BEYOND THE SILVER SCREEN
Changing preoccupations in vastly different eras drive two new novels
Sprawling new novels from two wellregarded writers are on the shelves: a history of the very early days of cinema by Australian American Dominic Smith and an exploration of the human condition in a digital age also characterised by climate change and mass migration by Indian author Amitav Ghosh.
Smith was inspired by a Library of Congress report that 75 per cent of all silent films are already lost forever owing to the instability of their medium (celluloid nitrate is both highly combustible and liable to disintegrate) to ponder a single question: what if there is a masterpiece we have never seen? And to answer it with his own Australian-American take on a once lost, now rediscovered Spanish film released in 1908, El hotel eléctrico.
Winkled out of his decaying Hollywood hotel in 1962 by a PhD student in film history, Claude Ballard relives his introduction to the moving image some 70 years earlier by the Lumière brothers – 10 reels, each less than a minute long, devised in patriotic French opposition to Edison’s clunky kinetoscope – and goes on to recount his own life in film. In Paris with his consumptive sister he films, with her blessing, her dying breaths.
In 1896, as a concession agent for the Lumières, he takes film to America and Australia, making his own ever longer experiments along the way and gathering around him a little company: a loyal manager, a young Australian stuntman and the elusive love of his life, the ferocious Shakespearean actress Sabine Montrose who discovers film, and Ballard, when the audience reaction to his projections interrupts her performance of Hamlet on the other side of a party-wall.
In 1910 they achieve their hour-long epic melodrama, complete with tiger, dirigible and themes of consumption, but disaster swiftly follows. The production is forced to close and, by 1914, Ballard and his manager are negotiating with the Belgian consul to film the German invasion of his country, where Ballard eventually uses his film not only to reveal German atrocities but also to assert his position as a prisoner of war and effect his own rescue.
Looked at as a whole the novel is oddly shapeless, but this is partly because it is so full of poetically elucidated detail. The writing is to savour, often leisurely but vividly pictorial; the reader stops to admire the precision of a word or an image – Sabine’s memories are “braided” in French and English; an omnibus comes “glinting through noontime”. In a novel spun through with the magic of tiny film sequences – a falling cat, a beautiful woman bathing in a