Picturing home : domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film / Hollie Price.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Price, Hollie, author.

Series:

Studies in popular culture (Manchester, England)

Studies in popular culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Home in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

Civilization, Modern--Social aspects.

Civilization, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages) : illustrations (black and white); digital file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2021.

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

data file

Summary:

This book examines the modes of address used to depict domestic life in a range of canonical and popular British films in the 1940s. Drawing on a wide range of evidence magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and ephemera from the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, it contextualises onscreen images of home in this period as engaging with the popular promotion of suburbia and domestic modernity in the interwar years. Picturing Home therefore provides a new reading of the ways in which British 1940s films visually convey a middlebrow vision of modernity, looking back to the interwar past as a means of imagining the postwar future: characterised by a balance between tradition and progress, domesticity and nationhood, aspirational glamour and restraint, privacy and community.

"Picturing home: Domestic life, modernity and the middlebrow in 1940s British film explores the depiction of domestic life - the everyday spaces of kitchen-living rooms, hallways and bedrooms - in British feature films made and released during the Second World War and in the immediate postwar years. It offers a new critical analysis of a range of films through an interdisciplinary exploration of domesticity, modernity and the middlebrow. This book examines the visual styles of picturing home in British films at a time when images of domestic life offered some hope for a safe return from war. It suggests that pictorial depictions of home onscreen in the 1940s engaged with modes of address that had been used to promote ideas about domestic modernity linked with suburbia in the interwar years. It contextualises filmic constructions of domestic life in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, exploring a wide range of evidence including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and ephemera from the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it provides a new reading of 1940s British films as conveying a nuanced vision of modernity for contemporary audiences, characterised by a middlebrow sense of balance and negotiating between prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public. The book's primary readership will be academics and students working in film studies, particularly those focusing on British cinema. Its secondary readership will be academics working in other areas of film and popular culture, including cinematic space, the home and suburbia and middlebrow culture." -- Back Cover.

Contents:

Introduction: 'Mid pleasures and palaces'

1. 'Tea Table Politics': mapping the industrial working-class home

2. Pastoral images: capturing 'A Landscape from Within'

3. Dream palaces: transforming the domestic Interior

4. Interior lives: imagining private visions of home

Conclusion: 'The best of both worlds'

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher-supplied metadata; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9781526138217

1526138212

OCLC:

1240712166