Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

LETTERS FROM ABROAD
issues forth a heart-rending song, succeed in drawing out a greater abundance
of tears than would otherwise have been the case. Suppressed turbulence
leaks out of the New York mind, and New Yorkers return to their homes
at midnight with refreshed bodies and tender ears, both of which will contract
on the next morning when a symphony of riveting machines, honking horns,
groaning vehicles burst forth with a fiercer violence because of a night's rest.
Movietone orchestral music, on the other hand, is still mastered by
numerous forms of squeaks, static, and jarring sounds; but, fortunately, the
New York ear is accustomed to such noise and from habit scarcely hears it.
One wonders what will become of the large orchestras still performing in
many of the New York gold-lined, moving picture theatres.
The Movietone has its good uses, as exemplified by the picture "The
Patriot" in which the voices of running Russians increased the mass effect,
and the singing of the old Russian national anthem by numerous people,
heightening the glory of a new order, succeeded in gaining the participation
of the audience to a great extent, an accomplishment rarely achieved in the
theatre in this country.
With the general acceptance of the Movietone, and the manner in which
it is being employed, the moving picture industry again reveals its interest
solely in net profits. Every device is brought into play whereby the screen
will exploit every hidden nook of its audience's puerile emotions; and the
most sterile and stereotyped plots continue to be produced, childish patriotism
and ideals are played up to, and in the next "fade-in" the dose of lewdness
is increased, while in the neighbouring theatre a censor closes the show
because an actor on the legitimate stage utters several profane words.
The possibilities of the screen fill one with hope: what opportunities to
produce marvellous effects of photography! What vast and limitless means
by which to accomplish what the stage is necessarily powerless to do: scenic
effects, character portrayal to the point of symbolism, the interplay of masses,
structures, crowds, depiction of our machine age and its possibilities, interpretation
of American life, its tempo, its preoccupation with the acquirement
of wealth to the point of fatuity, and so on indefinitely. The Movietone could
find its proper place in the aforementioned. But instead we find the moving
picture industry descending to the twelve-year-old intelligence of its general
public, appealing to its infantile emotions, as do the so-called American
literary magazines.
Despair is out of place here. The moving picture industry failing to take
advantages of aesthetic possibilities, ignoring its opportunity to become one of
the arts, twisting and distorting its interpretation of life, submitting itself to
any atrocity for the sake of earning more dollars, is, in its entirety, a grand
example of American ideals, and New York ideals in particular. What it has
failed to portray on its screen, the industry as a whole has succeeded in
exemplifying.
JOSEPH VOGEL.