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.

affectionate enough, will sometimes achieve a flash-point by its very affection. The making of a mould is as fair an example as any. There have been more ambitious sequences of furnace work, rhythmicised and tempo'd to beat the band. They are all — Ruttman's, Flaherty's, Iven's, Rotha's and my own — vulgar in comparison. So much for the informationists and what they represent. Rotha's Shipyard brings us back with something like full measure to the old position — for impressionism and against analysis, for art and against information, and no one will say his case is not finely made. The other people were critical and had no creative power to back them, though they very plaintively tried. Rotha is certainly creative. He comes equipped with a great splendour of camera work. He has a force and fervour of tempo'd description better than anything before him, for he has known how to use sound to intensify his impressions. He joins with the other school in his industrial background and sociological implication and, if he had freedom, his sociological implication would be even plainer than was permitted in Shipyard. In these matters Rotha is certainly on the side of the gods. Yet, when the splendid flurry is done, are the bones of the ship in the film — are the wash and the width of the sea it will sail ? Is the man who planned her there? — are the orders he gave? — is the shaping of the ship to the blue print of his knowledge and purpose ? Does the fo'c'sle head rise high with purpose willed and form made to a purpose? Is it enough to make a poem of men hammering and building and forget the precision of a rivet? The energies are certainly there, caught, indeed shimmering, among the rising ribs of the colossus. The voices are there, in broken scraps of calls and conversation. The tools are there in hot bursts of riveting and beating and turning. Something of the town behind them is there and the houses they came from, and the unemployment they will go back to when the job is done, and something, too, of their thoughts. A great deal is there: shimmering all of it as the sunlight of fine photography flashes across plate and hammer and screw. But — and I ask this detachedly that the case may be understood — is it really a ship that goes down to the sea or only a hunk of art? The case of the others is that the art is better if it is also a ship. In any case it is of the greatest value that Rotha should reach out separately in this way, and of the greatest importance that his growing point should prosper. It may be that two separate arts are involved and that we must look to the development of both. The one is cold and, with power, may yet be classical ; the other is rhetorical and may yet, with power, be romantic. But this is certain: in our realistic cinema, all roads lead by one hill or another to poetry. Poets they must all be — or stay forever journalists. 196