Melodramatic narratives of self and nation in post-war British popular film

Abstract

This thesis investigates the parallel portrayals of nationalities and sexualities in British post-Second World War popular film. The aim in this thesis is to focus on the genres of crime and melodrama, and to look at the concept of melodrama as an analytical tool apt for the analysis of both sexualities and nationalities. This thesis argues that undercurrents of queer and ‘foreign’ identities inform the narratives of self and nation in both crime films and melodramas of the post-war period. This study takes a text-oriented, interdisciplinary methodological approach, and is divided into five sections, including three thematic chapters, each offering close readings of four primary films from the years 1945-1953, with a main focus on the immediate post-war years. The Introduction maps out the historical contexts and explores the key theoretical frameworks for the thesis, with a specific interest in the conjunctions of queer studies and theories of nationalities and nationalisms. Section II explores the theme of amnesia and awakening in four melodramas, looking at examples of male and female amnesiacs on screen, suggesting that the depictions of psychological ailment differ along gendered lines. This section investigates the significance of both individual and collective remembering and forgetting in the construction of the nation and individual identities. Section III analyses the imaginings of time and space in post-war films; focuses on ‘queer villains’ in films of the period; and investigates how implications of sexual ‘deviancy’ were connected to non-futurity in post-war cultural imagination. Finally, Section IV explores the thematic of naming and interpellations by taking two films of the early-1950s to build a comparison with the late-1940s films that dominate the discussion in this thesis. This final section looks at uneasy social ‘calls’ and the presentations of women as, often distorted, mirrors for male national subjects.

Date of Award	20 Jun 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Gill Plain (Supervisor)