Reframing British Cinema, 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion (review)

Christine Gledhill's groundbreaking book on 1920s British cinema offers a detailed and extremely thorough exploration of this little-known period in British film history. Looking specifically at films made between 1918 and 1928, Gledhill discerns an industry very much in transition, still infiltrated with Victorian and Edwardian tropes at the same time that it is already beginning its struggle against American hegemony. Although film scholars generally dismiss British films from this period because they appear to be "enmeshed in a culture that was seemingly retrogressive and middlebrow," especially when compared to American film and the European avant-garde, Gledhill attempts to illustrate that such dismissal is shortsighted.

Gledhill highlights the very reasons that most film scholars dismiss the period's films—their theatricality, their pictorialism, and their reliance on dependable "pretold" stories—as the tools by which to understand them. In doing so Gledhill is able to locate the films culturally by offering a "cultural poetics," which she uses as a schema to elucidate the peculiarities of 1920s British cinema as well as offering ways in which to see these films as the ancestors of contemporary cinema.

This book is the product of three very thorough methodological approaches to research. First, Gledhill offers a historical reading of theatrical, visual, and narrative entertainment from the 1880s to the 1920s. Second, Gledhill explores more than ten years of trade journals, fan magazines, and memorabilia surrounding the films in order to delineate what it meant to create British films specifically for a British audience. Finally, after viewing some 150 films, Gledhill discusses and offers a close analysis of the practices and techniques of the films themselves. The sheer amount of research put into this book is ambitious and in the end pays off for the reader who may never get a chance to view the films.

The book is divided into two sections. In the first, Gledhill discusses in detail the evolution of theatricality, pictorialism, and storytelling in British culture and how it informed and influenced British filmmaking in the 1920s. In the second section Gledhill deftly weaves her three themes, her "cultural poetics" of cinema, and illustrates how they were put into practice by various filmmakers and film actors. For Gledhill, theatricality is not just a reliance on stage plays and actors who have crossed over from theater but more the way "it acculturates cinematic perception, framing ways of seeing and organizing narrative" (30). Theatricality, according to Gledhill, mediates a connection between legitimate and popular forms of entertainment and influences the development of British cinema. Gledhill traces how gender- and class-based differences play out in the mixing and borrowing of media, like masquerade and cabaret, with actors such as Jon Burrows and Ivor Novello, and belie a tension in British culture.

In the next chapter, Gledhill expounds on the picture as another nodal point between a mass-mediated popular culture and high art. A key to pictorialism, as Gledhill conceives it, is "realisation," which offers pleasure through the reproduction of the picture, the painting, or the tableau, an aspect that is further enhanced by living and moving bodies used in the reproduction. Pictures are a means by which British directors augment the storytelling process and inform aesthetic pleasures. For Gledhill, pictures not only advance narrative meaning, but they are also connected to movement through the camera. In addition to this, she traces the shift from the grand-scale gesture to subtle visual detail and the articulation of the "look" that will be central to later filmmaking.

According to Gledhill, the performer becomes the site where public and private meet; the performance is the location where restraint meets passion, and the end result is a British predilection for the art of "underplaying." Performance then becomes an indicator of class as well as gender. Gledhill traces how this penchant for "underplaying" and a British love for character actors slowed the development of a star...