Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
The B&C Kinematograph Company and British Cinema
Early Twentieth-Century Spectacle and Melodrama
by Gerry Turvey
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
This book sheds new light on the under-researched period of early British cinema through an in-depth history of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company—also known as ‘B&C’—in the years 1908–1916, the period when it became one of Britain’s leading film producers. It provides an account of its films and personalities, and explores its production methods, business practices and policy changes.
Gerry Turvey examines the range of short film genres B&C manufactured, including newsworthy topicals and comics, and series dramas, and how they often drew on the resources of urban Britain’s existing popular culture—from cheap reading matter to East End melodramas. He discusses B&C’s first open-air studio in East Finchley, its extensive use of location filming, and its large, state-of-the-art studio at Walthamstow. He also investigates how the films were photographed and ‘staged’, their developing formal properties, and how the choice of genres shifted radically over time in an attempt to seek new audiences.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/SGOE1157
About the Author:
Gerry Turvey has been involved in film education since the 1960s, including a Principal Lectureship in Film Studies at Kingston University, and a long association with the Phoenix Cinema Trust in North London. He continues to research early film.
Press Reviews:
B&C was one of the most enterprising and successful British film studios of the 1910s, but less than 10% of its films have survived, and none of its business records were preserved. This book is consequently particularly impressive and valuable for the way that it manages to reconstruct this lost chapter of British cinema history in such fastidious detail.
Jon Burrows, University of Warwick
Turvey’s latest book is an expertly piloted powerhouse-on-wheels that fairly rattles through story after story from cinema’s formative years. Along the way it rampages through such territories as class-specific cultural tradition, film industry business practice, media evolution, film technology, creative roles, genre, publicity and film form. It applies and tests scholarly models, overturns received wisdom, positively fountains evidence (both previously unknown and previously under-used) and identifies patterns galore; its passage leaves the ground of early cinema history yet more fertile.Dr Andrew Shail, Senior Lecturer in Film, Newcastle University
See the publisher website: University of Exeter Press
> On a related topic:
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (2014)
Volume 5: 1900
by John Barnes
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (2014)
Volume 1: 1894-1896
by John Barnes
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (2014)
Volume 4: 1899
by John Barnes
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (2014)
Volume 3: 1898
by John Barnes
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (2014)
Volume 2: 1897
by John Barnes
Subject: Silent Cinema
Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (2019)
by Ian Christie
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Early Cinema in Scotland (2018)
Dir. John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and María A. Vélez-Serna
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
The Dream That Kicks (2017)
The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Back
