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ART OR BUSINESS 251
Latterly the film was the obvious art to encourage; it was new and needed encouragement. But the critics, professional and otherwise, deliberately ran it down, declared it had no future, laughed at it, pronounced that there could be no art in mere photography, and forgot the artistic possibilities of dramatic composition, architecture, grouping, acting, design of form and line, without which no good film today is complete. The result was that they frightened the potential patron away from it.
But the business men, who invariably think more rapidly and more clearly than the critic, refused to be put off the film, and therefore it slid quickly out of the realm of art and became a matter of big business. The men of money said: " Let us make entertainment out of this new-found power, if the critics declare it is hopeless as art." Can anyone blame them ? I don't. I say, more power to their elbow, because, at any rate, they saw something, even if it was only business, in the film. Every one of the big men in the film-business today started life in penurious circumstances : one was a trouser-presser, another kept a second-hand clothes shop, another was a clerk, a fourth was a bandsman. None of them secured any patronage, because the film possessed artistic possibilities. They were given money, because other men saw a chance of obtaining good financial returns on it.
Today, all the " advanced drama " people flock round the film as a medium of tremendous possibilities. They like to be seen at the Film Society's precious efforts or the Film Guild's shows in New York. The highest in the land, leaders of literature, politics, and art, slip into the cinemas now and again to see this and that picture. But I am afraid now that they are too late. They are hangers-on, not pioneers. Big business rules