The life of mise-en-scène: Visual style and British film criticism, 1946–78

The life of mise-en-scène

The life of mise-en-scène

Visual style and British film criticism, 1946–78

John Gibbs

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © John Gibbs 2013

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Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  Sequence

2  Transfusion and transformation: Sight and Sound in the 1950s

3  ‘Pistols for three, coffee for one’: the battle of form and content, circa 1960

4  Movie: aims and contexts

5  Movie: approaches and analysis

6  Melodrama and mise-en-scène

7  Postscript: Bordwell’s interventions

Conclusion

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

List of figures

1.1  Sequence, No. 9 (1949)

1.2  My Darling Clementine (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1946)

1.3  Meet Me in St. Louis (MGM / Loew’s Incorporated, 1944)

2.1  Momma Don’t Allow (BFI, 1956)

2.2  A Diary for Timothy (Crown Film Unit, 1945)

2.3  Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros Pictures, 1955)

2.4  The Searchers (Warner Bros Pictures / C.V. Whitney Picture, 1956)

3.1  Oxford Opinion, No. 41 (October 1960)

3.2  Comanche Station (Columbia Pictures Corporation / Ranown Pictures Corp., 1960)

3.3  Definition, No. 1 (February 1960)

3.4  Rio Bravo (Warner Bros Pictures / Armada Productions, 1959)

4.1  Le beau Serge (Ajym Films / Coopérative Générale du Cinéma Français, 1958)

4.2  River of No Return (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1954)

5.1  The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (MGM / Euterpe / Venice Productions, 1963)

5.2  Rope (Warner Bros Pictures / Transatlantic Pictures, 1948)

6.1  Written on the Wind (Universal International Pictures, 1956)

6.2  There’s Always Tomorrow (Universal International Pictures, 1956)

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank V.F. Perkins, Charles Barr, Alan Lovell and the late Ian Cameron for consenting to be interviewed, and for the quality of the perceptions that they shared with me. Revisiting their words I’m struck by how intelligent and generous their comments were, in some cases providing an elegant form of supervision as much as an answer to a specific historical question. My particular appreciation is due to Douglas Pye, who has supported my research in this area over a number of years: I’m greatly indebted to his insight, generosity and friendship. A number of other people have been important to this history, at one time or another, including Jonathan Bignell, Tom Brown, Stella Bruzzi, John Bull, Alison Butler, Rebecca Deren, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Ed Gallafent, Christine Geraghty, Jim Hillier, Eric Kindel, Andrew Klevan, Stephen Lacey, Jacob Leigh, Iris Luppa, James MacDowell, Derek Paget, Lisa Purse, Mike Stevenson, Lib Taylor and Deborah Thomas. Alastair Phillips and the late Paul Stiff encouraged me in different ways to return to this material after a number of years, and I’m grateful, as always, to my excellent colleagues in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading for providing such a supportive and stimulating working environment. Reading University’s Research Endowment Trust Fund supported the project, the members of the Sewing Circle, past and present, deserve a collective mention, and I’m grateful to the team at Manchester University Press for the opportunity.

Introduction

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in detailed film criticism. Since the turn of the millennium, the field has witnessed what has been described as a ‘renaissance of close analysis’.¹ Traditions of the interpretation of film style, pushed to the margins of film study for thirty years, have returned to take up a central place in a newly heterogeneous field, not displacing but enhancing other approaches. Alongside the ‘widespread, international revival’ of ‘the British school that was first associated with Movie in the ‘60s’, in Adrian Martin’s words, a diverse group of writers have been working to extend the subjects – and the methods – of detailed criticism, and to establish links between different national, critical and theoretical contexts.²

This book offers a history of the analysis of visual style in British journals in the postwar period, both the ‘British school’ referred to by Martin and other critical movements, more hazily remembered. Notwithstanding the revival of interest in style-based criticism and the growing interest in history and critical historiography which has begun to recontextualise other parts of the field – including works which rub shoulders with this – the specific qualities of the mise-en-scène tradition, and the other movements considered here, are obscured to the newcomer to the field. The original material this study explores is accessible only in copyright libraries and secondary sources frequently characterised by misrepresentation. The following pages uncover material which challenges the received notions of critical history, and present an under-explored period to a new generation of scholars.

