Cinema Ball is a 1936 film produced by Alec Baron, a tailor and amateur filmmaker born in Leeds on the 29th November 1913, and a central figure in Leeds’ Jewish community; he would have been around twenty three when he made Cinema Ball.  His family had fled to Britain in the late nineteenth century to escape persecution in Tsarist Russia, along with around 100,000 other Jews. The Russian pogroms would see more than two million Russian Jews move abroad, mostly to the United States. Out of...

Cinema Ball is a 1936 film produced by Alec Baron, a tailor and amateur filmmaker born in Leeds on the 29th November 1913, and a central figure in Leeds’ Jewish community; he would have been around twenty three when he made Cinema Ball.  His family had fled to Britain in the late nineteenth century to escape persecution in Tsarist Russia, along with around 100,000 other Jews. The Russian pogroms would see more than two million Russian Jews move abroad, mostly to the United States.

Out of love for film, Baron and a group of school friends would found the Leeds Film Group, a community which would show foreign or art cinema not otherwise destined for a commercial release. Combined with his important documentation of the Jewish life in Leeds, his role in Yorkshire film history is a vital one; he was also a supporter of the British Film Institute and the National Film Archive. For more information on Alec Baron and Judaism within Britain, see the context for his earlier, 1935 film Judean Club in Leeds.

Cinema Ball documents a fancy dress party at Leeds Town Hall. The novelty of seeing oneself on film had not worn off by 1936, as filmmaking equipment was not nearly as accessible as it is today. Both the two stars in the film – Roy Fox and Neil Hamilton (the actor, not the disgraced ex-Conservative politician) – had some degree of international fame, so their presence in the city must have been exciting.

Clubs or societies based around film have had an important part in influencing the wider cultural landscape.  The very first film society was Edmond Benoit-Levy’s ‘Film Club’. The French have a particularly well established tradition of film societies, with a much more marked influence on world cinema – ‘La Nouvelle Vague’, or ‘The French New Wave’, originated within the cinema clubs of Paris. The first film society in Britain was established in 1925 by intellectuals and film critics, including some members of the famous Bloomsbury Group, centred around figures such as John Maynard Keynes, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf.  Members of this society were closely associated with some of the most influential people in film of all time; Ivor Montagu, a Jewish communist and film critic, was notably friends with Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Influenced by film societies, the late night BBC film slot ‘Moviedrome’ would put films by visionaries such as film society-alumnus Jean-Luc Godard or Andrei Tarkovsky on mainstream television, probably shocking insomniacs and confused Match of the Day fans the country over. Today film societies are widespread, and are likely to be found in most cities and university unions, although not many of them can boast about having connections to, say, Werner Herzog or Terence Malick anymore.

Roy Fox was a Colorado-born dance bandleader, popular during the era of British Dance Band, a mixture of American Jazz and traditional British music hall popular in the 20s and 30s; many of the British Dance Band leaders would become popular as Big Band leaders in swing-era America. Much like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’, Roy Fox found himself institutionalised in a Swiss sanatorium for an illness of the lung – pleurisy, in Fox’s case – and found, upon being discharged, that the world had moved on without him.  He found himself displaced as band leader by pianist Lew Stone, and despite attempts to challenge this legally had to form a new band with old trumpeter Sid Buckman and started a residency at Café Anglais. Fox’s original band had included Al Bowlly as its singer; Al Bowlly is sometimes suggested to have invented the style of singing known as ‘crooning’, and is also occasionally referred to as the very first pop star.  

The actor Neil Hamilton was given his first big break by the director D. H. Griffith. Although once remembered primarily for pioneering many aspects of Hollywood films still in use today, this is now overshadowed by the heinous racism and historical revisionism integral to the plot of Griffith’s most famous film, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. Originally entitled ‘The Clansmen’, the film followed the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan and featured hundreds of white actors in blackface portraying African-Americans in an unspeakably offensive, cartoonish, dehumanising way. Despite this, the list of directors that would cite him as a direct influence is substantial: Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Carl Theodor Dreyer, to name just those incredibly influential in their own right. Notably, however, the above tend to refer to Griffith’s later and less obviously prejudiced ‘Intolerance’, made in 1916, as his most distinguished legacy. After the wild success of The Birth of a Nation, cinema audiences became less and less interested in Griffith’s films and he sank further and further into alcoholism. On July 23rd 1948, the director that Charlie Chaplin had described as ‘the teacher of us all’ died of a cerebral haemorrhage alone in the hotel where he was living.

Although Neil Hamilton himself is most likely remembered primarily as Commissioner Gordon in the campy 1960s television ‘Batman’, his most accomplished work was probably his work with the aforementioned D. H. Griffith: The Sixth Commandment and the sorely underappreciated Isn’t Life Wonderful. Many of the earliest films he acted in are now lost, such as an adaption of The Great Gatsby. Other roles he might have hoped would disappear, namely the regrettable The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, are still available to watch.

The pogroms that forced the Baron family to flee their homeland started in the nineteenth century. The exact riot which constitutes the first pogrom is debated – some would point towards 1821, in Odessa, while others might point towards 1859 riots in the same city. By 1884, however, the term ‘pogrom’ was well-established in the English language after a three-year spree of anti-Jewish violence in the south-west of the Russian Empire. The pogroms were primarily sparked by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of the ‘People’s Will’ in 1881, a socialist movement with a focus on Russia’s agrarian peasantry, while Russia’s large Jewish population nonetheless footed the blame.

The pogroms, like many other historical outbursts of anti-Semitism, saw a particular focus on the destruction or theft of Jewish commercial or material goods; the 1905 pogrom in Odessa was the bloodiest, seeing around 2,500 Jews killed. The civil war that followed Lenin’s 1917 revolution saw some of the most vicious pogroms, with all sides of the conflict participating. Many Jews, however, saw the Red Army as the most likely to help them, as when the Red Army’s participation in pogroms was made known to the Soviet high command, severe punishments were put in place. Soviet Russia established laws banning anti-Semitism, though speaking Hebrew was banned, as was Zionism. More in depth discussion of the pogroms and a history of anti-Semitism can be found in the context for Judean Club In Leeds.

Further Reading:

moviedrome

The British dance band

D.W. Griffith: Father of Film

Pogroms