The History of the British Film 1896–1906 (Volume I)

185 Pages·1948·16.631 MB·English

by  Rachael Low, Roger Manvell

THE HISTORY OF BRITISH
FILM
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http:// taylora ndfra ncis.com
THE HISTORY OF
THE BRITISH FILM
1896-1906
Rachael Low
with Roger Manvel/
Edited and with a new introduction by Jeffrey
Richards
Routledge
i \.
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1997
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Reprinted 1999
First issued in paperback 2011
History of the British Film
7 Volumes: ISBN 0-415-15451-0
This is a reprint of the 1948 edition
© 1948 Rachael Low; Introduction © 1997 Jeffrey Richards
Typeset in Garamond by Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Low, Rachael. [History of the British film). History of the British
Film I edited and with a new introduction by Jeffrey Richards.
Originally published: History of the British Film. London: Allen &
Unwin, 1949-1985.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Motion pictures-Great Britain-History. I. Richards, Jeffrey, 1945-
. II. Title.
PN1993.5.G7L6 1997 96-51734
791.43 '0941-dc21 CIP
ISBNlO: 0-415-15451-0 (hbk)
ISBNlO: 0-415-67983-4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-15451-2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-67983-1 (pbk)
Publisher's Note
These reprints are taken from original copies of each book. In many
cases the condition of these originals is not perfect, the paper, often
handmade, having suffered over time, and the copy from such factors
as inconsistent printing pressures resulting in faint text, show-
through from one side of a leaf to the other, the filling-in of some
characters, and the break-up of type. The publisher has gone to great
lengths to ensure the quality of these reprints, but wishes to point out
that certain characteristics of the original copies will, of necessity, be
apparent in reprints thereof.
INTRODUCTION
RACHAEL LOW AND THE BRITISH
CINEMA
Rachael Low's seven-volume history of the British cinema is one of
the epoch-making enterprises in British culture. When she began
her work, British film history barely existed. By the time she
finished, it was flourishing, and it owes her an enormous debt for
her pioneering and inspiring role.
Rachael Low was born in London in 1923, the younger of the
two daughters of the cartoonist David Low, creator of Colonel
Blimp. She was brought up in Golders Green and went to school in
Hampstead. She studied economics and sociology at the London
School of Economics, graduating in 1944 with a B. Sc (Econ). She
was immediately conscripted into the Ministry of Economic
Warfare, which she left at the end of 1945. She then went to work
for the British Film Institute Information Department. The
research officer of the Institute was Roger Manvell, an energetic
and influential figure in the film culture, and it was his idea that
there should be some form of publication to mark the fiftieth
anniversary in 1946 of the introduction of cinema to Britain.
There existed at that time no systematic or authoritative history
of British cinema, and it was decided to remedy this defect. The
British Film Institute therefore set up a committee to plan and
direct the programme for research into the history of the industry.
The aim was to establish the facts. The committee was chaired by
the pioneering silent film producer Cecil Hepworth and included
George Pearson, another notable veteran of the industry; Roger
Manvell; Ernest Lindgren, curator of the National Film Library;
and Rachael Low. Rachael Low was entrusted with the research and
Manvel! with overseeing its transformation into a book.1
The first volume of the British film history was devoted to the
first ten years of cinema, 1896-1906, dating its start from the first
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INTRODUCTION
commercial showing in Britain. Rachael Low tackled the problem
of research in a thoroughly scholarly way. She identified three
sources of information. There were the surviving films of the period
themselves, housed in the National Film Library, which she
systematically viewed. There were interviews with surviving
pioneers. The two veterans on the committee shared their
memories with her, though Hepworth, embittered by the way he
had been left behind by the industry, wanted to talk mainly about
his own career; Pearson was willing to talk more widely and
broadly about the industry. Both were in due course to publish
valuable volumes of reminiscence.2 Among cinema veterans from
whom Low received much cooperation, help and advice were Sir
Michael Balcon, Victor Saville, Thorold Dickinson, Percy Nash,
A.V. Bramble, Baynham Honri, Kenelm Foss, Chrissie White and
Henry Edwards. Among scholars she found particularly helpful the
assistance of Ernest Lindgren, Roger Manvell and Paul Rotha.
