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Above: A scene from the Svenska Film, “The Carrousel,” with its pretty Norwegian star, Egede Nissen. Right: An English picture made from Poe’s “The Sign of the Four,” a Stoll Film
Above: A tense moment from a Gaumont Film called “The Spy.” These anxious ladies are sending thought waves to someone in distress. Right is a bit from the prolog of the Russian picture, “The Burning Bush”
Foreign Films
FRANCE
THE suspension of the showing of “The Birth of A Nation” in Paris by order of the Prefecture of Police, followed a few days later by a reversal of this decision and by permission to continue the showing, is an incident so typical of the moving-picture situation in France as to merit comment here. It is more than a mere bureaucratic gesture on the part of the authorities. It is more than a mere effort to ‘discountenance the attempt, made so often lately by Americans in Paris, to encourage a prejudice against the negro. The halting of Griffith's classic holds the key to the film situation in
France, a situation still very obscure to American producers who look to that country as a market for their wares and who are often confronted with what to them appears to be a baffling manifestation of French temperament in business matters. The fact is that the film “business” has never really become a business in France, in the sense that it is a business in the United States. Before the war, while America was still experimenting with technique and producing puerile pictures, the French were turning out artistic films constructed on classic literary lines. This adherence to the literary tradition in story and treatment, with a consistent attempt to make them true to life, made it easy for the French public to accept the movie as one of the arts, to be submitted to the same tests as a good book or a good play. They treated a picture as tho it were a representation of life and criticized it as such, and this attitude on the part of the public has remained unchanged even today.
A film audience in Paris is therefore psychologically very dif^ ferent from a film audi
ence in New York. While American producers are able to put over practically any fantasy or any departure from truth, the French encounter very lively hostility the moment they rub the public the wrong way, for the public regards a picture not only as an entertainment but a document reflecting life. One must have heard a French moving-picture audience hiss or boo or witnessed one of the not-infrequent manifestations in an auditorium to realize how true this is. French producers or exhibitors
(Twenty-four)