ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION

This chapter is a superstructure upon the foundations of chapters five, six, and seven.

I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human.  By an extension of this principle, non-human tones, textures, lines, and spaces take on a vitality almost like that of flesh and blood.  It is partly for this reason that some energy is hereby given to the matter of reenforcing the idea that the people with the proper training to take the higher photoplays in hand are not veteran managers of vaudeville circuits, but rather painters, sculptors, and architects, preferably those who are in the flush of their first reputation in these crafts.  Let us imagine the centres of the experimental drama, such as the Drama League, the Universities, and the stage societies, calling in people of these professions and starting photoplay competitions and enterprises.  Let the thesis be here emphasized that the architects, above all, are the men to advance the work in the ultra-creative photoplay.  “But few architects,” you say, “are creative, even in their own profession.”

Let us begin with the point of view of the highly trained pedantic young builder, the type that, in the past few years, has honored our landscape with those paradoxical memorials of Abraham Lincoln the railsplitter, memorials whose Ionic columns are straight from Paris.  Pericles is the real hero of such a man, not Lincoln.  So let him for the time surrender completely to that great Greek.  He is worthy of a monument nobler than any America has set up to any one.  The final pictures may be taken in front of buildings with which the architect or his favorite master has already edified this republic, or if the war is over, before some surviving old-world models.  But whatever the method, let him study to express at last the thing that moves within him as a creeping fire, which Americans do not yet understand and the loss of which makes the classic in our architecture a mere piling of elegant stones upon one another.  In the arrangement of crowds and flow of costuming and study of tableau climaxes, let the architect bring an illusion of that delicate flowering, that brilliant instant of time before the Peloponnesian war.  It does not seem impossible when one remembers the achievements of the author of Cabiria in approximating Rome and Carthage.

Let the principal figure of the pageant be the virgin Athena, walking as a presence visible only to us, yet among her own people, and robed and armed and panoplied, the guardian of Pericles, appearing in those streets that were herself.  Let the architect show her as she came only in a vision to Phidias, while the dramatic writers and mathematicians and poets and philosophers go by.  The crowds should be like pillars of Athens, and she like a great pillar.  The crowds should be like the tossing waves of the Ionic Sea and Athena like the white ship upon the waves.  The audiences in the tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by the wind, and Athena the one sower and reaper.  Crowds should descend the steps of the Acropolis, nymphs and fauns and Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, yet flowing like a white cataract down into the town, bearing with them Athena, their soul.  All this in the Photoplay of Pericles.

No civic or national incarnation since that time appeals to the poets like the French worship of the Maid of Orleans.  In Percy MacKaye’s book, The Present Hour, he says on the French attitude toward the war:

    “Half artist and half anchorite,
    Part siren and part Socrates,
    Her face alluring fair, yet recondite
    Smiled through her salons and academies.

    “Lightly she wore her double mask,
    Till sudden, at war’s kindling spark,
    Her inmost self, in shining mail and casque,
    Blazed to the world her single soul Jeanne d’Arc!”

To make a more elaborate showing of what is meant by architecture-in-motion, let us progress through the centuries and suppose that the builder has this enthusiasm for France, that he is slowly setting about to build a photoplay around the idea of the Maid.

First let him take the mural painting point of view.  Bear in mind these characteristics of that art:  it is wall-painting that is an organic part of the surface on which it appears:  it is on the same lines as the building and adapted to the colors and forms of the structure of which it is a part.

The wall-splendors of America that are the most scattered about in inexpensive copies are the decorations of the Boston Public Library.  Note the pillar-like quality of Sargent’s prophets, the solemn dignity of Abbey’s Holy Grail series, the grand horizontals and perpendiculars of the work of Puvis de Chavannes.  The last is the orthodox mural painter of the world, but the other two will serve the present purpose also.  These architectural paintings if they were dramatized, still retaining their powerful lines, would be three exceedingly varied examples of what is meant by architecture-in-motion.  The visions that appear to Jeanne d’Arc might be delineated in the mood of some one of these three painters.  The styles will not mix in the same episode.

