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THE INDEPENDENT FILM-MAKER
NO MORE FILM PLAYS!
ERIC M. KNIGHT
After many years of writing on cinema I have begun to despair of revolt against screen-pap coming from within the industry itself. I consider Hollywood and recall the broken hopes of Eisenstein, Stiller, Murnau, Flaherty, Dudley Murphy, and the other able men who were battered by the system there.
The crystallization of the film method must come from outside commercial ranks. More and more I am convinced that the 16 mm. film is the avenue to progress.
The tremendous cost of modern tone-film production raises an insurmountable barrier before the young would-be creator in celluloid. But the sub-calibre film offers him an inexpensive field in which to work.
The amazing lack of good sub-calibre film work is not due, as is commonly supposed, to the machines now available. I find it due almost solely to lack of imagination on the part of the workmen in the narrow-film field. Give a cinema group a supply of film stock and usually it will try to produce a "play" in imitation of Hollywood. If the world didn't produce another film-play for five years we'd still be over-supplied. Shoot sonatas of leaves and grass, tone-poems of clouds and water, gavottes in abstract shape, documentaries of the machines you toil at and the land you live in! But don't shoot a play!
The greatest need, as I see it, for progress in the narrow-film field, is for greater technical knowledge on the part of the creator. Generally the artist detests anything that smacks of figures and tables; yet cinema is art-through-machinc and it must be studied. You may have the finely sensitive eye that can see a camera-angle, frame a composition, see the delight of splashed sunlight and half-lit shadows; but that's only the beginning. If you won't learn to use a
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