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NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Since this work was completed there has been an unavoidable delay in publication which has given to some of the matter of immediate interest an air of staleness (also, let me hope, of prophecy). A slight loss of freshness in some of the details was to be expected in any case, in a work of research on a subject that is undergoing swift change and development. How swiftly the Cinema has changed since it entered the padded cell of the microphone and took to talking two years ago, need not be described here. We know that the cell has expanded to admit the open, and has lost its novelty. And we know that already new mechanical forces are being put to practical use, which had hardly been utilised six months ago. The work was planned and written at the close of one great historical period of the Cinema and at the beginning of another, and perhaps greater. It was a moment when the mighty Film Kings were beginning to build another (a Talkie) story upon the mammoth and long established money-production organisation called Hollywood. They hoped thus to overcome the dangerous cracks and fissures which they detected in their structure and apparatus, due to public revolt against the long continued bankruptcy of subject. They have now a harder task before them than the replacing of ethical subject by mechanical novelty. They must build story upon story in the full knowledge that it is a temporary expedient to stave off ultimate collapse. They can never, in this way, solve the true problem of the Cinema. That problem is the problem of Subject-power, not mechanical-power. Subject progress is stronger than mechanical policy; the Cinema race is for the most progressive in Subject-power, not for the most powerful in Talkie mumble.
XXXV