Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

324 FOCUS FILM COURSE By ANDREW BUCHANAN No. 10-SUBJECT-MATTER Has it ever occurred to you that film depends almost entirely on other media for its subject-matter ? Most commercially successful productions have been adapted from novels or plays; only a comparative few are original screen stories. Does this matter ? From some points of view, not at all ; from others, it matters a great deal. Consider, for instance, a successful film such as The Heiress. Who is bothering because it began life as a story written by Henry James before cinemas existed? Who was Henry James, anyway ? asks the young filmgoer. Then the story was turned into a play, and now it is a film ! Thjs habit of borrowing and adapting material provides critics with lots of opportunities to draw comparisons between stage and screen characters which are of no interest to the average film fan, who is seldom a theatre-goer and rarely a reader. Either a film is good, or bad. Where its story originated just doesn’t matter. That is the attitude of the least critical film goer. Others are drawn to adaptations of stage successes and/or best-selling novels because their titles are so familiar. Often, the name of a book, play, or author is of more value to producers than subject-matter. This has always been so. In silent film days, Oscar Wilde’s plays were filmed and the action was interrupted every few minutes by captions splashing his epigrams all over the screen. The interesting point is that in the silent era people thought film had reached its ultimate form. Then talking pictures appeared, upset everyone’s calculations, and once again film was considered to have reached its finest and final shape. How could there possibly be another kind of film, people ' say, for few' bother to look ahead, being content w’ith the shape of films today. And yet, behind the scenes, small groups are forever experimenting on new approaches to production — seeking wrays and means to make it unnecessary for this wonderful visual art to be so dependent not only upon novels and plays, but upon the spoken word. Here is the reason. The p.lay depends on human speech, the novel on the written word, and film, when permitted to flow’er to its fullest extent, upon picture language. When dialogue is the main form of narration on the screen, as it is today, the spoken word restricts the visual flow. Nor is this overcome by the numerous skilful ruses adopted to keep visuals on the move whilst dialogue has its say. The fundamental point is that in true motion picture construction, visuals should supersede w'ords as the form of narration, and although this means in certain ways employing silent film technique, it also means employing sound in new ways. The film of the future will almost certainly be as different to the talking film of today as is the latter from the silent film of yesterday. People are at work on a formula for wedding visuals to illustrative music and natural sound, with a minimum of human speech — a form of story-telling that would be universally understood. We need to remember that at the peak of silent film production, film was becoming the greatest universal medium ever known, needing no translation. The introduction of speech confined the circulation of films to those countries speaking the tongues in which they were made. There are hundreds of different words in as many tongues for Man, Dog, Tree, but pictures of a Man, a Dog, or a Tree are immediately recognised by all, or nearly all peoples. Have you not felt how inadequate is the spoken word when watching a film in a language you do not speak — characters chattering