But Is It Art?
I
THE question has been asked before.
Years and years ago, when Mary Pickford was just Gladys Smith and the prince of pantomime was ‘doing’ the London halls with Fred Karno, D. W. Griffith was thinking it over, hopefully. And certainly there have been movies, now and then, that deserved an affirmative answer. But technique has never yet stood still long enough to get the question finally disposed of. Now we have sound, — such lots of it! — with color on the way. Mass entertainment becomes more massive, its finances more gigantic, its publicity machine more formidable, day by day. Radio, linked up with the movies and what is left of vaudeville, has now captured almost the entire concert management business; and here is the R C A-Rockefeller combination building what it calls ‘a city of art: a city of artists and educators, whose lives are devoted solely to producing æsthetic enjoyment, entertainment, and education to all the people on a national or even world-wide scale. It seems almost like the impossible dream of art enthusiasts through the centuries suddenly come to life.’ Almost — but not quite. The question still is open. Is it art?
Who cares? I do. And who am I? I am one of many thousands of people — thousands, mark you, Mr. Movie Producer (though I suppose mere thousands are nothing to you) — who have learned somehow to know good from bad, true from false, in more things than clothes, food, and tobacco. You will find us everywhere — from college classrooms and faculty clubs to the fur trades, the hat trades, the needle trades, of New York, Rochester, Chicago, Cincinnati, and points west.
I admit you have the aces — as a class, we are not rich; but other trades than yours find us worth cultivating. We buy a good many books, and keep a steady pressure on the libraries for those we can’t afford. We fill the cheaper seats wherever good drama is showing or good music is being played, and if ever you have municipal opera in New York, we are the people who will most steadily (and critically) support it. Go to the Stadium concerts or the Metropolitan gallery if you don’t believe me.
As a class, we are not highbrow. We are not socially important enough to make discrimination a disguise for snobbery. We read detective tales by the bushel (and how we have jacked up their quality, by the way!) along writh Thomas Mann and Artsibashev; we like our Amos ’n’ Andy, know real jazz from imitation, and visit the Burlesque on a bellyful of beer and sauerkraut when we can get it. I think you would feel at home with us, Mr. Movie Producer — or you would have done so ten years ago, before you took yourself and your bank account so seriously. For what we want is not so much the &3230;sthetic — that term has an anæmic sound to modern ears — as the real, the significant, the vital. And to us most of what you offer is as dead as last Sunday’s mutton.
Perhaps that is as good a working definition of art, for this day and age, as one could get — the real, the significant, the vital. But it puts you, Mr. Producer, in a rather difficult position. For here you are with a technique — a very skillful technique — that is essentially, in your view, a reproduction; and how can any mere reproduction, no matter how good, be made to fit within that definition? The painter does not ‘reproduce’ a landscape, nor the poet a slice of experience. But movie technique in America seems determined to become an imitation of an imitation, a reproduction of a reproduction. As such, I am willing to grant, it may have a quite legitimate function. It can supplement the newspaper with the news reel, — the one makes about as much appeal to thought as the other, — and it can disseminate over a very wide field some knowledge of successful stage plays. That is something.
But it is not enough. Even from the box-office point of view, it is not enough. There is a considerable section of the public that demands more — demands, in fact, that the cinema move toward the status of an independent art in America as it is doing elsewhere. In order to achieve that status, begin that movement, cinema must fulfill the prerequisite that applies to all art in any medium whatever: namely, the discovery of something to say, and a way of saying it, uniquely fitted to the particular means of expression. The rule holds good without exception for any technique whatsoever — from soap in sculpture to Wilfrid Thomas and his color-organ or Stravinsky and the ballet.
In the light of that criterion, the basic trouble with American cinema is that it has nothing to say. And having evolved no vision of its own, suited to its own unique potentialities, it goes shopping around for things to say that have already been said in other techniques. Sometimes — as in Holiday, Street Scene, and Five Star Final — it succeeds in saying them over again extremely well. But hardly ever does it put its resources to work on genuine movie material. It was learning to do so, with encouraging results, up to about four years ago. But then came sound, and set it back almost where it had started.
