Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

THE FILMS OF FRITZ LANG 229 Broadly speaking, nine films out of ten shown to the British public concern the facts and emotions of what are supposed to be everyday people. To a certain extent this is desirable, for the cinema should be a reflector of our daily habits and actions so long as it mirrors them truthfully. But it would be deplorable if we were condemned to see on the screen nothing but incidents governed by the logic of everyday life. We should be subjected to a perpetual stream of dreary failures in love, industry and politics, dotted here and there with a chance success. And anyway, Hollywood (which supplies ninety-five per cent, of the world's film output) has definitely proved that it knows little of the mechanics of the art of living, and that American producers and directors are mostly incapable of building out of celluloid those things which are eidier true or logical. In the presentation of amazing inventions, adventurous undertakings and undreamed-of exploits, the cinema is performing functions proper unto itself. By means of the film's vast store of technical resources, things that are unreal and improbable can be made to take actual form before our eyes. Our minds may be constandy held in suspense between the knowledge that the incidents which we are seeing are in reality impossible and the veritable fact that there they are upon the screen. Far back in the early days of cinema in 1897, Georges Melies contrived all sorts of short magical pictures of conjuring tricks and similar deceptions at the Theatre Robert Houdin in Paris. Far from pursuing the more ordinary experiments with the new invention, such as