FilmIndia (1940)

For Our Technicians KEEP AWAY FROM US DEBUNKING SOME POPULAR NOTIONS By The Editor. BULLETIN OF THE ASSOCIATION OF CINE-TECHNICIANS There must be thousands of you among the motion picture audiences of this country that derive pleasure (and information) from the pages of this publication, but it is just possible that only one of you stops for a moment at this particular page to see what the poor technician has to say. To such a one, as representative of the millions that constitute the motion picture audience, we make this strange request to-day. We are grateful to you for giving us our livelihood but if you value this gift as well as your own entertainment always keep away from us, giving us the widest berth that you can think of. Never forget that we are show-people and that a screen, may be of silver but impenetrable, nevertheless, separates your lives and ours. Do not confuse us with our predecesors of entertainment, something more of that personal touch which we can never hope to give except at grave risk to the very foundations of the frail structure of cinematic entertainment. Our very seclusion and our so called secrets of the trade, are your guarantees for wholesome entertainment. Why then seek to disillusion yourself by prying into our secrets and into our lives, for we confess, we cannot stand a closer scrutiny but through the lenses of our own cameras and our own microphones. And why indeed should we submit to this closer scrutiny for our art lies not in the mere presentations of these portrayals of a group of players but in the manner of these presentations, by another group of trained craftsmen combining the utmost in engineering skill, artistry and in salesmanship. If we tell you to-day a few of our secrets it is because we feel it is also good for the industry that you realise and appreciate the efforts of these silent workers behind the screen FAR FROM REALITY! We will therefore begin by saying that the motion picture that you see to-day is no mere reproduction of a successful stage play, nor is it a record of every day happenings, photographed and presented for your enjoyment. It is a form of entertainment which combines the art of the story-writer, and the skill of the scenarist, a certain degree of histrionic ability of a group of players, and finally the artistry and skill of another group of highly trained workers known as the technicians. It is of the work of these latter that we wish to speak about. In a lot of newspaper superlatives advertising "screen epics' of to-day you are sure to have come across this one. "Filmed in the actual exteriors where the Saint lived and died." Well, let us assure you it is all so much jargon, meaning nothing, for no sensible producer these days would be foolish enough to transport a unit of perhaps over a hundred workers over a distance of hundreds of miles, just for a couple of shots, everything, even to the minutest detail can be duplicated by the skill of the film architect within the confines of the studio itself. Does this not take a little away from your enthusiasm? But we warned you. Most of Jehangir's "palaces" in Pukar were never designed and constructed by the Royal Architect, nor was Saint Tulsidas :n the. film of the same name ever within a thousand miles of the holy city of Benares. It was a group of technicians called set artists and designers that re-created this ancient glory for your enjoyment. And they never used stone or plaster, in fact nothing harder than ply-wood ppd papier-mache, It is sometimes even possible that the entire palace which you may have admired was never constructed even of this wood and papier-mache. Only that bit in which the players moved was erected and the rest put in by the combined skill and craftsmanship of the screen painter and the process artist. Truly a magnificent achievement, yet when told to you like this, it is but a fake. PAPER FLOWERS. Have you ever cared to scrutinise a little more closely the flowers presented by some lovesick and misguided film hero to his heroine. They are all paper and cloth, if you will believe, me. We found that treated properly, these paper and cloth flowers, photograph so much better than the real ones. When you see some one enjoying a film feast do not envy him, for possibly only the bit that he is actually eating may be real, the rest may be again mere wood and plaster. Even the steam you see rising out of a hot cup of tea may be just chemical steam and the tea itself a decoction unfit for human consumption. And — this is perhaps the unkindest cut of all — the wine we serve is nothing stronger than just Vimto. if it has to be drunk and coloured water if it has to be splashed about. And what of the players themselves. Most of our screen heroines, playing the roles of demure little girls in their teens, are past the ripe old age of thirty, have possibly a happy family of children at home and lead an otherwise entirely normal life, exactly the reverse of what we would expect the characters they are depicting, to be. HOW FLAT NOSES ARE CURED! Here we have the skill of another technician contributing his mite towards the strangest transformation of them all. He is the make-up artist. Deftly he shades a rather too prominent cheek-bone here, possibly brings out a slightly flat nose there, lines the eyes up a little, pencils the eyebrow, and paints that exasperating little arch, the cupid's bow so beloved of the screen struck Romeo, and there you have a girl who a moment before would have had difficulty in passing the crowd, now transformed into a thing of 59