Transparencies on Film

Abstract

Children when teasing each other in their squabbles, follow the rule: no fair copycat. Their wisdom seems to be lost on the all too thoroughly grownup adults. The Oberhauseners attacked the nearly sixty-year old trash production of the film industry with the epithet: "Daddy's Cinema." Representatives of the latter in turn could come up with no better retort than "Kiddy's Cinema." This cat, as once again the saying goes among children, does not copy. How pathetic to pit experience against immaturity when the issue is the very immaturity of that experience acquired during the adolescence of the medium. What is repulsive about Daddy's Cinema is its infantile character, regression manufactured on an industrial scale. The sophistry of the defenders insists on the very type of achievement the concept of which is challenged by the opposition. However, even if there were something to that reproach if films that did not play along with business really were in some ways clumsier than the latter's smoothly polished wares then the triumph would be pitiful. It would only demonstrate that those supported by the power of capital, technological routine and highly trained specialists could do better in some respects than those who rebel against the colossus and thus must necessarily forego the advantages of its accumulated potential. In this comparatively awkward and unprofessional cinema, uncertain of its effects, is inscribed the hope that the so-called mass media might eventually become something qualitatively different. While in autonomous art anything lagging