On the Movies

There is a fault in the current art of the films which is intensely typical of our time. I have hardly ever seen a motion picture in which the motion was not too rapid to give any real sense of rapidity. For just as a thing can be too small to be even seen as small, or too large to be even seen as large, so it can easily be too swift to be even seen as swift. In order that a man riding on a horse should look as if he were riding hard, it is first necessary that he should look like a man riding on a horse. It is not even an impossibly rapid ride, if he only looks like a Catherine wheel seen through a fog. It is not an impression of swiftness j because it is not an impression of anything. It is not an exaggeration of swiftness; because there is nothing to exaggerate. It would be perfectly natural that the pace of such a gallop should be exaggerated; but it is not. All art has an element of emphasis, which is really exaggeration; the exaggeration varies with the type of artistic work to be done, as whether it is tragedy, comedy, farce, or melodrama; but the exaggeration may go to the very wildest lengths without necessarily losing this vividness and actuality. But when it goes past a certain point, in a certain direction, it passes a merely material border of the powers of the eye and the conditions of time and space; and it becomes not a rapid but rather an invisible thing. This would seem to be a very obvious piece of common sense in connexion with any artistic eflFect; yet these artists and producers, who talk so learnedly and work so laboriously, in connexion with artistic effects, have apparently not yet learnt even a little thing like that. For instance, I have a simple, melodramatic mind; there is nothing lofty or peace-loving about me; and I thoroughly enjoy seeing people knocked down on the stage. I should have no objection to seeing them knocked down in real life, if the people were wisely and thoughtfully selected. In fact, I have seen them knocked down in real life; and sometimes knocked down very rapidly. It would be entirely in the right spirit of representative art if on the stage or on the film they were knocked down rather more rapidly than they can be in real life. But in nearly all those American cinema stories about "the great open spaces where men are men," my complaint is that when they begin to fight, the men are not men; but blurred and bewildering flashes of lightning. No man however slick, in no saloon however wild, in no mountains however rocky, ever moved with that degree of celerity to do anything. I therefore cease to believe in the man altogether; as much as if his body had visibly burst in two and the sawdust run out. He may be quicker on the draw than any other man in Red Dog Canyon, but I will be shot if any man ever shot or hit as quickly as all that. The principle applies to every sort of shooting. In one of Mr. Belloc's satires there is an allusion to an aristocratic infant who was "three years old and shooting up like a young lily." It is just as if the film were to take this sort of swiftness literally, and show the heroine rapidly elongating like the neck of Alice in Wonderland. It is as if the Coming of Spring were represented on the film in a series of jerks and leaps 3 as in that famous legendary landscape in which the hedges are shooting and the bull rushes out. In growing more rapid it would grow less realistic j and even if the bull does rush out, he must not rush ten times quicker than any bull is capable of rushing. We may well be content if he rushes about twice as quickly as the quickest bull in the world. But we, who sit watching these bloodless and blameless bull-fights, do not like to see the shattering of all conviction by mere confusion. We do like to fancy for a moment that we are looking at a real bull-fight 3 that we are contemplating a Spanish bull and not merely an Irish bull.

It is but part of the modern malady 3 the incapacity for doing things without overdoing things. It is an incapacity to understand the ancient paradox of moderation. As the drunkard is the man who does not understand the delicate and exquisite moment when he is moderately and reasonably drunk, so the motorist and the motion-picture artist are people who do not understand the divine and dizzy moment when they really feel that things are moving. Sometimes the drunkard and the motorist are blended in one perfect whole ^ and I disclaim all responsibility for the misuse of my jest about drunkenness, especially when it is combined with motoring. But the point is that there is probably an ultimate extreme of speed in which even a drunkard would enjoy nothing except a strangled sense of standing still. There comes a point at which speed stuns itself j and there is an unintentional truth in the exclamation of the radiant ass who declares that his new car is simply stunning. If speed can thus devour itself even in real life, it need not be said that on the accelerated cinema it swallows itself alive with all the suicidal finality of the hero who jumped down his own throat. Cars on the film often go much too fast, not for the laws of New York or London, but for the laws of space and time. For nature has written a Speed Limit in the nerves of the eye and the cells of the brainy and exceeding it, or even trying to exceed it, does not mean going to a prison but to a madhouse.

An artistic effect is something that is slightly impossible j though grammarians and logicians may both think this an impossible phrase. It is something that is mildly mad or faintly absurd. It is something that is just over the precipice of this prosaic world j but not far out in the void of vanity and emptiness. To accelerate a machine so as to make Mr. Tom Mix or Mr. Douglas Fairbanks run a little faster than a man can really run produces a magnificent impression j a theatrical effect like a thunderclap. To make him run a little faster than that destroys the whole effect at a blowj it merely extinguishes the man and exposes the machine. There is a figure in one of Michael Angelo's frescoes, in which the legs are somewhat lengthened so as to give an overwhelming impression of flying through the air. But if the legs had been extended indefinitely like the two parallel straight lines that could never meet, if they had wandered away in two endless strips over the whole of the Sistine Chapel, they would not produce any impression of rushing or of anything else. But the modern sensationalist has no notion of effecting anything except by extending itj by tugging its nerves out telescopically like some form of Asiatic torture j and increasing the pleasures of man by interminably pulling his leg. And that is why some of us feel the presence of something stupid and even barbaric in all this progress and acceleration j because it is but the elongation of one line and the exaggeration of one idea.

Speed itself is a balance and a comparison, as we know when two railway trains are moving at the same rate and both seem to be standing still. So a whole society may seem to be standing still, if it is only rushing unanimously in a mere routine j for indeed the whole society which we call mankind is for ever rushing on the round orbit of the earth about the sun 5 but rushing without any marked feeling of exhilaration. The extension of speed in area, as well as in degree, is a way of neutralizing its full artistic effect. I have seen this error also on the films; when so many things are made to move and mix in the motion picture that it seems to be a whirlpool rather than a river. First it is all motion and no picture j and then it is not even motion because it is not even aimj and in all motion there must be the outline of motive. But I suppose that so very simple a blunder must have a rather subde cause. Nothing is more curious, in the artistic history of mankind, than the obviousness of the things that were left out, compared with the cunning and intelligence of the things that were put in. It is a puzzle to understand how the splendid pagan poets of antiquity managed to get their effects with such few and vague ideas about colour; so that we do not always know whether they mean purple or blue or merely bright. It is equally a puzzle how the magnificent mediaeval craftsmen could not see that their figure-drawing was as bad as their colour scheme was brilliant. All ages leave out something, which to other ages seems very simple and self-evident J and it seems as if this age would make itself a laughing-stock in turn to later times, by not seeing the most obvious of all the psychological facts in aesthetics — the principle of contrast. It will have failed even to understand that you cannot see a man run fast if you cannot see him at all.