The cinema : 1952 (1952)

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YOUR CRITIC RIGHT OR WRONG ! 147 made through 'voluntary self-denial' is £ero de Conduite, which does not really belong there at all. Vigo's films were financed privately, quite outside the normal commercial framework, like much experimental French cinema in the late twenties and early thirties. Experimental films are usually conceived of as representing the purest artistic expression in the cinema, unhindered by producers or distributors. This was the case with Vigo, with Bunuel, with Flaherty when he made Nanook and Louisiana Story >, and the best work of these directors is undeniably among the most striking in the whole history of the cinema. On the other hand, Cocteau made Orphee, Renoir made Le Regie du Jeu, Carne made Le Jour se Leve, Pabst made Pandora9 s Box and Kameradschaft, Clair made Sous les Toits and Bresson made Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, de Sica made Bicycle Thieves and Chaplin his full-length features, within the commercial framework. Stroheim began Greed within it, but the film broke out and was never properly completed the same thing has happened with other leading directors. In Russia until the late thirties, at least directors had considerable freedom under a State-controlled industry, and the results included October, Earth, Mother, and The Childhood of Maxim Gorki. Distinction as to the sources of good films are not conclusive ; there are as many exceptions as rules, and the critic has, rather, to ask : Is working within an industry more damaging to the film artist than it is to the novelist or playwright? Can a film like City Lights or Earth or La Regie du Jeu or Bicycle Thieves be legitimately compared with the best of contemporary fiction and drama? The commercial growth of the novel and the theatre, after all, has been extremely rapid over the last hundred years : in the last century, when Dickens was being serialized and his books were being printed in far larger editions than those of Fielding or Jane Austen, the novel was in fact at a high peak of creative vitality. The difference is that the