Film History (2008) - Play as Experiment in 1920s British Cinema
Details
- article: Play as Experiment in 1920s British Cinema
- author(s): Christine Gledhill
- journal: Film History (2008)
- issue: volume 20, issue 1, pages 14-34
- DOI: 10.2979/FIL.2008.20.1.14
- journal ISSN: 0892-2160
- publisher: Indiana University Press
- keywords: Adrian Brunel, Alfred Hitchcock, Angus MacPhail, Art, Betty Balfour, British Film Institute, C.M. Woolf, Charles Barr, Charles Laughton, Clive Brook, Dallas Bower, Foreign Office, London, Frank Stanmore, Gainsborough Pictures, H.G. Wells, Henry Arthur Jones, Hyde Park, London, Islington Studios, London, Ivor Montagu, Ivor Novello, J.M. Barrie, John Grierson, Linda Williams, London Film Society, Michael Balcon, Ministry of Information, Motion pictures, New York City, New York, Noël Coward, Pam Cook, Peter Wollen, Play, Rachael Low, Savoy Hotel, London, Semiotics, Sidney Bernstein, Visual artists, Young and Innocent (1937)
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Abstract
This essay explores a space in British filmmaking in the interwar years that is neither formally avant-garde, nor alternative in any politically radical sense, nor, very often, self-consciously experimental. It argues instead that cinema in Britain offered a space of transition within both its historical moment and cultural context, a space characterised by 'play'. Precisely because the 'playful' strategies of much 1920s British filmmaking emerged from culturally ingrained practices, their engagement with cinematic form indirectly registered processes of cultural change, suggesting the encounter with the 'new' which cinema offered to certain actors, writers and would-be cineastes of the time.
