An Archive in the City: “True Pictures” and Animated News Films of suffragettes in the Holographs of Virginia Woolf's “The Movies” in the Berg Collection

Summary

Housed just a few short miles away from the 2009 “Woolf and the City” conference, within the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, Woolf's holographs on cinema include two fragmentary sheets of early jottings and two later partial drafts of “The Movies” (manuscripts of nine pages and eight pages respectively) leading to the 1926 published versions of “The Cinema.” Recall Woolf's narrator in A Room of One's Own (1929) wishing to look at holographs in the famous library at Oxbridge to consider whether changes in Thackeray's manuscript were for style or sense, and to guess at which words Milton changed in Lycidas. When I first examined Woolf's holographs years ago, I, too, had questions about revisions to her essay and wanted to find clues about any films she may have screened, and to see if her ideas about film had undergone significant changes within the drafts. Exploring the drafts proved a gratifying treasure hunt indeed; they not only explain parts of the published essay, such as the misleading reference to a film of Anna Karenina, but in their own right are meaningful reflections on cinema aesthetics that enrich the ongoing study of Woolf and film.

WOOLF AND FILM PROGRAMS IN THE FIRST DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Woolf's drafts reflect and interrogate film programs of her day. Such screenings would be startling to present day spectators, composed as the programs were of dozens of diverse segments and with audience members who came and went at any point during the program. An example from an eight-page program from the 1913 New Gallery Kinema provides a glimpse of that moment in cultural history:

NEW GALLERY KINEMA REGENT ST. PROGRAMME

New Gallery Kinema. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday, May 11, 12, 13 & 14, 1913 1. the Williamson Animated news. 2. Fate. 3. Lager Beer making. 4. The Lorelei. 5. Rowdy Comes Home. 6. The Power of Money. 7. Bloomer's Transformation. 8. The Missing Pearl. Playtime in Toyland. 23 advert spaces, 10 unfilled.