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Arts feature

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

9 December 2023

9:00 AM

9 December 2023

9:00 AM

‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’.

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