Film Appreciation and Cultural Leadership: Rudolf Arnheim, Roger Manvell and Two Books Called Film

This article examines the significance of Roger Manvell’s Penguin paperback Film to the postwar generation of volunteer film society activists in Britain. It begins by contrasting the concept of aesthetic appreciation and film analysis found in a prewar film theory classic, Rudolf Arnheim’s Film, translated into English and published in the UK by Faber in 1933, with that found in Manvell’s title of the same name. Manvell was a Leicester film society activist turned Ministry of Information film officer, and his book would be remembered as a “bible” for the new generation of film society activists after 1945. This article argues that at a time when the film society model was expanding, Manvell’s Film envisaged the responsible film society as an instrument of the educated classes advancing the cause of film as a socially responsible, realist, and popular art, rather than a minority art promoted by an intellectual or artistic vanguard