Ealing Revisited provides a major reappraisal of one of British cinema's best-loved institutions, Ealing Studios. During its heyday, Ealing produced a string of classic comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), but there is much more to Ealing than these films, as this volume of new writing on the studio shows. Addressing both known and less familiar aspects of Ealing's story, its films, actors and technicians, the contributors uncover what has gone unexplored, or unspoken, in previous histories of the studio, and consider the impact that Ealing has had on British cultural life from the 1930s to the present. Listed in the Independent on Sunday's Cinema books of 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ios-books-of-the-year-2012-cinema-8373713.html

This ground-breaking book takes as its focal point director Ken Loach's view that 'The only reason to make films that are a reflection on history is to talk about the present.' In the first book to take on this major genre in all its complexity, James Chapman argues that historical films say as much about the times in which they are made as about the past they purport to portray. Through in-depth case studies of fourteen key films spanning the 1930s up to the turn of the twenty first century, from The Private Life of Henry VIII and Zulu to Chariots of Fire and Elizabeth, Chapman examines the place of historical films in British cinema history and film culture. Looking closely at the issues that they present, from gender, class and ethnicity to militarism and imperialism, he also discusses controversies over historical accuracy, and the ways in which devices such as voice overs, title captions, and visual references to photographs and paintings assert a sense of historical verisimilitude. Exploring throughout the book the dialectical relationship between past and present, Chapman reveals how such films promote British achievements - but also sometimes question them - and how they project images of 'Britishness' to audiences both in the UK and internationally.

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), better known as Jew Suss, was a court Jew, who advised the Duke of Wurttemberg. Clever and handsome, even ostentatious, he fitted easily into court life, despite his humble origins. However, his unpopular economic policies made him enemies and when the Duke died suddenly Suss was arrested, convicted of 'destestable abuses' and exectued in Stuttgart in an iron cage. His spectacular rise and fall inspired a media outpouring in the eighteenth century and he has been much written about subsequently. In the twentieth century two films were made about him, one British in 1934, the other German in 1940. Goebbels took an active interest in the latter. After the war its director, Veit Harlan, was tried for Crimes against Humanity for having made the film. Despite his acquittal, the film's association with the Holocaust remains controversial to this day. For almost three centuries the life of Jew Suss has been adapted, distorted and transformed. This book tells the story of these transformations.

In this definitive and long-awaited history of 1950s British cinema, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter draw extensively on previously unknown archive material to chart the growing rejection of post-war deference by both film-makers and cinema audiences. Competition from television and successive changes in government policy all forced the production industry to become more market-sensitive. The films produced by Rank and Ealing, many of which harked back to wartime structures of feeling, were challenged by those backed by Anglo-Amalgamated and Hammer. The latter knew how to address the rebellious feelings and growing sexual discontents of a new generation of consumers. Even the British Board of Film Censors had to adopt a more liberal attitude. The collapse of the studio system also meant that the screenwriters and the art directors had to cede creative control to a new generation of independent producers and film directors. Harper and Porter explore the effects of these social, cultural, industrial, and economic changes on 1950s British cinema.

This set is one of the cornerstones of film scholarship, and one of the most important works on twentieth century British culture. Published between 1948 and 1985, the volumes document all aspects of film making in Britain from its origins in 1896 to 1939. Rachael Low pioneered the interpretation of films in their context, arguing that to understand films it was necessary to establish their context. Her seven volumes are an object lesson in meticulous research, lucid analysis and accessible style, and have become the benchmark in film history.

This book offers a comprehensive and revisionist overview of British cinema as, on the one hand, a commercial entertainment industry and, on the other, a series of institutions centred on economics, funding and relations to government.