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there is the possibility of mutual understanding. I have often been asked why so much fuss should be made about the cinema, and the real reason may lie in the knowledge of, or rather, belief in the possibilities of understanding by means of films. The wide gulf between the cultured and the uncultured, the privileged person and the under-dog, the master and the servant, those who give orders and those who execute them, is due to the fact that the one does not understand the other; the one thinks in abstract, the other in plastic terms, and the latter fails to understand the former. If the abstract thinker could be brought to learn how to see things and to give plastic expression to what he has seen, and seen with his mind's eye, so as to make it clear to others, then mutual understanding would be greatly facilitated. If we knew how to see, we should know how to express ourselves. Here is an important part of the cinema's social mission.
If in addition the separate scenes or " shots " in a film can give pleasure, if we can add a little to our stock of knowledge, and learn something about ourselves and if all this can enlist the services of all who are keen on education, recreational cinematography has unexampled opportunities. Improving entertainment, spiritual care, juvenile welfare, the transmission of knowledge and education in art can all follow if only those in charge have faith in the cinema and are given the chance of utilising its possibilities.
To this end, however, we must have educationally valuable films. We have no use for brigands, drug-fiends with complicated emotions or artificial milieux with half-a-dozen servants, motor-cars and such-like. We want none but good films.
Also we ourselves need to understand cinematography . We must know how films are made, how out of an idea derived, perhaps, from some familiar literary source, there develops the picture-sequence — the new and to us technically unfamiliar art-product. It must be brought home to us by experience how the collective organised efforts of author, scene-painter and architect, actors and director, lighting expert and photographer — in fact, the combination of art and industry, create a product unlike anything we know in the way of artistic creation, differing from our conceptions of literature and drama and unfamiliar to those whose experience of cheap literary classics leads them to suppose that cinematography, too, is an affair of words. We need to be initiated into the secrets of the film as a pictorial composition. We do not want to make films ourselves; in our educational zeal we have no wish to press for reforms where reform has already been carried out.
If we can succeed in bringing the cinema to those circles for which we feel responsible and vice versa, we shall have started a movement which may end in the majority of film distributors' becoming the transmitting agents of those cultural values which it is in the hands of cinematography to bestow.