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A BOOK TEACHES THE WAY TO
SEE FILMS
Love is blind, it does not criticize. The masses have seen themselves blind at films. It is convenient to be blind. But to open the eyes of the blind always remains a tormenting and ineffectual experiment.
To write about films means vain and desperate fight ; fight with shadows whose substance plays hide and seek. Producers and artists vanish behind the broad back of the public and when this public — being bored — once turns its back and begins to stay away from the cinemas — then technique fills the gap.
When the silent film finally seemed to be finished, it was sound which made business profitable again. Before sound-films have expired colour will have taken its chance. Or a new screen form. Or perhaps the still missing third dimension. Then the perspective cinema, and so on. It is the tragic fate of film theory that at the very moment it is thought to have been proved right it is destroyed by the new inventions.
Film theory could be firmer were not most of its thoughts on functions, laws and effects of film as isolated from each other as they are from a sufficiently large reading public. There are at least a dozen clever books on the film. But they are not known ; not even by people who would like to know them. Nor by those who ought to know them — first of all the authors of new film-books. Nearly every film critic behaves as if he himself were the first one in this province. He establishes a point of view of his own and woe betide the things he cannot see from this point of view.
Rudolf Arnheim is the first one to perceive, to weigh and to use what others before him have said. With his book Film als Kunst (Film as Art), published by Ernst Rowohlt, he is superior to all his predecessors, first of all because he succeeds in estimating and sorting them — by calmly and objectively proving his case — equally trained in physics, psycho-technics and aesthetics, and with the untrammelled mind of a young man who will not follow the stereotyped statements of our time. In that he again becomes superior to the others who understand everything by means of a formula or a catchword and who want to make it understood in exactly the same way.
It was Bela Balazs who wrote before Arnheim the most important theoretical book on the same subject : Der sichtbare Mensch (The visible man). The possibilities and difficulties of the film were still exciting and inspiring for him. To Arnheim who is younger and who comes later the matter seems less surprising. He does not surround the film with poetry, he dissects it. He watches calmly the things which thereby appear, reflects upon their meaning and explains their expediency. He does that in a simple language full of humour using the most intelligible phrases of every-day life. It is the language of a good teacher, of a young teacher who himself wants to profit by the thoughts he pronounces.
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