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6 CELLULOID
mention of many directors working in British and American studios to-day because their films have no meaning, while they themselves exhibit no understanding of, or interest in the cinema as I accept it. They have no more pretensions to be called film directors than they have to be called plumbers or clothes-dealers, in fact rather less.
Any extensive attempt to investigate the whole field of cinema in 1931, in all its forms and ramifications — the theatrical and the non-theatrical — would be, to borrow the words of John Grierson, like an attempt to investigate the extent of the printed word. It would be mere tomfoolery to pursue the newspaper, the magazine, the novel, the verse, the drama, the pamphlet, the treatise, and the hundred other branches of the printed page, and the same applies to the pursuit of cinematic knowledge. We can but use our discrimination and search always for the source and the initial tendency.
To do so is surely one of the most absorbing forms of research, for the cinema has grown up around us within a few years. Unlike those of painting, music or the drama, the very beginnings of cinema can be examined at first-hand. We can follow it step by step at our local cinema or film society. It is part of our very existence. It has superceded the theatre in prominence in the newspapers. It is developing every day and every week. And because it started as an industry and has grown into an art, it calls for intense study and consideration. It is accessible to every one of us and it urgently needs our criticism and judgment to guide it on its way.