Return to the lost continent

Abstract

The historiography of post-war British cinema has been dominated by the notion of the ‘Lost Continent’: a large body of work which was excluded by the realist critical establishment, in favour of ‘quality’ British films and, later, continental art cinema. ‘Return to the Lost Continent’ argues that the image of the critical establishment at the centre of this perspective is based on a flawed account of British film culture derived from a narrow range of evidence. Using newly accessible print sources, it aims to challenge the consensus view of British film culture before and after the Second World War, in particular by revealing the extent of the distribution of European films in and outside London, customarily and wrongly represented as an affair of the social elite.