Circles, Columns and Screenings: Mapping the Institutional, Discursive, Physical and Gendered Spaces of Film Criticism in 1940s London

Abstract

This article revisits the period considered within ‘The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema 1942–1948’ ( Ellis 1996 ), mapping the professional cultures, working contexts and industry relationships that underpinned the aesthetic judgements and collective directions which John Ellis observed within certain film critics’ published writings. Drawing on the records of the Critics’ Circle, Dilys Powell's papers and Kinematograph Weekly, it explores the evolution of increasingly organised professional cultures of film criticism and film publicity, arguing that the material conditions imposed by war caused tensions between them to escalate. In the context of two major challenges to critical integrity and practice – the evidence given by British producer R. J. Minney to the 1949 Royal Commission on the Press and an ongoing libel case between a BBC critic and MGM – the spaces of hospitality and film promotion became highly contested sites. This article focuses on the ways in which these spaces were characterised, used and policed. It finds that the value and purpose of press screenings were hotly disputed, and observes the way that the advancement of women within one sector (film criticism) but not the other (film publicity) created particular difficulties, as key female critics avoided the more compromised masculine spaces of publicity, making them harder for publicists to reach and fuelling trade resentment. More broadly, the article asserts the need to consider film critics as geographically and culturally located audiences who experience films as ‘professional’ viewers within extended and embodied cultures of habitual professional practice and physical space.