The soul of the moving picture (1924)

Record Details:

Title:
The soul of the moving picture
Date:
1924
Publisher:
New York : E. P. Dutton & Company
Volume:
The soul of the moving picture
Leaf #:
000178
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
December 21, 2023
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

120 The Soul of the Moving Picture the wish of the milieu signify the constant variation of the impure motive. Let no man fancy that it would be possible to construct a great motion picture from an environment. There is, for example, the case of the French film entitled Columbus — the most abominable piece of work, incidentally, that has ever been done on the screen. The life of the great discoverer was mashed and squeezed into a mess of incoherent scenes. The one great, heart-shaking act, or action — the real experience of Columbus's soul — was missing. In like manner, the film entitled August der Starke ("August the Strong") went up in smoke between the baroque castles of Saxony around which the gala coaches moved in unending procession while the uniforms shone forth in all their kind of glory. In between all this revived and represented ostentation were six love scenes — a new one for each act — each of loathsome brutality — and in each of them the poet was the match-maker! The surrounding world, the milieu, becomes the exclusive servant of the feelings. A historical film is a love action of times long since past, and never a treatise on the cultural history of that time. Schiller compressed the whole history of the Thirty Years' War into his Wallensteln. In it Max and Thekla drift along as if on a small