LITERATURE AND THE FILMS

Southland Times, Issue 23664, 12 November 1938, Page 14

LITERATURE AND THE FILMS

Aldous Huxley’s Opinions

The note from the studio, sent round by messenger, merely said that Aldous Huxley had gone to work on Vincent Sheean’s translation of Eve Curies “Madame Curie” as-one of two pictures Garbo would do on her return to Hollywood, writes Frank Daugherty in The Christian Science Monitor. I found Mr Huxley, about an hour later, crouched over a very, small Corona typewriter, circa 1915, in the patio of a tree-shaded Spanish house in Beverly Hills. I plunged at once into my subject. I knew Mr Huxley to be a practising champion of the novel in some of its more modern aspects, and I was curious to know if his presence in Hollywood working on a screen play meant that he intended to desert file novel for the film. He was not willing to deal with the subject on quite that basis, and began his remarks by expressing his annoyance with the attempts the movies occasionally make to achieve poetic moments in their romances by lines which obviously have not been written by poets. “Isn’t it possible for them to realize, he wanted to know, “that only poets can write poetic lines, and that poets aren’t common?” THE FILM IN PROPAGANDA His mentality played quickly and intelligently over the whole field of film production, and its importance in the modern scheme of things. Its first threat to world culture is, of course, as propaganda, he believes. He has been surprised that some of the great dictators have not been able to make better use of it for their purposes—except that, of course, propaganda at present is rather stupid and largely untrue. To reach great masses of people propaganda must leave out so much that is essential that it becomes greatly falsified, and is therefore vulnerable to the attack of men of knowledge. But there is always the chance that the future may bring a subtler, truer propaganda. Then the film, _it seems to him, might be the ideal instrument. Now he was willing to bring in the place of the novelist in all this. The novelist stood, he thought, as a sort of bulwark against encroachment upon the individual. He cited Edgar Snow’s book, “Red Star Over China,” in which some of the sovietized characters questioned by the author were unable to remember anything which had happened in their experience since the all-engrossing new order of themselves as part of the State, rather than individuals, had become the dominant factor of their consciousness. NOVELIST AND POET Squarely opposed to them, and to much of the socialized service to the present, is the novelist, who is concerned, first, last, and always, with the individual. People, he thought, were too ready to accept the findings of a new pundit psychology—and curiously, too, in Russia after even the word “psychology” had been banned there in the early years of the revolution. But now it is accepted everywhere. What isn’t realized he thinks, is that the novelist has always been the best psychologist; and with the novelist he includes the poet. What brings the changes of feeling and response which makes the men of one age write in poetry, the next in prose, he doesn’t know. But the characters in Chaucer, he thinks, bring us closer to a true study of the individual than most modern psychologists are able to do. And Dostoievsky, he says, will be a textbook for 300 years, perhaps, before the garden variety of psychologists have caught up to him. Was the film, then, the medium in which men would work to express the new age He didn’t know. He found it interesting that so many modem writers have been influenced by the film. He admitted, himself, to this influence. The film has trained large masses of people to go easily and quickly through transitions of emotion and thought which the novelist had had to take many pages of carefully laid words to prepare them to do. Music, it may be, he said, has been very useful in this regard. In music it is possible to play a' theme in a minor key, then, changing quickly to a major key, with the same theme achieve an almost opposite result. The film is not the equal of music here; but with music as an aid, reproducted on film as well as it is reproduced today, it is difficult to say just where the film can be limited.

This is, of course, his first screen play although he has been many times a visitor to Hollywood studios, and has kept up a lively interest in film production all over the world for years. His enthusiasm for Madame Curie as an individual is unbounded, and he holds no doubt of Garbo’s capacity to give her life on the screen. He is interested, too, to see how much of the natural scence for which she stood, and the heroic research she maintained, can be reproduced on the screen. And for this he is conferring with some of the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in an attempt to see if the natural functions of the film cannot be more adequately utilized than they have been in the past. But here he laughed. The film had once used all its functions to perfection in some of those early silent comedies. Then the play-back, the reverse, the slow motion, and a dozen other devices had given excitement and pleasure to audiences which they have forgotten, in the present concern over story, to demand any more.