There is no clan to-day more purely devoted to art for art's sake than
the Imagist clan. An Imagist film would offer a noble challenge to the
overstrained emotion, the over-loaded splendor, the mere repetition of
what are at present the finest photoplays. Now even the masterpieces are
incontinent. Except for some of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith's
beginning, there is nothing of Doric restraint from the best to the
worst. Read some of the poems of the people listed above, then imagine
the same moods in the films. Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints
taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, Pompeian mosaics in
kaleidoscopic but logical succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors
and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion.
Scarcely a photoplay but hints at the Imagists in one scene. Then the
illusion is lost in the next turn of the reel. Perhaps it would be a
sound observance to confine this form of motion picture to a half reel or
quarter reel, just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or quarter
page. A series of them could fill a special evening.
The Imagists are colorists. Some people do not consider that photographic
black, white, and gray are color. But here for instance are seven colors
which the Imagists might use: (1) The whiteness of swans in the light.
(2) The whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. (3) The color of a
sunburned man in the light. (4) His color in a gentle shadow. (5) His
color in a deeper shadow. (6) The blackness of black velvet in the light.
(7) The blackness of black velvet in a deep shadow. And to use these
colors with definite steps from one to the other does not militate
against an artistic mystery of edge and softness in the flow of line.
There is a list of possible Imagist textures which is only limited by the
number of things to be seen in the world. Probably only seven or ten
would be used in one scheme and the same list kept through one
production.
The Imagist photoplay will put discipline into the inner ranks of the
enlightened and remind the sculptors, painters, and architects of the
movies that there is a continence even beyond sculpture and that seas of
realism may not have the power of a little well-considered elimination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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