The film answers back : an historical appreciation of the cinema (1939)

may be quite easily followed from the most prominent films it produces. In externals, in such things as lighting, photography and sets, the U.S. film was as clear, bright and sharply distinct as you would expect from a gaze which took in prairie vistas and exciting opportunities. America was immense and young. Europe was ancient and cramped. America drew men to the conquest of illimitable spaces where no hereditary principle had yet laid its shrivelled hand upon the soil. In Europe, on the other hand, ideas of property, especially landed property, drove men to dig cellars for the sake of economy. Hence the American cinema gave us the clear gaze of objectivity and the wide sweep of the Western prairie, whilst the European gave us introspection and cramped dark cellars. In the American film the photography brought out the characters in bold relief, there was nothing blurred, gloomy or expressionist until European influence began to make itself felt. The external characteristics of the American production, whether it was a super-film or a pot-boiler, conformed to these qualities of space, freshness and brilliance. It was not only native in its spaciousness, lighting and happy objectivity, but also in the feeling that there was no need to make a fuss about petty property, since the potentialities of the good life were there for all men to grasp. But most important of all, the American film was American in its tempo, its personnel and its philosophy; in short, it was imbued with all the youthful vigour of American civilization itself. When we come to examine the human, the philosophic aspects of the post-war American film, we cannot do better than take as one example the work of D. W. Griffith, to afford us a cameo of what it looked like in its entirety. 255