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.
of attitude, could deny the separate and authoritative inspiration which impressionism represented.
Many of us, brought up in the post-impressionist revolt, have made structure our god. "Observe and analyse," "know and build," "out of research poetry comes," were the slogans we set before us. They suited the academic and the radical in our minds. They brought us more readily to the new material of our times.
I have watched with some closeness the working of these influences in the films of Wright, Elton and Legg. All are painstakingly and rather proudly academic. When they shoot a factory, say, they learn how to ask the right questions. Elton, for example, knows more than a little about railways and mechanics; Wright has mastered the history of every subject he has touched; and I will swear that Legg knows more about the organisation of the B.B.C. than any outsider decently should.
Critics have not failed to notice the tendency. " Close Up," that ancient citadel of the aesthetes, spotted it from the first. In aesthetic righteousness they deplored this concentration on the didactic. They sniffed a long and authoritative sniff , at the pedagogic in art. With equal sniff but less authority the boys and girls of " film art " followed them. I, for one, always liked the criticism for, so far as it goes, it means well and means rightly. The only point at which art is concerned with information is the point at which "the flame shoots up and the light kindles and it enters into the soul and feeds itself there." Flash-point there must be. Information indeed can be a dangerous business if the kindling process is not there. Most professors are a dreary warning of what happens when the informationist fails to become a poet.
But note the reverse of the argument. Information there must be or there is nothing to kindle. New information there must be or we are kindling to no purpose. And that is the task and the danger these others have set themselves.
If they have not always found an aesthetic flash-point in their researches into the social and economic structure, they have at least been looking for it. I remember when Elton's Aero Engine came out, how these very critics lit on the last reel of flight. It was a poem, they said, but why all the laborious business before about aero engines? They missed the point and missed it twice. In the first place any fathead could make a poem of flight, but it was a more difficult and more necessary thing to make a poem as Elton did of the making of the mould. For many of us, there is no depth to the poetry of flight unless the making and the moulding are realised behind. The smoke at the chimney stack is one thing and a fit vision for children. The smoke above the furnace is something else.
And again a point. Analysis itself, if it be fine enough and
195