The Art of the Moving Picture

by Vachel Lindsay, Stanley Kauffmann (Contributor), Kent Jones (Contributor)

"In the field of film aesthetics, it is the first important American work, still important--The Art of the Moving Picture is astonishing."
--Stanley Kauffmann

Written in 1915, The Art of the Moving Picture by poet Vachel Lindsay is the first book to treat movies as art. Lindsay writes a brilliant analysis of the early silent films (including several now lost films). He is extraordinarily prescient about the future of moviemaking--particularly about the business, the prominence of technology, and the emergence of the director as the author of the film.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Criticism, Art, History

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1915

About the author

Vachel Lindsay was an American poet responsible for pioneering modern singing poetry. His most famous work is "The Congo" which clearly exhibits his focus on sound in his poetry, using onomotopeia to imitate the pounding drums and chants of Congo's indigenous people.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and entertaining early example of film appreciation and criticism by the outstanding american poet Vachel Lindsay, first published in 1915 and later adjusted and slightly extended in a second edition in 1922.

It is an exploratory study of the art of photoplays or what are now called silent, black and white motion pictures. Curiously for us now, Linday proposes the following film genres: action, intimate, fairy splendor, crowd splendor, patriotic splendor and religious splendor. Lindsay develops some rudimentary aesthetic principles for each of these genres, taking pains to show how and why photoplays differ from stage plays -in one key chapter he lists thirty differences between them. These essential differences are what make it impossible to successfully transfer many stage plays, particularly those of Shakespeare or Ibsen, to the silent screen:

The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt's Camille. It is indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and taken at full length. Much space is occupied by the floor and the overhead portions of the stage setting. It lasts as long as would the spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said conversation if we can. It might be compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped with cotton.

There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays are struggling with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian traditions in the new medium. Many of the moving pictures discussed in this book are rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith of Bethulia, is a pronounced success. But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down. The successful motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being evolved every hour. Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic. But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations.

When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one follows. He does not realize that his camera-born opportunity to magnify persons and things instantly, to interweave them as actors on one level, to alternate scenes at the slightest whim, are the big substitutes for dialogue. By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: cottage, field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation between three places rather than three persons. By alternating the picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects rather than their voices. The collector presents a bill: the adventurer shows him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it. Moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.

The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the films. The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique. What is adapted to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression in another. The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.

Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should take hold of the super-photoplay.

If the talking moving picture becomes a reliable mirror of the human voice and frame, it will be the basis of such a separate art that none of the photoplay precedents will apply. It will be the phonoplay, not the photoplay.

At the center of any action photoplay is the high speed chase:

...when the photoplay chooses to behave it can reproduce a race far more joyously than the stage. On that fact is based the opportunity of this form. Many Action Pictures are indoors, but the abstract theory of the Action Film is based on the out-of-door chase. You remember the first one you saw where the policeman pursues the comical tramp over hill and dale and across the town lots. You remember that other where the cowboy follows the horse thief across the desert, spies him at last and chases him faster, faster, faster, and faster, and finally catches him. If the film was made in the days before the National Board of Censorship, it ends with the cowboy cheerfully hanging the villain; all details given to the last kick of the deceased.

In the Action Picture there is no adequate means for the development of any full grown personal passion. The distinguished character-study that makes genuine the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance. People are but types, swiftly moved chessmen [...]

Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.

As for the intimate photoplay:

The Intimate Motion Picture is the world's new medium for studying, not the great passions, such as black hate, transcendent love, devouring ambition, but rather the half relaxed or gently restrained moods of human creatures. It gives also our idiosyncrasies. It is gossip in extremis[...]

It is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human. But the haughty, who scorn the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy show. [...] Punch and Judy is the simplest form of marionette performance, and the marionette has a place in every street in history...

Photoplays of fairy splendor are built around special effects:

Mankind in his childhood has always wanted his furniture to do such things. Arthur names his blade Excalibur. It becomes a person. The man in the Arabian tale speaks to the magic carpet. It carries him whithersoever he desires. This yearning for personality in furniture begins to be crudely worked upon in the so-called trick-scenes.

[...L]et us examine at this point, as [...] typical, an old Pathé Film from France. The representatives of the moving-firm are sent for. They appear in the middle of the room with an astonishing jump. They are told that this household desires to have its goods and hearthstone gods transplanted two streets east. The agents salute. They disappear. Yet their wireless orders are obeyed with a military crispness. The books and newspapers climb out of the window. They go soberly down the street. In their wake are the dishes from the table. Then the more delicate porcelains climb down the shelves and follow. Then follow the hobble-de-hoy kitchen dishes, then the chairs, then the clothing, and the carpets from over the house. The most joyous and curious spectacle is to behold the shoes walking down the boulevard, from father's large boots to those of the youngest child. They form a complete satire of the family, yet have a masterful air of their own, as though they were the most important part of a human being.

Finally, he is particularly struck by D. W. Griffith´s, and to a lesser extent D´Annunzio´s crowd, patriotic and religious splendor photoplays which:

...deal with the total gestures of crowds: the pantomime of a torch-waving mass of men, the drill of an army on the march, or the bending of the heads of a congregation receiving the benediction.

It is fascinating to see how Vance Linday struggles to pin down the essence of the new art form by analogy to differences between old art forms:

Another way to demonstrate the thesis is to use the old classification of poetry: dramatic, lyric, epic. The Action Play is a narrow form of the dramatic. The Intimate Motion Picture is an equivalent of the lyric. [...O]ne type of the Intimate might be classed as imagist. And obviously the Splendor Pictures are the equivalent of the epic.