The development of the silent picture in eliminating the tedious and ridiculous captions and telling a true story of movement in direct and often beautiful picturization was full of promise. Chaplin and Fairbanks had brought their technique to a point at which it really became an art form. The Thief of Bagdad may well have recalled to theatregoers the thrill that swept over London twenty years ago when Reinhardt brought Sumurun to the Coliseum, with the inimitable Constantin. And then King Vidor, in The Crowd, fulfilled — though in a very different fashion — Griffith’s early dream of the mass drama; fulfilled it, despite the frequent false notes, in a fashion that can stand beside the best of Ufa or Sovkino and will probably remain unequaled in America for decades.
But the accession of sound set the whole industry back upon the wrong road — the road of imitation. Drama never got anywhere along that road, and neither — as an art — will the movie. The more it succeeds, the more it will fail.
When one sees a play one is never, one is not supposed to be, unaware that it is a play. It enacts itself under certain well-understood conditions, conventions, and limitations, out of which — out of these very conventions and limitations — the dramatist builds his art form. But the movie has no such accepted conventions and limitations save the one of black and white which it is trying hard to abolish. A movie kiss may not be immoral, but is nearly always offensive. It is more offensive than a stage kiss, since we are never in danger of forgetting that the stage kiss is stage, whereas the movie is always trying to make us forget that it is movie. It tries all the time to persuade us that it is life, to palm itself off as a slice of reality. Sound, as Hollywood uses sound, has encouraged it in this meretricious endeavor; with the result that a technical innovation of great importance has actually proved an impediment to the development of a genuine art.
II
Here we have a special case of a general and very interesting problem — the relation of technique to art in an age of applied science. In the thirteenth century there was no such problem — for the simple reason that technique was almost entirely manual. The same disciplines which led to mastery of technique led also in the direction of what technique was for. We do not find competent technique along with base design or ignoble aim; because training in workmanship was also, in the nature of the case, training in art. The master craftsman was not ‘at a loose end’ in the use of his craft; for, though it would be too much to say that even then technique and purpose were the same thing, they grew together out of the same stem and flowered together in execution and intention. The social pattern of work organization reflected the integration of process, product, and purpose.
It was true then, as it has always been, that great achievements need the support of accumulated wealth; workmen must be fed, housed, and cared for while their product is far in the future — whether or not that product is ultimately to be the means of taking back from the community more than was advanced to the workpeople. But the accumulated wealth which sustained the workpeople in the great ages of art was not seeking returns of a financial nature; and from that fact the workpeople derived an advantage largely denied to workpeople of to-day. The patronage which sustained them stood for an idea with which they could do something, instead of an idea with which they can do nothing — a purpose which enlisted their allegiance to a degree far beyond that which terminates with the pay envelope. It is no doubt well-intentioned of Mr. Smith to exhibit the portraits of the steel workers at the entrances of the Empire State Building; but neither publicity nor the size of the pay envelope can compare as an incentive with that mediæval idealism which tapped the vein of power at so much deeper a level. The struggle of a modern corporation to earn its dividends does not provide the artists in its service with ‘something to say’ in the sense in which the nature of their enterprise furnished an æsthetic programme to the mediæval craftsmen.
Similarly, among the workpeople themselves, the social pattern — based, when you come to think of it, on the fact that technique was manual — afforded safeguards for art itself that later disappeared. It is true that guild organization was eventually subverted by wealth and nepotism to a point at which it had to die a violent death. But in its proper time that organization reflected the characteristic fact of mediæval production — the fact that the same disciplines which led to mastery of technique led also in the direction of what technique was for. ‘I cannot help believing,’ says Mr. G. G. Coulton, in his Art and the Reformation, ‘that the generality of men were no more artistic then than they are now; and that, if they did not show the frequent modern preference for thoroughly bad art, it was because there was no thoroughly bad art for them to choose. The apprenticeship and guild system, which hindered the highest flights of all, rendered impossible the vilest lapses.’ If we look at the matter from a contemporary standpoint, that, after all, appears more than a little!
Our modern problem arises with the application of large-scale methods of production of all sorts, and especially with the coming in of the new spirit by which those methods were encouraged and directed — the spirit which Catholics ascribe to the Reformation, and Protestants to the Renaissance. Whether that spirit widened the economic gulf between rich and poor is debatable. There was certainly no innovation about the fact that it was still concentrated wealth that provided the chief opportunities for art. But there was novelty in the means by which wealth might be concentrated. There was, above all, novelty in the preposterous doctrine that the employment of wealth simply to produce more wealth constituted virtue before God and man. Contentious as might be the theology of the Incarnation, art had found centuries of inspiration in the idea of the Nativity. It could do nothing with Benjamin Franklin’s idea of ‘money begetting money.’ The new idea has become just as universal as the old; it happens to be an idea that is no good to the artist. Why is it no good to the artist? Because, philosophically considered, it has no meaning.
