Plan for cinema (1936)

52 PLAN FOR CINEMA talked, the public liked it best when it talked volubly and incessantly (fast moving, quick action), because that was nearest the cinema the public knew and had been conditioned into accepting. ^Very well, it shall talk, but it shall not stand still in so doing. The modern, high-tempo, wise-cracking, socially conscientious American film can be quite legitimately regarded as built on a kind of dialectic theory after the Russian manner. It is best explained, I think, by saying it is really two films — an aural and a visual. The theme7tfe"3rama, the story, are implicit in the dialogue ; they are made_explicit on the screen. Could we but hear the dialogue, say, as a broadcast play, the story would be quite comprehensible. The visual counterpart, the other film, as it were, supplies an additional explicitness to what is already implied in the speech. The work takes on a more potent significance, the two films hurrying along with neat grace in co-relation. Such a film is Milestone's] TheFront Pa^\i ^onejDfti^ films ever produced. It is a forerunner of the category into which will fall the television film of the future. It is content, and properly so, I submit, to treat sound dialectically in dialogue, letting vision be augmentative to it. It is full of dialogue uttered at amazing speed, and it is full of action from beginning to end. Unlike anything likely to be seen in films built on a pure montage plan, it does not discard the enormous value of the internals of the shot ; quite the contrary. It uses to the full every possible opportunity for the camera to move, TB£ /V\ov»n<£ cam bra — ¥\\OT06RAPH~\U6> 1TXKLf(lj oR THE