British art cinema

Creativity, experimentation and innovation

Paul Newland, Brian Hoyle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526133144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This is the first book to provide a direct and comprehensive account of British art cinema. Film history has tended to view British filmmakers as aesthetically conservative, but the truth is they have a long tradition of experiment and artistry, both within and beyond the mainstream. Beginning with the silent period and running up to the 2010s, the book draws attention to this tradition while acknowledging that art cinema in Britain is a complex and fluid concept that needs to be considered within broader concerns. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of British cinema history, film genre, experimental filmmaking, and British cultural history.

1 ‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith

Tom Ryall

In a European country like Britain you would normally expect the most interesting films to be produced within the area of art cinema.

Alan Lovell¹

Art cinema, as a significant historical element of a national film culture and a counterbalance to the international power of the American cinema, has a secure place, established very firmly in the 1920s, in the histories of the major European cinemas, and represented, in particular, by the films of France, Germany and the Soviet Union. Despite having much in common with such countries – including roots in the prehistory of the medium, claimants to its technological invention, contributors to its artistic development especially in the form of the pre-World War One ‘chase’ film, and a susceptibility to the power of the American cinema – Britain and British films, however, remain tangential to discussions of ‘art cinema’ in historical terms. Indeed, for Erik Hedling, using a very tight definition of the concept, ‘Britain did not have an internationally well-known art cinema […] until Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and other film-makers emerged in the 1980s.’² During the 1920s, the French, German and Soviet cinemas produced films which formed part of the broader artistic culture of European modernism and had direct links to movements such as expressionism, Dada, surrealism and constructivism. These films are now acknowledged as canonical in the history of art cinema and principal constituents of what Andrew Tudor has called ‘the period of “formation” during which the very status of cinema as art was a central focus for struggle’.³ In contrast, to quote Charles Barr, ‘(n)o British feature films from the silent era belong to an internationally known repertoire’.⁴ British silent films failed in their endeavours to compete in the arena of popular cinema, with their American counterparts dominating British screens, and, unlike other European countries, also failed to produce an ‘art cinema’. The ‘absence’, indeed, was noted at the time; as Oswell Blakeston wrote in the highbrow journal Close Up in 1927, ‘(w)here in the history of British pictures are to be found films with the aesthetic merits of “Caligari”; “Warning Shadows”; or “The Last Laugh”?’⁵

Yet the British film industry, despite a mid-decade production crisis, produced a substantial number of films during the period, with around 800 feature films shown between 1920 and 1929, and the omission of British titles from historical accounts of the 1920s is somewhat surprising.⁶ Recent writing on the period, however, has been more attentive to British achievement. John Orr has suggested that a handful of British films made towards the end of the decade, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1929) and Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), can be spoken of in the same breath as the French and German films as films that are ‘modernistic, experimenting with the possibilities of silent film narrative in an epoch of artistic modernism’.⁷ In a similar vein, Ian Christie includes A Cottage on Dartmoor in an article on key silent films drawn from an ‘international repertoire’ which includes work by leading European directors of the 1920s such as F. W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, René Clair, Luis Buñuel and Carl Dreyer.⁸

This chapter explores the notion of ‘art cinema’ in Britain during the 1920s and considers the cultural context in which British film-makers worked, the ideas and attitudes towards the medium and the intellectual atmosphere in which directors such as Hitchcock and Asquith began their careers. Many discussions of the distinctiveness or non-distinctiveness of British cinema throughout its long history situate the nation’s films in a kind of cultural limbo flanked on one side by the commercial entertainment of American cinema, and, on the other, by the European ‘art’ film. What emerges is the notion of a hesitant cinema committed neither to the vigour of popular cinema nor to the sophistication of the ‘art’ film, and unduly dependent upon the traditional and more indigenously respectable cultural forms of literature and theatre for subject matter, themes, performance styles and so on. Certainly, in the 1920s, the powerful exemplars for the direction of cinema came from two broad sources. Firstly, from the abundance of titles produced by the fast-growing Hollywood industry which dominated British screens and provided the typical experience of film-going for a mass audience. Secondly, from the diversity of modes and styles in, for example, the films of Germany, France and the Soviet Union, which the London-based Film Society started screening to a minority audience in 1925.

British film culture in the 1920s

As András Bálint Kovács has written, ‘(w)hen we speak of “art films” as opposed to “commercial entertainment films,” we are referring not to aesthetic qualities but to certain genres, styles, narrative procedures, distribution networks, production companies, film festivals, film journals, critics, groups of audiences – in short, an institutionalized film practice’.⁹ As in other European countries, the development of an ‘art film culture’ began in Britain in the 1920s with the emergence of a cinephiliac strand particularly among the young and the university-educated intellectuals devoted to the ‘aesthetic and cultural appreciation of cinema’.¹⁰ Although British film culture is often criticised for its parochialism, it has been suggested that ‘Britain during the 1920s was keen to engage with European and wider international trends in culture and intellectual thought, as well as more specific cinematic innovations and developments from abroad.’¹¹ In many ways, the fountainhead of this emergent minority film was the Film Society, founded in London in 1925. Though sharing many of the ideals of the continental ciné-club movement, it has been argued that the Film Society differed in some respects from its counterparts in France and Germany. The Society, it has been suggested, ‘compared to its continental relatives, was relatively highbrow and bourgeois; it modelled itself on a theatre society and boasted famous writers – the explicit model was first and foremost literature and theatre’.¹² Other constituents include journals such as Close Up (first published in 1927), and a cultural commentariat including figures such as Ivor Montagu, C. A. Lejeune, and Iris Barry writing on cinema in broadsheet newspapers such as The Times and the Observer, and in journals such as the Spectator and the New Statesman. In 1930, the publication of Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now, the ‘first English-language survey of world cinema’,¹³ is a suitable culmination and summary of the intellectual climate in which 1920s British films were made and circulated, and defined in relation to the international trends of the period.

