We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE ACTUAL
more difficult to discern, to the German film. Of one thing I am confident, that the British film will never prosper, save as the child of the American cinema, until our producers bring themselves to recognise the value of experiment. Only on exceedingly rare occasions does a producing firm in this country countenance a new form of technique, a development of outlook, or anything that is alien to their conservative methods of working. British studios are rilled with persons of third-rate intelligence who are inclined to condemn anything that is beyond their range. Producers, directors, scenarists, cameramen, art-directors, and their confreres are afraid of any new process, in case their feeble mentality is not sufficiently clever to grasp its significance. We are slow to learn from other film-producing countries, but we are always quick to imitate. But the danger lies in the disastrous fact that we generally imitate without understanding, without probing to the base of the ideas that we adopt (as for example, the mixed technique of Asquith's Cottage on Dartmoor and the ill-designed decor of Elvey's High Treason). For this reason there has never been any school of avant-garde in Britain. I do not suggest that an advanced school of cinematic experimentalism is essential, but I believe that it would stimulate the directors of the commercial cinema. There is, moreover, no school of thought for the furtherance of filmic theory, such as is found in other countries. There is none of the enthusiasm for the progress of the cinema which is so prevalent in France, Germany, Soviet Russia, and even America.1
On occasions, our studios burst into a flare of latent modernism that is usually deplorable. In such a vein was
1 The first progressive movement distinguishable in British films was, in fact, just beginning as this book was written, with Grierson's Drifter's (1929) and the establishment of the small E.M.B. Film Unit. It was to take more than ten years for the influence of the British documentary film movement to make itself felt on feature production, and for the studio directors to discover a new realism. Cf. The Foreman Went to France, The Way Ahead, Nine Men, The Overlanders, The Stars Look Down, Millions Like Us, Waterloo Road, etc. The Ministry of Information Films Division, under Mr. Jack Beddington, must be given great credit for intermixing the documentary and studio film techniques, as well as interchanging their respective exponents.
314