We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE SPECTATOR
FILM TERMINOLOGY
The loose use of loose terms is characteristic of an art not yet hampered with academics. But an attempt must be made some time, and the sooner the better, to rationalise the phraseology of cinema — its technical terms, the names of its species, and the definition of its functions. Some of the soundest writers on the film are unintelligible to the ordinary reader because of the jargon they use. Conservative Sunday newspapers and staid reviews, where even colloquialism is frowned upon, bewilder the reader accustomed to plain English when he comes to the cinema feature. Nor are our own pages exempt. Every writer has his own terminology, and it frequently happens that one exponent will use the same word as another when in fact he means something entirely different.
"Documentary" is perhaps the most abused word of all. It is used variously and mistakenly for educational, cultural (if anyone knows even what that means), propagandist, travelogue, interest, industrial, descriptive, and even advertising (x shillings a foot, go anywhere, shoot anything).
The word might have come to mean any of these things, though it could never mean them all. But it belongs properly to the genre to which it was first attached. And it is the association of the word with this genre that has given it the prestige which other users so much covet. Documentary proper is an art form as distinct as verse from prose and should no more be confused with the lecture film, the screen magazine, or Secrets of Nature than they are with studio dramatics. Perhaps the best definition of documentary is that once given by John Grierson in these pages: the creative treatment of actuality. Documentary does not merely describe, it interprets— using the living scene and the living story as opposed to the artificial scene and the acted story. Had this confusion in terms not arisen we might indeed have been spared the arty photography and pseudo-symphonic structure which have ruined so many educational and descriptive films.
THE PICTURE'S THE THING
Apart from such elementals the trouble in coining a word, as in
creating a technique, in films, is that it may so soon become obsolete.
The cinema should be the last home of dogmatism. Is not tele
75