American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1926)

November, 1926 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER Five The EDITOR'S LENS focused by FOSTER GOSS An Example Close at Home AN INTERESTING booklet, "The Home of Kodak," just received from Rochester, tells one of the most romantic stories of modern industry— that of the Eastman Kodak Company. The publication recounts the early efforts of George Eastman, how he was dissatisfied with the uwet plate'1 type of photography in vogue in the late seventies, and how he eventually evolved the "dry plate" method. There came the steady growth of his business until, within a few years, there was laid the foundation of what is now the gigantic institution at Rochester. * Eastman was not slow to realize the potentialities of the motion picture business, and set his organization to work to perfect the raw stock so necessary to the unprecedented new business. ' For the film industry, there is a very definite moral in the career of George P^astman and in the history of the firm that bears his name. If Eastman had been content to accept the old uwet plate" type of photography as final and to dabble around in the manufacture thereof, he would have been bound around by the limits of the primitive stages of a new science. * Even though photography in any form still seemed nothing short of a miracle at the time Eastman began his life's work, he was not disposed to regard it as a matter of the ultimate, but, instead, with that daring and imagination which characterizes all great men, insisted on perceiving its weaknesses and then set about to improve them. In this excursion into the realm of the industrial and scientific unknown, he not only profited himself, but he made the world at large profit — by virtue of his activities in motion pictures alone. The moral is that those within the profession can never allow themselves to look upon their calling as having reached a point of saturation, and thus to permit their imaginations to become satiated. What film workers in all lines need is a highly developed sense of values and proportions— which, is it not, closely akin to a deep-seated sense of humor? In the Making NEW camera angles and photographic effects bring new kinds of photoplays. The camera is an instrument to conjure with, and, like the Phoenix, rises, for a new life, out of the ashes of what previously may have been regarded as its own insufficiency. It has come to pass that novel cinematographic treatments invariably are the basis of the plaudits of the critics in heralding the triumphs of those films which are looked to as ushering in a new era in the cinema. But, in the efforts to merit these very plaudits, a strained condition is reached — which makes ridiculous that which was intended to be sublime. "I The engulfing wisdom that belongs to some directors and writers might well benefit from consultations with none other than the cinematographer when these new and novel film treatments are desired. H After all, it is the business of the cinematographer to know such things ; and, to say that he is able to respond when called on, is merely to make a matter-of-fact statement. 1 The writer should find in him a close consultant while the script is being written. How much better this would be than arbitrarily to finish a scenario wherein certain inflexible "effects" are tersely specified, with the cinematographer left to work out the results without having the benefit of, or the time in which to gain a thorough understanding of just what the writer is trying to express. The same applies to directors. The most successful of the foreignmade films have recognized the foregoing principles, and, as a result, have enjoyed triumphs which even Americans have tried to emulate. The basic fact must be recognized that the cinematographer is not solelv a medium of expression, but that he likewise is a medium of creation in motion pictures.