The cinema : 1952 (1952)

184 THE CINEMA combination as when a medical feature opens in a fictitious doctor's consulting-room and ends with laboratory technicians demonstrating to the cameras much of the flat and groping quality of television seems to result. For in attempting to combine the many different skills of television to obtain a pre-determined effect, the producer goes a long way towards the construct that is a film, without the resources and synthetic structure of film. Somewhere, I believe, undiscovered as yet, there lies a new way of observing reality ; so that in a programme higher in level than the 'camera visit' we yet do not expect the self-conscious fait accompli of the film; where the camera's power to overlook reality almost carelessly will be allied to a highly conceived and imaginative use of sound. For there can be little cfoubt that the important future of television in our society rests with the feature programme. Let us admit the enormous value of spreading drama wider than it has ranged for forty years, the interesting interviews, the successful variety acts that someone will one day find, the great future of outside broadcasts of public events and then recall that in millions of homes there will soon be found an instrument for reporting and commenting on public affairs, immeasurably more emotive than radio because it allies to sound the stimulus of vision. Television can attempt the job that documentary filmmakers once set themselves and were never able to complete. When the documentary style was first established, it was hailed as an influence which would help to abolish the atomic concept of society which grows more and more powerful and seductive. It is a truism to say that individuals know less and less of each other's daily lives, that each trade