Alongside a broad ambition of enriching the context for the modern practice of style-based criticism, and the benefit of providing a more accurate history for its own sake, this book has other interests which connect directly with the contemporary field. Mise-en-scène, and other ways of conceiving visual style, have been central to so many important debates – authorship, the critical discovery of Hollywood, melodrama – that the writing examined in the book shaped the field in enduring ways. Criticism which recognises the significance of film style has repeatedly been central to debates about popular forms and cultural value, and the interaction between attitudes to the popular and critical method is a recurrent concern across a number of chapters. Alongside the international dimensions of this debate, the book provides a crosssection of British culture and its attitudes to film. It also considers a range of important contexts, from material conditions of film viewing (and therefore criticism) to the cultural and political shifts of 1956.

Parameters

The temporal boundaries of this history are the first edition of Sequence, published by the Oxford University Film Society in 1946, and the melodrama criticism of the 1970s, articles which coincide with the institutionalisation of film studies within UK universities. (The Conclusion and Chapter 7, a postscript, are exceptions to this rule in that they comment upon more recent developments.) Writing in 1976, Robin Wood suggested that ‘the development of British film criticism in the past decades has been largely a matter of small groups overlapping, displacing, superseding one another, each centred on a magazine: the Sequence group, the Movie group, the Monogram group, the Screen group’.³ These journals, with the addition of Sight and Sound, form the backbone of the inquiry, although the history avoids an entirely linear trajectory, not least through its exploration of the other small journals, particularly of the early 1960s – Oxford Opinion, Motion, Definition, Universities and Left Review, Granta – which took part in the critically important debate around film style of the early 1960s.⁴ The end point of the period, in the early-to-middle years of the 1970s, marks the opening movement of the rejection of mise-en-scène criticism; it also marks the beginning of the enormous growth of academic writing about film, which has accelerated again since the turn of the millennium: it would be impossible to sustain a comparably detailed investigation of developments since this time, and since this time the relevant material is much more available, both physically and as part of the discourse of the subject.

This book is about journals and journal articles. Most of the important ideas under discussion were first expressed in articles, and only subsequently developed in book form. At the same time, focusing on articles necessitates some significant omissions. For example, while Robin Wood’s contributions to Movie and other journals are a major point of discussion, Hitchcock’s Films (1965), a work which had a major role in the significant articulation and widespread dissemination of mise-en-scène criticism, is only referred to in passing.⁵ Alongside developments in film publishing, the teaching of film in schools, colleges and adult education, which predated the advent of undergraduate film courses in the UK and involved a number of the writers discussed below, was also extremely important. Activities such as the work of Paddy Whannel and others at the Education Department of the BFI fall outside the bounds of this study, and receive acknowledgement only in passing.

Fortunately, some of these important factors have been the subject of other recent investigations into the multiple pasts of the field. Terry Bolas’s book Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (2009) explores the history of screen education in the UK, including discussion of the work of SEFT and the BFI Education Department.⁶ Inventing Film Studies (2008), edited by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, includes a transcription of conversations between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, which aims ‘[f]irst of all, to put on record the crucial contribution made by Paddy Whannel to the establishment of film studies as a recognized discipline’.⁷ The same volume includes a chapter by Mark Betts on ‘Little Books’, in which both Hitchcock’s Films and the Movie Paperbacks are key points of reference.⁸ Then there is The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin (imminently forthcoming, at the time of writing, from this publisher). The hope is that this book finds a complementary space alongside these works, as the field pieces together a better sense of its own history.

Existing histories of style-based criticism privilege the contributions of French writers, particularly André Bazin and the journal Cahiers du Cinéma; French criticism has been better supported by collections and commentary than British criticism of the same period. The accomplishments of these critics, and the international impact of their ideas, are not in dispute, but an emphasis on the happenings in France has left the story of the British criticism, and its own impact, less well recorded. There is a tendency to overlook not only the specific contributions of Movie but also the ideas expressed and developed in Sequence. Although not untouched by French criticism itself, Sequence espoused a number of concepts which subsequently became influential only after their expression in Cahiers. Moreover, a dialogue between British and French criticism is a continual feature of the history – not just in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A worthwhile project would be to produce a parallel history, examining the chronology and interaction of ideas on either side of the channel; in the meantime, this book adds texture to some of the complex ways in which French writing interacts with the British, while focusing on the distinctive, significant and less well known qualities of the work in British journals.

