VOGUE OF THE MOVIE

Evening Post, Volume 50, Issue 50, 27 August 1926, Page 7

VOGUE OF THE MOVIE

POSITION IN EUROPE TO-DAY

AMEEICA'S MASTERY OF THE

WORLD,

The detailed study of the film in Europe is less of value than of interest in itself; the value lies in the perspective it makes possible, in the relating of part to part and part to whole in the cinema, amj, above all, in the establishment of the position of America with regard to the film industries of the world. We are a little inclined to think in England—and who shall blame us"—that we have been made the exclusive dumping-ground c£ the American screen, writes C.A.L. in the "Manchester Guardian." A study of the other European countries will quickly reassure us on that score. The American film is everywhere, in Eome as it is in London, in Vienna as it is in Manchester, in Prague, in Paris, and in Stockholm too. It is a fact that has to be accepted: the movies of America have mastered the world.

America and the peace have hit film Europe hard. English production, which, if never prolific, was at least persistent, is powerless to support itself to-day. Swedish production is, for all practical purposes, dead. If people want to see films —as they x manifestly do —in Italy and Austria, Holland and Belgium, and Czecho-Slovakia, they havo to see American filmn because there are no other films to see. The Eussian cinema is alive but very young. The Trench cinema is occupied with films that are unsuitable for export and insufficient for home consumption, and in the interval has thrown open its doors to America without much regard of what the ond will bo. Germany alone has rallied enough to give any measure of protection to her own industry, to gather up her scattered forces and begin again. She is the only country that can provide herself and the rest of Europe with an alternative to the Stars and Stripes. She is looking forward. The other countries have shut their eyes, Britain among them. GERMANY'S FIGHT TO LIVE. It is very hard for us to realise, the majority of us, quite how insignificant wo are in the survey of the whole. To us it seems a tremendous disaster that British production should be dead, yet in fact it is no more disastrous than that Austrian or Italian or Swedish production should be dead, or that Russian production should have been only so lately born. We have never been more than the smallest part in the vast machine of the cinema. We have never mattered outside our own small film world. What is disastrous is not that we are as we are to-day, but that we steadfastly neglect to be what wo might be to-morrow. I am quito convinced, after a study, of the film conditions on the Continent, of the direction in which our safety lies. In spite of our past, in spite of our present, there might be a future for the British film if we swallowed our pride and came to a working alliance with the one country that has the quality to break through the American ring. Wo have the money—though it is not inside the industry—and the German cinema has the goodwill. We have tho treaties, and. Germany has the studios. We have the courage and Germany the power; we are independent and Germany is individual, and the time is coming when a general loosening of tho American grip on the theatres is going to makes these qualities a practical concern. Tho question of supremacy in the cinema is not a light one. The thing has got right under the skin of modern life. It belongs to the age, like jazz— belongs rightly to the age, and is busy shaping the next one, which will grow out of it and remake it. All across Europe and America the picture palaces stand in their thousands. The smallest village owns one. In the cities they are thick as flies—ugly, tawdry, pretentious, comfortable—each with its lurid posters, its frames of "stills," its triumphant "Oggi," or "Tousles soirs," or "Hier," or "Showing To-day." A EEAL LEAGUE OF NATIONS. . Whoever holds the key to the world's film trade holds the key to the popular mind. The movies are a real league of nations, a real fraternity of the common people. They speak a language that everyone can understand. They bring to every stranger in a new land the momentary sense of home. They set the imagination of every stay-at-home momentarily reaching out to strange peoples. They can ally, and they can incite to mischief, by workin on the relaxed mind of a million pleasure seekers. No one will dare to say, as ho passes from country to country, and finds the same picture houses, the same picture house methods, the same picture house audiences, the same picture house enthusiasms, that the movies are any longer a peep-show entertainment that wise men can afford to ignore.