A Shorter History of the Cinema, Part One.

The old Radio Theatre in Bowen Lane had heavy leather-faced seats that clunked up at the end of screenings as cinemagoers exited their seats, creating a kind of mechanical applause. The small cinema had been built in the 1940s to screen technical teaching films for science and engineering students. When I came along in 1975 the campus's technical functions had largely been supplanted by the new arts courses. Suddenly there was a thing called cinema studies. The first film screened that year was a master study in human nature made at the dreg-end of the 1960s by Sydney Pollack, its title being the rationalisation used by one character to murder another: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Then the journey began. We went back to Lumiere and rolled into a new century with Méliès, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (18-year-old students were adults in 1975 and consequently able to deal with controversy); Lloyd and Chaplin; the Soviet Eisenstein and early American and European directors.

We arrived at the end of the golden era of silent movies; F. W. Murnau's Sunrise a creation of such beauty and terror it would be impossible for anyone seeing the film on a large screen in a darkened cinema to ever forget the terrified woman floating to certain death on a raft of reeds in its dramatic climax. What followed the silent era was something of an immediate disappointment. It's hard for a contemporary audience to understand how. The answer was in the refined and often beautiful and metred (sometimes melo-) dramatic interplay between image, music and subtitle of the silent era. Scriptwriters took time to adjust to the new 'talkie' form; dialogue often appearing banal. Film editors probably faced the most difficult task. And some actors were revealed to have unattractive voice pitch or accent.