Skip to main content

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.

Comments

  1. That type of cinema is getting hard to find. I remember a movie theater on South Street in Philadelphia where I saw "The Thin Man"; it was wonderful. It's the best Christmas movie ever, never mind "Die Hard."

    ReplyDelete
  2. We seem to be losing our retro-movie specialist cinemas; my once-favourite being the Lumière in Lonsdale street where I saw a magnificent print of Le Mépris.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment