The holiday: Britishness and British film

The representation of the supposed free space of the holiday by a medium of mass entertainment offers a highly condensed image that demands analysis. In my thesis I question the ways in which the holiday film constructs a sense of Britishness based around the idea of community that is shaped and pressured by forces at different historical moments. Modern capitalist society offers us a structure where the holiday is presented to us as the ultimate contrast from work. It is commodified, and we choose to enter into this ideology, take our break, and return to work, refreshed. The holiday also offers a particular type of freedom, which distinguishes it from other forms of leisure. It can be considered as more of an ‘event’ than a weekend break from work, for instance. The emergence of the holiday as a form of mass entertainment for the working class appears to coincide with the birth of cinema in the same respect. By studying the holiday film I try to reveal what it tells us about British culture, the nation and British life, and how cinema audiences may have engaged with and responded to these texts