Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

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.

PROPAGANDA AND THE CINEMA 57 is likely to arise a technical standard equal if not superior to that of the Soviets. Such films as Broadway Limited, Philadelphia (made as propaganda for that city), and Coast to Coast (made for T.A.T. Maddox Lines), all committee-made pictures by Visugraphic, and Dr. Watson's Eyes of Science, a film of lenses made for Bausch and Lomb of Rochester, demonstrate this progress in technique. There is this strong factor to recommend the propaganda cinema to our attention, that skilful publicity — whether direct or incidental — demands a high standard of film technique if it is to be successful both as propaganda and as entertainment to cinema audiences. With this in mind, it is worth recalling that the Soviets developed the original cinematic experiments of Kuleshov entirely along propagandist lines — intensely specific propaganda at that. They discarded the use of professional actors and actresses. They left their studios and travelled far and wide in search of suitable natural material with which to emphasize the particular Bolshevik theme supplied to them by State scenariobureaux. Many hundreds of purely documentary films have been made within the last few years in the Soviet Union, for keeping the workers in touch with the progress of the State, for educating the illiterate peasants, and for the edification of the intelligentsia of Great Britain. It is impossible not to be impressed by the way in which the Soviet films are giving dramatic value to modern Russia, to Soviet grain, Soviet railroad construction, Soviet collective farming, Soviet electrical development, Soviet lumbering, Soviet leather, Soviet rice and a multitude of like subjects. Furthermore, it