And then, by an accident in the projection room, the film begins to reverse and so, naturally, one gropes upward out of the slime and returns to the first scene—to which is added the single phrase “It’s bankruptcy.” It opens with the deity “at his American (roll-top) desk. He hastily signs innumerable letters. He is in his shirt sleeves with a green eye-shade on his forehead. He rises, lights a big cigar, looks at his watch, strides nervously up and down the room.... He makes notes on his pad and blows away the ash which falls from his cigar between the leaves. Suddenly he snatches the telephone and begins to ’phone furiously....”
That is American movie technique which M Cendrars has evidently learned all too well, because he uses it, in all its tedious detail, in La Perle Fièvreuse, for which he is publishing not a scenario but a director’s script, with the cutbacks and visions and close-ups all numbered and marked. It is in the manner of the old Biograph movies with what may turn out to be not such innocent fun at the expense of the detective film. Among its characters are Max Trick, director of Trick’s Criminal Courier, the great daily which specializes in criminal news. He is marked “Type: le President Taft” and is first shown in his office with twenty-five telephones in front of him; among his collaborators are Nick Carter and Arsène Lupin, Conan Doyle and Maurice Leblanc.
What Jules Romains has accomplished is much more remarkable, for he has pushed the method of the cinema forward a long and significant step, and, while using everything it can give, he has produced a first class work of fiction. The plot of Donogoo-Tonka you will see at once, is entirely suitable to filming; it is not perhaps suitable to commercial success, but that can be, if it isn’t, another matter.
It begins in Paris with the unfortunate Lamendin, who is about to commit suicide. A friend gives him a card with the legend: “Before committing suicide ... don’t fail to read the other side,” and on the reverse is the advertisement of Professor Miguel Rufisque, director of the Institute of Biometric Psychotherapy, who guarantees to give you, within seven days, a violent love of life. Lamendin goes to the consulting room and after a fantastic examination is given certain instructions which eventually land him in the library of Prof. Yves Trouhadec, a geographer. Trouhadec would be certain of election to the Geographic Institute if he hadn’t, many years before, placed on a map of South America the wholly imaginary town of Donogoo-Tonka, in the gold-mining area. Lamendin now proposes to float a company, start an expedition, and insure the Professor’s election by actually creating the place.
In the second reel Donogoo-Tonka is launched; in the third we have adventurers in all parts of the world preparing to rush the gold fields, while Lamendin tarries at home making fake moving pictures of the place. At the end of the reel the adventurers have penetrated into the heart of the South American desert and, too wearied to go forward, aware of the deception practised upon them, encamp where they are. Derisively they call the place Donogoo-Tonka.
Later, a second group of adventurers comes. They are disappointed in the look of the place. But they are interested to hear that gold is being found; and while Lamendin at last sets sail, the Donogoo-Tonka Central Bar and the London & Donogoo-Tonka’s Splendid Hotel are going up; it is obviously the intention of the earlier arrivals to mulct the later.
And then, of course, gold really is found in the river bed and the price of all provisions goes up fifty per cent.
Regrettably, en voyage, Lamendin tells his pioneers that Donogoo does not exist. On his arrival at Rio de Janeiro he receives a cable from the Professor, demanding immediate results; and as he turns in despair he reads the announcement by Agence Meyer-Kohn, of the next caravan to the gold fields of Donogoo-Tonka. He arrives; he takes possession; he founds an empire, in which the religion of Scientific Error is established. Trouhadec, still living, is deified; he becomes Trouhadec, Father of his Country. The utility of geography is one of the prescribed subjects for public lectures.
That is a slightly more intelligent plot than most of the adventure things one sees in the movies. It is in the detail and in the presentation of an idea, the idea of scientific error, that M Romains has pressed beyond the professional technique of the moving picture without once exceeding its natural limitations. For instance in the waiting room where Lamendin sits with the other would-be suicides:
“Absurdity, given off by so many brains, becomes palpable. One begins to distinguish a sort of very subtle exhalation which disengages itself from the human bodies and little by little charges the atmosphere.” The settings in this scene are very much in the manner of Caligari. Or there is the debate in the soul of Professor Trouhadec who knows that he will profit by a fraud. From the beginning the spectator must realize that the debate is only on the surface; that in his heart Trouhadec is going to accept; the spectator is to see him thinking of truth with a capital T and, much deeper down, of himself as a member of the Institute. Just as in the exploitation of Donogoo-Tonka we see a man coming up the steps of a subway station with the words Donogoo-Tonka written on every step; until, as he emerges, his skull ceases to be opaque, and we see the twelve little letters dancing in his brain. M Romains has even carried the thing over into Keystone farce, so sure is he of his medium. During one of the lectures “his eloquence is so persuasive, his thought opens such penetrating channels into human nature that, little by little, little by little, a soft down begins to sprout on the bald head” of a man in the audience. Ça c’est du Cinema, as M Cendrars says.