Richard Dyer - Brief Encounter

BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the films classic status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the authors personal response to the film.

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Brief Encounter

2nd Edition

Richard Dyer

To Kay Dyer

Richard Dyer 1993, 2015

First edition published in 1993 by the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Reprinted 2007, 2012

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition published in 2015 by

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Front cover design: Rania Moudaress

Series text design: ketchup/SE14

Images from Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), Cineguild/Independent Producers; The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945), Gainsborough Pictures.

Set by couch

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ISBN 9781844578771

Contents

Foreword

I was giving a talk on a general topic and mentioned in passing that Brief Encounter was one of my favourite films. Ed Buscombe, the first editor of the Film Classics series, happened to be in the audience and contacted me afterwards to ask if Id like to write the Classic on Brief Encounter. It had never been in my plans but it is one of the most enjoyable tasks Ive ever undertaken.

At the time, the Classics were selected from a predetermined list of canonical films. Brief Encounters belonging in the list was unstable. On the one hand, it was one of the most famous of all British films, a widely familiar title and much beloved. On the other hand, it had not yet altogether benefitted from the rehabilitation of women-oriented media that the Hollywood womans film and soap opera had enjoyed, and it was still mired in the perception of British cinema itself as impossibly staid, not only in its class-bound, sexually repressive subject matter but in its dully realist and/or too carefully crafted style. My study sought to explore what the implications of both these factors were for Brief Encounter, accepting that the film, written and directed by men, was centred on a woman, addressed a female audience and drew on aspects of womens culture, and did come out of a view of cinema that valued both realism and craft. These elements shaped the film and, like any other cultural form, limited it but also made possible the feelings and fascinations that continued to make it loved and, in some quarters, admired.

In the twenty-odd years since then, the films reputation seems to me to have become much more secure. It is more beloved, sometimes with smart, po-mo condescension, but more often whole-heartedly. In April 2013 Time Out announced it as the most romantic film of all time. Carnforth Station, where the films exteriors were shot and which is still a commuter station for the Southern Lancashire area, has been spruced up and become a Heritage Centre with a Brief Encounter Refreshment Room. Still Life, the short play on which Brief Encounter is based, is now quite often revived, sometimes better than others, but always respectfully, with no camping about, and always using the film in its publicity. In 2009 an opera, with music by Andr Previn, was commissioned and premiered by Houston Grand Opera, perhaps a quixotic choice of subject, since the form of opera externalises and heightens emotions, whereas Brief Encounter conveys them through interiority and understatement. Most successfully, beginning in Birmingham in 2007 and then moving on to Wakefield, London and thence to the USA and Australia, Kneehigh Theatres production combined straight enactment on the part of the lovers, Rachmaninov, actual and pastiche footage of 1940s cinema, and break-out revue and music-hall numbers (drawing on Nol Cowards repertoire) for Myrtle and Albert and Beryl and Stanley. The form itself embodied a sense of period combined with the contemporary perspective offered both by multi media performance and giving expression to a sense of fun and even raunchiness in the station staff that the film only hints at. Alongside these various homages to and reimaginings of the film, there is also a renewed academic interest, notably in a long discussion in Alison McKees