The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Page 3 58 Educational Screen Films for Tomorrow A thoughtful study of educational potentialities of films based on the author's addresses before the Philadelphia Alliance and the Educational Film Library Association. THOMAS BAIRD Director, Film Division British Information Services TO sjjeak with seeming authority on the future of any subject calls for some temerity on the part of the forecaster. But where angels may fear to tread, it is not necessarily folly to foretell, for only by forecasting the future can we shape it. Our thought about the future can become our plan for the future. In tracing the graph of the future, we may use two references — the experience of the past and the requirement of the future. The past history of film, short as it may be, reveals that film has already taken several forms ; just as printing allows us to produce books on a variety of topics and subjects and in different styles, so film already has its own forms. There are story films which compare with the novel. There are non-fiction films which record history and travel. There are teaching films which compare with the educational textbooks and some which can be used as classroom aids to teaching curricular subjects in schools and colleges. In the newsreels we see a form comparable to the periodical, if not the newspaper. Because the film has already many forms and styles, it is likely that there is not a single future for films but many different futures. Let us try to see what has happened in the past and what is now happening to several types of film. Before doing so, however, it were well to remember that film is an expensive medium. The writer, with a penny pencil and a sheet of wrapping paper, can retire to his garret and compose a great sonnet. With a little more paper, he may write a great novel. The painter, with paint and canvas, can paint a great picture with little financial outlay. The orator need expend only his own breath, the composer only his energy and a little ink. No such easy access to the materials of his craft lies open to the film maker. It is true, a script may be written in an attic, a production planned in a man's mind, but to translate the idea or script into a finished film is a costly venture. Even the simplest film involves the collaboration of many craftsmen and the expenditure of much money on costly materials, equipment and processing. We must, therefore, always remember that the creation of a film is not only an artistic or a creative venture, it is also an industrial project. For this reason, most films require to earn a great deal of money in their retailing. Most films require eventually to be sold to you and me and the rest of the general public and this puts the creative artist eventually at our mercy, or at the mercy of those who sell his film to us. Few producers can afford to defy public taste, or the opinion of the film salesmen and make the film which they want to make irrespective of public opinion or public taste. The expensive cost of production is seen particularly clearly in the field of the entertainment film. A commercial entertainment film, produced for popular showing, often has a budget running into millions of dollars. The motion picture industry is, therefore, perhaps more of an industry than anything else, and like all other industries, it serves its retail trade. Those who rail against the lack of imagination, the poor taste and tiie shallow political outlook of commercial film producers would do well to remember this. They should, perhaps, be grateful that such an industry does, from time to time, produce a film which can be called imaginative or even great. If the same critics of the film industry were to apply their same tests and criticisms to the publishing of books, or to the publishing of music, they would probably find no greater proportion of true value in these worlds. If Hollywood and the other motion picture centres of the world produce a dozen first-class films in a year, they are probably doing as well, by an artistic standard, as the book publishing centres and the music publishing centres of the world. And I submit that it is economically easier for a creative artist in writing or music to create a masterpiece than it is for a craftsman in the film indu.stry. Remembering then the economic situation in the world's motion picture industry, there is no reason to expect any great development of imagination in the years immediately to come. So long as the cinema-going public continues to find the films as they are to its liking, there is no good reason why the film producer should change his style. As soon as the cinema-going public reject the published films, rest assured that the producers of films will protect their fantastic investments by providing what the public want. When good taste pays dividends, the producer will be interested, but not until then. The future of the entertainment film is, therefore, in the cinema-goer's hands. If the cinemag©er will patronize what you and I might believe to be the "good" films, there will be more of them ; as soon as they reject the trivial and the shallow and the vulgar, there will be less of these. But I can find little evidence that Hollywood, in its present output, is not judging well the public taste. Let those who criticize commercial films remember this well. Let us also hope that they will go on criticizing and pointing out to the motion picture industry other possibilities of films which will ajijieal to the public. But it is likely that before there is any fundamental change in the public taste for films, other forces will have to work and have their say. Perhaps the war was such a force and has engendered here and there a sense of new values which will create a taste for a different and better kind of film. Perhaps, on the other hand, war experience will tend to turn people away from any