The Art of the Moving Picture

The Art Of The Moving Picture, by Vachel

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Title: The Art Of The Moving Picture
Author: Vachel Lindsay
Release Date: July 26, 2004 [eBook #13029]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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