The Art Of The Moving Picture written by Vachel Lindsay
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Vachel Lindsay >> The Art Of The Moving Picture
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15 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE
By
VACHEL LINDSAY
Intended, First of All, for the New Art Museums Springing Up All over the
Country. But the Book Is for Our Universities and Institutions of
Learning. It Contains an Appeal to Our Whole Critical and Literary World,
and to Our Creators of Sculpture, Architecture, Painting, and the
American Cities They Are Building. Being the 1922 Revision of the Book
First Issued in 1915, and Beginning With an Ample Discourse on the Great
New Prospects of 1922
"Hail, all ye gods in the house of the soul, who weigh Heaven and
Earth in a balance, and who give celestial food."
From the book of the scribe Ani, translated from the
original Egyptian hieroglyphics by Professor E.A.
Wallis Budge
Dedicated
TO GEORGE MATHER RICHARDS
IN MEMORY OF THE ART STUDENT DAYS WE SPENT TOGETHER
WHEN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM WAS OUR PICTURE-DRAMA
CONTENTS
A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE DENVER ART ASSOCIATION
BOOK I
THE GENERAL PHOTOPLAY SITUATION IN
AMERICA, JANUARY 1, 1922, ESPECIALLY AS
VIEWED FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE CIVIC
CENTRE AT DENVER, COLORADO, AND THE
DENVER ART MUSEUM, WHICH IS TO BE A
LEADING FEATURE OF THIS CIVIC CENTRE
BOOK II
THE OUTLINE WHICH HAS BEEN ACCEPTED AS
THE BASIS OF PHOTOPLAY CRITICISM IN
AMERICA, BOTH IN THE STUDIOS OF THE
LOS ANGELES REGION, AND ALL THE SERIOUS
CRITICISM WHICH HAS APPEARED IN THE
DAILY PRESS AND THE MAGAZINES
CHAPTER
I. THE POINT OF VIEW
II. THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION
III. THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY
IV. THE MOTION PICTURE OF FAIRY SPLENDOR
V. THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR
VI. THE PICTURE OF PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR
VII. THE PICTURE OF RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR
VIII. SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION
IX. PAINTING-IN-MOTION
X. FURNITURE, TRAPPINGS, AND INVENTIONS IN MOTION
XI. ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION
XII. THIRTY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PHOTOPLAYS AND THE STAGE
XIII. HIEROGLYPHICS
BOOK III
MORE PERSONAL SPECULATIONS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS NOT BROUGHT
FORWARD SO DOGMATICALLY
XIV. THE ORCHESTRA, CONVERSATION, AND THE CENSORSHIP
XV. THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON
XVI. CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA
XVII. PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT
XVIII. ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS
XIX. ON COMING FORTH BY DAY
XX. THE PROPHET-WIZARD
XXI. THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD
A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE DENVER ART ASSOCIATION
The Art of the Moving Picture, as it appeared six years ago, possessed
among many elements of beauty at least one peculiarity. It viewed art as
a reality, and one of our most familiar and popular realities as an art.
This should have made the book either a revelation or utter Greek to most
of us, and those who read it probably dropped it easily into one or the
other of the two categories.
For myself, long a propagandist for its doctrines in another but related
field, the book came as a great solace. In it I found, not an appeal to
have the art museum used--which would have been an old though welcome
story--not this, but much to my surprise, the art museum actually at
work, one of the very wheels on which our culture rolled forward upon its
hopeful way. I saw among other museums the one whose destinies I was
tenderly guiding, playing in Lindsay's book the part that is played by
the classic myths in Milton, or by the dictionary in the writings of the
rest of us. For once the museum and its contents appeared, not as a
lovely curiosity, but as one of the basic, and in a sense humble
necessities of life. To paraphrase the author's own text, the art museum,
like the furniture in a good movie, was actually "in motion"--a character
in the play. On this point of view as on a pivot turns the whole book.
In The Art of the Moving Picture the nature and domain of a new Muse is
defined. She is the first legitimate addition to the family since classic
times. And as it required trained painters of pictures like Fulton and
Morse to visualize the possibility of the steamboat and the telegraph, so
the bold seer who perceived the true nature of this new star in our
nightly heavens, it should here be recorded, acquired much of the vision
of his seeing eye through an early training in art. Vachel Lindsay (as he
himself proudly asserts) was a student at the Institute in Chicago for
four years, spent one more at the League and at Chase's in New York, and
for four more haunted the Metropolitan Museum, lecturing to his fellows
on every art there shown from the Egyptian to that of Arthur B. Davies.
