British cinema has been far richer and more diverse than is generally recognized, as this collection of key writings on British film culture - from the conversion to sound in the late 1920s to the 1990s - testifies. Dissolving Views brings together a number of important and influential essays and the light they throw on 70 or so years of British cinema history makes this volume a vital, provocative and highly informative collection.

Andrew Higson is Professor of Film and Television at the University of York, UK.

1. Introduction Andrew Higson
2. Hitchcock's British Films Revisited Charles Barr
3. The Production Designer and the Gesamtkunstwerk: German Film Technicians in the British Film Industry of the 1930s Tim Bergfelder
4. Engendering the Nation: British Documentary Film 1930-1939 Kathryn Dodd and Philip Dodd
5. Neither Here Nor There: National Identity in Gainsborough Costume Drama Pam Cook
6. The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942-1948 John Ellis
7. From Holiday Camp to High Camp: Women in British Feature Films, 1945-1951 Sue Harper
8. Victim: Text as Context Andy Medhurst
9. Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the 'Kitchen Sink' Film Andrew Higson
10. Landscapes and Stories in the 1960s British Realism Terry Lovell
11. The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s Michael O'Pray
12. A Post-National European Cinema: A Consideration of Derek Jarman's The Tempest and Edward II Colin MacCabe
13. Beyond 'The Cinema of Duty'? The Pleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s Sarita Malik
14. Crossing Thresholds: The Contemporary British Woman's Film Justine King
15. The Heritage Film and British Cinema Andrew Higson
Bibliography
Index