International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1931)

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— 1094 — and that the duty of the latter is simply to join the dream to the reality. When penetrated with the profound sense of the Ginema, they will become the public of to morrow. The majority of the artistic dramas of today will soon cease to be what they are, sometimes well conceived but often incomplete. They will be enlarged. And this is why the Cinema, educational or artistic, is really a single body only with different means of expression and different applications. The Cinema considered from the artistic angle has not followed in its own evolution the precious indications to be found within its own technique. It has confined itself arbitrarily to telling moral tales and has not thought it worth while to study a new dramatic technique based upon those fundamentals of which I have tried to give you some idea. The Cinema is a teacher, it is also and above all an art, a new form of expression, but unfortunately in cinematic art, the instrument has preceded the thought. The first artists of the screen were ignorant of the rich field of new expression which the invention of the Lumiere brothers opened up to them and they allowed other arts to stifle that which was new born. Students, wishing only to study life, found, I think, the true sense of the Cinema in searching beyond man in the very heart of life itself. The Cinema is concerned with the dramas great and small throughout the whole of nature. The students alone have discovered this. Truth and subtlety, knowledge of the psychologically abstract and of the invisible, these are the contributions of the Cinema in the intellectual domain. Building from an entirely scientific and material base, we can already propound the theories of a new art, an art of visual and audible ideas, rooted in nature, in truth, in logic, in the knowledge of the invisible and in the understanding of the abstract. In the moral domain the Cinema has transformed us almost without our knowing it. In times past each people was encircled in its particular customs and thought itself the centre of the world. Now that the life of other peoples is made clear in its appealing movement still breathing warmly of its customs and habits, without transposition, we begin to understand that even if it is always foreign to us in its details, in its great and effective lines it is the same as our own. Thus the Cinema leeds us to understand the entire world and to the inevitable conclusion that above all questions of race and country there is humanity and that in humanity there are things infinitely small and infinitely great. From a knowledge of the entire world can develop fraternity. The films of each country bear marks of their origin; in particular ways they remain national, but above local customs, spiritual and social internationalism may appear. The Cinema is a marvellous international language and for that very reason it creates affection and understanding between