Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

50 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 6 derstanding, it is not yet apparent to teachers (and here English teachers have been particularly at fault) that the art of the motion picture is an independent, almost incredibly vital, art and, more specifically, that motion-picture art is not the art of literature, even though it may, as language art, have many close correlations with literature. Literature itself is, of course, a congeries of somewhat loosely related arts, all of which employ words as their primary medium but not all of them as their sole medium. It is foolish to expect a drama or a ballad to conform to the conventions and techniques of a novel. Even such intimately related arts as the novel and the short story cannot be subjected to the same criteria, and the massive epics of the Western world are art products quite distinct from the seventeen-,syllable hokkus of the Japanese. English teachers have, nevertheless, often insisted on fittingmotion pictures into the Procrustean standards of some form of literature. They have failed to realize that nowhere in the history of man has there existed an art that called for the combination of so many skills as is the case with the motion picture. It makes demands on astonishinly varied talents and seeks to merge many mechanical and human activities into a unit of art. Often, to be sure, this orchestration of talents produces a discord rather than a harmony ; only occasionally does it produce a masterpiece. But what we need to keep in mind constantly and steadfastly is that we do not judge the success or failure of a particular motion picture by the degree to which it reproduces the qualities of a fine novel or a beautiful poem or even a stirring play. This misunderstanding appears most frequently when a notable novel or biography, the lineaments of which have become familiar in our minds from enjoyable reading, is brought to the screen in a motion-picture version. The expectation of many admirers of the original is that its details will be faithfully reproduced in the movie. But this is a futile and foolish expectation. All that can be expected is that the movie version will show fidelity not to the cletaih but to the spirit of the original and that the producer will not make unnecessary and wanton changes in his reproduction of a classic. I regret to say that this reasonable expectation is often disappointed and that some movie versions of the classics keep little but the titles of the original. Yet we must continue to be reasonable, and there is a salutary measure those of us can take who tend to become impatient with Hollywood’s drastic alterations. All we need do is turn to that prototype of Hollywood, Elizabethan London’s Bankside, and to those forerunners of the Hollywood ere w, the rowdy, bawdy, boisterous, ruthless Elizabethan dramatists, and note what they did to the classics and to the best-sellers of their time. They were neither reverent nor scrupulous : their sole purpose was to produce plays that would satisfy to a reasonable extent their artistic conscience and also (and this was really important) satisfy the box office. The result, strangely and paradoxically, was a series of literary masterpieces, concerning which we usually remember only the fact that they were written as plays ; we forget that they were often stage versions of classics. 3. I should like to discuss here the way in which our undue literary and classroom seriousness generally deludes us into overlooking the excellent comedy of the screen, so that we rarely think it worthwhile in English classrooms to analyze the masterly comedic effects of a writer a n d producer like Preston Sturges or to discuss the remarkable histrionic skill of a great clown like Danny Kaye. I should also like to mention in passing the potent and favorable effect which the movies can have on reading, and on which some alert and intelligent publishers like Grosset and Dunlap have capitalized by synchronizing the publication of film stories with the appearance of the movies that tell the same stories. I shall go on to the third deficiency which vitiates the use of movies in the classroom, namely, the startling fact that no major textbooks have as yet been devised in which direct, extended, unremitting, and emphatic employment is made of sound-film material as an integral, not an incidental or supplementary, part of instruction. Such textbooks are certain to appear, perhaps in the near future. But failure to make it clear to potential producers of such textbooks that efficient, term-long combinations of verbal text and sound film will be welcomed by us is a deplorable indication of our lethargy and insensitivity. Nor have we developed adequate pedagogic techniques for handling such material, although there have been some sound and valuable discussions of the subject. I may particularly mention the volume called F o c u s on Learning: Motion Pictures in the School, written after much research by Charles F. Hoban, Jr., and published by the American Council on Education. Many teachers still do not realize that,