Elinor Glyn, Film History and Popular Culture: An Apologia

Abstract

As a woman film pioneer, Elinor Glyn is perhaps best remembered for her distinctive role within popular cinema culture, a role extending far beyond her official film credits. She exerted creative influence on the screen adaptations of many of her stories, and was highly successful in building and publicizing a distinctive branding for her own image as well as for her other creations. As a film and media personality, Glyn was, in today’s terms, clearly a celebrity, and was famous for more than simply being the author of the notorious Three Weeks. Nearly a century after her heyday, Glyn continues to be an intriguing figure. Her career and persona reveal a great deal about the ‘mentality’ of her times, especially of the troubled decade that followed the end of the Great War. It was during these years that Hollywood cinema rose to global prominence, while in the United States and elsewhere many aspects of popular culture became feminized, forged in the paradoxes of a consciousness shaped, on the one hand, by futurism, modernism and cosmopolitanism and, on the other, by vestiges of Victorian chivalric romance and older attitudes towards sexuality and relations between men and women. In this contradictory cultural formation, Glyn played her part to the hilt, and here perhaps lies the secret of her continuing fascination for feminist historians of film and popular culture.

Keywords:

• film censorship
• ‘It’
• Knowing Men
• The Price of Things
• Three Weeks

Notes

1 The Home Office was, and remains, the government department ultimately responsible for regulating cinemas in Britain.

2 ‘Popular sublime’ is Martin Hipsky’s coinage (Hipsky 2011).

3 Laura Horak subsequently located a print of Three Weeks in Gosfilmofond in Moscow (Horak 2010: 77).

4 A key publication emerging from this movement is Bean and Negra (2002).

5 See https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/, accessed 20 March 2018.

6 This film is not extant.

7 The history of this tortuous set of institutional arrangements is discussed in Kuhn (2001).

8 The film in question was a parody called Pimple’s Three Weeks (Without the Option).

9 The local authorities concerned were London County Council and Middlesex County Council.