Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1947)

25 y Basic factors in movie planning HAROLD E. B. SPEIGHT, ACL WHAT holds together in a single picture the many separate shots which make it up? It takes little experience, either in movie making or in watching superior screen results, to realize that a good picture differs from a poor one because the one has. while the other lacks, something essential. What is this essential quality? When we want to say that a picture has been prepared we say that a continuity has been worked out. Is continuity the something that we know to be all important? Perhaps continuity is not a good word for our purpose, for it suggests a sequence. The quality we are concerned with is one which gives distinction not simply to the sequence, but to the picture as a whole; not simply to the succession of shots, but to the special pattern which the shots are intended to reveal. In other words, the succession or series or sequence of shots is only the means used in cinema technique to achieve a certain end. The enjoyable experience of seeing a good movie is not found in merely watching interesting and artistic shots follow one another; it is found rather in the total effect of the series, in the emotion produced and remembered after the series or sequence has been completed. Shall we say, then, that, while it is important to understand and observe certain principles conveyed by the word continuity, without which the observer watching the screened picture would soon feel lost, it is important also to strive for an effect which characterizes the picture as a whole? The conventional standards still commonly applied to stage drama suggest a name for this desirable effect or quality. The dramatist is adjured to respect what are called the "unities'" — the unities of time, place and action. It is unity that we often, really mean when we refer to a good continuity. But what sort of unity is desirable in a movie? Not the unity of time, nor that of place, obviously. On the contrary, a marked feature of a movie, as the pictures on the professional screen demonstrate, is the ability of the camera to present quick changes of time and place; it is just there that some of us find the advance of the screen over the stage. Amateur movie makers who succeed in overcoming the temptation to create a stage play, or a staged reproduction of some everyday action, and then film it, discover that the art of the cinema has standards and principles of its own, not derived from the tradition of the stage. A good amateur movie of any kind must achieve a kind of unity appropriate to a movie and not strive for an ideal borrowed from another art. There is no conventional way of formulating cinema standards: the art is too new. It is to be hoped that it will remain free and not take over from other arts any canons or rules which cramp originality. Yet it may be well to express, at least tentatively, some convictions as to the kind of unity appropriate in a movie of the kind an amateur is likely to make. There is, first, the unity of theme, or we might say of significance. A movie should be about something or about some one. Agreed, you say? But this ideal is more easily professed than followed! Clearly, the person, thing or event around which [Continued on page 34] 16mm. scenes by John V. Hansen, FACL * In this study by John V. Hansen, FACL, of Californian missions is found an example of the unities of theme, character and purpose which Dean Speight offers as esthetic canons to insure coherence and clarity in films.