Experimental Cinema (1930-1932)

THE NEW CINEMA IT is one of the strange paradoxes of our time that the nineteenth century while trying in various ways to eliminate the mysterious and along with it mystery itself from the universe, at its close bequeathed to the twentieth, what is perhaps one of the greatest single forces that history will record, for imbuing immense masses of people with that concentrated mystic fervour which the church was once able to inspire in its devotees — ■ the cinema, silent conqueror of space, time and causality. In a remarkable communication concerning the machine in modern civilization written by Elva de Pue and published as an appendix by Waldo Frank in "The Rediscovery of America", Miss Elva de Pue writes that "the movie alone which tells one people in a universal language about the life of other peoples, however banal its initial stammering language, must in the end draw them closer together than even the mystery which they gathered of yore in magnificent cathedrals which pointed them away from the earth and its values, the earth which they were forced temporarily to deny. In a world filled with the stench of gangrened wounds; in a world filled with the stench of sewage gathering in moats; in a world filled with plague, that plague which eventually was a factor in the loss of belief in a merciful God: no incense could disguise those stenches. No great bells and no calm glory of intoning could 'drown the cries of brutalized underlings tortured by their masters, lay and clerical. In that dark world the dependence upon another life was necessary as a compensation, as salvation from despair." Today, particularly in America, at a time when there is everywhere desire to escape the perils and the problems of a mechanical age, at a time when it has become almost fashionable to fall back into traditional positions, beaten paths off the main road, without even attempt at analysis or positive statement of the problems of mechanism as to their social, political or psychological elements, and in this sense, the humanism of those who look back to New England for authority, is as far away from the actual problems of the American scene as the humanitarianism of those who look forward to U. S. S. R for a point of reference. At a time like this, there is exigent need of a force powerful enough to assist in the presentation of these problems, socially, politically, psychologically, and if possible to transform them to meet the realities of the time, realities deeply implanted by the revelations of modern science. That force itself can be nothing other than a mechanism, a machine. Anything other than the machine is impotent in the face of so much machinery to orient. Such a force is the motion picture machine which throws its light from one end of the world to the other and back in an instant, "that tells one people in a universal language about the life of other peoples however banal its initial stammering language" may be. The motion pic ture camera — which in the control of man is the cinema with a subject matter as wide as the universe and an understanding as great as nature, and in the control of men of genius — the cinema of Greed. Gold Rush, Theresa Raquin, Potemkin. End of St. Petersburg, New Babylon, Passion of Joan, Arsenal and ihe boundless potentialities of the new cinema of the future with its explorations into the legends and myths of the new age of the machine. This is the devotional cinema that is traversing with the speed of light and opening up to the masses, the mysteries of the new universe of modern physics, bounded yet limitless, almost in answer to the prayer for an interpretation of man's changing relationship with man and his ultimate position in the universe that will be something more than "isms" at the end of words or stultifying mechanical noise. The New Cinema — profound creator of free will and knowledge absolute — with the power of transmuting water into wine and thence to bread and back again to water should it choose to do so. wherein the fabled mountain to extend a metaphor, not only goes to Mahomet but to heaven as well to bring back the ghosts of all those slain in the name of Mohammedism; wherein Narcissus slips into the pool and finds himself being unreeled in the form of a flower that blooms to a fountain sprouting blood in streams as high as Betelgeuse — with no return to earth, defying gravities. In Cinema — Faust has reappeared on the thirteenth stroke of the clock, in new guise, to perpetuate the eternal alchemy that cannot be denied to spirit; the faustian soul has drunk deep of the new elixir and is appeased in cinema; for here is a new world of miracle wherein all is solved and sufficient; wherein every wish is granted; every hope fulfilled: wherein to conceive is to execute and execution — revelation. One receives in the words of a modern french cinematographer and poet: "A trolley car on the chest. An auto in the back. A trapdoor under foot. One has a tunnel in his eyes and rises to the fifteenth floor drawn by the hair. All this while smoking a pipe with the hands at the faucet ... A storm tears out your tonsils, a cry passes thru you like the shadow of an iceberg" (Cendrars) . Time is no more; the temporal becomes transformed into a timeless, ageless world; an incident occurs and later reoccurs at the same place and at the same moment in relation to past or future incidents. A smokestack falls and in an instant is resurrected to its former position. Two trains meet on one track and fly over each other with the grace of gods. Man has conquered the air without wing, in cinema; and the atom has finally given up its precious secret: of myths like these is born a great ideal. This is the subject of cinema, as all things are the subject of cinema; there is nothing it cannot transfix into a moment of beauty that no other agency can match so marvelously well; there is no Vol. I No. I Copyrighted 193 0 by Cinema Crafters