Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1944)

244 JUNE 1944 Serious people are generally stubborn people. The teachers, scientists, doctors and business men, finding Hollywood unsympathetic or evasive, turned to on their own and set to work with 16mm. and 8mm. movies. They knew what they wanted from this convenient and highly serviceable new medium, and they experimented as actively, if not so blithely, as had the amateurs who crowded Art on Hollywood. They came to the Amateur Cinema League with their problems, patient but determined. The men and women who made this new type of film were, for the most part, amateurs whose hobby had become a profession. The present war has changed the movie picture very radically. The practical film contingent has come into its own definitely. Hollywood has made a fine contribution to the war effort with its entertainment and its theatrical propaganda, but the really significant thing that has happened in films has been the use by government of the very practical kind of movies that Hollywood and the movie art critics considered unimportant before the war. It is quite probable that, if statistics were available, we should discover that 16mm. and 8mm. projections outnumber those of theatrical width film and that more people see them. The training films of the armed services and of other governmental units are the very type of movie product that the practical filmers have been asking for and making for some time. Practical films have become a part of the "film business," even if they are not a part of the "entertainment business." Whoever writes about the movies today must take them into his consideration. Any discussion of the art of the film that is limited to theatrical movies will be as incomplete as a treatise on literature that deals only with the drama. Again saying it inelegantly, the art of the motion picture has flown the Hollywood coop. Film critics of the Nineteen Forties must face the solid fact of these practical films, planned, made and used by people who have other ideas in their minds than Art. There is no hostility toward art in the ranks of practical filmers, but art is secondary to these serious men and women who intend to use, and who are using, movies for purposes which they believe to be important. Will the critics wash their hands of the whole business or will they get down to esthetic fundamentals? The sister art of Architecture has much experience to contribute. The practice of "conditioning space," to reduce architecture to its simplest terms, has gone on for a long time. Shelter, dwellings, assembly halls and storage have been used by man ever since he developed sense enough to "come in out of the rain." But, for many years, Archi tecture turned up its nose at all but the top crust of space conditioning. If a structure was important enough to deserve Art, the architects provided it. If the construction required was of too utilitarian a nature, or if it was intended for use by those who could not afford Architecture, it just got itself built without the benefit of esthetics. In the heyday of this architectural snobbery, the greatest effort was sometimes lavished on buildings that had no utilitarian purpose whatever. One is reminded of Aldous Huxley's clergyman, in Chrome Yellow, who wanted the war memorial in his village to be built to the glory of God and to be deliberately made totally useless, so that it could glorify with no sideline of serviceability. He elected to have a lych gate, "carved with knops." We have many of these unutilitarian structures in our own time, such as the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and others in our national capital. The absurdity of applying Art by Architecture to certain structures, while others were left unendowed with the mystic gift, came, in the Twentieth Century, to be well recognized. We had to live with and in the things we built, and they might as well be sightly as hideous. Architects then developed what they had called "functionalism," by the theory of which the art of architecture concerns itself with the function of the structure as well as with its added decorative and artistic features. Modern architecture admits that this art — probably the oldest of the eight — is to be evaluated first of all by its capacity to endow functional building with innate art, by the very terms of the plan. The older concept which produced so much of what we now contemptuously call "gingerbread" was based upon the theory that the art should be added upon the framework of a casual functional design. The estheticians of the movies will do well to follow the lead of modern architecture. If they fail to do so. they will be left sitting on a critical Mount Ararat from which the floods of cinematic reality will have receded. Films today are functional, and they are of two broad types — entertaining and practical; art — either with a big or little A — is needed in both. But the art of a practical film is not the same as that of the picture that is designed for entertainment. If "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," then each type will be genuinely artistic if it fulfills its function truthfully and honestly. The glamor concept of Hollywood movies has confused the clear thinking of many persons who should know better, when they discuss film art. Because Hollywood has found that glamor makes profits in the entertainment business, it does not follow that glamor will make sense in all practical films. Yet we find many otherwise intelligent filmers who will go round Robin Hood's barn to find some way to drag their best copy of Hollywood glamor into films where it not only has no function but where it is a genuine distraction. A great Hollywood producer not long ago solemnly announced that every movie must have glamor. In the name of all common sense, why? If its contents are a bitter pill, good for the patient but repulsive to the palate, they must, obviously, be coated to be swallowed. But there are many persons who watch a projected motion picture for entirely practical purposes, just as they read textbooks. If Blackstone must, in future, be prettied up with a love story and illustrated with "pinup girls," the boys of tomorrow will learn less law and more fiddle faddle. The makers of many practical films have no more need of glamor than a surgeon has of lace curtains in his operating room. They do have great need of clarity, of proportion and of suitability of sequence to subject. And there is real art in getting these things. The esthetic bases for the motion picture art of the future must be functional and not absolute. A film must be judged by the success with which it accomplishes its purpose and not upon how much artistic subtlety it provides by means of soft focus, "trick" lighting, oversized closeups and — God save the mark! — "camera angles." If the film calls for these things, to increase its emotional appeal and to make it more entertaining, they should be present. If the picture is straight exposition, the canons by which it must be evaluated are those which govern the criticism of all kinds of exposition, by the written or spoken word or by movies. If critics prefer to ignore this functional aspect of movies, they may claim to be critics of movie dramas, but not of films. The Army and Navy, with their forthright insistence upon results, have done much to clear the air surrounding movie art — and a great deal of this air has been very hot. Hollywood technicians have been poking their noses under the tent, trying to get glamor into training films, because glamor has been their business and because the public has paid well for it in theatres. But the services have, by and large, insisted that their practical movies shall serve practical ends and not provide opportunities for Hollywood's prettifying. After the war, a large number of men will come back to civilian filming, quite accustomed to making pictures for serious purposes. They will find that education, science and business are ready to use them. From their activities and from the broad gauge critical thinking of writers who realize the functional quality of modern movies will come the film esthetics of the future.