Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

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220 CELLULOID composed only of rascals, madmen and clowns? M To-day, we may refer to our daily newspaper and read almost any London film critic on Soviet films in general and the work of Pabst in particular. In point, the review of any film that deals with the essential facts of existence instead of artificiality. Zola was aware that the only way to attack evil was with a hot iron . . . with truth. During the whole of his career he met with bitter antagonism. Every novel was received with columns of hostile criticism. Abuse of every conceivable kind was heaped upon him. Until, after the famous Dreyfus affair, in which he carried the pursuit of truth outside the covers of his novels into the ramifications of national affairs, he fled into exile. His literature was variously condemned as pornographic, obscene, bestial, brutal, evil, to which came his sole, unanswerable reply : " For me there are no obscene works : there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones. Our analyses can no longer be obscene from the moment that they become scientific and contribute a document. ..." A document? Is not that in the nature of a film? To the student of the cinema perhaps the most interesting characteristic of Zola was his astonishing feeling for mass-movement, for the conception of a universal scheme of actions and reactions. The movements and existence of his smaller figures are plaited into the mass-movement of the whole. Take " Germinal," where the theme was " individual suffering posed against, or accompanied by, the eternal