Ernest Betts' 1928 book Heraclitis, or The Future of Film; The Picturegoer magazine
For British film criticism, the 1920s were exciting pioneer days. Where
critics of drama, art and literature worked within an established tradition of
values and rules, cinema was still too new to have enough history and stable
conventions to help widespread judgments form. The London Mercury made the point
when launching its film coverage in 1925; it also mentioned the lack of a
"British Museum or National Gallery for classic films", where history's backlog
could be viewed. The magazine proposed to wield "the unwavering application of
that taste whereon at bottom all critical judgment must be founded".
But for the fast-rising cinema intelligentsia, mere taste was not enough.
They needed first principles. They needed a vocabulary, aesthetic and technical
- crucial weapons in their fight to distinguish any genuine use of the medium
from the avalanche of films that only reproduced plays, or left famous novels
squeezed, flattened and strangled by intertitles. By the end of the 1920s, the
films and translated writings of Vsevelod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein
provided such weapons in abundance. Before this there was little of merit in
English, and nothing of length, beyond Vachel Lindsay's groundbreaking book of
1915, The Art of the Moving Pictures, issued in Britain in 1922 in a revised
edition that became required reading for anyone seeking to define a 'pure'
cinema. Lindsay envisioned a cinema closely fused with the established visual
arts, and completely liberated from stage mechanics. Robert Herring quoted some of his
terms directly ('space-music', 'sculpture-in-motion'); other British
commentators, like Ivor Montagu, let Lindsay's ideas gently percolate.
Additional new coinages emerged in print. One was 'cinematic' - "a shocking
word," wrote Ernest Betts in 1928 (in his book Heraclitus, or The Future of
Film), "but we must get used to it". But the most significant arrival was
'montage', from the French verb monter, to assemble, hoisted into prominence by
Soviet film practice and theory. Ivor Montagu, translating Pudovkin's writings
in 1928 for the book Film Technique, made only limited use of the term, though
its core creative concept of building a sequence's meaning from the impact and
rhythm of one edited shot upon another remained central. By the early 1930s,
theoretical essays by Eisenstein translated in the magazines Close Up and
transition had placed the word on its throne, at least for cinema intellectuals.
Those who joined the critics' ranks in the 1920s were not always champions of
film as art. Some were simple beneficiaries of Fleet Street's regular games of
musical chairs, where a passion for cinema was no particular requirement for the
job. Several newcomers were associated with the theatre - the entertainment
sphere that felt most threatened by cinema's widening popularity. In the April
1927 Picturegoer, the artist and playwright Dion Clayton Calthrop dismissed
cinema with a swipe as "the unimaginative man's public house". But dislike and
fear of the celluloid interloper didn't stop others entering the same pub
(Calthrop himself, earlier in the 1920s, had sold material for film adaptation).
At the Sunday Times, Sydney Carroll, formerly the paper's theatre critic,
reviewed cinema from 1925 until 1939; decades later, his successor Dilys Powell
described him with unusual vitriol as someone who "didn't know a film from a
sponge". More valuably, the theatre critic James Agate wrote occasional cinema
notices from 1921, and became the Tatler magazine's film critic in 1928.
Loquacious but readable, Agate took a breezy 'common man' approach - in the
1960s Raymond Durgnat memorably labelled his taste "Piccadilly Neanderthal".
Agate bristled at the new film jargon: "I should hate to know the meaning of
'montage'," he once claimed. Yet he still wanted his films 'cinematic'; in 1929
he specifically criticised E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly (1929) for containing
nothing that couldn't be acted on stage.
The trade papers continue to lavish praise wherever possible on distributors'
product. Predictably, they viewed the Film Society's activities with suspicion;
in October 1925, just before the Society opened, Ivor Montagu tried to reassure
Kinematograph Weekly readers that the Society's activities didn't reflect any
assumption of industry "wickedness, or stupidity... for not giving the public
the kind of film we like". Though never a champion of cinema art, the
Kinematograph Weekly nonetheless allowed itself over time to become more
critical of mainstream films and the industry. Pat L. Mannock, its British
studio correspondent, became a notably acerbic voice in the paper, puffing where
he could, but never failing where necessary to criticise failures of imagination
and skill, especially in the area of scripts.
The best American films, in this respect, gave critics and audiences a much
smoother ride, something biliously recognised in 1927 by the Daily Express
critic (and BBC radio critic) G.A. Atkinson. To cinema audiences, he wrote,
British films were seen as almost foreign films: "They go to see American stars.
They talk America, think America, and dream America." Unlike most newspaper
voices, especially those of the proprietors, Atkinson saw no reason to champion
the incoming legislation of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, designed to boost
and protect British film production: British films were not yet distinctive,
British, or good enough to deserve such support.
The fan magazines were certainly happy feeding off America's output: The
Picturegoer, the decade's leading fan magazine, could not have survived without
its regular Hollywood parade of stars and fashions. Even here, though, there was
some new acknowledgment that cinema involved more than star-gazing, and that
film technique and continental productions might also be of interest. An August
1921 article approvingly singled out the close-up as a favourite device of
"directors with advanced ideas"; in April 1924 it was praising Lang's Destiny
(Der müde Tod, 1921), and interviewing Abel Gance. When Mannock became the paper's editor (1927-1930), the review coverage became sharper, and more
cosmopolitan. Commenting on Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (US, 1928),
Mannock proclaimed its imported German star Emil Jannings as the screen's finest
actor, and declared seeing the film an absolute duty "to anyone who regards the
kinema as something more than a dim haven for courting couples". By 1928, partly
thanks to critics' ministrations, there were many more such people than there
had been a decade earlier.
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