Experimental Cinema (1930-1932)

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA latter effect was found to conflict rather too harshly with the sequence of events in real time. For instance, a scene showing a man in front of a street door, followed immediately by a scene showing the same man inside the house, is likely to produce the impression of something unreal An interval of time is clearly demanded between the two scenes, and this is supplied by an interpolated third scene which may be a close up of the man, or the view of the room he is about to enter, or some other related subject. The method of parallel action is but an extended application of the same principle and achieves a similar effect of expanded time which sometimes, as in the climaxes of Griffith's pictures, is deliberately prolonged beyond even the realistic implications of the subject for a specific emotional effect. The other and perhaps even more important reason for changing scenes and thus introducing a greater mobility of visual images, is found in the very character of realistic acting when it is used on the screen. In real life or on the stage speech itself constitutes action. A conversation between two persons may contain a series of events pregnant with dramatic significance, although the person speaking may engage in very little physical movement. On the screen the situation is different. Deprived of his words, even when these are present in the form of subtitles, the screen actor can express himself only by means of gesture and movement. Bu* -,he naturalistic convention of acting exclude0 s.ll but a few of these forms of expression. The inevitable result is that while the stage actor who uses speech can sustain a situation without a change in the setting for the length of a whole act, the screen actor finds his resources of expression exhausted within as short a time as a minute. It was to relieve the screen actor of this predicament and a. the same time to give greater emphasis and variety to the means of expression, that long situations were reduced to a series of fragmentary scenes with long and medium shots, close-ups and "angles" thrown in for the sake of variety and emphasis. It is instructive to note that with the advent of talkies long scenes depending entirely on the dialogue and showing very little movement made their appearance on the screen. The fact that the latest talkies indicate a return to the technique of the silent picture with its short and fragmentary scenes, only goes to prove that the handling of dialogue on the screen is still far from being efficient and that the old "dynamic" form of composition wields a superior power of emotional appeal. If the movement involved in the change from one scene to another brought to the fore the immediate significance of the form of the visual image, the movement resulting from a series of such changes organized in a manner conforming to a certain rhythmic scheme, placed the visual form in the position of the dominant factor in the building of cinematic composition. At this instance it is unnecessary to go into a description of the various methods of rhythmic organization of images beyond pointing to the work of Abel Gance, Leger and Murphy, Murnau, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. The important fact to be borne in mind is that cinematic rhythm is a form of visual composition which is itself charged with powerful emotional appeal and at the same time, while remaining independent of the image content, conveys and shapes the latter's appeal as well. The effect of rhythm is to organize sequences of visible beats and accents. It establishes a visual continuity of intermittent images as a function of time. It leaves untouched, however, the problem of spacial continuity, of the spacial relationship of images to one another as elements of the visual cinematic composition. No pictures known to the writer have so far suggested a satisfactory solution of this problem. And yet so long as this problem remains unsolved the motion picture as a medium of dynamic visual art will never reach its complete maturity. The continuity of visual form implies a dynamic composition of which the only existing illustration in other visual arts is found in the moving composition of ballet. Just as in the latter, the cinematic visual form has to be built in time, and its elements of composition should be not static images but lines of forces or movements in definite directions. It goes without saying that movement in this sense includes not only moving objects, nor movement of images in time only, but also their movement in space over the entire surface of the screen. The technical obstacles which still stand in the way of such dynamic composition are likely to be removed in the near future by the various announced devices for enlarged projection In them therefore lies the promise of the mature cinema whose intellectual and emotional appeal will be the function of its dynamic composition. Film Problems of Soviet Russia by HARRY ALAN POTAMKIN BRYHER, assistant editor of Close Up, has just published (under the imprint of Pool, Territet, Switzerland) a book entitled, "Film Problems of Soviet Russia." The title is misleading, for the book is in reality a compendium of synopsis of Soviet Films, with some critical commentary, and data anent directorial personalities, concluding with a chapter, from whose heading the book takes its name, on the British embargo of Russian motion pictures The sole "problem" of the Russian film considered here is the non-cinematic problem of the British antagonism. Bryher's book is a plea for the recognition of the Russian cinema by England. She stresses not only the artistic merit of the Soviet kino, but urges that vital cinema upon the British intelligence as quite in accord ideologically with the social sentiments of the free Briton. This would seem to characterize Russian ideology as reformative in its outlook, a quite acceptable middleman's social philosophy. This sums up the Russian social attack as entirely harmless. If that were so, the Russian film, informed by this assertive ideology, would lack the essential vigor which is its physical health, But