The Cine Technician (1938-1939)

12G THE CINE-TECHNICIAN Nov.-Dec., L088 FROM SLIDE TO SCREEN "March of the Movies," "Flashbacks" and the programme ft Section of the British Film Institute, all recently shown in give a history of cinematography. We present the comments representatives who saw them. INTERESTING AS CURIOSITIES M AllCIl of the Movies" and "Flashbacks" are both mistitled. The former is a march mainly of publicity stills, and a somewhat alcoholic march at that, going backwards and forwards, hither and von, without much regard to time and place. In the latter C. B. Cochran had a very queer idea of how long a "Hash" may be, and added to his sins by stopping short just where film technique as sued) was beginning to be interesting. In effect " Flashbacks, " which is silent, calls for less criticism than its partner in that you cannot accuse a thing of failing where it does not try to succeed. It is simply a collection of bits of old films, and even some complete old single-reelers strung together to induce a vein of pleasant reminiscence and remind us of the type of drama that thrilled us or the comedy that made us laugh twenty or thirty years ago. If we were thrilled or if we laughed we must have been very easily pleased indeed; though T cannot help reflecting on the attitude of a youngster of eleven or twelve who sat next to me during the show and was in paroxysms of laughter during the running of an early Charlie Chaplin. Obviously his reaction w as one of primary amusement inspired directly by the film, and not, as was ours, a secondary reaction in which we laughed at ourselves for having laughed twenty years ago as that boy did to-day. What was interesting in the technical sense was to see the conscious growth of the film as a separate form of story-telling, and I greatly regret that the show stopped when the individuality of film technique was just overcoming the handicap of being considered a crude novelty. I think it would improve enormously and be something more than a few torn and unrelated pages of film history if the. compilers had brought the story on another ten years to the end of the silent era, when photography, cutting as a real visual art, and the type of acting that was done mainly by facial expression were at their zenith. It would have given a more balanced perspective to what, as it stands, tends to be a bit boring at times, and where, owing to the extreme length of the dashes, a Mary Pickford film of VJl'i), say, is forced to be entertaining on its own because we cannot rely lor nearly two hours on entertainment derived purely from reminiscence. ".March of the .Movies" gets the harder kick because it tried and did fail. first of all. it had one of those American-style facetious commentaries which was extremely irritating and most scandalously used at times (as, for example, over the excerpts from Dante's Inferno) when silence would have been more than welcome. It would have been a blessed relief. om the Preservation London, claim to of three of our Frame from "March of the Movies." Note "A.C.T. Journal" in bottom left-hand comer. In that it carries the story on to 1938 I should look to a film of this sort to be in itself an example of all the excellencies of modem technical development, instead of which it appeared to h ive been put together by someone who stopped learning at the same; point as Cochran's silent flashbacks stopped. Dissolves and wipes were nonexistent, as far as I remember, and fades were just stupid. Continuity shots of strips of blank film and a swinging pendulum kept coming and going without any other reason than that the producer needed something to fill up the action while the commentator went on with his silly speech. Direct sound shots were not even in sync. The time continuity was also extremely faulty and the order of scenes seldom took a simple straight line from event to event. My greatest sense of irritation with this film came in the last reel when, after a description of the passing of the 1927 Films Act and fulsome eulogies of the foresight of John Maxwell it proceeded to state that owing to the question of copyright "we cannot show you anything from any of the great American films of that period." Well, if the} can't, why refer to it '.' 1 should have been happy, indeed more than happy, to find a British film being shown to the British public in which the producer stated that he had some little admiration for the many British film technicians who had made his own effort possible. It only adds to the inferiority complex of the native product for a producer to apologise from the screen itself that he cannot show you anything but British films. Come to think of it, this film, which was mainly drawn from B.I. P. sources and mostly the "Royal Cavalcade" at that, was so poorly done that it didn't make even B.I. P. look too hot. Why take as an excerpt from "Blackmail" a bit that only mentions the word of the title when everyone remembers the film for its justly renowned "knife" sequence? Why not show us something of Kanturek's lovely photography in "Blossom Time." Friese-Greene's exteriors on "Bill the Conqueror." Jarvis's well-timed cutting on "Black Limelight," or the multiple track recording of "Invitation to the Waltz?"