IT begins to look as if we will have to find a new explanation for the French. Since that would be difficult, I suggest that we hold fast to the old one, with variations. Let us continue to say that they are moribund and explain any outburst of activity as a death struggle. The last gasp. History provides plenty of precedent, and we who find pleasant things in their art and letters will rank ourselves with those cultivated persons who cannot begin to care for Latin until it becomes a highly corrupt language.
I do not know whether seeing new opportunities and developing them quickly are the best signs of degeneracy, for I seem to remember reading about these things in the advertisements, where nothing as irrevocable as degeneracy is permitted. The adaptability of the moving picture scenario to something besides moving pictures was a thing easy to guess; the thing has been done in both America and England in burlesque of the films—an adaptation requiring and receiving very little intelligence.
It may be slightly beside the point, but it is interesting to note that the cinema influence in literature in France is almost exactly opposite to what it is here. There it seems to make for brevity, hardness, clarity, brilliance. You will find it in the extraordinary stories of Paul Morand and Louis Aragon; and you will find in neither of these those characteristic sloppinesses which American authors are beginning to blame on the movies. If they would take the trouble of studying the pictures, instead of trying to make money out of them, and discover the elements in the cinema technique which are capable of making their own work fruitful, we might have better novels, and we certainly would have a few less bad pictures.
Two Frenchmen have, at the same time, used the scenario as a method of fiction, and each of them has written a highly ironic piece which is capable of being transferred to the film, but which reads sufficiently well to be considered as an end in itself.
Blaise Cendrars, poet, responsible for the Anthologie Nègre, is the author of La Fin du Monde and of La Perle Fièvreuse; the second of these is running as a serial in a Belgian magazine, Signaux. Both are called Novels; the third instalment of The Pearl adding the word cinematographic. The End of the World is a cosmic cinema-novel in fifty-five swift, concisely told scenes.
It deals with a sort of deity, resident on a planet accessible to all the mechanical comforts of this earth, who is induced to travel to Mars as a propagandist for his own religion. Like many propagandists he errs in his psychology and, in a Billy Sunday frenzy of the imagination, shows the Martians all the cruelties his religion is capable of. Too late he learns that “the Martians are disillusioned and confirmed pacifists, iodophages living on the peptonic vapours of human blood, but incapable of bearing the sight of the least cruelty.” The mission failing, he decides to make good on certain prophecies uttered in his name. The following scenes are left a little in the air; continuity is lacking. One begins again with the sculptured angel on Notre Dame blowing a blast on her trumpet and the whole world rushing towards Paris and crumbling into dust. Thereafter, with the aid of retarded and accelerated projection, we see the world slowly dissolving into its elements, through those stages so graphically presented to us by H. G. Wells. There is chaos, and then annihilation.
And then, by an accident in the projection room, the film begins to reverse and so, naturally, one gropes upward out of the slime and returns to the first scene—to which is added the single phrase “It’s bankruptcy.” It opens with the deity “at his American (roll-top) desk. He hastily signs innumerable letters. He is in his shirt sleeves with a green eye-shade on his forehead. He rises, lights a big cigar, looks at his watch, strides nervously up and down the room.... He makes notes on his pad and blows away the ash which falls from his cigar between the leaves. Suddenly he snatches the telephone and begins to ’phone furiously....”
That is American movie technique which M Cendrars has evidently learned all too well, because he uses it, in all its tedious detail, in La Perle Fièvreuse, for which he is publishing not a scenario but a director’s script, with the cutbacks and visions and close-ups all numbered and marked. It is in the manner of the old Biograph movies with what may turn out to be not such innocent fun at the expense of the detective film. Among its characters are Max Trick, director of Trick’s Criminal Courier, the great daily which specializes in criminal news. He is marked “Type: le President Taft” and is first shown in his office with twenty-five telephones in front of him; among his collaborators are Nick Carter and Arsène Lupin, Conan Doyle and Maurice Leblanc.
What Jules Romains has accomplished is much more remarkable, for he has pushed the method of the cinema forward a long and significant step, and, while using everything it can give, he has produced a first class work of fiction. The plot of Donogoo-Tonka you will see at once, is entirely suitable to filming; it is not perhaps suitable to commercial success, but that can be, if it isn’t, another matter.
