Elsie and Constance

I have written two more profiles for the Women Film Pioneers Project which were published this week. The WFPP is a long-running project at Columbia University to produce short online biographies of women who contributed to silent cinema, with the idea of rebalancing, or making you think again, about film history – or history in general. For both I was given a bit more space than usual to do justice to two remarkable women who reacted in quite different ways to how film was opening up the world.

Elsie Cohen (1895-1972) is the better-known figure, though her exceptional contribution to cinema has been rather buried by the achievements of others who would have been nowhere without the help she gave them. Cohen’s great achievement was her management of the Academy Cinema in London between 1931 and 1940. Knowledge of the importance of the Academy in British film culture is fading now, but for decades it was the temple to the art of film. It was the place where anyone who wanted to see the best of world cinema went. I remember going to the Academy in the early 80s and being in awe at this august Oxford Street venue where one saw The Seven Samurai, Wild Strawberries or the latest Eric Rohmer and came out feeling that you had seen the finest of the mind’s imaginings. Those were the last years of the Academy (it closed in 1986), when it was managed by Ivo Jarosy, step-son of George Hoellering, who had run the place since 1944 and who commissioned the iconic posters of Peter Strausfeld which played an important part in Making the Academy seem so special (I have one on my wall as I type this). But it was Elsie Cohen who made the Academy what it was, in meaning as much as content.

She was born Elsa Cohn, the daughter of Polish Jews who were in Amsterdam for her birth but soon moved to London (she became a naturalised Briton in 1925). She joined British film trade journal Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly in 1915 as a junior sub-editor and rapidly made a her mark as someone of huge energy matched by enterprise and an idealistic sense of film’s worth. Aged just twenty-two she was promoted to associate editor, then moved to a rival film paper, Pictures and Picturegoer, in the same role. In 1920 she became publicist and sales manager for British-Dutch film company, Anglo-Hollandia. It was no easy job promoting the humble offerings of the Dutch film industry in the 1920s – there was just the one film studio in the country – but Cohen achieved astonishing things, including finding an American distributor for six Hollandia films, purchasing the rights to the popular ‘Bulldog Drummond‘ films for the considerable of £5,000, and getting American actors to sail over to the Netherlands to appear in it. She took over when the company’s owner died in 1923, but the Dutch bankers supporting Hollandia could not tolerate the idea of a young woman running things and closed down the business instead.

After spending sometime at the Ufa studios in Germany witnessing assorted world classics in production (The Last Laugh, Variety), she returned to Britain as a floor manager for Ideal Films, then found her lasting vocation. She wanted there to be more chances for people to see the great European films she had witnessed being made, and got the chance in 1930 when the Palais de Luxe cinema in London was about to be converted into the renowned Windmill Theatre. Leasing the venue for six months, she turned into into a repertory cinema showing American, German and Russian films. She then teamed up with musician-entrepreneur Eric Hakim, who owned a cinema in Oxford Street. Previously it had been the Picture House; it was now known as the Academy, and Hakim wanted to dedicate it to showing foreign art films. Cohen became its manager and programmer.

The Academy rapidly built up a reputation and an audience. Cohen made her mark with a combination of world classics, such as cinema was now old enough to boast about (The Passion of Joan of Arc, The End of St Petersburg), and ground-breaking new films, notably Kameradschaft and Mädchen in Uniform (1931). Her programming nous and insistence on the best possible presentation, including subtitles, earned her praise and many press profiles. Critics, filmmakers, politicians, royalty, and plain film enthusiasts were seen at the Academy. Theatre critic James Agate wrote of “the extremely clever directress of what is far and away our best picture-house”. So what went wrong?

For a while things kept on going right. Cohen expanded the business into distribution (Unity Films) and was considering a move into production, working closely with her new deputy, an Austrian filmmaker George Hoellering, and new director of the cinema Basil Burton, wealthy communist nephew of Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere. Plans for expansion were halted by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Academy was bomb damaged in October 1940 and had to close. Cohen joined ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association), which provided entertainment for British forces overseas. She managed its Overseas Recorded Broadcasting Service, which made and distributing recordings, many via the BBC, an important and little-known aspect of her career which needs to be researched more thoroughly than I was able to do. Then the Academy re-opened in 1944 – with Hoellering as its manager. How this happened remains unclear – there are suggestions of deceit, though I found no concrete evidence to back this up – but a distressed Cohen found herself thrown out of the cinema that represented all that she believed in.

