Shadows of Desire: War, Youth and the Classical Vernacular

Abstract

The first issue of British film fan-magazine Picturegoer, in October 1913, announced that ‘actual stars, and the greatest of these, of the dramatic firmament’ are being drawn to appear on the screen, as if they were moths to a silver sheet, or rather celestial beings projected before an audience at a planetarium. Despite the exclusivity of the language, the magazine’s readers are then invited to make their ‘ “picture” acquaintance’ with these stars, already negotiating the balance of extraordinary and ordinary that characterises screen stardom.¹ In the same issue readers were alerted to the opening of The Carlton Theatre on London’s Tottenham Court Road. This ‘crimson carpeted Temple of White Marble’ was an early example of a wave of picture palaces from the 1910s to 1930s that provided comfort amid increasingly opulent architecture, often neo-classical, for exhibitors to draw larger middle-class audiences, who would have seen many of these actors on the (already culturally prestigious) stage, to worship the new screen gods.² ‘Playgoers’ will ‘become picturegoers’, the magazine concludes. At such screens that year fans might also experience what the magazine calls the ‘stupendous Italian productions’ of The Last Days of Pompeii (Mario Caserini), to which it devotes a main article, and the ‘great classical tragedy’ of Anthony and Cleopatra (Enrico Guazzoni), two of the many popular epics set in antiquity reaching an international audience in the 1910s, to which Hollywood would respond with ever-more expensive productions such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).