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The war years impacted upon the arts. Starting with the 1940s the talk will look at film in the post war years.
Lecturer Colin Shindler
The day consists of three lectures with a coffee break 11.30 - 12.00 and lunch break 1.00 - 2.00.
Session 1: Film in the 1940s: War and Society - World War II saw film audiences on both sides of the Atlantic at their all-time peak. In times of loss and deprivation, people needed films as much as they needed air raid shelters and blackout curtains and the British and American film industries rose to the occasion. It was the era of romantic movies like Brief Encounter, of escapist musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, of pro-British films like Mrs Miniver and pro-Russian films like Mission to Moscow, of stirring deeds in In Which We Serve. Stiff Upper Lip Britons and flag-waving patriotic Americans contributed equally to these golden years of film.
Lecture 2: Films in the 1950s: The Glory Days of the Hollywood Musical - It was the last great days of the classic studio musical and we'll be looking at Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, Fred Astaire in The Bandwagon, Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, the crazy water ballets of Esther Williams and the last hurrah - Vincente Minelli's fin-de-siecle romp Gigi with a score by Lerner and Lowe fresh from their triumph with My Fair Lady. The 1960s would bring different social conditions and different kinds of films to match them but in the era of Eisenhower complacency and You've Never Had It So Good conservatism the studio musical found its most enduring voice.
Lecture 3: Films of the 1960s: Carry on Up the Khyber and the End of Empire - It’s hard to laugh at something too immediate. The surest sign that something serious has finished is when you can laugh at it. The end of the British Empire, which started with the partition of India in 1947 but increased rapidly in the 1960s as the African colonies disappeared, was immortalised in the very best Carry On film ever made. Set in India under the Raj but clearly filmed in Pinewood, Up The Khyber starring Sid James as Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond and Kenneth Williams as the Khasi of Kalibar is a glorious parody of every imperial film ever made with its upstanding British heroes and mad/stupid/villainous natives. To set it in context we'll be looking at other films of the postwar period made about the Empire like Zulu, The Charge of the Light Brigade and Guns at Batasi.