The Twayne author series
volume on Ramón Gómez de la Serna briefly describes his 1923 “Hollywood” novel Cinelandia
as a somewhat disjointed effort that attempts to imitate cinematic techniques
but “seems merely to play with its subject” and “fails to come off, for Ramón
was writing about something he knew nothing about.” Having now read this deliriously
delightful novel (in its French translation, Ciné-Ville), I believe this
is a bit like faulting Jules Verne for having never visited the moon. Ciné-Ville
may be many things, but its accuracy as a portrayal of Hollywood is rather
beside the point. Ramón’s invented fantasy metropolis of Ciné-Ville, entirely
consecrated to cinema, is about as much a faithful rendering of Hollywood as a typical
Hollywood film is a faithful rendering of whatever inspired it.
Yet Ciné-Ville nonetheless
manages to offer up a recognizable, indelible, and even - given that it was
written before the genre of the “Hollywood novel” even existed – essential portrait
of the whole rangelanda[i]
of nascent Hollywood: its artifice, luminous leading ladies, suave leading men,
grimacing villains (relegated to their own special class in the city of Ciné-Ville),
tyrannical directors, droll fat men, fawning fanaticism over every latest
ingénue, torrid off-screen dramas, serial marriages and divorces
(mandatory in Ciné-Ville the morning following a marriage), wild cocktail
parties, producers and stunt men, stardom-seeking pilgrims and the casting
couches on which they land, takes and retakes, glycerin tears, cute fox
terriers, and bleached-white smiles that reproduce along “kilometers of film.”
That Ciné-Ville
is not intended as a literal portrait of Hollywood is evident from the first
page, in which the city is described, as in a newsreel, as a special zone of film
production with an outer appearance borrowed from all corners of the globe:
Ciné-Ville
has the silhouette of Constantinople, all the while calling to mind Florence
and New York. It contains within its limits not the vast totality of those cities,
but a neighborhood borrowed from each. Ciné-Ville, Noah’s Ark of different
architectures. Possessed of such immodesty that an exotic exhibitionism is
unleashed even in its constructions, the Florentine Dome facing a Great
Pagoda...Strange panorama of an immense Luna-Park…Approaching the city, one
finds reproductions of buildings from around the world, a great museum
collection…Arab architecture mingles with Scandinavian… All is strange,
conveying an impression like those decorative vignettes that used to illustrate
the headings in old magazines, cathedrals mixed among mosques among ancient villas...
The most prominent of Ciné-Ville’s
outlandish edifices is its immense electrical generating plant, the world’s
most powerful. Cleverly disguised as a cathedral, it also conveniently
functions as a film backdrop. This factory produces the prodigious, blinding light
that powers Ciné-Ville’s “fabulous center of superproduction”:
From all sides hang great crystal chandeliers,
fantasmic spidery arrays, immense batteries, casements of bulbs, whole plateaus
of light, electric globes like those illuminating the dressed windows of the
great department stores. A whole range of lights, sconces, magnificent new
figurations pour blasts of light into the studios, vast luminous platters of
cream. Mercury vapor lamps give one intramedullary injections. Any nuance of
feeling seeks refuge in darkened screening rooms and somber hearts: the excess
of light obliterates emotion. What miserable beings these are who thrive on the
cold simulation of life, in full denial!
Though the novel
consists primarily of discreet chapters each devoted to a facet of the world of
movies but that accumulate to portray the whole, there are scraps of story in Ciné-Ville
and a few recurring, albeit hastily-sketched characters who serve as little
more than types to populate the landscape. The few threads that create anything
resembling a plot first involve a newcomer to Ciné-Ville, Jacques Estruck, and
his integration into this blithe city bathed in an “air of a Palm Sunday, even
on Monday nights.” He is first tasked, as is everyone in Ciné-Ville, with
choosing a screen name to replace his real one (Ramón’s choices for many of
these names struck me as pitch-perfect: Venus d’Argent, Max York, Elsa
Brothers, Cléo de Mérode, Edma Blake, Mac Porland, Julanne Barry, King Walter,
Charles Wilh). Estruck’s story, like the few other mini-plots in Ciné-Ville,
is entirely secondary to Ramón’s interest in capturing the whole emerging world
of cinema, and Estruck disappears altogether when Ciné-Ville’s inhabitants,
accompanied the novel’s omniscient narrator, abruptly swivel their focus in the
direction of the cinema’s newest ingénue, Charlotte Bray, who sucks up all the
attention in Ciné-Ville like a resplendent black hole. I’m hardly giving anything
away by relating that Charlotte’s future in cinema is cut short by an
unfortunate encounter obviously modeled on the Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe
scandal that obsessed Hollywood in the early 1920’s.
