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 Æsop'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.