Brian McFarlane,
An Autobiography of British Cinema
Methuen, 1997
ISBN 0 413 70520 X
656 pp
A$39.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Random House)

Uploaded 12 November 1999

This book is an invaluable resource for British film historians. Brian McFarlane has marshalled a phenomenal amount of material and has produced a mammoth tome which will function both as a key work of reference and as a stimulus to other researchers. It is based on, but far surpasses, his earlier Sixty Voices, which contained sixty interviews with directors and stars. An Autobiography of British Cinema contains nearly 200 original interviews, and (very valuably) McFarlane has also included credit lists and brief analyses of figures like Alexander Korda who were of great importance but whose deaths precluded them from interview. The credit lists attached to each interview or article are very full and carefully researched, and the stills have been selected with an eye to aesthetic pleasure and surprise; they are rarely predictable.

Of course, some purists find the whole enterprise of oral history a suspect one, and they are deeply suspicious of the status of the interview as historical evidence. To be sure, some caution is necessary in interpreting oral evidence, and it can never operate as the determinant in the last instance when we want to assess the significance of a film, a director or an historical moment. Too often a star will give an overweening interpretation of their own input (the interview with Stewart Grainger here is a good example) and interviewees are not always reliable in their witness. But often the “authorial thumb in the pan”, as D.H. Lawrence puts it, can give quite a new slant or a fresh insight onto the intentions behind a text or a performance. It is the contrast between the artistic intentions and the actual achievements within the film which is so fascinating for critics, since the history of film (like so many other cultural histories) is made up of as many honourable failures as successes.

On the whole, however, McFarlane has avoided most if not all of the pitfalls. He has treated his interviewees with great tact and he has researched their work in an indefatigible manner. He has unearthed actors and technicians whom one had thought vanished for years (how long people live, especially the women!) and his persistence has been gratifyingly rewarded. Overall, this is a book which all historians of British cinema will need to use at some time. It is a great scholarly achievement.

Sue Harper