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142 THE CINEMA
he is offered. Refusal in either case risks a loss of professional prestige. The critic who writes for a national paper is bound by the demands of his readers or what his editor conceives these demands to be -just as the film-maker is circumscribed by the demands of his public, or his producer's view of them. In both cases the disagreeable realities of the situation cannot be ignored. If a critic is to earn his living by criticism, he needs the wage that a large newspaper can pay ; writing for specialist magazines, or writing books like The Film Till Now, is scarcely more rewarding in a financial sense than avant-garde activity in film-making itself. Again, the antitheses are pa rallel : ' experimental ' work in the cinema too often leans towards the over-esoteric, exists in a vacuum, and the theorist and specialist critic is, inevitably, cut off from the main body of cinema audiences and contemporary production . The cinema has been in existence for only fifty years, and has developed rapidly in technique and scope: when one considers it, there is reason for astonishment that artists have managed to keep pace with this intense commercialization at all. The shrewdest commercial producers, however, have always courted the artist, recognizing that even 'entertainment' cannot exist solely on the repetition of manufactured formulas, that c novelty ' and ' the picture that is different ' have essential ingredients that seasoned roufiers may not be able to provide. The number of important and even experimental films that have been produced within the commercial framework is often under-estimated, perhaps because trash in the cinema is more obtrusive than trash in any other medium, and its social implications are more serious. But from the point of view of the cinema's development as an art, there is nothing very extraordinary about the number of cheap or insignificant films produced. There is no reason to demand that every film should be a work of art : the output of bad novels and bad plays is equally high, and the important factor is that the kind of mass relaxation accepted