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.
4
vision ready to be put on the market at the opportune momen ? When the electric camera arrives what will happen to montage? And what of colour? And stereoscopy? The theorist in cinema has little time to gain a foothold before some new development sends his dogmas hurtling into the abyss of the forever-discarded. The film does not develop as painting, music, or literature have developed. It changes. It is dependent on the scientist and the engineer for its very existence. Its tools do not evolve in a gradual process of improvement. They are liable to be replaced with disturbing suddenness, requiring a complete re-orientation of ideas and the learning of an entirely new technique. Yet did not Homer exist before the printed word? And is not fine poetry still hammered out on the modern typewriter? The poet uses words to convey ideas; the film-maker uses images. No matter how much the mechanical production of pictures changes, cinema, if it continues at all, must still mean visual expression. Whatever its size or its frame or its colour the picture will remain the thing.
LITERATURE AND THE FILM
We have"" long complained of the influence of literature and the stage on the film. It was refreshing therefore to come across, in a little book of critical essays called "Gog Magog" (London: Dent, 7s. 6d.), a brief consideration of the influence of the film on literature and the drama. G. W. Stonier, the author of this modest "anatomy of modernism," points out how playwrights and novelists have tried deliberate imitation. 'Street Scene," "Grand Hotel,"" Stamboul Train," "42nd Parallel," are all undisguised efforts at cinema technique. The stage, in attempted retaliation perhaps, has its revolving platforms, and, as in "Hatter's Castle," its divided proscenium. Then there is the literary close-up, which Stonier finds in the writings of James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Dos Passos, and many other contemporary authors, when the distance between the reader and each of the characters in the novel is liable to shift. Writers, he says, now have a greater sense of visual property. This is not a new realisation, however, for the aim of writing has always been to convey images by means of words; but the cinema has brought this home afresh. Imagism and impressionism have both received new stimulus from the film, though how far the influence has been direct it would be difficult to estimate. And had the anatomist also examined painting and photography he would have found the influence of the cinema apparent in new angles of approach and in the revelation of the hidden beauty in the commonplace. All of which goes to prove that, after all, we cannot take our
76