Understanding Everyday Life in British and Irish Film

FAIN: FA-51655-05

Cheryl Temple Herr
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

My book offers a new approach to film in Britain and Ireland based on the depiction of social practices—the routine behaviors of everyday life such as making tea, answering a phone call, and catching the Tube--across the history of Anglo-Celtic cinema. Indigenous film critics have long struggled to define the four national cinemas (England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland) in terms of setting, characterization, or mode. My practice-oriented approach reconfigures the field to focus on lived customs, their history, and their role in identity-construction by way of the cinema. This project foregrounds the web of similarities and differences that constitutes a "practical community" in the Atlantic archipelago.

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