Return to the lost continent

Abstract

The historiography of post-war British cinema has been dominated by the notion of the ‘Lost Continent’: a large body of work which was excluded by the realist critical establishment, in favour of ‘quality’ British films and, later, continental art cinema. ‘Return to the Lost Continent’ argues that the image of the critical establishment at the centre of this perspective is based on a flawed account of British film culture derived from a narrow range of evidence. Using newly accessible print sources, it aims to challenge the consensus view of British film culture before and after the Second World War, in particular by revealing the extent of the distribution of European films in and outside London, customarily and wrongly represented as an affair of the social elite.

Keywords::

• British cinema
• British documentary movement
• British film criticism
• British film culture
• British Film Institute
• Close Up
• Film Society
• Screen
• Michael Powell
• Emeric Pressburger
• Robert Siodmak

Notes

^1. I have addressed Jamie Sexton's work elsewhere. See Miller 2010.

^2. See, among many others, Marcus's (2007, 262) The Tenth Muse.

^3. There are ambiguous mentions to the contrary, but to give an example of his procedures, Porter (2010, 20) writes that the ‘next cinema to show continental films’ after the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion (1928–30) was the Academy, which began to do so in 1931. He goes on to say that the Academy's programmer Elsie Cohen had in fact shown continental films at the Windmill, which took place in 1930, then over the page mentions that the Rialto also screened continental films, including René Clair's, though he does not make clear that it too preceded the Academy in doing so, nor that it was a highly prestigious venue. Six pages later he lets slip that in fact the Alhambra – a major venue in Leicester Square – had also shown Clair's films, now acknowledged as ‘extremely popular’, before the Academy began showing French films. None of these facts are related, muddling the point. It is then on p. 26 definitively stated that ‘From late 1931, however, all Clair's subsequent French films opened at the Academy, and they were widely shown by film societies throughout the country.’ The ‘however’ is meant to suggest a shrinkage in Clair's audience to the specialized cinemas and film societies. However, Clair's post-1931 films, such as A Nous La Liberté (1931), which in fact opened at the Rialto in early 1932, were in fact shown in commercial cinemas. A Nous La Liberté was shown in Manchester, Edinburgh, and Bristol during that year.

^4. This claim, which Petley is not alone in making, begs the question why, if the critics really wield this ‘very real power’ to virtually end careers, so many of the genres they object to continue to thrive.