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Author Jones, Matthew, 1984- author.

Title Science fiction cinema and 1950s Britain : recontextualising cultural anxiety / Matthew Jones
Published New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc., 2017

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Description 1 online resource (232 pages)
Contents Introduction: Teacups and flying saucers -- Section A: Communist infiltration and indoctrination -- Soviet brainwashing, British defectors and the corruptive elsewhere -- "He can be a communist here if he wants to": living with the monster -- Section B: Nuclear technology -- The beast in the atom: Britain's nuclear nightmares -- Atomic albion: Britain's nuclear dreams -- Section C: Race and immigration -- It came from the colonies!: mass immigration and the invasion narratives -- Loving the alien: after the Notting Hill race riots -- Section D: Britain at home and abroad -- Still overpaid, still oversexed and still over here: the American invasion of Europe -- Science fiction Britain: the nation of the future -- Conclusion
Summary "Title Description: For the last sixty years discussion of 1950s science fiction cinema has been dominated by claims that the genre reflected US paranoia about Soviet brainwashing and the nuclear bomb. However, classic films, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It Came from Outer Space (1953), and less familiar productions, such as It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), were regularly exported to countries across the world. The histories of their encounters with foreign audiences have not yet been told. Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain begins this task by recounting the story of 1950s British cinema-goers and the aliens and monsters they watched on the silver screen. Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Jones makes an exciting and important intervention by locating American science fiction films alongside their domestic counterparts in their British contexts of release and reception. He offers a radical reassessment of the genre, demonstrating for the first time that in Britain, which was a significant market for and producer of science fiction, these films gave voice to different fears than they did in America. While Americans experienced an economic boom, low immigration and the conferring of statehood on Alaska and Hawaii, Britons worried about economic uncertainty, mass immigration and the dissolution of the Empire. Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain uses these and other differences between the British and American experiences of the 1950s to tell a new history of the decade's science fiction cinema, exploring for the first time the ways in which the genre came to mean something unique to Britons."--Bloomsbury Publishing
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 202-222) and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on 11/24/2020)
Subject Science fiction films -- Great Britain -- History and criticism
Motion pictures -- Social aspects -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
British & Irish history.
Film: styles & genres.
Performing Arts -- Film & Video -- History & Criticism.
Motion pictures -- Social aspects
Science fiction films
Great Britain
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2017035799
ISBN 9781501322549
1501322540
9781501322563
1501322567
9781501322556
1501322559
1501322532
9781501322532