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190
Artist or Empiric?
By EDWARD CARRICK
Having been brought up as an artist and having lived all my early years among artists whose names are now among the mighty, I often wonder why more artists — real artists — are not employed to make films.
During the last 21 years that I have worked in films, I have heard much about our technical development and even more about the vast sums of money that are being poured into British films so that their quality will rank with the filmic product of other countries.
But all that we really need are IDEAS and ARTISTS to carry them out.
Great ideas cost no more than poor ones. It costs the publishers no more to print Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” than to print some doggerel verse about a contemporary hanging.
Shakespeare’s characters were as popular in Queen Elizabeth’s time as any characters written into modern drama — and yet the Elizabethan producers paid no more for these “classics” than we do for ordinary plays. Today things seem to have changed a bit. Is it that we are
constantly trying to develop our brains at the expense of our imaginations ?
As I see it, the knowledge of film technique will help you no further than a would-be-writer is helped by the knowledge of spelling and grammar (a most essential knowledge but to no advantage unless he is motivated by inspiration). Money and chromium dictaphones from American will not help.
It has been a custom for years to joke about artists and their
impracticability. The artists are all right : it is the empirics that are to blame. They masquerade as artists, but their “trial and error” methods are the very antithesis of the true artist’s 1 approach. As Leopold Eidlitz pointed ® out : “We cannot paint a picture and then consider what we shall call this picture ; painted as it were by accident, and yet claim for it the title of a work of art. To create a work of fine art, it is necesary that an idea should be represented in matter with I premeditation, and that the artist shall, I front the beginning of the work, and throughout every stage of it, be the master of the means and methods of accomplishing this object.”
It is only by trial and error that the ! phony artist can possibly succeed — but at whose expense ? I once worked | on a film with such an “artist” ... he shot 291,000 feet of film in order to I make a 3,000 foot picture !
Now that times have changed and money is not to be squandered and the future is to be borne in mind, I feel | that it is time we, in the film world, stopped to put our shop in order. It | is time we turned out these glib talkers, these “trial and error” boys and took English films seriously.
Let us have crazy comedies full of wit, social dramas keeping us awake to the realities of life, fantasies I transporting us into the unknown, heroics to revive us, but let them be I made by the best artists — artists who recognise that they have in charge a trust of enormous value. That upon I their studies, their devotion, their enthusiasm, must depend the thoughts I j and emotions of coming generations.
(“International Film Review”) 4)
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