SSR: ‘Dear Cinema Girls’: Girlhood, Picture-going, and the Interwar Film Magazine

By Maddison Grant

Complete citation:

Stead, L. (2018). ‘Dear cinema girls’: Girlhood, picture-going, and the interwar film magazine. In C. Clay, M. DiCenzo, B. Green, & F. Hackney (Eds.), Women's periodicals and print culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The interwar period (pp. 1-14). Edinburgh University Press.

Key Words: film magazine, fan magazine, girlhood, femininity, class, mass culture, domestic

Brief Overview:

This chapter ‘Dear Cinema Girls: Girlhood, Picture-going, and the Interwar Film Magazine’ explores how ideas of girlhood in Britain during the early twentieth century was explored and mediated through the British fan magazine.

 

Summary of key points:

• Fan film magazines evolved from story magazines from the 1910s into multi-feature media by the late teens, and(that) increasingly emulated the format of woman’s magazines as a means of addressing an increasing female audience.
  
  
• Film magazines were a distinct genre within film writing during this period, with women-centered film magazines offering a direct view on women’s experiences of modernity; where popular culture, public life, and debates about women, home, duty, and domesticity intersected.
   
•      Much of  the magazines content was aimed at young readers, particularly the girl reader who, during this period, was a figure aged anywhere from ten years old to mid-twenties. It targeted working-class and middle-class schoolgirls, as well as working girls employed in factories, mills, and commerce. 
   
• The cinema-going girl of the this period (teens, 1920s, 1930s) is found across a range of print media thus, fan magazines were part of a wide range of media discourses that constructed images of the cinema-going girl and the girl on screen.
   
• Concerns did surround this figure during the period with the young film fan perceived as vulnerable and gullible, and cinema being a notable target for these concerns.  Film magazines were also viewed as part of the problem, however, to the young women who read these magazines they had genuine value, and by taking film and female cinema culture seriously these papers offered some challenges to the image of girl fans as mindless consumers and cinema as intellectually damaging.
   
•   These magazines emphasized their participatory structures and encouraged debate and deconstruction of star images, allowing female audiences  to assemble non-domestic representation in order to work through the changing relationships between traditional and modern forms of girlhood. 
   
• Film magazines can be viewed as ‘multi-track’ media, combining writing, illustrations, photographs, and different fonts and formats thus allowing readers access to representations of stars through not only images but through other forms such as interviews, advertisement, and stories.
   
• A particular magazine discourse that used these multitrack qualities was tie-in stories that focused on girl heroines, such as the ‘tomboy’ whose image of girlhood expanded the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior.
   
• There were widespread anxieties during the interwar period concerning modern girls becoming like men and pushing the boundaries of traditional femininity through their presence as workers and consumers, through their leisure and activities, and through the adoption of more androgynous styles; factors all embodied by new girl screen-stars.
   
• Film magazines negotiated, uneasily, conservative and traditional ideals about marriage, domesticity and heterosexual partnership while also sharing space with more radical representations of modern, youthful femininity.
  
  
• Girlhood could be understood as an area and time of independence before marriage and female stars ability to keep and continue this identity and play characters defined as ‘girl’ while also being wives, mothers, and businesswomen made them unique role models.
   
• Girl stars could maintain this image, the girl reader could not. However, readers could use and engage with the tools stars used to achieve this, they were invited to build composite identities, styles, and ways of understanding themselves as girls, inspired by magazines and their inter-medial qualities.

 

 

 Important Quotations:

•  “They [film magazines] marketed themselves as pop-culture artefacts, self-consciously feminised, offering a strong contrast to the highbrow and experimental film writings of journals such as Close Up (1927–33), and the critical commentary of newspaper film writing from popular British critics such as C. A. Lejeune or Walter Mycroft.” (Stead, 2018, p. 2)
   
• “The value of film culture for shaping and reflecting upon women’s experience of modernity was taken seriously by both the creators and consumers of these papers. Within their pages, we find detailed explorations of the home lives and domestic identities of female stars, both Hollywood and European, alongside advertising for cosmetics, women’s clothing, and domestic products, presenting readers with fashion, etiquette, and homemaking advice learned from the movies.” (p. 2)
   
