Year book of motion pictures (1926)

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Where Are The Movies Moving By Aldous Huxley in "Vanity Fair," July, 1925. Copyright by Vanity Fair. With Permission of Vanity Fair In the course of one of his adventures, my favorite dramatic hero, Felix the Cat, begins to sing. He thrums his guitar, he lolls up his eyes, he opens his mouth. A stream of crotchets ..mi pemi-quavers comes gushing out of his throat. The little black notes hang in the air above him. Looking up, Felix sees them suspended there. With his usual quick re. ourcefulness, he realizes at once that these crotchets are exactly the things he has been looking for. He reaches up, catches a few handfuls of them, and before you can say Knife! he has fitted them together into the most ingenious little trolley or scooter, of which the wheels are made out of the round heads of the notes, the framework of their tails. He helps his companion into her seat, climbs in himself,seizes by its barbs the semi-quaver which serves as the lever of propulsion and, working it vigorously backwards and forwards, shoots away, (>ut of the picture, towards some unknown region of bliss to which we are not orhileged to follow him. Seen on the screen, this conversion of song into scooters seems the most naturnl. simple and logical thing in the world. The cat opens his mouth and the written .-vmbols of sound appear, by a familiar convention, in the air above him. Forgetting their symbolical significance and concentrating exclusively on their shape, we perceive that the notes are circles attached to lines — or, more concretely, wheels and rods, the raw material of trie engineer. Out of these wheels and rods, Felix, cat of all trades, makes a scooter. There is no improbability, no flaw in the artistic logic. One image easily and naturally suggests the other. For the dramatist of the screen, this sort of thing is child's play. As a mere word-monger and literary man, I envy him. For if I tried to do the same thing in terms of words, the result would be very nearly nonsense. I might write like this, for example: "Don Giovanni touched his guitar and began t" sing Deh, vieni alia finestra. The notes floated out and hung in the soft warm air of the Spanish night, like the component parts of a Ford car waiting to be assembled." At a first reading, this simi'e would seem quite incomprehensible, not to sav deliberately and perverselv idiotic. Prolonged reflection might at last extract from the phrase its meaning; the resemblance between printed notes and the parts of a motor car might finally suggest themselves to the imagination. But the process would certainly be slow; and, being slow, would be unsatisfactory. A simile that is understood with difficulty is a bad simile. In a good simile or striking metaphor the two ktiib. however remote from one another, must be made to come together in the reader's mind with, so to speak, a smart click. Now, to the average mind the connection between 1 ot'es and spare parts is not immediately obvious. (To begin with the idea suggested by the word "notes" is primarily an idea of sound; it is only on second thought that one recalls the r rimed sumbol.) Hence the inadequacs and ineffectiveness of the simile when expressed in words. On the screen, where it is expressed in visual images, it is perfectly satisfactory. J have dwelt at some length on Felix's song and scooter — but not, I think, unduly. For the example indicates very clearly what are the most pregnant potentialities of the cinema; it shows howcinematography differs from literature and the spoken drama and how it may be developed into something entirely new. What the cinema can do better than literature is to be fantastic. An artist who uses words as his medium finds himself severely limited in the expression of his phantasy by the fact that the wordhe uses are not his own invention, but tiaditional and hereditary things, impreg nated by centuries of use with definite meaning and aueroled with cttain specific asset ations. To a certain extent, a writer must employ cliches ;n order to be uncieiitood at all. He cannot dis^o ciate longunited ideas, or bring tog*nhfer ideas which have never prev;ons!y been joined, without appearing to his readers to bo lalfcrng nonsense. We have seen for example how difiit.i!? i* would be for a writer to associate, without a preliminary explanation, the ideas of musical notes and p !t:s ct a motor car — and how easy for the maker of films, who can almost arbitrarily associate any two ideas, simplv by bringing together a pair of suitable images. "Young" writers, especially in France, have for some years been in revolt against the tryannies of language. They have tried forcibly to dissociate old ideas, to use words in a new and revolutionary way. It cannot be said that the results have been very successful. To the general public their writing seems nonsensical; and even their admirers have to admit that their books make difficult reading. The fact is that these "young" writers are rebelling, not against effete literary conventions, but against language 3