We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
170 PROBLEMS OF STYLE IN THE FILM
only corpses. Panorama. This stolid monotony which takes hold of you and will not let go is like a long-drawn, desperate howling.
Here is another shot: a whole regiment blinded by poison gas is being driven through the streets of burning Bruges. Yes, the herd of blind men is being driven like a herd of sheep, herded with bayonet and butt to keep them from running into the burning ruins in their path. A picture for another Dante.
But there are worse things, although no human beings appear. The gardens of the Champagne after the German retreat. (It was not in the second world war that the Germans invented some of their methods.) We see a charnel-house of an ancient and lovely orchard culture. Thousands of precious, noble fruit trees neatly sawed off by power-saw, all exactly at the same height. The creation of centuries of skill and industry destroyed with machine-like accuracy. These pictures, too, have a physiognomy; the distorted faces of the tree-corpses are no less terrible than those of the human dead. But the caption to this, of course silent, shot was not: 'Behold the German barbarian ! ' It said 'C'est la guerre!' The noble faith of French peace-lovers did not blame the Germans even here, it blamed war. Nevertheless under the Weimar Republic the showing of this film was banned in Germany.
This French documentary of the first world war was dedicated to the six cameramen who had been killed on active service while shooting it. The Soviet war film showing the conquest of Berlin names in its credits fourteen cameramen killed while shooting it. This fate of the creative artist is also a new phenomenon in cultural history and is specific to film art. Artists in olden days rarely died of their dangerous creative work. And this has not merely a moral or political significance, but is of importance for the psychology of art as well.
This presentation of reality by means of motion pictures differs essentially from all other modes of presentation in that the reality being presented is not yet completed; it is itself still in the making while the presentation is being prepared. The creative artist does not need to dip into his memory and recall