She continued in the sound industry until the end of the 40s, then slipped into retirement. Her last years were sad ones. She was alone (there was a brief marriage which ended in divorce in 1936), unwell, and largely forgotten (film historian Anthony Slide did interview her for two highly informative pieces in the journal The Silent Picture in 1971). Letters in the archives of the BFI shown that there were some belated efforts to improve her circumstances by film industry people, led by Ivor Montagu, and the obituaries were warm when she died in 1972. But, though she has had some posthumous recognition and she does have a bust by her friend the Jamaican sculptor Ronald Moody on display at the National Portrait Gallery, she has remained in Hoellering’s shadow. He did great things at the Academy, where he remained in charge until his death in 1980, but they were based on the foundations she built. There was such a dynamism about her, such a belief that film was equal highest among the arts. If there could be a plaque to Cohen, Hollering and Jarosy outside what was the Academy and is now Flannels clothing store (address Academy House, 161-167 Oxford Street), that would be something. Meanwhile, I hope the profile I have written encourages more interest, and research.

While I was researching Elsie Cohen’s Dutch period I came across a reference to the publicity for Hollandia films being managed by Cohen in the Netherlands and Constance Bromley in Britain. Who was Constance Bromley, I wondered. So I started investigating, and quite a story emerged.

Constance Bromley (1882-1939) was born in Leeds and stayed close to Yorkshire throughout her globe-trotting career. She started out as a stage actress in 1905, joining the touring companies of some famous theatre producers, among them Herbert Beerbohm-Tree and Frank Benson (progenitor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She began with bit parts and understudying, but gradually worked her way up to second leads in Benson’s Shakespeare productions. She left the stage in 1910 to spend time with friends in India, moved to Canada to be with family, then back to Britain to make her first efforts in getting involved with film, then returned to the stage as part of a touring company in India in 1916.

A determined and enterprising character, Bromley found work at a Indian weekly illustrated magazine The Looker-On with was aimed at the British expat audience, and swiftly became its managing editor. There was time enough in the working week, however, for her to take on a second job, as secretary-manager of a Calcutta (now Kolkata) theatre, the Grand Opera House. Its new owner turned the prestige venue into a cinema, the Bijou Grand Opera House, in June 1917. This Bromley managed for two years, showing a mixture of British and American films to mostly British audiences (Indian audiences were allowed in but had to keep to the gallery).

It was in 1919 that Bromley found her vocation, of sorts, though it was a controversial one, and has remained so. Returning to Britain while still working for the cinema, she began writing to the film trade papers and then to the national newspapers, about Indian film audiences. Her theme was that the low morals shown by the portrayal of women in American films were causing India people to lose their respect for the West. Complaints about the supposed immoral influence of American films were common enough, but Bromley added a twist to this, linking a medium – cinema – that spoke to all to the British Raj’s fears about the Indian independence movement.

The titles of her newspaper articles spell it out: “White Women Films: Misleading Indian Natives”, Daily Mail 11 July 1919; “Firing the Train: Danger of ‘Third Degree’ Films in India”, Daily Express 13 January 1921; “India – Censorship and Propaganda – Influence of Foreign Films”, The Times 21 February 1922; “Films That Lower Our Prestige in India”, Leeds Mercury 20 August 1926. She called for greater censorship of films in India and greater use of film as British propaganda. They didn’t have the impact she had hoped for, but they have given her an immortality of sorts as she is much cited by scholars of Indian cinema and imperialism, her words viewed with a mixture of pity and alarm.

While she was writing these articles, Bromley found employment as a film publicist for a number of companies, including Grainger-Binger films who handled the Dutch films with which Elsie Cohen was associated. It’s quite likely that they met. When this work dried up in 1925, she turned to journalism and writing serials for regional newspapers, then disappeared into private life. She died in Salisbury on 19 June 1939. She never married, had no children, and left no papers. She might have disappeared were it not for some newspaper pieces, a few film trade press notices, and scattered archival documents. Put the pieces together and you start to recover a life. It is a good thing to do.

Links:

• My profiles of Elsie Cohen and Constance Bromley are on the Women Film Pioneer Projects site
• I wrote a post last year on the history and rationale behind the Women Film Pioneers Project, O Pioneers!
• I have also updated the Wikipedia entry for Elsie Cohen, based on the new material found, and created a Wikipedia entry for Constance Bromley