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The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

Volume 16 | 2020 | International Cinema in the Space Between: The Long Decade of the 1930s

A Special Topics Issue

Sarah E. Cornish
University of Northern Colorado
Alexis E. Pogorelskin
University of Minnesota—Duluth

Editors' Introduction

ARTICLES

The Sound Revolution: The Medium Re-Born

Editors' Introduction

Synchronized Sound Technology and the British Musical Film in the 1930s
Lara Ehrenfried

Politicizing Cinema: Defining It on the Left

Editors' Introduction

Little Magazines, Postwar Internationalism, and the Construction of World Cinema
Louise Kane

Mateo Santos and the Documentary of Occupation: "Cine Social" in the Spanish Anarchist Revolution
Ameya Tripathi

Cinema as a Stage: A Conservative Approach to the Medium

Editors' Introduction

“My Wife’s Not My Wife, She’s My Daughter": Relocating A Bill of Divorcement from Stage to Screen
Nicole Flynn

“People coming, going. Nothing ever happens": Hotels in German and American Interwar Films
Claudia Kotte

Cinema and the Creation of Holocaust Memory

Editors' Introduction

Kristallnacht on Film: From Reportage to Reenactments, 1938–1948
Lawrence Baron

The Cinematic Haunting of British World War II Memory: Genghis Cohn
Phyllis Lassner

GENERAL TOPICS FEATURE

Quiet Exposures: Elizabeth Bowen and Bill Brandt Picture Wartime London
Jacqueline Shin

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERMODERNIST ARCHIVE

Claude McKay’s Workers’ Dreadnought Poetry (1919–1920)
Amardeep Singh

REVIEW ESSAY: NEW EDITIONS FROM THE SPACE BETWEEN

Reviewing Reissues: Rose Macaulay
Debra Rae Cohen

BOOK REVIEWS

The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race
Adrienne Brown
Reviewed by Sophia Bamert

Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London
Elizabeth F. Evans
Reviewed by Bridget Chalk

Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive-Era Women’s Fiction
Ann Mattis
Reviewed by Kelley Wagers

Modernism, Sex, and Gender
Celia Marshik and Allison Pease
Reviewed by Geneviève Brassard

Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism
Sasha Colby
Reviewed by Nicole Flynn

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention
Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey, editors
Reviewed by Luke Seaber

A History of 1930s British Literature
Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, editors
Reviewed by Naomi Milthorpe

CONTRIBUTORS
Biographies

FROM THE EDITOR
Acknowledgments

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Clemence Dane’s hit West End play A Bill of Divorcement (1921) was adapted into a successful Hollywood film from RKO Studios, a 1932 David O. Selznick production directed by George Cukor and starring John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn in her screen debut. This essay argues that the combination of the text’s formal, geographic, and temporal relocation from one medium to another shifts the message of the text, emphasizing different aspects of its content and thereby reconfiguring its meaning for a new audience. An analysis of the social norms, notions of inheritance, sickness and health, marriage and family and, in particular, the treatment of eugenics in the two versions of the texts, elucidate the shifts in their historical contexts and imagined audiences.

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This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films. This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films.
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This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films. This essay examines Billy Wilder’s film A Foreign Affair (1948) in the context of Germany’s political, ethical, and cinematic reconstruction after World War II. It argues that the film is set apart from other films of the immediate postwar era by its unsettling ambivalence and also by its thorough meditation on surveillance as a political activity, artistic strategy, and tool for existential investigation. Through its espionage plot, its hybrid and meta-cinematic approach to genre, and its production history, A Foreign Affair suggests that surveillance is both the activity that most characterizes daily life in postwar Germany as well as the fundamental practice of postwar filmmaking and film viewing as the world tries to process and move beyond the horrific events of the recent past. Wilder’s position as exile-surveyor, moreover, combined with the spy thriller tropes of the film, reveal the instability and ambivalence of the immediate postwar period in Europe in a way that was not always visible in more propagandistic or didactic films.