Conclusion

The British documentary — both in film and in television — has undergone fluctuating critical fortunes. For many years documentary was claimed as ‘Britain’s outstanding contribution to the film’ and this became the critical orthodoxy. This view persisted even in the wake of the decline (or as Rotha would have it ‘erosion’) of British documentary film after the Second World War. Later critiques of documentary focused on the perceived formal and ideological shortcomings of the films and highlighted the fact that documentary was a marginal mode of film practice. And in the 1980s the intellectual ascendancy of the ‘documentary-realist tradition’ in British film and television culture was itself challenged by the emergence of a revisionist historiography that sought to excavate those genres and traditions marginalized by realist aesthetics. The most persistent metaphor of recent British film historiography has been that of the ‘lost continent’ — a term coined by Julian Petley to describe the ‘repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving the length and breadth of that cinema, crossing authorial and generic boundaries, sometimes almost entirely invisible, sometimes erupting explosively, always received critically with fear and disapproval’.2 A consequence of this revisionist historiography was the reclamation of popular but critically despised genres such as the Gainsborough costume melodramas and the Hammer horror films, and individualistic auteurs such as Michael Powell and Ken Russell whose work did not fit conventional notions of quality cinema.