49th Parallel DVD Notes
This is from the great British propaganda film 49th Parallel, which deals with Nazi U-Boat survivors trying to make it across Canada to get back to Germany. More entertaining than any action film I've seen all year. Far more witty, too. Michael Powell directed.
Here's notes from the Criterion Collection DVD Booklet, from a speech given by Michael Powelll on October 8, 1941.
"... We were working to make better films, and as they got better, we hoped to make them cheaper, because if too much money is involved, it isn't honest to experiment or take risks, and we all know that a creative art which fails to experiment is soon going to be dead. We accepted the fact of equal competition with American films, although over there the business is highly industrialized and is able to mass-produce a large quantity of films each year. It is to America that we owe our present high technical standards and the fact that the average persona expects his films as regularly as his meals, with the result that it has become the powerful medium that it is today. But we in England can never copy such production, nor have we got the huge public to guarantee such an outlay. Quantity should not be our goal but quality, individuality, reality. All these things are present in the best American films but only in the best, perhaps 50 films a year out of 500. Well, we can make 50 films a year in England, and we must see to it that we are competing in ideas and entertainment and freshness and guts with those 50 champions from Hollywood, not the 450 runners-up...."
There's more to this, but this is the key paragraph. Actually, the first sentence says it all.
Here's notes from the Criterion Collection DVD Booklet, from a speech given by Michael Powelll on October 8, 1941.
"... We were working to make better films, and as they got better, we hoped to make them cheaper, because if too much money is involved, it isn't honest to experiment or take risks, and we all know that a creative art which fails to experiment is soon going to be dead. We accepted the fact of equal competition with American films, although over there the business is highly industrialized and is able to mass-produce a large quantity of films each year. It is to America that we owe our present high technical standards and the fact that the average persona expects his films as regularly as his meals, with the result that it has become the powerful medium that it is today. But we in England can never copy such production, nor have we got the huge public to guarantee such an outlay. Quantity should not be our goal but quality, individuality, reality. All these things are present in the best American films but only in the best, perhaps 50 films a year out of 500. Well, we can make 50 films a year in England, and we must see to it that we are competing in ideas and entertainment and freshness and guts with those 50 champions from Hollywood, not the 450 runners-up...."
There's more to this, but this is the key paragraph. Actually, the first sentence says it all.
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