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THE ARTIST AND THE FILM
ARTHUR SHEARSBY
Up to the present, the contribution which modern art has made to the cinema has been practically negligible. With the exception of the Walt Disney cartoons, and all the trivial accessories of modernity in the shape of decoration and furnishing, the film, from the purely pictorial point of view, is very much in the position of the art of some seventy years ago. Neither modern clothes nor modern gags, helped out by the feeble imitations of Gauguin or the emasculated examples of Archipenko which adorn film interiors, can hide the essential poverty and deprivation which the cinema has suffered in its ruthless exclusion of the artist from its making.
With it all, this rigorous concentration of the film in the hands of commercially minded business men, it still remains a truism that the artist, and the artist alone, is the one person capable of transforming the howling, lusty incontinences of present-day cinema into the terms of a real art. The film is so peculiarly his medium, from the visual point of view. It offers him the means of bringing to life those special qualities of plastic form and conception, that sensibility to design, which are outwith the scope of stage presentation.
There are undisputed angles of the cinema from which the artist should be properly excluded, except in his photographic capacity. Drama, in its essential meaning of the presentation of human destiny by means of the individual, will always stand or fall by the fundamental purpose which gives it life, but there are still many, and much-neglected ways, in which the artist can bring an almost wholly-original offering to the screen.
Something of what may ultimately be accomplished can be glimpsed from the Disney cartoons, and, more recently, the French production, Joie de Vivre. Here we see the imagination of the painter at work in his own particular medium, the creation of significant form, divorced from the actual world of reality.
It would be rather futile to dispute at this date, in view of the vast popularity of Mickey Mouse, the immense influence which a
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