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ENTHUSIASMS AND EXECRATIONS 57
being so damned serious, to consider just one or two plain facts, and think on them. It
really is time we had a bit more cinema. A bit less quackery, a bit more appreciation of
magic which is not cameratricks in black and white.
Vol. V, no. 1 July 1929
Harry A. Potamkin
THE FRENCH CINEMA
Jean Lenauer, writing in the May Close Up, has said some true things which, because
they are not qualified, are dangerous. To say, for instance, that to him the French have
no sense of the cinema is no light charge, and, one may counter with one of two remarks:
this is a prejudice and not a critical judgement, or the question, a sense of what cinema?
For M. Lenauer, like his young French colleagues, is all for the American cinema. It is
true that he charges the French directors with apeing the American successes, but from
every indication his cinema-mind has been formed by the U.S.A movie. He is in this a
European and particularly a Frenchman, although his nativity is Viennese. Like the
young Frenchmen, he claims the movie as his and only his, and to have been born before
the film or with it — as in my own case — is to be put beyond the pale. The young
Frenchman delights in saying the French are without a cinema-sense. Lenauer has in
the May Close Up only repeated M. Auriol in transition No. 15, M. Charensol in La
Revue Federaliste of November, 1927, and the first utterer of this condemnation, the
late Louis Delluc. There are a host of others. In truth, the young Frenchman is
developing a defeatist mind, and Lenauer is throwing on his little pressure.
One of the slogans of the French counter-French critic is the denial of youth in the
French cinema world. Everyone I have met has complained of this, and Cavalcanti was
glad to have even an inane actress in Captain Fracasse because she was young. Youth!
Youth! It is a perennial cry. And what does it here signify? What does Youth claim in
this instance? That the cinema belongs to it. And how does it substantiate its claim? By
repeating the attitudes of the Frenchmen who first began to swear fidelity to the film.
Auriol utters Soupault's adorations of the American action-film. And everyone of them
echoes Canudo. Except that, typical of youth of all ages, these youngest Frenchmen
are rebelling against the old cinema - of France. The Revolt of Youth? Nonsense. The
Rebellion of Youth! Impatience and arrogance mostly. There is little development here
in France of that salutary skepticism among intelligent young men which included in
its scrutinies Youth. For Youth is not a fact, it is a symbol and that symbol has no
reference to the date of one's birth. It is true that art and youth are related, but it is not
the youth of which Lenauer talks, but youth which means fervor. Will Lenauer say
that the older Frenchmen whom he condemns are all without fervor? And am I, are
we, to deny sincerity and depth of devotion to the film to all those who do not love the