International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1930)

372 — each of the children that have been the objects of the examination. b) The possibility of analyzing for an unlimited period, one or more of the pictures following, picture by picture, the results of the reactions, and of tracing the beginning of a reaction and its immediate precedents, r) The possibility of taking several times and with different persons, the same subject at different stages. d) The absolute and irreplaceable value of the cinema for demonstrations of psychological character during courses of lessons or lectures. Art. — In an article published in a pamphlet of the VOKS (Society for Cultural Relations between the Soviets and Foreign Countries) S. Tretjakoff says that the cinema, like its sisters, music and literature, represents an act of the greatest mercy of fate towards the human puppet. « I fear » he writes « that if only for one week one were to close all the theaters, suppress all the papers and novels, smash violins and saxophones^ world revolution would break out among all those who would have no further possibilities of dreaming ». « The cinema knows how to calm. It may be likened to a form of nourishment administered to humanity while rocking it. It forms a nourishment necessary for all those who prefer not to rouse the masses from their rosy dreams, but it is always a mental food that is not at the command of everybody and acts purely according to the laws of the greatest human mercy ». Art is congenital to the cinema. It is impossible to conceive of a film, the basic conception of which is not art. If this were not so we should have cold, insipid, lifeless pictures, because the life and ultimate expression of the film are given to it by the cineast, who wishes to project into the ribbon his own soul and his own thought . Art is the natural element of the film. But, on the other hand, the film in its turn can give life to art. Recently, Gaston Paulain in Comoedia, quoting the case of an autodidactic who, taking up the ancient tradition, sculped straight on to wood and stone, without the aid of models or casts, getting his inspiration from his imagination, enamoured of beauty and in perpetual contemplation of the beauty of its constructive elements, expressed the wish that the film, and more especially the stereoscopic film of tomorrow, could offer a method of instruction, giving the necessary emphasis of the object to art students, the teachings of the great masters and the means by which they achieved their masterpieces. And it is right that one art should assist and support another. The cinema is a painting of living objects like photography, only superior because it can paint them in movement. And for this reason it needs music more than words because music is the form of art closest to painting. As art, the film exercises a vast influence on the life of peoples. It would be sufficient to reflect how many stylisations of the the decorative and architectural arts had their beginnings in the cinem.a. It suffices to remember that to remote provincial centers, to the country, where life is simple, the film carries its creations, which, although they may be phantasies, respond by reason of their modem technic, to artistic creations. It would again be sufficient to reflect that as, and because it is a creator of art, the film is the destroyer of the personal element, of that individualism which at one time was the rage, but which is now a remembrance of the future. The modern screen actor will prepare himself to give a veristic interpretation of the scene he is to film, which is natural and which, like all natural and simple things, is art, not artefice. In another article of this Review a brief examination is made of the value of the cinema as an element of art, compared to other representative and emotive elements, which are representative in proportion to their emotional possibilities of life. It is therefore sufficient to show here how, according to the most recent information received at the Rome Institute, the cinema presents itself to the world not only in its experimental and documentary form., but in a higher and more human aspect which is derived from its artistic form and inspiring ideas. At the University des Annales, Abel Gance gave a lecture on « The Cinema of Tomor