Laraine Porter

‘How Shall We Look Again’? Revisiting the Archive in British Silent Film and the Great War

As the First World War now passes from living memory, the film records that survive are increasingly significant in shaping our understanding of the conflict. Feature films produced in the aftermath indicate how the conflict entered the collective memory and was explored and exploited by cineastes, writers and performers. When we look again at films such as Blighty (1927), The Guns of Loos and Dawn (1928), we need to remind ourselves that these films were produced almost a decade after the end of the conflict and are part of the process of remembering. Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s poem ‘Lament’, published in a 1926 anthology, expressed this moment of troubled reflection of present upon past beautifully: We who are left, how shall we look again Happily on the sun or feel the rain Without remembering how they who went Ungrudgingly and spent Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?1 Most films of the early and mid-1920s were made with the benefit of hindsight and at a respectful distance. But by the late 1920s, respect and mourning were giving way to critique and questioning, indicated, for example, by the publication of poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That.

The “Missing Muscle”: Attitudes to Women Working in Cinema and Music 1910–1930

Abstract In the 1900s as Edwardian women musicians moved from music teaching into public performance, cinemas offered a safe place: out of the spotlight and in the relative anonymity of the darkened auditorium. The rapid growth in cinemas from the 1910s also meant that women were needed to fill the demand for ensembles, pianists, and vocalists, a demand that greatly increased during World War I however, women faced successive waves of backlashes and debates about their abilities played out in the music and popular press, in trade and fan magazines, and in the Musicians’ Union. Evidence of women’s experience can also be gleaned from personal testimony, diaries, and autobiography, but this is piecemeal and represents only a fraction of what was a considerable occupation for women. Focusing on cinema musicianship, this article will examine the battles for women entering the profession between 1900 and 1930.