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* FILM LANGUAGE ¢

By J. L. SHADBOLT

(Reprinted from the
Film Survey Bulletin No. 1)

As a member of the Film Survey Group
what do I want from the pictures I hope
to see?

Members, it is supposed, have asked
themselves that question. Perhaps they
would be interested in comparing their de-
mands with those of the committee who
took the trouble to organize such a group.

Our answer, on the face of it, is fairly
simple. We want to see films that speak
to us in FILM LANGUAGE. We do not
find many of these among the ordinary
commercial pictures that come to Vancou-
ver. Since practically al! of these are
Hollywood preducts we conclude that films
of the quality we want most to see are
rarely produced in Hollywood; and simple
reasoning argues that so long as they are
aimed at box office entertainment stan-
dards with the audience taught to like
what it gets, we never will get works of
adult appeal.

We know that in many other countries
great films are producéd which we can-
not see here because of the Hollywood
deadlock on commercial theatres. We
have nothing against Hollywood as such;
but we do want—we insist—on having
fine films. So we turn to these other coun-
tries, to Germany, France, Russia, Britain,
Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Ausiria and
Czecho -Slovakia, to their past as well as
their present, with the hope of bringing to
Vancouver the finest of their productions.
We will examine these, too, critically.

The film is a comparatively new medi-
um. Some would deny it a place among
the enduring arts. We believe it has
such a place. At any rate, it has an un-
denied place among the languages—among
the world’s means of communication. And
film, the moving picture, the cinema, has
a language of its own. What do we mean,
then, when we say we want a film to
speak to use in FILM LANGUAGE?

Let us come at the answer in a round-
about way. Perhaps the whole difficulty
in evaluating the film's intrinsic quality
lies in the failure to identify the idiom of
the cinema as distinct from other forms of
communication. One obvious reason for
this is that the total effect of a film is a
complex of so many impacts. The subject
alone, regardless almost of how it is
treated, is seductive—because it is enter-
taining, or we agree with its point of view
(and producers take good care to give us
only what we do agree with), or because,
occasionally, we dislike its point of view
or its politics, and in our preoccupation we
are apt to overlook the structure of the
film itself. Again we may be charmed or
offended by the personalities or acting of
the stars and cast involved. We may hate
gangster films and love musicals. We hate
adolescent romance, we are extravagant
over historical spectacles. We shun sordid,
everyday themes (enough of them in
everyday life) and we are famished for
witty, sparkling dialogue. We shy off
factual films, we want dramatic suspense
and fantasy—and so it goes. What it all
boils down to, one will usually admit, is
that one picks one’s movies to be enter-

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Water Colour by George Doubt
Drawing by Olive Noble-

Wash Drawing by Don Jarvis

Pen Drawing by Bill Calder

First Year Plant Form Panel
Drawings by Newton Bates — First Year

“PICASSO BALL" Drawing by Olive Noble

Masks by First Year Modelling Students

Drawn by Melvin Kero

‘

Drawing of School Cafeteria by Grace Manson
Drawing by Pauline Graham
Lino Cuts by Rehab. Students
Pen Drawing “Ly Jim Snelgrove
Life Drawings by Rehab. Students
Life Drawings by James MacDonald

tained and most certainly (here we agree)
not to be instructed. We may even enjoy
the more intellectual motives in viewing
current films as an index of social condi-
tions. Whatever extra satisfactions, up-
lifts or instruction come from our films we
gratefully accept as by-products of their
function in our social pattern merely as
entertainment. For the most part our films
deny us, or we deny ourselves those al-
together fuller dividends which accrue
from an objective understanding of the
film as an experience of art. For there is
a film language, an art form if you will,
just as truly as there is a language of
the novel, of painting, of poetry, sculpture,
architecture or music. The full import of
the film can be arrived at only in terms of
the film medium itself.

Just as it is fatuous and unsatisfactory to
consider architecture for its function alone,
or to try to explain poetry by its literal
meaning without getting at the nature of
a poetic image, so it is useless, however
beguiling, to try to get at the meaning of
a great film through its story or acting or
social content, without regard to its im-
agery. The true content of a great film
lies in its conception as filmic poetry
where the camera image itself, the parti-
cular nature of its composition — angular,
flat, splayed, drooping, erect and noble,
massive, thin, close or distant, blurred or
sharp, wistful, dramatic, empty or crowd-
ed, microscopic or panoramic, ironic, nar-
tative, symbolic or fantastic—is in exact
relation in its position on the screen, in its
sequence with what went before it, to the
PRECISE MEANING it is meant to convey
at that particular moment of a continuous-
ly unfolding concept. The physical image
and its psychological expressiveness are
one and the same thing in a true film. It
is like a chord or a cross-section of a mo-
ment in the playing of a symphony—
beautiful in itself but having its meaning
and its capacity to hold us only as it is
part of a progressive composition which is
building toward a climax. It is like an
image in poetry, haunting, memorable, but
it takes on its meaning in the mind only
because of its position in relation to the
total accumulated meaning of what led to
it and what ensued from it in the poem.
It is like a momentary scene or situation
in a novel. The memory relishes it as
imbued with the poignant rightness that
supercharges the least phrase of a con-
siderable work of style—the beauty of the

words themselves, the reality of what they .

describe or reveal, and their larger beauty
of context.

In experiencing a true film the under-
standing observer is continually aware in
the physical image on the screen of this
poetic logic of the extended overtones of
association and meaning which give in-
spired relevance. Each image unfolds this