But in compensation for this loss of catholicity in its message, it is sometimes said, art has been ‘socialized’ through the reproductive power of machinery. The fallacy is tempting, but patent. The fact that machine technique turns out tons or thousands where manual technique could produce only pounds or dozens does not mean that art is being socialized. For art lives in men’s minds, or nowhere; and you cannot make good the impairment of men’s minds by surrounding them with larger quantities of things. Any bit of Gothic carving, poor and unique though it be, represents a more truly socialized art than a victrola record. The very imperfections of Colonial furniture speak a language that is lost in the modern factory. We need not deny that there are also gains involved in the transition. But whether they are compensatory gains is still an open question,
III
It is, however, in the development of technique itself that the significance of the change comes out most clearly. Under machine technique it is no longer generally true that the disciplines which lead to mastery of the technique lead also in the direction of what technique is for. Training in workmanship is no longer, generally speaking, training in art.
There are cases in which the continuity of technique and purpose still obtains, and it is these cases that constitute the real art of our time — hough we do not usually think of them in that way. The modern locomotive, the automobile, the aeroplane, the dynamo; the feats of civil engineering, especially the great dams; the instruments of the astronomer and the physicist — here are cases where mastery of technique still means mastery of design, where execution and intention run together, and the product sings with the old integrity of workmanship fully informed of purpose from the start. Above all, the battleship — the one image of our time that can rouse the populace as could a Gothic portal in the age of faith. Whether these things are great art raises questions of ultimate intention that we must leave aside; but at least they fulfill the conditions under which art must always be produced. If architects were steelworkers, in the same sense in which the builders of locomotives and battleships are engineers, architecture too might be more than a question mark.
But over a wide field that was once the domain of art the divorce of technique from purpose has raised a scries of problems. Nor, indeed, over that field alone: the same disintegration is manifest in other social controls than that of art — the business of credit, for example. Here too, much to our cost, we find that knowledge of technique can be acquired without wisdom in its application, and that ‘ money begetting money’ as an ultimate purpose is not even safe. So, most conspicuously, in the pseudo-arts that science itself has created — radio and the movies. Here again we have impressive technical development which does not of itself convey any hint of proper function or worthy purpose. The mediæval mason could not carve his stone without some conception of what was fitting in design and what the stone was for. The copyist, even if he was no monk, but merely a paid scribe (and sometimes very poorly paid), had, in the nature of his work, purpose and function. For the glassworker, design was technique, technique design, and function the governor of both. So with woodworker and smith, armorer and lapidary, poet and musician. But in the ‘arts’ born of science, technique gives no adequate lead to purpose. Radio gives us a machine that will faithfully convey — anything you like; to the technician, as such, political blah and Beethoven symphony are all the same.
Recently a friend of mine, an expert photographer, went out in a London taxi at midnight, testing a new supersensitive film. He shot five hundred feet of it on ordinary street scenes, and every bit was overexposed! Magnificent achievement of technique! — but what to do with it when you have it? Technique as such has no more to say; technicians as such have no more to say. And in the absence of the direct lead from technique to ultimate function, function becomes the uncontested quarry of the money motive, dictated by the patrons of technique — the money-makers. Within these pseudoarts the artist has no natural status; if he would enter at all, it must be as an outsider who has to fight or compromise in an almost single-handed battle. The advantages that science has bestowed on his technique are more than offset by the severity of the struggle he has to make for his own spiritual integrity. And it is ironic that this struggle is most severe in just those fields that should give him his fullest opportunity — radio and the cinema.
IV
The proximate aim in both these fields is that of entertainment — partly because this is the one proximate aim thoroughly consistent with the ultimate idea of ‘ money begetting money,’ partly because the controllers are genuinely unable to envisage, or to compass, anything else. And the first thing to be said about it is that entertainment is not enough. It is not an adequate policy by which to deal with the common people. It is not even safe. After all, it has been tried before on a still grander scale. It killed the Latin drama much as it is killing the English, together with what there was of music and poetry, and it helped to kill Roman civilization itself. ‘All the resources and appliances of material civilization were mobilized to produce spectacles on a scale which the world has never seen before or since, and the net result was, from the point of view of culture, less than nothing.’
