THE EXTRAORDINARY PROFESSION
History of The Film: By' Matiric.e Bardeche and-Robert Brasil',
Translated and edited by Iris Barry. (Allen and Unwin. )
Dm you know that talkies were exhibited at the.Paris Exposit on of r9oo ; that American movie producers opened. titeir studios in California only so as to escape process-servers and be able to disappear over the Mexican border at a moment's notice ; that Charlie Chaplin began by wearing a forked beard and Harold Lloyd was first known as Lonesome Luke ; that The Italian Straw Hat was Clair's sixth film ; that in the uncensored version of Shoulder Arms the Allies gave Charlie Chaplin a banquet after his capture of the Kaiser " and the King of England creeps up and sneaks a button off his uniform as a souvenir " ; did you know . . . ? One could go on a long while recounting the information, astonishing and bizarre,
contained in this history book.
But their account of what the authors rightly call an " extra- ordinary profession " has higher merits—rare quality in books on the film—it is well and wittily written : the authors don't take their subject too seriously, and no one before them has evoked so delicately' and delightfully the world of the early film before the industry had developed along monstrous lines. We read of Bathing Beach in 1895 (a critic wrote of " the marvellous realism of an unmistakably genuine ocean ",\, and of little pictures of M. Ltuniere's home life. " Beside a pool in the garden, Mme. Lumiere, in a tussore dress with a polka-dot bodice and a sailor hat tilted over her forehead, fishes for goldfish with a roguish air. Under an arbour at the end of the garden, Auguste Lumiere and his friend Mr. Trewey play piquet and drink their beer." Who could have foreseen from these honest beginnings the epics of Mr. de Mille and the publicised malapropisms of Mr: Goldwyn ? The fur dealers and old-clothes men had not yet taken over : the camera was still in the hands of its inventors—cultivated men with quiet domestic imaginations.
As a history of the film the book contains triany errors—the editor corrects some of them in footnotes. A distortion is due to the date (1935) when it was written, before the resur - rection of the French film, but most mistakes can be put down to lack of English. (a handicap when writing of talkies) and to the quota limits of the authors' knowledge. The English cinema is completely ignored ; the name of the pioneer, Friese-Greene, seems unknown to patriots who dwell lovingly on Lumiere, and the work of Grierson, Balcon, Victor Savile, Hitchcock receives no notice. Granted that we rank a long way after America, France, Germany and Russia, could not room have been found for us with Norway, Holland and Denmark ? As criticism we may sometimes quarrel with the authors' predilection for the artistic and the literary, which makes them value Lang's Nibelungen over his M (though I hardly think it is the duty of their editor to " put them right in dogmatic footnotes), but as a record of the French cinema— and of the silent film generally—the book is admirable. Their quick surrealist-trained eye picks out the vivid detail, their comparisons—like that of Abel Gance with Victor Hugo— are illuminating, and they write with candour and panache (take their verdict on de Mille's huge cliche-crowded talent —" He shares with the Italian film-producers the responsibility of having been the spiritual ally of the financiers."
In some ways it is a sad book—a record of wasted oppor-
tunities : of debauched talents : of fine hopes dwindling down to a million dollars, and many readers will feel sympathy for the authors' lament at the end of the classic silent age : " Even today it is questionable whether it is possible to lo, the film sincerely unless one knew it in the silent days, in those last years which are inseparable from the days of one's youth. The Germans, the Russians, the French, the Americans and the Swede, had etched unforgettable shadows on the screen. . . . Thefaces of men and women had learnt to be expressive in those mute ilisanas by the aid of no more than an eyelid, the flicker of a glance. . . • We -demanded emotions and dreams, passion and suffering, and felt no need for words. There were quite ordinary films in which the extinguishing of a lamp at some window; a figure emerging from the mist pale and formless as a drowned body, the bend .'t a river revealing a road between two rows of trees, furnished 11' with that unique sensation of shock which a glimpse of an unknov, world provides. Those actors, so well adapted to express subletit • those plots which were of necessity so clear and so brief, may be forgotten in the future. But we who witnessed the birth of art may possibly also have seen it die."
GRAHAM GREENE.
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