THE CINEMA
The Birth of a Nation. New London Film Society.—Wonder Man. Leicester Square Theatre.—Plnk String and Sealing Wax. Tivoli and Marble Arch Pavilion.
THE New London Film Society's revival of The Birth of a Nation provides a background against which contemporary work stands in a revealing perspective. Here is David Wark Griffith in 1915 com- bining melodramatic excitement and the dignities of history, and doing it with an assurance never since to be excelled. The student of films will find close-ups, moving camera shots, cross-cutting and many other cinematic devices which have now become common- place technical items. But most important of all is the overriding attempt to use the principal attribute of the cinema its mobility of scene. For D. W. Griffith knew that he was dealing with moving pictures. And what has happened since? Certainly we have become more sensitive to the political implications of a film's content. The glorification of the Klu Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, the film's bitter racial prejudice, would these days lead to protest and demonstration. Yet to balance this healthy vigilance have we not become too ready to accept the static scene where words and not pictures provide any raison d'être that may be present?
Among this week's new films there is more of the essential quality of cinema to be found in Wonder Man than in Pink String and Sealing Wax. For though the first is nothing more than a farce designed to display the facial antics of Mr. Danny Kaye, at any rate his face is in steady and constant motion, whilst Pink String and Sealling Wax is prone to static theatricalism. It is true that in the latter film Mr. Mervyn johns and Miss Googie Withers con- tribute outstanding performances and Mr. Duncan Sutherland's period sets are deserving of high praise, but no screen melodrama
of an Edwardian poisoning can surely afford long periods of inertia. The villainies must be mobile. Mr. Kaye of Wonder Man is an endearing comic presented with a patchy and unbalanced plot.
What can be said of Brief Encounter, now that time enough has elapsed for second thoughts on what is clearly a major achievement? Certainly the Coward film has static periods. In listening to a radio broadcast of excerpts from the sound track, one was conscious that the visual image often is an inessential adjunct. Yet even in the film's wordier sections, the visual is so unobtrusively appropriate as to give the sense of a complete mastery of the medium. To the realism of the excellent dialogue the camera adds the pictorial detail most likely to reinforce it. No extravagant " subjective " camera angles, no " interpretative " movements of the camera, but a sim- plicity of technique in keeping with the story of three commonplace people finding a dramatically unspectacular solution to a common- place situation. A plain triangle of frustrated love. Yet the result of the reticent treatment is that ordinary hidden beauty is revealed in simple things like shyness, or running from sheer excitement, or discovering a shared joke, or loneliness, things normally unequal cc the cinema's stridences. In short, Brief Encounter owes its success largely to the normal inadequacies of films. It is a familiar yet ludicrous contradiction that the cinema, which has its origin in the camera's power to represent life, should so rarely do so.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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