Gloomy Sunday Afternoons

Caroline Maclean

• BuyThe Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period by Laura Marcus
  Oxford, 562 pp, £39.00, December 2007, ISBN 978 0 19 923027 3

‘You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,’ Tolstoy allegedly said on his 80th birthday, in 1908. It is difficult, now, to recapture the excitement that greeted the first moving images. The new magical machine, it was variously believed, could bring the dead back to life, enable people to travel in time and space, arouse sexual desire, speak (silently) in a universal language, and offer magnified and telescopic views of reality. Tolstoy went on to say that ‘a new form of writing will be necessary’ because the ‘swift’ scene changes on film were more effective than the ‘heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed’.