SCENES THAT LIVE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 June 1941, Page 6

SCENES THAT LIVE

DRAMA VERSUS CINEMA. The cinema has been with us a good many years, and readers have probably seen hundreds of films, yet I should be surprised if they can call up before them clearly one of those stories and feel again in memory any emotion they inspired—except again, astonishment. It is all gone, completely gone, writes the great dramatic critic, Mr Desmond MacCarthy. In the case of a play such recall is easy. Scenes from a play we have seen, or scenes from books we have read, often remain integral parts of an experience barely distinguishable from personal experience. Even when this is saying too much, we can still recall them; we can remember scenes and moments which have no permanent value or interest in the plays we saw, or in the novels we read, years ago. . . . You can rag the nature of things on the film, mock the laws of gravity, exhibit human beings running impossible risks, juggle with improbabilities of every description. The result may be extremely exhilarating. You can unfold vast spaces and panoramas, armies marching across plains and over mountains. You can show a thousand camp-fires burning, or a mob rushing about a town and sacking it; for the cinema can give the impression of things happening simultaneously in different places. But it is limited to the spectacular; the epic and not the dramatic is its proper province. Directly it attempts to deal with the personal life of the emotions it is confined to superficiality.