Cinema

“ The lie of the stationary photograph is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. Only the watching self remains—pregnant symbol!—in the darkness. ”

“ We might, impossible as it may seem, make some artistic use of the cinema, for that, if anything, is the haunt of women who find that it saves them even the trouble of reading. It is well, perhaps, for one’s peace of mind that one does not stop to imagine the possible appearance in all its nakedness of the soul to which the bulk of modern films appeals. ”

“ One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house. But watch a little longer and another emotion drowns the stirrings of civic ardour. Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. ”

“ Let us simply add that the kind of rest we have in mind is never the rest of inaction, of sleep, or of death; it is rather a dynamic repose. Just as the still portions of the motion picture may be active upon the spectator’s mind, so the motions may be reposeful while they are both at work and at play. Such harmony of pictorial motions on the screen is not too high an ideal for the lovers of the cinema. ”

“ Our cinema theatre is, I venture to state, of a far superior order, both as to drama and as to morality. It is not a mere lantern-hall, close and stuffy, with twopenny and fourpenny seats (half-price to children, and tea provided free at matinée performances) , but a white-and-gold Picturedrome, catering to an exclusive class of patrons at sixpence and a shilling, with neat attendants in dove-grey who atomise scent about the aisles, two palms, one at each side of the proscenium (real palms) , and, in addition to a piano, a mustel organ to accompany the pathetic passages in the films. ”

“ RHYTHM AND REPOSE IN FIXED DESIGN Directness, ease, emphasis, unity—these are the things which we have just demanded of cinema composition, the pictorial form which contains, and at the same time reveals, the story of a photoplay. But we demand something more. We do not get complete æsthetic pleasure from any composition which merely contains and reveals something else. ”

“ It is true that I had never been to the cinema before I married him, and I am not sure that it was not his first time, too. The wonders of one decade are the commonplace of the next, and in retrospect we should not forget this. ”

“ Subtle emotions it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this, because she thought that he thought that.’ (If a cinema company will film The Golden Bowl, I will burn seven candles as an offering to the Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave to the play and the novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. ”

“ We'll pick a good staff, select our stories with care, get the best men to write our scenarios, and gather round us a group of actors, like those who have made the Continental cinema what it is today, more interested in their work than in themselves, willing to take their chances of scoring in fine ensemble acting instead of insistent that every story shall be distorted, every scene directed, every picture cut to throw a so-called star into prominence. ”

“ I do not believe in the sound film. Something very right, very true, very precious, was cut short on the verge of its ultimate and certain perfection by the intrusion of spoken dialogue and by the consequent throw-back of the cinema toward the theatre. The silent film was slowly coming into its own as an independent art which had nothing to do with the theatre, an art closely allied with music, dependent on music, an art which visualized music, creating independently to a certain point and completed thereafter by music. ”

“ No other art, not even music, contains so great a number of varied parts as the motion picture. To fuse all of these parts into a single harmonious whole requires knowledge and skill and happy inspiration, yet fusion must take place in the cinema composition itself in order that the spectator may be spared the143 annoyance of trying to unify in his own mind the ill-adjusted factors on the screen. ”

“ In a theatre, you know, if you saw a knight riding through a forest, the effect would be managed by making the scenery slide backwards past him; and in a cinema it could all be shortened up by increasing the pace or leaving out part of the film. ”

“ My attention has been drawn to the most recent and perhaps the most terrible development of the Cinema by an advertisement, from which I take the following extracts:—
"HAVE YOUR OWN FILM TAKEN.
The most Modern Method of gaining Publicity.
To Members of Parliament, Mayors, Lecturers and other Public Men and Women.
"The Cinema has become the cheapest, the surest and most rapid road to publicity. It is estimated that a third of the population attend the Cinema once a week. ”

“ And so I return to my opening sentence: that though I do not know what is the official highbrow attitude towards the cinema, I should, if I had to define it in a hundred words for a symposium, write something like this. “The highbrow professes to despise the American sobstuff drama: he objects to the conversion into films of plays and novels. ”

“ A cinema audience can look up and see that all screen images are appearing through the instrumentality of one imageless beam of light. The colorful universal drama is similarly issuing from the single white light of a Cosmic Source. With inconceivable ingenuity God is staging an entertainment for His human children, making them actors as well as audience in His planetary theater. ”

“ Pictures of foreign countries are undoubtedly of great use. The cinema can never give us theories and philosophy. So with its lighter side. Charley's Aunt might make a good film; [Pg 94] The Importance of Being Earnest could not. The cinema can give us humour but not wit. What will happen when the cinema and the phonograph are made to work together perfectly I do not know. I may yet be able to take my bairns to a performance of Nan or The Wild Duck or The Doctor's Dilemma.
* * *
"Please, sir, Willie Smith was swearing." Thus little Maggie Shepherd to me to-day. ”

