byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

The early film critics, wrote Alistair Cooke in 1937, were presented with a new art form, unencumbered by tradition, and free “to define the movies with no more misgivings than Aristotle defined tragedy”. Or at least they would have been, but the press lost interest once the novelty wore off, and so “through a trick of snobbery the simple Aristotelian lost his chance”. This lapse did not pass without comment. While “every theatre play is accorded the honour of a press notice”, complained the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly as late as 1918, the “perfunctory sort of acknowledgement” given the likes of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance was “obviously written by people who bring to the kinema the prejudiced mind of dear old Granny from the country on her first visit to the play”.

There was a handful of exceptions, and the not entirely reliable consensus had it that WG Faulkner, of the London Evening News, was author of the “first regular criticisms of films in any British newspaper”. Faulkner, the paper’s local government correspondent, had found himself covering Charles Urban’s Kinemacolor films, shown at Fitzrovia’s Scala theatre during 1911, before beginning a weekly column on 17 January 1912. “The picture theatre has taken a firm place in the social enjoyment of the people,” he announced. “It is no longer a matter of wonder; it has become an everyday part of the national life.”