A series of books from the Manchester University Press prompts Mark Venner to look back over the careers of some unjustly neglected British filmmakers.

For the forty years following the birth of modern film criticism, it has been a common assertion amongst the critics that British cinema is a sickly anaemic thing, vastly inferior both to European arthouse cinema and mainstream Hollywood. In his early critical writings for Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut dismissed British cinema outright; most American critics ignored British films altogether, and the UK critics themselves bemoaned what they perceived as a lack of a breakthrough in modern British cinema. Where were the La Nottes, where were the likes of À bout de souffle, or even popular genre films like Hitchcock's Psycho? The British film industry was regarded as a sorry affair, and the films themselves were embarrassments – parochial failures to be forgotten about as soon as possible. There were exceptions of course. Raymond Durgnat championed British film in the 1960s, and his study A Mirror for England (1970) is now rightly regarded as a modern classic; similarly Roy Armes's A Critical History of British Cinema (1978) is required reading for any student of modern film. But even these highly regarded studies were selective. There were a great many extraordinary British filmmakers, often working on the fringes of the industry with miniscule budgets, who were unnoticed or ignored throughout their entire careers.

Rediscovering Britain
Thankfully there is now a genuine resurgence of interest in these forgotten British filmmakers. Martin Scorsese is currently working on a documentary on the history of British film; film historian Ian Christie has tirelessly promoted such great filmmakers as Powell and Pressburger; and both the BFI in Britain and Criterion in the US are releasing stunningly restored works by such neglected British directors as Arthur Crabtree and Ronald Neame on DVD. In publishing, Matthew Sweet recently documented the lost worlds of British Cinema in his riveting volume Shepperton Babylon, and now the Manchester University Press has published a breakthrough series of studies under the banner 'British Film Makers' that document the life and work of some of the most neglected yet remarkable film directors ever.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 112.