Middlebrow Cinema

MIDDLEBROW CINEMA Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and femi- nized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relation- ally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution. In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film- watching, and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions. The first study of its kind, the volume comprises of 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term ‘middlebrow’ across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational – and thus especially relevant and dynamic – area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book: • remaps ‘popular’ and ‘arthouse’ approaches; • explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican and Spanish ‘national’ cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, queer and transnational cinemas; • analyses biopic, heritage, historical film, melodrama, musical and sex comedy genres. Sally Faulkner is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film Studies at the University of Exeter, and author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (2004), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (2006) and A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910–2010 (2013). REMAPPING WORLD CINEMA: REGIONAL TENSIONS AND GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS Series Editors: Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison and Alex Marlow-Mann Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations rewrites the territory of contemporary world cinema, revising outdated assumptions of national cinemas, challenging complacent views of hegemonic film cultures and questioning common ideas of production, distribution and reception. It will remap established territories such as American, European and Asian cinema and explore new territories that exist both within and beyond nation- states such as regional cinemas and online communities, while also demarcating important contexts for global cinema such as festival circuits and the discipline of film studies itself. This book series is jointly coordinated by B-Film:The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies based at the University of Birmingham, the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Film and Media Research at the University of Kent. Advisory Board Michele Aaron Christopher E. Gittings Ian Malcolm Rijsdijk Tim Bergfelder Catherine Grant María Pilar Rodríguez Chris Berry Olof Hedling Joanna Rydzewska William Boddy Mette Hjort Karl Schoonover William Brown John Horne Deborah Shaw James Chapman Anik Imre Marc Silberman Paolo Cherchi Usai Dina Iordanova Murray Smith Ian Christie Geoff King Paul Julian Smith Anne Ciecko Mariana Liz Song Hwee Lim Timothy Corrigan Gina Marchetti Ann Marie Stock Virginia Crisp Laura U. Marks Stephen Teo Kian Teck Sean Cubitt David Martin-Jones Niamh Thornton Stuart Cunningham Alessandra Meleiro Dolores Tierney Jonathan Driskell Xavier Mendik Jan Uhde Rajinder Dudrah Madhuja Mukherjee Marije de Valck Thomas Elsaesser David Murphy Ravi Vasudevan Dunja Fehimovic´ Lcia Nagib Belén Vidal Rosalind Galt Lydia Papadimitriou Ginette Vincendeau David Gauntlett Chris Perriam James Walters Felicity Gee Catherine Portuges Emma Widdis Jeffrey Geiger Charles Ramírez Berg Vito Zagarrio Aaron Gerow Jonathan Rayner Yingjin Zhang Middlebrow Cinema Edited by Sally Faulkner MIDDLEBROW CINEMA Edited by Sally Faulkner First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Sally Faulkner The right of Sally Faulkner to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Faulkner, Sally, 1974- editor. Title: Middlebrow cinema / edited by Sally Faulkner. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Remapping world cinema: regional tensions and global transformations | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037720| ISBN 9781138777125 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138777132 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315630564 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Social aspects. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S6 M485 2016 | DDC 302.23/43—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037720 ISBN: 978-1-138-77712-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-77713-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-63056-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK CONTENTS List of figures vii List of tables ix Acknowledgements x Textual note xii List of contributors xiii Introduction.Approaching the middlebrow: audience; text; institution 1 Sally Faulkner PART I Mapping middlebrow 13 1 Hollywood middlebrow: a dialectical approach to 1940s cinema 15 Chris Cagle 2 Middlebrow taste: towards a new middle class – a certain tendency of 1950s French cinema 33 Susan Hayward 3 Mumbai middlebrow: ways of thinking about the middle ground in Hindi cinema 51 Rachel Dwyer vi Contents PART II Case studies 69 4 Time and the middlebrow in 1940s British cinema 71 Lawrence Napper 5 Rehearsing for democracy in dictatorship Spain: middlebrow period drama 1970–77 88 Sally Faulkner 6 The Mexican romantic sex comedy: the emergence of Mexican middlebrow filmmaking in the 1990s 107 Deborah Shaw 7 Wealth and justice: contemporary Chinese middlebrow cinema 122 Ting Guo 8 Counter-heritage, middlebrow and the fiction patrimoniale: reframing ‘middleness’ in the contemporary French historical film 139 Will Higbee 9 Radical politics, middlebrow cinema: Salvador (Puig Antich) and the search for a new consensus 156 Belén Vidal PART III Middlebrow across borders 179 10 ‘Kings of the Middle Way’: continental cinema on British screens 181 Lucy Mazdon 11 Hypotheses on the queer middlebrow 196 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover Index 212 FIGURES 1.1 Realist treatment of the backstage drama in A Double Life (Cukor 1947) 19 1.2 A Letter to Three Wives (Mankiewicz 1949): radio as a middlebrow spectre 25 3.1 Pakhi Roy Chaudhary (Sonakshi Sinha), a writer, and Varun Shrivastav (Ranveer Singh), an archaeologist, romance while sharing their love of the arts, including painting. Lootera (Motwane 2013) 61 3.2 The breakdown of the marriage of Gayatri (Rani Mukerji) and Dev (Randeep Hooda) in ‘This is a Strange Story’, Bombay Talkies (Johar 2013) 62 4.1 Guests at the Halfway House hear the air raid that a year ago destroyed the Inn in which they are staying. The Halfway House (Dearden 1944) 79 4.2 Clarissa Rohan (Phyllis Calvert) and Peter Rokeby (Stewart Granger) inspect the box of trinkets belonging to their ancestors in The Man in Grey (Arliss 1943) 83 5.1 Rivals Fortunata (Emma Penella) and Jacinta (Liana Orfei) share the frame. Fortunata y Jacinta (Fons 1970) 101 5.2 Sisterly solidarity: dying Fortunata bequeaths her newborn son to Jacinta in Madrid’s Cava de San Miguel Street. Fortunata y Jacinta (Fons 1970) 102 6.1 Gloria (Isabel Benet) plays the piano while waiting for Tomás to appear in Love in the Time of Hysteria (Cuarn 1991) 113 6.2 The female servants carry Miguel’s possessions to Carlos’s apartment in Sex, Shame and Tears (Serrano 1998) 118 7.1 If You Are the One (Feng 2008): Liang (Qi Shu) sits in the back of a SUV on her trip to Hokkaido 130 viii List of fgures 7.2 Let the Bullets Fly ( Jiang 2010): Zhang (Wen Jiang) announces: ‘I came to Goose Town for three things only: justice, justice, justice!’ 133 8.1 ‘Emotional engagement as (middlebrow) narrative strategy’: Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) pledges his allegiance to France in Days of Glory (Bouchareb 2006) 147 8.2 ‘Emotional detachment as (auteurist) narrative strategy’: Sara (Yahima Torres), the ‘unknowable’ Venus Hottentot in Black Venus (Kechiche 2010) 150 9.1 ‘I want to remember this moment’: the trope of student protest through performative prosthetic memory. Salvador (Puig Antich) (Huerga 2006) 162 9.2 Through the eyes of others: Salvador as seen by his sisters, whose gazes dominate the shot. Salvador (Puig Antich) (Huerga 2006) 167 11.1 Apparitional homosexual desire: the half-dead couple from Undertow (Fuentes-Len 2009) together privately in public 208 TABLES 2.1 1950s prize-winners 39 2.2 Nineteenth-century classical literary authors adapted to screen 40 2.3 Audience figures for adaptations of classic greats 41 2.4 Twentieth-century modern literary authors adapted to screen 42 2.5 Audience figures for

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