Close Up (Jul-Nov 1927)

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CLOSE UP induction, it would be necessary at regular intervals to give the infant a sound box on the ears. This is now a game in which ever\^one ma\' join. Xo intellectual equipment is necessary, but if you happen to be an expert on something or other — pianotuning will do nicely — the world will listen with increased respect to your views on "what is wrong Vvith the cinema". All that is necessary is to find something wrong. To say that it is a game is to put it too modestty ; it is an international sport. Engaged in it, men throw off not only their coats, but their muddy vesture, reveahng spiritual qualities hitherto undetected. The best-seller novelist or playwright, for instance — we have laughed at him and spurned his wwks. Yet, as his criticisms of the film reveal, no one reverences Art more than he. In his opinion, the cinema must rid itself of cheap sensationalism and trashy plots : it must have subtlety and the artistic touch. Could ideals go further ? It is another extraordinary attribute of the cinema — apart from such little functions as undermining 3'outh's morals, ruining the nation's eyesight, destroying the faculty of speech, and breaking up the British Empire — that it causes its critics to behave as it behaves itself. Thus a writer, warming up to complain of illiterate subtitles, seems to become rather illiterate himself. Employing the most violent language, he goes on to denounce the screen's violence. He ridicules the film producer's propensity to exaggerate, but in doing so exaggerates that exaggeration. 47