Korda himself lost control of the facility in 1939 to the Rank Organisation, whose own Pinewood Studios had opened at the end of September 1936. British Academy of Film and Television Arts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, List of highest-grossing films in the United Kingdom, "Table 8: Cinema Infrastructure - Capacity", "Table 6: Share of Top 3 distributors (Excel)", "Table 1: Feature Film Production - Genre/Method of Shooting", "Table 11: Exhibition - Admissions & Gross Box Office (GBO)", "BFI Screenonline: UK Feature Films Produced 1912–2003", "Harry Potter becomes highest-grossing film franchise", "World's first colour moving pictures discovered", "The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903)", "Associated British Picture Corporation (1933-70)", "Britain's World War II films were more than just propaganda", http://www.terramedia.co.uk/reference/law/british_film_import_duty.htm, "AMC CINEMAS® BRINGS THE MULTIPLEX TO THE UNITED KINGDOM", "How multiplex cinemas saved the British film industry 25 years ago", "Gary Oldman Talks 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,' 'Batman' Retirement", "Studio Tour Casts Spells Just Like Harry", "London Calling, With Luck, Lust and Ambition", "Warner Bros buys Harry Potter studios in £100m boost for UK films", "Warner to purchase and invest £100 million in film studio", "Only a small fraction of British films turn a profit, BFI study finds", "British film industry will suffer if the Government closes the UK Film Council", "Daniel Barber condemns UK Film Council abolition", "Clint Eastwood writes plea to save UK Film Council", "Clint Eastwood joins fight to save UK Film Council", Online campaign to save the UK Film Council, "Michael Winner berates UK Film Council supporters", "Cut the Film Council and end this 1970s navel-gazing", "Pros and cons of dumping UK film council", "Fade out from the UK Film Council ... to the British Film Institute", "Christopher Nolan on 'Interstellar' Critics, Making Original Films and Shunning Cellphones and Email (Q&A)", "Pinewood Shepperton back £96m takeover offer", "Pinewood Shepperton backs higher Peel Group bid over interest from billionaire businessman Mohammed Fayed", "Warner Bros opens revamped UK film studio", Statistical Yearbook 2011: 7.3 UK directors, "PM backs 'dynamic and entrepreneurial' UK film industry", "Tim Webber: the man who put Sandra Bullock in space", British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Glasgow International Financial Services District, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cinema_of_the_United_Kingdom&oldid=987007828, Articles with dead external links from July 2019, Articles with permanently dead external links, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2012, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. 1985. British films began to make use of documentary techniques; Cavalcanti joined Ealing for Went the Day Well? Park's follow up, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was another worldwide hit: it grossed $56 million at the US box office and £32 million in the UK. [83] The most commercially successful British directors in recent years are Paul Greengrass, Mike Newell, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and David Yates. At the closure of the UK Film Council on 31 March 2011, The Guardian reported that "The UKFC's entire annual budget was a reported £3m, while the cost of closing it down and restructuring is estimated to have been almost four times that amount. It was Grierson who coined the term "documentary" to describe a non-fiction film, and he produced the movement's most celebrated early films, Night Mail (1936), written and directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt, and incorporating the poem by W. H. Auden towards the end of the short. Eastwood warned Osborne that the closure could result in fewer foreign production companies choosing to work in the UK. As the 1960s progressed, American studios returned to financially supporting British films, especially those that capitalised on the "swinging London" image propagated by Time magazine in 1966. The latter film generated interested in other "regional" productions, including the Scottish films Small Faces (1996), Ratcatcher (1999) and My Name Is Joe (1998). Horace Ové's Pressure (1975) had been funded by the British Film Institute as was A Private Enterprise (1974), these being the first Black British and Asian British films, respectively. The duopoly in British cinema exhibition, via Rank and now EMI, continued. Although the earliest British films were of everyday events, the early 20th century saw the appearance of narrative shorts, mainly comedies and melodramas. Among the most significant films produced during this period were David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), Carol Reed's thrillers Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949), and Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), the most commercially successful film of its year in the United States. Actors and professionals, including James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Pete Postlethwaite, Damian Lewis, Timothy Spall, Daniel Barber and Ian Holm, campaigned against the Council's abolition. This documentary was funded not by the government but by the British Commercial Gas Association, which stood to make a handsome profit out of the rebuilding work the documentary was calling for. [33] ABPC's studios in Elstree came to be known as the "porridge factory", according to Lou Alexander, "for reasons more likely to do with the quantity of films that the company turned out, than their quality". Blacklisted in America, Joseph Losey had a significant influence on British cinema in the 1960s, particularly with his collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter and leading man Dirk Bogarde, including The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967). This was later challenged in court by Greene, causing the company to go out of business in 1915. It was established in 1950 coming into effect in 1957. These included adaptations of Richardson's stage productions of Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959), with Richard Burton, and The Entertainer (1960) with Laurence Olivier, both from Osborne's own screenplays. The 1956 statement of Free Cinema, the name was coined by Anderson, asserted: "No film can be too personal. By now contracted to Gaumont British, Alfred Hitchcock had settled on the thriller genre by the mid-1930s with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Although it had been funding British experimental films as early as 1952, the British Film Institute's foundation of a production board in 1964—and a substantial increase in public funding from 1971 onwards—enabled it to become a dominant force in developing British art cinema in the 1970s and 80s: from the first of Bill Douglas's Trilogy My Childhood (1972), and of Terence Davies' Trilogy Childhood (1978), via Peter Greenaway's earliest films (including the surprising commercial success of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)) and Derek Jarman's championing of the New Queer Cinema. The most important figure in the birth of the British documentary film was a Scot, John Grierson, the son of a schoolteacher. There was Graham Greene (Berkhamsted School and Oxford), who expressed various left-wing views (although this did not prevent him complaining, in a letter to his wife, that in Nottingham, “One sees absolutely no one here of one’s own class… It destroys democratic feelings at birth”). The London-based visual effects company Framestore, with Tim Webber the visual effects supervisor, have worked on some of the most technically and artistically challenging projects, including, The Dark Knight (2008) and Gravity (2013), with new techniques involved in Gravity realized by Webber and the Framestore team taking three years to complete.[86]. Music halls also proved influential in comedy films of this period, and a number of popular personalities emerged, including George Formby, Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and Will Hay. "[42] Hitchcock was then signed up to a seven-year contract by Selznick and moved to Hollywood. [12] Some of the films with the largest ever box office returns have been made in the United Kingdom, including the third and fourth highest-grossing film franchises (Harry Potter and James Bond).[13].