In the years between the two World Wars, a number of films emerged in Britain as alternatives to mainstream commercial filmmaking. These were supported by the appearance of specialist exhibition outlets (of which the most important was the Film Society) and critical journals (notably Close Up).
These cultural practices reflected an intellectual approach to the cinema, in which the medium was promoted as a modern, vanguardist art form. A number of films that did not fit in with commercial cinematic practice were championed, specifically those films seen as representing innovative aesthetic uses of the medium. Most admired were European movements of the 1920s: German Expressionism, Soviet montage and the French avant-garde.
In the mid-1920s a number of people connected to this movement began to make films reflecting these interests. The first batch of these were not clear-cut 'avant-garde' films, but parodic experiments, lampooning elements of British filmmaking perceived as 'distasteful'. Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu were two major practitioners of this form of filmmaking.
From the end of the 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s a more serious form of experimental filmmaking began to emerge. This included a number of self-consciously 'aesthetic' documentaries, many of which began to use Soviet-style montage methods in conjunction with 'pictorial' cinematography. A few Soviet-influenced films were also made by some of the left-wing political filmmaking groups such as Kino.
Alongside these documentary experiments were a number of more 'painterly', abstract films, many of which were also produced within the context of the documentary film movement. These included, most notably, abstract films by Len Lye. Outside the documentary movement, figures like Norman McLaren, Oswell Blakeston and Francis Bruguière also made some 'photographic' abstract films.
Jamie Sexton
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