Reframing British cinema, 1918-1928 : between restraint and passion / Christine Gledhill.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gledhill, Christine

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Great Britain--History.

Motion pictures.

Great Britain.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 214 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : BFI Pub., 2003.

Summary:

This is a major new study of British Cinema's formative years. Between 1918-1928 British film was poised between a Victorian past and a future marked out as American. Examining a cinema inextricably intertwined with notions of theatricality, pictorialism and storytelling, in which the high cultural, middlebrow and popular intersect, this book re-evaluates the little known but interesting and often startling films of the 1920s. Films such as the Blackpool melodrama Hindle Wakes, Guy Newell's Hardyesque meditation Fox Farm, Graham Cutts's exuberant adaptation The Rat (starring Ivor Novello as a Parisian apache!), Maurice Elvey's Comradeship, a haunting evocation of lives changed utterly after World War I and Alfred Hitchcock's early works are all considered afresh within British cultural traditions and are related to a specifically British mode of perception distinct from the norms of European art or popular American cinema.

By challenging limited conceptions of British cinema the book shows how the oppositions of underplayed performances and theatricalised spaces; of private passion and public restraint, of pictorial composition and social document, made for a cinema both distinctive and culturally recognisable. Through its recourse to adaptation and quotation, and the exchange across media and audiences of different forms and representations, this cinema is revealed to be one that also had much to say about class, about the changing role of women and about a society in transition which had its own aesthetic practices with which to present a varied set of stories. Based on years of archival research Christine Gledhill's revisionist study extends our knowledge of this little known period of British film-making. Through its re-evaluation of its relations to theatre, visual culture and literary tradition, this book will alter our sense of the origins and trajectory of British film in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Part 1 Co-ordinates 7

1 Theatricalising British Cinema 9

Programming and Exhibition Practices 10

Crossing the Boundary between Theatre and Cinema 11

Mixing Live and Filmed Performers 12

Theatricalising Film 14

Historicising Theatricality 16

Reforming Melodrama 16

Geography Versus Biography 19

The Theatricalisation of Cinematic Space 20

Cinematic Stages 21

Geographic Stages and Social Mapping 22

Narrative as Boundary-Crossing: The Rat and Underground 25

Performer and Audience 28

2 Going to the

British

Pictures 31

Pictures as Popular Culture 31

Picturing the World: From Painting to Pictures 32

Thinking in Pictures 33

Realisations 34

Old and New Masters: Populist Aesthetics 35

Gesture and Picture 37

Staging Pictures 37

Figures in a Landscape: Tansy 38

Gestural Aesthetics 40

The Intervention of the Camera 42

The Registers of Gesture 43

Pictorial Articulation: Frames, Vignettes and Boundaries 45

Ivy Duke: Pre-Raphaelite of the Cinema 47

Serial Discontinuity 48

The Illustrative Mode 48

Magic Lantern as Intertextual Relay 48

Pictorial Views and Travelogues 49

Serial Discontinuity and Parallel Pleasures 50

Pictorialism and Modernity 51

Problems of Continuity 51

Picture Collage 52

Montage of Emotions 54

Pictorialism and the Aesthetics of Affect 55

Aesthetics as Heritage 56

Pictures as Discourse 57

Picture as Cultural Document 58

The Discourse of Pictures 59

3 Performing British Cinema 62

Restraint and Passion 62

The Power of Restraint 62

A Distinctly English Style of Underplaying 64

Masterly Inactivity or Unnatural Restraint? The Problem of the Actress 65

Acting from the Heart 67

Self and Role 67

Matheson Lang in Othello and Carnival 68

Character Acting 71

Nationalising Naturalism: Hindle Wakes 72

Moore Marriott

'Our Best Character Actor' 74

Technologies of Performance 75

Acting or Being? 76

Stars and British Cinema 77

The Non-Actor and Stardom 78

Sincerity Versus Spontaneity 80

Stars as Characters 80

Contra the Non-Actor 81

Nationalising Stardom 82

Two British Stars 83

An Actor's Art Cinema? 84

Henry Edwards: Debonair Naturalist 85

Guy Newall: British Cinema's Finest Actor 85

The Art of Casting: Kenelm Foss 87

Coda: Coming Home to British Cinema 88

The Acculturation of Recognition 88

Part 2 Conjunctions 91

4 Directors' Picture Stories 93

Cecil Hepworth: Pictorial Poet of British Cinema 93

The Pastoral Context 94

Pastoral Moves: Tansy 95

Picture Stories: Pipes of Pan 97

Maurice Elvey and Pictorial Narration 100

Heart-Reading Pictures: Comradeship 102

Pictorialism Modernised 106

From Picture Stories to Flicker-Book Montage 108

Jack Graham Cutts and Cinematic Vision 111

'We touch each other with the sense of sight' 112

Cutts: Master Showman 112

Eye Power in The Wonderful Story 114

Forbidden Looks 116

Visions and Screens 117

Coda: Hitchcock, The Manxman and the Poetics of British Cinema 119

5 Class Acts: Genres, Modes and Performers 123

Cultural Modalities 124

Revivals and Reinventions 125

Acting Romantic 126

Dressing Up: The Costume Romance 127

Ethnic Transvestism 129

From Pantomime to Tango 131

Melodrama at the Threshold of Modernity 132

Bringing Hollywood Home: The Crime Melodrama 134

Generic Stratagems: Cross-Dressing, Disguise and Doubles 135

Villainy Doubled: Sweeney Todd 136

Domesticating Melodrama: Doubling for the Family Romance 137

The Aristocratic Villain and Female-Oriented Romance: If Youth But Knew 139

The Passionate Adventure: Doubling and Cross-Class Dressing 140

Taking Truns: Music Hall's Parodic Acts 144

Community Versus the Boundary: Squibs Wins the Calcutta Sweep 146

Music-Hall Performance: Role and Star 148

Shooting Stars and British Cinema Culture 149

6 The Stories British Cinema Tells 151

'The Story's the Thing' 151

Eminent British Authors 152

A Story Told in a Series of Pictures 154

Real Writers for Real Stories 155

The Teller not the Tale 156

Telling Tales and the Literate Image 157

The Traveller's Tale: Call of the Road 157

Wit and the Image: the Minerva Comedies 159

A Cinema of Intertitles 160

Storytelling as Construction 162

Projecting Life Stories: The Garden of Resurrection 163

The Picture's Story: Detection and the Image 166

'Tell Me a Story': A Child in Filmland 169

A Makeover World: The Man Without Desire 170

Filmland and Modernity: The Woman's Story 171

A Heroine Who Does 'Big Things': George Pearson's The Little People 172

British Cinema Goes to the Ball: Palais de Danse 174

In Conclusion: The Cultural Poetics of British Cinema 178.

Notes:

Filmography: pages [200]-202.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [203]-208) and index.

ISBN:

0851708919

0851708897

OCLC:

54685861