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There is no corrective influence from Russia because to date few Russian sound films are available.
But wherever Hollywood has been accepted, there has been a definite lowering of the standards of cinema. For Hollywood (if we except comic films) can produce kitsch magnificently but cannot produce art.
Those who are interested in cinema may be divided roughly into two groups : some say that it is movement and light, that what is photographed is unimportant, and that it is the way it is done that matters. These minds correspond to the grammarians of literature, and Hollywood with its wealth of technical development has won over this group easily. Logically, however, the group should belong rather with the avant garde of Paris; their ultimate achievement should be in the creation of abstract forms.
The second group, while interested in technical development, are concerned with film as a group of units, of which light is one, photography another, the story a third. They require these units to be co-ordinated into expression of an idea or group of ideas. At its highest, in the silent days, this group produced films such as Ten Days, Mother or Turksib.
The English cinema student will find however that practicallv no sound films of the second group are at present available for English screens. (The few that have been made are foreign.) He is forced to concentrate upon technique and gradually his critical perceptions become blunted through a continuous diet of Hollywood patent foods.
But, it will be asked here, what is this extreme danger of Hollywood? The stories are boring, but do they matter? Will not all intelligent people laugh at them ? Is it not better to study the American gangster than not to go to films at all ?
But this is a great part of the danger. People laugh the first few times, then (for we are all lazy) the intelligence becomes blurred, until even the rebel tends to accept insensibly the Hollywood code.
And acceptance of the code means that no serious problem may be filmed.
Hollywood has brains. It is like a good advertisement. A man would not be able to get five hundred pounds for a poster unless he had grasped the fundamental conceptions of human desire and response. Only civilization was not built nor discoveries made, through acceptance of easy and immediate gratification.
An animal is hungry, sees food and eats it. It does not think of famine or winter. Cave man began to think, began to store, began in that manner to build up the present age.
Hollywood insists that its films shall not violate the code of the prewar era. Success is symbolised in bigness, in gilt; an idiot child is better than no child, co-operative feeling between the sexes is forbidden least it should lessen the power of illicit eroticism. The avalanche, the famine, must be subordinated to sex appeal. That this code was responsible for