Introduction
Into its short life, the cinema has compressed a development that the older arts have taken centuries to attain. Its scope is at least as wide as that of the printed word; for cinema includes not only the narrative film that constitutes the bulk of commercial production, but also the abstract film, the documentary film, the educational film, the news-reel, the animated cartoon, and their various permutations and combinations.

The cinema is not only an art, but a vast entertainment industry, an important field for capitalist exploitation.

Treatment of so manifold a subject within the space of a short article must be of a most general nature; statements made are necessarily compressed and dogmatic; in addition, my enthusiasm for film-art leads me to enter on controversial matters, to make statements with which many will not wish to agree.

For these things, make allowances.

Cinema
The Film is the Supreme Art.
The most obvious characteristic of the film is that it appeals directly to the eye and ear, the senses through which our knowledge of the universe is chiefly derived. The film, more than any other medium, is capable of giving an exact representation of the external world as it appears to our senses. In a few short years this will be even more true, for by then colour photography and stereoscopy will have reached a state of development as perfect as that reached by non-colour photography and sound recording to-day. There are many reasons why the film is capable of giving a more exact representation of the external world than any other form of art.

Cinema is essentially dynamic, a fact which is emphasised by its very name; it deals with images in a state of constant change, and continual flow. “Everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away”. [add note?]

The film for the first time gives adequate release to that fundamental love of physical movement that is expressed only in rudimentary form in the dance, pantomime, and drama.

It gives to images a fluidity only previously possessed by music. “Plainly we have something here that can be raised to parallelism with the greatest musical compositions; we have possibilities of a spectacle equal to any music that has been or can be written, comprehending indeed the completist music as on of its factors”. [1]

By the process of editing or montage, the dynamic images of the film are juxtaposed and made to reinforce and to conflict with each other. In this way tremendous intensification and compression are achieved.

Not only does the film represent the things and processes of the external world exactly as they appear to the mind; it also has the power of presenting exactly the ideas, ever-changing, ever-conflicting, which reflect these things and processes. The film at last emancipates us from symbolism, the necessity of translating ideas into symbols and back again into ideas, for purposes of communication. It frees us from that petrification of ideas, which is a dangerously easy consequence of casting them into the mould of words; that petrification which leads to metaphysical modes of reasoning. The film moreover is capable, whether by means of crosscutting, mixes, or composite shots, of developing several ideas simultaneously.

Cinema … “comprehends things, and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending”. [2]

In short, the dialectical materialist, who gives even a cursory consideration to the properties of cinema, is led inescapably to the conclusion that in it we have at last a completely dialectical form of expression, and hence the supreme form of expression.

This proposition seems to me at once so simple, so irrefutable, and so immense in its implications that I cannot excuse the ignorance that still surrounds the film, manifested at its mildest as a tendency to treat the film as an art form still on trial; at its worst as a vulgar hostility.

The Film Will Largely Supplant the Older Arts.
Since the film expresses itself with the very stuff of ideas, it is destined largely to supplant the older arts, at the same time absorbing the valuable features of each.

This statement should not be controversial, provided that my previous argument has been accepted; nevertheless, it deserves further discussion. Let us see how far it applies to the film’s present state.

Consider first the drama. Only the sentimental reactionary who senses a mystical virtue in “flesh and blood drama” will deny or regret that the film has swept away all the limitations of time and space, and all the tiresome subterfuges that mar stage-drama. For instance, it does away with the business of “getting people on, and getting them off”, which (in the words of H.G. Wells) “is a vast and laborious part of dramatic technique”. At the same time there is no valuable form of expression so peculiar to the drama that it cannot be appropriated by the film.

Since the cinema’s appeal is primarily pictorial, it has also much in common with the static pictorial arts, that have annexed to themselves the name of ART. The principles of design evolved in painting and sculpture, serve as valuable guides in the design of the filmic image. But the dynamic character of the cinema gives it a freedom and power that is not possessed by ART. Principles of static design must be greatly modified in the film, and principles of dynamic design evolved in their place.

