The Fratellini are so ingenious and so full of surprises that it is useless to try to keep up with them. I have seen them a dozen times since first writing about them, sometimes three times in a week with a still growing delight. Some of the stunts demand to be mentioned. There is one as good as the photographer—it is based on the idea that a saxophone player who cannot play the saxophone, is engaged because he has a starving family; another, concealed in a box, does the actual playing in the test before the manager of the house. The complications can easily be guessed; but it is impossible to guess the combination of delicacy and uproariousness with which they are rendered. At the end of this act Alberto, the grotesque with the square painted windows over his eyes, hides in a sack and you have one of the everlasting sources of children’s humour carried to its supreme conclusion. Still another stunt is a dancing act, first as a burlesque of ballet, and then as a straight tango, with Francesco as a rather wicked old dowager in a green dress, and Alberto with complete facial make-up, but otherwise extremely chic, dancing exquisitely. Finally, I mention another entrance, superior to the one described in the text. Francesco, very much the English gentleman, arrives on the scene, followed by his two servants, Paulo and Alberto, the former with a ludicrous exaggeration of the Englishman’s travelling rug, the latter with a wicker hamper of unimaginable proportions. As these two stagger after their master he tries to get out, as if he had come into the wrong place. Finally he addresses himself to an attendant, at the same time ordering his servants to drop their impedimenta. Before these two have time to light cigarettes, Francesco is off again, they must lift the huge burdens and follow him; again he orders them to discharge and enters into conversation; and this goes on until it works itself into a fury, the master always walking in one direction while the servants are so far behind him that they are walking in the opposite one. The human basis of the event, the skill with which it is done, and the intensity of it, are combined to make a miracle. At the end Alberto is so exhausted that he sees visions and begins to fight a duel with his own shadow; he leaps back, guards, and finally falls upon it and beats it to death.
It may not be inappropriate to mention here the name of another clown also appearing, although not regularly, at the Medrano. He is one of the three Oréas, the other two being quite exceptional acrobats on the trapeze. The clown Oréas does not create as the Fratellini do; he parodies acrobatics and uses an amazingly physical adaptability for immense fun. To be sure he falls off and on the bars; but he is also capable of mounting a ladder in a series of march steps, and of missing the support, as he swings from the bar, sliding round it with his arm on the upright, and slipping down on his bottom, in a movement of great grace. His little trick of taking a glass full of beer out of his pocket at the end of each tumble is not new, but he does it extremely well, and he has the sense of gait as well as the sense of costume and impression.
THE CINEMA NOVEL
It begins to look as if we will have to find a new explanation for the French. Since that would be difficult, I suggest that we hold fast to the old one, with variations. Let us continue to say that they are moribund and explain any outburst of activity as a death struggle. The last gasp. History provides plenty of precedent, and we who find pleasant things in their art and letters will rank ourselves with those cultivated persons who cannot begin to care for Latin until it becomes a highly corrupt language.
I do not know whether seeing new opportunities and developing them quickly are the best signs of degeneracy, for I seem to remember reading about these things in the advertisements, where nothing as irrevocable as degeneracy is permitted. The adaptability of the moving picture scenario to something besides moving pictures was a thing easy to guess; the thing has been done in both America and England in burlesque of the films—an adaptation requiring and receiving very little intelligence.
It may be slightly beside the point, but it is interesting to note that the cinema influence in literature in France is almost exactly opposite to what it is here. There it seems to make for brevity, hardness, clarity, brilliance. You will find it in the extraordinary stories of Paul Morand and Louis Aragon; and you will find in neither of these those characteristic sloppinesses which American authors are beginning to blame on the movies. If they would take the trouble of studying the pictures, instead of trying to make money out of them, and discover the elements in the cinema technique which are capable of making their own work fruitful, we might have better novels, and we certainly would have a few less bad pictures.
Two Frenchmen have, at the same time, used the scenario as a method of fiction, and each of them has written a highly ironic piece which is capable of being transferred to the film, but which reads sufficiently well to be considered as an end in itself.
Blaise Cendrars, poet, responsible for the Anthologie Nègre, is the author of La Fin du Monde and of La Perle Fièvreuse; the second of these is running as a serial in a Belgian magazine, Signaux. Both are called Novels; the third instalment of The Pearl adding the word cinematographic. The End of the World is a cosmic cinema-novel in fifty-five swift, concisely told scenes.
It deals with a sort of deity, resident on a planet accessible to all the mechanical comforts of this earth, who is induced to travel to Mars as a propagandist for his own religion. Like many propagandists he errs in his psychology and, in a Billy Sunday frenzy of the imagination, shows the Martians all the cruelties his religion is capable of. Too late he learns that “the Martians are disillusioned and confirmed pacifists, iodophages living on the peptonic vapours of human blood, but incapable of bearing the sight of the least cruelty.” The mission failing, he decides to make good on certain prophecies uttered in his name. The following scenes are left a little in the air; continuity is lacking. One begins again with the sculptured angel on Notre Dame blowing a blast on her trumpet and the whole world rushing towards Paris and crumbling into dust. Thereafter, with the aid of retarded and accelerated projection, we see the world slowly dissolving into its elements, through those stages so graphically presented to us by H. G. Wells. There is chaos, and then annihilation.