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THE FILM SINCE THEN
For as long as they could, however, the cineastes clung to their belief that it was the unseemly intrusion of the dialogue film into the aesthetic paradise of the silent experimental films which had brought film art, as they understood it, to a standstill. Bryher and Macpherson washed their hands of the cinema and dismantled Close Up in 1933, while the Film Society and its increasing imitators had a thin time finding enough new material of the right degree of purity to present to their members. Others among the film aesthetes re-thought the whole problem of masscommunications and came to a new channel for their energies. They discovered that while the ' art ' film might be commercially impossible when served up as entertainment, its methods might powerfully serve the ends of propaganda. In radical contrast to their previous pursuit of the ' pure ' film as an end in itself, they now began to speak of ' films which serve a purpose beyond themselves.'
Serving a purpose beyond just film-making has been the main intellectual approach to the cinema ever since. In America, the energies of serious men have been principally devoted to the attempt to turn the Hollywood cameras on to the problems of modern existence. In Britain, a different course was undertaken. Under the guidance of John Grierson, a devoted group of educators, journalists, scientists— and former film aesthetes (among them Rotha) — created what has come to be known throughout the world as ' the British documentary film movement \ How documentary tried to make itself economically independent of the cinemas, how it absorbed the technical methods of all kinds of film-making in all countries, how it identified itself with the aims of government and industry and all those agencies which do the world's work, how it became an instrument and a force which was later to be used as a major weapon of war : all this is the story of Rotha's third book, Documentary Film (1936).1 The fact that one of the principal exponents of film aesthetics in 1929 should have
1 See also The Arts Enquiry Report on The Factual Film (Oxford University Press, 1947).
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