“ Plot, performers, places, equipment—these are only the materials which a picture-maker puts into cinematic forms. The art does not lie in the separate materials; it lies in the organization of those materials, a process which may be called cinema composition.A In a later chapter we shall discuss the proposition that the motion picture director is, or certainly should be, the master cinema composer. ”

“ The cinema became potentially that kind of torture medium the instant the first of the twenty-million-dollar spectacles in full color appeared on the screen.
We know what that kind of illusion can do today and when we watch a screen spectacle that distorts reality for three or four hours by making everything seem fifty or a hundred times as large as life ... we make sure that we are entering a theater that is Government supervised and not a Big-Image interrogation room presided over by a sadist in police uniform. ”

“ The children of to-day are such habitual Cinema-goers that too much cinematograph is to be discouraged, but the film used in proper perspective in the schools will excite and increase interest in science, industry, art, geography, travel, history, biography and literature. ”

“ Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. ”

“ He is also highly trained; he wears uniform and calls out the attractions. The cinema is one of the principal alleviations of modern life and but for this man's powerful voice many people might pass by and never enter. ”

“ But natural beauty of that sort is admissible to a cinema composition only when it is itself the dramatic theme of the story, and can be emphasized by the introduction of human figures or other elements, or when it can be subordinated to something else which is the dramatic theme. If nature cannot be thus composed she may still be photographed by the maker of scenics, travel pictures, etc., but she is of no practical value to the director of photoplays. ”

“ If the topical film brings a glimpse of the great world into remote and unsettled corners of the earth, the scenic film, on the other hand, does a like service for the dweller in cities; it brings sweeping panoramas of nature, magnificent and unfamiliar landscapes before his eyes. He has the joys of travel without stirring from his comfortable chair in the cinematograph theatre! In fact, the best scenic film is that taken from the front of a railway locomotive, with the camera and operator mounted upon the cow-catcher or its equivalent. ”

“ As it is, his only place in a cinema has been to indicate—by the appearance of his portrait on the screen—that the show is over. It isn't fair that he should come to be looked upon as a spoil-sport like that. It has a bad effect on the young. Many thanks for your suggestion. I'll give him a show with a letter. ”

“ The arrogance of the trained writer of fiction or of drama and the price of the producer were still beyond conciliation.
The first borrowings may have come in taking excerpts from history to make the modest spectacles that gave a new note to cinematography. Suffice it to say, that soon familiar masterpieces of fiction and dramatic literature began to appear. The moment that the exhaustless stores of literature were opened to the needs of cinematography we may say that the photodrama really had its inception. ”

“ The more he is spurred, the more tired he grows. The more tired he grows, the more he needs spurring. So the cinema must prosper. But I think it will prosper in a more moderate way; it will continue to grow, to absorb theatres and music-halls; it has already absorbed the Coronet, the Canterbury, Sadler’s Wells, the Tivoli, the Scala, the London Opera House, and others; but I think it will more and more tend to produce the historical film, films based33 on novels and plays of some slight merit ”

“ This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted 59 part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about Steel or The River. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. ”

“ So far as the motions in a picture present the actions and reactions of the dramatic characters clearly and emphatically, they do faithful work; but this work becomes play when it is relieved of its hardness and dullness, and is animated with a spontaneity and variety that catches up the spectator into a swinging movement of attention. And those motions which are both work and play are basic in the beauty of cinematic art. ”

“ It is rumoured that Cinema playwrights, following the example of certain well-known stage dramatists, are likely in future, in addition to the film representations, to publish their works in novel form. ”

“ I behold wonderful things and I behold them in the dark—so that while I watch I can talk quietly with a friend, and when the lights go up we are both gone, and only our empty bocks are left to show where we were sitting. The cinemas—yes! With their audiences which constantly change and new people coming in who sit plump down upon your lap because they cannot see an inch beyond their noses, the cinemas are useful. ”

“ With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these—the means of dissociating love from propagation. ”

“ When two or more rivals in a single town are making a common bid for popular favour, the public naturally patronises the establishment which offers the most refined pictures combined with comfort in the seating arrangements. The inferior film is being driven from the better class of cinematograph theatre, where a programme is offered which is varied in character, and of the highest excellence from the photographic, dramatic, and educational point of view, as well as from that of sheer amusement. ”

“ This all means that cinematography has become a gigantic industry, giving employment to hundreds of actors, photographers, and the army of men and women engaged in making and showing the films, to say nothing of the thousands of picture theatres that have sprung up in every city and town in the country. ”

“ Though the cinematographic world be flooded with talking and singing pictures, unless they are of some peculiar interest, the majority of picture-theatre lovers, after the first wave of excitement and curiosity, will patronise those establishments where they can see movement alone. ”

“ Thus they need strong stimuli if they are to react, and no doubt that is why cinemas are being established one by the side of the other, and run for ten hours a day. Like the sensational stories in the magazines, like the newspapers which consist in much headline and little text, they spur this tired creature. ”