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The sound film was exploited prematurely, not because its hour had really come, but to palliate the effects of a certain lassitude created bv an increasingly tiresome production.
Technique for its own sake, created for itself, plaving with material lacking substance, is futile. The cinema should occupy itself with the useful— work with human life, individual and social — construct !
As long as the coiffeur is tired out by his day of beards and hair, and time for meditation is not left bv the sane regulation of fatigue and repose, it is vain to hope the public will be capable of appreciating good material, and queue up for other gentlemen and ladies than Chevalier and those of Un Soir de Rafle.
When all goes well outside the cinema all will go well inside the cinema, for cinema tends to become the geometric centre of the activities of this decade. The [Moral Leagues hurl themselves against the cinema and accuse it of all ills — thus it is the cinema which accuses them !
If it is desired to set this appareil de civiliaatioii which is the cinema on the path of truth, the spirit of man must be reformed first !
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Which amounts to saying that reform of the cinema is impossible without a perceptible uplifting of the public level of intelligence. At first reading it sounds just enough. But it Avould remain to be seen if the spectators of the leisured classes, those untroubled by a day of beards and hair, would furnish proof of a sufficient electicism to enable it to be said that additional repose equals meditation and enrichment of the spirit. A sufficiency of examples obliges us, on the contrary, to state that it is not the public harassed by fatigue which judges least reasonably the value of a film.
To say that the cinema is the result of the activity of an epoch is equivalent to refusing it all aesthetic ambition likely to react favourably on this activity in expressing this or that new or personal idea.
To state that talented directors, such as Rene Clair and Chaplin in establishing a " golden mean," considered by most critics and the greater part of the public as " the summit of cinematic art," are doing harm to public spirit, seems somew^hat injudicious. Apart from the fact that this " golden mean " seems to us sufficiently inaccessible to the greater number of film directors, it is rare indeed that a well-advised critic allows himself to speak of a " summit " v/hen he is concerned with work of a certain altitude. It would be permissible, however, for him to say that the work in question dominated the whole, but his affirmation would not in any way aim at establishing an intangible ceiling.
The public, after all, is unlikely to gorge itself without makmg distinctions in its nourishment. Quite frequently it regrets the evening spent . . . and its money, not always, it is true, when a bad film is in question, but it has no means of direct action concerning the quality of film output. Apathy, lack of enthusiasm. But exactly, state our authors, spiritual reform