FILM WORLD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1938, Page 2

FILM WORLD

ACTIVITIES IN ARTIFICIAL LIGHT.

The film world is an indoor world, writes Miss C. A. Lejeune, the cinema critic. It thrives on artificial light and a forcing-house atmosphere. It is what the gardeners would call a good stove subject, luxuriant but tender. For convenience of working, that is excellent. It means product all the year round, independence of natural conditions, continuity and uniformity of output. In no other way would a prosperous industry be possible. But in the general zeal for efficiency, one thing tends to be forgotten. That is the inescapable, incurable affection of human nature for the things and places that they know. All art—and the cinema, I am sure, would prefer to be called an art —from the earliest times, has roughly fallen into two classes, the abstract and the representational. Western taste has always swung round toward the representational. We have not, as a civilisation, the blessed and comforting- power of the East to lose the urgency of our immediate surroundings in the span of an infinite cycle. We have to catch at least a wrack of what we Know in the things that move use; a native cast of face, a sunbeam across a room falling as we have seen it fall, little homely things like a worn pair 'of shoes, a flower, to tell us that another man is recalling in paint, or words, or photography, what is already dear and familiar to us. The ordinary man wants romance, and adventure, in his films, but he wants familiarity, too. He is anxious to escape from the drab round of work, the routine of office desk or factory, but not too far. Tibet and Hawaii and Borneo are useful spots for pictures. Anything may happen there. We won’t stop to ask questions about them. Synthetic studio sets have their purpose, too. But it is the unexpected flash of a familiar, down, the white ribbon of a road we have often tramped, the wide, wind-swept canopy of a friendly sky, that brings us back a second time into the cinema. ’