Englishness and Empire

In another class, War and Society in Modern Britain, I've been reading a few chapters out of Wendy Webster's "Englishness and Empire."

My favorite passages have to do with World War II era film-making:

"Narrative-documentary techniques were adopted in many films on the war, and their strong association with realism made them particularly suited to the idea of a sober and responsible nation, offering unsensational narratives characterized by a sense of stoicism and emotional restraint" (Webster, Englishness and Empire, 39).

“The fact that wartime feature films depicting war were made in black and white, like documentaries, reinforced these connections with sober realism, as well as reflecting wartime austerity. As war developed, the documentary realist style earned increasing praise from critics as distinctively British. The frequent contrasts that they made between the idea of national cinema and Hollywood reinforced the idea of national responsibility, restraint, and sobriety against Hollywood escapist, spectacular, glamorous, sensational, and over-emotional” (Webster, Englishness and Empire, 40).