This is the first book to provide a direct and comprehensive account of British art cinema. Film history has tended to view British filmmakers as aesthetically conservative, but the truth is they have a long tradition of experiment and artistry, both within and beyond the mainstream. Beginning with the silent period and running up to the 2010s, the book draws attention to this tradition while acknowledging that art cinema in Britain is a complex and fluid concept that needs to be considered within broader concerns. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of British cinema history, film genre, experimental filmmaking, and British cultural history.

Introduction: British art cinema: creativity, experimentation and innovation - Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle
1 'Art cinema', 1920s British film culture: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith - Tom Ryall
2 Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium - Owen Evans
3 Out of the war, on with the arts: cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain - Katerina Loukopoulou
4 Attitudes towards experiment in British cinema: the amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza - Ryan Shand
5 Art cinema, British production and the 1960s - Duncan Petrie
6 Happy accident: the symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter - Peter Jameson
7 The parameters of British art cinema: a case study of John Krish - Robert Shail
8 The reputation of Nicolas Roeg - Paul Newland
9 'As the first black face on the scene, I had to push the doors open': Horace Ové and Pressure (1975) - Sally Shaw
10 Art cinema and the British poetic realist tradition - David Forrest
11 The third avant garde: Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America - Paul Elliott
12 The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s - John Hill
13 Derek Jarman, trance films and medieval art cinema - Jo George
14 Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film in British art cinema - Brian Hoyle
15 Don Boyd and the business of art cinema - Phil Wickham
16 Shakespearean film as art cinema: Stage Beauty as a cerebral retort to Hollywood - Sarah Martindale
17 Boundary crossings and inter-subjective imaginings: Sarah Turner's Perestroika - Kim Knowles
Index