How far may the film in its present stage replace literary expression?

For purely descriptive purposes, for statement of specific objective fact, the film is unrivalled. A scene, an action, a process, may be presented on the screen accurately, concisely, and vividly, in a fraction of the time necessary for the verbal description.

The film is, of course, not confined to statement of objective fact. There is no conception capable of visualisation by the novelist, which cannot be realised on the film, however fantastic, complex, or vast it may be. Witness the mechanical ingenuity of The Invisible Man [James Whale, 1933], King Kong [Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933], Alice in Wonderland [Norman Z. McLeod, 1933], etc.; recall any film which depicts huge crowd or battle scenes, or natural cataclysms.

The film’s power of describing mental processes is still largely untapped. [Vsevolod] Pudovkin’s Mechanism of the Brain [Mekhanika golovnogo mozga], made in 1925, in conjunction with workers in Pavlov’s laboratory, remains still a comparatively isolated effort. To it, however, must be added [Georg Wilhelm] Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul [1926], a narrative film made with the help of Freud, and illustrating very powerfully the principles of Freudian psycho-analysis. Minor examples of the film’s capacity to show the workings of the subconscious mind were seen last year in the delightful dream-fantasies that gave distinction to the Pommer-Martin-UFA film Happy Ever After [Paul Martin, Robert Stevenson, 1932] and Henry King’s Carolina [1932]. Filmic duplication of the functions of memory and imagination is, of course, a commonplace, i.e., it is seen in the flash-back and the “flash-forward”.

The film can alter its point of view with even greater facility than the novel. It can see, now with the eyes of an observer, now with those of any one of the protagonists. It not only sees, but “feels” as the protagonist or the spectator, e.g., Pudovkin instances a case where “the camera sees with eyes of a beaten boxer rendered dizzy by a blow”.

It must be admitted that the film, at present, usually expresses thoughts and emotions by means of externals; by behaviouristic details, environment, camera treatment, and editing. By means of the close-up, for instance, the film may impart intensified expression to a lifted eyebrow, a pulsing artery, a clenched fist, or an inanimate object. The mood of a scene may also be powerfully influenced by the setting, by lighting, and by the position and movement of the camera. More important still, relational editing gives power to shots inexpressive by themselves. The director who finds himself unable adequately to express a thought in visual (or sound) images, can still go one better than the writer, by means of the “Strange Interlude” device of spoken words.

The film is, as of yet, clumsy in comparison with literature, when it seeks to make a summarised statement, or to deal with generalised conceptions. The film-director who wishes to extend the range of his art must continually seek to formalise the ideas implied by such words as ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’, ‘love’, ‘hate’, and so on, and thus to express generalised ideas in filmic terms.

But if it is true that many ideas area at present better expressed verbally than filmically, it is also true that the film has opened up avenues of expression previously inaccessible to literature, as well as the other arts; it is true that in regions of thought where the film and literature are comparable, the film is tremendously more powerful, and that it is continually extending its boundaries. And the only limits to those boundaries are the limitations of human thought.

Surely, one of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the almost daily advance in expressiveness, continuing the evolution that has been compressed into its brief history of a quarter-century as an art.

But, in contemplating the future of the film, we need not be apologetic for its present achievements. If we agree that the purpose of art is the communication of ideas as lucidly and powerfully as possible, we must admit that many of the films of the present day are, at least, on the same plane as the classics of the older arts. We must also admit that the film has all the properties which are necessary to enable it to absorb the other arts and transform them into a higher synthesis.

The Fundamental Properties of the Film
In America, the film had its birth, and from America came the beginnings of almost all the expressive technique of the film. Notably is this so in the remarkable early work of D.W. Griffith, such as the Birth of a Nation [1915] and Intolerance [1916]. Griffith it was who first realised the power of editing, and was responsible for many filmic devices, such as the close-up, iris-shot, fade, soft-focus, and so on. And Griffith’s impulse has made itself felt in the later work of American directors, and indeed throughout the world.

