BERLIN.

It is possible that some instinct tells an artist where to go to develop his capacity to the fullest extent. The Berlin of the early Thirties was never as creative as the Paris of the Twenties as far as literature was concerned but it saw the flowering and almost annihilation of the new art of the film.

I had rarely been to a cinema in my life, the idea of film seemed alien to me, I thought in 1927 only in terms of literature, of books but when Kenneth Macpherson said that he saw in imagination a new world of pictures that not only moved but moved as if they were reflexions of intellectual thoughts, I was perfectly willing to go to Berlin where apparently the " movement " had its heart.

It was one of the most exciting moments that I have ever experienced. The people we met said that they had no paper in which to express their views and this was where my Paris training was valuable. " If you want to write about the film, " I said to Kenneth with my background of what used to be called " the little magazines that die to make verse live " there must be a magazine. I wrote to a printer in France who had printed most of the small experimental papers and in xxx 1927 the first issue of Close Up appeared.

We went to Berlin, armed possibly with two issues. I had myself seen perhaps six films in my life, Kenneth had gone to any film available since early boyhood. It was a strange world to me, I did not understand it in the least at first but I made up for my ignorance by being extremely useful. In those days I spoke German fluently. We were usually there two or three times a year between 1927 and 1932, to see the new films and to meet the friends that Kenneth soon made in the world of the cinema. I had a different interest, I had not been brought up with films but books, I was intensely interested in the workings of the mind and I had already discovered Freud. I forget who gave me the introduction, but I met Dr Hanns Sachs, told him that psychology meant far more to me as a would be writer than pictures and within a few days found myself on the analytic couch, having, unlike most analysands, " the time of my life " because it interested me so much.

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I find myself impossible to describe that the atmosphere of that time. It was violent and strange and I felt more drawn into it than I had been into the literary world of Paris. Chance or destiny who knew, some people fitted into movies like a piece into a puzzle, they soared to the top for a few days or weeks, suddenly they were missing xxxix from the picture, perhaps to make a fresh start, perhaps never to be heard of again. Work of any kind was hard to get, people in the early Thirties were literally strarving. Yet because a camera caught not so much an expression as a thought beneath as if for their first time a lens could record an emotion or thought, we all seemed to be living in a world above ourselves, really something that was utterly new with no reflexions of other ages or thoughts about it.

It was also linked for me with psycho-analysis. I flet that the ananalysis of that period had been invented just for myown pleasure, I loved it. I had asked " why " ever since I could remember and now I was getting answers to my " why " for the first time. It stirred my sense of history and eventually, I was allowed to attend the formal meetings, a carrot being tendered to me in the hope that I would forget the outside world and prevent myself as a xxxii candidate for training. I am sorry for the world today, now

it has become a medical preserve and everything is standardised but in those days it was experimental, people wondered where this road led or that, it seemed to us a process that could change even the course of history, we saw ourselves as leaders and in fact we were the vanguard of a method that has changed through perhaps more than any other movement of the century.

I used to go to Dr Sachs, he lived in the Mommsenstrasse then, for my hour and in time was promoted to be allowed to go to the evening lectures, on theory and with examples. Being the smallest of the small fry there I was sometimes rather scared, sometimes some dialect remark an analysand had made was quoted to illustrate a point and my German was unequal to the colloquial language. I had an uneasy fear that I should be questioned as to how much I had understood but gradually theme and language capacity increased and I found each lecture grew easier but occasionally my English side came uppermost as wehn after a very serious talk on our tufty to scinece, patients and Freud, we left the lecture hall to encounter a class of ballet dangers from the floor overhead and the spectacle of the girls in their brief skirts circling gaily among the very serious professors pricked my sense of hilarity and tested my gravity of expression to the utmost.

Films and psychoanalysis, in those experimental days they were twins, some directors were trying to "make thoughts visible" and this was to some extent visible with the photographic techniques they had. Film was far more interesting in those days, it was flexible, sometimes a little blurred. To-day it is merely a set of colored postcards that move, it is a replica of humanity if you will but not a comment on it. I went five or six times a week in the Berlin of the Thirties, now I doubt if I go once in a year, it is mecanical now and as far as I am concerned, totally without interest.

Berlin was different. I found myself being flung into impossible situations and asked to do unheard of things.