Cinematographic annual : 1931 (1931)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CINEMATIC TELEOLOGY 19 mediately create two bitter factions. On one side we find reform sympathizers opposing institutions that might be so ordered as to furnish happiness for all, and on the other the stubborn followers of those institutions using every device to defy the opinions of their opposers, instead of trying to fill the breach by ordering things to the general weal. It is readily seen, then, that the tendency is to invite a specific following and to produce works that appeal to this patronage. It is just as likely, also, that this patronage becomes more and more tolerant of extravagances and abuses. Money lust enters into the scheme of things, and depravity is commercialized to the limit. The same old wheel of indulgence swings around, seemingly proving the existence of an indissoluble problem. This is why reforms are continually demanded. Art and the Drama When we come to consider the application of the principles of art to the drama, we wonder how we can review past achievements and connect them with our hopes for future developments, in order to estimate our ambitions in regards to motion pictures. The so-called modern ideas in art have long since invaded the dramatic field and there have been spasmodic attempts exhibited in the pictures. Just what is this nouveau art that we hear so much about? What is its generic impulse? Is it merely the modern craving for notoriety, the applause that rewards the conception of new ideas, the enjoyment of producing something that sets the conservative world by the ears? Or is it really some new development of nature that is gradually giving to man a new fourth dimensional twist of the brain, which leaves the hitherto unendowed with a helpless feeling of unfitness to meet the new order of things artistic? Even those who love to think that they have a great breadth of perception and can interpret hidden beauties, begin to doubt themselves when reviewing some of the examples of modern art. They refer suspiciously to those lines of Shakespeare: — "tongues in trees, books in running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." Those who have spent years and years in the class rooms of the various academies, patiently and industriously trying to reproduce the conventional ideas of beauty, feel a helpless uneasiness in the presence of those who rave over drawings of what to them represent childish crudeness, unaccountable distortions of familiar forms of beauty, crazy perspectives, "goofy" angles of vision, violent modulations in the scale of color harmony. They begin to question as to whether these exhibitions are an erroneous distinction between the old school of painful realism and simple, direct expression, or if they are unfortunately the sloughing off of an ancient species of man which is bridging the evolution of the new super, "fourth dimensional" mind. In the shame of a rapidly approaching "inferiority complex" we seek for enlightenment. We turn,, in sadness, from our idols and