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.
Unless the director can be given full control of production, with responsibility for the scenario, it would be wiser, instead of increasing his apparent but ineffective importance, to limit his scope to that of strict interpretation. With sound, music and colour playing increasingly important parts in production it is well-nigh impossible for the director to be master in every sphere, and the specialist, who must be artist as well as technician, is acquiring growing responsibility. Some one, necessarily, must take control of all these elements, weld them into a harmonious whole, fitting the director into his specialized niche alongside the musician, the colour artist, the camera-man, and so on. The obvious person for this task is the producer, whose apparently nebulous function has always been something of a mystery to the filmgoer and a recurring source of irritation to the serious film-maker. But to take charge of the artistic unity of a film the producer must be a very different person from the average studio executive concerned primarily with the financial returns of commercial investment. He must be himself an artist, able to visualise the film as a whole. He must be the heart, the soul of the film. Whoever else constructs the scenario, he it is who must conceive it, give it life. He must be able to play on the talents of his specialists as a musician plays on the keys of a piano.
When a director is elevated to such a position only then can he claim to be the creative genius of the film.
Yet would the appearance in the studios of this new type of creative producer materially alter the character of production? If we believe with Arnheim that the artist has already been reduced to absolute subservience to the grossest of commerical ends, it is obvious that the film, instead of developing in artistic significance, will remain as a social phenomenon of greater danger than value to mankind. But though the abject dependence of the craftsman is obvious and deplorable, it need not be concluded that the basis of production will not alter nor that the means and methods of filmmaking will not undergo vital changes. Only so long as no one has the final responsibility for the measure of a film's worth — only so long as the director is sufficiently swollen with pride and salary to accept a puppet position of authority — will the present tendency continue.
In the independent documentary field the producer has aready proved the artistic necessity of his presence. Without question it is even more necessary in the studios. But how is the new role to be created ? As a result of the increasing complexity of production the studios, either unwillingly or blindly, may themselves create the opening. Or the new movement to increase the importance of the director's position may give such artists as have the necessary abilities and strength of character the opportunity of seizing
192