NEW FILM TECHNIQUES
By CYRIL RAY
TWO new films—one already being shown in London, one soon to be shown—are each the product of a new studio technique. Rope, made in Hollywood by Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, is, as was noted in The Spectator last week, the first to which he has applied his method of the "ten-minute take." (He has since made another in England, Under Capricorn, in the same way.) And Warning to Wantons, made for Mr. Rank at Pinewood, which is likely to be shown by the end of the year, will afford us an opportunity of judging the aesthetic advantages or disadvantages of " independent-frame " production. Its commercial advantages seem to be already established as considerable. An experimental film for children, Mr. Marionette, is still in production at Elstree, also for Mr. Rank. This carries experiment farther still by calling television in to help and supplement the movie camera. This may be the most important step of all.
Mr. Hitchcock's "ten-minute take" is easily explained and understood. A ten-minute-long sequence of film, instead of being made up of many tiny scenes, is filmed at one swoop. So were the sequences in the earliest films, when the camera was plonked down in front of a stage and ground steadily away, for the whole length of the film, at the stage-bound actors. Here, though, the camera and its attendant microphone are allowed to be almost infinitely mobile ; the " wild " walls and furniture of the set—pieces, that is, that can be moved at will—glide noiselessly out of the camera's way as it follows the actors' movement or films them from fresh angles, and then glide back again to meet the camera's eye as it returns.
It was claimed for this new technique that it would make for a
new smoothness and speed in the finished film, and a deepened sense of actuality. But it turns its back on Griffith's discovery, developed by Eisenstein and Pudovkin, that the breaking-up of a sequence into short takes, and their subsequent assembling—the cutting and editing of a film—can be the master creative act in its making. Mr. Hitchcock is a director of great talent, but he would seem here to have been attracted more by the technical interest of the new method, and its challenge to his ingenuity, than by the creative opportunities it offered. They are disappointed who had hoped that Rope would have something new to show for its experimental step backwards—and for the new demands made by the ten-minute take on actors an* studio craftsmen.
It seems doubtful—though figures not yet published could prove me wrong—whether the ten-minute take can make for cheaper
films ; against the shorter time spent on actual shooting has to be set the increased cost of " wild " sets and the greater time spent by the actors in rehearsal. The independent-frame system, on the other hand, has already been proved to be much cheaper than the costly confusion in which most British and American films are made at present. Warning to Wantons is said to have taken half the time, half the studio space, and cost less than half the money—to have been made in six weeks instead of twelve, and for £toopoo instead of some £2.5o,00o—that it would have taken without the independent frame. Independent frame is a system by which the background setting—the "frame "—of a film is divorced from the work of the actors and prefabricated, so that the players come under contract only when the film has been partly made, and when the director can concentrate entirely on their acting because he has already satisfied himself as to the setting. This new system requires inten- sive preliminary work on a pictorial script—an unanimated cartoon, as it were—as well as the marshalling beforehand of every technical device known to the cinema. The ultimate phase of production— when the actors take their place in the independent frame— requires a much greater, and a much more skilful, use of back- projection than we have been accustomed to.
"Special effects," under the new system, become the ordinary tools of prefabrication. Trickery and make-believe? Of course ; but films are make-believe, and the film has sometimes been at its imaginative best when the resources of the medium have been most fully exploited. There seems no doubt that the new system can bring the cost of films down by half—eventually by much more. Mr. David Rawnsley, its originator, sees the possibility of making films for about L25,000 apiece as against the present typical figure, for a British film, of £200,000. And this fact in itself means liberation to the art of the cinema. Under the present system of production, or lack of system, it is virtually impossible to make a film in this country that can recover the cost of its making without a nation-wide showing and a nation-wide acceptance—to make a film, in other words, than can afford not to appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste. If films can be made more cheaply they can be made for specialised audiences ; we can have "Third Programme" films. What is more, the independent frame can be used for versions of the same film in different languages ; first British players, then French, then Italian, can take their place in the frame, each with their own directors. The frame, in fact, can be made wherever it is cheapest, or easiest, or most suitable.
Mr. David Rawnsley, who has been Mr. Rank's adviser on research and development, has associated with him Dr. Richard Massingham, who, as an amateur and as a professional, has made some highly original and imaginative films, and Mr. Maurice Gorham, once of the B.B.C.'s television service. Mr. Gorham, in the trade Press, has been explaining how television can be used to carry the independent-frame sYstem to its logical conclusion. In this new method of film-production television cameras take the place of the motion-picture camera. The picture image is transmitted first to a control booth, where the director cuts and edits the film, as it is being made, before it passes to the laboratories to be recorded, in the ordinary way, on celluloid. By this means the director, instead of making his film in snippets, and losing control of it in the post- production phase of cutting and editing, is in control of it throughout ; it is, inrfact, cut and edited largely at the moment of its making.
There will, no doubt, be technical difficulties and artistic fumblings before the new system or combination of systems—ten-minute takes, independent frames, and direction by television—becomes fully absorbed into the tradition of film-production. But it seems certain that the cinema has reached as important a stage in its development as when sound-on-film arrived for good twenty years ago. And it seems certain, too, that this projected correlation of the techniques of film- and television-production is going to be of greater im- portance in the long run than any short-term commercial rivalry between television and the cinema.
It looks, in any case, as though this rivalry—the period of cold war during which British films, but not American, have been tele- vised in America; foreign films, but not British, in Britain—is coming
to an end. A new "agreement in principle" between the B.B.C. and the film interests will, if implemented, enable the B.B.C. to televise major British films and the cinsmas to show Alexandra Palace productions on their big screens—when, that is, big-screen television is beyond its present advanced experimental stage.
Once it is perfected, the bigger London cinemas may show, apart from the B.B.C. productions available to everyone, dramas enacted at their own nearby studios, " piped " to the screen by co-axial cable, a highly complicated, and expensive, form of land-line. Provincial cinemas will have to wait until a " scrambled " form of television can be devised to check piracy by private viewers ; a nation-wide network of co-axial cables, at £73 a mile, is out of the question.
It will be a long time, though, before television—as distinct from the film proper which has made use of television techniques in its making—provides more than a small part of a cinema's programme. We shall be broken in to the new kind of programme by means of immediate "live " newsreels. Television has some way to go yet, as a scientific device and as an art, before it takes over the "big picture."
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