The cinema : 1952 (1952)

I76 THE CINEMA research system which is being built up allows those who have considered views to make them felt. In such a way it is possible for the thinking viewer to influence the course of television far more than he can affect the commercial cinema ; always provided that the B.B.G. will employ flexible minds in television, prepared to cater at times for the minority and ready to forswear the temptation to rehash the same material time and again, in the familiar Hollywood commercial style. n If you talk to a television producer, you are likely to be told that you must not dream of comparing television with the cinema. The B.B.C. should get over this sensitive inferiorityfeeling; for though the two media are in fact different in form and function, they have superficial likenesses, and the comparison between them is revealing and useful. To begin with, television is a medium, just as the film is. Both may aptly be compared with literature, and in both can be found, as it were, the poem, novel, play, essay, epic, brochure, and text-book. In other words, television can do many different jobs, and it is already idle to talk of a television aesthetic, except in the broadest sense. Yet as in writing there are fundamental principles of grammar and clarity winch apply to the entire range from poem to text-book, so there are similar principles in both cinema and television ; and these, common to both, are the cause of the superficial likeness between them. The visual and dynamic principles shared by television and film derive from their common form and limitations as sound motion-pictures. The image can move and talk within the frame, can be accompanied in its movement by synchronized dialogue, commentary, music or natural sound, and can dissolve from place to place or time to time. The