Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

j6 CELLULOID purely from a pictorial and non-literary point of view. If we were to witness some madly fantastic film in which the players spoke a gibberish tongue without meaning, the sound and visual appeal would be similar to that of the purer examples of Mickey Mouse. Both the dialogue and the images could be blended into a single form of expression quite unobtainable in a talking film recorded in English. Sound can help the cinema as a means of expression just as speech is proving detrimental to it. A thousand instances can be seen in the films of to-day where sound is of the greatest value for enhancing the dramatic effect of a scene and rousing the emotions of an audience, while in the same films dialogue is limiting freedom of expression. The cinemagoer is a member of a crowd, often one of two or three thousand persons, all of whom are simultaneously seeing the same programme, and who, by their presence together, are creating a mood which is not the mood of any single one of them, but the mood of them all. If the drama or comedy projected on the screen and issuing from the loudspeakers has been skilfully constructed, the appeal is there for the whole audience to receive according to their individual amount of intellectuality and their susceptibility to physical sensation. In connection with the cinema, it is clear that every emotion of the mind is based on sensation, a nervous process that has for its foundation, material reality in the human beings and things recorded by the camera and microphone, ranging from sudden shock to smooth transfusion according to the will of the director. As