Introduction To The Cinema

By G. M. Turnell
In an important survey of the cinema published six years ago in Paris, M. Leon Moussinac dismissed the English
cinema in three lines. "England," he wrote, " has never produced a genuine English film. Her industry is dominated by the influence of the great American firms."
A good deal has happened since these words were written. The American influence is declining; and though the best British films are usually directed by foreigners and the greatest force in the industry is a Hungarian, we do possess something that can be called a British film industry.
Yet one cannot help feeling that Moussinac's main criticism—that there has never been a genuine English film— is as true to-day as it was in 1929. It is the nature and causes of this failure that I wish to examine.
A Comparison Some light is thrown on the matter by a comparison between English and Soviet films. It is not simply that Eisenstein and Pudovkin are finer artists than characteristic representatives of British cinema, like Hitchcock and Saville.
It is that Russia has attempted—and the attempt has been largely ,successful— to express the deepest experiences of the race through the medium of cinema, which in itself is an artistic event of the highest importance.
The English genius, on the other hand, has so far failed to express itself cinematically, or has only done so in a very imperfect and incomplete nzanner.
Negative Virtues
Hitchcock's brilliant film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. is an excellent illustration of the strength and weakness of English cinema. It is competent, wellmade, virile, and totally lacking in vision. It cannot be said to reflect English life with anything like the completeness that representative Russian, German, and French films reflect the life of those countries.
It expresses, indeed, only the negative virtues of the English genius and fails to do justice to the great positive virtues, the fire and imagination, that have made our literature what it is.
It is possible to blame the apathy and indifference of the public and the vagaries of film censorship for the present state of affairs. But though these have played their part, the real reason lies deeper.
Not Taken Seriously It is that Englishmen as a whole have so far failed to take the ;cinema seriously. It is still regarded primarily as a distraction, as something apart fron the national life, instead of an art wh(i is, or soon will he, every bit as capable of reflecting the life of the people as literature or painting. The progress of the cinema during the last fifteen years makes this attitude obsolete.
It would be idle to pretend at present that the masterpieces of the cinema are comparable with the masterpieces of the other arts; but there is every reason to believe that once the resources of the medium have been fully explored, films will be made that will take their place beside the masterpieces of poetry and drama.
Knowledge of Celluloid It may be that Europe will follow the Russian example, and that future artistic genius will forsake literature for film. For it seems that film is the medium which is best able to express the experi
ences of our own time. It is rapidly becoming what one critic has already described it—"the art-form of democracy."
The problem before us is both a general and a particular one. It concerns us in a general way in as far as we arc English and in a particular way in as far as we are Catholics. In spite of the Pope's injunction, the activity of Catholics in English-speaking countries has been largely negative and certainly compares unfavourably with the Russian achievement. We have to begin by getting into our heads that the first necessity is a knowledge of celluloid.
Film-Conscious
Until Catholics have grasped the first principles of film aesthetic, have realised that there is a fundamental difference between film and popular cinema, nothing can be done.
What we in England need to do is to educate ourselves filmically to become filmconscious, in order that the artist will be able to express himself through film instead of being obliged always to turn to one of the other arts.
This brings us to the way in which a newspaper can help. If an art is to develop it must be served by good criticism. The function of the film critic is to educate the public. Neither more nor less.
Lack of Good Criticism One of the reasons why the English arc not film-conscious is the lack of good criticism. Anyone who glances at the sort of stuff published in the secular press can see at once that whatever it is, it is not film criticism. It is usually a series of notes on commercial films written by dramatic critics in their spare time.
It seems to me that this tendency to view one art in terms of another is one of the greatest obstacles to the development of cinema in England. There are certainly affinities between cinema and theatre and yet, as Bela Balazs—one of the first, as he was one of the best, writers on film— pointed out some years ago, the cinema's only claim to be considered an art lies in its power of expressing something that cannot be expressed, or not so well expressed, by any of the other arts.
Now, one of the difficulties of film is that most of its effects can be obtained in two ways—legitimately or illegitimately, by using the resources of the medium or by borrowing from the theatre.