Ciné-Ville is pure Ramónismo
– that term given for Gómez de la Serna’s singularly poetic, bravura style that
weaves into the narrative multiple iterations of his famous “greguerías” –
those condensed, humorous, impressionistic and metaphorical one-liners that here
paint the contours of the city and its inhabitants. While Ciné-Ville possesses
some narrative cohesion, Ramónismo is
in full flower throughout, occasionally with self-reflexive humor. In a chapter
entitled “The Perverse Child,” Ramón describes a spoiled child-actor who issues
quotable, pithy pronouncements that seem parodies of Ramón’s own greguerías. Elsewhere
in the novel, he appears to construct scenes expressly so he can fit in his greguerían
conceits, such as an exchange between two window-shopping actresses, one of
whom sees gloves as “an absolution” that allows one to “exchange one’s sins”
and feel “like a virgin” each time one puts on a new pair, and her companion
who wishes gemstones were soluble, so that she “could chew them, or throw them
into champagne to let them melt like ice.”
At times these
surrealistic elements blow up into whole, barmy, kooky anecdotes, as when as
when a leading lady, in a jealous rage over her husband’s pursuit of a young
actress, takes her revenge by starting a popular kissing school (the
descriptions of various aspects of kissing and of what constitutes a good kiss
are worth publication by themselves) or another sensation which grips the city
when an actress' beauty mark is stolen by her brutish husband. On the day
of the verdict for this theft, Ciné-Ville’s great fake moon glows above the
city and carries, in empathetic approval, its own beauty mark. Many of Ciné-Ville’s
pleasures derive from similarly poetic absurdities, yet, as in his stories, Ramón
can transform a moment of absurdist levity into something wonderfully poignant
or penetrating. Just when one suspects him of a certain facility and
triviality, he manages a lyrical and profound moment that reveals an artist
looking deeply and appreciatively at the world even as he’s reveling
deliriously in it.
Far from “merely
playing” with his subject, Ramón seems to be cavorting wildly, turning the full
force of his observational powers towards the world of cinema. Ciné-Ville
raises probing and prescient questions about film as art form and as popular
medium, including its relation to the novel, confounding of illusion and
reality, obsession with celebrity and denial of death (one of the more poetic
motifs in the novel is its repeated suggestion of illusory intimations of
immortality attained by the preservation of faces, gestures, and the presences
of actors and actresses on celluloid). These observations range from charming
perceptions about the capabilities of the new medium - such as noting that in
cinema, the dead don’t get up after the applause - to predictions about its
future. Ciné-Ville may well
contain one of the first literary references to television, as well as a
prediction that film will one day be disseminated by “radio wave” and a particularly
far-sighted speculation that it will one day be replaced by virtual reality, in
a remarkable passage that goes a step further by anticipating virtual reality’s
authoritarian aspects.
Despite this
clairvoyance, one is never quite sure, in this impressionistic compendium and in
the face of what obviously represents some skepticism regarding the art form
that would dominate the century, exactly how Ramón feels about cinema. Though
he’s undoubtedly awed by it, he seems almost afraid of its potential, piqued by
its turn towards melodrama both on-screen and off, and mocking of the frivolity
that accompanies it. A hint of this seems to be provided in a chapter entitled
“Experimental Films,” in which Ramón describes a parallel, isolated and nearly
forlorn “intimate studio” where the new medium of cinema is liberally tested
and pushed to its very limits, just as he appears to be doing with literature,
but in the end Ramón seems to toy equally with this more “serious” cinema, as
is evident from the delightful titles of some of these imaginary experimental
films: The Lost Hour, The Eyes of the Planets, Battle of the
Glow-worms, Cabaret of the Dead.
I’d noted in my earlier
post about Gómez de la Serna that he seems to view the world through a sort of
telescoping, microscoping kaleidoscope. Ciné-Ville too left me with this
impression of some mad, mechanical, scientific eye at work, its gaze going
everywhere and seeming to treat everything it falls upon equally, whether
material or human, which may explain the sketch-like quality of the characters.
Yet at the same time, this “Ramónoscope” appears capable of strong emotion, as
in an uproariously sarcastic treatment of self-appointed Hollywood censors or
in a charged chapter entitled “The Blacks,” which evinces the worst stereotypes
of Black actors in early Hollywood while simultaneously ferociously exposing
Hollywood’s racism.
Screwy and bally-hooey, Ciné-Ville
provides an invaluable portrait of cinema’s early years and a snapshot, as
though frozen across time, of Hollywood’s excesses then and now. What most
stuck me about Ciné-Ville was its modernity; apart from a handful of
minor period details, Ciné-Ville could easily be mistaken for a
contemporary novel. Ramón may never have visited the place – his knowledge of
Hollywood may have been gleaned exclusively from the screen itself, and at a
distance of some 10,000 kilometers – but his understanding of Hollywood dynamics
still at work today and the great poetic humor he brings to his observations merit Ciné-Ville a revered place among the great
novels of Hollywood. Exuberant, sparkling and with a depth of presence
surpassing its playful exterior, this
kid stays in the picture.
[i] A useful
word invented by a friend during a tipsy, late-night conversation years ago to
describe the ensemble of certain independent signifiers that, together, suggest
an understandable whole, as, for example, one might say of a wagon wheel, a
bleached cow skull, and a length of barbed wire that they constitute some of
the rangelanda of the Old West.