Rachael Low contacted the Cinema Veterans Society, people who
had worked in the industry before 1903, mainly renters and
exhibitors, and interviewed them. Other pioneers up and down the
country were tracked down and interviewed.
Low's third source was written and published material. An
appeal, issued through the press and through industry channels,
brought in valuable material, both published and unpublished, in
the form of catalogues, press books, contemporary reviews, letters,
memoirs, stills and publicity material. These three sources were to
continue to be the main ones for the project, joined later by
complete runs of the trade press, notably The Bioscope and Kinema
tography Weekly, an invaluable week by week chronicle of the
evolution of the industry.
With patient, systematic and meticulous scholarship, Rachael
Low assembled the materials necessary to create a narrative history
of the industry. Once this was done, Manvell helped her to shape
and organize the material. The first volume of the History of the
British Film, 1896-1906, credited jointly to Low and Manvell,
appeared in 1948, published like all the subsequent volumes by
Allen & Unwin.
By this time, Manvell had founded the British Film Academy,
and he invited Rachael Low to join him as its librarian, which she
did, taking up her post in January 1948. After the appearance of
Volume 1, Manvell dropped out, leaving Rachael Low to research
and write the remaining volumes alone, and the B.F.I. Research
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INTRODUCTION
Committee ceased to meet. Volume 2 of the History, 1906- 1914,
was handed over to the publishers in November 1947 and
published in 1949. Volume 3, covering the period 1914-18, was
begun in November 1947 and completed by Rachael Low while she
was at the British Academy. It was published in 1950. Material
from the first three volumes was submitted as a doctoral thesis,
'Developments in the British Film Industry before 1918', and she
was awarded a Ph.D by the London School of Economics in 1951.
The story had now been taken up to the end of the First World
War, and Rachael Low embarked on Volume 4 in March 1949. But
her life was about to take a dramatic turn which would lead to a
fourteen-year hiatus in her work. In August 1948 she had married
the engineer Michael Wheare, and in December 1949 she left the
British Academy. In 1950 she accompanied her husband to Iran,
where he had taken a job in the oil industry. In 1952 she went with
him to India, where he joined the tea industry. They remained in
India for twelve years. During that time, she worked as an
economic research assistant for the Bengal Chamber of Commerce
(1957-1962) and raised two children, Madeleine, born in February
1951, and Nicholas, born in November 1955.
In April 1964 the Wheare family finally left India, and Rachel
Low resumed her work on Volume 4 of the History of the British
Film. This volume, covering the period 1918-29, was eventually
published in 1971. Since she no longer worked either for the
British Film Institute or the British Film Academy, she needed
funding to continue her work. This was secured in 1969 when she
joined Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, as Calouste Gulben
kian Fellow receiving a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation to
research the development of the British film industry in the 1930s.
The research fellowship ended in 1972, but she retained her
connection with the college, first as a senior member from 1972 to
1983 and since then as a commoner. Her work on the 1930s was
originally planned for one volume, but the amount of material was
such that it eventually ran to three separate volumes, two on non
fiction films, History of the British Film 1929-39: Dommentary and
Educational Films of the 1930s and History of the British Film
1929-39: Films of Comment and Persuasion, both published in 1979,
and one on fictional films, Film Making in 1930s Britain, published
in 1985. She had always intended to stop when she had covered the
1930s. For the period since then had already been covered by a
number of historians, and the kind of work she had been doing for
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INTRODUCTION
the earlier decades was not required. The British Film Institute
decided that the project should be brought up to the present by
others hands and set up a committee in 1985, which Rachael Low
joined, to plan the future. It was decided to commission four
volumes from different authors, to cover the forties, fifties, sixties
and seventies. So far only one volume, Sixties British Cinema by
Robert Murphy, has appeared, published by the British Film
Institute in 1992. Rachael Low now lives in retirement near
Cambridge but maintains a lively interest in film history and has
recently contributed entries to the Dictionary of National Biography
as well as articles for the thirteen-volume Orbis part-work on the
history of the cinema called The Movie.
