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 #:
000224
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
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156 The Soul of the Moving Picture The Italian motion picture dangles about in epic robes, attaching, or affixing, scene to scene with proverbial epic breadth. The real action is included in just a few isolated scenes. The picture exists for its own sake, and it is surrounded with perfectly colossal decoration. We have but to think of the Dante film, or of Cabiria, and to a degree of Quo Va&'is. The rest of the world does not feel in this way; and it does not feel this way about the motion picture. The tense and rigid condensation of the action, and its logical progress from scene to scene — this is the desideratum of the German film. The fates we see all about us, and of which we ourselves are so many living proofs, are not to glide by each other and dissipate in the winds : they are to rebound against each other, and end when their struggle is over. Moreover, such fate as remains when the end has been reached is somehow to be transformed, and bear the stamp of this struggle. There was the case of Golem. It had in it the possibilities of some tremendous dramatic action. But in the final scenes this potential action was dissipated into an unintended and undesired epic flow: the de-souled monster had again become a lump of clay and lay before us in all its obvious impotency. Everything will turn out all right: