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What audiences want from film lecturers
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RUSSELL POTTER
WHEN the amateur filnier ventures onto the public lecture platform and says ( to cover up the horrible clattering of his knees against each other), "Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen . . ." — Well, you may remain an amateur movie maker, but you become also a public if only for the moment. You'll never be the same man again !
You have shown your pictures many times before — with or without music and talk. You have perhaps taken prizes with them. You perhaps have a sheaf of clippings from friendly newspapers and letters from club presidents and program chairmen.
But now, as you stand there on the public lecture platform and signal "'Lights out," you have a different kind of bear by the tail. \ou know your pictures are good; now you must convince a strange audience that they are good. That audience, from the point of view of a movie maker, is a lay audience. In it, the ratio of movie makers to photographic laymen is probably not more than one to ten. That means that the audience is interested — not in the technical problems that you solved in making your picture, not in the kind of equipment used, not in the fact that your picture won last year's national prize — but simply in the picture itself as a picture. Your picture, plus its projection, plus its presentation, must add up to an evening's entertainment.
Now that basic fact will condition the making of your picture, from the first exposure to the last clip in the cutting room. Throughout that whole long (and thoroughly enjoyable) process you must assume a semi-professional point of view; you must keep your audience — or the audience that you hope to get — in mind.
If, when the house lights go up again, the audience gives you spontaneous and generous applause and says as it leaves the auditorium. "What a swell evening!" "That was a good picture." then you will know that you and your pictures have satisfactorily passed the toughest test of all: you have ivon audience approval.
Back of that evening's success there are five factors, all equally important; they are (1) good material; (2) good cinematography; ( 3 > good cutting; (4) good projection; (5) good [Continued on page 187]
Editor's Note
Dr. Russell Potter is director of the Institute of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University in the City of New York. He has conducted for a decade and a half a highly successful annual program of public presentations including lectures, films and combinations of them. Probably nobody has as clear an insight as Dr. Potter into what kind of motion pictures will best please lecture audiences.
• First two 16mm. scenes, from the top, are from films of John V. Hansen, FACL; next two below were made by Ralph E. Gray, FACL; two on left were filmed by Frank E. Gunned, FACL; these men all use their own films frequently with lectures.