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FILMS OF THE QUARTER
SPIRIT OF EXPERIMENT
FORSYTH HARDY
Three films emerge from the quarter's cinema: because they are experiments and because, without experiment, no art can make progress. Under commercial conditions, experiment is expensive and hazardous, and seldom undertaken, even when the necessary imaginative ability is present; thus experiment is found most often in work not inspired only by a desire to amass profit — in the products of State-aided film units and in pictures made independently as mediums of personal expression.
The G.P.O. Film Unit has followed Pett and Pott and Weather Forecast with a more elaborate experiment in the expressive combination of visual and aural images — The Song of Ceylon. The direction is by Basil Wright, and in shaping the material he worked in close co-operation with Walter Leigh, Grierson and Cavalcanti. The special achievement of the film is its complete breakaway from the conventional narrative form and the substitution of a form of construction in which sound plays an essential part. If this nonvisual continuity is not sympathetically appreciated, the film may well appear, as Charles Davy suggests, " meandering instead of marching." So unconventional is the form of the film that its peculiar quality is not immediately apparent. Few experiments in art are completely assimilated at the first contact, though it is the exception for a film to be, because of its subtlety, incapable of instant understanding.
A second experiment of the quarter is The Idea, by Berthold Bartosch, based on a book of wood-cuts by Frans Masereel. This, an attempt to use the cartoon form with a serious purpose, is probably the result of an independent artist's desire to obtain complete and continuous control over the film as a medium of expression — the sort of control he cannot have under studio conditions. The theme of the film is the birth of an idea and its reception by, and effect on, society, and the action is represented by two-dimensional figures against backgrounds at different levels which give depth to the scenes. The film does not attempt to define the idea, contenting itself with illustrating its reception; but its success in this limited achievement suggests that the cartoon form is capable of adaptation to a serious purpose, and that the conventional film form is not the only one available for the artist with something to say.
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