Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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of everything new that has been done and written in the sphere of the art, technical achievement, economics and politics of the film. Noxon calls the Institute a piece of machinery for Italian propaganda. I have been working for over a year in the Institute. I am a foreigner and believe myself unbiased. In all cases I have been in a position to observe that it was Luciano de Feo's endeavour to secure the collaboration of outstanding men in all countries and to make use of the material supplied by them in the true spirit of international objectivity. Why, in spite of all this, should the Italian Government find it to its interest to subsidize the Institute? Well, in my opinion, because it would enhance Italy's prestige if so important a factor in modern life as the film had its international headquarters in Rome. Rome is anxious to become again what it once was. Is this explanation adequate? CAMERA MOVEMENT The first essential of a moving-picture is necessarily movement. This has two aspects: an objective, that is to say in the material surveyed; and a subjective, that is to say in the eye of the camera. The purpose of the latter may be said to be the active interpretation of the former — working in such a way as to bring out by selection and emphasis special points of detail or of subjective mood. No film, it is clear, can be made without an intimate interplay of the two elements ; but it is also true that it is the second which chiefly distinguishes the film from other dramatic forms; and it is therefore with this that we are here concerned. Subjective movement in a film has two alternative renderings. It is possible for us actually to follow the progress of the camera from point to point; or we may cut out the intervening stages and concern ourselves only with the points of rest. This latter method, in the use of which movement is achieved by the flashing from one stationary set-up to another, and which leaves everything to the cutter, is that favoured by such Russian directors as Pudovkin and Eisenstein. The common usage of the Russians, to whom moving-camera shots are anathema, is completely opposed to that prevalent in the Western cinema. Here and in America, every other shot taken is a moving-shot ; and at the same time the potentialities of constructive editing are to a great extent simply ignored. Somewhere between the two extremes come the better of the Continental directors: Clair, Pabst, and, if we may include him among the Continentals, Lubitsch.