Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial - often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers.

In this Very Short Introduction, Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points - Alfred Hitchcock - Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language.

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Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programmes in Film Studies at graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St Louis, Galway and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British Cinema, including books on Ealing Studios (1977) and English Hitchcock (1999), and he was co-writer, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series (new edition, 2012) and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, co-authored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf.