We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
26 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA
were the pictures that D. W. Griffith made more intensely actual by using the close-up, the cut-back and the fade-out. Then came the long procession of all manner of pictures from Hollywood with only three things to bind them together, actuality, fashion and the box office. Good or bad, costly or cheap, an enormous mass of pictures had that much in common.
Of the second kind, which are far less numerous than the first, but equalling if not surpassing them in importance, are pictures such as come within — what shall I say ? the Freudian field. Pictures that interpret phantasy in the Freudian way. I refer to the sound part of Freudism, not quakery. This sound part which deserves the title of New Psychology and is extremely valuable, has together with other new departments of science, like Sexology found its way into even commercial pictures unsuspected by the Film Kings, who of course are not expected to know anything about human scientific " mysteries," and unsuspected also by that Over-lord of Film Kings, the Censor, whose chief fault is not that he is stupid, but that he is unfashionable. He is never in the fashion in the world of new and daring scientific knowledge with the result that such knowledge gets into the pictures where it spreadeagles its five fingers to its nose at him.
I shall explain how the New Science outwits the Censor in another chapter. Here I shall indicate only the elements of the sound part of Freudism. They are Repression, Conflict, the great factor in development. Regression to childhood. And Fixation, or complete stoppage. These are bound up with Civil Life, Sex, War and Fear. Civil Life and Fear are related to Conflict. Fear alone is the great factor of war. Fear created the British Navy. During the past fifteen years the whole of the civilised world has been paralysed with dreadful fear. Peace rests on confidence. Fear is a very active source of war. If we examine the pictures since say 1919, we shall find that character and conduct in them are mainly shaped by fear, especially portrayals of the Great War; Civil War, or war