1 August 2009

Having spent numerous hours in the last few weeks restoring and tweaking The Old Dark Arthouse in the wake of a hard drive crash, I find myself at the brink of being able to post daily.

Aside from Bergmania and the weekly Gomer Night (which just wrapped True Blood, S.01), the screenings at The Old Dark Arthouse are likely to be mostly films of the 1930s, the era of my current obsession.

Why the 1930s?

Having an informed experience of the 1930s seems essential to me, not only as regards film history, but the understanding of world history in general. But I was initially drawn to the era by the films of the time. As for any Monster Kid (those of us who, through TV and monster magazines, became hooked on horror films as youths in the 1960s and early 1970s), 1930s Hollywood horror films were my earliest experience of film as an art. And of course, Popeye, Betty Boop, The Three Stooges, and Warner Bros. cartoons comprised the core of children's TV programming in the mid-1960s. As my tastes broadened in my teens, I became aware of Busby Berkeley, the Marx Bros., W.C. Fields, and the Astaire and Rogers pictures, among others.

But there's so much more to 30s cinema. The recognition and resurrection of the Pre-Code era cinema has been a revelation, of course. But so too has been the context given the time by noting those forgotten or neglected genres and players which comprised the bulk of Hollywood film in the 30s, but had been eclipsed by what became the recognized classics of the time. What survived to be shown on TV in the 60s were only those films which continued to appeal to 60s TV audiences. It's a selection process which was bound to occur, but it had the effect of filtering and thereby limiting our exposure to the pop culture of the 30s.

For example, it seems like comic books and superheroes are universally American, and it's hard to imagine American pop culture without them. However, there were no superheroes before the introduction of Superman in 1938, and comic books, though they existed before then, were quite different.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ask yourself, what was the 30s pop culture landscape like in the absence of comic books? Speculating on the answer to that and similar questions has been very rewarding to me, and given me a new perspective on the lived experience of the 1930s.

I specifically asked myself, had I become a teenager in the mid-1930s rather than the mid-1960s, what pop culture would I have consumed? What would I have been exposed to, and what would I have gravitated towards as my entertainment of choice? An earlier attempt to answer that question led me to read, last year, the first Tarzan novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a fantasy novel by 20s pulp author A. Merritt, a mystery by Edgar Wallace, and a number of stories from Weird Menace pulps. These are all works which would have been part of a bright teen's reading material at the time.

More to come...