Picturing Home: Domestic Life and Modernity in 1940s British Film

This book examines the modes of address used to depict domestic life in a range of canonical and popular British films in the 1940s. Drawing on a wide range of evidence magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and ephemera from the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, it contextualises onscreen images of home in this period as engaging with the popular promotion of suburbia and domestic modernity in the interwar years. Picturing Home therefore provides a new reading of the ways in which British 1940s films visually convey a middlebrow vision of modernity, looking back to the interwar past as a means of imagining the postwar future: characterised by a balance between tradition and progress, domesticity and nationhood, aspirational glamour and restraint, privacy and community. – .