The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

December 1956 CINE TECHNICIAN 185 THEY START ON APRIL FOOLS DAY ! By Christopher Brunei WARNING: You must read this before eating your Christmas dinner, or else you will fall asleep. ^ ,TE are so used to doom and gloom in the slumps that hit film production that, when things get better, we do not always recognise it. Maybe the improvement never lasts long enough. Take feature films registered each year with the Board of Trade, for instance. For most of us the year begins on January 1, but for the statisticians at the Board of Trade it seems it starts on April Fool's Day. For the year from April 1, 1951, to March 31, 1952, 114 British features were registered. The next year it grew to 117, then to 138, and in the year 1954-55 to 150 pictures. Before you start dreaming of an Eldorado with twelve months' continuous work and bags of overtime (not a word to A.C.T.T. about that ! ) look at the figures published some weeks ago; down to 110 films in the year 1955-56. Shorts took a similar plunge during the past year from 326 pictures to 279. It is all wrong 1 rl g> . . . Shorts took a plunge this, because there have been fewer foreign films around. So British studios and documentary units ought to have been bridging the gap. Why have they not? Have the National Film Finance Cor poration and the British Film Production Fund failed to assist producers? Far from it, but it seems that the uncertainty about the Government's intentions over these two institutions has made many producers rather cautious. This is the season for fairy tales, so maybe that one about us film employees getting too much money and making films too expensive has been a contributory cause? The N.F.F.C.'s last annual report gives the answer. The average cost of pictures it has assisted has fallen fairly steadily over the past six years, so that it is now below £100,000. Technicians, craftsmen and actors have on average drawn . . . getting too much money £8,961 less in wages and salaries on each film assisted by the Corporation in the year to March 31, 1956, as compared with the previous year. I have worked it out to be the same as a wage cut of 3s. 2d. in the pound — and with fewer films around and the prices of things on the increase that is serious. It is a good thing we have all got Trade Unions to help put things right. The employers have been getting more work out of everyone. On these films they got fourteen seconds a day more in the can compared with the previous year. It sounds little enough, but put it another way : the average number of days each picture took to shoot was reduced in the same period from 46 to 41 — 5 days' work less on each feature. Soon we shall be making our New Year resolutions. Let us all decide on a few simple things like making certain our M.P.s know the need for proper assistance for British pictures through a strong new Quota Act, and a bountiful N.F.F.C; let us help A.C.T.T. to help us; let us make certain we come to the annual general meeting to discuss our problems in March; let us . . . But enough of pep talk — let us enjoy our Christmas feast. Pass the slide-rule, please! Book Review Elsevir's Dictionary of Cinema, Sound and Music. W. E. Clayson (Compiler). 948 pp. (Amsterdam, Elsevir) Cleaver-Hill Press. £6. In this latest of an internationally published series of specialised polyglot dictionaries, over three thousand technical terms in cinematography, sound recording and music are defined. For each the French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and German term is given; alphabetical reference lists follow for each language, and there is a bibliography of sources. Differences between American and ' British English ' are shown, although the terms noted as slang are almost all American. Such a dictionary is an essential tool of the technical translator. As a guide to usage in English Feature studios, however, this dictionary is not everywhere reliable, and sometimes the definitions are not clear or are misleading. We are told an Assistant Director is ' an executive who notes the scenes taken to prevent confusion later on' and that a Production Manager is the same as an Associate Producer, while Dubbing and Recordist are still ambiguous. Some space could have been saved by avoiding repetition and the glossary extended; we miss, to take a few words at random, location, cutting copy, wild, loops, trims, mixer, boomswinger, wardrobe, azimuth. The book, printed in the Netherlands, is very finely produced. C. L. M.