The new spirit in the cinema (1930)

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18 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA and a still longer period of drawings. In due course abstract drawing became related to the experiments with lantern slides. These three paths of research and experiment have become mixed. Various theories, such as the persistence of vision, the portrayal of movement by drawings, have become confused with one another. Ingenious minds have done their best to remove boundaries, and to make inquiry into origins and developments very hard. Here and there an over industrious investigator has thrown the origin of the moving picture back to cave drawings. What have abstractions like primitive cave drawings to do with living photographs, or a series of mechanical snapshots? ;' The Cinema at the Dawn of History," is a fine sounding title and for that reason no doubt it is attractive to the historian in search of sensation and pence. While the picture of the cave man laying the foundations of Hollywood is a certain draw if well done. Some persons know nothing about Cinema history. All the same they say that Hollywood was founded and is run by living cave men. But that is a matter of opinion. On the whole then, the path of the seeker after the truth of the origin of the motion picture, as we know it to-day, is a tortuous and hazardous one. It is long, strange and involved. The theory of the portrayal of movement has wobbled very much, now keeping to its own path, now seeking to enter upon a path full of queer turnings and twistings, of ups and downs, of odd little alleys, more than one blind one, and it has successfully slipped out of the verifiable in to the unverifiable. Let me point out a few sources of confusion. The principal is the neglect or inability to distinguish between illusion of movement expressed by drawings from the earliest to the latest time, and the portrayal of actual or living movement by a machine, or photographic means; the one being the outcome of human observation and sensibility, the other, the reflection of actual movement by a mechanical process — a process that excludes human sensibility. Then comes conflicting evidence; gaps