FilmIndia (May-Dec 1938)

The Artistic Side of Motion Pictures By ALICE AMES WINTER. (The first series of articles dealing with films as the hand maiden of art. Subsequent subjects dealt with will be The Camera Angle, Time Lapses, Montage Symbolism and other techniques peculiar to the present day film.) From a trivial toy to an art in a single generation— this is the history of the motion picture. Its days as an art are of very recent date. This means that its best exponents have reached the point where they use it to give the rest of us not only a thrill but a wider understanding of men and nature and the things that count. Every art has its mechanical tools, its musical instruments, its marble, its paint, but the test comes in its ability to use these mechanical tools as servants of finer purposes. Pictures like The Good Earth, Zola, Romeo and Juliet, Captains Courageous, Dead End, Lost Horizon, and a constantly growing list of notable productions are the evidence of the artistry of the motion picture. The thing to observe is how pictures share certain methods of expression with other arts: How they have developed tools of their own, unlike any of the others. The realization that the cinema is a thing to itself, unlike any other art, began a generation ago when Griffith, in making The Birth of a Nation, brought home to the motion picture world the fact that it was using new tools in a new way. Much very stupid criticism comes from people who think of the picture as merely an illustrated book or play. As a matter of fact, whenever the picture maker uses a piece of literature he must translate it into cinema form, different from literature, as for example, Shelly's "Skylark" would be if you put it into music or expressed in painting. Says Rotha, English critic, "No medium of expression calls for such wide range of technical accomplishment as does the film. This dynamic mental pictorialism is, I claim, the most powerful form of expression available to-day to the creative artist." THE CINEMA AND THE STAGE. Both develop a story of character, destiny, struggle or whimsy by means of dramatic action. Both present living beings moving through circumstances and fate. The stage has the inestimable advantages of the presence of living actors with their personal appeal to the audience. Moreover, the temperament of the actor responds to audience appeal. He is as delicately strung as a violin. Use ARYAN FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY So, as it were, the audience shares in the performance, calling out from the actor the qualities that correspond with its own personality. The cinema actor has no inspiring audience. He must "register" emotions, from love to hate, out of his own inner impulsion. The stage is strictly limited by the small space framed by the proscenium arch, while the film story can range at will over tremendous space and time. Again, the spectator at a stage play sits in a fixed spot and sees everything from a fixed point of view. The film gives the onlooker a dozen points of view, here, there, near far — this side, that side. Because, of its limitations and the distance between actors and audience, the play must follow certain conventions. It is "theatrical" whereas the excellence of a picture requires it to be natural, intimate, free. The screen actor becomes bombastic the moment he uses stage technique. THE MOTION PICTURE AND THE NOVEL. Again there are points in common, as well as wide differences. Like the cinema, the novel is unlimited in time and space. It may leap where it will, when it will. Both claim the right to step inside the very minds of their characters and tell you how they