Close Up (Jan-Jun 1929)

CLOSE UP color (as differing from the present tone or color-value film) may create their own mountings? I cannot see how this can be opposed. It is like an objection to sculpture because it is not painting, or to a painting because it is not an etching. The depth film provides its own category, the color film its own. If the color film could achieve fluidity, it would be at once on its way to singularity. There are certain things that cannot be combined, harmonized or crossed. The confusion of the evolving silent movie with sound is an instance of this reciprocal hostility. But certain other things permit crossing — the abstract frieze, for instance, and the sculptural mask accept paint. The handicap to the creation of independent forms in the cinema is largely literalness. It is evinced in a film like The Crowd, which demanded a less chronological and a more patterned production. It is evinced in speech-mimicry. Literalness is the absence of concept. It is matter-of-fact, cautious and fears organization on a plastic basis. It has kept the so-called epic film from being epic, and it is at the source of the inability of directors to incorporate the inferences of the subject-matter of films into the treatment. Alexander Bakshy has stated this well as the failure of The Crowd. Literalness has kept the movie from utilizing its possible rhythms, to be found in the movements of the cinema, which, as Mr. Bakshy has said, are four : the film or pellicule, the camera, the player, the screen. Only now is the screen as an instrument beginning to be used, in the magnascope or phantom screen, in the triptych. Several years ago Mr. Bakshy offered a plan to use for symphonic, contrapuntal pictures of scope a screen within a screen, a multiple screen 36