‘Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema’ — A Partial Review.
So I picked-up ‘Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema’ last week and although I’m only 100 pages into this 800 page behemoth it’s already one of the best collections of film writing I’ve encountered.
I knew I’d fallen in love with it when I read Minnie Pallister’s complaint on page 13 that “the reason why so much nonsense is written about cinemas is because the wrong people write about them, although this can’t be helped because the only people who really know what cinemas are, are, as a rule, inarticulate.”
Goodness! I thought to myself. Has she been reading my blog?!
For there on I’ve been treated to some of the most delightfully catty, opinionated, overly erudite, scathing, witty, condescending, hilarious, cutting, venomously barbed, acidulous observations I’ve ever clapped eyes on.
For example, there’s a piece from the London Black and White, 4th April 1896, where the author, identified only by her first name of Virginia, writes about a trip to the cinema with her friend Julia only to suddenly interject — “Which reminds me that I really detest Julia, for she can walk down the most attractive streets, gaze into all the shop windows, and desire nothing. This, she thinks, marks her as superior; while I am convinced it simply stigmatises her as an inferior animal, with no possible appreciation of beauty, but scant taste and small ambition.”
Yeah. Fuck you, Julia!
Although the best piece, so far, is Ann Rix’ wonderful piece about her visit to the Veriscope (1897) where she reviews EVERYTHING except the actual film itself, which just so happens to be a boxing prize-fight. So she reviews her fellow female friends whom she calls “various simple ostriches of my acquaintance”; she reviews the other women, those “primitive, savage harpies, those birds of prey worse-than-man”. She reviews the Olympia itself, a “huge, white-painted circus, and little groups of persons freckle its big, round face with dark, irregular patches that do not, in some ways relieve the whiteness of it.”
This is something stated in the book’s introduction — that when women wrote about film they tended to focus just as much, if not more, on the sights, smells, decor, fashions and human life contained within the cinema itself instead of focusing purely on the abstract, illusionary world flickering on the screen (men, it appears, are only captivated by, and only write about, the flashing lights and the various statistics that power them).
So in Resi Langer’s ‘In the Movie Houses of Western Berlin’ (1919) she writes of the cashier — “Her hair is well-kempt — perhaps she has touched it up a bit, but so what. It becomes her. With well-manicured white hands she dispenses the colourful tickets to those who desire them. An eternal “Thank you!” floats over the beautifully reddened lips. Perhaps a little Leichner red deepens the shade — perhaps it’s natural. The effect is good. All wishing to partake of the film goodies awaiting inside are damned up in front of her little glass house.”
When the movie is over (this time whatever is playing isn’t even referred to at all) “accompanied by music, everyone streams towards the exits, and what was once a whole disintegrates into atoms, for today. Perhaps tomorrow each one will once again form a vital part of the whole and allow itself to be caught up in another light oasis.”
And, obviously, there’s TONNES written about hats with various men and women being so proud of their latest head-gear they point blank refuse to remove them during the picture show with one such incident resulting in the great Viennese Hat War of 1911 (why has no one ever dramatised this event?).
This book is fantastic to the point it’s making me wish men had never been allowed to write about movies in the first place. I mean Christ, I thought it was fun being a flippant middle-aged bachelor living in the 21st Century but that’s nothing compared to what it must’ve been like being a 19th Century Viennese spinster.
So I’ve decided I need to up my game which means next time I’m at the pictures I won’t review the movie (the film is, after all, frequently the most boring part of going to the cinema) but, instead, the people around me. And why don’t you, dear reader, join me? Seriously, come along next time I go and we can watch the movie together. Then, the following morning, I can publically criticise your dress sense and tell everyone how much of an asshole you were.