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.
Accomplishment in this connection is still limited to the shorter documentaries; but the effect of these is not to be written-off as negligible. The remarkable popularity of the films produced by the E.M.B. Film Unit is beginning to alter the outlook of the commercial producer to documentary. Those earlier films, at present being exhibited throughout the country, include Industrial Britain, by Grierson and Flaherty, which, in a series of intelligently conceived and expressively photographed sequences, convincingly argues that behind the smoke and the steam of modern industry there is always the craftsman, and that Britain's industrial supremacy is built up on a centuries-old tradition of craftsmanship. Two films by Basil Wright, The Country Comes to Town and O'er Hill and Dale, have the lyrical quality that has been apparent in all of Wright's work. The latter gives a simple, clear-cut impression of the meaning of Spring to the shepherd — the anxieties, the dangers, the rewards. In this film Wright has caught, with an effectiveness only a Scotsman can appreciate, the peculiar atmosphere of the cold, grey, empty uplands of Southern Scotland. Also among the E.M.B. documentaries now being generally exhibited is Arthur Elton's Upstream, an illuminating impression of the salmon trek from the sea to the breeding-grounds. Here Elton, forestalling Pudovkin, makes effective use of the close-up in time, grading the leaping salmon in various degrees of slow motion and thus securing some curious and interesting emphases. These films, at least, have begun the task of showing Britain on the screen. Their success will surely persuade the producers that modern London can be as interesting on the screen as Old Vienna, and that there is no need to go to the ends of the earth when drama is waiting on the doorstep.
The quarter is more interesting if not more distinctive for Thunder Over Mexico. Paul Rotha discusses two important aspects of the film's exhibition. For the rest, it may be recorded that the film as we see it is little more than a Mexican Bad Man tale of the rape of one girl and the execution of three peons, with a prologue and epilogue scrappily descriptive of the emergence of a new Mexico. Without the control of the mind originally conceiving the theme, the film has neither coherence nor conviction. The style, too, is impossible to associate with the director of Potemkin.
America's films of the quarter are odd in their variety. They include Little Women, which has been welcomed as "a complete joy" by one critic who thinks it "simple [and] sincere to the spirit of a gorgeously sentimental race." The film certainly reproduces, to the last sniff, the last sob, every drop of the sentimentality which has made the novel an established best-seller. In complete contrast is the advanced sophistication of Lubitsch's Design for Living. It is hard to find a common strain also in two such films as Alice in Won
181