Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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THE FILM ABROAD FILMS IN PARIS ALEXANDER WERTH The death of the avant garde movement is an old story, but its tragedy still clings to all consideration of French cinema. Nowhere is the victory of cheap commercialism so resented and the outlook of directors so hopeless. The French avant gardists were innocents. They built a school of cinema, and the films of Cavalcanti, Clair, Epstein and Jean Renoir created a specialized but powerful audience. Both the distributors who handled them and the little theatres which showed them prospered. Unfortunately, the distributors and the exhibitors made money and they used it to go utterly commercial. The directors were abandoned. The specialized audience was abandoned for the boys and girls of the boulevards. That specialized audience has disappeared. Complacent theatre directors tell you so. The best film of the moment is Jean Vigo's Atalante, partly financed, they say, by Vigo himself. A great mistake the Film Society not taking last season 2jro de Conduite, his satire of school life, and one they must make up for this year. Vigo is young, and at 26 his style has not yet matured, but he is strangely fanciful — with little outbursts of surrealist imagery that mark him a poet. Fritz Lang's latest film Liliom is out. It appears under Pommer's production but, as Pommer was ill most of the time, the film is very much Lang's. This is a fairly ordinary account of the tale in which Liliom, the tough of the sideshows, lives and loves and fights his way to an early death, ascends into heaven, and is given his day on earth after sixteen years in purgatory to make amends. The heaven scenes are in the manner of Metropolis. Angels sit amphitheatre fashion on clouds with stars twinkling about, and judgment is a star-dusted version of the police court Liliom abandoned below. This Sunday school dream is presented literally, without poetry or satire or fun. But the film is well made and, as to trick work, excellent. Lang got his Hollywood contract on this. By coincidence Marie by Fejos, with Annabella, has just come in from Hungary, with the self-same theme. Marie, the little girl with the illegitimate baby, is hunted and harried from door to door, till, when the baby is taken away from her, she too dies and ascends into a star-dusted heaven. There is word of Marie going to the London Academy, though the English censorship ordinarily bans all 30