Abstract

Orwell is not known as a film critic. But he was excited by the possibilities of film as a medium and what he described, in his essay ‘New Words’, as its ‘almost limitless powers of representation’. Orwell was intensely alive to the potential of film. The positive facet was its unprecedented flexibility and power as a medium and its potential for remaking the way we see the world.
Equally he was alive to the negative reading of the role of film: its role as a mechanical art in the promotion of escapism, the subordinate role of the writer in the process of film production, and its undermining of the audience for literature.