Abstract

The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation.

The fifth in a series of volumes from the annual British Silent Cinema Festival held in Nottingham (and the first to be published by Exeter), this collective study offers an original treatment of the relationship between pre-1930 cinema and landscape. The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists – practitioners, academics and individual researchers – who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.

Laraine Porter is the Director of Broadway cinema and media centre in Nottingham, and co-ordinator of the British Silent Cinema Festival held annually in Nottingham; she has co-edited four previous volumes based on work presented at these festivals. Bryony Dixon is Curator of Silent Film at the British Institute’s National Film and Television Archive; she co-programmes the British Silent Cinema Festival, and manages the BFI’s current Chaplin project.

‘Virtually everything in this admirable volume deserves to be noticed.’ (Screening the Past, Issue 22, Jan. 2008) ‘It is the first of these proceedings to be published by the University of Exeter Press, which offers a new and more attractive design, and the contributons themselves are equally good’ (Early Popular Visual Culture: 6,3. November 2008)