Film Culture (1957)

JEROME HILL: HANDMADE AND FACTORY-MADE FILMS Early in the evolution of the cinema it was shown that, with imaginative cutting, the strips of film—those little fragments of reality recorded by the dispassionate eye of the lens—could be so arranged that a whole new medium of expression was open to the creative artist. Later, when sound was added to film, bringing with it still another dimension, and then color, it seemed there was almost no limit to what this art could do—the only truly new art to develop since the industrial revolution and the advent of the Age of Science. And yet, for a variety of reasons most of which, I suppose, could be defended, only occasionally do we see truly cinematic films, acclaimed by critics and public alike. Those that we do see, have in common one fact: they are largely the work of one man. They are what I would call “handmade,” as opposed to ‘‘factory-made,” films. When in the early thirties I began experimenting with the first model of the Eastman Kodak Special, a 16mm motion picture camera with variable speeds and shutters and a battery of lenses, it was in the hope that I could eventually produce such “handmade” films, exercising the same centralized control at every step of the process, to which I had become accustomed as a painter working with colors and brushes and canvas. I was living in France at the time and, although the example of Robert Flaherty was my central inspiration, the avantgarde films being made at the time in Europe seemed to me to point to possibilities that had not yet been exploited in motion pictures of a more popular kind. To be independent of studios and actors I chose “ready-made” subjects that were filmically interesting in themselves, actions performed by people unself-con 10 MAKING A DOCUMENTARY — sciously. I made a documentary (later reshot in America with Ctto Lang and released by Warner Brothers) in collaboration with Hannes Schneider, the renowned Austrian authority on skiing, to elucidate the dynamics of his teaching methods. The tiny skier, moving against the blank page of the snow field, according to then quite new kinetic principles, left behind him a wondrous arabesque that illustrated the new truths that Schneider had been trying for so long to put into words. My next film was on the blind. It was made in Morristown under the strict supervision of the Seeing Eye people. Here I tried to make the most of the hidden drama in the meeting of the highly-trained dog with the helpless man to whom it is destined to devote its life. In this instance, nothing could be staged. The first take always had to be “it’—there was no such thing as persuading the dog to redo a scene that hadn’t come off... GRANDMA MOSES Through my experiences in the making of training films during the war, I learned the severe limits of the film as a teaching device, the relative importance of the eye and the ear in the registering of impressions, and the quite special faculty of synthesizing ideas that belongs so emphatically to the cinema. Just after the war, it was my good fortune to meet Erica Anderson, a Viennese photographer living in New York, who had made several art films. When I saw the uncut material that she had taken of Grandma Moses, I felt that she and I would make an excellent team. My own interest in motion picture work had veered away from camera work to the functions of editor, director and script writer—those interdependent activities that are so badly named and which are rounded up in the French word réalisateur. Erica has a fine eye for detail, a flair for the whimsical, and a highly developed ALBERT SCHWEITZER.