4 MARCH 1995, Page 40

Careless talkies cost wives

Michael Hulse

THE FILM EXPLAINER by Gert Hofmann, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann Secker & Warburg, £9,99, pp. 250 He's going to be a poet one day,' says Karl Hofmann in this novel, biogra- phy, or whatever it is. 'He's already got the self-pity for it.' He's talking about his grandson Gert, the author of this book. Gert Hofmann, I suspect, was in his turn indulging in a sly swipe when he coined the mot, since he had been the target of his son Michael's acrimony — self-pitying, I've no doubt, from the father's point of view — in a poetry book of that title. The more we learn about the Hofmann dynasty, the more they emerge as men of tart words and insight, thin skins, and self-dramatisation.

The Film Explainer is not so much a fiction as a long and sustained portrait of

the author's grandfather, told with deft subtlety through Gert Hofmann's memo- ries of early boyhood, the conversations of adults, the half-comprehensions of the child. In the small provincial town of Lim- bach in Saxony, Karl Hofmann is paid a pittance to provide commentary on the action in silent films. Passing references to Hitler's birthday and the occupation of the Rhineland mark the advance of the talking picture era, the obsolescence of Grand- father's job. The writing is on the wall, no longer on the screen. Herr Theilhaber, the owner of the Apollo cinema, buys in the machines he needs for sound and cuts the film explainer's duties to two days a week, then one, then none.

Grandfather Hofmann is a self- important character with self-centred wants:

He craved better teeth with which to chew his bacon, more hair to comb and some more reliable equipment to stick into Grand- mother and Fraulein Fritsche who lived by the sewage works.

He smells, has a war wound which he'll let Grandson or provincial Nazis see, and thinks his cinema jobbing makes him an artist, an opinion Grandmother heartlessly jibs at sharing: 'He's not just an artist with- out any bread, he's an artist without any art,' she observes.

The age of talkies (which Michael Hof- mann, in one of several rather odd compro- mises with the German language, renders as 'sound-films') begins at Theilhaber's Apollo with The Jazz Singer, aptly enough. I confess this made me wonder. It isn't possi- ble to date this exactly, but the evidence seems to point to some time in 1936 or even later, by when the aversion to Negermusik (nigger music, as ja77 was known in Weimar and Nazi times) would have made Jolson's classic an unlikely choice — not least since Theilhaber was himself Jewish. But then, maybe he chose the world's first talkie precisely because it starred another Unterrnensch: the late Gert Hofmann, one of the finest German novel- ists of recent years, was a master of indirec- tion.

At any rate, Grandfather is certain that the talkies will never catch on. The silent movies are his life, his raison d'etre. The novel is crammed with summaries of plots, and some of them are truly bizarre. In The Doll, for instance, a shy young man afraid of marriage takes refuge in a cloister, where he marries a doll which

turns out to be a pretty young lady instead, and he has to lie down in a bed with the young lady and be happy.

Small wonder, say I, that Grandmother is sceptical of her husband's refusal to live in the real world: 'What is it that makes a grown man scuttle of to the cinema and invent stories?' But Grandfather knows that it is the thought of Pola Negri, Asta Nielsen or Greta Garbo that keeps him going.