A painter from old time we mention here, not because he was orthodox, but because of his genius for the drawing of action, and because he covered tremendous wall-spaces with Venetian tone and color, is Tintoretto.  If there is a mistrust that the mural painting standard will tend to destroy the sense of action, Tintoretto will restore confidence in that regard.  As the Winged Victory represents flying in sculpture, so his work is the extreme example of action with the brush.  The Venetians called him the furious painter.  One must understand a man through his admirers.  So explore Ruskin’s sayings on Tintoretto.

I have a dozen moving picture magazine clippings, which are in their humble way first or second cousins of mural paintings.  I will describe but two, since the method of selection has already been amply indicated, and the reader can find his own examples.  For a Crowd Picture, for instance, here is a scene at a masquerade ball.  The glitter of the costumes is an extension of the glitter of the candelabra overhead.  The people are as it were chandeliers, hung lower down.  The lines of the candelabra relate to the very ribbon streamers of the heroine, and the massive wood-work is the big brother of the square-shouldered heroes in the foreground, though one is a clown, one is a Russian Duke, and one is Don Cæsar De Bazan.  The building is the father of the people.  These relations can be kept in the court scenes of the production of Jeanne d’Arc.

Here is a night picture from a war story in which the light is furnished by two fires whose coals and brands are hidden by earth heaped in front.  The sentiment of tenting on the old camp-ground pervades the scene.  The far end of the line of those keeping bivouac disappears into the distance, and the depths of the ranks behind them fade into the thick shadows.  The flag, a little above the line, catches the light.  One great tree overhead spreads its leafless half-lit arms through the gloom.  Behind all this is unmitigated black.  The composition reminds one of a Hiroshige study of midnight.  These men are certainly a part of the architecture of out of doors, and mysterious as the vault of Heaven.  This type of a camp-fire is possible in our Jeanne d’Arc.

These pictures, new and old, great and unknown, indicate some of the standards of judgment and types of vision whereby our conception of the play is to be evolved.

By what means shall we block it in?  Our friend Tintoretto made use of methods which are here described from one of his biographers, W. Roscoe Osler:  “They have been much enlarged upon in the different biographies as the means whereby Tintoretto obtained his power.  They constituted, however, his habitual method of determining the effect and general grouping of his compositions.  He moulded with extreme care small models of his figures in wax and clay.  Titian and other painters as well as Tintoretto employed this method as the means of determining the light and shade of their design.  Afterwards the later stages of their work were painted from the life.  But in Tintoretto’s compositions the position and arrangement of his figures as he began to dwell upon his great conceptions were such as to render the study from the living model a matter of great difficulty and at times an impossibility....  He ... modelled his sculptures ... imparting to his models a far more complete character than had been customary.  These firmly moulded figures, sometimes draped, sometimes free, he suspended in a box made of wood, or of cardboard for his smaller work, in whose walls he made an aperture to admit a lighted candle....  He sits moving the light about amidst his assemblage of figures.  Every aspect of sublimity of light suitable to a Madonna surrounded with angels, or a heavenly choir, finds its miniature response among the figures as the light moves.

“This was the method by which, in conjunction with a profound study of outward nature, sympathy with the beauty of different types of face and varieties of form, with the many changing hues of the Venetian scene, with the great laws of color and a knowledge of literature and history, he was able to shadow forth his great imagery of the intuitional world.”

This method of Tintoretto suggests several possible derivatives in the preparation of motion pictures.  Let the painters and sculptors be now called upon for painting models and sculptural models, while the architect, already present, supplies the architectural models, all three giving us visible scenarios to furnish the cardinal motives for the acting, from which the amateur photoplay company of the university can begin their interpretation.