Rachael Low's volumes are the product of a particular moment
in British film culture - a moment of confidence and belief in
British cinema. The year 1946 saw the peak of cinema attendance
in Britain: 1635 million attendances. It was never subsequently to
be equalled. It was seen to epitomise the achievement during the
war years of what was agreed to have been a 'golden age of British
cinema', an era in which British films for the first time consistently
matched Hollywood in popularity but also achieved an artistic
maturity and a sense of distinctive British identity which many
critics had felt to be absent from British cinema before the war.
Dilys Powell, the influential critic of The Sunday Times, captured
this mood when she wrote in her survey of wartime cinema:
The British public, always a cinema-going public,
has ... become doubly so during the war years. And with the
increase in numbers, a certain sharpening of public taste is to
be observed. Themes which would have been thought too
serious or too controversial for the ordinary spectator are now
accepted as a matter of course ... there is a desire for solidity
and truth, even in the sphere of entertainment .... The semi
documentary film has gained a hold over British imagina
tion .... The serious British film has thus found an audience
as well as a subject.3
The new seriousness was part of a dominant critical ethic in late
1940s Britain which has been explored and explained by John
Ellis.4 This ethic was rooted in the traditions of documentary
realism, literary quality and a middle-class improvement ethic. Bur
optimism about the arrival of film as an art and of British cinema
in particular as a serious and respect-worthy national cinema was
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INTRODUCTION
palpable and received many manifestations. The British Film
Academy was founded in 1946 'to advance film art and technique
by discussion and research and to encourage creative film making
energies'. The Daily Mail National Film Award was instituted in
1945 and became a glittering annual event, with film-goers
balloted and voting as first winner Anthony Asquith's The Way to
the Stafs. The annual Royal Film Performance was instituted in
1946, beginning with the imaginative Powell and Pressburger
fantasy A Matter of Life and Death. The annual Bfitish Film Yeafbook
was launched in 1946. There was an upsurge in film book
publishing. Collections of the criticism of leading film critics C.A.
Lejeune, Richard Winnington and James Agate were published.5
There were serious attempts to survey the history of British cinema
in such books as Michael 25 Yeafs in Films and Twenty Yean
of Bt·itish Film 1925-1945.6 The Pengttin Film Review was launched
in August 1946 and ran until May 1949 under the general
editorship of Roger Manvel!. Geoff Brown has written that it 'was
dominated by the earnest enthusiasms of the evangelists and
educationalists - the kind of people who had worked in the war
with Civil Defence groups, the Army Bureau of Current Affairs and
similar organizations, helping to stimulate discussion about every
aspect of "modern society" which would emerge at the end of the
fighting' and who believed that cinema 'had the power not only to
provide art and entertainment: it could also buttress civilization
and democracy after the knocks these concepts had received at the
hands of Hitler and his allies'. 7
At the same time the British Film Institute, founded in 1933
and hitherto concentrating on the role of film in education and on
the development of 'film appreciation', was reoriented as a result of
the Radcliffe Report (1948). Although the B.F.I. was to maintain
an educational aspect, the use of film as a visual aid in schools was
deemed to lie with the National Committee for Visual Aids in
Education, and the Institute was encouraged to devote its energies
to running the National Film Library (later renamed the National
Film Archive), to provide a first-rate information service and to
promote the understanding of film as an art. So a new director,
Denis Forman, was appointed and these objectives vigorously
pursued. The Telekinema, set up for the Festival of Britain, was
acquired as a national film theatre. In 1949 the B.F.I.'s house
journal, Sight and Sottnd, acquired a new editor, Gavin Lambert, and
a new emphasis, shifting from the educational to the artistic
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