The relationship between the discussion of film style and arguments around authorship is, naturally enough, a major strand of the study. Conceptions of the director as author come in two varieties: those grounded in mise-en-scène and those which are based on the identification of recurring features across a body of films. Authorship arguments of the former kind are clearly of greater relevance to the matter in hand, and this history does not attempt to explore criticism that is interested in style solely as a ‘hallmark’ – such as Peter Wollen’s/Lee Russell’s work. In articles from the end of the period, the links between mise-en-scène and the director become more tenuous. In these articles, mise-en-scène is configured in relation to issues other than directorial choice. It is part of the term’s interest that it has been conceived in these various ways.

Questions of terminology are among the underlying interests of the study, both in the relationships between the terms and concepts used by different journals to discuss visual style, and in the varying connotations which are attached to ‘mise-en-scène’ where it is employed. This leads to a technical point about how terminology is recorded. The Oxford English Dictionary spells mise-en-scène with hyphens and without italicisation, and this is the form which this book follows when it is speaking in its own voice.⁹ However ‘mise-en-scène’ is spelt in various ways by different critics. In French it has no hyphens, and a number of writers and translators quoted employ this version, sometimes italicising the word to indicate its etymol-ogy; David Bordwell dispenses with the accent. In every quotation the spelling of the original has been followed.

Structure

The first chapter looks at the influential journal Sequence, which emerged from the Oxford University Film Society in 1946 and was written and edited by a number of significant figures including Lindsay Anderson, Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz. Through a detailed analysis of the writing in Sequence a number of important points emerge, including a focus on the concept of ‘film poetry’ which makes a fascinating comparison with later concepts for appreciating visual style, and which is central to the Sequence’s valuation of popular cinema. Studying Sequence also invites a reconsideration of the chronology of some related debates, including authorship. The chapter demonstrates one of the interesting features of the history in general, which is the way in which earlier positions and arguments are buried by the movements that follow: there is a lot more in common between Sequence and Movie than anyone – with the exception of Charles Barr – was able (or prepared) to recognise in the early 1960s, but those things that might have become continuities were obscured by the next strata of the history.¹⁰

In the early 1950s a number of the writers associated with Sequence began to write for Sight and Sound; in particular, Gavin Lambert, who became its editor in 1950. In the early part of the decade, the Sequence impulse was alive and well, notwithstanding some collisions with the establishment at the BFI (Lambert was almost fired for a scathing review of The Blue Lamp soon after arrival). Chapter 2 examines both the exciting qualities of the journal in the first part of the decade and their gradual erosion to the point where Sight and Sound could embody staid orthodoxy by the end of the 1950s. The year 1956 is a crucial point in this part of the history, and the chapter looks at both the response of writers such as Anderson to the political, social and artistic changes of that moment (including his call to arms, ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’) and the wider debates about ‘committed criticism’ which played out on the pages of the journal. It is also the year when Gavin Lambert left Britain to work with Nicholas Ray in Hollywood, which proves a key turning point: the Autumn 1956 issue is a particular point of focus in the later stages of the chapter. Other points of discussion include the response to emerging French criticism, the debate around the arrival of widescreen formats and responses to some key filmmakers, including Max Ophuls and Ray.

By 1960 a range of new critical voices were emerging, united in their dislike for Sight and Sound, some on grounds of the cultural snobbery that characterised the journal’s attitude to the ‘commercial cinema’ and the paucity of critical methods which seemed unable to engage with an exciting period of films, others led by a feeling that ‘committed criticism’ was neither committed nor expert enough. Chapter 3 looks at the battle over the relative significance of form and content, and how this should inform criticism, which broke out in the early 1960s. The combatants include Oxford Opinion, the student journal on which the critics who were to found Movie first articulated their arguments, and Sight and Sound, but also a whole range of other small journals (Motion, Definition, Film, Universities and Left Review, Granta) and parts of the wider media (The Spectator). Together, they were involved in a critical debate of an animation and passion which is difficult to imagine today. The chapter moves between a selection of important but little known articles, drawing out a series of debates around the challenge provoked by Oxford Opinion, and encounters important writing from V.F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Paddy Whannel and Charles Barr. The chapter also draws on a witty article by Raymond Durgnat from 1963, ‘Standing Up for Jesus!’, as a form of contemporary metacommentary. The films of Nicholas Ray continue to be a point of reference as his work of the late 1950s became a major subject of the debate.