Only such a background as this could have evolved the conception of
"Architecture, sculpture, and painting in motion" and given authenticity
to its presentation. The validity of Lindsay's analysis is attested by
Freeburg's helpful characterization, "Composition in fluid forms," which
it seems to have suggested. To Lindsay's category one would be tempted to
add, "pattern in motion," applying it to such a film as the "Caligari"
which he and I have seen together and discussed during these past few
days. Pattern in this connection would imply an emphasis on the intrinsic
suggestion of the spot and shape apart from their immediate relation to
the appearance of natural objects. But this is a digression. It simply
serves to show the breadth and adaptability of Lindsay's method.
The book was written for a visual-minded public and for those who would
be its leaders. A long, long line of picture-readers trailing from the
dawn of history, stimulated all the masterpieces of pictorial art from
Altamira to Michelangelo. For less than five centuries now Gutenberg has
had them scurrying to learn their A, B, C's, but they are drifting back
to their old ways again, and nightly are forming themselves in cues at
the doorways of the "Isis," the "Tivoli," and the "Riviera," the while
it is sadly noted that "'the pictures' are driving literature off the
parlor table."
With the creative implications of this new pictorial art, with the whole
visual-minded race clamoring for more, what may we not dream in the way
of a new renaissance? How are we to step in to the possession of such a
destiny? Are the institutions with a purely literary theory of life going
to meet the need? Are the art schools and the art museums making
themselves ready to assimilate a new art form? Or what is the type of
institution that will ultimately take the position of leadership in
culture through this new universal instrument?
What possibilities lie in this art, once it is understood and developed,
to plant new conceptions of civic and national idealism? How far may it
go in cultivating concerted emotion in the now ungoverned crowd? Such
questions as these can be answered only by minds with the imagination to
see art as a reality; with faith to visualize for the little mid-western
"home town" a new and living Pallas Athena; with courage to raze the very
houses of the city to make new and greater forums and "civic centres."
For ourselves in Denver, we shall try to do justice to the new Muse. In
the museum which we build we shall provide a shrine for her. We shall
first endeavor by those simple means which lie to our hands, to know the
areas of charm and imagination which remain as yet an untilled field of
her domain. Plowing is a simple art, but it requires much sweat. This at
least we know--to the expenditure we cheerfully consent. So much for the
beginning. It would be boastful to describe plans to keep pace with the
enlarging of the motion picture field before a real beginning is made.
But with youth in its favor, the Denver Art Museum hopes yet to see this
art set in its rightful place with painting, sculpture, architecture, and
the handicrafts--hopes yet to be an instrument in the great work of
making this art real as those others are being even now made real, to the
expanding vision of an eager people.
GEORGE WILLIAM EGGERS
Director
The Denver Art Association
DENVER, COLORADO,
New Year's Day, 1922.
