Saturday 21 January
Hitchcock, A. J. is named as a member of the newly founded Kinema Club by Motion Picture Studio magazine.
Motion Picture Studio had been founded in mid-1921, by the publisher of Kinematograph Weekly, to give a voice to British filmmakers – as opposed to distributors and cinema owners – and it had led the campaign to establish a club to accommodate the same sort of people. The day after this article appeared, as part of a Kinema Club special issue, the club had its opening party in its premises at 8–9 Great Newport Street, near Leicester Square.
There were doubters. In an early issue of the magazine the screenwriter Eliot Stannard wrote that factionalism would ensure the Kinema Club’s failure, and that ‘it would almost immediately degenerate into a dumping ground for film people who congregate not for “social intercourse,” but to air their grievances’. Motion Picture Studio wanted its faction to prevail within the industry, and its next editorial after the club’s opening characterized the senior generation as ‘blatantly crude, soullessly inartistic, and emphatically unintelligent’. The magazine and club both folded during 1924.
Hitchcock’s name seldom found its way into the trade press in these years, but Motion Picture Studio had published his first known article on film, early in its life, and early in Hitchcock’s career, in July 1921: ‘Titles – Artistic and Otherwise’.