We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
October, 1926
AM ERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER
Five
The EDITOR'S LENS
focused by FOSTER GOSS
Reward of Merit
\X/HILE the supply of cinematographers in Hollywood still exceeds the demand, it is a significant circumstance, as mentioned by Daniel B. Clark, president of the American Society of Cinematographers, in other pages of this issue, that, during the past month, the point was reached where not one of the A.S.C. members who are freelancing was available.
* For the pictures that are "bigger and better," A.S.C. members are in demand — all of which shows sound production judgment on the part of studio officials.
New Field for Fiction
[^HE retrospect of another generation may be
necessary to accomplish it, but the cinematog
rapher seems destined to become a romantic figure
in fiction, either in literature or on the screen itself.
If The exploit of Ralph Earle, Pathe News cinematographer, in the recent Florida hurricane, was an Odessey condensed in the characteristically modern short period of time. Once again it showed the cinematographer as the romantic figure that he is.
1 Overland trail pioneers, railroad builders — yea, even the fireman, postman and policeman — and others who contemporaneously are acknowledged as leading a drab existence have been transformed, by the magic of screen stories, into heroic entities.
1l Even as Hollywood has taken its own picture many times and looked at it, some day some author is going to write the story of the cinematographer for the screen. It may be a Florida hurricane, a Johnstown flood or a cinematographic dash around the world. The deeds of men like Earle and Herford Tynes Cowling will offer material enough. And there will be an author to write the story — one with a perspective as must be held by a newspaperman like Linton Wells, who himself has just established the record for "going around the world."
Subservient Art?
f Whatever may be the excellencies or the crudities of the German-made motion pictures, they at least are centering attention on one long-neglected fact — that the cinema is an art distinct and complete in itself. However inanely simple such a statement may seem to be, it is still true that pictures are largely literature, paintings, etc., as expressed in cinematography. It's been a case of "the play's the thing" rather than "the picture's the thing."
11 As is well pointed out by John F. Seitz, A. S. C, it is a truism that when a subject finds perfect expression in one art, it does not necessarily follow that such perfection can be duplicated in another. Hence the great themes of literature often "miss" in films.
If The German idea, "The Big Parade" treatment, have pointed the way. Simple stories, deliberately told, attain a forcefulness which indicates what is still to come in the cinema art.