THE exhibition of British Film Art at the Victoria and
Albert merits a visit not only because it illustrates the immense labour involved in the making of a picture, but also because the exhibits are so delightful in themselves. Oliver Messel, Oscar Werndorff, Michael Relph, David Rawnsley, Laurence Irving are but a few of the artists represented, and even if the raison d'être were left out of it this would still be a first-rate collection of water-colours. The purpose of the exhibition, however, A not entirely aesthetic but rather designed to bring home to the uninitiated the fact that the price of a cinema-ticket is well and truly earned.
To each set, whether it be a drawing-room in Surbiton or a palace on the Nile, is given long hours of planning. The actual designs painted by artists are but a beginning. Blue prints, infinitely more detailed and to the lay mind hifinitely more confusing than those drawn up by architects. are then made and studied. Elevations, and sections filled with geometrical figures and hieroglyphs, followed by scale models and tabulated documentaries, complete the operation, and it is indeed a very marvel that at the finish of it all one sees photographs of quite ordinary things. V. G.
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