Plan for cinema (1936)

f4o TUouCrUr*-. Kio/QL f^Kp/Fyii&Kjce INTRODUCTORY J says invalid and faintly ridiculous. He keeps up a steady flow of abuse against the philistinism of the film industries in America and Great Britain, screams and rampages he does, until you begin to think the poor fellow has been done some hideous personal Jnjury by a producer or executive, and has come thereby utterly to hate cinema instead of loving it as he purports to do. When not engaged in telling the film barons how bold and bad they are, this pseudo-critic is busy deploring the shoddy outlook on life held by all cinema hall proprietors for showing the 'muck5 produced by those cesspools of artistic decadence which are Hollywood and Elstree. 'Why/ he howls, 'cannot I go to my local cinema hall and see an entertainment which is not an insult to my intelligence? Why do not American and British producers take a leaf out of Russia's book?5 And having mentioned Russia, our poor lamb falls flat on his face in ecstatic abandon at the feet of the twin-gods, ^isenstein and Pudovkin. . Russia, you must understand, is one of the major symptoms of his strange disease. The names of her two admittedly great cinema masters will be bandied about from American slapstick to Teutonic tragedy in sullying comparison, a diatribe here against the ineffective, plagiarized, misunderstood use of a point of technique, a harangue there because So-and-so would have been done by one or the other of the meister in such and such a way, and lo ! one of the magic names has been mentioned, and we feel a special pen has been put to paper so that the great shall have