Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

Iris Barry's pioneering column began 100 years ago and made the first proper case for the movies to be considered art

One of Britain’s first professional movie critics, Iris Barry, in 1929. Credit: Sasha / Hulton Archive / Getty Images 
issue 09 December 2023
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‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’.

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