FILM CHRONICLE
423
belles I saw at the Paris Cinematheque properly mimicked the attitudes
of statuary and properly evoked,
circa
1911, the future of Futurism with
its urgent graphs of the havoc wrought, and the patterns made, by
machines. The movies, a "living" pictorial record of moral and physical
dynamics, may pretend to historical status, and while they are notably
void of vast theory, no doubt exists as to their vast space, the camera
eye and its privileges being such that, potentially, no privacy is sacred
to them, whether human or that of remote nebulae. The cult of the
movies is based mostly, therefore, on their history not as an art but
as a humanly directed technological instrument. They have contributed
to telltale missiles more than to fine art.
As museums of natural history are steadily becoming more artistic,
instead of remaining like monumental antique shops made from taxi–
dermists' premises, so art museums are becoming,
de rigueur,
more na–
turalistic-with only "token" walls such as the four-sided movie screen
has. After all, Hollywood, now a cult at the Museum of Modern Art,
is more "natural history" than "art history." True, during the Museum's
programs, one laughs and marvels at fashions in acting and dress, some–
times nostalgically or otherwise admiring them, but one does the same
at the Museum of Natural History before fashions in protozoa, which
can be fantastically funny. How serious, in one respect, life must have
been, struggling up from the slime and the ooze ! But having come all
this distance, when we see it ingeniously portrayed and enlarged by
immaculate forms of tinted glass in a museum, we marvel and laugh
indiscriminately.
Psychopathologists may say we laugh too much, and the laughter
may be more sinister than we realize if it somehow soars to the historical
level, where Marx observed (with stinging persuasiveness) that when
history repeats itself-as happens in the cult programs of film museums–
what was once meant as tragic is apt to look farced. Of course, it is
not that history has actually changed
within
the reel of antiquated film,
except to deteriorate its clarity; it is that history has changed outside
it, and the risible awe of seeing Sarah Bernhardt, acting Queen Elizabeth
for the new art, prepare for a pratfall on a mountain of pillows and
then duly land, has only to do with changes in stage fashions and the
superior mechanics developed by acting, which now sustains a calis–
thenic grace it lacked in the last century. Everybody loves seeing Joan
Crawford hoof the Charleston in a film of the '20s: she had-and still
has-the know-how.
Yet the historical level of film art is like the historical level itself
when considered as humanity's overall, persistent case: everything (but
