"A new form of true beauty": Aesthetics and Early Film Criticism

Talking in the Cinema

The German novelist Gert Hofmann's The Film Explainer (1990) is a semi-autobiographical account of Hofmann's grandfather, who was a film "lecturer" or "explainer" (and cinema pianist) in provincial Germany throughout the silent era and beyond. Finally made redundant in the early 1930s by the triumph of sound film, he defends his role to the cinema proprietor until the last: "I'm not superfluous. An audience needs someone to explain a film to them, at least its finer points. They have no idea what is contained in a film if you look at it closely, in every single shot. No, no, said Grandfather, that must be explained. Otherwise, it would be lost."¹ He is finally routed by a screening of The Jazz Singer (which arrives in the village some years after its U.S. premiere): "After a while, the film started talking again. It explained itself . . . Ridiculous, all that talking! Who does that in real life, whispered Grandfather, I certainly don't, and everyone shouted: Quiet! You're being a nuisance, Hindenburg! . . . . Anyway, instead of sitting and listening quietly, Grandfather talked and commented his way though the first sound-film ever shown at the Apollo in Limbach" (FE, 82–3).

As an increasing number of films start to talk, the grandfather retreats into silence. His "silent period" is broken by his attendance at local Nazi party meetings: "when the sound-film era began, I suddenly couldn't talk any more. I thought: There is no one left who is interested in your ideas. But now I'm talking again!" (FE, 177). In fact, what he wants to talk about are film-scenarios and a proposal for "the re-introduction of silent films in the context of national renewal" (FE, 179). In 1939, the old man is taken to Berlin with a local group to attend a Nazi rally, but, leaving his party and his veteran's flag behind, he slips into Berlin's empty Gloria Palais. "Then, before the film began – my first and last film in Berlin—said Grandfather—I played my life as a cinemagoer to my inner eye, beginning with my very first picture. Some went by quickly, some slowly, some completely stopped" (FE, 226). The film he saw "and was to rave about until his death was of course Gone with the Wind"; returning to the rally, he listens to Hitler, while thinking about Scarlett O'Hara. Not long after this, he is killed in an explosion in the cinema in his home town.

The novel-memoir ends with these words:

Grandfather at seventy said: In the beginning was the light. The light was switched off. I stood in front of the screen, all alone. I looked into the audience. There weren't many of them there. I gave the signal Go! He said: In all the films of that time, even if they played indoors, it rained. That was because the films had been damaged by the fingers of the projectionists. We lined the gate with black velvet to slow the film. Even that damaged it. Also, they got old and worn. Grandfather took me by the hand. He said it wasn't the shaking projection that made everything tremble. Nor was it people's breathing. It was the heartbeat of the man who was supervising everything, the film explainer's, mine.

(FE, 250)

The writer on cinema, in its first decades, was a "film explainer" of a very particular kind. "Discourse about the cinema" was the phrase Christian Metz used in his account of cinema's "third machine," the sphere, additional to those of the industry and the spectator, of the cinematic writer (critic, historian, theoretician).² Such discourse, inflected in very particular ways in the silent period, can, I would argue, be understood as a form of "talking in the cinema."

This is nicely literalized in the first English-language book of film theory, the American poet Vachel Lindsay's The Art of the Moving Picture, first published in 1915, and revised in 1922. In the revised version, Lindsay...