‘Ah, but,’ say the money-makers, ‘our entertainment is moral!’ The movie industry points to the pontifical jurisdiction of the Hays organization, with its production code of negative maxims and its lists of previewing organizations ‘endorsing’ pictures whose one claim to approval is that they do not conflict with the prejudices of really ‘nice’ people. What more could anyone want?
Again, the first thing to be said is that morality — this sort of morality — is not enough. Morality of this negative generalized kind needs frequent and vigorous challenging if it is not to degenerate into the lukewarm messiness of people who never indulge in a good drink, a cold bath, or an honest quarrel. All it amounts to is a rude procedure for assuring that the mass of people shall never be startled into thinking seriously, for holding the popular mores as stationary as possible in a world which is in every other respect changing rapidly. Bad taste, false sentiment, and downright vulgarity abound in endorsed pictures — to say nothing of the unendorsed pictures which go merrily on. The one stipulation is apparently that the cinema shall confirm the comfortable conviction that mass ideology is the best of ail possible faiths, and that people who interfere with it are either villains per se or misguided innocents with whom a Hollywood providence will deal sternly in the last reel. The European movie, technically inferior as it often is to the American, is far more stimulating, because it is free both to deal seriously with important social issues and to make fun of things in general — including such sacrosanct affairs as marriage and divorce. The American movie, its system clogged and constipated with a sticky diet of stale ideas, has rendered itself almost incapable of either good drama or good farce.
The case of Mr. Dreiser and Mr. von Sternberg is illuminating. It might well have been doubted whether the essential values of An American Tragedy could possibly be translated into a moving picture; but $138,000 is a lot of money, and Mr. Dreiser assented to having the effort made. Here is what he thinks — with good reason — of the result: The novel is ‘an indictment of our social system,’ and the film is a ‘gross misrepresentation.’ ‘Instead of the picture presenting a universal psychological theme, it tells a specific story of a murder; instead of an indictment of society, the picture is a justification of society and an indictment of Clyde.’ And here, most illuminating of all, is a letter which the industry publishes officially as proof of its slogan that ‘the objectionable becomes unobjectionable ’: ‘ When I heard this picture was to be made I rather regretted it, as I felt the book was not of sufficient value to be brought before the public. The picture has made me change my mind.9
Current movie ideology is illustrated even more vividly by two press extracts reproduced side by side in the Motion Picture Monthly—the official organ of the Hays office. One states the opinion of the Presbyterian, a church publication from Philadelphia: ‘We saw Skippy, which is making its appeal to children. To us it was not funny and was utterly wrong in its general philosophy, and also presented a sickly sentimentalism on the part of silly parents.’ The other is an editorial comment from the Press of Houston, Texas: ‘When Skippy threw himself on the bed with his little heart seemingly broken, and when a little girl in front of me cried over the death of a dog in the picture, I was not ashamed that I had to wipe something from my eyes also. I like to see such pictures presented in Houston.’ Will it be believed that the industry thinks it has proved the value of the film by printing these two extracts side by side? One would like to hear the candid comments of any half-dozen Hollywood producers on Skippy and the sentimental editor.
After all, it is not as if Hollywood or Mr. Hays were consumed with a burning fire of conviction as to the finality of common taste or morality. The situation would be more hopeful if they were — somebody might undertake to cure them, and there would be an issue in the air. Mr. Hays was put in to drag the industry out of a mess, and stays in (very expensively) to keep it on the right side of the politicians and the bank ledgers. The result is that the American movie, considered as a whole, has nothing to say; and the public, this past two years, has been showing on that account a perceptible loss of interest in it.
It is matter, therefore, for serious consideration whether it would not be worth while, both for the industry and for the public, to scrap the entire line of tactics and propaganda pursued by the Hays organization and encourage producers to go ahead and produce whatever they like. Undoubtedly there would be some risk involved — some pornography, in short. But there would remain, not merely the police, but an increasing number of people in the industry itself concerned to take it seriously and stop abuse. And there might be a good deal gained, for a reason suggested earlier in this article, which the reader may now care to consider.