From Germany has come a realisation of the value of environmental setting and filmic design and the expressive use of mixes and superimposed shots. In Germany, too, was developed much of the film’s power of psychological expression. German directors realised also the expressive value of camera angles and camera movement, and the freedom they gave to the camera was eagerly seized upon by the Americans with their greater technical equipment.

From France has come much interesting independent work in the abstract film, the surrealist film, and the welding of film and music.

But, chiefly because directors in capitalist countries are under the control of a profit-making economy, they have made very little conscious evaluation of filmic properties. The work of such directors seems to have been largely instinctive; at any rate they have not expressed the principles on which it is based. [Georg Wilhelm] Pabst, [René] Clair, D.W Griffith, [Charles] Chaplin, [Ernst] Lubitsch, [Erich] von Stroheim, have given us almost no expositions of the principles of film-art, whether in filmic or literary form.

Only in Soviet Russia has there been consistent and conscious investigation of the fundamental properties of the film.

Kuleshov started from the simple proposition that “in every art there must be firstly a material, and secondly a method of composing this material specially adapted to this art”. Kuleshov and Pudovkin, having considered the work of American directors, and in particular that of D.W. Griffith, and having made their own experiments, arrived at the conclusion that the material in film work is the strips of film on which the action before the camera is recorded, and the method of composing this material is their joining together in a particular, creatively discovered order.

The action of the film must be analysed into its separate components, and the task of the director is the building-up (‘montage’) of the film strips containing these elements, in the correct sequence, governed solely by the laws of thought, in the correct length, so as to establish that all-important filmic rhythm, and using appropriate transition devices. Thus the director creates a filmic space and filmic time differing from real space and real time.

These propositions, briefly, constitute the basis of the theory of montage of the Russian left wing filmic school, the theory which has had such tremendous results in the hands of those giants, Pudovkin and [Sergei] Eisenstein, as well as in the hands of lesser directors; results such as Battleship Potemkin [1925], The End of St. Petersburg [1927], October [1928], Mother [1926], Storm Over Asia [1928], The General Line [1929].

It has been left to Eisenstein in recent years to emphasise the correspondence of filmic expression with Marxian dialectic, which was already implicit in the theories of the left-wing group.

The Soviet film-artists have justified Lenin’s initial confidence in the film as a medium for sociological propaganda. Consider the reasons why it has such power in this respect.

The film for the first time gives expression to the crowd, which in literature and the drama appears as an inarticulate, amorphous thing. Its capacity for wide panoramas, makes the great crowd scenes a features of the cinema. But the camera can also observe details, it can pick out typical components of the mass, and by the process of montage it enables the spectator to share in a flash the various thoughts and emotions of typical individuals of the crowd. Thus the crowd receives a manifold, heightened individuality, since it is compounded of the emotions of many.

The film’s ability to reproduce with ‘remorseless realism’ the smallest detail, and to exclude irrelevant details, coupled with its capacity for vivid and rapid statement, enables it if need be to speak with a force that is irresistible and hammer-like.

Together with the fact that the film gives expression to the masses, must be considered the fact that it also speaks to the masses. Here, at last is an art with a universal appeal. The film speaks, not to a coterie, but to all. Its vast audience is something unique in history. The writer communicates with thousands, the film director’s audience is numbered in millions (e.g., Chaplin’s potential audience is estimated at 300,000,000).

… and Capitalism
What has Capitalism made of this medium, whose possibilities as an art and as a medium for propaganda and education are so great?

In considering this, we must remember, firstly, that the cost of film production places the film-artist peculiarly under the control of the capitalist; secondly, the tremendous market for film makes their production, distribution, and exhibition a huge industry (fourth industry in U.S.A). But surely a very strange industry – one full of the queerest illogicalities and exaggerations.

