Cinematic Illusions Explained

From its earliest origins the language of cinema has been all about illusion and deceit. These Liebig trade cards from 1913 reveal some of the ingenious tricks designed to fool the viewer into accepting an alternate reality. Moments of high drama and tension are improvised by solemn technicians with slender resources. A model train hurtles off a table top in a simulated disaster while a hit and run victim contemplates his severed legs with an indignant air. A primitive form of back projection is shown in a two part image that turns the picture space inside out. What look like giant gooseberries are pursued down the street. Finally we are shown how the illusory can be made complete by rotating the camera lens through 90 degrees.

Louxor – a cinema reborn

The architectural language of Classical Greece is heavy with a sense of authority and power but that of Ancient Egypt is indelibly associated with either fun and frivolity or the curious world of freemasonry. Egyptiana is one of the most fundamentally impure architectural styles and finds its place in shopping arcades, theatres and cinemas, where it is viewed with either indulgence or offence depending on your predisposition. The refined and incorruptible eye will see a promiscuous assemblage of dubious decorative devices while the hedonistically inclined will see something cheap and cheerful, unashamedly designed to please. 

The Louxor Palais du Cinéma on Boulevard de Magenta (at the Barbès-Rochechouart intersection) opened in 1921 as a dazzling example of Egyptian-inspired Art Deco. It prospered for many decades but time ran out in 1983 when it closed and became, for a while, part of the Tati empire that flourishes on the north side of the crossroads. After years of campaigning by local interest groups the City of Paris funded a programme of renovation that began in 2010 and finished in April 2013 when the Louxor reopened to great acclaim. Every cornice, every lotus leaf and every palm motif meticulously restored. The cinema programming reflects the ethnically diverse character of the locality and has brought much needed community enhancement to one of the least prosperous areas of the city. At the end of this post we offer a brief home-made video portrait of this never less than exhilarating intersection where Parisian drivers, bikers and cyclists put on a magnificent display of manoeuvring at the outer limits of safety. 

Lucky People

 

The American Tobacco Company (manufacturers of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand), unhappy at trailing Camel cigarettes in public popularity turned to Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the public relations industry) to revitalise their product and encourage female smoking. Bernays pursued his target with two strategies. The first was to overcome the female inhibition about smoking outdoors by breeding the confidence to light up anytime and anywhere on equal terms with men. In 1929 Bernays hired a small army of glamour models to march in the New York City Easter Parade flagrantly and imperiously smoking Lucky Strikes in full view of the assembled public. The subsequent press coverage of this transgressive event was a classic instance of the publicity that money cannot buy.

 

The second strategy was to promote cigarette smoking on the cinema screen by circulating directors and producers with handy guides to the wide range of dramatic possibilities that can be enhanced by the imaginative deployment of a cigarette in the hands or mouths of the cast. Bernays understood that cinema audiences could be depended on to imitate what they saw on screen and obediently smoke their way through moments of emotional stress and tension. Bernays called this process, engineering consent. This was the era of the green Lucky Strike pack and one of Bernays’s greatest concerns was that the female smoker, endowed by nature with a superior sense of colour relationships, might be put off by the shade of green, finding it clashing with their favoured choice of tones and shades. Much energy was expended on a campaign to persuade the couture industry of the wondrous potential of green as a high fashion colour to little effect. The green neurosis persisted until 1941 when Raymond Loewy designed the white pack with the famous target on both front and back. The advertisers congratulated themselves on having doubled the publicity potential of the pack without spending an additional cent.

   

The services of Hollywood stars were always available if the price was right and copywriters carefully crafted the form of words that would help seal the deal with smokers. The comforting fiction that nationally recognised figures from the movies, with their enormous disposable incomes could find nothing better than Lucky Strike placed them, for an instant, on an equal footing with their audience. Every actor had a similar story to tell – without Lucky Strike they could never have survived their punishing work schedule or maintained the expressive tones of their all-important voices. Most participants cultivated a frosty air of hauteur – only a few deigned to look with favour on their admirers but they all agreed that nothing eased throat irritation more effectively than a cigarette.

David Watkin and Clara Schumann

Since his death in February, I have been reading the second volume of David Watkin’s autobiography which goes by the chirpy title, “Was Clara Schumann a Fag Hag?” This was his last labour of love, the printed copies being delivered only weeks before his death. The book has an episodic structure and the opening chapters on the early years and the entry into film-making are substantially the same as the material in volume one, the similarly interrogative, “Why is there only one word for Thesaurus?” As such, it tends to read as an expanded version of its predecessor although it’s none the worse for that.

The pleasure in reading this book is to hear again the author’s voice as he relates his vast fund of scandalous and wickedly funny anecdotes. Apparently born with an instinct to constantly go against the grain, his descriptions of growing up in a prosperous, boring and sober minded family are especially amusing. As a child, the offer to give up attending church for Lent could hardly be better devised to offend the Catholic sensibility of his parents. There is a disarming sense of modesty in the refusal to inflate his cinematic achievements or to paint himself in a flattering light.

He was proud of his ability to sleep soundly through the frenzied activity of a film set and we are quickly convinced that arrogance played no part in this practice despite the notoriety it brought him. He explains it as simply a practical way of arranging his time and conserving resources. In a way, it is emblematic of a certain kind of Englishness that seems to be on the verge of extinction in which an apparent air of utter nonchalance conceals an intense drive for perfectionism. Perhaps it develops from the notion that to display the serious minded demeanour popularly associated with high professional standards is no more than an exercise in bad manners or, even worse, a device for the concealment of mediocrity.

His inventive approach to cinematography and his unorthodox innovations already have their place in the history of cinema. What this book achieves is something he held to be of even greater importance, it seals his achievement of a rich and full life, consistently lived well and always with great good humour and relish for the absurd. For more on David Watkin, please visit www.davidwatkin.co.uk/