BOOK I--THE GENERAL PHOTOPLAY SITUATION IN AMERICA, JANUARY 1, 1922
Especially as Viewed from the Heights of the Civic Centre at Denver,
Colorado, and the Denver Art Museum, Which Is to Be a Leading Feature of
This Civic Centre
In the second chapter of book two, on page 8, the theoretical outline
begins, with a discussion of the Photoplay of Action. I put there on
record the first crude commercial films that in any way establish the
principle. There can never be but one first of anything, and if the
negatives of these films survive the shrinking and the warping that comes
with time, they will still be, in a certain sense, classic, and ten years
hence or two years hence will still be better remembered than any films
of the current releases, which come on like newspapers, and as George Ade
says:--"Nothing is so dead as yesterday's newspaper." But the first
newspapers, and the first imprints of Addison's Spectator, and the first
Almanacs of Benjamin Franklin, and the first broadside ballads and the
like, are ever collected and remembered. And the lists of films given in
books two and three of this work are the only critical and carefully
sorted lists of the early motion pictures that I happen to know anything
about. I hope to be corrected if I am too boastful, but I boast that my
lists must be referred to by all those who desire to study these
experiments in their beginnings. So I let them remain, as still vivid in
the memory of all true lovers of the photoplay who have watched its
growth, fascinated from the first. But I would add to the list of Action
Films of chapter two the recent popular example, Douglas Fairbanks in The
Three Musketeers. That is perhaps the most literal "Chase-Picture" that
was ever really successful in the commercial world. The story is cut to
one episode. The whole task of the four famous swordsmen of Dumas is to
get the Queen's token that is in the hands of Buckingham in England, and
return with it to Paris in time for the great ball. It is one long race
with the Cardinal's guards who are at last left behind. It is the same
plot as Reynard the Fox, John Masefield's poem--Reynard successfully
eluding the huntsmen and the dogs. If that poem is ever put on in an Art
Museum film, it will have to be staged like one of AEsop's Fables, with a
_man_ acting the Fox, for the children's delight. And I earnestly urge
all who would understand the deeper significance of the "chase-picture"
or the "Action Picture" to give more thought to Masefield's poem than to
Fairbanks' marvellous acting in the school of the younger Salvini. The
Mood of the _intimate photoplay_, chapter three, still remains indicated
in the current films by the acting of Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford,
when they are not roused up by their directors to turn handsprings to
keep the people staring. Mary Pickford in particular has been stimulated
to be over-athletic, and in all her career she has been given just one
chance to be her more delicate self, and that was in the almost forgotten
film:--A Romance of the Redwoods. This is one of the serious commercial
attempts that should be revived and studied, in spite of its crudities of
plot, by our Art Museums. There is something of the grandeur of the
redwoods in it, in contrast to the sustained Botticelli grace of "Our
Mary."
I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet,
Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh. I am the one poet who wrote them songs when
they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen,
or the name of their director. Woman's clubs are always asking me for
bits of delicious gossip about myself to fill up literary essays. Now
there's a bit. There are two things to be said for those poems. First,
they were heartfelt. Second, any one could improve on them.
In the fourth chapter of book two I discourse elaborately and formally on
The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor. And to this carefully balanced
technical discourse I would add the informal word, this New Year's Day,
that this type is best illustrated by such fairy-tales as have been most
ingratiatingly retold in the books of Padraic Colum, and dazzlingly
illustrated by Willy Pogany. The Colum-Pogany School of Thought is one
which the commercial producers have not yet condescended to illustrate in
celluloid, and it remains a special province for the Art Museum Film.
Fairy-tales need not be more than one-tenth of a reel long. Some of the
best fairy-tales in the whole history of man can be told in a breath.
And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a
reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film
tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director. Remember
the brevity of Lincoln's Gettysburg address....
And so my commentary, New Year's Day, 1922, proceeds, using for points of
more and more extensive departure the refrains and old catch-phrases of
books two and three.
Chapter V--The Picture of Crowd Splendor, being the type illustrated by
Griffith's Intolerance.
Chapter VI--The Picture of Patriotic Splendor, which was illustrated by
all the War Films, the one most recently approved and accepted by the
public being The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Chapter VII--The Picture of Religious Splendor, which has no examples,
that remain in the memory with any sharpness in 1922, except The Faith
Healer, founded on the play by William Vaughn Moody, the poet, with much
of the directing and scenario by Mrs. William Vaughn Moody, and a more
talked-of commercial film, The Miracle Man. But not until the religious
film is taken out of the commercial field, and allowed to develop
unhampered under the Church and the Art Museum, will the splendid
religious and ritualistic opportunity be realized.
Chapter VIII--Sculpture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument
of chapter two. The Photoplay of Action. Like the Action Film, this
aspect of composition is much better understood by the commercial people
than some other sides of the art. Some of the best of the William S. Hart
productions show appreciation of this quality by the director, the
photographer, and the public. Not only is the man but the horse allowed
to be moving bronze, and not mere cowboy pasteboard. Many of the pictures
of Charles Ray make the hero quite a bronze-looking sculpturesque person,
despite his yokel raiment.
Chapter IX--Painting-in-Motion, being a continuation on a higher terrace
of chapter three, The Intimate Photoplay. Charlie Chaplin has intimate
and painter's qualities in his acting, and he makes himself into a
painting or an etching in the midst of furious slapstick. But he has been
in no films that were themselves paintings. The argument of this chapter
has been carried much further in Freeburg's book, The Art of Photoplay
Making.
