David McGillivray introduces House of Mortal Sin 8/11/14

                                 

My first experience of a Pete Walker film was catching the final 5 minutes of The Comeback (1978) on late night TV in the 1980s. A screening of House of Whipcord (1974) at a two-day film festival of 1970s trash at the Phoenix, Leicester in the 1990s cemented my addiction.

It was at the Phoenix festival that screenplay writer for Whipcord, David McGillivray autographed his Doing Rude Things book and dedicated it to the 'Twins of Evil' (my brother and I) simultaneously dismissing his own joke as "the usual rubbish".

McGillivray wrote a wonderfully economic script for Pete Walker's House of Mortal Sin (1976) that is both chilling and hilarious. However, he claims not to have seen the film since the cast and crew screening, so embarrassed is he by his work.

McGillivray has an eternally dry wit and self-deprecating sense of humour that is immense fun for the listener. Here he is introducing House of Mortal Sin at the Barbican, London, with Kim Newman, on 8th November 2014 (audio with stills):

YouTube clip of McGillivray's introduction

                                 

Abstract: The Changing Face of the Amateur Holiday Film in Britain as Constructed by Postwar Amateur Cine World (1945-1951)

This is a copy of my abstract from an article I recently had published in the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television.

The Changing Face of the Amateur Holiday Film in Britain as Constructed by Postwar Amateur Cine World (1945-1951)

Amateur film-making, motoring and holidaymaking were three complementary leisure activities that re-emerged with a greater intensity for middle-class consumers in Britain in the immediate post-war period. The end of restrictions on travel, an increasing availability of film stock and the first real chance to take advantage of the Holidays With Pay Act (the latter of which had been disrupted by the Second World War) created new opportunities for cine enthusiasts to produce a holiday film after 1945.

In this article, I consider how instructional articles on how to make a holiday film may have helped to construct ideologically a sense of British national identity for the middle-class readers of Amateur Cine World between 1945 and 1951. These articles can be mapped closely with the shifting patterns of holiday- making in the post-war period, and tend to encourage cine hobbyists to construct a sense of Britishness through their representations of the holiday; initially through images of the British countryside and coastline, and eventually by the framing of cultural difference in their first holidays abroad. 

A close analysis of this discourse can provide an insight into a construction of class, gender and national identity that is an alternative to the mainstream British feature film, for instance. 

The full article can be found online at:
Matt's Article at Taylor Francis Online