The film till now : a survey of world cinema (1960)

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THE FILM SINCE THEN disappointing. Its ' English ' narration was naive to the extent of embarrassment, attempting to infuse melodrama into visuals which were already dramatic in their authenticity. I have said that the Soviet historical films were among the best of their kind. Yet there is a strong affinity between them and such Western commercial counterparts as Juarez and Zola. The Hollywood liberals set the stage for their triumphs of progressivism in the past because they dared not set it in the present. The Soviet artists seem to have clung to history because it enabled them to preserve theatrical reconstruction as against that organisation of observed reality which we have come to call documentary. Historical reconstruction was, it is true, one of the policy tasks handed down to them from on high, but unless all signs fail, it was they who made it a major task. If this be true, Grierson's criticism of Soviet sound cinema quoted above still holds in 1948. (IV) The German Film ' Irretrievably sunk into retrogression, the bulk of the German people could not help submitting to Hitler. Since Germany thus carried out what had been anticipated by her cinema from its very beginning,1 conspicuous screen characters now came true in life itself. Personified daydreams of minds to whom freedom meant a fatal shock, and adolescence a perpetual temptation, these figures filled the arena of Nazi Germany. Homunculus walked about in the flesh. Self-appointed Caligaris hypnotised innumerable Cesares into murder. Raving Mabuses committed fantastic crimes with impunity, and mad Ivans devised unheard-of tortures. Along with this unholy procession, many motifs known from the screen turned into actual events. In Nuremberg, the ornamental pattern of i My italics— R.G. 580