The cinema : 1952 (1952)

YOUR CRITIC RIGHT OR WRONG! 137 The third channel through which the main contribution to the art of the film has come is that of the less specialized market of the cinema. Here we find the evident commercial success of film-making of a high order, like Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Chaplin's work of the twenties, Ford's Stagecoach, the most famous full-length films of Walt Disney, and Carol Reed's Odd Man Out or The Third Man. Both worlds, commercial and artistic, meet for a moment and shake hands. It is an interesting spectacle. The problem for the film-maker, then, is the present completely miscellaneous nature of his public. The policy of the industry through which he works is to aim at the lowest common factor of taste in this public. The policy of the artist is to aim at the highest common faccor. That has caused the Fifty Years' War of the film and the cinema. In it the artist not infrequently wins a battle, and the critic should be fighting at his side to help him build up an ever-increasing, intelligently appreciative public within the greater one which patronizes the cinema. But to do this the critic must himself have standards he can share with the film-maker. These standards are constantly being created and enlarged by the film-makers themselves in the general evolution of their art, but the critic himself in his observation of what is being done and in his reflections upon what could be done can contribute greatly to the process. The theory of film art, the principles enunciated or discussed in such books as Paul Rotha's The Film till Now, Pudovkin's Film Technique and Film Acting, Eisenstein's Film Sense and Film Form, Arnheim's Film, and Ernest Lindgren's Art of the Film, may, for the sake of reference, be called academic criticism, though in each case these books arose out of hard observation of hundreds of examples of film-making and in some cases out of hard experiment with camera and