Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

262 A Classic of Cinema History By Hilary Carpenter , O.P. There is a very ancient musical axiom with a paradoxical flavour which is still current in liturgical chant books : Pulchritudo cantus in pausis consistit — The beauty of singing lies in the pauses. This is the musical rendering of the basic principle of all art, and it could be applied to visual art in this form : The beauty of the picture lies in what you don’t see. This negation covers both what is excluded by the frame and what is included within it. A frame, whether it be the edges of a canvas or the limits of a cinema screen, is the delimitation of an area of light, which area becomes a picture when it is partially and intelligently occluded by shadows of greater or less intensity; only thus can the necessary contrasts be produced to make light significant in the pictorial sense. It is true to say, therefore, that visual art is the ability to control shadows, and this is pre-eminently true of cinematographic art. It is elementary to observe that there can be no actual exercise of art without craft. Every artist must be a craftsman, or at least have the mental ability to control the necessary craftsmen. For this reason, the history of the Magic Shadows of the cinema screen is of prime importance to all who would take an intelligent interest in the art of the cinema. By the same token, the recent volumel by Martin Quigley, Jnr. will undoubtedly rank as a classic of cinema pre-history, 4 more especially as the author has the rare gift of combining the fruits of scientific research with a very readable style of presentation, and shows great aptitude of choice in pictorial illustration — none of which is perhaps surprising in the 1 “Magic Shadows— The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures.’’ By Martin Quigley, Jr. (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 1948; S3. 50.) gifted Editor of the Motion Picture Herald. It has been the aim of men since the dawn of history to reproduce mechanically the functions of the human eye in order indefinitely to extend in space and time the power of the eye itself — and especially the power of the eye to see things in motion. The first real step forward in this direction and the basic essential element in its present day ' perfection was the discovery and making of a lens; and it is historically certain that lenses for magnification were in use in Babvlon 700 years before Christ. ABSIT OMEN. From this point on Mr. Quigley traces the history of the lens through Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, Alhazen, to the “magic” of the Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon — a magic that was none the less effective and scientific for being “all done with mirrors”. (He might also have seen the germ of the “talkies” in the Dominican St. Albert the Great’s talking automaton which so startled St. Thomas Aquinas.) From then on the development of the “magic shadows” was significantly ecclesiastical ; the Church was unwittingly in process of Christianising Babylon — and the process is by no means complete ! It was the priest Leone Alberti who developed the camera lucida and also the vastly more important camera obscura (the immediate forerunner of the camera) which was perfected considerably by his disciple, the famous Leonardo da Vinci. It was, however, a layman, the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista da Porta, who was the first commercial showman of the magic shadows — “a boy wonder who would have felt at home in modern Hollywood,” says Martin Quigley. Considerable advance in the making and use of lenses was made by a