The soul of the moving picture (1924)

26 The Soul of the Moving Picture may either cleanse the film to the point of high art by grasping the true significance of such text as is needed, or he may demote the same film with all its art potentialities, to the grade of a mere hawked pamphlet by filling his text with the heavy, plebeian splashings of everyday and everyman conversation. But never mind ! Such texts may be regarded as a failure, but they are by no means equivalent to the transferral of the material to the purely spiritual world (which is closed to the sensuous moving picture because it cannot be disclosed through gestures alone). But wherever we sense an attempt on the part of the text to make even a remote effort at touching on the problems of the intellect or spirit, we notice at once the patchouly stench of botched and bungled art. All those expressions of a well-meant and, in poetry, quite permissible brooding and grieving over the sinister incidents of life, as well as such threadbare philosophizing as goes with this species of mental indulgence — all of these utterances taste like thin lemonade, sweet, flat, and insipid. In them there is not a grain of real film feeling; the art of the great picture they know not. Exalted spirit, how near I feel myself to thee — such is the boast of the moving picture in this instance — that is, when it makes short shift with its fundamental right and