Picture perfect : landscape, place and travel in British cinema before 1930

The British cinema has drawn extensively on the national landscapes.

Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound-up with a popular definition of national heritage.

Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation.

The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists - practitioners, academics and individual researchers - who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.

Topics covered include: the 'violent realism' of Edwardian cinema; urban and rural landscapes in film publicity; pictorialism in Hepworth's features and 'actualities'; encounters between urban and rural in British film; the popular genre of the racing drama; British cinema's encounters with foreign landscapes; the politicisation of public space in Labour films; and commentaries on built environment in early films.