Review by New York Times Review
THE WORLD OF SILENT film is largely a vanished one. In an author's note at the start of his radiant new novel, "The Electric Hotel," Dominic Smith tells us that, thanks in part to the fragility of celluloid nitrate, more than 75 percent of all silent films have been lost. Maybe that's why the silents we do have - particularly the early, pre-1920s ones - can seem like missives from an aboveground Atlantis, satin-silver remnants of a civilization that's alluringly alien yet also recognizably human. Watching an early silent can feel like peering into another person's dream. Smith captures that spirit, and more, in "The Electric Hotel," a vital and highly entertaining work about the act of creation, and about what it means to pick up and move on after you've lost everything. The story weaves through the streets of Paris and across the wild landscape of Australia, and even traverses the Belgian battlefields of World War I. But it begins and ends in early-1960s Hollywood, where we meet Claude Ballard, an elderly former filmmaker with the emphasis on former: Though he wanders through the city with two small cameras in tow - one for stills and another for movies - he hasn't made a feature film since 1910. That one, "The Electric Hotel," an ambitious and fantastical hourlong melodrama, nearly killed him. Although a film student named Martin Embry finds Claude in Hollywood, the bulk of this story takes place in and around Fort Lee, N.J., the true birthplace of American cinema. It's there that Claude, a Frenchman who received his early training from the pioneering Lumiere brothers, joins with three partners to create a small studio: There's Hal Bender, a Brooklyn theater owner whose beloved father was murdered by thuggish moneylenders; the Australian stuntman Chip Spalding, "a teenage daredevil in a loincloth"; and the haughty but complex French actress Sabine Montrose, who makes the shift from stage to film at Claude's urging - and who, in the process, also becomes his undoing. When the elderly Claude is asked about her, his answer, after a pause, is this: "Well, let's see.... Ah, I remember: She ate my entrails like a feral dog and then she vanished into thin air." But then, what's a little heartbreak - or even a big one - in the context of the project of a lifetime? With "The Electric Hotel," Smith - whose previous novel was "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" - puts a human face on the details of early film history. In Claude, he gives us a character who's alive to the ways in which celluloid can capture flashes of life and depths of feeling. But Claude is also susceptible to the tragedy of love, as it presents itself in matters of the heart or in a work of art. The ghostly soul of the novel is the section detailing the making of Claude's masterwork, the story of a mysterious, consumptive widow - played by Sabine, her face made lunar with lavender powder, her eyes rimmed with midnight kohl - who runs a remote hotel where traveling salesmen might stop, at their peril, for the night. The movie's spectral details include a children's dollhouse where the furniture rearranges itself and a ruined garden just made for moonlight. After nightfall, the widow steps out for a walk with a tiger - because, why not? Smith borrowed the title of his book, and a few of the visual ideas of the movie within it, from a delightful 1908 stop-motion film by the Spanish director Segundo de Chomón, long thought to be lost but now found; you can watch it on YouTtibe. But Claude Ballard and Sabine Montrose's "Electric Hotel" lives, sadly, only within the pages of this novel. It's the ultimate lost film, unfindable and unseeable no matter how many drawers we open or vaults we scour - and yet so vivid we can imagine every frame, tiger and all. STEPHANIE zacharek is the film critic at Time magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1962, cinematographer Claude Ballard is rusticating with the other eccentric, washed-up denizens of Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel. When a doctoral candidate arrives to interview him, Claude's past begins to unspool, and Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, 2016) shifts the focus to the nascent film industry at the turn of the century. On the Hudson Palisades, a ragtag bunch of innovators Claude, aging French stage actress Sabine Montrose (clearly modeled on Sarah Bernhardt), an Australian stunt man, and a Brooklyn entrepreneur creates a silent film masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Success is within their grasp when archvillain Thomas Edison lets loose his copyright lawyers. The atmosphere is convincing as Smith transports readers to fin de siècle New Jersey, the sick room of a tubercular widow, and Belgium in the throes of WWI. The depth and breadth of the characterization is truly impressive, the story line immersive, and the prose richly evocative as the novel ranges from tragic to nail-biting to hilarious. Smith's tale is as luminous as celluloid projected on a silver screen hung from a dirigible floating over the Hudson (yes, this happens). Highly recommended.