Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930-1945: Reading Between the Frames

Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930-1945: Reading Between the Frames

Lara Feigel

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0748639500

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book tells the story of a generation of writers who were passionately engaged with politics and with cinema, exploring the rise and fall of a distinct tradition of cinematic literature. Dismayed by the rise of fascism in Europe and by the widening gulf separating the classes at home, these writers turned to cinema as a popular and hard-hitting art form. Lara Feigel crosses boundaries between high modernism and social realism and between 'high' and 'popular' culture, bringing together Virginia Woolf with W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen with John Sommerfield, Sergei Eisenstein with Gracie Fields. The book ends in the Second World War, an era when the bombs and searchlights rendered everyday life cinematic.

Feigel interrogates the genres she maps, drawing on cultural theories from the 1920s onwards to investigate the nature of the cinematic and the literary. While it was not possible directly to transfer the techniques of the screen to the page any more than it was possible to 'go over' to the working classes, the attempts nonetheless reveal a fascinating intersection of the visual and the verbal, the political and the aesthetic. In reading between the frames of an unexplored literary tradition, this book redefines 1930s and wartime literature and politics.

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and accuses the German boy of stealing his marbles and the German boy dares the French boy to come across the border and get them. This results in a fight, which necessitates the involvement of adults, questioning the possibility of harmony between nations. Russell Berman writes: the point of the gaming commencement is not simply that adults are behaving like children but, more importantly, the suggestion that the wrong game is being played since the aleatory moment of free play, the rolling

Antagonist’ and financier to ‘look’, ‘pass on’, ‘join’, ‘view’, ‘mobilise’. He has privileged access to a sweeping bird’s, aeroplane’s or camera-eye view, and can announce authoritatively that ‘The game is up’.32 Below there is the Mass-Observer, ‘the figure in the crowd, whose view is frequently obscured by other passers-by and by traffic’.33 The observers in May the Twelfth are just such figures, jostling each other in a crowded text that refuses to allow precedence to any of its voices. There

MacNeice’s 1933 poem Birmingham, the poet identifies himself in the first person plural with the working classes who indulge in ‘Saturday thrills’: Next week-end it is likely in the heart’s funfair we shall pull Strong enough on the handle to get back our money.52 But in his 1939 Autumn Journal, MacNeice exposes his own separation from the workers during his time in Birmingham, making himself the subject of his own cross-class montage. ‘We lived in Birmingham through the slump’, he says,

journey, was impressed by the crowd’s behaviour and their knowledge of the game. Much has been done to spoil football, he laments, with the heavy financial interests and the ‘monstrous M2261 - FEIGEL PRINT.indd 103 1/6/10 14:17:59 104 Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930–1945 partisanship’ of the crowds, ‘but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt, and it has gone out and conquered the world’. He lauds the crowd specifically for its community feeling, finding that it is good, when the

commentators but by the key figures of the decade themselves. It seems pertinent here to consider Raymond Williams’ strange, late engagement with the 1930s in his 1985 essay on ‘Cinema and Socialism’. Here Williams charts the hopes and failures of the 1930s Left, who saw film ‘as an inherently popular and in that sense democratic art’ and saw cinema, like socialism itself, as ‘a harbinger of a new kind of world’.36 Williams, like Sontag, sees the movement as failing. What the Left failed to

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