The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

THE C I N E T E C H N I C I A N September— October, NEW BOOKS REVIEWED An Index to the Creative Work of David Warx Griffith : — Part I. The Birth of an Art. 19081815. Compiled by Seymour Stern. Supplement to Sight (Did Sound. This is a catalogue — if it were about Eisens they'd call it an iconography — of all Griffith's film work u]i to the beginning of The Birth of a Nation. And fascinating to read it is. too. Anyone who thinks of Griffith in terms of half-a-dozen films or so should have a look at this : there ale over 3* >U films listed in this pamphlet. That means an average of two a week at least throughout the whole six years; I've gone through the list carefully and as Ear as 1 can see he didn't have a single week's holiday, without work on some film or other, from beginning to end. Of course, they were only onereel sileiits mostly, but even so it is a terrific achievement, particularly when you remember thai during this time he was making continual developments in shooting and editing technique, which are noted in this list as they appear. The creative (and money-making) spirit was alive in those days all right: in these lifeless and constipated days any old over-censored, over-careful, over-finickey dead-as-mutton epic will take at least a year to produce and get shown. It's worth thinking why, with all the improvements in knowledge, technique and equipment since then, films are s i much more laborious and difficult to make today, and when made, so much less alive and worth :eing than were Griffith's. Is it that their subjects today (and the atmosphere of the studio) are so remote from ordinary popular feeling and the lite of our times that the majority of the technicians find themselves shut off from any spirit of coin i a1 ion ? Anyway, our Mr. Seymour Stern ha no use for any idea of co-operation. He describes Griffith's films as "all one-man jobs" and even has the stupidity to call him " in the most exact and literal sense, director of photography," when it is obvious (read Hilly Bitzer's description elsewhere in this issue of how Mary Pickford Hist came to use make-up) that all films in those days were " in the most exact and literal sense" co-operative fforts. It is a sad thing that for everj creative man like Griffith there sb aid be dozens ol S moiir Sterns (after the appropriate lapse ol time has lent a halo to hi formerly despised work) ready and eager to clamber upon his back like so many old nun of the sea and earn a living and a certain pale notoriety by listing, annotating and generally pulling to pieces what he did from si creative generosity. This list is interesting eno . _ but I think Air. Seymour Stern would be betl employed boosting some at present despised an 1 down at luck contemporary who really needs . In 1910 he would have shot a glance of s< Griffith and the movies ami busily set about ing and annotating the works of Ibsen or Teheko-for the benefit of the fashionable intellectuals the day. F.S. The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp. I E. \Y. and M M. Robson. Svdnevan SocieU. ■2 I'd. As anyone will expect who read the Eobson's The Film Answers Back, you certainly have a lively if topsy-turvy time with this pamphlet. o neral effect is very much that of filmindia : you never know quite where, from some perfe sensible premise, the welter of words and _ met is going to land von bv the time it is finished. The FUdi Answers Back had a pi in -tly g 1 tral idea, that films as a rule should have a constructive happy ending, with people solving their problems and good triumphant; hut by the t tla argument was over Pabst had been turned from a sincere internationalist into a chauv and any American film was the cats' whiskerHere this argument is developed in an attack on poor old Colonel Blimp, which the authors si a cunning and subvi rsh ttempt to laud everything German and pour scorn on everything E lish. The high-spot of the pamphlet, certainly, wlure you suddenly find that the authors 1 somehow conclusively proved that the shown ° Blimp was the direct cause of the rele Aioslex I Now I don't think anyone would particularly want to defend Emeric Pressl urger a i writer. There is certainly something fishy al his Squadron Leader X or C-Boat ('apt striding unscathed through the stupid dem cies, and 1 suppose there can be few people know a little a he does about the real lite of tb 8 country. lint the author are not satisfied wit that; burning with their new-found vansittar; they would have even English dug-out. g in- and loutish young public-schoolboy suba I w n as patterns ol honour, intelligence and virtue. It they haven't found out by now that there's something pretty badly wrong with