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NEW FIELDS NEW TECHNIQUES
ALEXANDER HAMMID
1 00 often we hear the film spoken of as a medium of mass communication. Although that is by no means a negligible aspect of the film, I would like to shift the emphasis to another aspect of it — one at least as important, — that of the film as a unique and largely unexplored medium of creative expression.
The cinematograph, a thoroughly modern machine, a true child of our age of mechanism and relativity, contains within itself a remarkable contradiction: while, like so many other mechanical processes, it is capable of mechanical reproduction, it is also capable of a basically new kind of attack upon man's senses and mind. Thus, the cinema is at the same time a reproductive and creative process.
If we consider the cinema as a medium of mass communication in these terms, we cannot but become aware of the contradiction between the abstract idea of anonymous masses and, on the other hand, the direct, personal intimacy which exists between the screen and each individual spectator.
Although often linked into kinship with the theatre, the cinema, by its very nature, is capable of an individual contact with every member of its audience and does not inspire, nor require, the same collective feeling and response on its part.
As a film begins to unreel, the extraordinary illusory power of the screen draws every single spectator to participate intimately
ALEXANDER HAMMID (formerly known as Alexander Hackenschmied) co-directed and photographed the documentaries Crisis, Lights Out in Europe and The Forgotten Village. During the war, for the Overseas Branch of OWI, he directed The Valley of the Tennessee, Arturo Toscanini (with Irving Lerner), A Better Tomorrow and The Library of Congress.
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