Elementary Differences The first business of the film critic is to tell us whether a film is a film at all, and whether its effects are obtained filmically Or not. It is because he fails so notoriously in this that cinema is always in danger— especially sine, the introduction of sound —of degenerating into photographed stageplays.
In the circumstances it seems worth while suggesting one or two elementary differences between cinema and the other arts. It is often when film is closest to theatre that it differs most essentially from it.
A little application ought to show, for instance, that there are important differences between film-acting and stage-acting—though this is usually overlooked by film journalists. Conrad Veidt (when well directed) and Annabella are film actors while George Arliss and Katherine Hepburn seem to me to be nothing but photographed stage actors without any real sense of their medium.
Obscured by Star System The chief difference—it has been obscured by the star system, a direct importation from the theatre—is that the film actor depends far more on the director than the stage actor on the producer.
The director is the real creator of the film, and he uses his actors—or "acting material," as they are often called—as a means of expressing what is in his mini.
Theatre, on the other hand, often subordinates everything to acting and the play becomes simply a means of allowing an actor to express his own personality.
The dependence of the film actor on the director is shown by the close-up which, when properly used, is one of the cardinal points of film technique.
Moreover, the film actor employs mime and gesture where the stage actor relies on the spoken word. One of the most notable things about the real film actor is the way in which he has adapted himself to the talking film. He differs from the "star in that the spoken word is not a substitute for acting, but complementary to it. An excellent illustrations of this was recently provided by the German film Matichen lu Uniform.
A critic once compared cinema to the acquisition of a new sense in man. The comparison is expressive. It is of the essence of film that it can reveal states tit mind with a vividness and penetration denied to the other arts.
There is the close-up which enables the camera to see what no one else can secs There are studies of states of mind such as wC get in films of child-psychology like Poll do Garotte and La Mtziernelle, or the conflict in the barrister's mind in Crit;;e Without Passion, or, best of all, the asphyxiated miner's brain storm in Pabst's Kameradschaft.
Juxtaposes Shots
Again, by means of montage—the arrangement of the different images in a certain order—the director can juxtapose things which in reality are separate. At the end of a film called The Battle (seen in London last year) a shot of a sword raised to cut off a man's head is followed by a shot of all the Japanese boats at the harbour suddenly and simultaneously lowering their sails.
We wait for the sword to fall and see instead the falling sails, and this provides a pleasure which is peculiar to film. This juxtaposition is a device very much used by Pudovkin, particularly as an expression of his irony.
In his film Storm Over Asia, for instance, he juxtaposes shots of a hideoas Eastern idol (symbol of decaying superstition) and shots of the colonel's wife (symbol of the decay of the bourgeoiscapitalist regime), and the effect is terrific.
Symbolism in Films To study film is rather like learning a new language—a language of symbols and angles which alone makes the rheaning ct a film clear. Symbolism is very much used in Russian films.
In Potemkin the breaking waves are symbols of class conflict. The final shot of the battleship sailing, as it were, straight into the audience, signifies the triumph of the revolution.
After the trial in Pudovkin's Mother there is a shot of two czarist officials taken from below in such a way that 'hey dominate the screen and therefore become symbols of the triumph of the czarist regime over the proletariat.
The danger of all these things is that they may easily degenerate into a trick. It is important to distinguish between the legitimate use of angles to express feeliag in a film like Dreyer's magnificent Passion de Jeanne d'Arc—a film composed almost entirely of close-ups—and the useless virtuosity displayed in the scene on the steps at Juan's supposed funeral in Korda's Private Life of Don Juan. The triumph of the best Russian films lies in the fact that every shot, every angle, is an integral part of the whole film.
Learning About Films These are merely a few of the more obvious technical points. That they are obvious and commonplace in no way diminishes their importance. We have to remember that the film director is working with pieces of celluloid of different lengths which he arranges in a certain order and then sticks together so that they correspond to the pattern in his own mind.
It is only by thinking in these terms that we can hope to become film conscious. But the only way of learning about film is to „see good films. Unhappily this is not always easy in a barbarous and backward country like our own But even in England we have seen publicly during the last year (in addition to all the films mentioned above) things Like The Virtuous Isidore and Retnous, either of which can teach us more about film than a library of theoretical works or all the critics in London.