Reading the geographies of post-war British film culture through the reception of French film

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which British specialist film culture anticipated and received the resumed supply of French films at the end of the Second World War. It finds that in serious film journalism and within the rapidly expanding film society movement, new French cinema was the focus of at least as much British attention as Italian neo-realism – the European cinema more famously associated with the era. The paper posits that a number of factors, including anti-Americanism, combined to position the delayed wartime and immediate post-war French releases as a site of impossible expectations and subsequent interpretative difficulty for British cinephiles. In particular, through a case study of the local mediation of French cinema in the English city of Nottingham, this paper considers the role of published criticism for setting the local viewing frame within the provincial film society movement. By tracing the tensions surrounding the circulation of film prints, information, and opinion relating to these prestigious cultural imports, it becomes possible to gain greater insight into both the range of nationally specific meanings attributed to the imported films and the geographic and cultural inequalities at work within the film culture of the country of reception.

Keywords::

• film society movement
• transnational reception
• film criticism
• French film
• post-war film culture

Notes

^1. Collated from BFI Annual Report accounts of British Federation of Film Societies' figures.

^2. Mazdon's larger project considers the longer history of British reception of French film, but this initial article shares many features with the exhibition-centred studies listed.

^3. An incomplete collection of Birmingham Film Society material is held by the BFI, in Special Collections. In 1952, the BFI started issuing a monthly critical round-up pamphlet called Critics' Choice to members, echoing the provincial film society practice.

^4.The Times reported a prestigious crowd for the film's British premiere held at Studio One on 16 October 1936, and it ran there until 7 May 1937. It returned to London in the autumn of 1937, playing short runs at a succession of cinemas: the Berkeley (October), the Everyman (January 1938), and the Forum (January/February 1938), before being screened by the BBC in October 1938. Its progress can be tracked through the advertising and broadcasting listings of The Times.

^5. These are collected in NCA, M12, 361.

^6. This was one of the titles most commonly requested in 1948 for the 1949/50 season (10 members), NCA, M12, 361.

^7. This was founded in 1947 by one of the older film societies, the Edinburgh Film Guild, and building upon the wartime writings of organisers, Forsyth Hardy and Norman Wilson, it helped to consolidate Edinburgh as a competing node of film culture authority and leadership within the British film society movement.

^8. New London Film Society (NLFS) programme notes for the final show of the 1947/48 season (9 May 1948) include advance notice of the screening of Lumière d'été to be held on 30 November 1948 (author's own collection). As Drazin notes, both Dilys Powell and Richard Winnington were not only members of the society, they also promoted the NLFS in their columns. His assertion that the NLFS screening of Lumière d'été was one of a series of British premieres organised by Vaughan does not seem to be supported by the records of the respective Stanford Hall and Scala exhibition dates, but he may be right in claiming that the director Jean Gremillion flew in from Paris to attend the London screening (Drazin 1999, 74).

^9. Vincent Porter (2010, 25) notes a precedent for this in 1938, when Jim Fairfax-Jones arranged a screening of La Kermesse héroïque at the Southampton Society, the day before his own cinema, the Everyman in Hampstead, was due to revive it.

^10. Although a German and French co-production, this was billed to members as a German film.

^11. The run lasted from April 1951 to October 1952, before moving to the Berkeley (The Times, April 23, 1951; October 10, 1953).