Historical Dictionary of British Cinema by Alan Burton and Steve Chibnall (review)

A reference book demands a delicate series of trade-offs. On the one hand, such a work needs to be as comprehensive as possible. On the other, it has to inform through concise morsels rather than long, linear arguments. A reference book should survey the widest possible bounds of its topic (even if its topic only covers a sub-field). Yet, controlled by the restrictions of even a generous word allotment, it has to make choices about representative examples, and cannot feature the same degree of obscurity as a series of articles or a book focused on a single, narrower subject.

Thankfully, Alan Burton and Steve Chibnall’s Historical Dictionary of British Cinema mostly makes smart trade-offs, and it emerges as an essential single-volume reference work for scholars of cinema from the United Kingdom. As with many books on “British” cinema, the material heavily skews toward films from England. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are given their own entries, including only a few films each, but otherwise they pop up only on occasion. Arguably, this is consistent with the historical reality of film production in the British Isles. Most production offices, studios, and sources of finance are located in the Greater London area. In general, the geographical specificity of British cinema is notoriously difficult to track. Burton and Chibnall are good on the relationship between Britain and Hollywood (in the 1930s, Hungarian-born director and impresario, Alexander Korda, made lavish costume biopics that broke into the revered American market, while the 1960s saw unprecedented American investment in British films) (17, 247). Thus, the book necessarily examines British cinema in relation to other national traditions.

The book is mainly composed of an A-Z selection of entries on production companies, cinematographers, art directors, actors, individual films, genres, studios, and producers. Directors are especially well represented, from the famous (Cecil Hepworth, Alfred Hitchcock) to the slightly more obscure (Pete Walker, Peter Whitehead). Where the Historical Dictionary of British Cinema really impresses is in two sections that bookend the main body of text. The Introduction is a masterpiece of broad historical contextualization. It outlines the major themes, movements, and historiographical questions that have dominated the study of British cinema, and, as such, will prove especially useful in film courses with only a limited amount of time to consider this national tradition. In fact, the opening sentence of the Introduction charts ideas traced in the rest of the book (a “map” of British cinema history scattered throughout appropriate entries): “The history of the British cinema has been one of boom and bust, with periods of fertile creativity and business confidence invariably followed by ones of artistic lethargy and financial precariousness” (1). The other great resource in the book is its bibliography, which is introduced in a comprehensive prose review and then broken down by subject. To the non-specialist, this is perhaps the most useful aspect of this Historical Dictionary, as it gives a starting place for researching virtually any topic related to British cinema. Other sections cater to trivia buffs, and include a terse Chronology of key dates and Appendices that list awards.

Burton and Chibnall are both key figures in the study of British cinema. As active participants in the field, they (thankfully) rise above a fact-reportage mode in most of their entries and dedicate ample space to critical commentary. The more complex and nebulous entries (“Social realism” or “Melodrama”) are often the best, and Burton and Chibnall display an uncanny awareness of recent scholarship. The book is not a freeze-frame of how we understand British cinema now so much as a meditation on how understandings have changed over time. The piece on director Michael Winner, for example, acknowledges how unfashionability and the fortunes of time have often downplayed perceived contributions to the national tradition (430-431).

The book is not without flaws. Given the length of the text, it is almost inevitable that a few errors slip through. Conflicting release dates are...