Window on the world; Dr. Roger Manvell

The National Association of educational broadcasters in cooperation with the British Information Services presents a window on the world a tape recorded series of talks by eminent British citizens. This week our speaker is Dr. Roger Manville director of the British Film Academy. His subject the future of the film. Here now is Dr. Roger Mann bell. This is Roger Manvel speaking to you from the offices of the British Film Academy in London. Perhaps I will first of all to explain that the film academy here is rather like the many ways the film academy in Hollywood. It's essentially an organization belonging to the people who make all films. And we are concerned all the time to make the conditions for filmmakers better or to encourage them to understand the enormous responsibility that there is in making films at all and particularly this time when

television theirs is so important in people's homes. And when we have to encourage them and encourage them by making ever better films to leave their homes occasionally and turn off their television sets occasionally and go out into the open or into the movie theaters to see motion pictures the only way of course to do that is to make the motion pictures good. We are of course now I think after stage when you could say we have moved into the third revolution in movie. I mean by that that the first revolution was of course the movie itself when it was first discovered in so many different countries including of course the United States. Sixty years ago that was in itself a tremendous revolution. And then came sound at the end of the 20 years and that too was a tremendous revolution because the pictures up to sound have been rather like all fairy stories.

You've gone to the pictures and you've gone to the pictures as a deaf mute and you had sat there and you looked through a window onto a totally silent world. Now I know that we arranged to have music I know that we built up the emotions of the stories by having orchestras and pianos and so on going all the time that was sound of course but nonetheless the world looked at through the screen was a world that was still mysterious because it never talked to you. It was a world far apart. And then came sound and all of a sudden what came off the screen was real it was actual. The people became because they were talking at the same time as acting. They became people in whom It was impossible not to believe. They had to be extraordinary creatures if one couldn't believe in their reality they had to behave like lunatics. But for one didn't believe in their reality. And of course so many of the first sound of motion pictures were what we call hundred percent. Talk is they were mainly concerned to put

dialog across and to use theater plays on the screen to enable the actors to talk as much as possible because that's what people found with curiosity when the first talkies began. Curiosity lay in the fact that noises could be made that dialogue could be put across. And the idea of music went rather and into the background. But the important thing was that you could now make your characters real in the movie in the movie screenplays as distinct from the world of fantasy. From the silent days and now today we have the third revolution. Now I don't think that there's a third revolution is as fundamental as the coming of sound. I don't want to belittle it at all but I do want to make it clear that what we're dealing with now is merely the size and kind of picture that we have alongside our sound. It doesn't. A complete change in the nature of the movie.

It's a modification on enlargement of the sort of movie that we get. Now what's happened is you know two things. One that hasn't come off very well yet and the other that has come awfully well. The thing that's come off very well is writing the picture making it bigger because well with television in the background it seemed wise to make the picture in the movie theater a much larger and more grandiose than it had been on the what was called the old postage stamp screen. That was the first thing. The second thing was to try and make even more impressive. The relationship of the audience to that picture to pull them into the action on the screen even more then they had the chance to be in the past. Of course you know I know everybody knows that movie even in silent years because you could move your camera right inside the action on the screen. I did tend to make the audience feel they were

part of the show. When sound came sound increase that sense of taking part in the action being involved in the action particularly when the cutting was very quick and say in a fight scene you were suddenly found yourself almost dragged into into the into the fight yourself. That didn't involve this thing that's called audience participation. Now when white screen came that in that took that further it took it nearly made the audience feel they were even more embraced by the picture. You couldn't be embraced by a postage stamp but you can be embraced by a screen which curves right round your. As you sit here we say fairly far forward in the movie theater and cinema ROM of the first great wide screen system to be commercialized in the current time. So Iran aimed at involving you in the picture. Now I have heard it said and I don't know what is going to happen or not but I've heard it said

that the ideal behind the what we call the backroom boys I don't with you call them that they're the chaps who are really inventing these advances if we call them advances in motion pictures. That their aim is ultimately to provide us with a form of entertainment for which it is impossible for us not to identify ourselves. But the thing is going to happen all around us. Sound is going to be all around us the picture is going to be all around us. And as far as I can see we are going to be the chief actors in these films. I don't the audience will have no escape from the motion picture. Well that seems to me to be going absolutely too far because the more you make the picture. In the long run a complete reproduction of the physical world around us the less chance you give to the artist the director the writer the act to perform the magic of the drama.

