Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

58 CELLULOID is significant to point out that one of these films, Turin's Turhjib, has been booked at more than two hundred cinemas in Great Britain. To which I might add that Turkjib is, in Stalin's opinion, the exemplary propaganda film as distinct from the bourgeois quality of the much disapproved Earth. What the cinema has achieved so admirably for Russia it might well accomplish for Canada. It is true that many short films, some of them very lovely pictorially, have been made under the supervision of the excellently equipped Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau (a section of the Department of Trade and Commerce at Ottawa), but so far these have not developed to any high standard of technical interest. The distribution for these films is very large and represents the most impressive achievement of the Bureau, for not only is the circulation widespread over Canada, but contacts have been established in such distant places as Australia, New Zealand, most of Central Europe, France, Germany, America, Japan, India, Scandinavia, and, of course, Great Britain. There are a hundred Canadian subjects which call for dramatic film treatment in the manner of the Russians, basis for pictures which would circulate all over the world when made with natural sound and advanced methods of cutting. The policing of Canada's Arctic Empire by the NorthWest Mounted Police; the development of the air-mail routes; the airway to Europe by Baffin Land; Canada's wealth of water power; the breaking up of winter and the glorious coming of a Canadian spring; these are subjects which, if well handled, would excite the world.