CINEMA AND EMPIRE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 93, 20 April 1932, Page 6

CINEMA AND EMPIRE.

Recently I was in Derby, on the north coast of West Australia. To get there is not easy; few people try (writes a correspondent in "The Times"). You see a jetty running out from the mangroves; a few houses achingly white in the sun; some baobab trees. Ships call now and then to take away cattle; drovers wander down to cash their cheques and go on the spree. A few score men, whose wives are plucky, live there, sighing for vegetables, grateful for books. Fine people. I give this sketch of Derby because it throws into higher relief a talk 1 had there —one so rich in fancy, so fruitful in ideas, so noteworthy in that place that three sentences from it prompt this letter. We were sitting outside the hotel (it was too hot- to go in) watching the sky flame behind the haobabs as the sun went down. One of us, like myself, was an Englishman, wearing a familiar school tie. 'He had just been to the Buccaneer Archipelago with his lugger and a black crew, hunting dugong, the sea cow. He asked me: "How can I market dugong oil? It's tho finest cure in the world for baldness!" Another was the publican, a Scotsman. He asked me: "Can you recommend any books which give the trend of modern philosophic thought?" The third was an Australian. He said to lis all: "The day is coming, if it has not already come, when the British film and the British talkie will mean more to the British Empire than the British Navy." I dealt with the questions as well as I could, but I think this statement demands more critics than four men in Derby, W.A. I have too much of the Navy in me to accept it willingly, but I feci uneasily that it may not be as wrong as I should like to think it is. The value of the comparison is arguable; but of the actual influence of the film there can be no question. It is disturbing. For nearly two years I have been wandering over a good deal of Australasia and part qi-fthe East. Everywhere is the picture theatre. It may be merely a shed, open to the sky, with films shown only when the camel or tho aeroplane can bring them; but its power for good or bad is constant. It is the seedbed of ideas. No close study of films and talkies is needed to convince one that the British point of view is neglected overseas. There is little enough shown with "home" as a setting; practically nothing of the Empire, that treasurehouse of colour and drama. Sentimentally this is a pity; politically it is a tragedy, for in this case "point of view" connotes standards, influence, trade. We might have a link as strong as the Press is now, as vivid as broadcasting is going to be. Instead of that link there is a patchwork qnilt.