Movie is the journal which offers the most sustained exploration of visual style, and the most significant point in the history of these ideas: Movie’s development of a detailed criticism, sensitive to the non-verbal elements of film style, and its application of this approach to American cinema (not exclusively, but most influentially) not only led to the appreciation of forms of popular cinema that were until this point considered beyond the pale but enabled a wider understanding of film and the ways in which it is expressive, in turn a major factor in enabling the establishment of Film Studies as a discipline.

The discussion of early Movie is spread across two chapters. Chapter 4 develops elements of the contextual discussion begun in Chapter 3, but broadens it to include other factors which shaped Movie’s critical practice. It is also concerned with describing Movie, examining the ambitions of the journal and the ways in which style is discussed and conceptualised. The emphasis of this chapter is on aims and contexts, exploring some of the material and critical challenges of writing in detail about films during this period and establishing some shaping perspectives in terms of the ambitions of the writers and the debates into which they emerged. It looks at influence of the French connection, not just Bazin and Cahiers du Cinéma but also the MacMahonists, who visited London during this period and met up with the Movie writers. The chapter also investigates the frequently asserted connection between literary criticism and the approaches developed in Movie. Along the way it examines some of the ways in which Movie has been previously characterised, and challenges some of the reductions which have been used to characterise the journal, as subsequent movements have sought to define their own position in opposition to what preceded them. Chapter 5 identifies the range of different approaches to interpreting mise-en-scène advanced in Movie, drawing out sections on action, camera movement and placing, point of view, staging, connections between different parts of the film (including visual motifs) and a range of further debates. It analyses this material, drawing out some of the underlying assumptions and principles which shape the arguments which appeared in Movie.

Chapter 6 addresses the role of mise-en-scène in the discussion of melodrama in journal articles of the 1970s. It makes particular reference to Thomas Elsaesser’s ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’ which was published in Monogram in 1972, and two articles by Paul Willemen which appeared in Screen in 1971 and the winter of 1972/3. Two further articles are considered: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, published in Screen in 1977, and Laura Mulvey’s ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’ which appeared in Movie at the end of that year.

‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ is an extraordinary article, and Elsaesser’s appreciation of the plastic and expressive qualities of domestic melodrama and the broader melodramatic tradition is exemplary. Having identified and discussed a range of different models of melodramatic mise-en-scène expressed in that article, which lead in a range of productive directions, the chapter then looks at debates emerging in the other articles, including the relationship between mise-en-scène and point of view, ‘distanciation’ and other modernist concepts that Sirk and others may have brought to Hollywood melodrama, and the emerging feminist interest in the genre. All are explored through their particular concern with the visual expressivity of melodrama.

The chapter also reflects on the ways in which visual style is reconceptualised in relation to debates around genre – and the rediscovery of melodrama is a particularly interesting case study here. This leads to a reflection on whether the mise-en-scène tradition of criticism is essentially connected to the study of melodrama – looking back through the history so far, are many of the films which have repaid detailed attention melodramas? Finally, the chapter explores what happened to the mise-en-scène tradition with the advent of the theoretical movements of the early 1970s when the ‘Screen group’ supersedes the ‘Monogram group’.

Chapter 7 jumps outside the immediate timeframe of the rest of the book, and considers an article by David Bordwell from the 1980s – ‘Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism’. The logic of this departure is twofold – firstly because the article provides strong evidence for the necessity of a revisionist history of the kind embodied in the book itself; secondly because Bordwell’s version of the history of mise-en-scène criticism is advanced in the context of one of the most influential ways of writing about film style that have emerged in the intervening period – cognitive film theory.

