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
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Sooner or later the finer significances of cinema art and purpose must be resolved and their true relationships established. Meanwhile all of us, critics and craftsmen alike, talk glibly of evolving technique without any clear idea of what we want to do with cinema, what we want to make it say once we know how. All the talk of film being still in its infancy is so much nonsense — a cowardly deceit to cover our wretched incompetence. Young in years the cinema may be, but it has already achieved ample maturity, with everything needful to produce the dreamed-of masterpieces. But where are they ?
What excuse can we offer for their absence ? The trade . . . the moguls of the box-office . . . the cost of production . . . censorship. Effete aesthetes may vent their imprecations in a wild hysteria, but they are as far from the truth as they are from practicalities. Nor need the producers blame the public, who may refuse but never demand. Reformers may rant and rave, but the masses, by and large, like their pleasures highly spiced. And when an august Governor of the British Film Institute believes it to be " not a bad thing " that the passions and emotions " thus find an outlet vicariously " — why should the trade worry ?
The film industry lives up to its name, of which it has no reason to be either proud or ashamed. It exists to make money, as much as possible in the soonest possible time. It deceives nobody on this score, least of all itself. But while as a business proposition it may employ artists it has little concern with the production of art as a medium of expressions. Its use for art is to sell more and more miles of celluloid. And if it is not the art you want, says the trade, it sells our films and we pay plenty for it. Thus the principal object of censure casts the blame elsewhere.
And so the guilty game of pitch and toss goes on. Let us put an end to it forthwith. Let us be honest with ourselves and admit
403