04 - Images de la ville postindustrielle anglophone - Philipp Drummond et Leland Tracy

Philipp Drummond - The Cinematic North of England: Post-Industrial Identities in The Full Monty and Brassed Off

If London was the key hub of the BritishEmpire as it waxed and waned between 1600 and the mid-20th Century, its engine room wasthe North of England, the birthplace of the global Industrial Revolution, withthe discovery of steam-power, the rise of the factory and railway systems, andthe growth of the powerful twin industries of coal and steel. The collieries ofYorkshire, with the steel city of Sheffield at their heart, were fundamental tothese developments, and it is here that the recent effects ofde-industrialisation were most sharply felt as these industries were eventuallydestroyed by the forces of political change and globalisation.

ThisPaper considers British Cinema’s wider representations of Yorkshire – with itscharacteristic tensions between industrial urbanism and the beauties of ruralnature – and of ‘the North’ in general in its various socio-politicaldifferences from the all-powerful ‘South’. Analysis is focussed on two richlysymptomatic feature films of the later 1990s, poignant social comedies whichchronicle the impact of these changes, and the new personal, social and spatialidentities to which they gave rise.

InMark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996),Yorkshire miners in the imaginary village of ‘Grimley’ struggle to at leastmaintain their roles as brass band musicians when the local pit closes; in thecase of Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997),redundant steelworkers in Sheffield opt for a rather different and newrelationship to music when, for one night only, they decide to become the mostrevealing of striptease artistes.

Comparingand contrasting the two films, the Paper explores the changing images ofmasculinity and femininity occasioned by the new relationships with labour,unemployment, city, and landscape, as well as the deployment of culturalparadigms from the world of popular culture which, harnessing thetransformative power of the musical genre, mark the films as fantasies ofpersonal survival in an inimical and alienated environment.

Leland Tracy - Pets or Meat? – Contrasting Portrayals of Flint, Michigan in Michael Moore’s Roger & Me

Flint,Michigan has a remarkable place in the history of American automobilemanufacturing. It was the birthplace of General Motors, once the world’slargest automobile manufacturer, and the setting for the 1937 Flint sit-downstrike, which led to the United Automobile Workers unionization of the industry.Flint is also the hometown of Michael Moore, one of America’s mostcontroversial documentary filmmakers.

Inthe early 1980’s, General Motors CEO Roger Smith began a series of layoffs,which led to more than 30,000 Flint workers losing their jobs. General Motorswas by far the largest employer in Flint, and these layoffs had a catastrophiceffect on the social and economic fabric of the community. Michael Moore’s 1989film Roger and Me depicts theseeffects in both a disturbing and humoristic way.

WhileMoore’s film was financially successful, and well received by most critics, itraises a fundamental question about the nature of documentary filmmaking: Isthere a clear distinction to be made between documentaries, and other genressuch as satire or political propaganda? And if so, what criteria might be usedto make this distinction? Can Moore’s use of dramatic editing techniques tocreate a harsh and humorous juxtaposition between the wealth of the Flint’selites, and the despair of the laid off workers and the rest of the communityreally be considered documentary?

Wewill attempt to answer these questions by examining Moore’s film and theresponses it has elicited – Harlan Jacobson, for example, has criticized Moorefor taking liberties with the chronology of events in the film – and by aconsideration of the interdependence between American popular culture andpolitics in an increasingly polarized american society.