Two novels about silent film histories that never happened
In my review of Hollywood: The Oral History, I remarked on my learning that even notable filmmakers didn’t necessarily think they were making enduring art. Edward Dmytryk, award-winning director of Crossfire (1947), described his feelings then about the industry’s place in history:
If we had all known that they were going to be still running these pictures forty or fifty years later… and asking us to get up and talk about them… we probably would have shot them differently… We thought the movie would go out and be run for a few weeks or a few months in the theater and then would be completely forgotten.
This notion may be doubly true of films from the silent era. Filmmakers in this nacent industry couldn’t be sure that the medium itself would ever be more than a diversion. As well, technicians in the industry were well aware that the silver-nitrate-based film stocks in use at the time were prone to deteriorate and even to catch fire. According to Brittanica.com:
An estimated 11,000 movies were made in the U.S. from 1912 through 1929, during film’s silent age. About 70 percent of movies from that era are thought to be lost forever. Some were lost to physical damage such as from fire and chemical decay, while others were deemed too costly to store by the studios that made them.
The late Paul Auster’s brilliant novel about a pioneering filmmaker emphasizes the ephemeral nature of both art and life itself.
I’m here appending my review of Dominic Smith’s historical novel about the silent era, The Electric Hotel. Both Auster and Smith are spinning fanciful stories about works of art that have disappeared forever.
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