• “Representations of girlhood within these papers were built predominantly around young, and largely American female star images, but they were also constructed through particular uses of the specific tools and techniques of magazine media. The film paper blended photographs, film stills, and illustrations with prose, storytelling, and advertising, and scattered representations of its stars across these varied platforms, breaking apart the sense of a gendered star identity as stable or singular. Film periodicals thus invited readers into a complex and unstable network of film-inflected girlhoods.” (p. 2-3)
   
• “As such, reading the interwar film magazine is one way of rereading the narrative of ‘home and duty’, complicating a domestic ideal by offsetting more glamorous images and alternative possibilities of modern femininity against more conservative discourses on domesticity and female identity. The print cultures of film affected ideas about girlhood, class, and mass culture in this way, allowing their readers to simultaneously assign, test out, and in some ways rewrite girls’ culturally ascribed domestic roles.” (p. 3)
   
• “The ‘film-struck’ girl was at the centre of a network of media soliciting her attention, time, and money. Popular culture exploited such dreams of stardom, and capitalised on the glamorous appeal of the screen, whilst the female cinema-goer simultaneously found herself subject to cultural concerns about the lowbrow reputation and potentially damaging effects of both movies and cinema environments that threatened to disrupt a more conservative, domesticated image of youthful femininity.” (p. 3)
   
•  “The meanings that both the magazines and their participating readers assign to the term ‘girl’ are fluid, but there is a particular emphasis upon girlhood as a period of experimentation, using film stars to test out and try on potential articulations of future womanhood. The broader interwar environment focused on the image of the housewife as an emblem of postwar national culture, equating womanhood with heterosexual partnership, domesticity, and retirement from paid labour: but within film-fan discourses, both girlhood and womanhood were configured in unstable and contradictory ways that unsettled a clear-cut affirmation of more traditional gender norms.” (p. 7)
   
• “One particular thread of magazine discourse that played upon these multitrack qualities, and their ability to turn young female identity into a multiple and layered image, was the inclusion of tie-in stories focused on girl heroines.” (p. 8)
   
• “In depicting tomboy characters, they created a fantasy space in which to play around, however superficially, with the ‘girl’ identity. Yet, to return to Peg’s story [a serial from…]: like so many of her counterpart serial heroines, the girl protagonist is destined for heterosexual partnership by the conclusion of the narrative, setting aside her earlier high jinks to marry the male lead, at which point the narrative concludes.” (p. 10)
   
• “Yet narrative resolution does not necessarily cancel out the more playful or disruptive aspects of narrative process in these girl-centred texts. The intermedial qualities of the paper, where its pages cross the borders between media in the inclusion of prose, illustrations, and photography, went some way to disrupt these resolutions. Multiple female identities for any given characterisation remained in play, sustained beyond the reader’s engagement with the story as a single unit in the larger tapestry of the magazine.” (p. 11)
   
• “Engaging with tie-in fiction specifically within the film magazine thus allowed girls to encounter new negotiations of the otherwise seemingly irresolvable conflict between the liberties of girlhood and the restriction of marriage and domesticity through the multiple and varied images of characters and stars.” (p. 11)
   
• “British fan magazines’ handling of girl stars, or stars with notable girl-inflected star images, seemingly dealt with these contradictions by simply multiplying them, offering them to readers for selection and resignification in the process of consuming the mixed representations of the magazine format. Such a proliferation of alternative and contradictory representations of gendered duty and identity thus in some ways troubled the broader narrative of postwar return to domesticity.” (p. 12)
  
  
• “The particular qualities of the magazine as multitrack media thus meant that readers could interact with stars as composite of girl/woman representations, both potentially subversive and more conservative, traditional and modern.” (p. 12)
   
• “Fan magazines therefore answered back to the reductive stereotype of the cinema- going girl by presenting themselves as a toolkit for learning about new fashions and trends, and a platform for girls to debate their own ideas about girlhood and film culture through the participatory structures of these texts.” (p. 12)