Because we all go through this into the movie for entertainment we go to be transformed into another world to be taken. Sometimes we say out of ourselves and identified with the story with other people. The characters of the action. And there are two ways of doing that one is to capture our imagination which is what the filmmakers the great filmmakers have done up to now and the other is to take us physically by the hair and the ears and thrust us into the action. In this in the way the Senate does house in Iran I think it is a wonderful invention. It's wonderful actuality that is wonderful in those last shots of the first in Iran that will send Iran a program in which you're flying over the states and seeing seeing the world through the window of this all embracing camera. But what are its chances for drama. How far can it go with an

audience. How far can it risk frightening an audience out of their skins. How far can it risk so identifying the audience with the action that the only way in which you could have for example a situation in a thriller The moment of tension would be by taking the action as far away as possible from the audience instead of frightening them out of their skins. In other words the Imagination is more important in these new forms of cinema and the more one develops them in the direction of mere reproduction of real life and real sensations and so on the less chance you have. Of creating a fine rich imaginative drama with the money will be pushed back on many showing street scenes. Small scale action and things which on the whole are not going to be very exciting any more exciting than going out into the street. Now it's as it seems to me. That's the danger of it all. Not to let the medium get so out of hand that it becomes nothing but a reproduction of real life. Now in Britain here

we've tended to take more to for production purposes not exhibition for production purposes. The Vista vision then to Cinemascope there are many many theaters here showing the large wide screen cinema scope films and these are as you know on the whole spectacular films films not so much concerned with details of character but with big scale action. Now the only thing that is concerning me a little bit is that if we have the screens too big and have to load them with too much action that we're going to lose the ultimate appeal which lies behind or no dramatic entertainment with a movie all the life there or anywhere. And that is the appeal of human beings in the long run one doesn't want to look at Large numbers of gladiators destroying large numbers of other gladiators or innumerable Lions beating up innumerable victims. What one wants is a story about people we want to get close in on

their character and on their emotions and the way they act. I other words I'm thinking of are pictures just come over here from the States called Mateo which is to my mind of beauty I know it originated on television it's come to the movie screen and kept all the intimacy of character and wonderful acting and the feeling of being in a real place with real people which I think has been one of the great gifts of the old time movie a movie sound. I would like to lose that to television. You see I think ultimately air television is quite a different form of entertainment from the movie as we know it. TV's but at its best. When it's dealing with something that is actually happening now where we all know this there's nothing original in what I'm saying. But I think it's true and it's easy to forget it. That it's best when it's dealing with something now when it's dealing with the out what we call the outside broadcast that is when the cameras go out and pick up something that's actually happening when it's dealing with something like a discussion in the

studio or a quiz or a game or something in which living people are taking part. Now and when it turns to storytelling to drama I think the movie has it every time. No one can have fairly simple move is what you're made for television. And just show us the story in closeup but ultimately for once the detail and the care and the attention to qualities of acting. To the feeling for place and moving about in places those wonderful qualities that belong to what I call the old time movie. And I hope will be a movie of the present in the future as well. Then one needs the care of the production value as we call it which goes into the making of the real motion picture. That can be done on television at the present time there isn't the time there's money to make these careful studies of human beings which the great films American films British films

European Continental films from everywhere these films have done. That's the thing that I think Will's ensure that the movie survives in the theaters with the great artists and writers and directors as we have known that will survive alongside television. Living with it as a different and much more detailed and careful form of entertainment. You have been listening to Dr. Roger Mann vele director of the British Film Academy speaking on the subject. Future of the film. Listen next week when window on the world will present Mr. Frederick Lloyd general manager of the doily karte opera company. His subject Gilbert and Sullivan and early card this has been a tape recorded presentation of the National Association of educational broadcasters in cooperation with the British Information Services. This is the NOAA E.B. Radio Network.