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.
A FILM REVIEW
FOCUS :
(Incorporating " Catholic Film News” )
ORGAN OF THE CATHOLIC FILM SOCIETY
Vol. I
JULY, 1948
No. 7
EDITORIAL
SADLY OR SERIOUSLY?
IT is said, sometimes, that Englishmen take their pleasures sadly. I do not think this is true; but I do think that to avoid taking pleasures sadly we should take them seriously. Seriously in the sense that we should understand what we are doing. Who will deny that we get more fun when playing football, tennis and cricket if we know the finer points? Who will deny that we get more enjoyment from films if we become students of the Art of Film?
But is Film an Art?
Recently I have given some talks on Films to different Catholic organisations. (I have come to the conclusion that there is a desire among many Catholics to take their films seriously) ; during these talks, sooner or later, cropped up the hoary question: "Is Film an
Art?”. ‘‘How,’’ says someone, "can the film which merely records photographically something which already exists outside itself but does not create, be called an art? . . . It is too mechanical to be considered an art form.”
Films offer the widest scope to creative artists. When you come to think of it, the Art of Film is akin to the art of poetry. What the poet does with words, (he creates order, design and harmony, which is to say, he puts mind into his work) , the film director does with a series of photographs. When you get a director, a script-writer and an editor who are poets, you get a work of art.
In his book "The Film as an Art” which I recommend, Ernest Lindgren quotes Pudovkin: "To the film director each shot of the finished film subserves the same purpose as the word to the poet
. . . Editing is the basic creative force, by power of which the soulless photographs (the separate shots) are engineered into living, cinematographic form . . . editing is the creative force of filmic reality, and . . . nature provides only the raw material with which it works. That precisely is the relationship between reality and the film.”
He also quotes Eisenstein who says: "The basic fact was true, and remains true to this day, that the juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus another shot — as it does a creation.” Good poems are good pictures. Good films are good moving pictures.
Towards the end of his chapter on The Art of The Film, Ernest Lindgren quotes Pudovkin again: "I am sure that sound film is potentially the art of the future . . . it is a synthesis of each and every element — the oral, the visual, the philosophical: it is our opportunity to translate the world in all its lines and shadows into a new art form that has succeeded and will supercede all the older arts, for it is the supreme medium in which we can express today and tomorrow.
In his Encyclical "Vigilanti Cura” Pope Pius XI takes for granted that film is an art. The Catholic International Film Congress held at Brussels last summer opened in the Academy of Arts and closed with solemn High Mass, in the principal church of the city.
I thought this was . a nice piece of symbolism. It proves that Rome takes the cinema seriously. It reminds us that films can serve art and religion.