I have examined the motion picture from its various angles. I have shown what it is like, explained its fundamental nature, commented on the forces that impel it, discussed the wishes at which it aims, elucidated its origin, and set up its goal. My purpose has been to detach the motion picture from technique, and to make it serviceable to art and culture. I have endeavored to proclaim the mission of the motion picture artist.
No one people, taken as a whole, has Kultur. It is only the purest, the noblest, the best of a given people from whose splendor there radiates a remote luster that finds its way to the active life of the masses. If properly applied, and molded by the proper people, the motion picture will be a potent factor in this act of purification. It will deepen our world of feeling and make it more cordial, warmer. Do you recall hearing that anyone ever blamed a given instrument because so many bunglers play on it?
From the motion picture there will flow forth a fruitful stream. All poetic creations of the sensual soul find now their original art. Liberated from them, the poem in words will serve the intellectual soul more joyfully than ever. The time will come, too, when it will be shown that in the motion picture there is either no art at all, or only great art. There are abysses all along the road; each step is threatened; but ingenious security will find its way past all these dangers.
One thing is certain: the motion picture, in its inseparable union with technique, is one step more away from Kultur and toward civilization. The inventions of civilization endure; they connote the inescapable way of humanity. Just as cannon and railroads, electricity and air ships, can no longer be struck from the book of life of coming generations by the willed and willful act of individuals, parties, or the whole human race for that matter, just so is it true that the technical invention of the motion picture belongs forever to the conditions upon which the future will be predicated. We can no longer turn this stream aside; to swim against it would be an imbecilic undertaking. To allow oneself to be driven along by it would be distinctly immoral. Shrewdness and morality make it imperative that we constitute ourselves the advance waves of this stream, so that it may be made to flow in the right and proper channels to the end that its goal may be noble, its course one of generous service to human kind.
For the task of the coming centuries will be the reconciliation of Kultur and civilization. The motion picture—never as a unit or a totality, always as reflected in the possibilities suggested by its rarest fruits—is a powerful sign that this reconciliation will be a complete success.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Page numbers in the table of contents for illustrations point to the illustration. The placement before/after a full paragraph may have affected the location.
Missing full-stops and abbreviation stops silently added.
The paragraph ending on page [136] with “loses itself in moral fustian” probably is missing the word “melodrama” at the end.