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 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 Jean- Paul 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 Jean- Bertrand 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 nor boxing. Huston proposed the project; Sartre delivered a synopsis, thought some more (lots more), then delivered an initial draft. This combination of action and reflection might well have proved an exemplar of dialectal scenario writing. It turned out a disaster.

The first draft was ‘as thick as my thigh’ , claimed Huston; it threatened to run over seven hours. Sartre and Huston spent weeks together at St Clerans, Huston’s Irish country house. Despite their mutual enthusiasm for booze, women and introspection, they failed to connect or make progress. In Huston’s retelling, it was mainly Sartre who did the talking, minutes at a time without cease or apparent acknowledgement. ‘There was no such thing as a conversation with him, ’ Sartre in turn confided to Simone de Beauvoir; he found Huston lacking in concentration, easily bored, perpetually distracted.

He was unimpressed by the household, too: ‘everybody dead, with frozen complexes. ’ At one point (and Mel Brooks could hardly have made this up) Huston attempted to hynoptise Sartre. ‘Hypnotically impregnable, ’ conceded the man who could stare a lion in the eye before shooting it.

Freud is an anomaly in Huston’s output, a sombre oddity between The Misfits and The Night of the Iguana and, despite the lack of credit for Sartre, the links between his vision and Huston’s are apparent. Huston’s picture is in black and white with a leaner narrative, voiceover from Huston himself and expressionistic dream sequences, while Sartre’s dream scenes in his screenplay are altogether more elaborate and occasionally in colour. Both versions feature significant architecture, of course; for Sartre, it’s a lighthouse – ‘Perfectly round and of considerable height, it is also evocative of a phallic symbol. Behind the tower, a marvellously calm, green sea, with a little white foam on the crests of small waves. ’ And so on.

By absurd comparison, a decade and a half later comes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘description’ (he makes the distinction from literary work) of his film Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir (no translation necessary), published in 1974. Studded with black-and-white stills from the production, this is the story, though narrative is clearly superfluous here, of two barely clad women, murder, a suggestion of witchcraft, a detective and a prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Michael Lonsdale) and even a very young Isabelle Huppert as a student. Much of the action, if that’s a fair description of tableaux interspersed with glances and a bit of stroking, is set in a convent prison. Meanwhile in Britain we were making Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

Freud’s theories and cinema had grown together, his publications in the 1890s coinciding with the early public screenings. Just 20 years on, a popular manual for those wishing to take up the newest art was The Cinematograph Book: A Complete Practical Guide to the Taking and Projecting of Cinematograph Pictures (1915), of which the Library has a 1916 edition with half-tone plates and line drawings of remarkable clarity, even if baffling to a modern reader (but not half as baffling as the inside of a digital camera would be).

The tone of the editor Bernard E. Jones is brisk but kind: ‘A scenic subject is suggested as a good one for the novice because the work will be more like ordinary photography, and there will be no embarrassment from the necessity of following energetic action. ’ Once he gets over this initial reticence, however, Jones presents plenty on exposure and f-stops, printing positive film and eventual projection, with diagrams to explain the mysterious Demeny’s Dog Movement (Georges Demeny was Leon Gaumont’s partner in the short-lived manufacture of the Bioscope in 1895) to allow for optimum projection. Are there many things more fascinating than detailed illustrations for manoeuvres no one (or only a very few historical specialists) may ever make again? Or the unsettling evangelism of ‘singing poet’ Vachel Lindsay, writing The Art of the Moving Picture in Springfield, Illinois (also in 1915), exhorting film-makers, warriors for this ‘new weapon of men’ , to be ‘delivered from the temptation to cynicism and the timidities of orthodoxy … Every year, despite earthly sorrow and the punishment of your mortal sins, despite all weakness and all of Time’s revenges upon you, despite Nature’s reproofs and the whips of the angels, new visions will come, new prophecies will come. ’

A more measured enthusiasm runs through Edward Carrick’s Designing for Moving Pictures, donated to the Library on its publication in 1941. Carrick was the son of Edward Gordon Craig, grandson of Ellen Terry. The title was No. 27 in the ‘How to Do It’ series issued by Studio Publications. Other volumes included Figure Drawing, Embroidery Design and Making Pottery. You’d imagine that this would be a gentle introduction for the weekend crafters and the cine-camera amateurs. Carrick however was a successful art director, working for Basil Dean on Lorna Doone in 1934 and Carol Reed on Midshipman Easy in 1935; he also provided suitably ominous surroundings for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Dolores del Rio as Apache dancers caught up in a murder in Accused from 1936. Despite his knowhow, there’s no trace of condescension; Carrick sets no limit to the ambition of the ‘yes, do please try this at home’ approach. Among subsections on ‘set-dressing: mist, treetops and cobwebs’ or ‘stones and trees of plaster’ , he shares his experience of providing a three-masted vessel in the open sea for Midshipman Easy.

