Bryony Dixon, Sight & Sound November 2015
Lampooning the film world was a risky strategy, a bit of barefaced cheek unlikely to ingratiate him to the industry or the fans who, the film implies, lap up the studio system’s shallow genre product.” “Shooting Stars was an audacious debut for Asquith – as Luke McKernan has put it, it was ‘a young man’s film’, intended to create a stir, a tactic followed by later prodigies such as Welles and Tarantino.
“Everyone loves a film about filmmaking, and Anthony Asquith’s first film, Shooting Stars (1928), is one of the best and earliest – a love-letter to the process. The men may look absurd, but their absurdity is at least identifiable as the same sort of absurdity as they practise today.” The things which always date a film most violently are feminine fashions and feminine behaviour. “No woman nowadays could, either seriously or in fun, posture and fret like Annette Benson does as the film-actress heroine of Shooting Stars: the same frailties of female temperament today have a totally different mode of expression. I feel no identification at all with the people of this curious past life. “I was 19 when this film was made, and I have only an inexact, partly idealised and heavily censored recollection of how we really looked and behaved. John Francis Lane, Sight & Sound Autumn 1978 3. Perhaps the most delightful invention, however, is the use of the cinema, the camera, as deus ex machina.” “The characters are all brilliantly conceived and animated beetles. Beetle are last seen in jail together, resigned and reconciled. The wife swipes the husband, the husband swipes the cameraman and the cinema catches fire. Beetle’s amorous adventure (and he is of course the projectionist). “Husband and wife make up and he takes her to the movies, where the film they see is none other than the one which our cameraman had been filming of Mr. Beetle’s wife, equally bored with married life, has meanwhile been receiving her lover, and there is a fight when Mr. A bored husband falls for a music hall singer and takes her to a hotel (‘Hotel de I’Amour‘), where a cameraman who is in love with the singer follows them and films their night of love through the keyhole. “The film employs animated puppets, which I believe were not much in use at that time, and Starewicz uses beetle characters for his story of provincial infidelity.
“The greatest curiosity however, was The Cameraman’s Revenge, an animated film made in 1912 by Władysław Starewicz, a Pole whom Khanzhonkov had been enterprising enough to ‘discover’ and bring to Russia.
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