Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain: Exeter Studies in Film History

British culture between the wars has long been the subject of critical appraisal: the artistic patronage of the Sitwell siblings; the multifaceted Modernism of writers like Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh; and the folk collections and compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams have all been explored as key aspects of Britain’s cultural heritage. Similarly, many film studies have focused on the interwar period in France, Germany, and the Soviet Union as the birthplace of avant-garde filmmaking. Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain is the first book-length exploration of the modernist and anti-mainstream currents behind exemplary British institutions like the Film Society and the key cinema journal Close Up in order to illustrate the rise of British experimental filmmaking. Jamie Sexton combines the history of the scene with a rich analysis of the films themselves, as well as their critical reception—taking an interdisciplinary approach to this long-neglected area of cinema history and firmly situating a time and place that championed film as an intellectual, modern art.