Shakespeare’s poetic image was thus killed by a single shot. But it sometimes takes more ingenuity to destroy a charm. Take, for instance, this descriptive line from “Evangeline”:
“When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”
Those words are surely full of emotional, imaginative appeal. Yes, but not for the director of the Fox “Evangeline.” He inserts the line as a title, then shows Evangeline strolling over a forest path, and then “cuts in” a close-up of hands playing across the strings of a gigantic harp!
There is nothing mysterious about the emotions of any moderately intelligent person who sees things like that on the screen. “Movie stuff!” he groans, and wonders “how they have the nerve to get away with it.” We have a quarrel with the director, not because he has failed to picturize the imagined sweetness of that silence which comes when exquisite music has ceased, but because he has considered it necessary to picturize anything at all in support of the poet’s words.
This brings us again to the question whether art should strive to present any beauty other than that of the subject represented. Was he a great artist who, according to an old fable, painted fruit so realistically that the birds came to peck at it? And would Michelangelo have been a better artist if he had given his marble statues the colors of real flesh, or if he had made statues with flesh soft to the touch and capable of perspiring on a hot day? We think not.
Art may please through illusion, but never by deception. We get a peculiar emotional experience from imagining that Michelangelo’s “Moses” is alive with human grandeur, but we should not like to be caught in a mob of idiots staring at some more realistically sculptural Moses, in the expectation that he was about to make a speech or perform a trick. Neither can we go into ecstasies over the fact that the fur mantle in some portrait is so skillfully painted that all the women want to stroke it.
The depressing thing about many movies is that they are to the ideal photoplay what the wax figure of a shop window is to sculpture. Instead of dancing lightly through a rich atmosphere of suggestion they are anchored heavily with bolts of dollar-marked material. And worse days are to come if the “stunt” workers are fed with applause. They promise us pictures in natural colors, more natural than any now produced. They promise us pictures that have depth so real that the beholder may be tempted to take a stroll into them. They promise us pictures that talk, and whistle, and chirp, and bark. And perhaps somewhere they are even promising pictures that will give off scents.
All these wonders will create industrial activity. They will make good advertising, and will doubtless bring crowds to the theaters. But they will not bring happiness to those fortunate individuals who can enjoy art because it is art, who can get a finer thrill from a painting that felicitously suggests interesting trees, than from one which looks so much like a real orchard that the birds and bees swarm in through the gallery doors.
Let the motion picture look like a motion picture of life, and not like life itself. Let the mobilization of characters in a photoplay start fancies and stir emotions finer and deeper than any which we can experience by observing our neighbors or by reading sensational newspapers. Let the lights and shadows on the screen, the lines and shapes, the patterns and movements suggest to our imaginations richer beauties than those which are actually shown to our eyes. Let the motion picture become as romantic as music, and yet remain equally consistent with reality and truth.
Thus we have considered two mysterious art-emotions, namely, that which is aroused by a peculiar artistic poignancy in the cinema design itself, and that which is aroused when the suggestions and associations of the design make our own imaginations creative. A third art-emotion comes from the conscious or sub-conscious appreciation of something exquisite in the finished product.