Page 96 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon

screen plays throughout his career. Both the novel and the
film emerge out of the mechanized horrors of World War I,
a war whose peace prefigured the larger conflagration in very

specific ways, and both prefigure a desire to transcend the ways
the world (war) is too much with us, expressing a yearning
for utopian ideals as articulating a sort of spiritual critique
of Enlightenment ideals (yet again).

Cinema too, especially Hollywood cinema, helped create
a kind of utopian space, a space where escape could be realized
(even if only for a few hours on a Depression era aer noon)

and the reality of ones grinding existence tossed into an over-
saturated colour fest exploding in eye-popping grandeur —
so much so that Hitler put Universum Film AG (UFA) on
notice to up the colour voltage or suffer the consequences.

That there is a film of Lost Horizon, of any utopian work,
emerging out of Hollywood constitutes a redundancy for
the whole studio system moment of this lustrous Golden Age

of cinema operated in and mobilized utopian potentials.
Capra, too, figured in this utopian vision, working a nostalgic
machine of the lost or repressed or cynically-manipulated
virtues of small-town America and its common-sense values

that could help save the country once more from those who