Robert Murphy (ed)
The British Cinema Book
London: BFI, 1997.
ISBN 0-85170-641-X.
279pp.
A$39.95 (paper)
Uploaded 16 April 1999

British director Stephen Frears, in his affirmation of British cinema in the television documentary  Typically British , cited Francois Truffaut’s observation that there was a certain incompatibility between the words “British” and “Cinema”. Frears response was “bollocks to Truffaut” and this is the prevailing sentiment throughout this excellent collection of readings which, collectively, charters the overall complexity and intricacies of the British cinema. Robert Murphy notes in the introduction that, apart from a brief upsurge of interest between 1942 and 1947, the British cinema has been disparaged and despised for most of its existence. Alan Lovell points out that when he presented a paper titled “The British cinema: the unknown cinema” to a British Film Institute seminar in 1969 the scholarly neglect of British cinema was so great that it was effectively an unknown cinema.

There are two parts to this book. Part one consists of fifteen historically specific issues, in chronological order, ranging from Charles Barr’s paper on the British silent cinema to Christine Geraghty’s study of the changing position of women in 1960s British cinema. Part two is less chronologically developed and includes specific aspects of the British cinema such as Lindsay Anderson and the development of British art cinema, British realism, British comedy, Black representation, censorship, exhibition and the British Horror Genre. Alan Lovell’s views of the British cinema and its role in British cultural life are contrasted with those of John Hill, and Robert Murphy concludes the book with the selection of ten films which, he argues, are representative of various periods in British cinema history.

The book’s determination to eradicate the prevailing diffident perception of the British cinema is established in the first entry from Charles Barr, who argues that early British film-makers, such as Cecil Hepworth, deserve wider recognition for their contribution to the development of the formal aspects of film as it moved beyond the presentation of isolated effects and attractions to a coherent film style which David Bordwell, and others, subsequently designated the classical narrative model. For example Cecil Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover in 1905 presents in a seven minute story a lucid succession of visual images. Hepworth’s narrative pattern of symmetry and repetition, Barr maintains, was a “clear precursor of the short films made by D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Company in America between 1908 and 1913, based on the same structural principle of repetition and variation, of permutations worked upon a limited number of camera set-ups. Griffith is likely to have seen Rescued by Rover, and it may be no coincidence that his own first film, The Adventures of Dollie, tells of the loss and rescue of a small child.” (8)

As Griffith would soon make parallel editing a feature of his films, a dimension that Hepworth never developed, the British cinema lost its cinematic verve after 1905 although Hepworth continued to make (visually dull) films for a further twenty years. Barr ruefully concludes that whilst Britain could supply the talent (such as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel) during the silent period, it could not provide an appropriate cinematic framework, either institutionally or formally. It was not until the influx of new talent in the mid 1920s, such as Michael Balcon, Victor Saville, Herbert Wilcox, Anthony Asquith and Alfred Hitchcock, and the influence of international film-makers, that the British cinema was able to find a strong, meaningful national identity for its own production.

A crucial component in this revival of the British cinema was the first Cinematograph Films Act which was passed in 1927 and four contributors to the book, Sarah Street, Tom Ryall, Lawrence Napper and Linda Wood, include positive references to the effects of this legislation in their assessments of the British cinema in the 1930s. The Act was the first case of a government intervening to protect a commercial film industry forcing renters and exhibitors to acquire and show a minimum “quota” of local films out of the total number they handled. In 1925, for example, only 5 per cent of films shown were British and, after the Act, the number steadily grew so that by 1932 it was 24 per cent. This, Tom Ryall argues, was responsible for a studio system in Britain not dissimilar to that of Hollywood with its interrelated cluster of major, minor and “B” film companies. Certainly, Ryall maintains, the British industry was the most substantial source of film production in Europe by the late 1930s with 1600 films produced in the ten years after 1927 (28).

Whilst the Act is traditionally criticised for producing “quota quickies”, the low budget thrillers and comedies churned out to meet the statutory needs of exhibitors and renters, this volume uniformly challenges this view from different viewpoints. Lawrence Napper, for example, argues that the “quota quickies”, with their lack of production values and their emphasis on dialogue rather than editing to tell their stories, together with their music hall roots, appealed to rural and provincial British audiences because they dramatised the “fears of a threat to indigenous British cultural values. This ‘threat’ is characterised as being to do with the modernity, classlessness and instability implied by the impetus towards social mobility which was an increasingly visible aspect of Britain in the 1930s.” (43)

Other contributors, including Marcia Landy on “Melodrama and femininity in World War Two British cinema”, Kevin Gough-Yates on the significant contribution of European exiles to the British Cinema , Tim Pulleine on the Ealing Studio and Vincent Porter on the conflict between J. Arthur Rank’s Methodist values and the changing economic nature of the British film industry in the 1950s, also challenge orthodox perceptions of the British film industry. As Alan Lovell concludes, that whilst arguments “can be made that comparable cinemas like the French or Italian have, over their whole history, been superior to the British cinema … the differences are only relative ones. British cinema isn’t a special case. There isn’t some fundamental British cinematic deficiency which needs to be accounted for. Bollocks to Truffaut indeed!” (242)

Geoff Mayer