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*WE TURN TO HISTORY
From the clangorous and peptonized horror of American civilization the camera is turning to the gracious beauty of a romantic past. Gangsters give place to barons, showgirls to royal mistresses. The chattering of the machine-gun will no longer spit across the soundtrack; the screen will be filled with the patterns of epee and sword. Thus we may escape into a past seen through the rose-dim spectacles of nostalgia for a saner world.
But that gives no renewed invigoration for the struggle against values which would reduce our world to a shallow farce, a struggle to make strength and intellect and beauty the common heritage of mankind. The past is a tissue as complex and as splendid as the present; but the interpretations of the past are not the meanings we can put to the same things to-day. We solve our ancestors' problems; for those of to-day we have no precedent. Of what importance to us is finesse in love-making — the deceptions of an immoral game of sex played among the dust-smeared gilt of baroque obscenities — or a code which loosed slaughter and rape over Badajoz and Drogheda, or a sincerity which lit the fires of persecution throughout Europe?
Gin and kisses become romantic in periwigged heroes. Make gin and loveless kisses harmless by every means. The audience cannot project the unclean powder and curls of the eighteenth century or the splashed and dirty velvets of Henry VIII into its daily life. But a vicarious enjoyment of "selfishness, cruelty, ingratitude and sensuality, and the grossness of the King's manners," to quote a review, will not teach an audience self-respect. Historical films will not contribute the slightest inspiration to the people of to-day. Romance is not a value of life. It is an attitude of escape from reality. Reality for us is our civilization, with its amazing material progress, its striving for a clearer vision and a new scale of values to replace those destroyed by the war. We escaped into that stabler world in Cavalcade] a mild regret — what else was left? Let us have films which keep our world before us ; the faith of the propagandist and the honesty of documentary side by side with American satire. Only when we cannot grasp the complexity of our civilization, the achievements of which we are so proud, as well as the flaws which deface them, will we turn to romance for escape. History is the stuff of our past; but the romantic history of the film is the dressing up of a child who suffers from inferiority, an unworthy escape from ourselves and our civilization. Thomas Simms.
* A reply to Philip Lindsay. See "The Camera Turns on Histon," Cinema Quarterly, Autumn, 1933.
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