Papers and screens

As Melissa points out, Ewald André Dupont’s smoky, dreamy Piccadilly (1929) has a special interest in tactile penmanship and acts of witnessing, establishing “a special link between the written word and the cinematic”. But slouched in front of a squat 1970s television set with bulky headphones strapped to my ears (read: the undeniably strange experience of watching a film, alone, in the reserve section of Fisher library), a slightly different mapping of words onto the cinematic frame caught my attention.


Newspapers…the written word rendered mechanical, marking the fickleness of fame and the ceaseless ebb and flow of popular trends. They’re paraded by vendors on street corners; they infiltrate both the exclusive backstage of the Piccadilly Club and the modest, patchwork rooms in Limehouse; they fall in and out of the characters’ hands.

Newspapers are implicated in the spectacle of public communication – transitory, momentary, capricious. There’s a metaphoric intersection between the unstoppable overturning of the public news cycle, the spinning film reel, and the plot of Piccadilly. Sure, Piccadilly bears a certain permanence. On the one hand, it’s practically ‘captured’, inscribed fixedly upon the surface of Dupont’s film reel; on the other, it gives an impression of stagnation because it is fairly dirge-like, moving lethargically through the storyline. But film is always an experience on-the-run, in time; it flits and dances across the screen, keeping us in our seats for a prescribed two-or-so hours. And Piccadilly is textually and extratextually poised at a moment of indelible shift: from the clumsy conventionality of Mabel’s dancing to the exotic, erotic fluidity of Shosho, from Gilda Gray to Anna May Wong, from the Silver Screen to the cutting-edge talkie. It’s a study in flux.

Piccadilly looks at itself squarely in the mirror, perceives its status as an ephemeral visual fragment, and stubbornly, stoically, refuses to make any claims to immortality. The film stages itself as a daily news story, a sensational event that culminates in a courtroom scene – which is in turn just another public performance, a crude negotiation of narrative in the tragic mode. The film’s ultimate ‘testimony’? It bears witness to public indifference, a type of careless forgetfulness – wilful, collective amnesia. “Life goes on!” declares the newspaper placard that ends the film. There’s always a new star with a new show, waiting in the wings of a new neon-lit venue. The film gleefully destroys its own mythology, denying its own significance.


Something I find particularly interesting is Piccadilly’s use of newspapers to screen, to conceal. Newspapers are co-opted as props in the rehearsing of narratives of romance and courtship and power. Mabel coyly peers out at scorned suitor Vic from beneath the crowded textual surface of The Stage, and Shosho impulsively kisses Jimmy under the ‘cover’ of the morning edition. This latter act of shielding is caught up not only in the short-lived romance of Shosho and Jimmy, but the equally short-lived romance of Shosho and her public. The kiss is predicated on the newspaper itself, or more particularly the news in the paper: Shosho’s elation stems from the announcement, enactment and (temporary) securing of her public success on the front-page spread. Shrouding the action in secrecy, shutting out the other characters along with the cinematic audience, and yet serving as a token of publication and display, of exposure/disclosure – this is a nuanced figuration of the revealing and concealing functions of newspapers in the scheme of Piccadilly.