The Art of the Moving Picture

by Vachel Lindsay

For episodes that follow the precedent of the simple Action Film tiny wax models of the figures, toned and costumed to the heart's delight, would tell the high points of the story. Let them represent, perhaps, seven crucial situations from the proposed photoplay. Let them be designed as uniquely in their dresses as are the Russian dancers' dresses, by Léon Bakst. Then to alternate with these, seven little paintings of episodes, designed in blacks, whites, and grays, each representing some elusive point in the intimate aspects of the story. Let there be a definite system of space and texture relations retained throughout the set.

The models for the splendor scenes would, of course, be designed by the architect, and these other scenes alternated with and subordinated to his work. The effects which he would conceive would be on a grander scale. The models for these might be mere extensions of the methods of those others, but in the typical and highest let us imagine ourselves going beyond Tintoretto in preparation.

Let the principal splendor moods and effects be indicated by actual structures, such miniatures as architects offer along with their plans of public buildings, but transfigured beyond that standard by the light of inspiration combined with experimental candle-light, spot-light, sunlight, or torchlight. They must not be conceived as stage arrangements of wax figures with harmonious and fitting backgrounds, but as backgrounds that clamor for utterance through the figures in front of them, as Athens finds her soul in the Athena with which we began. These three sorts of models, properly harmonized, should have with them a written scenario constructed to indicate all the scenes between. The scenario will lead up to these models for climaxes and hold them together in the celestial hurdle-race.

We have in our museums some definite architectural suggestions as to the style of these models. There are in Blackstone Hall in the Chicago Art Institute several great Romanesque and Gothic portals, pillars, and statues that might tell directly upon certain settings of our Jeanne d'Arc pageant. They are from Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, the Abbey church of St. Gilles, the Abbey of Charlieu, the Cathedral of Amiens, Notre Dame at Paris, the Cathedral of Bordeaux, and the Cathedral of Rheims. Perhaps the object I care for most in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is the complete model of Notre Dame, Paris, by M. Joly. Why was this model of Notre Dame made with such exquisite pains? Certainly not as a matter of mere information or cultivation. I venture the first right these things have to be taken care of in museums is to stimulate to new creative effort.

I went to look over the Chicago collection with a friend and poet Arthur Davison Ficke. He said something to this effect: "The first thing I see when I look at these fragments is the whole cathedral in all its original proportions. Then I behold the mediæval marketplace hunched against the building, burying the foundations, the life of man growing rank and weedlike around it. Then I see the bishop coming from the door with his impressive train. But a crusade may go by on the way to the Holy Land. A crusade may come home battered and in rags. I get the sense of life, as of a rapid in a river flowing round a great rock."

The cathedral stands for the age-long meditation of the ascetics in the midst of battling tribes. This brooding architecture has a blood-brotherhood with the meditating, saint-seeing Jeanne d'Arc.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a large and famous canvas painted by the dying Bastien-Lepage;—Jeanne Listening to the Voices. It is a picture of which the technicians and the poets are equally enamored. The tale of Jeanne d'Arc could be told, carrying this particular peasant girl through the story. And for a piece of architectural pageantry akin to the photoplay ballroom scene already described, yet far above it, there is nothing more apt for our purpose than the painting by Boutet de Monvel filling the space at the top of the stair at the Chicago Art Institute. Though the Bastien-Lepage is a large painting, this is many times the size. It shows Joan's visit at the court of Chinon. It is big without being empty. It conveys a glitter which expresses one of the things that is meant by the phrase: Splendor Photoplay. But for moving picture purposes it is the Bastien-Lepage Joan that should appear here, set in dramatic contrast to the Boutet de Monvel Court. Two valuable neighbors to whom I have read this chapter suggest that the whole Boutet de Monvel illustrated child's book about our heroine could be used on this grand scale, for a background.

The Inness room at the Chicago Art Institute is another school for the meditative producer, if he would evolve his tribute to France on American soil. Though no photoplay tableau has yet approximated the brush of Inness, why not attempt to lead Jeanne through an Inness landscape? The Bastien-Lepage trees are in France. But here is an American world in which one could see visions and hear voices. Where is the inspired camera that will record something of what Inness beheld?

Thus much for the atmosphere and trappings of our Jeanne d'Arc scenario. Where will we get our story? It should, of course, be written from the ground up for this production, but as good Americans we would probably find a mass of suggestions in Mark Twain's Joan of Arc.

Quite recently a moving picture company sent its photographers to Springfield, Illinois, and produced a story with our city for a background, using our social set for actors. Backed by the local commercial association for whose benefit the thing was made, the resources of the place were at the command of routine producers. Springfield dressed its best, and acted with fair skill. The heroine was a charming débutante, the hero the son of Governor Dunne. The Mine Owner's Daughter was at best a mediocre photoplay. But this type of social-artistic event, that happened once, may be attempted a hundred times, each time slowly improving. Which brings us to something that is in the end very far from The Mine Owner's Daughter. By what scenario method the following film or series of films is to be produced I will not venture to say. No doubt the way will come if once the dream has a sufficient hold.