Now and then: the ebbs and flows of British cinema

British cinema, in Australia at least but probably elsewhere too, has always occupied a sort of middle ground. In the days when it was a recognizable national cinema, with a regular output and with cinemas largely (sometimes exclusively) devoted to screening this, it fell somewhere between the mainstream and the art-house. Those days came to an end in the early 1960s, but until then what was often referred to as 'a good British film' was seen as a sort of opposition to the Hollywood domination of our screens without, however, giving us the arthouse trouble of reading subtitles. Like the revived Australian cinema since the 1970s, British cinema had the problem as a national cinema trying to stake out an audience area of its own of using the same language (more or less) as Hollywood, whose conquest of the world's English-speaking audiences was completed during the teens of the twentieth century. It was a conquest that met with little resistance from the public, but there were always other filmmakers who needed to create their own stories and who sought to persuade that public to give them at least some of its attention.