Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

FILM AND RADIO GUIDE WILLIAM LEWIN, EDITOR January, 1 946 Volume XII, No. 4 16MM EXCHANGE PRACTICES BY B. A. AUGHINBAUGH Director, Slide & Film Exchange, State Department of Education, Columbus, Ohio No. 20: What is This "Confusion in the English Field ? Translation is changing from one language to another layiguage. This consists of alterations in spellings, syntax, idioms. Both the original and the translation demand essentially that nouns function through verbs. The whole set-up is completely symbolic, employing sound symbols. Ninety percent of the nouns represent visual concepts either directly or abstractly; ten percent will represent all the other sensory concepts, directly or abstractly. But changing a book into a motion picture is no mere translation. This is a change in which natural forms replace the nouns, and some form of action, state, or condition replaces the verbs. The adjectives become colors, shapes, et cetera ; the adverbs become positions, or degrees of size, distance, and time. The alteration is as complete as the metamorphosis which changes a caterpillar into a butterfly. This change is, of course, a reversal of the mental activity which made a living or a pictorial caterpillar into the word-symbol "caterpillar.” However, the one who undertakes the alteration from words to reality faces a different task, and in many ways a more exacting task, than the one who works only with words. The one who works with lan B. A. Aughinbaugh guage broadly sketches his wordscenes and characters, but he that works with motion pictures works with very specific entities. An author need not be very precise, since he knows that his words will serve only as suggestions to his readers. But the worker in cinematics can trust to no such “suggestions” because acts must be precise and, as Hamlet says, an act “overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve ; the censure of which one must o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.” A script can hide a multitude of creatures under the words, “a fight between prehistoric creatures,” but when a picture director not so long ago “metamorphosed” such a fight into a death-battle between a paleozoic creature and a mesozoic one, the protests of one spectator, who knew better, caused the producer to recall the picture and remake the scene at a cost of many thousands of dollars. Picture producers can afford to have their patrons laugh with them but not at them ! The writer in the course of his work has discussed the subject of pictures for the English field with many competent teachers. He has found that it is the situations just set forth which form the basis of criticisms. Teachers fail to realize that there is no sure key by which one person may unlock the store of pictorial images that are contained in another person’s mind. Certainly words provide no such key. But teachers do not realize this until they see, via the 'motion picture, that their conceptions and some other person’s conceptions (the picture director’s, for example) may differ very widely. There are circumstances which aggravate this situation. The legitimate theatre has a background outdating the book. It is an aristocrat. Its great actors and actresses are legends. But the cinema crept into being through a very lowly, if not actually a bawdy, background. The antics of some cinema actors and actresses have not helped to elevate it. There