Picturing home : domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film

This book explores how home was pictured in the 'golden age' of British cinema. Drawing on a wide range of evidence to explore the depiction of domestic life in popular culture, it resituates feature films from the 1940s in relation to narratives of domestic, suburban modernity and the middlebrow established in the interwar years. Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns-- Publisher Front matter 1 Dedication 7 Contents 8 List of figures 9 General editor’s foreword 12 Acknowledgements 14 Introduction: ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces’ 16 ‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home 36 Pastoral images: capturing ‘A Landscape from Within’ 84 Dream palaces: transforming the domestic interior 138 Interior lives: imagining private visions of home 188 Conclusion: ‘The best of both worlds’ 233 Bibliography 239 Index 254