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THE LAST OF THE SILENTS.
So the last of Inner-London's silent cinemas has gone. The construction of a News Reel theatre on the site of the little Gaiety Cinema in Tottenham Court Road shatters what, for hundreds of London movie fans was a sentimental link with the past.
Many of us had a strange affection for this little cinema. Situated in the West End, flanked on all sides by far more expensive rivals announcing " hundred-per-cent." talkies, it steadfastly ignored the march of progress, and although the months ran into years none but silent films flickered across its battered but honoured screen.
It is doubtful if the Gaiety changed much from the day it was built to the day of its death. The creaky piano, usually the sole accompaniment to the pictures, the back row of seats covered with dainty if dusty bits of lace, the film breaks at crucial moments, the sensational challenging posters out front — all this took us back to a period long before the talkies arrived.
And the films ! The Gaiety was .a joy for the connoisseur, for without warning you would notice one day that some almost forgotten epic of the great German era was shewing. And black-hatted intellectuals would rub shoulders with the denizens of Tottenham Court Road's back streets, admiring the genius of Pabst and the artistry of Brigitte Helm.
And then perhaps an unknown French or Italian production would send us scampering along in keen anticipation. Russian films were shewn too> — The End of St. Petersburgh ran for a fortnight. American railroad dramas with middle-West settings, thrilling exploits of Harry Peel, the German stunt king, revivals of incrediblv ancient Chaplins — you never knew what you would get next at the Gaiety.
And now it has gone and a big slice of the past has gone with it.
R. Bond.
SPECTATORS' GROUPS IN AMERICA.
The film club, begun in France after the war by men like that lamented missionary of the film-as-art, Canudo, has at last reached the shores of the United States. North America had already inaugurated a film-exhibition body in Mexico City ; the commercial offspring of the film club, "the little cinema," had been Americanized and demoralized; individuals had projected their careers in corporate guilds and the like ; but the non-ulterior film club had really never been adopted in these Yankee provinces. And then — almost simultaneously — two appear, the Film Society and the! Film Forum, the latter the larger body in anticipated membership. There is no competition between these two groups, indeed several individuals are associated with both, either officially or unofficially,