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PREFACE
of all kinds, cultural and scientific bodies, and the many other specialised groups that are using films more and more as part of their activities. The aim should be to build up each cinema into a kind of film centre, with a grip on every cultural activity of the medium including the housing of sub-standard libraries of educational films.
Thus the public would be able to absorb gradually a higher quality of entertainment than the ordinary commercial cinema provides, while leaving the latter free to cater to the mass-appeal. This proposal it is contended would cause the Trade to raise less objection to Government action than any proposals involving nationalisation or control over screen-time.
Some such project as this is the only solution I can see to curing a situation that leaves one twentieth of the filmgoing public frustrated and unsatisfied, and some of the best elements in film production impotent and unfulfilled.1 Public taste in Britain in the past ten years has matured and is being met in the fields of art, music and literature. The same thing is happening in the cinema, and there is little the exhibitors and renters societies can do to prevent
it.
*
Despite the inevitable process of commercialising the making of motion pictures by their manufacturing studios and the resultant organisation of technicians and other kinds of labour employed in production, the past eighteen years have seen certain notable developments in creative film-making which Mr. Griffith ably deals with later in this book. They have also been the subject of several considered works published since 1930, notably Mr. Lewis Jacobs' Rise of the American Film and Miss Iris Barry's translation of the French History of Motion Pictures by Bardeche and Brasillach. There are one or two trends of a general nature, however, upon which I feel impelled to comment.
1 This proposal was contained in a private memorandum submitted to the President of the Board of Trade, December 12, 1945,
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