Poachers in view: the representation of poaching in early British film, c.1903-14

Abstract

ABSTRACT For early film-makers in Britain the countryside was a highly valuable resource. As a modern urban culture acquired a distinctly ruralist orientation, the landscapes and lives of rural Britain became popular subjects for a rapidly developing visual mass media. Within this expanding visual economy, rural settings provided both picturesque space for the screen and interesting situations and characters to fill it. Forming a distinctive sub-genre to the Edwardian countryside film were those that focused on poachers and poaching. Already a popular subject in drama, literature and song, it now attracted the attention of most of the period’s leading domestic film producers. Demonstrating the richly intermedial nature of early cinema, these poaching-based films relied heavily on Victorian game-law melodramas and the regular coverage of so-called poaching affrays in the national and regional press. They also traded on audience pre-engagement via a general sympathy for the poacher coupled with a broad dislike of the game-preserving class. Through a study of three surviving poacher films from 1903, 1906 and 1912, this archetypal rural figure emerges as a significant presence on the early twentieth-century screen. At a time when the politics and culture of the land occupied a central place in public discourse, and when the causes and effects of poverty were being conceived in new ways, the poacher on view was a surprisingly complex and modern one.