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 THEORETICAL
experience, also, is necessarily restricted and seldom put on record. El Greco's Agony in the Garden may be consulted at almost any time with convenience, but in the case of a film it is only possible to rely on memory for reference, a precarious method of analysis.1
Furthermore, even to see a film is not necessarily to observe all its values, as Mr. Eric Elliott has remarked.2 Scientific tests have shown that only sixty per cent, of a film is seen by an observer. What then of the remaining forty per cent. ? The difficulty has, of course, been intensified by the introduction of the synchronised dialogue film and its accompanying sound. The loss to the visual image whilst the audience is trying to understand the dialogue must be great. It follows naturally, as in criticism of painting and music, that the better the dramatic construction of a film the more difficult it becomes to analyse that construction. The critic himself is inclined to fall under the power of the story, and another and more impartial viewing is necessary in order to appraise the numerous technical values.
A tremendous handicap is also experienced in illustrating filmic argument. It is possible only to suggest the different methods of film technique, of montage and of continuity, by giving examples that have been actually observed, taken from productions of all dates. In some cases the quoted instances may have been seen by others, but when the total
1 Since the above was written, there have been set up several museums and film archives, most important of which are the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, the Cinematheque Francaise, Paris, the National Film Library, London, and the Czechoslovak Film Archive, Prague. In 1938, these bodies met and set up the International Federation of Film Archives. The Film Library in New York has done especially fine work, not only in preserving and making available for study important films of all countries, but in compiling programme notes, issuing pamphlets, holding special exhibitions and collecting probably the best library of books and other printed matter about the film in the world. Its Curator, Miss Iris Barry, is a distinguished film historian and critic of many years' experience, and the excellence of the Film Library is mainly a result of her devotion to the cinema.
2 Vide, The Anatomy of the Motion Picture, by Eric Elliott (Pool, 1928).
330