The Cine Technician (1938-1939)

88 THE CINE TECHNICIAN September-Oc tober, 1939 ITS FILMS (Continued from page 86) Hollywood influence. We saw how these met in The River and in The Plow That Broke The Plains. In both these films there was a sense of box office which demands a very super technical perfection and a certain superficiality of thinking. This is the Hollywood end of things. The other characteristic of both these films is thenconcern to make visually beautiful real people without considering if this superficial visual beauty is in itself real. This is based on a misinterpretation of the early British documentaries. The Plow That Broke The Plains and The River are both showing in the United States cinemas, and The City, which is the latest American documentary, is to be seen here also. The City is an interesting film and a disappointing one. It cost probably three times as much as a British film of the same scope and it has technical brilliance to which few British documentaries can lay claim. But for the greater part its argument does not bear inspection. One cannot help feeling that the film would have gone very much further if some of the time and money spent on attaining a virtuoso brilliance had been spent on research and some of the time and energy which have gone to its slick cutting had been expended on clearer thinking. It is scarcely a step forward in the history of American documentary because it has sacrificed the truth and sincerity of its argument in making a film that was good to look at and superficially entertaining. It marks, I think, a critical point in American documentary development, for it is obvious that the producers of American documentary must choose whether they will pawn one of their beautiful cameras and spend the money on a visit to the Public Library or whether they will continue their brilliant photography without reference to the more profound patterns of life itself. In this country many of our cameras have been tied together with string because we believed that our arguments were more important than our photography. Hollywood's contribution to the Fair is a film called Land Of Libert;/, and the fact that it is made of cut-outs 1 take to be a gesture of America's educational integrity. Cecil B. de Mille has raked through his epics of the past and removed the baths and the bedrooms. The result is a long pageant of America's historical characters. The Lincolns, the Lees and the Grants, who have given the land its present ideals, if not its present character. This is, of course, a very expert job of work and it is interesting to see again some of the great actors of the past in their historical roles, but there is more of American reality in one sequence of The City than there is in this panoramic national anthem. Great Britain's cinema is just what we expected: compromise. We in Great Britain feel much more certain of our past than of our future and it was only to be expected that in a Fair which would try to lay down the plan of democracy that Great Britain should try to find its place at the foundations. This she has done by telling the story of the long British struggle to achieve democracy and the centrepiece of the exhibit is that foundationstone — The Magna Carta. The story moves up through the ages and shows George Washington as a secondgeneration immigrant from Britain carrying the British idea of democracy into a new country. The conceiving of America in liberty is shown to stem back to the tradition of an English gentleman. In the cinema this story is reinforced. The piece de resistance is the Coronation Film and it is interesting to note that the sore-footed thousands who tramp the Fair daily have flocked to the British cinema to see again this greatest show of all time. The programme is normally made up of the Coronation Film, (Concluded on page 90) THE GIANT DIORAMA (Concluded from page 86) On these "drum" gears are bolted glass-mounted Kodachrome transparencies — 96 pictures to a drum. Twenty-two gears are used in the eleven twin projectors, so that the system carries 2,112 colour-film pictures ready for automatic projection. To link the gear-rings with the automatic indexing system, the projectors employ one of the largest singlestep spur gear reductions ever attempted — 48 to 1. The 45-inch gears work directly from a 15/16 inch pinion. Each colour slide carries a series of gear teeth, integrally mounted along its edge. Together, these teeth form a continuous series around the film ring, and serve to operate the optical registering system built into each film gate. This registering means consists of a small rectangular plate of selected optical glass, which spins as the film ring rotates. As each picture moves into position, this glass swings upright before it. If the picture halts a trifle too high in the gate, the registering-glass remains tilted slightly forward at the top. If the picture stops too low in the gate, the glass tilts back correspondingly, its movement being controlled by the gear teeth on the film. In either case, refraction through the glass shifts the pictureimage so that it travels at proper level through the lens, and is correctly positioned on the screen. This correct level is maintained even if the colour slide vibrates up and down in stopping, since the registering glass moves in synchronism with it. Such a means of optical registration has heretofore been found only on ultra-speed laboratorv cameras, used for taking pictures at 1/100,000 to 1/500.000 second; but in the KodakBuilding projectors, it helps provide screen registration of unparelleled accuracy. The illuminating system of each Eastman projector is centrally housed, with the ring gears and film drums revolving around it. Water cells are used for cooling, and in addition, a blast of air, chilled almost to freezing, is directed on each projector gate. Large-aperture, long focus projection lenses are used, and specially designed shutters are utilised for many screen effects. For the World's Fair colour show, photographers of the Eastman Kodak Companv prepared a special collection of more than 100,000 Kodachrome transparencies. The design of the Kodak projectors makes it possible to change the whole colour show overnight, simply by unbolting one group of slides, and replacing them with another. Demonstrations in the Kodak Building are continuous from ten o'clock in the morning until ten at night. Each individual show lasts approximately ten minutes. The exhibit is one of the most popular in the whole of the World's Fair.