Pair and Panorama: Henry Green’s Cinematic Modernism

We can better understand Henry Green’s underappreciated late modernist comedy Party Going (1939) by acknowledging its debt to the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. This essay argues specifically that Green’s narrative refracts the abrupt shifts in scene and perspective that constitute shot/reverse shot editing, a staple of 1930s narrative film. By situating Party Going in relation to Edmund Gréville’s British film Brief Ecstasy (1937), the essay demonstrates how Green appropriates the narrow frame of shot/reverse shot—canonically used as a means of depicting two characters in conversation—and widens the frame to engage a greatly enlarged visual universe. This widening makes possible a more expansive set of perspectives, providing what the essay terms dynamic viewpoint. Through this technique, Green orchestrates a narrative of unstable perspectives and ambiguous meanings, simultaneously commenting on the precarities of British life in the politically and socially fraught 1930s and establishing a critical distance from the Hollywood films whose visual language he both appropriates and reformulates for his own distinct purposes.