Cecil Hepworth: and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899–1911 by Simon Brown (review)

The history of early British cinema is often depicted as one of struggle and sometimes of failure. Rachel Low, a pillar among British film historians, refers to it as a “humiliating period of stagnation” (1–2). In his part-biography, part-microhistory, Cecil Hepworth: and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899–1911, Simon Brown reassesses the state of the British film industry in the Edwardian period. In the past, scholars like Low have blamed the industry itself for its difficulties without considering wider contexts. They tend to look at the industry as a whole and group all of the studios together without taking into account their many differences and particular experiences. This method has created easy targets for criticism, including the quota quickies, for overproduction and for a lack of quality compared to European and Hollywood films. Brown pushes past the limits of these old views to offer a new perspective on this narrative. Offering almost a direct response to Low, Brown argues “that it is too simplistic to accept that the problem was a collective inertia among the pioneers” (7). He explores the business and economic forces at work in this period to illustrate that these pioneer filmmakers should not bear the entire burden of the standard criticisms. He even goes as far to suggest that these pioneers had enjoyed a period of relative success prior to the institutionalization of modern business practices. Brown’s book injects some welcome nuance and detail into the discussion of this complex industry.

Each chapter engages a different part of the film industry: there are chapters on film production at the Hepworth Manufacturing Company (HMC), sales and distribution, marketing, and finally exhibition. Brown beautifully intertwines Hepworth’s story, which quickly expands beyond biography into a nuanced view of British film history offering equal parts film production and business. Hepworth and Company began in 1899 and later became the HMC in 1904 after he bought out his partner H. V. Lawley. From the beginning Brown provides a wealth of material drawn from memoirs, interviews, and correspondence found in the British Film Institute. These allow him to question past depictions of Hepworth as an amateur “gentleman-filmmaker” (13) and reveal a well-oiled and even progressive enterprise. Hepworth’s early career challenges the argument about low-quality British filmmaking, as the HMC was a highly adaptive and technologically astute operation noted for its industrialized division of labor. The bump in the road for most British producers came when the industry transformed into a more complex business at the point when exhibitors rented films from producers through rental-distributors around 1905. These middlemen took control of the industry to the detriment of companies like Hepworth’s. Somewhat like Charles Musser’s periodization of early American films, Brown’s history hinges around the years 1905 and 1908. In the years leading up to 1905 the producers were in control, which in turn allowed HMC to expand its facility. In 1907 after a further expansion following a fire, Hepworth increased production as many producers did to become reliable sources of films year-round (54). But, as Brown argues, increased production cannot be taken simply as overproduction. As he makes clear, the British industry was not inherently misguided but rendered ineffectual by market forces (17). Brown couches the struggles of the British industry in terms of business; and unlike their American counterparts, these pioneers had difficulty mixing business and art.

In chapter two Brown lays out his most important contribution, one that calls into question the assessments of previous historians like Low who criticized the industry for overproduction and low quality. In the economics of early distribution practices, he maintains, “we find the root causes of the problems for British production, which were principally in the realm of distribution and the changes taking place in the way in which films were sold” (56–57). Put simply, it was the rise...