Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

solid. It has the power not just of technical creation or good looks, but of facts — hard, indisputable facts — instead of the publicity fudge which so often goes for subject in current documentary. And when, throwing open the doors of her church, she cross-sections the community in town and country, industry and street, underneath the chant of choir and the richness of anthem, your hardest materialist will be disturbed at this manifestation of faith. Again, here is no fixed moment of time hung suspended on the screen, but a feeling of continuance, a feeling of something started in dim ages that lives not just to-day but for all time. Miss Grierson has achieved something which, I think, no other documentary has done and which, I am sure, most other documentalists would be unable to do, because they lack both her simplicity of approach and that disregard of personal advancement which is reflected so strongly in her work. And, lastly, I am impressed by the skilful way in which instruction and knowledge have been mixed with emotional appeal so that both theatre audience and school class will benefit by the film, an accomplishment that makes some of these purely educational pictures look rather like waste of time and effort. Paul Rotha THE CONTINENTALS This quarter's continentals have been a mixed bag: one or two very good, others passable, and others negligible. The most interesting, although one of the least commercially successful of the new films, was Hey-Rupl, a Czecho-Slovakian comedy with an undercurrent, perhaps unintentional, of sociological comment. It is loosely constructed, and the leading parts are played by two popular Czech comedians, Jiri Voskovec and Jan Werich. Their wanderings before establishing a co-operative milk factory are often extremely diverting, but there is too much of this, and the high spots are separated by long intervals when nothing seems to happen at all. Some episodes smack of Chaplin, others of Clair. The sound is good and the exteriors and interiors are well photographed. Technically, the film confirms the favourable impressions made by Fred Maturitou and Exstase, but as a whole it lacks any marked public appeal. It is a film for the student. Some gorgeous fooling was seen in Skylark. The story is of two apprentices who go up in an aeroplane, each being under the impression that the other is an instructor. Having ascended, they are afraid to come down. They stay up for a considerable time and break every conceivable record for endurance, distance, and so on. Eventually they land, to be acclaimed national heroes. It is a comparatively short film, and even so takes rather a long time to get into its stride; but once the aeroplane goes up the fun is immense. 179