Small Scale help

AIMS:
To clarify what you should be doing
To provide guidance via my own example
Be aware of the marking criteria
To go away with a clear understanding of what to do for next weeks lesson
9/29/2011
1

How ‘race’ is constructed in British social problem films
Small Scale Research Project

Focus film? Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959)
Second film: Flame in the Streets
(Roy Ward Baker, 1961)
Third film: A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961)
Fourth film: Pool of London (Basil Dearden, 1951)

What is a social problem film?
“…the social problem films of the late 1940s and 1950s are commonsensical texts… Sensitive to changes in the culture and in the industry, the social problem film is also a distant relative of neorealism and of docudrama.”
“The social problem film was particularly sensitive to the “news of the day and to immediate social issues that were identified with journalism, social science research, and legislative-political developments.”
“Films such as Sapphire (1959) dramatized the social problem of race…”
(Landy in Landy, 2001:149)

Why I chose my investigation title
While studying for my A Levels I was exposed to films such as:

Why I chose my investigation title
While studying for my degree I covered a unit called Media Ethnicity & Nation for one of the lectures we were encouraged to look at the following films
Jemima + Johnny (1966)

Sapphire
Sapphire is a film which picks up race as an issue, by mapping it across gender, in the story of a girl who tries to pass as white.
The framework of the detective story makes the woman into the problem, and raises questions about the way in which genre determines meaning in popular forms.
Sapphireis a graphic portrayal of ethnic tensions in 1950s London, The film presents a multifaceted and frequently surprising portrait that involves not just "the usual suspects", but is able to reveal underlying insecurities and fears of ordinary people. Sapphire is also notable for showing a successful, middle-class black community - unusual even in today's British films. (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/440288/)

Flame in the Streets
Made in the wake of the 1959 Notting Hill riots in London, Flame in the Streets is an early examination of tense racial prejudices within a working-class family when their daughter falls in love with a Jamaican.
Jacko Palmer (John Mills), is a liberal-minded trade unionist, he fights racial discrimination in a London furniture factory and averts a threatened strike over the appointment of West Indian Gomez (Earl Cameron) to shop steward, but has to face up to his own deeper prejudices when his daughter (Sylvia Syms) falls in love with a Jamaican teacher. The couple plan on marrying, and that creates havoc in the Palmer household where Kathie's racist mother Nell (Brenda De Banzie) finds this out. Meanwhile, the streets of London are infused with racial tension as ‘Teddy Boys’ confront the West Indian immigrants on an intense November night.

A Taste of Honey
One of the original kitchen-sink British dramas of the 1960s, A Taste of Honey grabbed several bulls by the horns - domestic strife, sex, race, pregnancy and homosexuality - and produced a gritty and powerful story about the life of a working class girl from 'up north'.
Rita Tushingham plays Jo, who leaves home after her alcoholic mother marries a wrong 'un. She moves in with a gay colleague, has an ill-advised one night stand with a vanishing black sailor, and ends up in the family way. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/years/1961/films3.shtml)

Two sailors, on shore leave, are caught up in a diamond smuggling racket. More complications ensue for black sailor Johnny who finds love and heartache in London docklands.
Basil Dearden's paean to London docklands in the 1950s is as enchanting and as murky as the river: a noir-ish heist tale, liberally suffused with a fable of forbidden love and unrestrained passion. The heist element of Pool of London (1951) is well crafted and suspenseful, but the most striking aspect is Dearden's tentative venture into racial politics, with the first interracial relationship in a British film. (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/475521/)
Pool of London

How my investigation is starting to take shape
Some things that I will be looking at and discussing in my presentation is race representation and it construction
Black race representation
Sexuality
Imperialism
Africa
Stereotypes
Essentialism
White race representation
Teddy Boys
White as a privilege
‘The tolerant white man’
Illogical white women

Some things that I will be looking at and discussing in my presentation is how these films reflected society at the time and recurring motifs
Fear of miscegenation
Families under threat
Fears over immigration linked to moral decline
Punishment for crossing the colour line

Some extra questions and things to investigate further
The contradictory nature of the films
Did these films help racial tensions at the time or just fuel a fire?

Next steps
BREAKING DOWN CHOSEN TEXTS
Identify key scenes
Identify narrative structure
List key characters
Match an important scene to each of the key characters
List the micro features that bring bearing on the area of the investigation.
List messages and values that are expressed
ENSURE ALL NOTES MADE ON THE ABOVE ARE RELEVANT TO MY INVESTIGATION
Textual analysis from the films themselves - EXAMPLE
‘At the level of dialogue, the film seeks to disclaim such an interpretation. Reflecting on the meaning of the 'red taffeta under a tweed skirt'. Leoroyd offers the explanation “that's the black under the white alright." Hazard tells him to "corrie off it'; but what we see, rather than what we are told, seems to support Leoroyd rather than Hazard.’
(John Hill, in Screen Vol 26/1 1985)

Next steps…
Conduct Contextual Research – finding out what was happening in Britain when the films were made
‘The onset of mass immigration from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean in the late 1940s and the 1950s coincided with the dismantling of the British Empire, and the decline of Britain's global status. Immigration became the focus for the debate about these broader shifts. While policy makers welcomed the influx of new labour, there was at the same time considerable unease about the impact that such immigration may have on traditional concepts of Britishness. As a Colonial Office report of 1955 observed, 'a large coloured community as a noticeable feature of our social life would weaken... the concept of England or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached.' These fears translated themselves into a concern about the need to control immigration. Immigration controls were seen, not as a means of matching immigrants to jobs, but of preventing the presence of too many non-white immigrants from tarnishing Britain's racial identity.’ (http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/immigration_oxford.html)

Next steps…
Other things to do
If you are investigating something new to you, e.g. a topic or films you don’t know of the RESEARCH, swot up on them
Use you blog to store useful links/information you’ve come across
YOU COULD… start to break down your investigation into smaller parts e.g.
looking at the construction of the representations
what are the representations informed by?
what was going on at the time the films were made before, during, after?
Consider the British context - e.g. themes across films
Does the director of the film make a difference?
Reviews of films/ Critical responses to the films
What is the current state of representation?

Small Scale help

by Belinda Raji

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