It begins in Paris with the unfortunate Lamendin, who is about to commit suicide. A friend gives him a card with the legend: “Before committing suicide ... don’t fail to read the other side,” and on the reverse is the advertisement of Professor Miguel Rufisque, director of the Institute of Biometric Psychotherapy, who guarantees to give you, within seven days, a violent love of life. Lamendin goes to the consulting room and after a fantastic examination is given certain instructions which eventually land him in the library of Prof. Yves Trouhadec, a geographer. Trouhadec would be certain of election to the Geographic Institute if he hadn’t, many years before, placed on a map of South America the wholly imaginary town of Donogoo-Tonka, in the gold-mining area. Lamendin now proposes to float a company, start an expedition, and insure the Professor’s election by actually creating the place.
In the second reel Donogoo-Tonka is launched; in the third we have adventurers in all parts of the world preparing to rush the gold fields, while Lamendin tarries at home making fake moving pictures of the place. At the end of the reel the adventurers have penetrated into the heart of the South American desert and, too wearied to go forward, aware of the deception practised upon them, encamp where they are. Derisively they call the place Donogoo-Tonka.
Later, a second group of adventurers comes. They are disappointed in the look of the place. But they are interested to hear that gold is being found; and while Lamendin at last sets sail, the Donogoo-Tonka Central Bar and the London & Donogoo-Tonka’s Splendid Hotel are going up; it is obviously the intention of the earlier arrivals to mulct the later.
And then, of course, gold really is found in the river bed and the price of all provisions goes up fifty per cent.
Regrettably, en voyage, Lamendin tells his pioneers that Donogoo does not exist. On his arrival at Rio de Janeiro he receives a cable from the Professor, demanding immediate results; and as he turns in despair he reads the announcement by Agence Meyer-Kohn, of the next caravan to the gold fields of Donogoo-Tonka. He arrives; he takes possession; he founds an empire, in which the religion of Scientific Error is established. Trouhadec, still living, is deified; he becomes Trouhadec, Father of his Country. The utility of geography is one of the prescribed subjects for public lectures.
That is a slightly more intelligent plot than most of the adventure things one sees in the movies. It is in the detail and in the presentation of an idea, the idea of scientific error, that M Romains has pressed beyond the professional technique of the moving picture without once exceeding its natural limitations. For instance in the waiting room where Lamendin sits with the other would-be suicides:
“Absurdity, given off by so many brains, becomes palpable. One begins to distinguish a sort of very subtle exhalation which disengages itself from the human bodies and little by little charges the atmosphere.” The settings in this scene are very much in the manner of Caligari. Or there is the debate in the soul of Professor Trouhadec who knows that he will profit by a fraud. From the beginning the spectator must realize that the debate is only on the surface; that in his heart Trouhadec is going to accept; the spectator is to see him thinking of truth with a capital T and, much deeper down, of himself as a member of the Institute. Just as in the exploitation of Donogoo-Tonka we see a man coming up the steps of a subway station with the words Donogoo-Tonka written on every step; until, as he emerges, his skull ceases to be opaque, and we see the twelve little letters dancing in his brain. M Romains has even carried the thing over into Keystone farce, so sure is he of his medium. During one of the lectures “his eloquence is so persuasive, his thought opens such penetrating channels into human nature that, little by little, little by little, a soft down begins to sprout on the bald head” of a man in the audience. Ça c’est du Cinema, as M Cendrars says.
M Romains has also a complete understanding of projection. He protests, in a preface, against the monotonous speeding-up of pictures and urges that this one be taken and shown in the rhythm of ordinary life, with a shading toward slow, especially in the scenes “where the only events which pass before us are the thoughts of the characters” (required reading for Mr Griffith and Mr de Mille for one year is in those words). In the scenes which exploit the shares in Donogoo-Tonka we enter into the minds of individuals, of groups, of crowds; at the end the very framework of a building succumbs to the madness of the idea. And then, with a technical mastery not yet put into practise, M Romains directs that the various scenes just projected be shown again, side by side, with a gradually accelerated rhythm. In the scenes of the adventurers we get glimpses at Marseilles, London, Naples, Porto, Singapore, San Francisco; then we see the groups starting out; the lines of their voyage converge. These scenes are projected first in succession and then simultaneously. Each time we see them we recognize some of the individuals we have seen before. “And when by chance the faces are turned towards us, we have a feeling that they, too, recognize us.” The cinema has not yet accomplished that; chiefly, I fancy, because it never has been asked to.
M Romains is the prophet of unanisme, and it would be remarkable if he did not use the moving picture to push his point. The end of Donogoo-Tonka is pure poetry.
The horizon has receded before the Palace and the chief figures look out into a light which has its own laws. Paris appears deep in the background. “But so close, perhaps, that we are troubled to see it and would like to fall back a step.
“As if, yielding to friendly pressure, the world has renounced for one evening its concept of space and all its habits.”