Excerpt from Film Forum Review
Taken as a whole, the past four issues of Film Forum Review constitute a catalog of films selected for adult discussion purposes. Some of the films are old, some are new; some were made in the United States, some in other countries; the common element they share is that they are all available here at this time, and that they have certain discussion values. The 1947 issues of Film Forum Review, then, have lasting value as a reference catalog for adult discussion leaders.
To keep this catalog practical and useful, Film Forum Review will continue reviewing films as they are released, (and it will catch up on some of the films which were screened too late for publication in the special issue, and on some films which were not available for screening at the proper time during the past year.) Each quarter, some thirty or forty films will be reviewed in Film Forum Review, as they have been in the past year. However, they will not be grouped into special issues. Each issue will have reviews on all the new films of that quarter. The reviews will refer back to films published in the special issues, and their relative merits and failures should be always weighed with respect to other films within the same general subject-matter framework.
Major Findings
Judging from catalog descriptions of the 500 films we screened, it could be expected that all of them would have been valuable as adult discussion aids. The number of films found acceptable or better - 176 - is astonishingly low. And of that number only 83 fell in the Recommended and Highly Recommended categories.
The trouble with most of the films was that they were not produced specifically for adult education. Consequently, our job was that of identifying those that could reasonably be adapted for adult discussion from among all the films currently distributed.
Out-of-dateness was a major factor in disqualifying or limiting the usefulness of a large proportion of the films we screened. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that many of the films still in circulation were made during wartime to meet problems which were based in specific wartime situations. Other defects in the films screened were immaturity and incompleteness in presenting the problems inherent in the subjects they were concerned with. Another large number of films were considerably weakened by their failing to make good use of the film medium as a means of communication.
Three major types of production sponsorship can be identified among the films we have reviewed. They are governmental, organizational, and theatrical sponsorship.
Governmental Sponsorship
Seventy-five of the films we have reviewed were produced under governmental sponsorship of one kind or another. Of these 30 came from Canada, 20 from Great Britain, 19 from the United States, and six from other countries. In view of the fact that Canada and Great Britain have extensive film-producing programs, it does not seem remarkable that so substantial a number of films should come from these sources.
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