The film and the public (1955)

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THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC throughout the world because of her need to fight with all the weapons at her command the inroads that television has made since the war upon the patronage of her mass public? First of all, there are three influences which are continuously at work in the cinema the economic, the inventive, and the artistic and they are mostly out of gear with each other. From the inventor's point of view sound should have been synchronized with the film from the beginning, and films should have been coloured from the earliest period. Both Lumiere and Friese-Greene were interested in developing stereoscopic films. As for wide-screen, the equivalent of Cinemascope to-day, this was, as I have said, publicly demonstrated by Henri Chretien twenty-five years ago, while, as we have seen, Abel Gance used a triple screen with three projectors running simultaneously for his film Napoleon, which was first shown in France in 1925, and so demonstrated the equivalent of Cinerama to-day, though without its special effect of engulfing the audience. The story of the film as far as the inventors are concerned is a totally different one from that of the commercial cinema as it has been known to the public. The artist, on the other hand, has normally taken the cinema as he has found it and moulded it to his purpose. Griffith changed the shape of the picture for certain dramatic effects by masking off the sides for example, in Intolerance he used a tall, narrow picture in the centre of the screen to emphasize the height of the walls of Babylon from which the dead and wounded fell to the ground far below. Eisenstein, too, wrote in favour of a square screen, saying that the film-maker could create a picture any shape he liked within the square. After the violent protests made on all sides about the horrors of sound in contrast to the beauties of the silent picture, distinguished film-makers like Clair and Hitchcock and Pabst and Milestone set about developing the true art of the sound film. These men and their successors will in all probability take over either the stereoscopic or the wide-screen films (or both of them merged 98