‘I am not a camera’: camera consciousness in 1930s Britain and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

In the 1930s, a generation of British writers embraced the cinema at the same time as they committed themselves to left-wing politics. Stephen Spender later described radical German and Russian cinema as conveying ‘a message of hope like an answer to The Waste Land’. This article argues that cinema entered literature not just as a set of techniques, but as a mode of vision, and that this vision quickly became less hopeful. Having accepted the cinematic quality of their surroundings, several 1930s writers figured consciousness itself as a camera or projector. These narratives take the cinematic as read and investigate the experience of living in a world whose subjects are absent actors mediated by the cinema screen. In this context, the cinema becomes a vehicle not so much for a Benjaminian politicisation of aesthetics as for a more reactionary political disengagement. Here this is explored through a discussion of texts by Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood and then through an analysis of the cinematic literature of the Spanish Civil War. The article ends with an analysis of Susan Sontag's critique of Baudrillard's ‘hyerperreal’, suggesting that this debate was prefigured in the 1930s.