LAUSR

At this writing, the Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press comprises more than 700 volumes, a few of which – Film, Film Music, Film Noir, The History of Film, Silent Film, Documentary Film, Hollywood – are devoted to cinema. The most recent addition to their number is British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction by Charles Barr, an author and scholar with unsurpassed expertise in this area. The enterprise he undertakes is trickier than one might think, since any historian of this subject must keep a steady eye on the differences between British cinema and English cinema, which are similar but distinct categories, and must also confront the disrespect for British film that has been an ill-founded prejudice among sundry pundits who should know better. In an early chapter, Barr quotes three commentators from three countries on this matter. British critic V.F. Perkins in 1962: “The British cinema is as dead as before. Perhaps it was never alive.” French filmmaker and cinephile François Truffaut in 1966: “Isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’?” American reviewer Pauline Kael in 1968: “English films have always been a sad joke.” While those examples hail from decades ago, they represent attitudes that lingered until the growing availability of British pictures enabled moviegoers to form fuller, more sophisticated opinions. Barr traces those distribution changes with care, noting a succession of venues that have made knowledge about British film history (and all film history) widely accessible. The first to arrive was repertory cinema, involving film societies, libraries, archives, and specialized exhibition spaces. Next came armchair cinema, in the form of television showings that could be noteworthy events in the pre-VHS days when televised films had to be seen on the schedules set by broadcasters, bringing “an awareness, even if not articulated, that masses of people were watching the same film at the same time”; a bit later, films became collectable and re-watchable when VCRs and their progeny entered the arena. And today there’s also desktop cinema, facilitated by computers, streaming platforms, and disk players that produce “a form of cinema now controlled, crucially, by the consumer, not the exhibitor.” The evolution of these formats has allowed progressively broad access to British pictures and to a more complete awareness of their collective qualities as a national cinema as well as their merits and demerits as individual works. “The story of change in the ways we access films,” Barr writes, “is itself a central part of the history of cinema.” Britain became a leader in recognizing the socio-cultural importance of cinema as early as the World War I period, when the newly established Imperial War Museum began preserving footage of the war; the founding of London’s Film Society in 1925 reaffirmed the country’s leadership