Cinema Quarterly (1933 - 1934)

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photometer, to set the right stop, to handle your filters, you'd better go back to pencil-sketching. In fact, the best workman will go beyond his needs and will start at once to do his own laboratory work. For the one great drawback of the sub-calibre film at this time is the use of reversal stock — i.e., stock that is developed by the film maker into a positive. You send the exposed film back to the maker. In some factories your film is machine-developed — by a machine that automatically labours to iron out all the fades that you slaved to get. To record on negative stock, to develop and print it yourself, immediately makes your medium flexible; the grace of dissolves, superimpositions, the entire possibilities of montage, are then available. Under these conditions the rank amateurishness of the subcalibre film disappears, and in truth you can attain all the technical perfection of the standard film of commercial cinema — and even more. The sub-calibre film as a field for the film-artist is now being enriched by the 16 mm. sound-cameras. Two years ago the American Society of Motion Picture Engineers declared publicly that 16 mm. sound-on-film was impossible. Recently I made a film with the "impossible" camera created by RCAVictor. Still in the experimental stage at that time, still full of many "bugs," the camera could fulfil its major destiny: it could record sound with all the fidelity of any ten thousand dollar Hollywood apparatus. Speech recorded perfectly; music recordings were surpassed only by the lately developed "High Fidelity" and "Wide Range" systems now used in Hollywood, wThich record overtones in the extremely high and extremely low cycles. The only drawback to the coming sound cameras in the narrowfilm field is lack of flexibility. They are produced for the amateur who wants to take a picture of little Nancy singing "Oats, peas, beans, and barley grows." Recording again is on the rigid reversal film stock, and there is no means of post-synchronization of sound. In other words, it is a talkie-camera — and what the film-creator needs is a tone-film camera; one that records on negative stock and which will thus allow all conceivable variations of sight-images and sound-images that are corelated at the desire of the artist in the printing. Possibly the construction of such cameras must be worked out by ingenious amateurs who will guide the mass-production men much as radio amateurs were always far ahead of the industrial radiobuilders in the earlier days of development. But whether in sound or in silence, the narrow film field offers a chance to those young men who groan at the vulgarity and artistic sterility of the movie industry's product. 62