Big Show ─ British Cinema Culture In The Great War 1914-1918

Parallel to the Great War ran the Big Show in Britain, and eventually their two paths crossed. Here Hammond (English/film, U. of Southampton) shows how the situation resulted not in Hollywood's domination of the British film market but in the eventual cultural acceptance of the cinema as a part of British social life. In a series of case studies, which he wisely locates in Southampton, he traces the ways cinema expressed the experiences of war; he explains the impact of films based on the heroes and the fallen, the various reactions to realism the beginnings of the respectability of film with Griffith, the work of Chaplin which needed no transatlantic translation, and the emergence of a remarkable and compelling combination of tragic and comic imagery in 1918. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael Hammond is a lecturer in Film in the Department of English at the University of Southampton. He has written extensively in the area of reception of early cinema in Britain, including a contribution to Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896-1930, edited by Andrew Higson (UEP, 2002).