Film Culture (1957)

that television ts having a very stimulating influence. A television show like Omnibus, which is not a straight dramatic or vaudeville show, but which is really the equivalent of feature material in the magazines, opens up areas which simply were not considered suitable as theatrical entertainment twenty-five or thirty years ago. But you must not blame the motion picture for the mental level of entertainment thirty years ago, because the theatre was exactly the same. It was just as remote from life as motion pictures. I don’t think that audiences today are as limited as they were in those days in the popular, melodramatic theatre. People were concerned with the very simple emotions of fear, of wishfulfillment, and certain emotions of a sentimental and facile kind. But today we are asking them to be interested in far more elaborate patterns of emotional participation than the early motion pictures did, or the early melodramatic theatre did. You mean the vicarious experience is becoming less escapist ? It is still escapist, but on a more complex level. I don’t think people are going to cease hoping for escape when they turn to entertainment, but I think that their escape is of a less obvious or less facile kind. What has television done to influence the business aspect of motion pictures? Well, its enormous economic influence is obvious and again the solution is not quite clear. The great problem is exhibition of motion pictures; it is whether in the future there will continue to be aggregations of persons watching films in a theatre (be it an outdoor, indoor, large or small theatre). Are the persons who are watching in their chairs at home in as good a position to view a motion picture or an entertainment on a sereen as the persons who have moved specifically into a theatre to see it? I don’t think that we've really found the answer to that yet. The people who own theatres obviously believe that people should congregate in large theatres and see movies. A great number of people, I think, believe that they can see the same movies with as much pleasure sitting at home. I don’t think that story has yet been told; I think the universal use of color on a television screen will have a big influence in determining that, and I don’t think we'll know the answer for another ten or twenty years. Do you feel, then, that it’s a matter of technical development in making the television screen as capable of technical achievement as the motion picture? It'll never be as large, and obviously, it shouldn't be. A drawing room is not as large as a theatre and, as a matter of fact, a great deal has changed in the art of the motion picture anyhow, because the moment you 6 start making Cinemascope and wide screen pictures you are no longer adhering to the aesthetic rules that govern the small screen—so that motion pictures have changed. Whether they will change eventually to be, all of them, suitable for exhibition on a drawing room screen, or whether they will continue to make special pictures for theatres which will attract a great many people to that form of special entertainment—we just don't know. I don’t think anybody knows—I think there is no question that the convenience of being able to sit at home and see something in a manner which is really not so different from what you sce in the theatre is a factor that can't be overlooked by anyone. A certain gregariousness of the audience that comes because it wants to leave home and come together still exists, and I think that will always exist. And there will be certain forms of motion picture entertainment which will always take advantage of this gregariousness. But the bulk of films can perfectly well be viewed at home on a home screen. Then the theory of producing films for television differently from the way they would be produced for the motion picture screen is fallacious? Yes, but the thing has already happened, unfortunately, on purely aesthetic grounds. The motion picture techniques employed in the large screen are no longer as purely cinematic as those that were employed in the old-time black and white, almost square, screen. But all theatrical entertainment has always been subject to pressures and compulsions that were not aesthetic. The Elizabethan theatre, which is the greatest single theatrical flowering, arrived as the result of all kinds of strange circumstances—the fact that plays were performed in yards certainly changed the whole manner of playwriting. Then, later, when the innyards and the public theatre were pulled down, the theatre became a court institution, and plays were written for a ballroom instead of being written for a 300-seat auditorium. But, as I say, the theatre has always been subject to these social and economic pressures. I think, actually, the same is true of motion pictures, of mass entertainment today. Nobody asked the film makers if they'd like to make films on long rectangles instead of squares. Nobody consulted anybody until the economic decision had been made that you must now go into Cinemascope. At that point the people who made the pictures were summoned and told that they had to make them that way—and the people adapted themselves and even discovered certain aesthetic novelties and certain assets in the new medium. And that will always be true. You feel that the slackening of what you call pure cinema in pictures made nowadays partly preconceived (Continued on page 20)