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.
CLOSE UP
whole host of films which are merely faithful and literal transcriptions of their subjects. This is the curse of Swedish films, where literary respect is such that every director obediently inserts each sideplot and detail of the novel, however complex and confusing, starting a thousand hares that are not run to earth. It is to be so in France, where the ignorant superstition of illiterate and conscience striken film men together with the pretentious impertinence of Academicians combine to agree that nothing adapted may be altered, novels and plays must in future be just photographed. Not that a faithful film illustration is always without value independently from the book or play from which it is made. Greed is probably better than McTeague for all its deliberate attempt to be only the same ; although the incidents are merely imitated and the film has no existence separate from the book. Raskolnikov by the originality of its treatment becomes an interesting, a creative criticism of parts of the Dostoievsky story. But Taras Bulha adds nothing of any kind to the Gogol story. It is illustrative and nothing more. Any merits of the film are the merits of the story. Any charm of character is aroused by the likeness of the character to Gogol's conceptions. But, since the story is such an excellent story, and many of the characters so attractive in the story, the film holds one's interest. The great mpments in the story — the death of the younger son, the death of the elder son — are not botched ; they have the same power in writing and in picture. And lusty old Taras himself, an actor manager from Kiev, has the personality of Gogol's Taras. What a bear ! When he is overwhelmed at the end he fallg as a very tree of the forest. But the production is entirely crude. There is only one cinematic movement, the entry into the besieged town, the panning camera on the starving inhabitants. Much of the minor acting is terribly tawdry, its worst moments were cut by the Film Society's editors. The film was left by Ermoliev at fourteen reels, at his request it was reduced by the Film Society to seven. Its performance was largely marred by the music, which failed to seduce the spectator's attention until the middle of the film and often was out of step. This was the fault not of the musical director, but of unforeseen circumstances ; all the old film joins of five years back started to break in rehearsal, which had accordingly to be abandoned while the film was made ready for the show itself. (IVOR MONTAGU, 43, Leicester Square, LONDON, W. I.)
82