When the Movies Come of Age

A Prophecy that Man's Greatest Conceptions of His Destiny May Some Day Appear on the Screen

RALPH BLOCK

IN the creative barrenness of the motion picture, Chaplin alone—impresario, creator, actor—has fringed the potentialities of the motion camera. The presentation of reality— remote, obscure, incomplete—its incompletions, its comedic absurdities, its accidental tragedies, its lack of pattern and its general aimlessness, is Chaplin's accomplishment, accompanied by a high, windy laughter that has its none-toohidden moments of desperation. Only time will develop in him and others, a more comprehensive art, general and not so personal, to give its audience more than the satisfaction of recognition when life, both interior and exterior, is thrust up before them by the motion picture.

The contemporary movement has obviously fallen short of any such objective. Its audiences have had day-dreams handed out to them; as in the novel and the theatre, its devotees have been supplied with an escape from reality, anodyned to the four harsh walls of existence, never sent back empowered to survive against it.

Once the motion camera is freed of the necessity of retelling Cinderella and Jack-the-Giantkiller it can use adequately its power for synthesizing motion to the vision.

Painting creates an illusion of perspective— space, volume—but its designs, no matter how potential-in suggestion, are static. The forms of sculpture are similarly still. Poetry and music are dynamic, Dionysian, but in themselves they give nothing to the satisfaction of the eye. The theatre alone combines these arts, in the play, the ballet and the pantomime. These have musical sound, speech, scenic perspective, and movement of objects in space against a background—all of these elements set in an organic design. But the projected art of the motion camera surpasses these effects of the theatre in an unique respect—it offers not only motion against a background but motion from background to background to background. It supplies a continuousness of motion which can be found comparably only in music.

Expressionism in the Cinema

IF life is a stream of becoming, never once achieved, motion is basic to its portrayal. The contemporary motion picture offers little more than a succession of still compositions of men and things against a still background. Sometimes these backgrounds borrow enough from painting and sculpture to suggest movement, but the composition of achieved rather than suggested movement is still to be accomplished. The relationship of scenes that flow into each other and out into other scenes affords an entirely new basis for the study of an integrating rhythm, a key of pulsation in which the entire urge of motion is to be set. Like music, such an art will make recurrent use of thematic repetition, as the basis of symmetry and essential to an art that takes form, not within one complete instantaneously defined setting but only in the constructing spaces of the imagination.

While the motion camera has been lackadaisical and slow in realizing its own capacities, the stage has not been behind-hand in taking advantage of elements essentially cinematographic. Expressionism in the theatre is related in a considerable degree to the cinema. Yet such continuousness, so convincing a picture of flowing consciousness as may be found in Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, cannot be found anywhere in the motion picture. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari devotes itself to an astonishing fluidity of design, but all this rests after all upon a conventionally well ordered mechanism of plot. Sumurun, called One Arabian Night when it was presented in America, was less devoted to rhythmic backgrounds than to a realization of the fluidity of the camera. Here the lens seemed to be a living thing, moving up and down and across and through space, reciting a plunging, tumultuous, mad narrative of rushing events.

The Loneliness of Subjectivity

THE showmen of an earlier day unwittingly possessed a medium which suggested movement of this kind. In the spherically constructed panoramas of The Battle of Gettysburg of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, not only events flowed in and out of each other in time and space, but space itself, caught and held in surfaces and forms, moved, changed, was translated and transvalued and recreated from point to point.

Abstract design, concentration to essential elements—all this is interesting and revealing only to a civilization that has a passion for finality. A time such as our own, freed from constructive necessity by the very frustration of its purposes, tends to discard the pleasures of objectivity. The strangely unified and coherent life of the mind itself, objectified at most only in modern music and painting, and to some extent in the other arts, is the passion of those who have waved their farewell to the passions and competitions of everyday human life. Yet an art solely preoccupied with such subtlety is condemned on its social side to loneliness and futility. It must go to life for warmth and strength.

Much sound and fury has been spent in our time on the validity of pantomime in the motion picture. In one sense the actor is successful only as he leaves pantomime behind. To crystallize all emotion in a set and inelastic alphabet of formulized motion is to make an art that is heavy, inexpressive and awkward. In another sense a pantomime, a sign language of the highest elasticity, will be necessary to give vitality to the future art of motion. It will concern itself with compressing a host of general human memories into a single one that is able to represent all of them. It will awaken cycles of epic memory with the essential sweep of the hands or lift of the eyes; balanced and patterned, it will call to mind all the large generalizations with which human beings dignify themselves in the great Inane.

Those artists who are born into a world familiar with the laws of a new art will find new vistas to inmost reality through it. There will be a Palestrina, doubtless, and in time a Bach, a Beethoven, a Wagner. The first scales and harmonies of motion will be simple: in time they will tend toward complexity, become contrapuntal, symphonic, and this development will go hand in hand with an enlarged capacity of the mind to grasp new patterns of motion, new chromatisms, and finally new harmonies and shattered tones. Hegel will again be justified.

This art, like all others, will swing ceaselessly between abstraction and reality, between classic form and the hidden symmetry of expressionism. Theatres will be revolutionized to suit these changes. The position of the audience will be modified to take the utmost advantage of crowd participation and reflected interior crowd reaction. Light, sound, heat, even atomic vibrations yet undiscovered, will be employed to heighten the attack upon the imagination, concentrated on the channels of the eyes. Life itself will be prefigured here to the eyes, whirled in and out of that maze which is existence, fused—men and things and places—into such a complete whole as only music has been able to offer; stating, declaring, establishing, disclosing everything in a frame of duration that becomes timeless.

What dramas may not.be reconceived out of the past, transvalued by this new instrument. Consider Faust—blown into vastness until it has become the terrifying picture of Man, alone with himself and an Antagonist he can never define,, never understand, never hate, always fear, and never completely defy. The Divine Comedy—the great fulness and great emptiness of man's fate, and aftermath! An art will be released to take the utmost advantage of all man's great conceptions of his destiny—Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Macbeth, all the implications of the drama of Christ—played in the depths of space and in a movement partaking something of the rhythm of creation itself.

An Instrument of Reality

IT will not be a windy art entirely. The dry humor of reality, even essentialized as we have it in Chaplin, will have its place. Most significantly, a modern and somewhat neurasthenic world will find in this flow of action, this instrument of becoming, a fitting carriage for what is imperfectly poured into James Joyce's Ulysses, A. La Recherche du Temps Perdu of Marcel Proust, the works of Dorothy Richardson, and to some extent the fluid novels of May Sinclair, and many imitators. Here will be reality, tragic-comedic, humorless, flat —with and without the inspired human attitude—heads, shoulders, torsos of a mad accidental world, moving with that absence of reason which is completely rhythmic. There are ghosts even today, the shadows which men cannot escape even under the shelter of their latest rationalization. Imagine the impalpable atmospheres of The Altar of the Dead dissolving in slow smoke on the silver screen—and the involved organism of a picture prose which even Henry James might in time have compounded for it. Or see translated for the vision the fatal echoes of a lost life hidden under the murmur of Tod und Verklarung.

There will be many to limit such an art; although it will be without limits. In time it may be honorable, which is not easy to conceive in this moment.