MOVIE MAKING--FROM THE EYES OF A PIONEER

B esides her out-of-print autobiography, “Memoirs of a Star, (Doubleday, 1969), Pola Negri also wrote about her views on film making in “La Vie et Le Reve au Cinema” (Life and Dream in the Cinema), published in the ‘20s.

Privately printed in Paris and written in French, the slim volume was well received. Copies are next to impossible to find because only 200 were printed. However, a copy was made available to Calendar by Prof. Alexis Gonzales of Loyola University in New Orleans. The translations are Gonzales’ as well.

ON FILM SCRIPTS: “When reading certain scenarios, one is ashamed of being able to read. A bad film realized after an absurd scenario is a typical event, but a poor film inspired by a literary masterpiece is, indeed, a crime of high treason against human thought.”

ON MUSIC and SILENT FILMS: “Music is the natural auxiliary to the art of gesture. Both these arts--the one sensual, the other intellectual--complete each other. Music raises passions and cinema awakens ideas. The silent art is merely a suggestive one. It expresses nothing. Speech only weakens the strength of feelings.”

ON THEATER and FILM: “The dramatic artist should not be a movie actor. The silent art has upset tradition. Here mime, attitudes, entrances, movements and smiles are different from that in any other art. The dramatic and silent arts do not associate. They exclude each other. Exceptions only confirm the rule. True that Leonardo da Vinci was a painter as well as an architect, a natural philosopher, an engineer and a writer. The difficulty resides in not believing oneself another Leonardo.”

ON FILM and COMMUNCATIONS: “To love one another, we must know one another, and to know one another, we must speak a universal language understood by everybody. The cinema bears in its germ an olive branch. It shall become the great regulator of human harmony.”