But perhaps the most adequate way of showing the meaning of this outline is to say that the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the Fairy Pageant, along with the rest of the Splendor Pictures, may be described as architecture-in-motion.

Many of his observations strike the modern day reader as almost prescient. For example this is what he has to say about the japanese actor and pre-Valentino heart throb, Sessue Hayakawa, in an interesting anticipation of, say, Akira Kurawa´s work:

Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japanese tales more adapted to the films. We should have stories of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi, written from the ground up for the photoplay theatre. We should have the story of the Forty-seven Ronin, not a Japanese stage version, but a work from the source-material. We should have legends of the various clans, picturizations of the code of the Samurai.

This volume is divided into three very uneven books. The first book is an introduction well worth skipping, while the third book reads like miscellaneous leftovers on topics such as censorship, the possible role of California in movie making, a rather strained comparison between movie houses and saloons (bars) and some rather bombastic passages on technology as magic. The second book is the part most worth reading, if you at all interested in the early years of film appreciation.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started out sort of interesting...but then I realized he was nothing but a pompous windbag.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

✔️Published in 1922.
🖊 My review: Well-written long essay by Vachel Lindsay on the motion picture industry. I enjoyed reading this. 💫 What I like also is there are many mentions of film I did not know about, so I added a few to my watch list. 📌 I would read this again.
🤔 My rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
🟣 Media form: Kindle version.
🟢 E-book format found here on : Project Gutenberg .
🔲 Excerpts of note:

🔸It is my hope that the moving picture prophet-wizards will set before the world a new group of pictures of the future.

🔸American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day. The cartoons of Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines and on the bill-boards and in the street-cars, the acres of photographs in the Sunday newspapers, make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England. Let us then accept for our classic land, for our standard of form, the country naturally our own. Hieroglyphics are so much nearer to the American mood than the rest of the Egyptian legacy, that Americans seldom get as far as the Hieroglyphics to discover how congenial they are.

🔸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."

🔸It would be a noble thing if American experts in the Japanese principles of decoration, of the school of Arthur W. Dow, should tell stories of old Japan with the assistance of such men as Sessue Hayakawa.

🔸D'Annunzio is Griffith's most inspired rival in these things. He lacks Griffith's knowledge of what is photoplay and what is not.

🔸Here is a picture of Mary Pickford as Fanchon the Cricket [1915 movie, from a book by [author:George Sand|1464], La Petite Fadette. She is in the cottage with the strange old mother. I have seen a painting in this mood by the Greek Nickolas Gysis.

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[Stewart Storrar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book by Vachel Lindsey is an attempt to analyse film from a linguistic-based model of film theory. In her book - specifically the section referring to hieroglyphics - she compares the art of film with various different types of language systems. While this style of looking at film is useful to a certain extent in terms of semiotic analysis, it does have its flaws from a film theorist perspective.
One major flaw of the theories presented in this book being that it does not take into consideration how linguistic-based models of film analysis can limit or restrict the analysis of film to specific parameters. Specific parameters that may overlook what makes film unique to what film really is.

Certainly an interesting read.

[Henrique Quadros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man what a crazy book. It claims to be a guide to future film critics on how to approach cinema as an artform, but it ends up being this often esoteric lyrical essay on a myriad of topics ranging from Egyptian mythology to what future languages will be like. It is NOT a film criticism book, but whatever it is, it was enjoyable for the most part. There were several points in which it just felt like a Victorian-era middle class dude rambling about things completely unrelatable to us nowadays, but even at this boring points it was fascinating. Talk about books as artifacts. If you like early 20th century American poetry and random tangents, I'd recommend checking this one out

[Guillem BG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Está divido en dos partes. La segunda es una especulación sobre el poder del cine y el rumbo que debería tomar para engrandecer EEUU. Más allá del carácter profético conseguido y, por tanto, impresionante, es un poco denso.

Eso sí, la primera parte, donde analiza el cine hasta el momento y lo clasifica, comparándola con otras artes, es maravilloso. Visionario, Vachel Lindsay junto a su admirado Griffith son los dos culpables del cine como es hoy día. Aquí es cuando uno entiende por qué es tan grande este periodo y necesario. Del 1915 pero lectura obligatoria, debería ser

[Warren C Hawkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

While recognizing the significance of Lindsay's work in the history of film appreciation and study, I never could find enjoyment in it. I'm sure the gulf of years between its authorship and my consumption of the text partly exacerbated (through no fault of the author obviously) my issues, but I failed to overcome the feeling that this primarily served as an exercise for Lindsay's self-indulgence and pretensions. I feel its modern target audience is fairly limited; and, frankly, I don't expect it was much broader in 1915.

[Thomas Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful ode the Moving Picture, but it does have an unnecessary detour into hieroglyphics.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

For now, I speed read this as research for my thesis project, so I will come back with a better review later. I was really interested in the art critique approach to film studies, though, and found a few chapters in particular that I will be able to use extensively. Plus, living in Springfield makes this fun to read, as there's a lot of local culture information in it.

If you're at all interested in silent film criticism, this is a very interesting book. It also contains the statement, "A duck looks to me like a caricature of an alderman," and I love that more than I can say.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird and kind of a tedious read, but lovable and insightful at the same time.