III.

On November first, 1915, at Springfield, Illinois, Vachel Lindsay signed

a book on _The Art of the Moving Picture_. The last chapter was called

“The Acceptable Year of the Lord.” From having seen forecastings in

photoplay hieroglyphics the children in times-to-come can rise and say:

“This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears”:

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of

exquisite films, sects using special motion pictures for a

predetermined end, all you who are taking the work as a sacred

trust, I bid you God-speed. Consider what it will do to your

souls, if you are true to your trust.... The record of your

ripeness will be found in your craftsmanship. You will be God’s

thoroughbreds.

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the

whole earth changes. In after centuries its beginning will be

indeed remembered.

It has come, this new weapon of men, and by faith and a study of

the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial

wonder.

This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my

hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate

Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are

architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after

thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”

Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving

picture has come to be a parasite on them.

Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin.

Meunier has moved us too. Also Monolo and Fagi. Now comes Lindsay: “I

desire for the moving picture not the stillness but the majesty of

sculpture.... Not the mood of Venus de Milo, but let us turn to that

sister of hers—the great Victory of Samothrace”.

... I have seen much of Lindsay’s advice followed word for word since

this book of his was published. Tyrone Power in _The Dream of Eugene

Aram_. Power’s face and figure were more majestic on the stage than in

this picture. There was a “sculpture-group,” as you would call it, in

this picture—a farmer and two squires on a hilltop. It was in

silhouette, a _sketch_ and not sculpture. The nearest I have seen to the

majesty and immobility of sculpture, marble or otherwise, was the head

of William S. Hart in _The Aryan_. The picture was shadowed so as to

center on his poetic face, the fascination of which none but Forbes

Robertson’s has. Hart’s face on the screen, his eyes looking into the

eyes of you, at his throat a handkerchief of white—a bust by an artist

indeed! But the shadows parted, and the hieroglyphic-crowded background

came into view. Hart’s head moved, became part of a _moving picture_ and

sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it _moved_....

“Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a

public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one

thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its

look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and

makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture?

Frank Lloyd Wright has models in plaster of some of his

buildings—“modern” skyscrapers, hotels, and homes, growing, rising

upward, white and beautiful. It was these works of architecture which

called forth the phrase “flowers in stone”. He alone, it seems, has made

art of architecture in our day. He objects to Lindsay saying his art can

be that of moving pictures; its very literalness, its actualness being

the very negation of the soul and constitution of art. In _The Dumb Girl

of Portici_ the Smalleys, as inspired as any of the producers, used the

entire Field Museum in Jackson Park, Chicago, as a background for a

pageant of Italian royalty, of the middle ages. Insisting on

architecture can spoil pictures. It did this one.

Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the

theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes

fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again.

Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of

naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves,

will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck

dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life

across life? I have seen it in the moving-picture only in the flight of

gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees and the

sea; in short—nature. But nature is nature. The painter’s art!

Botticelli’s _Spring_, or _The Birth of Venus_—pictures containing the

essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us

this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there

_are_ artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know

nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with

his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has

this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the

_color_ as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that

live.

The rest of this might be entitled: “An open letter to Vachel Lindsay”,

for it is “not so dogmatically set forth” and is mere man-to-man talk.

I have seen most of your suggestions swallowed whole by moving-picture

makers.... Your hieroglyphics idea—well, James Oppenheim was an

accomplice in that. “On Coming Forth by Day” or your suggestion to use

the Book of the Dead—a Chicago woman, the patient, too-patient,

beautifully reverent Lou Wall Moore has been working for years on an

adaptation of one of the books which, when it does appear on the stage,

will have more rhythm and terrible swiftness than ever your moving

picture could, the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most

magical of all, the voice:

Priest: Men pass away since the time of Ra

And the youths come in their stead.

As Ra reappears every morning

And Tum sets in the west,

Men are begetting and women conceiving;

Each nostril inhales once the breeze of the dawn;

But all born of women go down to their places.

As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or

rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the

“midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people

standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the

morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and

variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I

wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by

these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano

stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture.

(The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that

the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the

silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing

and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re

off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here:

business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night;

salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant

maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen;

newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of

leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of

the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each

other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get

“woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time”

gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation.

But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of

night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the

aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock,

has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated

women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces

the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing

in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law,

Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the

audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?

Your educational film also I have seen applied. _Saved From the Flames_

worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches

a lesson. So does _The Human Cauldron_—your own phrase, I believe, taken

from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done

with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane

in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t

save _The Raven_ from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.

Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come

forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne

D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park:

this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular

priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be

no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly

Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ

was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John

the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a

personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If

you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You

recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you

realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to

affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and

you are still rhyming about a hill top.