The Conclusion points to some of the more recent developments of the mise-en-scène tradition and reflects further on what the history might reveal for the present.

Notes

1  Deborah Allison, ‘Close-Up #1 edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye’, Senses of Cinema, No. 40, July–August 2006. http://sensesofcin-ema.com/2006/book-reviews/close-up-gibbs-pye/ (Accessed 9 February 2009).

2  Adrian Martin, ‘Turn the Page: From Mise en scène to Dispositif’, Screening the Past, No. 31 (August 2011). www.screeningthepast.com/2011/07/turn-the-page-from-mise-en-scene-to-dispositif/ (Accessed 31 August 2011).

3  Robin Wood, Personal Views. London: Gordon Fraser, 1976, p. 33. These same journals – with the inclusion of Sight and Sound and some prewar examples (such as Close Up), and the exclusion of Monogram – form what Charles Barr has described as the ‘leading edge’ journals of British film criticism (see Chapter 1). Charles Barr, All Our Yesterdays. London: BFI, 1986, p. 5.

4  Films and Filming does not appear in the study, despite being in publication between 1954 and 1980 (and subsequent to that, in various forms). It is not a magazine that ever appears in the critical discussion and although it sometimes responded very positively to films and debates, and published the work of some interesting and relevant writers – Raymond Durgnat was a frequent contributor during the early 1960s, for example, and Andrew Sarris contributed a two-part article on Howard Hawks’s films in 1962 – it was not an initiator of debate, and is not a focus for this history. Andrew Sarris, ‘The World of Howard Hawks’, Films and Filming, Vol. 8, No. 10 (July 1962), pp. 20–3, 48–9; Sarris, ‘Masculine Codes and Useless Creatures’, Films and Filming, Vol. 8, No. 11, (August 1962), pp. 44–8.

5  Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films. London: Zwemmer, 1965.

6  Terry Bolas, Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies. Bristol: Intellect, 2009.

7  Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘From Cinephilia to Film Studies’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies. London: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 217–32 (p. 215).

8  Mark Betts, ‘Little Books’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies. London: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 319–49.

9  J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, prepared by, The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 (Vol. IX, p. 862).

10  A version of Chapter 1 appeared in Issue 4 of the Journal of Popular British Cinema, (2001), entitled British Film Culture and Criticism and edited by James Chapman and Christine Geraghty. John Gibbs, ‘Sequence and the Archaeology of British Film Criticism’, The Journal of Popular British Cinema, No. 4, (2001), pp. 14–29.

1

Sequence

The misapprehensions of the received history of film criticism, and there are many, in part result from the tendency of critical and theoretical movements to denigrate their immediate predecessors. Defining one’s own stance may involve – perhaps inevitably involves – the repudiation of established ideas. There is a consequent danger, however, that polemic may become inscribed as history, and therefore a corresponding need to re-examine primary sources.

As later chapters investigate, some of the more radical tendencies of the journal Movie were completely overlooked by Screen when the latter established itself at the expense of the former as ‘the leading edge or growth point of film criticism in Britain’.¹ Articles and editorials from the time of Sam Rohdie’s accession stress the continuities between Movie and traditional aesthetics – Leavis, English Romanticism, realism – in order to draw attention to the unprecedented departure that Screen represented.²

Another example of an aesthetic buried by a subsequent movement is illustrated by Sequence. The difference in this case is that the interment was effected by critics who had formerly contributed to Sequence themselves. The process by which the Sequence impulse dwindled in the years after its writers became associated with Sight and Sound is a complex one, shaped by cultural forces within and beyond film criticism – and forms the subject of Chapter 2. For the time being, it is enough to say that the Sight and Sound of 1960 under the editorship of Penelope Houston was so far removed from Sequence that the rebellion effected by Movie (and Oxford Opinion) was in many ways analogous to that of Sequence fifteen years previously.

