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Modernism/modernity 11.3 (2004) 488-515


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Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film Culture in London 1924-1926:

the Adelphi, the Spectator, the Film Society, and the British Vogue

Leslie Kathleen Hankins


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Iris Barry. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
[Begin Page 489]
Nowadays cinema and other arts are old marriage partners. Then they would barely acknowledge each other's existence with a nod. Iris was essential queen pin of the battle to make them better acquainted. 1

As scholars recover traces of London's film culture of the 1920s—particularly the connections between the literati and the cinéastes—one intriguing figure meets us at every turn: Iris Barry. But, she remains somewhat a phantom.2 Although scholars have unearthed film work from the late 1920s and early 1930s by H. D., Dorothy Richardson, and Bryher in Close Up,3 and have shown some interest in Virginia Woolf's 1926 essay, "The Cinema," 4 we are just beginning to realize the vital role of Iris Barry, born in Birmingham, who came to London to become one of the most prolific and influential figures in film forums of her day. Barry led the way in the 1920s as film culture swept London both in print and through that phenomenal cultural institution, the Film Society. Thanks to Iris Barry, cinema was in vogue; cinema was, in fact, in Vogue, the Adelphi, the Spectator, and the Daily Mail. In 1924, she penned her earliest film criticism: two film reviews for the Contributors' Club in the Adelphi for March and April. She went on to write over forty essays for the Spectator in 1924-1927, at least five essays for the British Vogue in 1924-1926, and over sixty columns for the Daily Mail from 1926-1930. Her many articles and her pioneering book, Let's [End Page 489] Go to the Pictures,5 published in the autumn of 1926, shaped a generation of cinema enthusiasts. The quantity of Barry's film contributions (around sixty articles and one book between 1924-1926 alone) and the range, from regular columns in newspapers to articles in a high fashion magazine and a little magazine, are staggering (fig. 2).6

By all contemporary accounts, Iris Barry was unforgettable. But, history works in strange ways, as feminist scholars have shown for decades. Resurrecting her from footnotes and archives, this article will foreground Barry's presence and her voice, to allow a new generation of film theorists to hear from this astonishing and prolific public intellectual. Barry was an original, a New Woman writ large: outspoken, bohemian, and intelligent. Self-educated in cinema after a convent school education abroad, she was enterprising, energetic, and inspiring. Years before her cinema book was published and before her leadership role with the Film Society, Barry was a familiar figure in London as a writer, poet, and satirical novelist in the bohemian circles of little magazines of the teens; Sidney Bernstein and Ivor Montagu recall: "When the old original film society was conceived . . . Iris was already a literary figure on the Spectator, her Bloomsbury parties attended by poets, musicians, critics, artists and gate-crashed by Society figures who strove desperately to attach to themselves the epithet 'intellectual' in mitigation of the label 'snob.'"7 One of the young generation of poets discovered by Ezra Pound,8 she sent him, as she put it, "a suitcase full" of poetry, some of which appeared in Poetry and Drama, Poetry, the Little Review, the Apple, the Egoist, and Others. She published reviews of plays and a short story, "Grandmother," in the Adelphi. And, she was fascinated by film—which she found intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining. At the time, London offered few intelligent essays about cinema—other than ones imported from France or in international journals, such as Broom.9 Ivor Montagu points out, "Apart from Iris Barry, who was given a chance to do some film...

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