Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

74 CELLULOID again at his producers until they allow him to do something worth while. The departments which are principally to blame, I think, are those from which treatments and scenarios are supposed to issue. Not until one has had direct experience of the scenarios drawn up in this country from which directors are instructed to work, can it be imagined how inadequate they are. Even technically, in arrangement of shots and lapses of continuity, English scenarists seem devoid of the most elementary ideas of film construction. While I dislike citing Russia on almost every hand, I cannot help but stress the importance of the lesson in production that waits to be learned. Not, of course, for its specific propagandist aim but for its intense estimation of technical methods, and for its enormous desire to use the cinema as an instrument of some purpose. Although the general adoption of the talking film has cut short any far-reaching influence that the best of the Soviet films might have had on the technique of Western Europe and America, there are, nevertheless, distinct tendencies towards scientific methods of construction in some theatrical films of to-day. The showing of such films as The General Line and Storm Over Asia in America has not passed unheeded. There was evidence of clever shot-cutting in the harvest scenes of The Right to Love, in the fortissimo opening of The Benson Murder Case, and in many parts of Milestone's The Front Page. In Germany, where Russian films have been widely presented during the last three years, there is a marked improvement in cutting, particularly noticeable in Der M order Dimitri Karazamov, Zwei Herzen im \ — Ta\t,