What is it about?
The article looks at the film criticism of Caroline Lejeune, who was the Observer newspaper film critic for over 30 years. This criticism is found in her archive, which was acquired by the University of Manchester in 2021. The archive holds materials on films including the proofs of Lejeune's reviews, handwritten screening notes, press clippings, magazine articles, production company communiques and private correspondence. Whilst Lejeune never blatantly contradicts herself across different pieces she wrote on the same film, there is a something notable shift in critical emphasis across these writings, something that the work here deconstructs.
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Why is it important?
The article draws on the Caroline Lejeune archive at the John Rylands Research Institute & Library, a relatively new holding that contains materials on over 520 films. The writing considers the means by which Lejeune wrote film criticism for multiple outlets, with particular focus on three films she reviewed in 1953; The Titfield Thunderbolt, Moulin Rouge and The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Perspectives
This writing was the product of over 200 hours of archival research conducted during Spring/Summer 2022, with the then-uncatalogued holdings of the Lejeune archive at the JRRIL. Given there were only six films that had three reviews by Lejeune attached to them out of over 500, it stood to reason that these would form the basis for the analysis itself, which considers the nuances and modulations of comment that she used across the different publications the reviews were intended for.
Dr John David Ayres
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The C. A. Lejeune Archive: Film Criticism for The Observer, The Sketch and Britain To-day, Journal of British Cinema and Television, January 2025, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2025.0752.
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