"Kings of the Middle Way": continental cinema on British screens

Mazdon, Lucy

Abstract

Synchronized sound of course created new challenges for non-English-language films in Britain as dialogue now rendered them inaccessible and arguably even more ‘highbrow’ to many filmgoers. There existed two main outlets for the showing of these films throughout the 1930s: the London-based Film Society established in 1925 and its regional off-shoots, and the specialized cinemas. French films were a very prominent feature of the Everyman’s programmes, both during the 1930s and after the cinema’s post-war re-opening. The idea for such a society had come from filmmaker and writer Ivor Montagu and actor Hugh Miller. The continental cinemas showed ‘prestigious’ European film to a ‘discerning’ audience. The lack of new films due to the war was countered by frequent and often popular revivals, revivals that would entrench both the familiarity of these films and their canonization, again playing an important role in positioning a certain type of continental cinema in a quality middle ground.

Citation

Mazdon, L. (2016). "Kings of the Middle Way": continental cinema on British screens. In S. Faulkner (Ed.), Middlebrow Cinema (181-195). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315630564

• Online Publication Date: Apr 18, 2016
• Publication Date: Apr 12, 2016
• Deposit Date: Dec 19, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 17, 2021
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 181-195
• Series Title: Remapping world cinema : regional tensions and global transformations
• Book Title: Middlebrow Cinema
• Chapter Number: 10
• ISBN: 9781138777125 9781138777132
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315630564
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3327828
• Publisher URL: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/42708/9781317247418.pdf?sequence=1