We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
A WORKING PLAN FOR SUB-STANDARD
"EMBFU"
I use this title because sub-standard production has been too exclusively associated with leisure : with summertime glimpses of children digging in sand pits and other domestic, or would-be domestic, felicities of the personal life. Much of the product of amateur groups, if better in technical degree, belongs to the same category of leisure-time activity. The felicities in this case are the slightly more public, but still very local, felicities of charade. The participants, more often than not, are simply having a good clean time together: seeing themselves act. They are not doing anything especially purposive with their films.
The Preston Film Society made a good little film about electricity a year ago for the local electricity people. The Edinburgh Guild has made a 16 mm. short, with the civic intention of bringing Edinburgh alive. These cases are exceptions. The majority have been pottering about with comedies and dramas, which could not, of course, have any hope of audience outside the family circle.
Some of you may wish to qualify this description of amateur intention, for the phrase "experimental cinema" is often used for these efforts. The suggestion is that behind amateur work there is sometimes the high ambition of making works of art. I think not often, or there would be more documentaries among the amateurs and fewer dramas. By the very nature of the case, the necessary limitations of amateur work (the lack of studio, laboratory, not to mention thespian facilities) make the studio grade far more difficult than the documentary grade. And there is good reason to believe that if the intention were really experimental the amateurs would choose that particular field in which experiment is a practical possibility. We must conclude that the amateurs have been playing themselves.
19