Introduction

Abstract

From scholarly and historic accounts to cultural and cinematic studies, the same clichés about the 1970s as a decade of decline and as a time of crisis abound. It has been too easy to limit explorations of British culture to selective considerations of obvious examples. Some of these accounts actively celebrate the low-culture appeal of the 1970s, while others lean towards the autobiographical. There is, of course, an important place for personal historical accounts and anecdotal history, but that place is not here. The limitations of the existing material open up a space for a rigorous cultural investigation of the 1970s. This account has emerged from the archival sources and combines the methodology of the cultural historian with the approach of the film scholar. Its aim is to definitively map the legislative and economic constraints on the British film industry in the 1970s.