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16
Film in Out Time
The time has come to take up a thread which was left hanging in midair at the end of chapter 9. That chapter closed with the remark that the spectator is not dreaming all the time and that the fact of his awakening naturally raises the question as to what film may mean to his conscious mind.* Relevant as the question then was, there would have been little purpose in pursuing it further at a time when the question was in a sense premature. Only now that the inner workings of film have been dealt with is it possible and indeed necessary to come to grips with this issue, which is the most central of all : what is the good of film experience?
PRIMACY OF INNER LIFE?
No doubt a major portion of the material which dazes and thrills the moviegoer consists of sights of the outer world, crude physical spectacles and details. And this emphasis on externals goes hand in hand with a neglect of the things we usually consider essential. In Pygmalion the scenes added to the original, scenes which ignored its moral to concentrate on incidental life, prove much more effective than the salient points of the Shavian dialogue, which is drowned in bagatelles; and what the adaptation thus loses in significance is plainly a boon to it from the cinematic viewpoint.** The cinema seems to come into its own when it clings to the surface of things.
So one might conclude that films divert the spectator from the core of life. This is why Paul Valcry objects to them. He conceives of the cinema as an "external memory endowed with mechanical perfection."
* See pp. 171-2. **Cf. pp. 228-9.
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