For episodes that follow the precedent of the simple Action Film tiny wax models of the figures, toned and costumed to the heart’s delight, would tell the high points of the story.  Let them represent, perhaps, seven crucial situations from the proposed photoplay.  Let them be designed as uniquely in their dresses as are the Russian dancers’ dresses, by Leon Bakst.  Then to alternate with these, seven little paintings of episodes, designed in blacks, whites, and grays, each representing some elusive point in the intimate aspects of the story.  Let there be a definite system of space and texture relations retained throughout the set.

The models for the splendor scenes would, of course, be designed by the architect, and these other scenes alternated with and subordinated to his work.  The effects which he would conceive would be on a grander scale.  The models for these might be mere extensions of the methods of those others, but in the typical and highest let us imagine ourselves going beyond Tintoretto in preparation.

Let the principal splendor moods and effects be indicated by actual structures, such miniatures as architects offer along with their plans of public buildings, but transfigured beyond that standard by the light of inspiration combined with experimental candle-light, spot-light, sunlight, or torchlight.  They must not be conceived as stage arrangements of wax figures with harmonious and fitting backgrounds, but as backgrounds that clamor for utterance through the figures in front of them, as Athens finds her soul in the Athena with which we began.  These three sorts of models, properly harmonized, should have with them a written scenario constructed to indicate all the scenes between.  The scenario will lead up to these models for climaxes and hold them together in the celestial hurdle-race.

We have in our museums some definite architectural suggestions as to the style of these models.  There are in Blackstone Hall in the Chicago Art Institute several great Romanesque and Gothic portals, pillars, and statues that might tell directly upon certain settings of our Jeanne d’Arc pageant.  They are from Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, the Abbey church of St. Gilles, the Abbey of Charlieu, the Cathedral of Amiens, Notre Dame at Paris, the Cathedral of Bordeaux, and the Cathedral of Rheims.  Perhaps the object I care for most in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is the complete model of Notre Dame, Paris, by M. Joly.  Why was this model of Notre Dame made with such exquisite pains?  Certainly not as a matter of mere information or cultivation.  I venture the first right these things have to be taken care of in museums is to stimulate to new creative effort.

I went to look over the Chicago collection with a friend and poet Arthur Davison Ficke.  He said something to this effect:  “The first thing I see when I look at these fragments is the whole cathedral in all its original proportions.  Then I behold the mediaeval marketplace hunched against the building, burying the foundations, the life of man growing rank and weedlike around it.  Then I see the bishop coming from the door with his impressive train.  But a crusade may go by on the way to the Holy Land.  A crusade may come home battered and in rags.  I get the sense of life, as of a rapid in a river flowing round a great rock.”

The cathedral stands for the age-long meditation of the ascetics in the midst of battling tribes.  This brooding architecture has a blood-brotherhood with the meditating, saint-seeing Jeanne d’Arc.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a large and famous canvas painted by the dying Bastien-Lepage; Jeanne Listening to the Voices.  It is a picture of which the technicians and the poets are equally enamored.  The tale of Jeanne d’Arc could be told, carrying this particular peasant girl through the story.  And for a piece of architectural pageantry akin to the photoplay ballroom scene already described, yet far above it, there is nothing more apt for our purpose than the painting by Boutet de Monvel filling the space at the top of the stair at the Chicago Art Institute.  Though the Bastien-Lepage is a large painting, this is many times the size.  It shows Joan’s visit at the court of Chinon.  It is big without being empty.  It conveys a glitter which expresses one of the things that is meant by the phrase:  Splendor Photoplay.  But for moving picture purposes it is the Bastien-Lepage Joan that should appear here, set in dramatic contrast to the Boutet de Monvel Court.  Two valuable neighbors to whom I have read this chapter suggest that the whole Boutet de Monvel illustrated child’s book about our heroine could be used on this grand scale, for a background.

The Inness room at the Chicago Art Institute is another school for the meditative producer, if he would evolve his tribute to France on American soil.  Though no photoplay tableau has yet approximated the brush of Inness, why not attempt to lead Jeanne through an Inness landscape?  The Bastien-Lepage trees are in France.  But here is an American world in which one could see visions and hear voices.  Where is the inspired camera that will record something of what Inness beheld?

