2016 Essays

Beatrice Maude Tildesley

Matthews, Jill Julius

Beatrice Tildesley is a little known name. Her status as a woman, an Australian, and a critic has muffled any resonance in traditional film history. But in the 1920s and 1930s she had considerable influence as a leading member of Sydney’s cultural elite. She was one of very few Australian intellectuals to write seriously on the cinema and can lay claim to being the country’s foremost independent film critic and commentator for a decade beginning in the mid-1920s.