The Film Renter and Moving Picture News (Jan-Feb 1923)

6 THE FILM RENTER & MOVING PICTURE NEWS. February 10, 1923. PUTTING HISTORY RIGHT. A Reply to W. Gavazzi King. (By G. A. ATKINSON, Kinema Correspondent, “Daily Express’ and ‘‘Sunday Express.’ ) “Mr. Atkinson appears to regard with equanimity, if not positive approval, the digressions of film producers from history in historical subjects. I do not. The film is now appealing to a larger and better class of patron. It is everywhere acclaimed as an educational agency. It should not, therefore, disseminate historical error nor historical incongruities. Failure to synchronise facts with the fiction of an historical film argues. . a deplorable literary deficiency.’’ Mr. W. Gavazzi Kino, General Secretary, C.E.A. R. E. A. BAUGHAN’S contribution in last week’s Fina Renter to this discussion on ‘‘ Entertainment Values plus Artistic Standards,’’ begs the whole question. He was invited to explain why he considered that entertainment values did not come within the scope of professional film criticism. This he has not done, and there is no reason why I should not explain his diffidence. He knows as well as I do that criticism whicli does not seek to interest the general newspaper reader, from the standpoint of entertainment values, is doomed. He represents a moribund school of journalism. Let me now turn, with due caution, to a more spirited controversialist, Mr. W. Gavazzi King. I know from past experience that it is usually unprofitable to cross swords with Mr. King. : I am not aware that I have any feelings, either of approval ov disapproval, when the film producer departs from whatever Mr. King may understand by the word ‘* history,’’ but I certainly experience the strongest sensations of disapproval when the film producer departs from the entertainment public’s conception of history. History: Popular and ‘‘ Educational.’’ When the film maker deals with Alfred the Great, I want to see that eminent man burning cakcs and going disguised a3 a minstrel into the camp of the Danes. The basis of either incident may be wholly unhistorical, but each is certainly history from an entertainment point of view, which is not necessarily the viewpoint of what Mr. King calls an ‘‘ educational agency:’’ When Elizabethan history is the subject, I want to see Raleigh spreading his cloak for the queen to walk over, and Drake calling for more beer and bowls as the Armada heaves in sight. These are the things which the popular mind.first recalls in connection with the reign of Queen Bess, and not all the conflagrations started by Mr. Blackton in the cause of art and education can make the popular mind think otherwise. It is noteworthy, hy the way, that Mr. Baughan, to whom entertainment value is an unknown quantity, and art everything, said of the ‘* Virgin Queen,” ‘‘ Its chief merit is that it does present Elizabethan England faithfully.’’ That, if I may be permitted to say so, precisely expresses what is wrong with the film. The historical truth about Robin Hood, for instance, is that he was a common thief and fugitive from justice, but the entertainment truth about him is that he was a semi-legendary bandit of democratic sympathies, who set game laws at defiance and reversed modern methods of piracy by robbing the rich and distributing largesse to the poor. ** Robin Hood ’’ and ‘ Virgin Queen ’’ Compared. Mr. King, as he is careful to explain, is a university man, and commands the sympathy of those not launched on the world with a top-hamper of fallacious theories about history. History is a word coined by college dons to express something that is essentially undemocratic and remote from the lives of ordinary people. Folk-lore, not history, rewarded Robin Hood with a beautiful girl and peerage. Folk-lore is the only true history, because it is an expression of the soul of common humanity. In Mr. King’s kind of story it ig the profiteers who get the girls and the peerages, and it is precisely because the history imposed on us by college dons consists, in the main, of a record of trouble caused by tyrants and profiteers, that the average man instinctively distrusts history disguised, or not disguised at all, as entertainment. I find the film, ‘‘ Robin Hood,” correct because it is based chiefly on legend. I find the film, ‘‘ The Virgin Queen ’”’ all wrong because it is based chiefly on history. I would willingly forego ten films like ‘‘ The Virgin Queen ''—and I think I have the entire entertainment public behind me—for one single-reel film which attempted to show a day in the life of the ordinary iman in Elizabethan times. That would be great history, bit it is history that you never read or see, because what Mr. King calls history is made and written by the wrong kind of people. The personages of the history books are lay figures which cannot be made human, though they may be made humorous, as we saw in the case of ‘When Knighthood was in Flower." Putting Films on a Democratic Basis. Since I am committed to u definition I should say that recorder history can seldom be more than the expression of a point of view. Three nations haye three authentic histories of the Battle of Waterloo, and they all differ in fundamental details. At least three nations, and not fewer than five generals, claim to have won the Great War recently concluded, The truth, from an entertainment point of view, is that the Battle of Waterloo was won by Mr. William Adams, and that the Great War was won by the man in the tip-up seat at the kinema theatre. Our business is to pub every film on a demo. cratic basis, whether it deals with history or hysteria. Away from the kinema industry Mr, King can be as finicky as he pleases about the facts of history, but I am irresistibly urged to say that if I,'as an Englishman, produced an historical film dealing with the Battle of Bannockburn, the verdict of Mr. King, as a Scotsman, would probably have far more title to be called historic than anything I could put into the film.