Captain Cook, when he discovered Australia, must have felt like I do when I am asked to suggest what the new British film should be or may be. How shall one lay down rules for the development of an uncharted continent?
For that is what the film is as a medium of expression. It differs from the novel, the play, music, and the ballet. Perhaps it approaches nearest to music and the ballet. It can play on the emotions and can delight the eye. But how we shall finally use the film none of us—British directors or otherwise—can tell. The stage drama has been 2,000 years in reaching its present state of perfection—or imperfection! The film show, in less than 20 years, has made much quicker strides. But it is still far from being an art in the sense that painting and writing can be art.
How far the builders of a new British film industry can remedy this state of affairs is difficult to say. The Americans have left us very few stories to film. And did not someone once say that there are only six plots in the world?
But there is no reason why we should not tell stories of English boys who leave the village and make good in the big city—why rural drama should not be found and filmed among the mountains of Wales and the moors of Yorkshire. Our history—national and imperial—provides a wonderful storehouse of film drama. And there is the sea, our particular heritage: not only the Navy but the great business of the mercantile marine should have a place on our screens.
Perhaps our immediate opportunity lies in more careful and more intelligent treatment of film stories. The American film directors under their commercially minded employers have learnt a good deal about studio lighting, action photographs, and telling a story plainly and smoothly in moving pictures. They have learnt, as it were, to put the nouns, verbs, and adjectives of the film language together.
But even if we conceive the film going no further as an art, it is obvious that what we must strive for at once is the way to use these film nouns and verbs as cunningly as do the great novelist and the great dramatist, to achieve certain effects on an audience.
A historic example of what I mean was introduced by Charles Chaplin in his Woman of Paris. He crystallized a situation with subtlety and economy of time when he made his dilettante hero take a clean handkerchief from a drawer in his mistress’s dressing chest and let fall an evening dress collar. You knew all you needed to know about their relationship.
We are still working on those lines of economy in pictures today. The difficulty is that our art is commercial. We have no benefactors to finance productions which only a minority of the public want to see. So we can only advance a little—a very little—faster than the public’s understanding.
One is disappointed sometimes to find now the average filmgoer misses little points which were apparently too subtle. If the public will only learn to take more for granted on the screen, it stands to reason that we directors will have more screen time in which to deal with the big situations in a film.
Then what of the future? We must not forget that our duty is always to provide entertainment for those who pay. Ideas of entertainment vary. The man who enjoys the latest detective thrills probably hates poetry. But, luckily for the poet, books cost less to make than films—considerably less. When you have to spend £50,000 or £100,000 on a film you must make it to please a lot of people in order to get your money back.
But suppose we could make really artistic films for the artistically minded minority. Could we not then make as beautiful a film about rain as Debussy did a tone poem in his “Jardins sous la pluie”? And what a lovely film of rhythmic movement and light and shade we could make out of cloud studies—a sort of film interpretation of Shelley’s “The Cloud.” Such things have been attempted on the Continent, where they frequently make pictures for love rather than profit; one German producer even makes film studies of cubes and circles which change their shape as they move over the screen in rhythmic form like a Cubist painting in motion. But those things are not for the present, though they suggest how the film may become an artistic medium.
There is no reason, however, why we should not use such rhythmic pictures as moods and backgrounds for our screen stories. How many people realize, I wonder, that we do aim at moods in our films? We call it “tempo,” and by paying careful attention to the speed with which we act our little plays we do attempt to guide the observing minds into the right mood.
A light-hearted comedy played slowly may produce the sense of impending doom, just as a too brightly acted drama might never give an atmosphere of tragedy.
And, having decided the “tempo” of a film, we must keep to it all through or it will jerk up and down. I had to film a little scene in The Farmer’s Wife six times the other day because the players took it too slowly to fit in with the mood of the picture.
Film directors live with their pictures while they are being made. They are their babies just as much as an author’s novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man. It often happens today that the author’s story is made into screen form on paper by one man, who may have been overseen by some important executive, filmed by another, cut by another, and edited by another.
Suppose novels were produced in this way!
“Films We Could Make” was originally published in the London Evening News, November 16, 1927.