A sociological study of the British independent film field: The case of British-Asian film production 1976-1996.

This thesis performs a social mapping of the field of British-Asian independent film between 1976 and 1996. Through a practical application of Pierre Bourdieu's methodological approach to reading cultural production, this research examines a series of film production contexts as a means of revealing refracted homologies between particular texts, the cultural field and the broader field of power in Britain. The empirical core of the thesis identifies and examines five different film practices: an excluded film practice, an institutional film practice, a theoretical film practice, a successful film practice and contemporary film practices. The selected films are primarily analysed as cultural "barometers" of the given social contexts, providing for each of the empirical chapters a basis from which to map the genesis of a particular film practice. By mapping the relations between cultural production, the key social events and forces for change as actualised within the films, each empirical chapter aims to reveal the dominant logic which informed given film practices. Ethnicity, instead of functioning as the essential object of analysis, provides this research with a starting point and the key sampling device to map the British independent film field. In principal, this thesis examines the ways in which images of "ethnic minorities" in the British independent film field have been both liberated and regulated through the presence of dominant dispositions which have structured the field generating, and consecrating particular film-making practices over and above others