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.
22 CELLULOID
per cent, in comparison with those of the same season of the year before. It is more evident than ever that the dialogue cinema has reached the zenith of its appeal. The position is one of inertia both in the trade and in the public and something fresh must be found to sustain the profits of the movie-makers.
THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL
The extreme difficulties presented by the necessity of universal appeal to meet exorbitant costs of production have been greatly augmented by the introduction of speech into the cinema. If there is one problem more than another which by its urgency occupies the minds of producers in Europe and America to-day, without doubt it is that of the limited appeal of the dialogue film.
Apart from technical matters, the primary quality of a good film should be the universal meaning of its theme. The great work of art, the symphony or the painting, appeals with equal force to any person irrespective of his or her nationality. That factor was the whole basis of the silent cinema. Its universal appeal made it a great industry. Chaplin was as well-known in Poland as in Penzance. But the self-imposed language barrier of the speech film fells at one sweep this integral quality of the cinema. Whatever we may argue against dialogue in the cinema, however much we may appreciate that it has brought the best plays to the screen, the fact remains that literary speech strikes a fatal blow straight at the heart of the cinema.