V
The movie industry, even in America, is at last beginning to develop an independent technique. It has been slow to do this because its principal interest hitherto has been, not the technique of the cinema, but the technique of ‘money begetting money.’ The power, however, of a purely technical interest in the cinema as such is asserting itself in numerous small groups or individuals scattered about the country, and to some extent even in Hollywood; and it is from technique, if from anywhere, that salvation may come.
By this I mean that if the American cinema, or any considerable part of it, can move forward from the point at which it is merely the commercial exploitation of an ingenious machine to the point at which it regards that machine as a necessary incidental in the practice of a genuine technique of the cinema as such, — a new means of expression, — then that technique itself may push its practitioners forward into a position in which they will be compelled to find something significant to say. A genuine cinema technique will (or rather may) of itself demand theme and subject matter that are significant in the social and philosophical, as well as in the artistic, sense. This is possibility, not certainty. And even as possibility it presupposes certain essentials: freedom for the producer, and an outlet to the public (which may have to be specially devised); freedom from the mob ideology inculcated by the Hays office and the financial interests; selection of theme and subject purely from the cinema point of view — not from a desire to exploit, for financial reasons, any new craze, story, news topic, or reputation. But there is this much as prima facie encouragement for such a forecast: the films which have won lasting recognition as worth while, in the larger sense, are in most cases those in which a genuine cinema technique has been most nearly approached.
To take an early example, D. W. Griffith was one of the first men in America to strive for the development of a cinema technique that should be more than mere photography, or cinephotography. He developed not only spectacle (artificial, in his case), but the visual leitmotif, some intelligent use of the close-up, and an elementary montage; he realized, too, the emotional power of the visual sequence. Mr. Griffith would be the first to testify that his desire to do these things — to achieve what he called the mass drama — compelled him to search for material that would sustain them; and the result was that the famous Griffith films had something to say — something not very profound or original, perhaps, something that reflected in certain ways his personal prejudices, but something significant as far as it went.
Again, the moments of greatness that King Vidor has achieved are precisely those in which his technique has been nearest to pure cinema; his moments (or half hours) of failure are precisely those in which he falls back on mere story, star, or mob sentiment to carry his film along. Mr. Flaherty’s film, just because it is so often real movie, conveys something profoundly suggestive to thought and imagination. Chaplin’s work, precisely because it is so nearly pure cinema, constitutes a commentary on life that defies expression in any other medium. In Europe the documentary film is full of promise — the film in which actual subject matter is used simply on the basis of its suitability to cinema expression. The result is in many cases a challenging, yet almost unconscious, comment on civilization.
Let me state here that I purposely avoid discussion of the revolutionary cinema of Russia. That cinema has from its very nature something significant to say; and its tremendous incentive gives it a corresponding æsthetic advantage. Its outlook is far more hopeful, and its essential problem far simpler, than that of the American cinema. Similarly I make my acknowledgments to the revolutionary groups in this country and in England, especially to the editors of Experimental Cinema. — groups which have come to demand a radical change in social control and philosophy. They may be right in their contention that there is no redeeming the popular cinema without such change. I will go so far as to say that it looks that way at present. But I am trying here to outline a position which makes the fewest possible demands, which starts as near as possible to existing American circumstances. And, with that in mind, the best hope I can discern lies in an increasing preoccupation with cinema technique — in the development, that is to say, of an attitude in which all that science can give is taken for granted, and its appliances fall increasingly into the control of men concerned with cinema expression as such. Then, I suggest, it may once more be true that mastery of technique will lead also in the direction of what technique is for.
VI
The reader, if (like the writer) he is a pure outsider in this business, needs at this point to understand somewhat more definitely what is meant by the technique of the cinema; especially in those respects in which it is different from the technique of the camera. The vast mass of American movies are still mere photography — good, when they are good, only in a mechanical sense. The usual American film is built of what is supposed to be popular subject matter, — story, play, novel, revue, any old thing, — plus star, plus a few camera tricks and bits of camera prettiness tied together in a desperate effort to amuse the thirteenyear-old mind. (As a matter of fact, much of it is an insult to even the thirteen-year-olds. I have two, and I know it.) The thesis here advanced applies to it, therefore, only so far as an increasing interest in the cinema itself can win its way against all the other pressures and motives.
