Plan for cinema (1936)

ASPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCENE 33 of mass psychological inducement; unfortunately the film industry has a very pronounced taste for ostentation, with the result that its posters are rather more subjectively vulgar and objectively worthless than most others. The whole business of poster advertising is naturally objectionable to a person of sensibility, for, apart from the chaos of colour, of line, and of form, there is the continual subjective insistence wherever one's eyes may look that somebody's petrol or cheese or soap is superior to somebody else's, a big upper-cut directed to knock us senseless into accepting a conglomerated mass of half-truths, and directed, moreover, to making us want something for which we have no real need or desire. Such is the strategy on which the bombardment of poster offensive is conducted. A visitor from another planet standing in some main thoroughfare of any big modern metropolis would surely believe we were very markedly pagan, that the flashing lights, whirling letters, enormous human heads in neon and mercury vapour were graven images set up in homage to our various gods. Indeed, he would not be far wrong. We are far more consciously aware of the brand of cigarette we smoke, the brewer of the beer we drink, and the companies who are responsible for our schoolboy complexions, than we are of the names of our so-called spiritual benefactors. The film poster attempts the impossible in that it tries to show arrested action. Only a very skilled painter can do such a thing, and then with little success as action essentially implies time. The spatial arts are D