Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

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4 CELLULOID but this has resulted in little of any real value to the man engaged in film production. And, after all, there can be no great satisfaction in restricting ourselves to a concrete, arithmetical form of cinema that is the sum conclusion of complex calculation. Some film directors attempt to raise a skeleton of theoretical reasoning in order to justify their faults and discover a tenth dimension of the kino which provides knotty problems for the intelligentsia. It is a most admirable ambition to discard every element that is not one of the integral forces of modern cinema, but by the very nature of the medium it is an ambition to which there are many obstacles. On the other hand, it is disastrous for the mind of a cinematographer to be disordered or in a state of fluctuation between two or more ideas. Just as a director must know, or at least show pretensions of knowing, precisely what shots he wants on the studio floor, so must his outlook be clear and well-defined, like that of a Le Corbusier or a Zola. Quite often a film expresses much more than the director originally intended. Many so-called flashes of genius in the cinema are accidental, but the director or cameraman, as the case may be, is quick to turn his good fortune to advantage, either in the creation of fresh cinematic work or in the interests of showmanship according to his status. In brief, the film industry to-day is a giant commercial organization involving something like five hundred million pounds of capital, of which four-fifths is invested in the United States of America; an industry which has grown up over night and which stretches its cumbersome bulk into every corner of the earth; an