THE CINEMA.
CINEMA NOTES.
IT is a pity there have been so few good films this summer. If the American films due for release in the autumn—some of which are good and most of which I have seen privately a long while since—could not have been hurried along, might it not have been possible to show, in this slack summer season, The Fall of an Empress, a Roman spectacle originally called Messalina, which is now running in Paris ? Could no one have given us the German Taras Maim, which, from the photographs, looks not merely unusual but really well cast and produced, if a trifle blood-thirsty ? There are other German films which one would like to look at, such as Helen of Troy and Carlos and Elizabeth ; we know the Continent can make praiseworthy historical pictures, and it seems a pity we are not allowed to see them. Then, Mr. Cochran -promised us Violettes Imperiales for July : if he continues -to refuse to be a showman, may not someone else present it ? 'Raquel Meller, already familiar here as a diseuse, is said to have achieved a success in it both as actress and author, and the film has already had a run in Paris. Or was it im- .practicable to show us again some of the best old films, such as The Birth of a Nation, Robin Hood or Tor able David ?
Excepting two or three fairly good film-plays, which include The Bright Shawl, the careful adaptation of Hergesheimer's novel recently shown at the Marble Arch Pavilion, and Lucretia Lombard, this summer has produced little of interest save a quantity of excellent non-dramatic pictures, such as the series Cannibals of the Southern Seas, -which, intended to educate, do actually often give aesthetic pleasure as well. I have rarely noticed a more moving scene than a group of Papuan boys in the Cannibals series, bidding good-bye to their older brothers who were leaving for military service The unstudied abandon of grief, the -soft movements of bare brown limbs must have enchanted all those -who, like myself, saw the Papuans by hazard in an ordinary cinema. The Tivoli Cinema in the Strand, which has maintained an extra- ordinarily high standard since its opening, also gave us Trailing African Wild Animals, with its beautiful elephants, zebras, giraffes and apes ; the highly controversial Grindell-Matthews Death-Ray film, and, best of all, Pathe's Wembley. This film is exactly what both newly-arrived visitors to England and hardened Wembley enthusiasts needed to give them a real " sense " of the Exhibition as a whole, and to show them, in greater detail than the crowds allow one to enjoy on the ground itself, exhibits like the Queen's Doll's House and those :manifold processes of manufacture which are so inevitably interesting to us moderns with our highly-specialized and therefore limited experience of life. Great praise is due, too, to He and Ski, a happily photographed film with lovely snow scenes around St. Moritz as a setting for its dramatic paper- chase on skis. Apart altogether from dramatic and visual values, the cinema by means of films like these acts as a store- house of information wherein the individual may become familiar with the manifold habit of his, and, indeed, also of past, times—a function which has probably gained more adherents to the picture-screen even than the pleasure-giving or cathartic quality of its plays.
And as a compensation for one's discontent -with the dramatic side of the summer cinema, news comes that Mr. Geoffrey Moss has met Mr. D. W. Griffiths, oldest-established of all the seven film producers of outstanding talent, somewhere in Italy : that Mr. Moss has written a film-story, and that lkIr. Griffiths is probably going to begin producing -it at once, on the Continent. It is encouraging that this young English writer, probably independently, should have carried out the suggestion, recently made in these pages, that it is high time writers sought to interest themselves actively and at first- hand in cinematography, the newest and (I personally believe) at the moment the livest of the arts. It is by some such. liaison that future progress will be assured.
IRIS BARRY...
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