The Film

Case For The Prosecution
Highbred Films Are Not Highbrow Films
From IRIS CONLAY, Catholic Herald Film Critic
I will open my case against the film with a quotation from a correspondent who puts first things first and complains that the film " began wrong."
"I can remember," she writes, " when Hamilton's Panorama at Brixton Ball was first replaced by a cinema de luxe (somewhere about 1904, I believe) and 1 think this is where the trouble dates back. Cinema developed from a form of entertainment intended for children and nursemaids, so that the first films were wild west
and romances of the kind which still sell in novellette form.
"The fact that it was possible to make money out of the cinemas whose prices were well within the reach of the two classes of audience above mentioned seems to have blinkered Industry and the Artist alike into passing by the possibilities offered by the film medium as an actually new means of expression."
Progress Towards . . . ?
Her conclusion that film has been overlooked as a new thing is one that I agree with, but I quarrel with her inference that it was a bad thing that films began by supplying the demands of the lowly intelligence. That films grew out of a Brixton nurserymaid's mentality is not detrimental; all art had such humble beginnings; it might almost be an omen that they belong to true art and not to artiness—the spurious product of the dilettante.
The real trouble is not so much in their origin, which is as good as another, but in their development. Still the Industry is catering for the Brixton nursemaid of 1904 --and the Brixton nursemaid of 1904 is a changing person; now she is far away a more particular person than she was, and if the Industry does not take care it will get itself overtaken by the nursemaid and left behind.
For the time being things arc safe. Drawing room comedies are still amusing to those who live in the kitchen, but there are not many lived-in kitchens left. Spectacular shows grow bigger and bigger but each one satisfies the person who sees it less and less every time. Producers go wildly in search of more and more bizarre subjects to introduce (i,e, Lost Horizon. Good Earth) but the end of such quests is mad ness.
Value of Ordinary Things
The newness that will bring life to the film is not to be found in new worlds invented by H. G. Wells, nor in new clothes and manners invented by Hollywood but in new views on ordinary things.
Simple views, too, on the life of our own people, our own history—not clothespageant history that always looks like fancy dress.
France has made such films (Rene Clair began); Austria, too, and Soviet Russia excels at the job, so why not ourselves? Nor are they highbrow people who make these things—in this country foreign films get highbrow labels because of the language difficulty—but some are the wildest farces and musical shows ever shot. Foreign productions may perhaps be labelled high bred—hut not often highbrow.
If others can afford to be absolutely national surely we can afford the same luxury; it has always been the ruin of British films that we talk the same language as America?
Material Not Immoral
Immorality, in the strict meaning of the word, is not the main charge I should level against the British film as compared with other forms of modern public entertainment. I remember no villains triumphing over good men or virtue lost, extolled in praiseworthy terms. On such broad lines the film is safe, but the evil is more subtle than that. The accusations I do bring against it belong to its worldliness. material-mindedness, its vulgarity and its characterless sentimentality.
am tired of the parade of luxury; 1 am tired of the monotonously "smart" women (smart in dress and repartee) and I an tired of the confusion between having a good time and being happy.
Spirituality—and now I'm not talking of its religious sense—is hardly in the vocabulary of British producers; they seem to be yellow" about it. But Korda was not terrified of it in his portrait of Rembrandt, but he spoilt the effect of the film by loose construction; but with the exception of Flaherty and Korda it has been left to the sensitivity of Germans or Russians to give us feeling that is genuine and not sentiment that is mushy.
Strained Imagination
Linked with spirituality is the quality of imagination. It is imagination that should enable the producer to use this new medium of film for new things.
By now it is time surely that some one acted upon the realisation that films are not extenuated theatre, and that adapted play or novel is not the ideal stuff out of which to make cinema. Theatre is far-away stuff, one dimensional, limited in space, a conventional affair at best. But cinema has limitless possibilities— can be intimate and personal, and is not bounded by space or time, is able to show external action and internal reaction all at once; something without conventions to be built up, piled up, heaven reaching.
But imaginative users of cinema medium
are distortionists still. Len Lye surrealistically experimentieg is vastly interesting, but too remote and precious to be valuable.
Let's Keep Friends
Religious bias I have never met in the cinema; in fact I have evidenced nothing but extreme sympathy and friendliness in the industry towards the Catholic viewpoint (after this I hope it will still remain with me), but I do endorse the opinion of the writer who pointed out last week that film producers always seem to imagine that Catholics go around in clouds of
,incense, jangling rosaries. Dim religious
light, too, is apparently another necessity for introducing Catholic atmosphere into a film. These things arc not really very accurate.
Publicity methods, that is to say posters and titles, are still rather misleading, I think, but it is only fair to say that they are vastly improving artistically every year. The external sex-motive is still rated highest in advertising theory, and good shows are, to many people's minds, ruined by unnecessarily suggestive titles. But things are getting better.
Too Slow, Too Fast
On the question of speed and slickness in direction there is much I should like to say. Our films are both too slow and too fast all at once.
For instance, to tie up what I have to say to concrete, there are, in the new Korda film Action for Slander, long passages of conversation which cry out for
short circuiting. They may be realistic, they may say necessary things, but no one I have spoken to bothered to listen to 50 per cent. of them, and yet followed the drift of the story without taking them in. Why were they there then? On the other hand there were chances sprouting in that film everywhere, where a little slow development, a little silent evidence of inward thoughts and emotions growing in the various characters would have been real excitement. But these are overleapt in one mad rush to get to the end—of a series of long and boring conversations.
Big and British
A few words about The Edge of the World (New Gallery), a new British film, will make a fitting end to this bedtime story.
A tragic tale of real things related with realistic beauty and very reminiscent of Grierson's Turn of the Tide and Flaherty's Man of Aran, it has more story than both these films, but I think no more power because of its more popular appeal.
The lovely things that remain in the mind after seeing the picture are the swirl of those fierce. Atlantic waters, the long winding paths across the island, the quiet restfulness of the Sabbath day observances, the sun and the rain's influences upon the landscape shots. and the rugged hardiness and real goodness expressed in the islanders' faces.
More and more a taste for this sort of thing is growing, and if we could have it flavoured with yet more imagination and less box-office terror, it would be a grand thing. But let us remember that there are other subjects in this England to make natural stories from besides islands. Nor need the stories necessarily be tragic, industrial life also might lend itself to something familiar to this nation of shopkeepers.