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when he hears that Mr. X, the best-selling novelist, has been given a film contract. It is conceivable that the artist who understands both idioms may be faced with the problem of deciding in which to express himself.
Novel or film? Words or sounds and images? The choice of the novel is indicated at present by factors which have little to do with the validity of film as an art medium — the collectivism which makes it impossible for the artist to remain in full control of his material from first to last, the high cost of production, and so forth. Suppose, however, that such factors are ruled out. Is the film potentially a richer medium of expression than the novel? Is it subtle enough to express intellectual ideas? Could it stand the strain put upon the more flexible structure of the novel ?
Two limitations deriving from the nature of the medium at once present themselves — the physical inability of the spectator to keep his receptive faculties unblunted for longer than (say) two hours; and the momentariness of film, which makes it essential that the significance of the moving image (reinforced it may be, by sound) should be instantaneously apprehended by the spectator.
Pudovkin, writing of the silent films, holds that a film more than 7000 feet long "already creates an unnecessary exhaustion." With the introduction of sound-film demands have been made on the spectator's ears as well as on his eyes, and there has been an intensification of the strain, with the natural result that films tend to be shorter. It is, of course, possible to issue a film in parts, as was done in the case of Fritz Lang's Nibelungs and (recently) in the case of Raymond Bernard's Les Miser ables \ but I am inclined to agree with Pudovkin that "the film of deeper content, the value of which lies always in the impression it creates as a whole, can certainly not be thus divided into parts for the spectator to see separately one each week."
He is, however, surely unduly pessimistic when he maintains that "the influence of this limitation of film length is yet increased by the fact that the film technician, for the effective representation of a concept, requires considerably more material than, let us say, the novelist or playwright." Words which contain a whole complex of images are not so easy to come by as Pudovkin imagines. The evocation of atmosphere in the first chapter of "The Return of the Native" is not achieved by the use of a few significant phrases. Hardy, major artist though he is, requires pages to get his effect. An artist of similar stature using film as his medium could evoke the desired atmosphere more economically and with no diminution of effect by his arrangement of half a dozen sensitively chosen images. If he had sound at his command he could describe Egdon Heath and bring home its significance by an even sparser use of his material.
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