The Art of the Moving Picture

The Art Of The Moving Picture,
by Vachel

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Vachel Lindsay
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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