The international photographer (Jan-Dec 1930)

Thirty The INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER May, 1930 cinematic images, that is to say, on the influence exercised on our psyche by the living picture of the cinema. These include sensations in general, and visual sensations in particular, the phenomena of perception and the vast stretch of psvchomotor and psycho-sensory reflexes. The secret of the suggestive power of the cinema lies in the manner of utilizing these various constitutent elements of biological reactions, and raising them to a high degree of sensory significance. Each of the Fine Arts has its own mode of manifestation, and its own appeal to heart and mind, and it is not my intention to make comparisons between forms of art that are incomparable. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that as regards the sensory aspect, certain cinematic images are sometimes more significant than other forms of art. Take, for example, a landscape. A writer may describe it in clear and adequate words, enabling you to perceive it with the mind's eye (mental vision) in all its fascination. A painter on the other hand will fix it on his canvas, giving you a conception of its reality; but it is a static reality, the fleeting moment held fast by the painter's brush. Whereas on the screen you see the landscape in all its reality, in its dynamic reality. The mountains, the valleys, the houses clustering around the church, the towering campanile, the animals moving under the shady trees with the foliage stirred by the wind, men going about their business. In these images all the manifestations of life are woven together with a grand variety of lights and forms that give relief to the picture. I do not mean to assert that for this reason cinematographic art is superior to that of writing or painting; each has its own special and unique advantages; but doubtless, the landscape projected on the screen assumes for the majority a more convincing, more humanly eloquent appeal, because cinematographic representations are not above anybody's level, while a certain habit of culture is required to understand the beauty of a poem or a prose passage. The factors which contribute to the expressive energy of the cinema are of various orders. Some act subjectively, others objectively. The former are physio-psychological and refer to the spectator; the others are of a technical order and concern the art of the cinema itself. Foremost among the factors of the first category is the elementary or fundamental character of the cinematographic, that of teaching us by natural images as Nature herself does. Man in relation to the cinema is in identically the same position as man in relation to nature. He learns by seeing. But there is a difference, the cinema shows a much greater number of images in a given unit of time than Nature can. Take, for example, the film of a scientific expedition; in an hour it will show you the events of several months. There is another consideration to be made. Man is naturally inclined to be "visual." He is born an image maker and almost instinctively clothes every abstract idea in concrete forms. The method of art, personifying incorporeal entities, is also that of Nature. Thus a painter personified the images of virtue, vice, justice and so forth, on his canvas. Visual images predominate in our consciousness, and this is most providential, because without this tendency manv abstract ideas would be incomprehensible to the majority of us, if thev could not be conveyed by means of images. "Mental iconography," as de Sanctis says, "is a common phenomenon." It is the instinctive tendency of man, who finds his natural mental food in the moving picture. The cinema, as we have already pointed out, utilizes on a large scale the physiological phenomenon of the persistency for a certain period of the sensation at the back of the eye-ball, as a result of which the images corresponding to the various instants of the action follow in a succession of absolute continuity, giving the illusion of a single image of animated things, very much like what happens in nature. Interesting cinematographic spectacles have further the virtue of stimulating the attention of the spectator, which is a psychic aspect of the greatest importance, directing the attention toward the object in order to know it and its details. It often succeeds in awakening in the spectator the still rarer spirit of inquiry, the sense of "investigation," which lies beyond the threshold of sensation, making people "visual" who are not generally so. There are many who have not visual perception in the sense of seeing what surrounds them. Among such are often people of high culture, absorbed in interior reflection. Such people on returning from a walk will not recall any faces they have seen. After a drive they will not know whether it was uphill or downhill, whether the vegetation was rich or consisted chiefly of trees, whether the sun shone or clouds obscured it. On the other hand, as Scarfoglio has pointed out, such details do not escape the "visual," and endow him with a psychological patrimony of images that are stored up in his memory. The cinema acts in this sense: Awakening our attention, it leads us to look beyond the conventional goal, increasing, so to speak, the excitability of our visual apparatus, thereby lowering the threshold of sensibility. The cinema is also a powerful memorizer, for its images which are merely living symbols distributed on the screen and woven into the pictures of the series, form a sort of mnemonic chain which clings to the memory. This is an important aspect of our psychic life. We know in proportion as we succeed in remembering. Once it was assumed that everything encountered by the senses remained lodged in the memory. Today it is generally believed that perhaps only about ten per cent of our mental operations become concrete and make an impression on our memory. All the rest remain in the vast domain of the subconscious. What we call conscious perceptions are nothing but the peaks of symbolic promontories the bases of which are hidden in the depth of the subconscious. This has been pointed out by William Walker Atkinson, who illustrated the concept by an apt comparison. We are, he says, so to speak in a forest on a dark night, holding a lantern in our hands. The lantern lights up a small luminous circle around us, which is surrounded by an ample ring of shadow; beyond this there is complete blackness. The bright circle is our consciousness, in which by degrees and as required, there arise subconscious impressions as from the dark ring of shadow. In no one moment of our psychic life do we succeed in attaining consciousness of more than a small part of what is stored in our minds. And many things that seem forgotten and which we have possibly tried in vain to recall, rush up in our minds at a given moment almost involuntarily, by a sort of automatic impulse. Our subconsciousness may be likened to a great reservoir, in which impressions are deposited and stored. But not all impressions. Only those to which we have given a certain attention. The "size and form" of the impression is indeed in proportion to the amount of attention given at the moment when the impression was produced. It has already been pointed out what a powerful stimulator of attention the screen is, and as such it must necessarily contribute to feed our memory and, therefore, to our education, all the more as the sense of sight is recognized as the one that is the most apt and most instrumental in aiding the mind to register correctly the impressions received. The cinema also plays a large part in the zone of psychic reflex actions, both on account of the state of soul and the emotional impulses inherent in the nature of some subjects and on account of its "mimicry." "The face is the tacit voice of the soul," said Goethe, wishing to express how our most intimate sentiments are registered and transmitted by it. Mimicry is a language apart, supremely capable of expressing our state of soul by the facial expression and by gestures. No fewer than seventeen muscles concur in the formation of our facial expression. Much has been said and written on the subject. There is passionate, natural mimicry, with automatic and reflex expressions, betraying the most diverse states of mind; joy, suffering, fear, anger, desire and so on. And then there is intentional mimicry, voluntary or semivoluntary, which is artificial and dependent on the will of the actor, who deliberately interprets the psychic states of which it is the expression. The cinema avails itself largely of this form of language to exteriorise the states of soul of the actors. By a similar complexity of subjective reactions, called forth in the spectators by means of psycho-reflective mechanisms, the cinema achieves its educational aims. But what is the intrinsic virtue of the cinema, which makes it capable of arousing such vast psychic sensory reactions? It is doubtless the particular character inherent in this form of art and its technical excellence. Foremost among its characteristics is that of universality. The language of the cinema, consisting of pictures is universal, speaking to all peoples regardless of the bounds of state frontiers. The technical means at the disposal of this cinematic apparatus ensures the production of images of extraordinary luminosity and vivacity. (Concluded on Page 3S)