Research Archive Citation for published version: Nathaniel Weiner, ‘Resistance through realism: Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 21 (2): 165-188, April 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415603376 Document Version: This is the Accepted Manuscript version. The version in the University of Hertfordshire Research Archive may differ from the final published version. Copyright and Reuse: © The Author(s) 2015. This manuscript version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Enquiries If you believe this document infringes copyright, please contact the Research & Scholarly Communications Team at
[email protected] 1 Resistance through realism: Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain Introduction With 2014 marking its 50th anniversary, the past few years have seen a great deal of scholarship reflecting on the legacy of the Birmingham School (cf. Bland, 2013; Clarke, 2013; Gilroy, 2013; Hall, 2013; McRobbie, 2013). This article uses film to contribute to this ongoing process of reflection and re-evaluation, revisiting that moment in the Birmingham School’s history when its focus was on working-class youth subcultures. It looks at four lesser-known British social realist films whose release roughly coincides with the Centre’s period of research activity on subcultures. They are Pressure (1976), Babylon (1980), Bloody Kids (1979) and Made in Britain (1982). In their portrayal of British working-class youth subcultures, these films are highly evocative of the scholarly work produced at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s.