Cinema is still looking for its language and is only now coming somewhere near grasping it. The cinema's progress towards self-awareness has always been hampered by its equivocal position, hanging between art and the factory: the original sin of its genesis in the market-place. The question of what constitutes the language of the cinema is far from simple; it is not yet clear even to professionals. Whenever we talk about the language of cinema, modern or otherwise, we tend to substitute a collection of the fashionable methods of the day, as often as not borrowed from the neighbour arts. We thus fall captive to the transient, chance assumptions of the moment. It becomes possible to say, for instance, that today 'the flashback is the cinema's last word', and tomorrow to declare just as presumptuously that 'any dislocation of time is finished in cinema, the tendency today is towards classical plot development.' Surely no method can of itself either date or be right for the spirit of the time? The first thing to establish must still be what the author means, and only then—why he has used this or that form. Of course we are not
discussing the wholesale adoption of well-worn methods—that comes under imitation and mechanical craftsmanship and as such is not an artistic problem.