HIDDEN CORNERS
in focus
Francine Stock selects her personal favourites from the Cinematograph collection of titles in Science & Miscellaneous
Nestling in Science & Miscellaneous, beginning with Harold Lloyd, as he clutches at a clock-face above Manhattan traffic in Safety Last!, and ending with Gelsomina, gazing wide-eyed at Zampano the strongman in Federico Fellini’s La Strada, lies Cinematograph, buffered by Chronology and Circus. It’s an intriguing rather than a comprehensive collection. Like cinema itself over the past 120 years, it flourishes in distinct epoques. Certain directors command several inches of shelf – Ingmar Bergman, René Clair, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock – directors who most
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probably reflect the tastes of The London Library users – Andrei Tarkovsky, yes, but Quentin Tarantino, not so much … and Michael Bay not at all. Among several François Truffaut books in this section is a collection of interviews and his book on Hitchcock. (Antoine de Baecque’s study of the life of Truffaut himself, published in 1996, is in Biography, however, as are his letters to Renoir in Letters: Jean Renoir, published in 1994.) There are studies of national cinema – including Russia, India, Canada, Mexico, Iran – and collections of the great film writers, supple, sharp or sententious, from James Agate and
James Agee through Graham Greene and Pauline Kael to Andrew Sarris. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are so many published scripts of all kinds of films – Harold Pinter’s 1990 take on Ian McEwan in Venice, The Comfort of Strangers (delivering, like Christopher Walken to Rupert Everett, a sudden punch to the solar plexus); Fellini’s young bucks in Rimini, I Vitelloni – in Italian, naturally (in Quattro Film, 1974) – or Shane Meadows’ northern boxing-club drama Twentyfourseven (1998). In an age when pirated versions of contemporary scripts turn up in shoals on the internet, it’s good to see these bound texts with gold-lettered spines stand solid against the vagaries of fashion and boxoffice success or failure, director’s cuts and DVD release. None is more impressive, arguably, than the hefty annotated volume of JeanPaul Sartre’s screenplay for John Huston’s film Freud. This you can browse either in English (The Freud Scenario, trans. Quintin Hoard, 1985) or the original French, published in 1984. Editor JeanBertrand Pontalis (a former pupil of Sartre) provides what can be reassembled of this grand projet of the 1950s: synopsis, first version (1959), second version (1960), and a comparative table. Huston did indeed make a film in 1962, Freud: The Secret Passion, with Montgomery Clift as the Doctor and Susannah York as Cecily (an amalgam of early cases, including Anna O.), but that carries no screen credit for Sartre. The story of the script-that-never-was would make a film itself. What a team they promised to make – one of America’s most virile directors, Oscar-winner for Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), in creative partnership with the Marxist philosopher superstar, with a demonstrable pulling power that relied on neither fox-hunting