Cinema consists of three elements — image, movement, sequence; and a little thought about each of them in turn can put the layman in a position to understand at least the elements of the discussion.
Image: a photograph in a rectangular frame; a photograph of something seen. There are so many different things to see, and so many people to see them! And we all see such different things in the same objects, the same people — do we not? If anyone could show me your world exactly as you see it, — even if it consists of pretty much the same things, the same people, as my world, — I might learn quite a lot about you. And then suppose you are a farmer and I a city clerk; or suppose you are on the crest of the wave, and I in the trough of some misfortune or obsession — what different things we shall see in each other’s worlds! Here is one possibility of camera work in the hands of a director (like Alexander Room) who can get inside people’s minds, and give you his characters by giving you their world as it is to them.
Next take the case everybody has encountered — the case of the artist, sweating and suffering to show you the things he sees in your world for no other reason than because he must. Still photography is being used to do this, not only in Germany but in America, in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston and other pioneers. The significance of things — that is what such men are after, not mere prettiness. To see their work is an event; something happens to the spectator, even if it is only a shock, a challenge to the visual understanding. If you cannot see their work, look at a Cézanne or a Van Gogh still life — especially at Van Gogh’s ‘Kitchen Chair.’ Here, indeed, is more than the camera can ever do; but the effort to grasp the peculiar kind of significance that such work attains wall convey an idea of what image may be. The essence of it cannot be translated, though a whole metaphysic may be built around it.
Now consider the appearances of things as they may come to a philosophic or reflective mind; the sort of mind that, seeing them for what they are, sees them at the same time in a certain mood, a certain temper, a certain key — the key of compassion, let us say, or irony, or fatalism, or, if that is possible, sub specie æternitatis. This is the order of vision that we meet in Eisenstein, in Chaplin, sometimes in King Vidor — this personal impersonality, this effort to convey through the image a certain way of apprehending things, a certain sense of life. And remember that at one moment your vision may be almost completely filled with some quite small thing, — an ink bottle, a fly, a hand (this is the justification for the close-up), — while at the next it may take in the contours of an entire landscape, an entire city; also that the camera can see more than the eye can see — farther down, and higher up, as it were. Observe, too, that in all this we are taking for granted all the technical accomplishments of the camera as such, — depth, chiaroscuro, stereoscopic effect, composition in the frame, camera angle, distortion, and so on, — and feeling our way forward toward a use of them which shall give us an idea of what these things are for.
Movement, and the rhythm of movement: the event. Let me say briefly (though it is, I think, the most æsthetically important of all these pointers) that all that is true of image — all — is in the same way true of the event. The cinema is much closer to the event than the stage — let anyone who doubts it read George Arliss’a amusing account of his first cinema experience in Up the Years from Bloomsbury. I would ask the reader to apply, bit by bit, what has been said above of the image to the concept of the event; for this is one of the fundamental and unique properties of true cinema. The work of Pudovkin shows it in an intense degree; Pommer and René Clair use it effectively, though in quite other keys. Then the rhythm of movement — of gesture, of crowds, of machinery; of traffic, of the sky, of the waves — here is something that cinema can handle and control to its own purposes, sometimes in the object itself, always in the instrument. And here again we have a technique that begins where photography leaves off, and leads — or may lead — of itself in the direction of what technique is for.
Sequence: the succession of images and events, not all in the same tempo, the same key, or the same degree of realization. That is visual life, that is cinema. Here is an illuminating quotation: ‘The possibility that the great master did not realize the erroneous relationship of the sizes is quite out of the question. He rejected naturalism quite consciously, and while every detail separately regarded is constructed on the principle of the most concentrated naturalism, their combination in the general composition is subordinated solely to the problem of content. He took as his normal proportions the quintessence of psychological expressiveness.’ The passage refers, not to a cinema artist, but to the eighteenthcentury Japanese engraver, Sharaku; and it is quoted from Kurth’s monograph by Eisenstein in a recent issue of Experimental Cinema. Eisenstein adds: —
‘Is not this exactly what we of the cinema do in time, as he in simultaneity, when we cause a monstrous disproportion of the elements of a normally flowing event, dismembering it. . . . By the combination of these monstrous incongruities we gather up the disintegrated event once more into one whole, but in our aspect. According to our treatment in relation to the event.’
