The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

School Department irector's enthusiasm, they lose sight for moment of the needs of the story as a rhole, and assent to changes which in the nd they regret. Then the film is made. Footage always uns over the prescribed length. It is un- voidable, for there is always more than ne camera on a picture, and often sev- ral shots are made of the same scene, lut the advantages are obvious when it or 5 'to cutting and editing. The direc- i>r c!oes the first cutting. The original fteen thousand feet or so of film is re- uced by him to perhaps ten thousand. 1 selects the best shots of each scene, lerely cutting the film to episodes and icidents. Then comes the film editor, fho cuts to the proper footage (about ve thousand feet) with a view to bal- nce of incident, characters, climax, and nity, always under the direction of the cenario department. '^Fitle-writing is next in order, done lt'her by the scenario editors, or under heir immediate supervision. And then here comes a final pruning necessitated •y the insertion of the titles; for the pic- ure complete must come within a given If&th, "-eanization checks vagaries," said ' : rn when I asked whether in his aLlWii&hce better results were obtained irhen the production was made by one nan or many. "Though perhaps much of beauty, gen- js, or inspiration is lost, still the result j more often good than bad. When one aan writes, directs, edits, completes the icture, his personality and ideas have ull sway. But as he succeeds more reatly, so will he fail more greatly. "A big producing company must have eturns, must have the money to keep oing, and therefore must keep to a lore or less conventional course. Yet it an not do without the finer minds and ne loftier ideals." The personality of the director is a big factor. He makes the story as he sees it. The De Milles, Griffith, Tourneur, Hopper, given the same story, would in- terpret it differently—in terms of their own experience. It would be an inter- esting experiment, I thought just here, if a group of directors could be given the same story to produce, each according to his own notion. It is one of the things which may become possible when the movies have advanced from the status of an industry to that of an art. As to screen adaptations of novels—Mr. Bern is speaking again—which are invari- ably inaccurate on the screen, and dis- appointing to one who is familiar with the original forms, the explanation was simple and plausible. To begin with, the screen must present the entire story in little over an hour, whereas a novel may take eight or ten hours. So the screen must condense. Delicate shadings of character, which in iife would run through a period of years, are impracticable on the screen. Vagueness is not filmable; characters must be painted strongly—the hero whiter, the villain blacker than they would be in real life—so that the ideals and images that are to be conveyed, will in the short time permitted be strongly impressed. Then, too, there must be a definite con- clusion. Real life never settles anything; screen life does, for most people appar- ently do not want real life on the screen. They want life reduced to what Mr. Ralph Block calls the "fairy-tale formu- la." And so we have virtue rewarded and villainy confounded in every picture. The names may change, but there is never any perceptible variation in the formula. (This is not Mr. Bern speak- ing!). I called to mind a magazine article, by the same Mr. Block, in which he de- clares that the motion picture is not a fine art, but a popular art, and that it will always be limited by its appeal to