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mere pictorial symbol can have on the imagination of the people. Mickey is a star of the first magnitude, a creature of fantasy, who can yet exercise an appeal denied to all but the greatest of actors. The Joie de Vivre cartoon, unsatisfactory as it is in many ways, is a still more cogent illustration of the effect which an abstract symbol can have on the imagination. A purely pictorial production, divorced from any attribute of the human, it yet manages to convey a wealth of strange and fundamental meaning.
A new approach, of course, would be needed on the part of directors if the modern experiments in the visual arts were to be properly incorporated into the film. The commercial Caliph, with his florid imagination, and entire lack of visual perception, would have to give way to the man who could weave the tragi-comedy of life out of the inter-relationship of masses and planes, of form, and eventually, colour.
A good deal of substantial support may be advanced for the belief that abstract cinematic art, when it comes, will be able to exert quite as catholic an appeal as the realistic drama of the present day. There is as vast a scope, within its symbolic bounds, as has been shown to exist between the blood-and-thunder crudities of melodrama and the more rare and subtle revelations of the higher drama. The intelligence of the film-going public is not the negligible factor which directors would have us believe. The average film at the present time is definitely created for the rapturous attentions of the adolescent, but there is no basis for the belief that the whole of the cinema-loving public is in a state of juvenility.
Certainly to the more mature in mind, abstract art, if allowed free access to the cinema, would have a tremendous appeal, and it is here that the fallacy of technique must be exposed. Technique is not, and never will be, art. Technique is applied thought, not creative thought, and it is creative thought which is so badly needed in the cinema of the present day. Technique can use the machine for all it is worth, but it cannot supply it with the life-giving material which is its real source of vitality.
The technical resources are all at hand, however. Only the necessary imagination is lacking, coupled with the type of mind which knows what it wants, and is determined to get it. It must, again, be the kind of imagination which can work in masses and planes, and visualize in the new medium.
Let us, for the sake of illustration, try to demonstrate how modern experimental art may help the cinema by the use of human material. Suppose we begin with a two-reel drama of the Edgar Allan Poe type, or the creation of a film round the story of H. G. Wells' "Invisible Man"?
The essential charm of such stories lies in their element of
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