The screen writer (June 1945-May 1946)

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NEW FIELDS — NEW TECHNIQUES (even if the word is "screenplay"), with his faith in and dependence on ideas expressed in words, who is responsible for the values of the film. Those values are literary rather than cinematographic. Similarly, in the field of documentary or factual films, the fact — explained and evaluated by words — took over: the more significant the fact, the more important the film. Perhaps the only visual value that still retains recognition in films is spectacularity. The war documentaries have brought this to a peak: the facts of this war surpass average imagination and the film records of them are accordingly unsurpassed in sensational and spectacular impact. With few exceptions, the imagination of those who do the recording is negligible. Rain, the early documentary of Joris Ivens, was a revelation. It was about nothing but a rainy city day as seen and reacted upon by a sensitive person behind the camera. Its simple and delicate visual poetry provoked in many of us new stirring hopes for the development of a more sensitive idiom of cinema. Unfortunately the development took an opposite course and commercial sensationalism has brought us to that point where a documentary must feature a skyful of blazing rockets and crashing suicide planes over a beachful of dead GIs in order to stir the heart of the audience for a few moments. The concept of the camera as an instrument for recording existing or contrived realities (documentary or fiction) has again taken a dangerously firm hold on us. This is, perhaps, due to the fact that the insecurity about a creative work not based on common facts and established meanings reflects the deeper insecurity of our time. But even if this is so, I have enough faith in contemporary man's spiritual stature to believe that he deserves and can profit from a more creative cinema. My belief is corroborated by the existence of a rich creative activity in other art forms, such as literature, music and plastic arts. I see no reason why the cinema should not likewise develop and cultivate some free and profound creative production in addi 25