Price £7.50 (£5.00 to MLS members)
Jenny Hammerton, For Ladies Only?: Eve’s Film Review, Pathé Cinemagazine 1921-33
Hastings: The Projection Box, 2001
ISBN 978-1903000-02-1
144 pages, 102 illustrations, paperback, 15 x 21cm
Eve’s Film Review was a ‘cinemagazine’ distributed by British Pathé in the 1920s and early 1930s – the term ‘cinemagazine’ described a presentation similar to the newsreel in format but very different in subject matter and tone. Produced weekly and presented as offering ‘a slice of life’, cinemagazines contained sequences of short film items showing the strange and curious as well as the everyday.
Eve’s Film Review celebrated glorious fashions, bizarre beauty regimes, quirky home crafts and astounding cabaret acts, in a weekly reflection of womanhood in all its complicated glory. Richly illustrated with frame enlargements from the original films, this book arises from Jenny Hammerton’s work on cataloguing almost 1,500 items from the original cinemagazines held in the British Pathé Archive. With an intelligent and engaging commentary, she outlines the content of this unique 12-year work and how it reflected 1920s Britain’s social concerns over a new visibility of female sexuality and the gradual infiltration by women of what had traditionally been male spheres.