The Electric Hotel

April 8, 2019
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.

April 26, 2019
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel is a sensory delight, retelling the life story of a former film director—known as ‘the Frenchman behind the viewfinder’—with the rich vocabulary of cinema. Claude Ballard, a French auteur of silent films now lost to history, is dragged out of obscurity by a film student interested in his masterpiece The Electric Hotel. Through interviews, readers learn of Ballard’s tutelage under cinema’s first greats, the Lumiere brothers, his struggles and successes in the early American studio days, and how an unrealised romance bled into his film, ultimately leaving him emotionally and financially bankrupt. Smith uses Ballard’s lost cinematic work as an anchor for this emotional and turbulent story, highlighting not only the incredible and alluring power of film but also its ability to provide structure and meaning to sometimes impossible lives, even if that same ‘art’ is tragic too: ‘When I dream of that old life I see it like a strip of burning celluloid,’ says Ballard. With a keen eye for cinema’s early history, The Electric Hotel will attract readers with an appetite for old Hollywood and keep them, with its protagonist’s story of ambition, art and redemption.

Nathan Smith is a freelance writer