Opium for the People.
In speaking of the capitalist film, I refer chiefly to Hollywood, because here it is seen in its most typical form. Also, the Hollywood product comprises almost all the films seen in Australia, British films being but inferior imitations of Hollywood.

To supply its vast market, Hollywood has ransacked the world for its ‘wage laborers’, in the shape of directors, camera-men, technicians, writers, scenarists, composers, and actors. And all these wage-laborers are regimented into the production of entertainment commodities for the world, Chaplin being almost alone in his ability to follow his own artistic inclinations.

Some of Hollywood’s employees fight continuously, and with partial success, against its production methods; a few are able to break away into independent production now and then; many adjust themselves to the system with great strain, but most have few scruples about taking part in the lucrative game of ‘selling the public what it wants’; in other words, selling the wage-earners and the salaried workers of the world what finance-capital is trying to make them want – a narcotic, a weekly escape from the realities of bourgeois society.

And so these narcotics are supplies in quantities, in the shape of standardised adventure films, slick comedies, lavish song and dance shows, and sentimental melodramas.

But whatever the type of film, it must always be modified to reach as wide a market as possible. The melodrama must have comic relief, and the adventure-film a love interest, no matter how irrelevant. A “happy ending” is tacked on to the logical “unhappy ending”. The film must also supply the erotic release rendered necessary by bourgeois social conventions.

But whatever happens in the course of the film, these bourgeois social conventions must always be placated in the last few feet; virtue must be rewarded and vice destroyed; the “abandoned woman” must reform or receive her deserts; the gangster must die a noble death or be overtaken by the “forces of law and order”.

And the film must pander to other myths of the bourgeois state. So we have the myths of equality of opportunity; business success is lauded as the supreme goal; the chorus-girly becomes a star, and so on.

Life in the film-world moves smoothly through gilded decors; there is no poverty, no sign of the class-struggle here.

A social problem, if seriously stated, is given the individualist solution that is no solution.

A film seriously criticising existing society is unthinkable unless, in rare case, box office considerations render it possible.

To the fact that the theme of the film is conditioned by bourgeois ideology, is added the obstacle of the star system, which subordinates ideas to the exploitation of a personality that is generally non-existent.

And even that considerable body of films to which the above sweeping generalisations do not apply, is again and again marred by concessions to ‘the box office’. The film-artist must fight continually against the demands of the producing company.

Hollywood film production becomes more and more departmentalised. To supply the ever hungry market, novels, plays and musical comedies are seized upon, as well as scenarios. These must pass through the hand of scenarists, dialogue writers, producers, directors, and editors, emerging after weird and uncoordinated processes as botched apologies for films.

There is no training for the film-artist under Capitalism. He must discover the principles of his art slowly, by trial and error, instinctively, by rule of thumb. Nor, of course, is he at liberty to make any artistic experiments. The abstract and documentary films must remain unexplored, while he continues to churn out the most obvious kind of narrative film.

But when his capitalist masters have decided that it will pay them to have an addition to the technical resources of the film, in the form of sound, then the film director must hasten to comply with their demands. The public must have talking pictures – not only that, but 100 per cent. TALKIES! But that is not enough – they must have ALL TALKING, SINGING, and DANCING pictures! And each must talk and sing and dance more violently than the last. The painfully discovered principles of the silent film must be instantly jettisoned, the film must go back to its infancy, and subordinate itself to the outworn conventions of stage-drama and musical comedy. Then there must ensue a long process of recovery while the director, in between production work, endeavours to formulate methods of treatment of sound.

And we may be certain that much the same retrogression will occur when the owners of Hollywood decide on the wholesale introduction of colour photography. The Hollywood director is not free to exercise his aesthetic judgment. He is enslaved to his employer’s ideas of box-office demands.

But having suggested how film-art is hampered by Hollywood, I must emphasise that Hollywood cannot be dismissed so easily.

