Film Talk: C. A. Lejeune and the Female Film Critic
This chapter examines how early film criticism evolved as a distinct branch of women’s interwar ‘film talk’ through writers such as Iris Barry and Dilys Powell, taking C. A. Lejeune as a central case study. It explores Lejeune’s early writing in her The Manchester Guardian column from 1922 to 1928 and early work for the Observer. The chapter looks at developments and trends in her writing, considering how her columns produced a journalistic mode of film talk coloured specifically by debates and concerns about gender. This is read through Lejeune’s specific discussions about notions of women’s cinema, women and stardom, and female spectatorship. Gender shaped and shadowed much of her critical discourse, not only through the gendered associations of the topics she discussed – especially stardom – but through her approach to negotiating her own gender identity as a professional film critic, and the experimentation she enacted with crafting and refining her journalistic voice as a distinctly film-based writer. The chapter explores the stylistic strategies of Lejeune’s column writing, examining her use of literary techniques and fictional frameworks as a way to turn her attention far more explicitly to the topic of women and cinema.