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THE CAMERA TURNS ON HISTORY
PHILIP LINDSAY
Author of the novel " Here Comes the King," and responsible for the accuracy of the historical details in Henry VIII.
Romance is coming back into the films. I think that we can now say good-bye to the gangster, the muscular college-boy, the backchatting show-girl, and the drunken reporter. That phase in films has passed ; romance is coming back, and the historical film is returning into its own again. Almost all the great silent successes were costume, and I feel assured that the great talkie successes will be costume. The public wants them; the world, in fact, needs them. We have been pushed up too close to the shoddy, vulgar, and brutal things of to-day; we are tormented by memories of the last war, frightened at the menace of another war; we have gone to the films for relaxation, for inspiration, or for pleasure, and we have returned shocked and a little ashamed of our civilisation. In future, however, we will be shown the great achievements of man in the past; we will see heroic deeds and splendid women, and thus we will be taught that our civilisation is not a crude, sudden growth — not a 'system,55 as the communists, in defiance of history, will call it — but that down the centuries man has been striving forward, building, creating.
The films can teach us this. Instead of degrading man, they can exalt him. I have no time for the young intellectuals, overdosed with psycho-analysis, who, on suddenly discovering that savage impulses remain in our unconscious, persist in believing that those impulses are our whole mind. Man is not a vile creature. Anyone who studies history cannot help being impressed by the rapidity and vitality of his growth. It is not so very long ago since we lived in swamps and knuckled our faces like Rodin5s "Thinker,55 crushed under immense and savage heads, tormented by the birth of dreams beyond knowledge. We have conquered the earth, we are conquering space — all in so amazingly swift a period. Surely our achievement is something of which to be immensely proud?
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