National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1939 - Jan 1942)

8 National Board of Review Magazine nized ; flowers, animals, human and mythological forms, depicting stories, impressions and patterns. Tricky camerawork is brought to an unprecedented pitch of virtuosity ; the audience is whirled 300,000,000 miles through space, the earth is split open by convulsive earthc|uakes, colors unhampered by outlines are animated in a fashion heretofore unknown. But this does not end the wonders of Fantasia. The really astonishing and indescribable part of the production is the altogether revolutionary type of dimensional sound worked out by Disney engineers and RCA Victor. The audience gets the illusion that the orchestra is actually playing in the theatre. Besides this the sound is flexible ; it can be made to issue from any desired part of the house, it can be followed as it springs forth from dififerent parts of the screen. For example, in the final number of Fantasia, Schubert's "Ave Maria," combining orchestra and chorus, while the images dwindle and fade into shadowy gradations on the screen, the music suddenly sweeps around to the back of the theatre and envelops the audience. But really to be appreciated Fantasia must be experienced. In this New Yorkers and those visiting the city are fortunate, for the elaborate and intricate equipment needed to exhibit this latest creation of Walt Disney's art, limits the showing of the film to about a dozen cities of which New York has the honor of being the first. For the Movie Student in New York IF you drop in on the Museum of Modern Art about four any afternoon from now until the first of the year, you can see movies made by D. W. Griffith covering his work from 1907 to 1924. This is the most ambitious of the cinema exhibitions that the Film Library of the Museum has put on since it was founded five years ago. It includes "The Lonely Villa," Mary Pickford's second picture ; "The Birth of a Nation ;'" "Way Down East;" and, perhaps to be timely, a post-war film depicting the tragedies of defeat and hunger in Central Europe called "Isn't Life Wonderful?" Besides the movies an elaborate display of material on Griffith as actor, producer and director may be seen in the Museum itself. Included in this is a projection on the wall of a sequence from his monumental film "Intolerance." Along with this exhibition Miss Iris Barry, the Curator of the Film Library, has just published an exhaustive book on the life and works of D. W. which may be purchased in the lobby of the Museum. All of which is part of the unique job The Museum of Modern Art Film Library is doing to salvage the cinema and preserve a body of famous and representative films. Here the motion picture is treated as an art, to be collected and exhibited much as other museums collect and exhibit paintings and sculpture. Until the Film Library was started in 1935 next to nothing had been done in this direction. Anyone pursuing research on the movies, an art hardly forty five years old, heretofore had run up against almost insuperable difficulties in verifying material. Unlike students in the other arts with galleries, museums and libraries at hand most everywhere, the cinema historian had to rely mainly on his memory, carrying impressions, in many cases, made years before, or on descriptions and criticisms surviving in journals and publications. Consequently the research staff of the Film Library is handed many a headache correcting errors in "standard" works and other critical writings, errors that naturally followed when pictures important in the development of the film had either been lost through neglect or early indifference or had lain in the vaults of producers, in most cases quite beyond the means or influence of the researcher. The Film Library remedied all this by making available to those interested four services : the arrangement of the movies they possess into series shown daily in the Museum theatre; the rental of films to study groups for non-commercial screenings throughout the country ; the maintenance of a large librarv of books, periodicals, scripts, movie stills and related material for the use