Chapter 11 - Literature and Film

Summary

Between 1900 and 1914, British cinema went through a boom period. Film exhibition began to move out of church halls and music halls into new, purpose-built theatrical venues, while a generation of British producers and directors began to build and consolidate Britain’s film industry. This chapter gives an account of the challenge posed to literature, and the resources created for it, by the increasing popularity, the spectacular novelty, and the technical impressiveness of this early cinema. It shows how the emerging institutions of early British film culture – its studios, its theatrical venues, its accompanying film criticism and popular press – contributed to a new cultural landscape in which literature and cinema, in their reciprocal shaping, engendered a powerful set of ideas about the nature of cultural modernity.