The Electric Hotel

For those interested in the early days of cinema, like I am, The Electric Hotel, by Dominic Smith, is a fine read. I liked it best when it dealt with the heady days when filmmaking was a brand new art, and everything had to be invented. It unravels somewhat in the second half, but it's still a thumbs up from me.

The central character is Claude Ballard. When we first meet him he is an octogenarian living in a hotel in Hollywood. It is the early 1960s, and a film historian has tracked him down. Ballard was a pioneer filmmaker, and made a film called The Electric Hotel which was thought to be lost, but a copy is right there in a can in his room.

The book flashes back to Ballard's early days. He gets a job with the Lumiere brothers, showing films around the world. He impressed them with some of his films, including one that shows his sister in her death throes from tuberculosis.

The Lumieres, who were real people, expanded the film business from the likes of Thomas Edison, by showing films to many people at once: "Indeed, we asked ourselves, Louis said, why keep the images cooped up inside a wooden cabinet? What if there was a way to project the views onto a wall? The technical problem, alors, was the movement of the celluloid strip. How to thread at just the right speed, that was the question, and I am happy to report that we solved it as precisely as astronomers using mathematics to locate a new star or planet."

During an exhibition in New York City of this newfangled entertainment, Ballard interrupts the performance of Hamlet in the theater next door starring a famous French actress, Sabine Montrose. She will end up starring in several of Ballard's films, as well as becoming his lover. Smith uses several metaphors describing Ballard's love for Montrose: "Loving a woman like that, Hal thought, was chasing smoke. He was sure that love could buoy a man, but it could also drag him down, and it was clear that Claude Ballard was sinking into the mires and backwaters of unrequited love."

Hal is Hal Bender, who owns one of the first picture houses in Brooklyn, the Bender Bijou. He and Ballard and Montrose and a stunt man from Australia are an engaging team, their magnum opus being The Electric Hotel, shot on the New Jersey Palisades, which includes a live tiger and the stunt man leaping from a zeppelin while on fire.

The film is an initial smash, but Edison shuts it down, as there are patent violations. Ballard ends up in Europe during World War I and is captured by the Germans, who force him to make propaganda films. That part of the plot ends in something resembling the ending of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. Montrose goes into exile in Andorra, and I think it's the first book I've ever read set in that tiny country.

The Electric Hotel spins the best magic early on, where Smith has given us the benefits of his research into movie making in the first decade of the twentieth century. There's something ghostly even reading about early movies, as we conjure the images in our head. Smith is also an excellent stylist, the prose matching the ephemeral nature of film:

"The past never stops banging at the doors of the present. We pack it into tattered suitcases, lock it into rusting metal trunks beneath our beds, press it between yellowed pages of newsprint, but it hangs over us at night like a poisonous cloud, seeps into our shirt collars and bedclothes."