Chapter X--Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion, being a
continuation of the chapter on Fairy Splendor. In this field we find one
of the worst failures of the commercial films, and their utterly
unimaginative corporation promoters. Again I must refer them to such
fairy books as those of Padraic Colum, where neither sword nor wing nor
boat is found to move, except for a fairy reason.
I have just returned this very afternoon from a special showing of the
famous imported film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Some of the earnest
spirits of the Denver Art Association, finding it was in storage in the
town, had it privately brought forth to study it with reference to its
bearing on their new policies. What influence it will have in that most
vital group, time will show.
Meanwhile it is a marvellous illustration of the meaning of this chapter
and the chapter on Fairy Splendor, though it is a diabolical not a
beneficent vitality that is given to inanimate things. The furniture,
trappings, and inventions are in motion to express the haunted mind, as
in Griffith's Avenging Conscience, described pages 121 through 132. The
two should be shown together in the same afternoon, in the Art Museum
study rooms. Caligari is undoubtedly the most important imported film
since that work of D'Annunzio, Cabiria, described pages 55 through 57.
But it is the opposite type of film. Cabiria is all out-doors and
splendor on the Mediterranean scale. In general, imported films do not
concern Americans, for we have now a vast range of technique. All we lack
is the sense to use it.
The cabinet of Caligari is indeed a cabinet, and the feeling of being in
a cell, and smothered by all the oppressions of a weary mind, does not
desert the spectator for a minute.
The play is more important, technically, than in its subject-matter and
mood. It proves in a hundred new ways the resources of the film in making
all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act at all,
the leading actors in the films. But they need not necessarily act to a
diabolical end. An angel could have as well been brought from the cabinet
as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have been a work
of beneficence and health and healing. I could not help but think that
the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could have been
acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case and great
sarcophagus. The wings of Isis and Nephthys could have been spread over
the sky instead of the oppressive walls of the crooked city. Lights
instead of shadows could have been made actors and real hieroglyphic
inscriptions instead of scrawls.
As it was, the alleged insane man was more sensible than most motion
picture directors, for his scenery acted with him, and not according to
accident or silly formula. I make these points as an antidote to the
general description of this production by those who praise it.
They speak of the scenery as grotesque, strained, and experimental, and
the plot as sinister. But this does not get to the root of the matter.
There is rather the implication in most of the criticisms and praises
that the scenery is abstract. Quite the contrary is the case. Indoors
looks like indoors. Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs.
The actors do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to
believe. The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for
the most part expressed in the acting and plot. The fair looks like a
fair and the library looks like a library. There is nothing experimental
about any of the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or
over-considered. It seems experimental because it is thrown into contrast
with extreme commercial formulas in the regular line of the "movie
trade." But compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or
Du Lac or Duerer, or Rembrandt's etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more
realistic. And Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions
of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter. Hundreds of indoor stories
will be along such lines, once the merely commercial motive is
eliminated, and the artist is set free. This film is an extraordinary
variation of the intimate, as expounded in chapter three. It is
drawing-in-motion, instead of painting-in-motion. Because it was drawing
instead of painting, literary-minded people stepped to the hasty
conclusion it was experimental. Half-tone effects are, for the most part,
eliminated. Line is dominant everywhere. It is the opposite of vast
conceptions like Theodora--which are architecture-in-motion. All the
architecture of the Caligari film seems pasteboard. The whole thing
happens in a cabinet.
It is the most overwhelming contrast to Griffith's Intolerance that could
be in any way imagined. It contains, one may say, all the effects left
out of Intolerance. The word cabinet is a quadruple pun. Not only does it
mean a mystery box and a box holding a somnambulist, but a kind of
treasury of tiny twisted thoughts. There is not one line or conception in
it on the grand scale, or even the grandiose. It is a devil's toy-house.
One feels like a mouse in a mouse-trap so small one cannot turn around.
In Intolerance, Griffith hurls nation at nation, race at race, century
against century, and his camera is not only a telescope across the plains
of Babylon, but across the ages. Griffith is, in Intolerance, the
ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron,
and since he is the first of his kind I, for one, am willing to name him
with Marlowe.
