Cyril Cusack: If walls have ears and windows seem like eyes, the ancient oak panelling and leaded panes of this Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, where we are gathered by the courtesy of the learned Benchers, have stored up a memory of many a legal inquisition into strange territories of human thought and behaviour. If a tongue could be added to them, they could tell of very diverse causes heard and judgments given upon them. But surely they have seldom if ever witnessed a stranger occasion than this, when that very modem example of human ingenuity and skill, the Cinema, pleads its cause as an art through the medium of a medieval disputation. Such a subject might well seem very far removed from the thinkers of the middle ages and their method of enquiry might well appear ill-chosen to examine its claims. In the sphere of visuals it is surely a far cry from the modern film to the crabbed manuscripts and theological preoccupations of the thirteenth century.

Yet, after all, there is a certain fittingness in the occasion. The Cinema, with all that it stands for, is undoubtedly a great force in modern life, and opinion is very divided as to whether it is a force for good or evil, for the advancement of civilisation and culture or for its impeding and destruction. It is well, therefore, that it should be brought to the bar of judgement and, in that case, it is most fitting that its cause should be heard in this Old Hall of one of the oldest Inns of Court in this ancient city of London. For the Cinema is now on trial as to its claim to be an art, and even the highest form of art; and the canons of art, according to which it must be judged, are laws as firm and as ancient as the true laws of human behaviour.