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mind, but subsequent readings should resolve most of the obscurities. If one has the proper equipment, the time to spare, and determination, one is bound sooner or later to force a way through the entanglements that defend the citadel, and once that is captured one finds that the spoil within is adequate compensation for the ardours of the attack. And so it is with painting and sculpture. (Music and the ballet suffer, though to a less extent, from the same disability as film.) One may look at Genesis and not immediately understand Epstein's intention. A Picasso still-life may at first glance appear a grotesque blob of colour. But after a period of concentration — and artistic enjoyment, as Arnheim reminds us, is not mere receptiveness — one begins to understand the particular approach of these artists, the peculiar quality of their vision.
The difficulty with film is that it allows no period of concentration. Nor is it often practicable to see a film more than once or twice. We can read a page of print fifty times, or pay fifty visits to an art gallery, but facilities for viewing a film over and over again are denied to all but a privileged minority.
Inevitably the conclusion is forced upon the novelist who would wish to express his concepts in film that it is by its very nature a medium incapable of being at once subtle and intelligible. That conclusion would be modified if one could feel that the human brain is likely in the process of evolution to develop further. However well disposed he may be to film, the novelist will continue to use the written word when he wishes to express the more subtle workings of his mind, unless in the course of time there is an acceleration of the process by which the brain decodes, co-ordinates and transmutes into emotional and intellectual responses the messages flashed to it via the telegraphy of the senses. Film would, among a race of supermen, be the ideal medium of artistic expression. But unfortunately we are not supermen.
A copy of The Great Train Robbery, generally regarded as the first story film to be produced, has been discovered in Glasgow. In the course of a lecture on the history of the cinema to the Scottish Educational Cinema Society, G. A. Oakley made a passing reference to the film and, at the close, a teacher in the audience remarked that he had in his possession a film dealing with a train robbery. Further investigation revealed that it was a copy of the early film which had been purchased many years previously from a photographic dealer in Cork and had lain undisturbed in a garret. The film has been handed over to the British Film Institute through the Scottish Film Council and it is understood that the intention is to have copies made which may be available to film societies. The film, a super in length in its time, is about 800 feet long. The present condition of the copy will not permit of its being projected without frequent breakages occurring.
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