INTERVIEW

MATTHEW SWEET

BBC Four: How difficult was it to get hold of the films?
Matthew Sweet: None of this stuff is shown on the telly - you have to go and find it for yourself. The BFI has the biggest concentration of material, but much of it is quite inaccessible. There are lots of things that haven't been transferred onto a print that you can go and order and watch. I also went to events like the Nottingham Silent Film Festival, an event that runs every year in April. That was a great resource.

BBC Four: The title Shepperton Babylon is resonant with decadence; did British stars and filmmakers match their Hollywood counterparts' bad behaviour?
Matthew Sweet: People often think that the world of British cinema is terribly genteel. All John Mills, Dulcie Gray and cups of tea; but it really isn't true. The book is called Shepperton Babylon because I wanted to make that allusion to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, but it's not a book about people dying on the toilet. We do have our scandals, and they're good and juicy. We have terrible stories of suicides and chorus girls being burnt to death, we had a good line in conmen in the British cinema.

BBC Four: Where did the idea of British cinema as staid and dull come from?
Matthew Sweet: There were lots of outside influences that were interested in generating negative opinions about British cinema. The first is Hollywood - there were many good British films just slamming into a brick wall as far as Hollywood was concerned, and that was simply an expression of economic protectionism. At the end of the 1920s another set of villains come into this story: the high-minded British intellectuals who were forging a serious discourse about cinema. Unfortunately, they seemed to think that you could only admire Russian cinema by kicking British cinema. So at the end of the 1920s - when the British studio system was really booming and producing really great, involving and complex films - they are saying that these films are British and consequently among the world's worst. And then they praise Russian directors, in particular for technical innovations like associative montage, which they simply don't know are there in British films in the years previous to this. In a way kicking British films becomes a badge of intellectual seriousness.

BBC Four: Why has this idea remained unchallenged for so long?
Matthew Sweet: These films are not accessible - you can't just go and get them at the video shop. Even in the 1960s, when film studies courses had been set up and magazines like Films and Filming had their period of greatest influence and productivity, you could open a copy of Films and Filming and read remarks about the 'barren Twenties' - clearly by writers who had never seen a British film from the 1920s. When film courses were established British film was utterly ignored by them, apart from one or two things that you were allowed to like. Until at least two years ago there was a prospectus you could get from the University of Dundee that summed up the first 30 years of British cinema as "a cottage industry stifled by prejudice".

BBC Four: And if you were to think of a couple of films that have fallen off the cultural radar but deserve to be remembered what would you choose?
Matthew Sweet: There are two films I would love everybody to see and that I think if people sat down in front of them all those anxieties and prejudices they might have about British cinema might vanish. The first is The Informer, which is a story about the IRA in Dublin at the end of the Twenties and it's the most perfect studio picture I've seen. There's a scene where a man who's been responsible for the death of a colleague in the IRA goes into the house of the mother who's just lost her son to pay his respects to her, knowing that he's the cause of this man's death. It's a moment of incredible power.

There's also a film I love called Shooting Stars which is great because it's set in a British studio, so it gives you all this wonderful behind-the-scenes stuff. It has an amazing sequence of a man coming down the side of a cliff on a bicycle at great speed. It's filmed with a camera mounted on the bicycle and it's like a comedy version of the Odessa Steps sequence. Shooting Stars has a wonderful sense of the pathos of the world of cinema. It is a world where people's reputations can be made and killed overnight and it also has a fantastic love triangle in it.

BBC Four: The book is full of tragic stories of fading stars and filmmakers, but it's also very funny. Were you determined not to write a maudlin book?
Matthew Sweet: When you look at stories of disaster there's always some absurdity in there waiting to be discovered. The comedy and tragedy of these stories is very deeply interlocked, although it pains me that so many people died forgotten when their work might be rediscovered. They'll never know and they had to endure years of being dismissed and sometime of open contempt. I've talked to the children of silent film stars who had to listen to people at cocktail parties in the 1950s making sarcastic remarks about their parents being tied to railway tracks. So yes, there is a certain kind of melancholy in the story. But these films were riotous experiences for many of the people who worked on them. It wasn't a miserable and depressing world.

BBC Four: What proportion of the films of this period now remain?
Matthew Sweet: About 80% of our silent film heritage has been lost. In those days film was considered to have a lifespan of not more than 6 years - once it had been shown on the last circle of the distribution circuit its life was over. Film companies all along Wardour Street had vats of peroxide on their roofs for melting down films that they couldn't sell any more. Scrap merchants would melt films down along with discarded dentures, broken tortoiseshell combs and old spectacles and this gloop would then be used for waterproofing aeroplane wings. So if you see an aeroplane of a certain vintage in a museum, run your hands along its body and you might be touching some lost British classic - or even your granny's false teeth.