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.
94
CLOSE UP
Film Sciences (Archiv fur Filmkunde), founded and directed by Dr. Gregor. They contain a great number of pictures and books pertaining to cinema, and represent an institution devoted to the theoretical side of film making.
The book profits by all the experience the author has gained in his dual capacity as head of the Archives and professor in the Max Reinhardt school, and, last but not least, as an attentive spectator in the cinema. It is a book on the spiritual foundations of the film, on its position in the culture of our time, written by a doctor of philosophy ; not for the greater public, maybe, which wants to know how a film is made, and not for directors and dramatists of large film trusts, whose interest is in how to make better films . . . . ( ?)
This book contains observations only, but no practical hints, it reveals the historical development of the film as a cultural factor, and the psychological reasons for the effect produced in such a surprising degree on the civilizations of the twentieth century. The author is not a fanatic, not an artist wholeheartedly devoted to the film, but an impartial observer who sees both advantages and disadvantages, and who finally does not grant the film its right as an art !
More than two hundred illustrations help to explain Gregor's ideas; they certainly emphasise the scientific character of the work.
The first chapter deals with the history of the film, and links the connection of present-day culture with that of former times, showing — in too much detail sometimes — how the desire of men to capture eternal motion is as old as mankind itself. In our time this desire has reached a culminating point, and, rightly, Gregor calls our age a " visual age, an age always wanting the form even without the content," and he confirms his statement by examples chosen from other spheres.
In the analysis of film dramaturgy, to which the third chapter is devoted, the question is excellently reduced to specific examples. Gregor here proves an attentive and cultivated spectator, capable of recognising deficiencies better than the film expert — to whom the pictorial effect and the effective progress of the action are apt to seem over important. And here also the old problem of differentiation between film and theatre, to which attention cannot be called too often, is explained.
" The film and contemporary art " constitutes the last but one chapter of the book, and here is treated the mutual influence of film, theatre and literature on one another. At the end the problem of the suggestive effect of the film is analysed from the point of view of psychology. The effect of music, to which rhythm is as necessary as it is to the film, is used for comparison. And especially where he examines rhythm and its effect on the spectator (and now also the listener) Gregor is able to clarify many things which have been sensed unconsciously only by those seeing the films. " Optic-acoustic effect " is his expression for it, and in his