Dave Allen 
Dr Justin Smith
Interest
My interest in British film culture of the 1970s stems from my doctoral work on films of the period which have subsequently earned cult status ' I am thinking here of titles such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Quadrophenia (1979). Researching the production and exhibition contexts of such films revealed a cinematic culture riven by profound uncertainty on the one hand, and audacious opportunism on the other.
For sure, the British film industry foundered as a result of the dramatic reduction of American funding at the beginning of the 1970s: 'runaway' production which had done much to artificially boost its fortunes during the 'Swinging Sixties'. The repercussions were considerable: formerly influential independent producers (such as British Lion) were taken over or went to the wall, industry talent and experience haemorrhaged across the Atlantic, new pockets of money (from the recording industry for example) made incursions into the film business in ad hoc arrangements to promote one-off novelties.
There is evidence of a marked degree of anxiety across the industry as to who was the audience for popular film. For sure the old mass audience was dwindling fast, but preferences also seemed to be diverging to form discrete taste-communities. The variety in both type and quality of films produced in this period, indicates the strenuous efforts made to try to appeal to this new consumption climate: from television spin-offs to sexploitation, from low-budget horror to big-budget international adventures, from European co-productions to avant-garde auteurism. The fragility of the market at the levels of both production and exhibition was only exacerbated by ambivalence in Government policy on state intervention, crises over film censorship, the dominance of television culture and the rise of home video.
Such fluidity, uncertainty, inconsistency and diversity makes 1970s cinema both fascinating and challenging to map. Where are the continuities and breaks? What models of creative agency emerge? How do the profound anxieties at large impact upon visual style, generic and taboo boundaries, and manner or modes of address? Only partial answers to such questions can be found by recourse to the archives and to the established methods of revisionist film history. For a more comprehensive picture of visual culture of the period, it will be necessary to consider other approaches.
How useful might it be, for example, to survey the attitudes manifest in a range of films of the period to the residual culture: to history, structures of hierarchy, fashions, ideas of national identity? How helpful might we find it to pursue the cinematic technology and film vocabulary of the 1970s in an effort to identify trends in manner and visual style? What is the relation in the picture plane, for instance, between background and foreground? How stable is the composition of mise-en-sc'ne? It could be suggested, for example, that typical filmic modes of address during the decade manifest what might be described as a 'throwaway' style; to what extent does this mark a post-modern sensibility emergent in the visual culture? In what ways might evidence of such apparent flippancy and a tendency towards cultural irreverence mark an equivocal attitude which might be traced back, in the first instance, to production arrangements and key personnel or, secondly, to more pervasive structures of feeling in culture and society at large? And where are the patterns of correspondence and overlap, of difference and divergence to be found in comparing the output of mainstream popular cinema to that of other forms of moving image culture? Such must be the range and focus of our analysis if we are to fully articulate the character of British cinema in this unique and undervalued period.