Motorways, Service Stations, and Brighton Pier’ – Landscape and the Flow of Working-Class Life Amid the Post-1979 Cinematic Output of the Children’s Film FoundationPeter Jachimiak7. A World of Arrangements: Feminist and Transnational Mappings of Class Struggle in Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live (For Shirley) (1982)Rachel Fabian8. Sea, Coal and Beauty: Seacoal (1985) by Amber Film and Photography CollectiveKarolina Kosińska9. Mutations of British social cinemaAnnette Kuhn10. New Girls on the Block: Music and Dance as Spaces of Aesthetic Politics in Fish Tank (2009) and Rocks (2020)Alice Pember11. Representing Working-Class Space in UK Drill Music VideosAustin Cooper12. 'Enduring symbols of people and place' (2015)David Roberts and Andrea Luka Zimmerman13. ‘You didn’t have to sell us this house.’/ ‘Didn’t we?’:  Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) John White

The work undertaken here fits very well with the burgeoning scholarship of social class in British cinema and will add to the expanding body of knowledge and publications devoted to the subject. This is an invaluable resource for any scholars or students studying class and British cinema (as well as representations of class in film more broadly).