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Over 39 chapters The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History 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, such as the British Board of Film Classification, the National Film Finance Corporation, the British Film Institute, and the UK Film Council. Whereas most histories of British cinema focus on directors, stars, genres and themes, The Routledge Companion explores the forces enabling and constraining the films´ production, distribution, exhibition, and reception contexts from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors´ mostly empirical and archive-based scholarship, which often draws on insider perspectives of key film institutions, illuminates aspects of British film culture that have been neglected or marginalised (for example, the Watch Committee system, the Eady Levy, the rise of the multiplex, film festivals) and emphasises areas where scholarship has either been especially productive and influential, such as in early and silent cinema, or promoted new approaches, such as audience and memory studies. The book vividly describes a film culture awkwardly torn between art and commerce, the state and the free market, the national and the transnational, and, in recent years, between cinema and television.

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