In a moment it bridges over for you the gap between youth and age, as in Sweethearts. But there is another way of playing tricks with the clock, by making it stand still for some of your personages, while it ticks regularly for the rest. A. E. W. Mason, in one of his stories, gave an extra quarter of an hour now and then to one of the characters—that is to say, the clock stopped for them during that period, but not for him—and while outside time, so to speak, he could do all sorts of things (if I remember rightly he committed a murder) without risk of detection. But the great magician of this kind is Barrie. The heroine of his Truth about the Russian Dancers had a sudden desire for an infant, and within a half-hour was delivered of one; a remarkably rapid case of parthenogenesis. The infant was carried out and returned the next moment a child of ten. “He grows apace,” said somebody. These were cases of the clock galloping. With the heroine of Mary Rose on the island it stands still, so that she returns twenty-five years later to her family precisely the same girl as she left them. We all know what pathetic effects Barrie gets out of this trick with the clock. But he has, of course, to assume supernatural intervention to warrant them. And there you have the contrast with the film. In the “spoken drama,” poor, decrepit old thing, they appeal to that silly faculty, the human imagination; whereas the film has only to turn some wheels quicker or slower and it is all done for you, under your nose, without any imagination at all. Elephants are scuttling about like antelopes and divers plunging into the water at a snail’s pace. No wonder that, according to our New York advices, “film magnates have made so much money that they have been able to buy chains of theatres throughout the country,” and that “everybody talks films in the United States.”
FUTURIST DANCING
That amazing propagandist, Signor Marinetti, of Milan, who favours me from time to time with his manifestos, now sends “La Danse Futuriste.” I confess that I have not a ha’porth of Futurism in my composition. I am what Signor Marinetti would himself call a Passéiste, a mere Pastist. Hence I have generally failed to discover any meaning in these manifestos, and have thrown them into the waste-paper basket. But as the present one happens to arrive at the same time as another Futurist tract—Signor Ardengo Soffici’s “Estetica Futurista”—I have read the two together, to see if one throws any light on the other. It is right to say that “the” Soffici (to adopt an Italianism) disclaims any connexion with “the” Marinetti, explaining that he puts forward a doctrine, whereas official Futurism has no doctrine, but only manifestos. It couldn’t have, he rather unkindly adds, seeing that its very nature is “anticultural and instinctolatrous.” (Rather jolly, don’t you think, the rich and varied vocabulary of these Italian gentlemen?) Nevertheless, I have ventured to study one document by the light of the other; and, if the result is only to make darkness visible, it is a certain gain, after all, to get anything visible in such a matter.
And first for the Marinetti. His manifesto begins by taking an historical survey of dancing through the ages. The earliest dances, he points out, reflected the terror of humanity at the unknown and the incomprehensible in the Cosmos. Thus round dances were rhythmical pantomimes reproducing the rotatory movement of the stars. The gestures of the Catholic priest in the celebration of Mass imitate these early dances and contain the same astronomical symbol—a statement calculated to provoke devout Catholics to fury. (I should like to hear the learned author of “The Golden Bough” on the anthropological side of it.) Then came the lascivious dances of the East, and their modern Parisian counterpart—or sham imitation. For this he gives a quasi-mathematical formula in the familiar Futurist style. “Parisian red pepper + buckler + lance + ecstasy before idols signifying nothing + nothing + undulation of Montmartre hips = erotic Pastist anachronism for tourists.” Golly, what a formula!
Before the war Paris went crazy over dances from South America: the Argentine tango, the Chilean zamacueca, the Brazilian maxixe, the Paraguayan santafé. Compliments to Diaghileff, Nijinsky (“the pure geometry” of dancing), and Isadora Duncan, “whose art has many points of contact with impressionism in painting, just as Nijinsky’s has with the forms and masses of Cézanne.” Under the influence of Cubist experiments, and particularly under the influence of Picasso, dancing became an autonomous art. It was no longer subject to music, but took its place. Kind words for Dalcroze; but “we Futurists prefer Loie Fuller and the nigger cake-walk (utilization of electric light and machinery).” Machinery’s the thing! “We must have gestures imitating the movements of motors, pay assiduous court to wings, wheels, pistons, prepare the fusion of man and machine, and so arrive at the metallism of Futurist dancing. Music is fundamentally nostalgic, and on that account rarely of any use in Futurist dancing. Noise, caused by friction and shock of solid bodies, liquids, or high-pressure gases, has become one of the most dynamic elements of Futurist poesy. Noise is the language of the new human-mechanical life.” So Futurist dancing will be accompanied by “organized noises” and the orchestra of “noise-makers” invented by Luigi Russolo. Finally, Futurist dancing will be:—
Inharmonious—Ungraceful—Asymmetrical—Dynamic—Motlibriste.
All this, of course, is as plain as a pikestaff. The Futurist aim is simply to run counter to tradition, to go by rule of contrary, to say No when everybody for centuries has been saying Yes, and Yes when everybody has been saying No. But when it comes to putting this principle into practice we see at once there are limitations. Thus, take the Marinetti’s first example, the “Aviation” dance. The dancer will dance on a big map (which would have pleased the late Lord Salisbury). She must be a continual palpitation of azure veils. On her breast she will wear a (celluloid) screw, and for her hat a model monoplane. She will dance before a succession of screens, bearing the announcements 800 metres, 500 metres, etc. She will leap over a heap of green stuffs (indicating a mountain). “Organized noises” will imitate rain and wind and continual interruptions of the electric light will simulate lightning, while the dancer will jump through hoops of pink paper (sunset) and blue paper (night). And so forth.
Was there ever such a lame and impotent conclusion? The new dancing, so pompously announced, proves to be nothing but the crude symbolism to be seen already in every Christmas pantomime—nay, in every village entertainment or “vicar’s treat.” And we never guessed, when our aunts took us to see the good old fun, that we were witnessing something dynamic and motlibriste!
I turn to the Soffici. He finds the philosophy of Futurism in the clown, because the clown’s supreme wisdom is to run counter to common sense. “The universe has no meaning outside the fireworks of phenomena—say the tricks and acts and jokes of the clown. Your problems, your systems, are absurd, dear sirs; all’s one and nothing counts save the sport of the imagination. Let us away with our ergotism, with the lure of reason, let us abandon ourselves entirely to the frenzy of innovations that provoke wonder.” It is this emancipation, adds the Soffici, this artificial creation of a lyric reality independent of the nexus of natural manifestations and appearances, this gay symbolism, that our æsthetic puts forward as the aim for the new artist.