First Lady of Film

Radio - In Production for BBC Radio 4
In partnership with TellTale

Writers Igor Toronyi-Lalic/James King

Producer  Ashley Pollak

Is cinema an art? One of the first people to argue its case was Iris Barry. A hundred years ago the 27-year-old Brummie became the first professional film critic at a serious British journal. Read her articles for The Spectator, and later for the Daily Mail, and you can see an art form being born.

Between 1924 and 1930, she reported on the first talkies, the first nature docs, the first slow-motion sports films. She hailed the first cinematic masterpieces by Chaplin, Griffiths, Lang, Murnau, Pabst and Ford, witnessed the birth of Felix the Cat, raved about the dawn of Technicolor. Reviewing Hitchcock’s first silent feature, she foresaw a great future.

Uniquely a groupie of both the London avant-garde around Ezra Pound and the rival Bloomsbury Set, she wrote the first book in Britain on the aesthetics of cinema. She began dating films, started shaping a canon and laid out the fundamentals of what would become ‘auteur theory’.

In 1925 she set up a precursor to the BFI, the London Film Society – with H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and J.M. Keynes among its founding members – which presented the UK premiere of Buñuel’s banned L’Age d’Or, which they smuggled in from France in Nancy Cunard’s hatbox.

In the thirties, she was one of the first people to realise the importance of preservation, convincing Hollywood to start archiving their films and setting up the hugely influential film department at MoMA, New York. She partied with Disney, yachted with Picasso, hung out with Chaplin. In Moscow she got Eisenstein to cough up some scripts. In Cannes she served on the jury of the first film festival in 1946.

This documentary will tell the wild story of a forgotten pioneer who invented the art of film criticism as we know it.