History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | Margaret Thatcher

Daniel-Craig-–-Casino-Royale

“There comes a time when you’ve just gotta’ be a man”: An analysis of shifting on-screen representations of British masculinity in the post-Thatcher period

“Sam’s dissertation was an outstandingly researched piece of work. It synthesised contextual and historiographical issues regarding masculinity and film in the post-Thatcher era in a conceptually interesting way, and made great use of visual sources as a cultural lens from which to understand anxieties surrounding changing concepts of masculinity in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sam demonstrated an excellent understanding of film culture, not just in the period studied, but across the twentieth century, and the way in which he revealed how certain masculine filmic archetypes were shaped and modified in response to the shifting contemporary climate was nothing less than compelling.” – Dr Rob James, Sam’s dissertation supervisor. […]

Continue Reading 0
dunkirk

Re-using the past: history on film.

In this blog Dr Rob James, senior lecturer in history, reflects on the issue of ‘truth’ in historical feature films, revealing how filmmakers have frequently used past events to comment about contemporary situations. Rob specialises in researching people’s leisure pursuits, and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including his second year option unit ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ and the final year Special Subject strand ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’. As James Chapman has noted in his masterly book Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film, ‘a historical feature film will often have as much […]

Continue Reading 0