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128 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1926)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0128 and id is 1 raw text is: The Motion Picture By TERRY RAMSAYE Author of A Million and One Nights-The History of the Motion Picture T HE history of the motion picture begins with the origins of human expression. The real story of the art is as old as the race and its desire to re-create events to pleasurably re-enjoy the emotions inspired of the events. The motion picture is a basic art and in the sense of being a visual re-creation of the desired event, it is more funda- mental in character and import than the arts of pageantry, ritual, the drama of the speaking stage and the art of the printed and spoken word, to all of which the motion picture is directly and genealogically akin. It is rather clear that there is a certain atavistic element in the motion picture in that it represents the attainment, by the use of tediously evolved tools and materials, of the precise thing that pre- historic man sought in the beginning. The written language and the arts involving literacy and the use of the word must be understood in their true relation, as make-shift expedients, attenuated, evolved and far removed from their origins, tediously forged out of association and experience in the effort to satisfy the living picture wish, the actual re-creation of the event. If man had been a better picture-maker the evolution of language might well have been indefinitely delayed, and with it all its elaborated art-offspring and word-cultures. The motion pic- ture is by, for and of the primitive. The cave wall paintings, the pre- historic s'culptures, the pictographs, sign languages and their kindred expres- sions were all endeavors at the living motion picture. The stylus and chisel were too slow, and expression side- stepped into words to get the movement in terms of the active verb. The motion picture wish had to wait until the cen- turies of technological development brought optics and chemistry to serve. But the coming of the motion picture was inevitable. Its growth formation may be traced out in organic pattern, as obvious and consistent as the structure of a plant from root to leaf. The chain of events and causations is clear and definite all the way from the wall pic- tures of Dordogne to the white-lighted movie theatre of to-day. Commercial timidities and misgiv- ings concerning the stability and per- sistence of the motion picture are trivial vaporings of the uninformed. The motion picture is in fact the oldest, most simple art in the culture of the race. It is broadly founded on basic wishes and as an institution may be expected to rapidly increase its domi- nation, which even now, after a brief commercial development of only three decades, tends to overshadow in terms of patronage all of the older arts. The dominance of the motion picture and its seeming miracles of prosperity are not matters of accident, they are merely the floration of long repressed roots. The extreme brevity of motion pic- ture experience is the only truly unique aspect of its history. The motion picture differs in its growth pattern from the other arts only in velocity, the swiftness with which phase follows phase. Its opportunity had been ripen- ing through the ages. The screen was long over-due, hence the extraordinary effulgence of its early period of develop- ment. 1

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