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'Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey—America’s first movie town—and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.
'For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
- Large print.
Works about this Work
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Moving Pictures
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 15 June 2019; (p. 21)
— Review of The Electric Hotel 2019 single work novel'The arrival of cinema is something that, like the Great War, has slipped out of living memory but only barely. We can just make out its faint glow over the temporal horizon. Yet the shift it instituted in our sense of reality is scarcely possible to imagine. There was an endless pictorial before, when we recorded the world as a series of static images, and then the rush of after, that ‘‘silver quickening’’ when the noun of our visual depictions became a verb.' (Introduction)
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Dominic Smith : The Electric Hotel
2019
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , July 2019;'The early years of cinema in Paris and US infuse this new novel from the Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.'
-
Moving Pictures
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 15 June 2019; (p. 21)
— Review of The Electric Hotel 2019 single work novel'The arrival of cinema is something that, like the Great War, has slipped out of living memory but only barely. We can just make out its faint glow over the temporal horizon. Yet the shift it instituted in our sense of reality is scarcely possible to imagine. There was an endless pictorial before, when we recorded the world as a series of static images, and then the rush of after, that ‘‘silver quickening’’ when the noun of our visual depictions became a verb.' (Introduction)
-
Dominic Smith : The Electric Hotel
2019
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , July 2019;'The early years of cinema in Paris and US infuse this new novel from the Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.'
Awards
- 2020 longlisted HNSA Historical Novel Prize
- 2020 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
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Paris,
cFrance,cWestern Europe, Europe,
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New Jersey,
cUnited States of America (USA),cAmericas,
- Belgium, Western Europe, Europe,