THE TALKIES AS ART.

Shannon News, 27 September 1929, Page 1

THE TALKIES AS ART.

ENGLISH CRITIC’S OPINION. - Music rendered to the old silent film much the same sort of service that it still affords the restaurant. By dispersing critical auction in different directions it not protected the poor scenario writer as it yet does (the cook, out by covering awkward lacunae generally helped the amenities of tho movies. The talkies,, however, Have suddenly promoted music from these useful Cinderella-like' functions to an aesthetic partnership in uEich, if composers only accept their opportunities, it ought to become predominant. Already we find a far-seeing anonymous English critic of the motion pictures writing: “We hear people say that the talkies want a 'Lubitsch or a Lang or a Griffith to direct them. Believe me, that is the last thing they want. What they must have is a composer, a man who lliinks, sees and hears music. They want a Wagner. And it is very unlikely that they will find him. But meanwhile we can do our best for the new entertainment, and give ourselves the most > pleasure, if we turn all our critical energy towards the synthesis of the real sound picture. . . The Wagnerian Analogy

Wagner, the colossal musician, the dramatic poet, the 'reformer and revolutionary, the ardent student of Eastern philosophies (through Schopenhaur and those Sanskrit volumes that were always on hii handiest library shelves), the theatre technician and stage director, and a dozen other things, had, alas, like most musicians, little perception and less understanding of the visual arts. The evidence provided by the Bayreuth stage and photographs of the interior of “Wahnfried” is more-than enough, were evidence needed. To-day the “Art-work of the. Future” is mostly a relic of the past that owes its survival, not to “national-poetic and na-tional-ethical culture,” nor to a philosophy that very few even of the Wagnorites have fathomed, but almost wholly to the amazing vitality of its music—music to which some of us now prefer to listen in the concert hall, where our imaginations are free from the noisy attentions of those insufferable characters “in helmets and wild beast skins,” ' who prowl about a gloomy, prehistoric stage cumbered with “real” trees, rocks and ’ other solid objects made of painted canvas. The did Wagnerian synthesis would silence and wipe out tho talkies in a week. It is, in fact, as extinct as its own stage decoration, because in constructing it Wagner —who exemplified the perfect type of musician—neglected the fundamental fact that the other arts share with music a common basis and origin. ‘ ‘Significant Form’ ’ Again.

“What they (the talkies) must have is a compose!* who thinks, sees and hears music.’’ -In other, words, the talkie composer must discover' the essential qualities that distinguish his peculiar medium or means of expression from those associated with the concert hall or opera house. To achieve aesthetic unity he will have to establish some relationship between music (instrumental and vocal), the art of the camera and scenic design, the dance and drama, as expressed through microphone and lens. Fifteen years ago in his book “Art,'’ Olive Bell advanced an aesthetic hypothesis which enabled the few musicians who read it to perceive at once the relation betw'cen their art and visual arc, a relation then obscured by painting, which, was purely descriptive and literary, and to that extent not art at all. Mr. Bell’s hypothesis is reducible to two words: “Significant Form.” These represent a quality ‘ 1 shared by all objects which provoke our aesthetic notions.” (Chapter one of “Art,” read in conjunction with the third chapter of Hanslick’s “The Beautiful in Mu sic,” is extraordinarily -illuminating and should be studied by- every poser and critic.) Form, in its deepest and freest sense, is ail element con: nion to every art; and the first task ol the talkie composer should be to see and feel “form” in other arts as he hears and is conscious of it in his own. He must learn, to borrow Mr. Bell’s words, that if visually a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. For the musician, whose form, outline and colour are never those of tangible material ' dbjects, this should be easy. Music ’the liey Art One hopes that the talkie will avoid the fate of the silent film. As a writer on film aesthetics pointed out recently: “When- the artists and critics of the world awoke to the truth that what was potentially a new art had been born among them, they were too late. 'The films had already entrenched themselves in error; a great barrier of financial success had been erected -botween them and genuine experimentalists; the history of the growth of every other art had, in this instance, been reversed. ...”

Everyone will agree that talkies must not, like the silent films, be allowed to “lag miserably at the heels of novelists and dramatists.” Nor those of opera composers, one may add. A musician, Serge Diaghileff, evolved the synthesis of the remarkable modern ballet, and if the big film corporations had a 'grain of aesthetic sense — wiiich perhaps is expecting too much—they would rush to offer him'their studios and unlimited resources to. play with. Because “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music” and

its fusion of matter and form, music is ■; the key, art, as it were, of every acs- : '-J thetic synthesis that includes it. But one has an uncomfortable feel-, ing that many of our composers are j sitting aloof and aloft in their ivory towers, where the vulgar voice of the talkie never penetrates, still composing operas with mythological or classical 1 librettos, a la Wagner, and, in the remote contingency of one being produced, writing pamphlets that prove what is only too obvious to everybody, j viz., that words and music never have '■ and never will agree in opera. Then, \ why waste mote words and music? Why ; not acquire a wider artistic culture ami } take to the talkies?