The culture was not confined to the obscure fringes of the film world but drew in directors and producers working in the mainstream commercial film industry, especially through the agency of the Film Society despite its ‘highbrow’ orientation and a degree of scepticism in the industry. Montagu, the central figure in the Society, worked for a small post-production film company, and was the cultural and artistic driving force of the endeavour. He was joined by a number of significant figures from the commercial film industry such as veteran director and film pioneer, George Pearson; the producer Michael Balcon; Sidney Bernstein, head of the Granada cinema chain; journalist Walter Mycroft, who subsequently became a key producer at British International Pictures; film critic, Iris Barry; together with young aspirant film-makers such as Anthony Asquith and Angus Macphail. In addition, the Society drew upon support from the world of high culture including prominent figures such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw from the literary world; Roger Fry and Augustus John from the fine arts; alongside John Maynard Keynes, Julian Huxley, and J. B. S. Haldane from the intellectual and scientific community.¹⁴

The major animating principle of the Society was a keen interest in films coming from France, Germany and the Soviet Union which were radically different especially in terms of film style and technique from contemporary British films, and, perhaps a more important feature, from the Hollywood films which dominated British screens in the 1920s. As one writer has noted, ‘in the fifty performances of the (London) Film Society held between its foundation in October 1925 and the end of 1931, fifty-nine complete films over two thousand feet in length were screened. Five of these were Hollywood productions, three were Japanese, and fifty-one were

European.’¹⁵ Ivor Montagu referred to its focus on the ‘unusual film’ though he also wrote that a ‘good epithet for our quarry is hard to seek. “Artistic” is pretentious, “cultural” bunkum.’¹⁶ Yet, ‘artistic’ is probably the correct term to refer generally to the kind of film favoured by the Society, drawing upon the emergent world of experimental, avant-garde, and modernist cinema developing across Europe in the 1920s. Broad though it was, such a cinema offered a range of alternatives to the commercial films of the time, and could be understood as occupying ‘the space in which an indigenous cinema can develop and make its critical and economic mark’.¹⁷ For the European (including Britain) and Russian cinemas attempting to establish or re-establish themselves following World War One, it was a matter of contesting the power of the American cinema both in terms of film style and genre, and in terms of audience appeal. The ‘critical’ mark is registered through thematic and stylistic differentiation from the ‘classical’ narrative form with its analytical editing, its unobtrusive camera techniques, and its subordination of film technique to narrative clarity. The ‘economic’ mark had to do with offering films which aligned themselves with ‘high culture’ and modernist development in the arts, to secure a niche international audience drawn from the cultural intelligentsia for whom the popular commercial cinema of Hollywood was at best a pleasant diversion, at worst a detrimental influence on the development of film art. As Ian Aitken has suggested, this was especially true of the major titles of German art cinema, which ‘were mainly produced as part of a commercial strategy, which consisted of finding a niche market within the international middle-class audience’, and he went on to suggest that ‘films such as Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari were not so much authentic works of art which carried on the aesthetic and oppositional mission of expressionism, but more the outcome of product differentiation within the more general commodification of the commercial cinema’.¹⁸

It may be that the balance between the artistic and economic impulses varied from one European country to another, but the general picture of the full-blooded commercial cinema model established by Hollywood counterposed to a European artistically orientated cinema is still an influential framework for meditations on national cinematic identity. A more nuanced version of the models of cinematic activity which contextualised European film-making in the 1920s, however, is provided by Higson and Maltby:

Viewed in terms of reception as well as production, European film culture is perhaps best understood as a series of distinctive but overlapping strands. One strand is the Americanised metropolitan popular culture, confidently modernist, knowin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction – British art cinema: creativity, experimentation and innovation
• 1 ‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith
• 2 Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium
• 3 Out of the war, on with the arts: cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain
• 4 Attitudes towards experiment in British cinema: the amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza
• 5 Art cinema, British production and the 1960s
• 6 Happy accident: the symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter
• 7 The parameters of British art cinema: a case study of John Krish
• 8 The reputation of Nicolas Roeg
• 9 ‘As the first Black face on the scene, I had to push the doors open’: – Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)
• 10 Art cinema and the British poetic realist tradition
• 11 The third avant garde: Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America
• 12 The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s
• 13 Derek Jarman, trance films and medieval art cinema
• 14 Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film in British art cinema
• 15 Don Boyd and the business of art cinema
• 16 Shakespearean film as art cinema: Stage Beauty as a cerebral retort to Hollywood
• 17 Boundary crossings and inter-subjective imaginings: Sarah Turner’s Perestroika
• Index