Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

208 CELLULOID is inspired by what is shown on the screen. In the first place Van Dyke, and in the second the editor, had not approached the taking and the editing of these marvellous falls from a cinematic point of view. To reassure ourselves of this, we have only to recall the treatment of rushing water by Victor Turin in Tur\sib. To have produced a really emotional result, Van Dyke should have shot this scene from at least a dozen dramatically chosen angles (allowing, of course, for the difficulties of the location) with a definite plan in his head as to the final assembly and order of these shots on the screen, much in the same way as Asquith and Barkas approached the landing scenes in Tell England. Our knowledge of the cinema persuades us that by working in this way, Van Dyke could have achieved as strong, if not stronger, reaction on the audience from the screen reconstruction of the falls, than if they had actually been there themselves. And think, for a moment, of the full force of that reaction if cinematically evoked in a full house at the London Empire! This persuasive illusion of reality is surely one of the fundamental duties of cinema. But unfortunately Van Dyke is accustomed to working in the American style, which for effect relies almost entirely on the pictorial value of the material photographed and disregards any such important factors as constructive assembling in terms of rhythm, light values and shot-lengths. In fact, all the editing of Trader Horn amounts to is a clever patching together of some real African shots, some scenes taken in a Hollywood studio, and the result of some double-printing, in an attempt to make the picture on the screen as artificially