The new spirit in the cinema (1930)

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24 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA and draughtsmanship. The Father of Cubism set the fashion of abstracting a sort of activism from natural objects which has since his time become universal. Then came the militant Marinetti and his Italian Futurists who performed the conjuring trick of passing objects through the brain to obtain livingness. Actually they observed objects moving against each other, abstracted odds and ends of form, and composed a picture by sticking them together. So they sought to catch the movement on the hop. Then there were the German Expressionists who passed objects into the brain, which skinned them alive, till nothing was left but the bare line forming a dynamic design, and then ejected the result, like Jonah's whale. This, the Expressionists, maintained was " pure " movement or another example of movement on the hop. And then there were the Paris Rhythmists, John D. Fergusson, Estelle Rice & Co., shepherded by John Middleton Murry, the apostle of Bergson, and strongly influenced by the Russian Ballet rhythmists, just as the presentday Russian cinema rhythmists, Pudovkin and others, may be said to be influenced by the said Paris ones. According to their theory of movement, the thing to do is to take a root motive, say a curve, cut out harmonising curves and straights from surrounding objects, piece them together and so obtain a portrait, or other subject, having unity and continuity which were so characteristic of the early Bakst ballets. Mainly by tricks latter-day painting was brought into the sphere of illusion of movement. Likewise the Cinema has been brought into a similar sphere by tricks. According to Dziga Vertov, the Russian director, someone has put a brain into the empty skull of the camera, and this accounts for the many strange things that have taken place of late. But camera tricks appeared early in the history of the Cinema. Almost as soon as it had begun to dazzle folk with its then miracles of movement in peep shows and nickel-odeons, the camera took to cutting capers, as though it were a cross between a spring-heel Jack and a conjuror. About 1900 Melie made a