That brings the reader into contact with what I am tempted to call the metaphysics of montage — montage being the deliberate ordering of sequence in film image and event, looking toward the final totality of effect.
I take another, perhaps easier, analogy from the writings of the pianist, George Woodhouse. Woodhouse, taking the Tannhäuser ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ as a familiar example, asks, In what does the music really consist? It is not simply in the melody. It is not in the rather uninteresting chords, taken as chords. The music is what happens in between the chords, happens in the listener’s mind; the music is in the sequence. From the tension established in the mind, subsisting and developing through the succession of auditory impulses, arises a whole that is more than the sum of the parts — that is, in short, Wagner’s music. Along such lines advanced workers in the cinema are developing their own visual-temporal art — an art that is only just struggling into the Hollywood consciousness. And again, it turns out to be a technique that may, of its own momentum, push the film forward into the realm of meaning.
VII
That the development in America of cinema technique may lead in the direction of really significant art is but a guess; but in view of the circumstances it seems the best guess possible. The present financial motivation of the industry imposes on it a double handicap: the advance toward a genuine cinema technique is retarded, and the results of that technique sincerely and courageously used are discountenanced. Sincerity and courage are not among the virtues known to the Hays office. Yet neither of these handicaps is inherent even in private financial control. Movies everywhere are commercial except in Russia; but even from the commercial point of view it pays better to aim high than to aim low. The American cinema for many years has based its policy upon the appeal to the mob mind. It is now paying the penalty — the financial penalty — of having done so. It is likely to go on paying that penalty for a long time without even the consolation of being able to lay the blame upon the trade depression. For the simple fact is that people are easily surfeited with that sort of entertainment. So long as new shocks, new stunts, can be produced every week, idle curiosity may sustain interest; but the shocks and the stunts become more and more expensive as they become less and less effective, and eventually the public is seized with apathy while the industry is in the grip of financial elephantiasis.
That is the present position. The public has reached the point at which all movies and all movie stars begin to look alike; and it will not take the trouble to distinguish the good films from the bad ones. As a matter of fact, the industry has produced some of the best narrative films ever made anywhere within the past year or so. But it has gone on so long advertising bad work and good work alike in shrieking superlatives that the appeal no longer ‘registers.’ We have heard it all so often before.
If the movie industry were to consult the librarians as to what people read in America, it might get some inkling of its own mistake. Apart from the phenomenal success in this country of such authors as Dewey, Wells, Russell, Jeans, Eddington, the tremendous improvement within the past decade in the quality of popular novels, detective stories, and the writing in the big weeklies is worth pondering by the commercial producers. America is not so completely tabloidminded as Hollywood thinks it is. Thousands upon thousands of quite ordinary people have so often paid their money to sit in darkness for a couple of hours and have their senses and their intelligence simultaneously affronted that not even the industry’s most frantic advertising will now lure them within reach of a box office. The industry has aimed for years too low, and the public has awakened to the fact before Hollywood. It does not pay to libel half a nation. In the long run, art (or the nearest you can get to it) is a better investment than claptrap.
We are not yet ready to admit — at least, the writer is not — that the only hope for art lies in social revolution. If the Russian cinema is on the whole the finest, that is not because of, but in spite of, the fact that it is propaganda. Its strength lies in its freedom from the stupid fetishism of ‘money begetting money,’ in its freedom to concern itself with life that is real in place of life that is sham. It might be even stronger were the hand of the state less heavy upon it. For it is less likely that revolution will foster art than that art will foster revolution; and there is no general validity in either theorem. All that can be said is that art will gravitate toward that system in which it finds the greater freedom. Poor and dangerous is the state of that nation in which the search for riches involves the enslavement of the arts.
This is not generally the case of America. Whatever else may be said of America, it cannot be accused of unfriendliness toward the arts. Here is the possibility of a new art, born out of science, which may with luck and courage (invincible combination!) enable American society to look itself in the face as never before, and perhaps — who knows? — discern some nobler destiny upon its forehead than ‘money begetting money.’ Why should not the industry use its own powers of finance and publicity, its control of distribution and exhibition facilities, in order to keep its output worthy of a people that still claims to be both free and progressive? It has everything — including perhaps a few dollars — to gain, and, heaven knows, little enough to lose. Or must this become yet another case where private charity has to be called in to rescue culture from civilization?