To return to Sequence is to uncover a complex discussion of the director as the artist responsible for a film, a readiness to look for artists in Hollywood cinema, a determination not to be dissuaded from this task in the face of melodrama and a concern with the relationship between style and meaning. These are all attributes that tend not to be associated with British criticism till the advent of Movie. Nor do the points of comparison end here. Both journals were interested in contemporary European cinema as well as Hollywood; both admired Renoir.³ Neither journal had much time for the ‘Film Appreciation’ school of criticism, which presented an orthodoxy common to both periods or, as Charles Barr has noted, the respective renaissances ascribed to the British cinema of each period.⁴ (That Sequence writers turned filmmakers were involved in the second of these alleged upturns is not without irony.)

Movie’s unique contribution to the study of film centres on its concern with mise-en-scène – not simply as a theoretical concept to support claims for Hollywood directors (which, though extremely important, it shared with Cahiers du Cinéma) but also as the basis of a detailed criticism. Due consideration for mise-en-scène brought film criticism to a maturity which it had hitherto failed to achieve. Yet, preceding both Cahiers and Movie, Sequence attained a sophisticated appreciation of mise-en-scène. In Sequence, however, the discussion went by another name: ‘poetry’. This chapter explores the attributes of ‘poetry’ and its interaction with important related concepts, and recognises Sequence’s place within a tradition of British criticism characterised by its concern with visual style.

Context

For two issues Sequence was the journal of the Oxford University Film Society but was subsequently published independently from London (the move relating to the graduation of some of the participants). Fourteen issues of Sequence were published over a period of five years, the first in December 1946. With the exception of a missing issue for Spring 1950, it appeared as a quarterly from number 2 (Winter 1947) to number 13 (New Year 1951). The fourteenth issue – self-consciously the last – appeared a year later. Substantially reliant on donations for its publication, it records the reluctant decision to cease publication in the face of rising costs.⁵ The editorial claims that the journal had built a circulation of four thousand, from an initial six hundred.

Figure 1.1 The cover of Sequence, No. 9 (1949)

Sequence was edited, or more frequently co-edited, by six different people. Peter Ericsson, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert were the major figures. John Boud, Penelope Houston and Karel Reisz were editorially involved in at least one issue. Lambert, a friend of Anderson’s from school rather than a contemporary at Oxford, continued to write important articles after his appointment to the BFI in 1950 as Director of Publications, a job that encompassed the editorship of Sight and Sound. Occasional contributors include Gérard Philipe (No. 7), Lotte Eisner (No. 8), Douglas Slocombe (‘The Work of Gregg Toland’, No. 8), Jean Douchet (an interview with Bresson, No. 13), John Huston (‘Regarding Flaherty’, No. 14) and Satyajit Ray (‘Renoir in Calcutta’, No. 10). Elizabeth Sussex’s book on Anderson claims that the editors wrote material under pseudonyms in order to suggest a greater variety of voices.⁶

A typical issue consists of: an editorial, ‘Free Comment’; a series of accounts of films in production, ‘On the Floors’; three or four articles; ‘People We Like’, a profile of an actor, often one felt to be unjustly overshadowed; ‘As They Go’, a collection of short reviews of current films; four more substantial film reviews; perhaps two book reviews. The articles cover a range of subjects. The majority are appraisals of the work of a director: there are two on Carné, two on Ford, and one apiece on Preston Sturges, Donskoi, Clair, Sucksdorff, Hitchcock, Walt Disney, Cocteau, Wyler and Milestone. There are also several interviews with directors. There are various articles on movements or national cinemas: Anderson’s ‘British Cinema: The Descending Spiral’, Lambert’s ‘French Cinema: A New Pessimism’, Houston’s ‘Hollywood Warning’. And there are a number of more theoretical articles: ‘Dance in the Cinema’, ‘Creative Elements’, ‘The Director’s Cinema?’.

As the list of featured directors suggests, articles on continental cinema, particularly French, and the American cinema substantially outnumber those which address British films. A number of British films are reviewed, and discussion of the state of the domestic industry appears frequently in editorials and elsewhere, but Sequence is not often to be found championing British work. The editorial of the sixth issue conveys something of the attitude when it defends the journal against the accusation of being pro-Hollywood ‘at the expense of French or British films’, in the following terms:

There is of course no question as to the general superiority of the French Cinema; on the other hand, no need to indulge in odious comparisons to show that the American Cinema is at the moment in a more lively condition than our own. One would have thought that the flow of passionless prestige pictures from Denham and Shepperton,