Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

263 German priest, Johannes Kepler, and a Jesuit colleague, Christopher Schiemer. But the principle of projection was discovered by the real father (or, at any rate, grandfather) of the cinema, a German priest named Kircher, who put on a “premiere” for high ecclesiastics in Rome just over three centuries ago to demonstrate his “magic lantern”. The search for movement in pictures was given great impetus by two French priests, Abb6 Nollet and Abbe Guyot, while their discoveries were commercialised, often unscrupulously, by laymen. Nevertheless, it was two laymen, Plateau, a Belgian scientist, and Roget, author of the famous Thesaurus, who first put motion into pictures. The former, indeed, was amongst the martyrs of science, for he sacrificed his own eyesight that future generations might see pictures in motion. It remained for an Austrian, Baron General Franz von Uchatius, to combine the Kircher projector with the Plateau principles of motion in pictures, and the cinema was born. Mr. Quigley’s lucid description of the apparatus and its use in all these developments makes absorbing reading. From Austria the ball passes again to France and also to England with the epoch making discovery of photography by Daguerre and Talbot, but immediately afterwards the United States entered the field with the system of printing photographs on glass slides perfected by the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia. Backwards and forwards between the Old World and the New passed the ball of development in motion pictures, until Marcy of France and Edison and Eastman of the United States, the theorist and the practitioners, combined to produce the prototype of all film movie projectors. From that time it was merely a question of overcoming practical difficulties and perfecting apparatus. Mr. Quigley follows the efforts of the pioneers in various countries with fascinating assiduity until Edison perfects his Vitascope in 1895, and the magic shadows at last reach the cinema screen. “And thus the motion picture, like many another achievement of the human heart and hand and mind, has come down to us as the result of incalculable effort on the part of many ... It is the creation of men of many centuries and many nations and from these diversities of time and persons it has gained its amazing power, its universal appeal. ”2 We have given only the most sketchy precis of this learned and fascinating book, but perhaps enough to indicate both its interest and its importance. Notwithstanding the technical perfection attained in the apparatus, the cinema has not yet justified the devotion and labours of its pioneers through the centuries. Their aim was, as we have said, to reproduce the functions of the human eye and to extend their scope in an almost unlimited degree. But in the perfecting of this production one thing tends to be forgotten ; the human eye is the organ of the human intelligence. It looks out upon a world of reality and is made to see the goodness and truth that lie in beauty. That is what is to such a large extent lacking in the modern cinema; but it is something that the cinema is capable of, and worthy of ; and Martin Quigley’s book is peculiarly valuable in illuminating the mind to a better appreciation of both the capability and the worth of these magic shadows. 2 “Magic Shadows”; p. 161. FOCUS INDEX A complete index of FOCUS: A Film Review, Vols. I and II, is now available. Copies may be obtained from the Manager, Blue Cottage, Sumner Place Mews, London, S.W.7, on receipt of stamps to the value of ljd. J