ABSTRACT
In his introduction to the 1986 collection All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, Charles Barr noted that successive phases in the history of minority film culture in the UK have been signposted by the appearance of a series of small-circulation journals, each of which in turn represented “the ‘leading edge’ or growth point of film criticism in Britain” (1986: 5). These journals were, in order of their appearance: Close-Up, first published in 1927; Cinema Quarterly (1932) and its direct successors World Film News (1936) and Documentary News Letter (1940), all linked to the documentary movement; Sequence (1947); Sight & Sound (1949, the date when the longstanding BFI house journal’s editorship was assumed by Sequence alumnus Gavin Lambert); Movie (1962); and Screen (1971, again the date of a change in editorial direction rather than a first issue as such). Barr further observed: “A strong recurring feature within this influential succession of magazines is a hostility to the established practices of British film journalism and/ or British filmmaking, particularly when the one operates in chauvinistic support of the other” (1986: 6). In some cases, those established journalistic practices were associated with the immediately preceding minority magazine: Movie and its writers defined themselves partly in opposition to the critical ethos represented by Sight & Sound, while Screen similarly took up a position opposed to that of Movie (see, for example, the combative statements made in Perkins 1960, the Introduction to Cameron 1972, Rohdie 1972/3 and Neale 1975). However, aside from certain continuities (such as the importance accorded by both Sequence and Movie to Hollywood directors: see Gibbs 2001), if there is one thing that united these journals it was their antagonism to the prevailing currents of film journalism in the form of the reviewers writing for “lay” newspapers and magazines aimed at the general public: in particular the so-called “quality” press of broadsheet newspapers and middlebrow periodicals (see, for instance, Anderson 1947).
