The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

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30 THE CIKE-TECHNICIA.N March— April, 1948 NEW BOOKS REVIEWED Photographic Optics, by Arthur Cox, B.A., B.Sc. Focal Press, 15/-. " Can you measure the focal length of a lens? Do you know the meaning of the word aberrations ? Do you know how a zoom lens works? Do you know why a wide-angle lens distorts at the edges? And do you know what is meant by (a) the angle of incidence, (b) the angle of reflection, and (c) the angle of deviation? " It sounds like a general knowledge test, doesn't it? And so it is. A general knowledge test for all members of the camera department and still department. I wonder how many of us could honestly answer "yes" to all the above questions. And yet if we cannot we are not in the true sense of the word cine-technicians. They are all very elementary questions really, and all very important. Mind you, I can speak with great confidence because I can answer them all — the reason being that I have recently been polishing up my knowledge with the aid of a book — a book which is well worth reading. It is full from cover to cover of the most useful information oi this sort. Long focus lenses, short focus lenses, projection lenses, enlarging lenses, depth of focus and definition. All (Concluded on next page) PSYCHOANALYTIC NOTES— (Concluded from previous page) some such terms. But the point that I want to stress is that this almost physical taking in corresponds in the mind to a psychic mechanism of ocular introjection. And that under certain emotional preconditions the screen technique of cutting to an actor's close-up may form the strongest possible physical basis for a psychic technique of increasing an audience's sense of identification with him. It will be sufficiently obvious by now that a far reaching analogy can be made between these psychic mechanisms and the technical processes of cinematography. That this is so need not afford occasion for surprise. We need no concept other than projection to explain it. The timing of cuts in a dialogue is obviously explicable in economic terms of mental emotional tensions. And of this it need only be said that psychoanalytic theory and practice are very much aware of the importance of time factors in alternating identifications. But in relation to the unconscious sense of omnipotence you will have seen a psychoanalytic reason for making one type of. cut as tight as possible. It must come as pat as the devil in the old catastrophe. On the rhythms of direction and of editing I do not feel competent to enlarge : but only to point out that these can sometimes take over the pattern of quite fundamental physical tensions, as that essentially of orgasm, in the opening sequence of Renoir's La Bete Humaine. We have heard much at different times of the "hypnotic" influence of the screen. This adjective is used sometimes loosely to express some feeling of omnipotence, sometimes by persons who are aware of the diminution in critical faculty of the cinema audience, and who have perhaps correlated with this the single source of light in darkness as analogous to the trappings of mesmerism. One thing is certain. The screen as such exerts no hypnotic influence. How easy would it be for the propagandists if it did ! One can, it is true, see the members of an audience carry over their identifications into everyday life. We can see them as they emerge from the Picture Palace walking pixillated in the rain like Mr. Deeds, or hear them speaking in voices modified to the accents of the Bowery. But this is quite another matter. It is analogous to the continuance into waking life of some of the feeling of a dream. Without any reference to the analytical theory of hypnotism and of dreams I should at once say that the psychological state of the cinemagoer approximates in all its essential conditions 'to that of the dreamer. It is no accident that the cinema provides the only really effectual medium for the representation of a dream. And dreams since the work of Freud are known to psychological science as wish-fulfilments. At this point I am reminded of a limerick I once heard. ' ' Young girls who frequent Picture Palaces Don't hold with psychoanalysis. The great Dr. Freud Is extremely annoyed That they cling to their long-standing fallacies. ' ' This rather charming verse takes too naive a view of Freud, too pessimistic a view of the cinema audience. The author of The Future of an Illusion was a man who accepted the hypothesis of mental evolution. Though in this article I have spoken much of the primitive, of the fantastic and the infantile, I should like to finish on another note. In the cinema we see portrayed with accuracy authentic action, genuine voices, real people. More and more does the screen express realities, personal, social, economic. More and more. I think, do audiences look for reality from the cinema. The deeper satisfaction of omnipotence, inherent in the medium, remains as the fundamental wishfulfilment. Alongside of this the pathway to reality is free.