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CINEMA QUARTERLY
Volume 3, Number 3
SPRING
1935
SUBTLETY ON THE SCREEN. "The film," says Campbell Nairne in an article in this issue of Cinema Quarterly, "is, by its very nature, a medium incapable of being at once subtle and intelligible." We must either accept this statement at its face value, and reluctantly place the film as a means of expression at a lower level than most of its protagonists would admit it to be, or else reconsider our idea of what is meant by subtlety and intelligibility, along with what we understand as cinema.
To be intelligible, in its broadest sense, implies surely that the ideas expressed by their creator may be readily comprehended by the spectator. In this respect, by creating its illusions by means of naturalistic material, the film can be as simple as a child's first picture book. Subtlety, on the other hand, is a more cerebral accomplishment, demanding a delicate apprehension of the finer shades of thought and expression.
On considerations apart from even the grossly commercial one of requiring to address the largest possible audience, what Nairne calls the " moment ariness" of the film would seem to limit expression to a studied simplicity. " Momentariness " means that unless the image and its accompanying aurals are immediately understandable the spectator will have failed to grasp their significance before other images and other sounds will be engrossing his attention. Thus it would appear that the film-maker's powers of expression are restricted not to the compass of his own abilities but to the physiological limitations of the spectator — hence the well-worn but readily understood symbolism of the average Hollywood production. The use of the cliche in journalism recently was defended on the grounds that the familiar phrase ought to be regarded as an ideograph, or omnibus expression, and accepted as any single word in common use is accepted. But journalism is not literature, and while the cliche and picture-book simplicity may be necessary in the average feature film, which must tell its tale with precision and speed, it does not follow that the medium, as a whole, is incapable of subtlety.
Campbell Nairne is a novelist, and his view of the film is justified
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