C.A. Lejeune and British film criticism: book and lecture news

You may or may not know this, but when I started Silent London I was working at the Guardian newspaper. So, it was at this time, when I was reading and writing about the silent era, and sitting in the Guardian office (rarely at the same time, I hasten to add) that I first became just a little obsessed with C.A. Lejeune.

Caroline Alice Lejeune, pioneering press film critic, media celebrity, Manchester icon and one half of the Sunday Ladies, with the Sunday Times’s Dilys Powell, is a pet subject of mine. I find her writing to be witty and wise and gentle, and her story, of falling in and out of love with the cinema, to be absorbing and not a little moving. It is also fascinating to me how she first got her job as the first real film critic on the Manchester Guardian, and moved to the Observer for another three decades. So I have been doing a little research. Well a lot in fact.

You can read my chapter, ‘The Making of C.A. Lejeune, Film Critic’, all about how she started out in the business, in a new book from Edinburgh University Press, called Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark, edited by Robert Shail and Sheldon Hall. I am going to paste the official blurb in full here:

For decades, cinema audiences have turned to the film reviews featured in national and local newspapers, listened to commentators via radio, television and, latterly, the internet, and read fan magazines to learn about the latest releases. These critics helped shape the responses of generations of film fans, creating success and failure, as well as controversy.

This wide-ranging collection brings together some of the leading academics on British film history to consider the role of these commentators. It covers the work of influential critics like Dilys Powell and Raymond Durgnat and key magazines such as Time Out, Monthly Film Bulletin and Radio Times. Contributors include leading scholars such as James Chapman, Pamela Hutchinson and Julian Petley, along with the screenwriter and filmmaker David McGillivray and others who have worked as film journalists themselves.

For film students or cinema enthusiasts anywhere, this volume provides an insightful analysis of the British film critic.

But that’s not all. For more from me on C.A. Lejeune, and her female colleagues in early British film criticism, including Iris Barry, Elsie Cohen, Dilys Powell and more, I will be giving a free, online lecture on 15 August, hosted by the wonderful people at the San Francisco Film Preserve. I am looking forward to sharing some of my research with you. If you can’t tune in that day, the lecture will be available online afterwards, but do please register. Here is the blurb for the lecture. I look forward to seeing some of you online.

In 1922, with a weekly column in the Manchester Guardian, C. A. Lejeune became one of Britain’s first lay film critics, and began to define what that could mean. Soon, she was the best of the bunch, and the funniest, too – but her opinions often became controversial. This talk will look at Lejeune’s passion for cinema and her remarkable career, which included three decades at The Observer, and becoming a fixture on BBC radio and TV. It will also introduce some of the many women who joined her in giving British film criticism a “womanly” voice from the 1920s to the 1950s. Chief among these is her fellow “Sunday Lady” Dilys Powell, her brilliant counterpart at the Sunday Times, who outlasted them all.

Maybe I am biased, but I think they if we ever want to quote film critics in our writing on archive cinema, we really should know how and why they came to form those opinions. Where they are coming from, in other words. Especially if, like Lejeune, they once wrote “The kinema must please the women or die.”

• Order Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark here.
• Sign up for C.A. Lejeune and Britain’s Lady Film Critics here.
• Read more about C.A. Lejeune on the Women Film Pioneers Project.
• If you are thinking, as one wise soul said to me, what about Iris Barry? Well, watch this space…
• And if you are interested in British cinema, how could I not plug this book, Great Expectations: Postwar British Cinema 1945-1960, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht, which accompanies a retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival with the same name. I wrote on the contribution of women, including as critics, to the British film industry at this time, and I will be in Locarno to introduce a couple of films too.
• Silent London will always be free to all readers. If you enjoy checking in with the site, including reports from silent film festivals, features and reviews, please consider shouting me a coffee on my Ko-Fi page.