In Northcliffe Jail: Iris Barry, film journalist

A reinvestigation of Iris Barry’s work for the Daily Mail in the period 1925–30. Barry is celebrated as a critic and curator. As a founder of the Film Society in London in the 1920s and first curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s she is a heroine of minority film culture. This article argues that her role in mass film culture has been overlooked. While it has been acknowledged that Barry wrote for the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular newspapers, this article demonstrates that the number of articles she wrote for the paper has been underestimated by a factor of ten. Beyond the case of Barry, this article argues that elite institutions like the Film Society have been given undue credit for the phenomenon of ‘taking film seriously.’.