Search results for ""Author Jeffrey Richards""

Thorold Dickinson has been called the "major lost talent of the British film industry." Nevertheless, four of his films, Gaslight, Men of Two Worlds, The Next of Kin, and Queen of Spades are among the most critically respected British films of all time. Although he directed only nine feature films and a handful of short documentaries, he devoted his life to the advancement of cinema. After his directorial career ended, he became Chief of Film Services of the U.N. Department of Public Information in New York and later returned to England to establish the first department of film studies in a British university. This book explores in detail every aspect of the life and career of Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984). It is based on extensive interviews with Dickinson and a number of his colleagues and friends, an examination of his papers, and a detailed analysis of each of his films. Thorold Dickinson and the British Cinema begins with a re-examination of Dickinson's career in the light of ten years of a new writing about British cinema, and in particular, about the options open to a British cinema permanently dwarfed by Hollywood. Illustrations.

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The great director John Ford (1894-1973) is best known for classic westerns, but his body of work encompasses much more than this single genre. Jeffrey Richards develops and broadens our understanding of Ford's film-making oeuvre by studying his non-Western films through the lens of Ford’s life and abiding preoccupations. Ford's other cinematic worlds included Ireland, the Family, Catholicism, War and the Sea, which share with his westerns the recurrent themes of memory and loss, the plight of outsiders and the tragedy of family breakup. Richards' revisionist study both provides new insights into familiar films such as The Fugitive (1947); The Quiet Man (1952), Gideon’s Way and The Informer (1935) and reclaims neglected masterpieces, among them Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and the extraordinary The Long Voyage Home. (1940).

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This book traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the 'leisure preference' of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a 'leisured class' was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power - until it became thought of as 'the idle rich'. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement. Accessible, wide-ranging and occasionally polemical, this book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time.

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This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians – including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman – and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.

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