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.

THE THREEPENNY OPERA 113 is not all. The camerawork and lighting also are closely related to the settings and the action. The remarkable photographic genius of Fritz Arno Wagner must be added to the creators of the environment.1 His lighting, camera set-ups and camera movements are worked out in careful relationship to the sets and the action. When the camera is in motion, the smoothly sliding pan glides from one figure to another across the set with a perfect respect for its material. Low-level or high-level, its set-up and path of direction is governed by the mood of the scene, which is also the mood created by the set. The shots and their relationships are so inseparably the joint work of Pabst and Wagner that their perfection is beyond proper description. All through his career Pabst has been distinguished for his genius in selection of photographic angles to convey meaning, and when working with such an expert technician as Wagner, the result is not to be approached by any other production unit whether in America or Europe. It wxre useless for me to describe these images detail for detail. I can only say that for me they represent the peak of technical achievement of this kind, and that they prove beyond question that perfect harmony of thought between director, cameraman and architect is indispensable if a film is to obtain complete success. This is a fact that might well be studied by British 1 Outstanding films photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner are : Lang's The Spy, Grime's At the "Edge of the World and Marquis d'Eon, Murnau's Dracula, Pabst's ]eanne Ney, Robison's Warning Shadows, and Lang's new sound film. In my opinion, he is the most skilled cameraman in Europe. H