ABSTRACT
It was during the 1920s that people started treating the film seriously in Britain. The writer John St Loe Strachey was a founder member of the Film Society formed in London during the twenties and, as editor of the Spectator, was an early sponsor of serious articles about the cinema. He said at the Stoll Picture Theatre Club in 1924:
‘One of the things which have attracted me to the cinema is the fact that it has enabled us to witness the birth of a new art—an opportunity that has not previously arisen for many generations.… Nobody is consciously developing the cinema; it is developing itself.’ 1