--Bethany Latham Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith (The Last Painting of Sara De Vos) takes readers back to the dawn of the motion picture era in his splendid latest. Claude Ballard is an old man in 1962, living at Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel, when he's contacted by Martin Embry, a PhD candidate in film history. When the elderly director reveals that he owns a print of his first feature film, long considered lost, the young scholar's enthusiasm about its discovery prompts Claude to reminisce about the film's genesis and aftermath. From his early days photographically documenting ailments at a Paris hospital, to his rapid rise to prominence by demonstrating the capabilities of the Lumière brothers' moving picture innovations, to his ill-fated (both professionally and personally) production of The Electric Hotel, to his surprising heroic turn in WWI, Claude's own story-and those of the leading lady, stuntman, and impresario who collaborated with him-unfolds as cinematically as the scenes he creates on film. Fascinating information about the making of silent films (including a villainous cameo by Thomas Edison) is balanced by poignant, emotional portrayals of individuals attempting to define their lives offscreen even as they made history on it. Smith winningly delves into Hollywood's past. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The year is 1963, and silent-film director Claude Ballard is tracked down at the Los Angeles hotel where he's long lived by a PhD student writing about Claude's lost masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Smith, who delved into art history in his previous novel, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, does much the same for the history of early cinema this time around. Beyond that, we end up learning much more about Ballard's life, including his derring-do covering the carnage of World War I and his relationship with the love of his life, the complex and sultry actress Sabine Montrose. There's even a cameo by a most unpleasant Thomas Edison, who does his best to put a stop to Ballard's wildly successful film. Ballard's obsession with the moving image drives him throughout his journeys, and at times you want reach through the pages and give him a little shake. But he's an admirable person even if he doesn't realize it. VERDICT Smith tries to cover too much territory, but Ballard is finely rendered, and there are quite a few edge-of-your-seat moments. Recommended to fans of Graham Moore's The Last Days of Night and Amor Towles's The Gentleman from Moscow. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]-Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A long-retired moviemaker recalls the early days of silent films in Smith's atmospheric follow-up to The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016, etc.).In 1962, 85-year-old Claude Ballard lives in a run-down Hollywood hotel and spends his days gathering mushrooms and photographing street scenes. He has not made a movie since his "grand cinematic experiment," The Electric Hotel, appeared in 1910. As his reminiscences to young film scholar Martin Embry unfold, we eventually learn the reasons for his decision, but first we get a wonderfully vivid re-creation of the spell cast by the earliest films, when photographer's apprentice Claude sees the Lumire brothers' first reels exhibited in the basement of a Paris hotel in 1895: "every inch of the screen was aliveyou burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze." His work for the Lumires takes him to New York, where the audience's loud response to a moving picture next door to her theater infuriates touring French actress Sabine Montrose. She winds up in bed with Claude and in the new medium; buccaneering producer Hal Bender finds them a studio perched over the Palisades in New Jersey, where he hopes to elude Thomas Edison's litigious Motion Picture Patents Company. Smith skillfully blends film history with the adventures of his cast; a Stanislavsky-obsessed acting coach and an Australian stuntman are among the intriguingly idiosyncratic folks who join Sabine, Claude, and Hal, each haunted by damage a parent has inflicted, to joyously invent a new art form. The novel climaxes with a brilliantly detailed account of the filming of The Electric Hotel and its triumphant premiere, followed by multiple blows that have been deftly foreshadowed. The account of Claude's traumatic experiences filming the devastation of World War I is something of a letdown, but a final scene with Sabine ties up emotional loose ends, and Martin's screening of the restored Electric Hotel provides a moving finale.A compelling plot, robust characters, and finely crafted prose richly evoke a bygone age and art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
