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come to consist of a large number of different scenes most of which had a title in front or an inserted title of spoken words. These titles could not be inserted in the negative because in the case of foreign orders the titles had to be in the language of the country in which they were to be shown. There was, therefore, for every picture negative, a roll of negative titles for each of the countries who ordered prints. A quite elaborate system of signals painted on the negative where each title was to come had to be evolved, for you could not expect an examining-room girl to know how to insert, say, each Russian title in the proper place or even right way up.
The same applied (only more so!) to films which were printed in different sections on variously coloured celluloid. For convenience the sections of any one colour were grouped and printed together. They had to be separated afterwards and assembled according to a similar signalling system. It required some thinking out, but, once established, the system worked without any difficulty.
I have now got to a place — its date is somewhere in 1908 — where my reconstituted diary shows a jumble of events with very little sequence and several completely blank pages. It could perhaps be taken apart and its contents fitted together again in order of time and little watertight compartments, but that would, I think, rob them of both significance and interest. Order of date is all very well for people with Catalogue minds' but order of events is much more important, for dates are stupid things; they merely follow one another like convicts walking in line, but events act and re-act together and flash their influence to and fro almost endlessly.
It is most likely that the blankness of the pages is due to the hiatus which must have occurred at this time. The original studio and all the work-rooms had been destroyed by fire and were now being rebuilt; the second studio, nearly double its size, had had its foundations cut out and its walls were going up as rapidly as could be expected, but the little ants' nest had been badly disturbed and with all the industry in the world it is clear that there must have been considerable interruption in its output.
There must have been a time when from the present point of view, nothing of importance was happening, and from the scanty records that I am able to piece together, I can find very little except trivialities, which are scarcely worth recording here. We
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