Carrick believed real skies would prove better than a studio backdrop, but the ocean was impractical (and too expensive) so he built a 45-foot-high scaffolding platform on the lot (high enough to clear sightlines from trees and buildings) and built the ship on top of it, ‘much to the amusement of the townspeople, who could see the ship, as it were, sailing over the roof-tops from almost any house in the town’ . Other tips for the amateur include glass shots (painting a scene on to a piece of glass and combining that with live action so figures would appear to be in an exotic location, for less expense than a lavish set) and, my favourite, the Schufftan Process named for the cameraman on the proto-noir Quai des Brumes (1938). A scale model or image of a location, a silvered piece of glass at 45 degrees to the camera, some judicious scraping … and you can add a roof to a ruined castle, merge a tank of water with the sky.

Aside from the make-do-andmend derring-do, what makes Carrick’s observations so appealing is his manifest love for the medium. As he says in the Foreword: ‘Don’t come into Film at all unless you are also going to help wholeheartedly to make it the greatest medium of expression that man has ever handled.’

This inclusive enthusiasm is striking in writing on film from the first half of the twentieth century, even if the promise of film’s greatness also carries concerns about its effect. There were moral panics over moving pictures well before the age of video nasties. Jacob Peter Mayer’s Sociology of Film from 1946 contains testimonies from filmgoers of all ages of the impact that the screen had on them, although the welfare of children in the face of mass entertainment is clearly a preoccupation for the author. Mayer, who was a refugee from Germany, managed to produce this study between weightier work on Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber.

It’s a bizarre work, interspersing first-hand filmgoers’ accounts with lengthy quotes (without translation) from de Tocqueville and other experts such as the French critic Albert Thibaudet. These lofty observations might bump up against the opinions of children from Hampstead and North Paddington as to their favourite animal film, or an office clerk on the incidence of new technologies (automated mortuary drawers in medical drama, the Dictaphone in Double Indemnity, and so on) that had most impressed him.

On the whole, the picture-goers consider themselves influenced mainly by hair, clothes or etiquette. (A 28-year-old, who had been an engineer in wartime, and before that had spent nine years in the hotel trade, admits: ‘Ramon Navarro was a great influence on my trying to be chivalrous, polite and understanding to women. ’) Sometimes, though, the testimonies are more intimate – through observations they make about what happens on the screen, people reveal themselves: a 20-something ended an affair with a married man after a viewing of Back Street, which proved more influential than her friends’ advice; a 49-year-old wife had taken great strength from Jane Eyre’s devotion to the challenging Mr Rochester as demonstrated by Joan Fontaine in the 1943 film with Orson Welles: ‘I decided to love my husband like that whatever he did to upset me … in consequence he has become more faithful to me. That film helped me more than any sophistry could have done. ’ Then, as an aside, she mentions a recent viewing of Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942): ‘I often have dreams in which I am in the icy water clinging to the side of the upturned boat. In my dream I am never saved, but sink down, gasping, to the bottom. ’

Censorship stalks these pages (and the shelves). Mayer deplores that American and British authorities suppressed The Forgotten Village (1941), a study in so-called ‘ethnofiction’ , set in Mexico, scripted by John Steinbeck, for its scenes of childbirth and breastfeeding. He’s all for film as education, admiring the Soviet system of showing films in schools, but is also terrified about its effects if commercial interests dominate what children, in particular, watch. A State Distributing Corporation might ensure less Hollywood and more from Russia and France, he suggests. Otherwise, ‘if we persist in our academic remoteness from film as mass- influence, the doom of our civilisation is certain’ .

As these shelves demonstrate, film certainly proved a fertile patch for academic study, in further education if not in schools. But did that banish remoteness? Arguably, the pursuit of film studies at its worst turned in on itself, with its own language, sacred cows and roped-off territories as inaccessible to the average cinema-goer as the most paternalistic of early film commentaries. The collection is a good reminder of how, at best, film writing is inclusive.

A book published a dozen years ago (and not so easy to find outside the Library), Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, edited by Antonia Lant with Ingrid Periz, is a glorious demonstration of accessible, informed comment, with scores of contributions from Colette to Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West to the poet Bryher, as well as practitioners like early screenwriters Clara Beranger and Anita Loos.

Bryher has her own volume on the shelves from 1929. Two years earlier, she had set up the film journal, Close Up, with her intimate associates, Kenneth Macpherson and Hilda Doolittle. Her enquiry, Film Problems of Soviet Russia, begins with an arresting account of a flight to Berlin to see a number of Russian films (at this point, she admits, her total experience had been of just four). Some time into the flight, the plane developed a fault; she understood the crew to say that they would crash. At that moment, gazing out of the window at a fast-approaching bank of trees, she recalled a shot from René Clair’s The Prey of the Wind. The plane eventually made its way to ground without casualties, and Bryher goes on to rhapsodise about the films she saw on her arrival, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, The Peasant Women of Riazan, directed by the former actor and stage manager Olga Priobrashenskaya, and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s treatment of Maxim Gorky’s 1906 story, Mother. Open up British cinemas to these films, she urges, they will not bring revolution. Train the critics, she exhorts, train audiences: let them demand more challenging fare than the standard British or American commercial offering. ‘For the moment the battle is to the spectator. Is he willing to allow a handful of individuals to deny him the intellectual liberty common to the Continent?’

The terms may have changed, the censors have been outrun, but look at the selection on the shelves of S. Cinematograph (and the choice at your local multiplex) and judge whether Bryher’s battle is yet over.