Enduring Symbols of People and Place

Enduring Symbols of People and Place is a chapter in Beyond the Council Estate, Cinematic Spaces of the Working Class.

Edited by Deirdre O'Neill and Katerina Flint-Nicol, Edinburgh University Press Political Cinema Series.

Reshapes the narrative and its trajectory in how the working class is discussed in relation to British Cinema

Considers classed identities beyond the confines of social realism

Navigates between historical and contemporary cinema narratives and aesthetics

Illuminates the epistemic dimensions of working-class political struggle through the specificities of distinct places

Utilises film and the study of film to make connections between politics, classed experience public life and larger social issues

In recent years British cinema has utilised the iconic image of the council estate as an emblematic shorthand for defining the supposedly dysfunctional character of the working-class people who reside there. As a spatial determinant, it has come to signify a whole group of people in the popular imaginary as anti-social, violent and workshy. Drawing on the latest research into class and British cinema, the chapters in this edited collection explore classed identities in relation to the spaces which they occupy, both onscreen and off.

The chapters in this collection shift the spatial location of the working class away from the council estates in which they are visually and symbolically contained to explore alternative spaces where their complexities, struggles and resistance to the systemic cultural and political discourses that define them can be foregrounded.

Political Cinemas is a book series with two strands. The first strand focuses on the rich history of politically-engaged filmmakers working across and within activist circles, arthouse cinemas and industrial studio systems. It offers fresh insights into how filmmakers, past and present, have sought to utilise cinema as a vehicle for social change. The second strand in the series offers new analyses of all aspects of film and film culture, written from an overtly political lens. As unprecedented emergencies beget the planet - pandemics, economic crises, climate change – the series publishes books which offer new insights into how film and film culture have both shaped and responded to the crises through which we have lived, and how they might positively influence the ones we are moving into.