Television at Hand

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1058, 23 August 1930, Page 25

Television at Hand

TRIALS MADE RECENTLY Instantaneous News Reel Shows A HINT lias been dropped by Mr. Harry Warner, of Warner Bros., that the advent of television for motion pictures is imminent. Two years ago the talking picture burst upon exhibitors and minor producers, throwing those in Britain and elsewhere into a condition of panic. The probability is that this new announcement will have a similar effect if time proves that it is a practical advance in the science of films and their presentation. “Television in cinemas is as certain as the next day’s dawn,” asserts a London expert in discussing the present trend.

When talking pictures arrived in Britain production was stopped. Exhibitors rushed into the arms of the electric companies and mortgaged their incomes for 14 years so that that their patrons might thrill to the tears of Mr. A 1 Jolson. The combined hosts of English producers and exhibitors presently lifted their heads in worship of this new Moloch of sound, writes au English critic.

It happens that people in this country are getting just a little weary of the elementary essays in entertaiumeh, and clearly films are now in the mood for a new development. They were in this condition just before Mr. Harry Warner flung his

bombshell of “sound” at the world. People bad .grown blase to the delights of silent pictures. And Mr. Warner’s new conception of a “televised” news reel is obviously the development of which lilm-goers are now waiting. News Reel Value In point of fact the news reel is more often than not the most interesting item in a cinema’s programme. That memorable film, for example, which British Movietone News issued of its record of the Trooping of the Colour was a classic. I have sat in a theatre in the West End of London at nine o’clock in the evening of Derby Day and watched Blenheim gallop past the post and heard all those cheerful, raucous noises which thrill you at Epsom. And afterward the tremendous pageantry of the Guards trooping their flag. That film stirred me as few films could. It was real and graphic. It was history being made. And I warrant that within five years from now people will be sitting in cinemas and watching a picture of the Derby not six hours after the race is run, but at the instant of its running. I was in New York last autumn and spent one whole evening in the projection room of the renowned Roxy Theatre. There were a dozen amusing gadgets to watch in that gargantuan temple of sound. But chiefly I was interested in some discs which looked like enormous gramophone records. I asked what they were used for. They told me then that every day the Western Electric engineers were in the Roxy exifbrimenting with certain ideas in television. Every night during a recent month moving pictures were “radio-ed” from Washington and picked up more or less perfectly in New York. Some of these pictures have an amazing clarity. Yes, television is at hand.