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Fox Movietone Follies of 1929

1992; The MIT Press; Volume: 60; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/779030

1536-013X

Michel Leiris, Dominic Faccini,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

So, then, Oxford Street, you stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee: the time was come at last that I no more should pace in anguish thy neverending terraces, no more should dream and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger. Successors, too many, to myself and Ann have doubtless since trodden in our footsteps, inheritors of our calamities: other orphans than Ann have sighed: tears have been shed by other chldren: and thou, Oxford Street, hast since, doubtless, echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts. For myself, however, the storm which I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair-weather .. This passage from the Confessions of an Opium Eater immediately follows Thomas de Quincey's account of his encounter, in a nearly deserted house he had rented for lodgings, with a poor child terrorized by ghosts, suffering from cold and hunger, who would huddle up close to him for warmth and comfort at night. Then, there is the moving story of the little London prostitute, Ann, with whom Quincey, on his darkest days, would sadly walk the Oxford Street pavements, and who once may have saved him from dying of starvation with a glass of spiced port from her thin purse. Despite the appeal of the most dazzling scenes in Fox Follies, they are necessarily surpassed by two far more arresting images, which reveal that street magic-sometimes sparkling, at others somber-which creates the marvelous jewel box, velvet-lined, within which, suspected or not, lie glistening a young girl's heady tears. . . . There's the girl, pretty but too modestly dressed and plaintive, standing in front of a sumptuous shop window until the wax figures come alive in dream, drawing her to them, trying the finery on her. There's the girl who sobs beneath the falling snow, while a crowd of shady folk of all sorts stir about in flashes, with inexpressibly absurd gestures. These are both Little Match Girls straight out of children's tales, or orphans out of melodrama. There are those who don't cry: the sirens bobbing up and down in a submarine ballet along enormous algae, like the mysterious bottle-imps in majestic motion