National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1933 - Dec 1935)

May, 1933 5 He was enthusiastic, he loved the movie. There was another man, Poirier, one of the finest of the French directors ; another the late Louis Delluc, really the pioneer in the new French forms, and another was Moissinac, a critic. They formed the first Film Club. From the first Film Club many have derived. In France itself in 1929, when I was there, there were probably a dozen by various names, some of them fantastic affairs to which people came simply to have fights, where they would debate the merits of the particular film shown. There the young Frenchmen, who always like to squabble, could get up and call the others names. I remember one incident where one man got up and said not only was the picture rotten but the piano player was just as bad. Actually what evolved was either this kind of vandalism or the tendency to create the cult. We have had cults in America, the cult of Caligari, for instance. I agree with Moissinac that this film is a date and not a milestone. There have been other cults. The French began the Charlie Chaplin cult. They went into the special cult, which may amuse Americans, of the art of the American film. The favorite picture in France today, the favorite artistic film, is generally an American one, and what we consider here trash, aesthetically or ethically reprehensible, will be exhibited in Paris as art. There was a picture A Girl in Every Port, a Victor McLaglen picture. There were some young and lovely women in the film and the picture was clever and well timed, so it became an art film, and in one of the leading highbrow periodicals in Paris there was a review in which Victor McLaglen was called "un grand artiste." Anyone who knows him knows he is only and always Victor McLaglen. This sort of exoticism is in the French Film Club, and we have the same attitude here in America toward the foreign product. The film club came to America not as the film club. It was carried over in its diluted form, the little cinema. What happened in those places in America "dedicated" to the little cinema? We had one cult, the Ufa cult. All the films from the studio of Ufa — which in early days produced films like The Last Laugh, still one of the greatest pictures ever made — were called art in America. Finally even the critics got wise to it, so that they began to pan the little cinemas. Today we can hardly speak of them as little cinemas ; they are houses showing foreign products, sometimes good pictures. Nevertheless, we can accredit the little cinemas for introducing to American audiences some of the leading films that have been made which otherwise would never have entered America. I may say also for the film club that a great director, perhaps not great, but certainly important, Rene Clair, the young Frenchman, is decidedly a product of the film club movement. The film club has come into America and that is what concerns us. The film club has come into America as a growth of the original film club idea — for instance, the Film Forum and the Film Society, and as a member of both I consider them from the same standpoint, not by what they are doing so early in their careers, but what they must do if they are to observe the organic principle of the film club, and that is, that the film club has its ultimate justification only when it recognizes itself as an educational forum. That is why I am justified in bringing the film club into this discussion. I want to oppose in this discussion the cult idea of the film club, where gentlemen and ladies in high hats and evening gowns are shown Mickey Mouse to satisfy their sense of the exquisite. I oppose also the Messianic filmcult which thinks that the movie is a thing absolute and apart, that has no relation to other arts or has no relation to life. We have had much writing in which the whole tendency is to say that the movie is pure only when it has no relation to anything else. We have to fight both the populist cult and the Messianic cult. The movie is not