One is forced to admire the technical proficiency of Hollywood films; the efficient settings, good lighting, fine camera work, competent acting, and clever directions common to all films, factors which often give interest to the paltriest theme. Their very lavishness is not to be ignored, or the exhaustive research and expenditure that ensure accuracy in the minutest details of environment.

There is quite a large class of films, which though not great art, are clever entertainment. I confess to a delight in [Walt] Disney’s fantasies, that is not entirely due to their technical interest. Hollywood, also, produces a number of charming and innocuous idylls of domestic and small-town life, and from its annual crop there emerge a few films that I would defend as good art. Often, a gleam of sociological truth breaks through, and now and then masterpieces such as Street Scene [King Vidor, 1931], All Quiet on the Western Front [Lewis Milestone, 1930], I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang [Mervyn LeRoy, 1932].

Censorship
Hampered as the film is by capitalist production methods, we must seek the major obstacle in Capitalism’s more direct attack – the censorship. The cinema is being throttled by restrictions, such as no other art has had to endure under bourgeois “democracy”. The Australian censorship, besides banning scores of films yearly, makes cuts in more than half the feature films, for the most trivial reasons. And these eliminations, since they destroy rhythm, are far more serious than would be the tearing out of pages and blacking-out of passages in half the books entering the country.

Film censorship everywhere acts on the assumption that the film must be used only as opium for the masses. “The cinema screen is not the place for treatment of intimate, biological, pathological, and political subjects” is the typical attitude. Consideration will show that the object of censorship is not primarily the prevention of “lascivious” and “immoral” subjects, but the ruthless suppression of any serious criticism of those mighty bulwarks of bourgeois society: religion, marriage, and the family.

But it is in regard to political subjects that censorship is seen at its worst. I can do not better than quote from reports of the British Board of Film Censors. The board forbids films dealing with strikes, it forbids “stories and scenes which are calculated and possibly intended to ferment social unrest and discontent”; it forbids “scenes depicting the forces of order firing on an unarmed populace”; it forbids “stories showing any antagonistic or strained relations between white men nd the coloured population of the British Empire”… but there is not need to continue. These quotations, typical also of the attitude of Australian and other censorship authorities, show that the film has been suffering Fascist repression for years. It is not surprising that Capitalism should have enchained so powerful a medium; what is surprising is that it has been allowed to do so without protest from that body of opinion which has ensured some measure of intellectual freedom in literature. And here I am not attacking only social democrats, liberals, rationalists, and free thinkers; I cannot exempt Marxists from the charge of indifference.

But it is where Capitalism appears as an open dictatorship, as Fascism, that the fate of the film has been most tragic. Fascism has destroyed the artistic traditions of the German film, at its zenith an equal of the Soviet film. Such films as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari [Robert Wiene, 1920], Warning Shadows [Schatten, Arthur Robinson, 1923], Varieté  [Ewald André Dupont, 1925], The Last Laugh [Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924], Metropolis [Fritz Lang, 1925], Secrets of a Soul [Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1926], Die Dreigroschenoper [Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931], White Hell of Pitz Palu [Arnold Fanck, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929], Kameradschaft [Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931] are no more, and Germany’s finest film-artists have been exiled, including the greatest of them, Pabst.

Conclusion
Consider this art form, enchained by profit-making, bourgeois ideology and Fascist repression, and then turn to the films of Soviet Russia, where the film artist has something vital to express, and is able to express it with all the power at his command, by reason of his aesthetic background, his training, and his freedom to investigate the properties of his art; factors which have won for the Soviet film a pre-eminence recognised not only by Communists but by every bourgeois critic.

In conclusion, the fact that filmic expression is dialectic expression, that the film is the most powerful of propaganda media, that it has played a major part in Soviet Socialist construction – these facts demand that the film receives that intense study that has not yet been given to it by Communists outside the U.S.S.R., or by members of the M.U. Labour Club.

April-June, 1935

NOTES
[1] H.G. Wells, The King Who Was a King: An Unconventional Novel (Toronto: Gundy, 1929), p. 11.
[2] Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962), p. 131.