Sarah C J Street

'Got to Dance my Way to Heaven': Jessie Matthews, art deco and the British musical of the 1930s

Abstract This article examines the career of British film star Jessie Matthews in the 1930s. It focuses on the musicals she appeared in, particularly those that displayed an art deco aesthetic. Street challenges William K. Eversons dismissal of the musicals as escapist entertainment by arguing that the interrelationship between Matthewss performances and the art deco sets in which they were staged provides a crucial exchange which relates very much to the 1930s in terms of their common aesthetic and concerns with consumption and consumerism. The art deco context of the films creation and reception is linked to contemporary economic and social changes that were taking place in Britain. In her analysis Street provides close textual analyses of Evergreen (1934) and Its Love Again (1936), two key films whose sets were designed by celebrated production designer Alfred Junge. The article suggests ways in which musical performance can be analysed while taking into account the work of the set designer in creating an equally ‘performative’ register in relation to mise-en-scéne.

The temporalities of intermediality: Colour in cinema and the arts of the 1920s

This article presents a case study in intermediality concerning the intersection of cinema, colour, and a range of related media in the 1920s. In film history, colour is a rich yet understudied field in the 1920s, particularly in light of the recent attention paid to both early cinema colour and 1930s Technicolor. Following the constraints of the First World War, there was a surge in colour production in the early 1920s across media and national cinemas. To understand this increase in colour during the ‘Jazz Age’, it is vital to appreciate the significance of colour before the First World War; specifically for cinema, one must also examine the intermedial role of colour during cinema’s early years. For developing theoretical insights into this material, we turn first to André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s analysis (2005) of the institutionalization and accompanying stylistic transformation of the cinema around 1910, as it emerged as an autonomous and self-sustaining narrative medium. With this change, according to Gaudreault and Marion, the fundamental intermedial relations that characterized the earlier years of cinema were no longer so apparent; rather, the structure of cinema’s intermediality transformed with institutionalization. We argue that the 1920s presents a vital perspective on this history, when cinema and other media were profoundly influenced by a colour wave that surged across the arts. Far from intermediality disappearing, in the 1920s cinema’s engagement with the other arts was going through a particularly exciting and innovative phase.

British Cinema, American Reception: Black Narcissus (1947) and the Legion of Decency

For the historian researching British cinema, there can often appear to be a paucity of archival source material. However, it is important to recognize that much excellent primary material resides in American archives. While the British Film Institute’s Special Collections has extended its holdings over the past decades, including key acquisitions such as the Michael Powell papers, Joseph Losey collection and Michael Balcon papers, it is often difficult to find primary sources on particular film companies. To research even the most dominant companies sends one on an extensive trail: the Rank Organization, for example, has not made its papers publicly available, leaving an important gap in our knowledge about its day-to-day operation. While excellent research has been done on Rank, of necessity this depends on combining a plethora of sources emanating from different locations, often lacking the precise details about internal operations, structure, personnel and statistics pertaining to a major film company that can, for example, be found in the archives of the major Hollywood studios.