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The card of invitation to^this meeting" bears the representation of three differently proportioned horizontal rectangles : 3x4: 3x5: 3x6, as suggestions for the proportions of the screen for wide film projection. They also represent the limits within which revolves the creative imagination of the screen reformers and the authors of the coming era of a new frame shape.
I do not desire to be exaggeratedly symbolic, nor rude, and compare the creeping rectangles of these proposed shapes to the creeping mentality of the film thereto reduced by the weight upon it of the commercial pressure of dollars, pounds, francs, or marks according to the locality in which the cinema happens to be suffering !
But I must point out that, in proposing these proportions for discussion, we only reinforce the fact that for thirty years we have been content to see excluded 50 per cent, of composition possibilities, in consequence of the horizontal shape of the frame.
By those excluded I mean all the possibilities of vertical, upright composition. And instead of using the opportunity afforded by the advent of wide film to break that loathsome upper part of the frame, which for thirty years — six years myself personally — has bent us and obliged us to a passive horizontalism, we are on the point of emphasising this horizontalism still more.
It is my purpose to defend the cause of this 50 per cent, of compositional possibilities exiled from the light of the screen. It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the virile, active, vertical composition !
I am not anxious to enter into the dark phallic and sexual ancestry of the vertical shape as symbol of growth, strength, or power. It would be too easy and possibly too offensive for many a delicate hearer !
But I do want to point out that the movement towards a vertical perception led our hairy ancestors on their way to a higher level. This vertical tendences can be traced in their biological, cultural, intellectual and industrial efforts and manifestations.
We started as worms creeping on our stomach. Then we ran horizontally for hundreds of years on our four legs. But we became something like mankind only from the moment when we hoisted ourselves onto our hind legs and assumed the vertical position.
Repeating the same process locallv in the verticalisation of our facial angle too.
I cannot enter in detail nor is such entry necessary, into an outline of the whole influence of the biological and psychological revolution and shock sequential as result of that paramount change of attitude. Enough if we mention his activities. For long years man was shepherded in tribes on outspread endless fields, bound to the earth in an age-long bondage by the nature of the primitive plough. But he marked in vertical milestones each summit of his progress to a higher level of social, cultural, or intellectual development. The upright lingam of the mystic Indian knowledge of the olden time, the obelisks of the Egyptian astrologers, Trajan's column in