British Rural Landscapes on Film

Paul Newland is REF Manager at Bath Spa University

• Introduction: approaching British rural landscapes on film - Paul Newland1 Silent landscapes: rural settings, national identity and British silent cinema - Andrew Higson 2 British landscapes in pre-Second World War film publicity - Paul Moody3 Rural imagery in Second World War British cinema - Tom Ryall4 'An unlimited field for experiment': Britain's stereoscopic landscapes - Keith M. Johnston 5 The figure (and disfigurement) in the landscape: The Go-Between's picturesque - Mark Broughton6 'Here is Wales, there England': contested borders and blurred boundaries in On the Black Hill - Kate Woodward7 Where the land meets the sea: liminality, identity and rural landscape in contemporary Scottish cinema - Duncan Petrie8 Fantasy, fallacy and allusion: reconceptualising British landscapes through the lens of children's cinema - Suzanne Speidel9 Picturesque, pastoral and dirty: uncivilised topographies in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights - Stella Hockenhull10 Folk horror and the contemporary cult of British rural landscape: the case of Blood on Satan's Claw - Paul Newland11 sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel - Paul Newland12 Film and the repossession of rural space: interview with Patrick Keiller - Paul NewlandIndex

‘This is a useful work ... Newland's Introduction valuably locates the debates about landscape in film within a social and cultural context. He gives an interesting account of the contributions of art history and cultural geography to the issue in hand, and makes a large (and in my view justifiable) claim that cinema has a privileged role in prefiguring social expectations of rural space. Essentially, film mines the available fields of topography and iconography and recycles them in a palatable form. To be sure, this edited volume, like all of its kind, has some internal contradictions because of the plural authorship. But what is gained is variety and richness of texture ... overall, this is a very stimulating book and one which rewards re-reading.’Sue Harper, The Journal of British Cinema and Television. ‘This fine collection of essays and interviews investigates the modes and significance of British rural landscape on screen within the history of British national cinema. It sets out to challenge heritage cinema’s representational paradigm of treating landscape as mere spectacle, and focuses instead on films in which the notion of the rural incorporates the depiction of the interconnectedness of land and its inhabitants […] The book may serve as an excellent introduction to the topic for students, as well as a source of new ideas and some refreshingly new perspectives for the initiated expert.’Erzsébet Stróbl, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 2018)