Came the dawn : memories of a film pioneer (1951)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




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.

sub-title or other interpolation, it ends as one scene and continues as another. It was held by some critics that my 'dissolves' wasted time and used up film-stock unnecessarily. On the contrary they very often saved time. For instance, a man walking out of one room and into another. In the usual method he must, for the sake of continuity, be seen rising from his chair, walking across to the door, opening it (change to next scene), coming into the room, perhaps closing door, crossing to the centre where the action is to continue. My double fade covered almost all this ; really speeded up the action while seeming to make it smoother, and saved, besides time and footage, the jerky change from one scene to the other. Alternatively in a long smooth sequence, an unexpected jerk may be dramatically important and then it can be used with redoubled effect. Another favourite device of mine, of which — with the fade — most people left me in sole enjoyment was the 'vignette.' I had found by an early experiment that a soft vignetted edge all round the picture was much more aesthetically pleasing than a hard line and the unrelieved black frame. Once, long ago, when Charles Pathe came to see me and I showed him one or two of my very early films, he said in effect — for he had very little English — 'Why need those small houses be so ugly? There is no reason why, for this film, they should not have been pretty cottages.' I never forgot that. Always, all my life since, I have striven for beauty, for pictorial meaning and effect in every case where it is obtainable. Much of my success, I am sure, is in the aesthetic pleasure conveyed, but not recognised, by the beauty of the scene and generally mistaken for some unknown other quality in the film. It is like music with modern picture-plays : many people do not hear it at all, but it may add a great deal to their enjoyment, unless it has the opposite effect and does quite the reverse. About the vignette: it is produced by a carefully adjusted little frame just in front of my lens, which, being so close, is entirely out of focus and merely gives a pleasing soft edge to the picture. But the drawback was that I could no longer use my 'fade-out' in the ordinary way, for stopping down the lens naturally brought the little frame progressively into focus and spoilt the effect. For those who are interested, the answer was a photographic 'wedge' — a strip of glass, black at one end and clear at the other with infinite gradations between them, and this was arranged to slide from clear to black before the lens by just pulling a string, and so 123