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.
a painting, or a painting like a photograph; but only as it is bad architecture to make a reinforced concrete factory look like a Doric temple. It is a question of media. But, if this is the case, can we say not merely that photography and painting are different arts, but that they belong to different classes of art?
Coming to films: is there art in the simple reproduction of a stage play or variety turn? Obviously not; and the result is not true film. But is there art in the reproduction of a Mickey Mouse cartoon? Is there selection of angles, selection of viewpoint, or anything else? There cannot be. The camera's only job is to reproduce the object (that is, the drawing) set before it as clearly as possible. Yet the result is admitted by most people to be true film. Are there, then, two kinds of film, belonging to widely separated genera of arts?
Take the third case : radio. Reproduction of a piece of music is admittedly not radio art. Reproduction of a stage play, by analogy with films, is unlikely to be so. But according to Arnheim, Goethe's "Faust" is more a radio play than a stage drama, and therefore a radio production of "Faust" is radio art. What difference between the stage and radio production is so essential that it transmutes "Faust" into a different kind of art? Or is it not the case that radio drama is simply an improved way of obtaining the same effect on the spectator as in stage drama?
A play, "Easter 1916," produced at the Dublin Gate Theatre, was mostly made up of speeches off-stage. These were accompanied by a simple and thematically unimportant, though pleasing, visual setting, which remained substantially unchanged throughout. All the information, and nearly all the emotion, was conveyed verbally. Are we to believe that if this play were broadcast (which would need no change except the elimination of the setting) the effect would be something different not only in degree, but in kind?
Photography and painting, radio plays and stage drama, cartoonfilm and normal story-film are not different arts but different techniques. The only new art is that of the film, and it is new because a succession of visual images cannot be created without the help of some mechanical apparatus. The only new departure made possible by radio, gramophone, and sound-strip is the orchestration of natural sounds, and this will very probably prove to be a branch of music. The effect of the spoken word is not magically transmuted simply because it happens to come through a loud-speaker.
The film uses reality because it cannot help doing so, and the reality is not the first thing. The first thing is the image in the mind, and the reality is then chosen so that the resulting photograph will resemble, as closely as possible, the original image.
G. F. D ALTON.
174