Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

THE FILM TO-DAY 5 industry which attracts over two hundred and fifty million people every week within its doors; an industry hopelessly entangled with mergers and amalgamations and a complicated network of financial interests; an industry which, huge as it is in itself, is only one factor in that gigantic business of mechanical entertainment which combines the radio, the gramophone, the cinema and television. The interests lying behind this great amusement combine are hardly those of entertainment for the multitude, whether cultural, aesthetic or educational. What passes for entertainment is in actuality propaganda, sometimes political, occasionally religious, but more often industrial or agricultural. Statistics are not happy things to thrust upon the reader at this early stage, but I would mention that it is said that the Association of Motion Picture Producers of America, under the leadership of the great panjandrum, Will Hays, reckons that every foot of American film brought into England represents one dollar's worth of American goods sold to the British public. The length of an average American feature film is eight thousand feet. No serious student of the cinema, however, is dismayed by these rather appalling facts. No one interested in the fascination of the technique of the film is disconcerted at the mass of material presented to him or her weekly by the companies of America and England. No critic attempts to keep pace with this enormous output which we loosely term films, because so much of it is manufactured to type and so much of it is entirely worthless. For example, I have excluded from this survey any