Of What Are the Young Films Dreaming?

By Le Comte tienne de Beaumont

The Little Review 11 (Winter 1926): 73-74.

In 1900 A Swede [sic] found a block of magnetic steel which retained the invisible
vibration of sound and retranslated them for the human ear. The steel, when demagnetized,
became deaf and dumb.
If matter hears and speaks, do no objects see? Do not lines adjust themselves to one
another? A process not yet accessible to the human consciousness.
Similarly, do not the vibrations of the cinema have speech, thought, will? Scientific
investigators may track down the evidences of this life; Egyptian hieroglyphics may interpret
its system of logic; but is not the imagination to be permitted its faith in an arrangement of
living lines which, going beyond pretext and scenery, play the leading role?
Of what are the young films dreaming? This title is not a programme. I am not
proposing a new art. I lay no claim to the sublime. I simply desire the satisfaction of working
with these living lines which arise in such profusion from the objects about us, whether hard
and sharp like crystals, reflections, prisms; or curved and liquid as in clouds, mists, and
smoke, the very life of form. I have enjoyed imagining things in motion; I have stirred up
atoms of all kinds and compared them with forms grown human: a face, a landscape, speed,
immobility, the infinite gradations of black and white.
The art of the cinema offers us a new expression of thought; it allows us to attempt the
translation of our dreams.
I say attempt, because the eye of the camera functions differently from our own and
what a difference there is between [END PAGE 73] the thought and its realization! There is
the same diversity in the way we see things. The gulf separating one mind from another is
wide. Things have a different meaning for each of us. What I see, I alone see. We are always
in isolation. When something enters our consciousness, it has a color and a significance
peculiar to the individual. Alas! and yet fortunately, we are not made in series!
Communication is only approximate, which is at once a virtue and a defect.
I am reminded of a passage in Marcel Proust, the second chapter of Albertine Disparue:
I cannot realize that each person on opening his eyes will fail to see the images which I see,
believing that the thought of the author is perceived directly by the reader, whereas it is
another thought that takes shape in his mind.
All humanity joins in the attempt to provide the materials for such distortion. And it
would be a great satisfaction to me should I succeed here, in this country whose cinema
productions have given the whole world fresh emotional experiences to an extent which no
other art has rivaled for some time. [END PAGE 74]