French film director Maurice Tourneur wrote this in Kinematograph Weekly in January 1924. It is one of many articles published in the British trade and daily papers in the early 1920s that addressed the question of whether cinema could be considered an art form or would only ever be an entertainment medium. In its earliest days the moving picture was primarily a working-class diversion usually exhibited in insalubrious surroundings, but by the First World War it had begun to attract a better class of patron as films became more sophisticated and cinemas and theatres took over as the principal venues to watch them in. This gradual movement upmarket was accompanied by calls for British cinema to develop along more artistic lines, though there were differing views about what that actually meant.

Voices were heard both from within the industry and from outside but the trade press took particular interest in the opinions of those who worked in the American film industry, presumably believing that they held the key to box office success. As a top-rung director in Hollywood since 1914, Tourneur's contribution to the debate was of particular interest to Kinematograph Weekly's readers, which almost certainly included Adrian Brunel.

Tourneur's views appeared just weeks before the release of Brunel's first feature but were in sharp contrast to his own. ‘Ours is an art before it is a business,’ Brunel had told Motion Picture Studio in 1922, adding, ‘look after the art and the pounds will look after themselves, for in the kinema, art pays’ (26 August 1922: 6). But while Brunel's theory was as yet untested, Tourneur's realisation that commercial imperatives excluded film from the arts had emerged through bitter experience. He had set up his own production company in 1918 to take his directing into a more artistic realm than the studios would permit. Under its auspices he made some lyrical features, among which The Blue Bird and Prunella (both 1918) stand out as heavily stylised, fairy-tale-like theatrical adaptations.