Thus much for the atmosphere and trappings of our Jeanne d’Arc scenario.  Where will we get our story?  It should, of course, be written from the ground up for this production, but as good Americans we would probably find a mass of suggestions in Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc.

Quite recently a moving picture company sent its photographers to Springfield, Illinois, and produced a story with our city for a background, using our social set for actors.  Backed by the local commercial association for whose benefit the thing was made, the resources of the place were at the command of routine producers.  Springfield dressed its best, and acted with fair skill.  The heroine was a charming debutante, the hero the son of Governor Dunne.  The Mine Owner’s Daughter was at best a mediocre photoplay.  But this type of social-artistic event, that happened once, may be attempted a hundred times, each time slowly improving.  Which brings us to something that is in the end very far from The Mine Owner’s Daughter.  By what scenario method the following film or series of films is to be produced I will not venture to say.  No doubt the way will come if once the dream has a sufficient hold.

I have long maintained that my home-town should have a goddess like Athena.  The legend should be forthcoming.  The producer, while not employing armies, should use many actors and the tale be told with the same power with which the productions of Judith of Bethulia and The Battle Hymn of the Republic were evolved.  While the following story may not be the form which Springfield civic religion will ultimately take, it is here recorded as a second cousin of the dream that I hope will some day be set forth.

Late in an afternoon in October, a light is seen in the zenith like a dancing star.  The clouds form round it in the approximation of a circle.  Now there becomes visible a group of heads and shoulders of presences that are looking down through the ring of clouds, watching the star, like giant children that peep down a well.  The jewel descends by four sparkling chains, so far away they look to be dewy threads of silk.  As the bright mystery grows larger it appears to be approaching the treeless hill of Washington Park, a hill that is surrounded by many wooded ridges.  The people come running from everywhere to watch.  Here indeed will be a Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean.  Flying machines appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round as they go up, trying to reach the slowly descending plummet.

At last, while the throng cheers, one bird-man has attained it.  He brings back his message that the gift is an image, covered loosely with a wrapping that seems to be of spun gold.  Now the many aviators whirl round the descending wonder, like seagulls playing about a ship’s mast.  Soon, amid an awestruck throng, the image is on the hillock.  The golden chains, and the giant children holding them there above, have melted into threads of mist and nothingness.  The shining wrapping falls away.  The people look upon a seated statue of marble and gold.  There is a branch of wrought-gold maple leaves in her hands.  Then beside the image is a fluttering transfigured presence of which the image seems to be a representation.  This spirit, carrying a living maple branch in her hand, says to the people:  “Men and Women of Springfield, this carving is the Lady Springfield sent by your Lord from Heaven.  Build no canopy over her.  Let her ever be under the prairie-sky.  Do her perpetual honor.”  The messenger, who is the soul and voice of Springfield, fades into the crowd, to emerge on great and terrible occasions.

This is only one story.  Round this public event let the photoplay romancer weave what tales of private fortune he will, narratives bound up with the events of that October day, as the story of Nathan and Naomi is woven into Judith of Bethulia.

Henceforth the city officers are secular priests of Our Lady Springfield.  Their failure in duty is a profanation of her name.  A yearly pledge of the first voters is taken in her presence like the old Athenian oath of citizenship.  The seasonal pageants march to the statue’s feet, scattering flowers.  The important outdoor festivals are given on the edge of her hill.  All the roads lead to her footstool.  Pilgrims come from the Seven Seas to look upon her face that is carved by Invisible Powers.  Moreover, the living messenger that is her actual soul appears in dreams, or visions of the open day, when the days are dark for the city, when her patriots are irresolute, and her children are put to shame.  This spirit with the maple branch rallies them, leads them to victories like those that were won of old in the name of Jeanne d’Arc or Pallas Athena herself.