Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

THE FILMS OF FRITZ LANG 237 be doubled and even quadrupled by proper methods of film construction. In other words, Fritz Lang hardly seems to possess all the necessary knowledge of editing, of exact timing of shots, of precise discrimination of camera positions, and of the other principles of film construction which distinguish a cinematic mind from one that largely thinks in terms of beautiful pictorial compositions, " acting," and well conceived sets. What I regret most about Lang is that he does not appreciate the supreme importance of the assemblage of shots on the screen. In each of his succeeding films, he shows the audience in one single shot a scene which might with advantage have been broken up into at least half-a-dozen shorter pieces. The simple act of photographing the movements and facial expressions of several persons in a set and placing the result on the screen is inadequate for the purposes of the cinema. Such simple and direct methods do not constitute the complex art and science of cinematography. If this gifted metteur-en-scene appreciated to a greater extent the irrefutable fact that constructive methods of assemblage, as discovered and developed by the Soviet cinematographers, are the best means whereby true cinematic effect can be achieved, then his remarkable ideas and fascinating conceptions, so wonderfully suited to the medium, would assume unimaginable proportions of excitement. Treated on such a cinematic basis, The Woman in the Moon, with its splendid array of landscapes and situations, would have been an unprecedented achievement of its kind. Keyed up to the tension of tight steel wire by proper