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FOCUS
A FILM ♦ REVIEW
Organ of the Catholic Film Institute
Vol. V
SEPTEMBER 1952
No. 9
Some Weaknesses of the Cinema
Today, most people accept film as an art and not merely as an industry. But, because film is both art and industry there is — human nature being what it is — always the danger of it becoming a powerful industry and a pusillanimous art. One of the greatest weaknesses of the contemporary cinema is that it puts the lesser before the greater, the effect before the cause, the corpus before the anima. It was the art of film which caused and created the film industry; nevertheless the cinema industry tends to dominate the intelligence and the will of film artists. This is inverting the right order of things.
Because film is a community art, a democratic art, it will never be able to indulge in the luxury of art for art’s sake. Unlike the poet, the painter and the sculptor, the film artist will never be able to create alone and for his own enjoyment. Film will always be dependent upon exhibitors, distributors, projectionists and so on; but it should not be subject to them. The life is more than the raiment !
Another weakness of the cinema is that it confuses sentimentality with sentiment. A work of art is a creation of heart and head. It is the fusion of the female element of charm and the male element of strength. All head and no heart produces a work that lacks charm and looks clumsy. All heart and no head produces a work which lacks strength and looks unreal.
Too much sugar in a cup of tea will destroy the quality of tea and something that was meant to be refreshing becomes revolting. The quality of many films is destroyed by too much sweetness, by sentimentality which is an unrecognised form of insincerity. There is too much sentiment in the film Room For One More. Less heart and more head might have put this film in the same class as Mandy, which is a good example of a film which has the right balance of thought and feeling.
Other weaknesses of the cinema are the tendency to turn love into lust, to make the abnormal ways of life appear as the normal ways and to glorify toughness in a way that destroys good manners and Christian morals.
Editor.