The Cine Technician (1935-1937)

November, 1935 The Journal of the Association of CineTechnicians 49 Motion Picture Society of India Affiliation to A.C.T. In pursuance of the Association's policy of maintaining close contact with technicians in other countries we are pleased to report that the Motion Picture Society of India has just affiliated to A.C.T. Journals will be exchanged and facilities of membership granted to members of either Association when visiting either India or England, as the case may be. Members visiting our office will be pleased to read the Journal of our Indian colleagues, which is an excellent technical publication dealing with all aspects of Indian Film production, which incidentally is a much larger business than many of us imagine. We feel sure that both Associations will benefit as a result of this co-operation. Twelve. Hours' Hard Labour (coiiiimied from page 47.) man worries less about subtle and effective angles. So long as the lighting "will do," it will probably be passed, whereas six hours ago new arrangements would be tried and modified and adjusted. You can frequently spot the shooting in a film that has been done when everybody has been tired and stale. You can often detect the smell of midnight oil about the cutting of a film which has been raced through at the last moment. You can sometimes murmur, in fact, "No, that's not just bad acting and bad direction. It's simply that the actors are tired and the director snappy and bad-tempered. They've had too long a spell on the set." There is an idea abroad among people unconnected with the cinema industry that everybody concerned with making films is endowed heavily with the "artistic temperament." Nobody but a publicity man, surely, could have invented that term and invested it with glamour. We all utter it with breath hushed in awe and admiration and envy ; and people who need something to bolster up their claims to genius tend to cultivate a bad temper so that people can talk about their "artistic temperament." For seventy-five per cent, of artistic temperament is just simply bad temper. And I would hazard a guess that at least seventy-five per cent, of the bad temper of the film studios is tiredness. It's another manifestation of too-long hours. The stills man may always be a nuisance, but towards the end of a long and tiring day he becomes a bloody nuisance — and you probably tell him so and are quite definite about the things that will happen to him if he doesn't get his camera out of the way quick ! And then you curse somebody else. It seems obvious enough that nobody is going to do very good work in that atmosphere. I do not know whether there is a film studio with a rule that nobody shall work more than eight hours a day, or more than seven if a film is going through against time. And I don't know whether anyone would have the strength of mind to obey the rule if it existed. But I am quite certain that it would result in better films, and in that it would drastically reduce the time required to make them. The industrial psychologist has a lot of work to do in the cinema industry ! STUDIO FILM LABORATORIES LTD. TITLE MAKERS TO THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY AUTOMATIC, NEGATIVK AND POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT SENSITOMETRIC CONTROL SPECIAL PROCESSING & OPTICAL PRINTING INSERTS TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY 80-82 WARDOUR ST. LONDON, W.l GERRARD 1365-66