The Film Between Art and Skill

The film industry is not merely an economic production like sugar, butter, or coal; it also has an artistic form. It is growing along the principles of the true art suited to the democratic age, because it combines technical skill in science with excellence in acting. It did not come as the fruit of one mind's effort but as the result of the collaboration of many; and beyond that, it has its political and social value.

From the purely artistic point of view we see that countries such as Russia and France have not contributed an ample share to the international film market, yet they have films to show probably equal to what America and Britain possess. The credit for what America and Britain have gained goes back to the fact that the English language, with its various idioms and diverse expressions, is the language current in speech over a very wide range in Great Britain, the United States of America, all the British possessions and colonies, and India — where many languages exist, though English is the most widely accepted of them, even among the most ardent Indian nationalists, and is the chosen tongue of many Indian novelists and poets — and finally it is used in South America, where for commercial reasons it is almost everyone's second language. The aim of the American film industry in its early days was to obtain a very large capital, and thus the best American films arose, being immediately saleable.

British films, on the other hand, arose from the ideals of young men thinking in their secluded rooms. What distinguishes Britain from all the world is what are called instructional films — or living pictures — among them "Desert Victory" and "Western Approaches," and, in a broad sense, like Noël Coward's story, giving examples of wartime. These films did not appear because there was a demand for them, but because intelligent young men like John Grierson, Harry Watt, and Cavalcanti wished to produce them and sold the idea to institutions one would never think of, such as the British Post Office, or the gas, light, or coke companies, or the contractors of the British public utilities, who allot funds for the best and newest British instructional films.

Ordinary British films before the war were of various sorts: some were serious to a most astonishing degree, some middling, and some poor. Those among them that won approval — as is the case with a Hitchcock film — were those that relied on the instructional method. Hitchcock adapted the plots of his stories from Edgar Wallace or John Buchan and made them arresting by taking up in his treatment all the fine, familiar matters of real life, striking the sensitive chords in a way that makes a man feel his heart truly stirred, as though the event had actually happened. So he photographed real streets and real railway stations and avoided sets. The best film he made in America was "Shadow of a Doubt," in which he followed the same method.

The hope truly to be sought in the British films to come lies in these fundamental matters — not in the manner of displaying stars, or in showing off a technical skill of one uniform pattern, nor in box-office receipts and other such things that involve no sound intellectual understanding.