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A NOVELIST LOOKS AT THE CINEMA
LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON
Perhaps, in the interests of truth and alliteration, this should read A Philistine looks at the Films.
As becomes a good Scots novelist, I live in a pleasant village near London ; and, in the intervals of writing novels for a livelihood and writing history for pleasure, I attend of an evening the local cinema. It is popularly known as the bug house; the jest having long staled, there is no longer even a suggestion of vocal quotes around this insulting misnomer. For it is certainly a misnomer. The seats are comfortably padded, even for ninepence; a girl with trim ankles and intriguing curls comes round at intervals with a gleaming apparatus and sprays the air with sweet-smelling savours; the ashtrays are large and capacious; and it is amusing, in the intervals, to brood upon one's neighbours and consider the wild growth of hair which furs the necks of women who neglect the barber.
But at this point the Big Picture comes on. In the first hour we have witnessed two news reels; a speech by Signor Mussolini, simian and swarthy (why has Hollywood never offered him adequate inducements to understudy King Kong?) ; shots of a fire in a London factory, taken from the roof of a nearby building which was surely a public-house owned by a pressing philanthropist, so desperately poor is the photography and so completely moronic the camera-man in missing every good angle of vision; and No. CVII of Unusual Jobs, showing the day-to-day life of an Arizonan miner who has turned an empty gallery into a home for sick and ailing bats. Then has followed the Travelogue.
Travelogues in English bug houses (for I'll keep the homely misnomer) deal with only two portions of this wide and terrible planet of ours. We are never shown the Iguazu Falls or the heights of the Andes or the snows on Popocatepetl ; or North Africa and the white blaze of sunlight across Ghizeh; or S. Sophia brooding over Constantinople; or Edinburgh clustered reeking about its hill; or London in summer; or the whores' quarters in Bombay; or the bleak and terrible tracks that were followed by the Alaskan treks of '98; or Mohenjo-Daro, the cradle of Indian civilization; or the Manger in Bethelehem at Christmas time, with the pilgrims swop
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