But for technical study for Art Schools, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is
more profitable. It shows how masterpieces can be made, with the
second-hand furniture of any attic. But I hope fairy-tales, not
diabolical stories, will come from these attics. Fairy-tales are
inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times
hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not
willing to stop to tell them. Lillian Gish could be given wings and a
wand if she only had directors and scenario writers who believed in
fairies. And the same can most heartily be said of Mae Marsh.
Chapter XI--Architecture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument
about the Splendor Pictures, in chapters five, six, and seven. This is an
element constantly re-illustrated in a magnificent but fragmentary way by
the News Films. Any picture of a seagull flying so close to the camera
that it becomes as large as a flying machine, or any flying machine made
by man and photographed in epic flight captures the eye because it is
architecture and in motion, motion which is the mysterious fourth
dimension of its grace and glory. So likewise, and in kind, any picture
of a tossing ship. The most superb example of architecture-in-motion in
the commercial history of the films is the march of the moving war-towers
against the walls of Babylon in Griffith's Intolerance. But Griffith is
the only person so far who has known how to put a fighting soul into a
moving tower.
The only real war that has occurred in the films with the world's
greatest war going on outside was Griffith's War Against Babylon. The
rest was news.
Chapter XII--Thirty Differences between the Photoplays and the Stage. The
argument of the whole of the 1915 edition has been accepted by the
studios, the motion picture magazines, and the daily motion picture
columns throughout the land. I have read hundreds of editorials and
magazines, and scarcely one that differed from it in theory. Most of them
read like paraphrases of this work. And of all arguments made, the one in
this chapter is the one oftenest accepted in its entirety. The people who
dominate the films are obviously those who grew up with them from the
very beginning, and the merely stage actors who rushed in with the
highest tide of prosperity now have to take second rank if they remain in
the films. But most of these have gone back to the stage by this time,
with their managers as well, and certainly this chapter is abundantly
proved out.
Chapter XIII--Hieroglyphics. One of the implications of this chapter and
the one preceding is that the fewer words printed on the screen the
better, and that the ideal film has no words printed on it at all, but is
one unbroken sheet of photography. This is admitted in theory in all the
studios now, though the only film of the kind ever produced of general
popular success was The Old Swimmin' Hole, acted by Charles Ray. If I
remember, there was not one word on the screen, after the cast of
characters was given. The whole story was clearly and beautifully told by
Photoplay Hieroglyphics. For this feature alone, despite many defects of
the film, it should be studied in every art school in America.
Meanwhile "Title writing" remains a commercial necessity. In this field
there is but one person who has won distinction--Anita Loos. She is one
of the four or five important and thoroughly artistic brains in the
photoplay game. Among them is the distinguished John Emerson. In
combination with John Emerson, director, producer, etc., she has done so
many other things well, her talents as a title writer are incidental, but
certainly to be mentioned in this place.
The outline we are discussing continues through
_Book III--More Personal Speculations and Afterthoughts Not Brought
Forward so Dogmatically_.
Chapter XIV--The Orchestra, Conversation, and the Censorship. In this
chapter, on page 189, I suggest suppressing the orchestra entirely and
encouraging the audience to talk about the film. No photoplay people have
risen to contradict this theory, but it is a chapter that once caused me
great embarrassment. With Christopher Morley, the well-known author of
Shandygaff and other temperance literature, I was trying to prove out
this chapter. As soon as the orchestra stopped, while the show rolled on
in glory, I talked about the main points in this book, illustrating it by
the film before us. Almost everything that happened was a happy
illustration of my ideas. But there were two shop girls in front of us
awfully in love with a certain second-rate actor who insisted on kissing
the heroine every so often, and with her apparent approval. Every time we
talked about that those shop girls glared at us as though we were robbing
them of their time and money. Finally one of them dragged the other out
into the aisle, and dashed out of the house with her dear chum, saying,
so all could hear: "Well, come on, Terasa, we might as well go, if these
two talking _pests_ are going to keep this up behind us." The poor girl's
voice trembled. She was in tears. She was gone before we could apologize
or offer flowers. So I say in applying this chapter, in our present stage
of civilization, sit on the front seat, where no one can hear your
whisperings but Mary Pickford on the screen. She is but a shadow there,
and will not mind.
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