Travelling Light

Last week’s Oscar winner, The Artist, is about that liminal moment in cinema history when the silent movie became the talkie. It was also a salient reminder of the continuing influence of the Jewish community in Hollywood. The producer of The Artist is the indomitable, Harvey Weinstein.

Nicholas Wright’s new play, Travelling Light, is concerned with another liminal moment in cinema history – the moment when the still photograph became a moving picture and motion pictures were born. The play also highlights the fact that the birth of modern film took place within the Jewish community. These cinematic pioneers became the pilgrim fathers and mothers who took their new invention to America and laid the foundations for the Hollywood factory of dreams of Louis B Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn.

Travelling Light sees in the bustling life of the shtetl, the small town, the embryonic beginnings of cinema. A scene in the play, where the would be director, Maurice Montgomery, and his female assistant, realise that a length of continuous film can be spliced and glued together to form a new narrative is presented as significant as the invention of the combustion engine. It’s a wonderful Eureka moment. Man using his intellect, creativity and ingenuity to produce something that would provide another light with which we might interpret the world around us.

But why did the community of the shtetl become the focus for such inventiveness and creativity? In a programme note, the writer, Eva Hoffman, points to the moral centre at the heart of the shtetl:

Everyone within the shtetl’s small compass knew each other; and although there was clear social hierarchy, based on the values of wealth and religious learning, the importance of charity meant that not even the poorest or the most improvident were entirely rejected from the communal net. On the Sabbath, those who could not afford a proper meal were taken in by their more prosperous neighbours; and on those evening, the shtetl really did become a united organism, with Sabbath candles visible through each home’s windows....

What accounted for this outburst of inventiveness and creativity? Perhaps it was precisely the encounter between traditionalism and modernity; the disciplines of piety and religious reasoning colliding with new, turbulent social realities...such confrontations can liberate surprising forces of imagination and thought...

Travelling Light is a sentimental reimagining of the early days of cinema. All those eureka moments – editing, casting, continuity, cinematography, finance, etc – are celebrated with real warmth and humour in Wright’s play. When I next walk into the local cinema multiplex, I’ll remember with a new clarity the huge contribution that small Jewish communities made in providing pleasure, entertainment and stimulation to those millions of us who simply love the movies.

Travelling Light by Nicholas Wright is currently on at the National Theatre, London.

Mission Impossible vs The Artist: Sound and fury vs silence

Two recent films – Mission Impossible and The Artist – provide contradictory cinematic experiences and ask the audience to engage with the medium of film in different ways. Both films are interesting because they are box office draws and have received favourable critical reviews. The Artist (though, in my view, hugely overrrated) is hotly tipped to win Oscars this year. But The Invisible Province is interested in the question of our engagement with a film –not so much the fact that we do engage with a film, but what that engagement looks like.

Is there a place for a cinema that requires our attention and concentration? Or will the dominant tendency in film be to cater for the diminishing attention span of audiences who simply want the relentless activity (with a car chase thrown in) and white noise (but turned up to full volume) that mirrors so much of contemporary urban life? Is some kind of synthesis possible that bridges these differing expressions of engagement? Mission Impossible and The Artist provide some clues to possible answers.



The latest episode of the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible franchise is filmmaking for the Play station generation. Ghost Protocol jettisons narrative in favour of action set pieces that comprise different levels of difficulty for Ethan Hunt and his crack team. The film is littered with props and gadgets: adhesive gloves, a scanning contact lens, masks and guns. This is paraphernalia lifted from the virtual worlds of the computer game, the equipment that a contestant wins as he hits scores and climbs levels. But the computer game influence is also evident in the film’s pace, editing and aesthetic of Heraclitean flux. There is no opportunity to look at anything, to savour or reflect on an image, because everything passes as a Formula 1 blur.

Faced with such lobotomised filmmaking, all an audience is required to do is to be directed from one frenetic set piece to the next while shutting down any critical mental faculties en route. With one’s synapses besieged by the film’s sound and fury, the characters on screen are no longer required to resemble anything remotely human. There are buff bod's, hot chicks and IT geeks in this caricature paradise. All they have to do is kick ass and perform gymnastic tricks in exotic locations. The only method acting in this movie is performed by Tom Cruise’s hair. The violence comes from the Road Runner/Coyote stable (the director, Brad Bird, previously directed the Pixar animation hit, The Incredibles) and it exists outside any recognisable moral universe, except the most infantile one of goodies and baddies.

The argument in favour of movies like Mission Impossible is that it is popular entertainment with pretensions to nothing higher than a big box office return. It gives the popcorn audience what it wants is the usual defense. That may be true and the huge numbers going to see this film suggest that it is delivering the goods. Although giving people what they think they want is not the same as giving them something of value – something that allows them to reflect on themselves and others in a less predictable, clichéd manner.

But the failure of a film like Mission Impossible is not that it provides mere entertainment (being entertained is an important thing) but that it debases the language of tension, suspense, and ambiguity by impersonating a foreign medium, the computer game. It is the unique cinematic syntax associated with the thriller/action movie that makes an Alfred Hitchcock film so compelling or the Waterloo chase sequence that opens The Bourne Ultimatum so edge-of-seat exciting. Without this common, fully developed language, an audience is turned into passive, disengaged viewers. They are fed thin cinematic gruel that leaves them cinematically malnourished. Up until this point in time, cinema’s main interests existed independently of the attitudes and aesthetic of the Wii or the Play station. This is changing and with this change the engagement with a film becomes less focussed and more distracted.



The Artist takes us back to the early days of cinema – the silent movie. It reminds us of how audiences engaged with a film, less as a piece of entertainment and more as an event. Some of the most poignant moments in this novelty film are images of a cinema full of people watching a silent movie and having an emotional experience – visibly expressing emotions of happiness, sadness or fear. In that age of cinema, the viewer had to engage with the story. They had the job of interpreting the visual mood of a piece or the emotions the actors on screen were attempting to communicate.

The silent movie demanded directorial storytelling skill and expressiveness. Viable narrative arcs existed which allowed the viewer not only to follow the story with ease but to contribute to the plot development in an active manner. What was left unspoken on screen, found a voice in the imagination of the viewer. In this way, the viewer began to form their own cinematic lexicon with which to engage with the images on the screen.

Two very different films. Two very different ways for an audience to engage with a film. The popularity of The Artist suggests that there may still be an appetite for films that make an audience work. Yet, it is Ghost Protocol that will father a litter of poor imitations who will, in turn, fill our multiplex screens and leave audiences, if not speechless, then, probably dumb.