As Jack says, from the anthropological perspective, those films are culture. And in fact, from every other well-defined perspective, except for the values-based one, which says that some person or organization gets to decide if something is "culture" based on how "good" it is. The problem with that model, as I said, is that "tradarts" usually lose out, and are not considered culture by most of the arbiters who decide what counts a "culture."

"Tradarts," by the way, is simply a neologism for "traditional arts," which is itself more-or-less contiguous with what is often called "folklore." The term has developed mainly in the internet age, when "tradarts" became an element of various URLs, including the one Diane gave above. It is a conscious attempt to shed the terms "folk" and "folklore" because of the baggage those terms carry.

Academic folklorists, as well as people who perform traditional music and dance, have for years struggled with the baggage of the term "folk," so I sympathize with Diane's wish to avoid it. The problem is that "traditional" is no better. In the language of arts organizations, which is where my career has been up to a couple of years ago, the "traditional arts" are painting, classical music, ballet, and other "High art." My former boss used to come to meetings with funders and say "we present folk and other non-traditional arts," until I worked with her to break her of the habit. So using another term, which already had another meaning, rarely does any good.

Inventing a new term like "tradarts" may help, so I wish her luck with it. But I don't see it catching on much, so if one uses the term one is rarely understood.

One challenge for this thread, it seems to me, is that some of us are taking Lizzie Cornish's question at face value, and others are responding to different questions, based on a long-running argument that most of us here don't quite understand. The thread was not called "English Tradarts-What are they?" so even if your favorite kinds of culture fall under the umbrella of tradarts, discussing other forms of culture is still appropriate to this thread. I think it's relatively obvious that films and poetry (even poetry I may not like) are perfectly valid examples of "culture." The question was, what makes culture "English"?