“A shad­ow shaped like a tad­pole sud­den­ly appeared at one cor­ner of the screen,” recalls Vir­ginia Woolf. “It swelled to an immense size, quiv­ered, bulged, and sank back again into nonen­ti­ty. For a moment it seemed to embody some mon­strous dis­eased imag­i­na­tion of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be con­veyed by shape more effec­tive­ly than by words. The mon­strous quiv­er­ing tad­pole seemed to be fear itself, and not the state­ment ‘I am afraid.’ ” She wit­nessed this at a screen­ing of the silent Ger­man Expres­sion­ist hor­ror film The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari (which you can watch for your­self above), and in it glimpsed the future of cin­e­ma itself.

Woolf elab­o­rates on this glimpse in her essay “The Cin­e­ma,” first pub­lished in a 1926 issue of the jour­nal The Nation and Athenaeum. (The British Library has a scan from the pub­li­ca­tion here.) “Peo­ple say that the sav­age no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civ­i­liza­tion, that every­thing has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambi­tious,” she begins. “But these philoso­phers have pre­sum­ably for­got­ten the movies.” She goes on, in this short piece, to come to grips with this new artis­tic medi­um, to artic­u­late her expe­ri­ence of it (as “the eye licks it up all instan­ta­neous­ly”) as well as its poten­tial and then-cur­rent lim­i­ta­tions, such as an over-reliance on lit­er­ary mate­r­i­al.

“The alliance is unnat­ur­al,” the author of Mrs. Dal­loway (filmed in 1997, and two years lat­er more imag­i­na­tive­ly used as the basis for Michael Cun­ning­ham’s nov­el The Hours, turned into cin­e­ma itself in 2002) declares about the adap­ta­tion of nov­els into movies. “Eye and brain are torn asun­der ruth­less­ly as they try vain­ly to work in cou­ples. The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karen­i­na.’ A volup­tuous lady in black vel­vet wear­ing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, ‘That is no more Anna Karen­i­na than it is Queen Vic­to­ria.’ ” She com­plains, as New York­er film crit­ic Richard Brody puts it, “that moviemak­ers, instead of rely­ing on the inher­ent prop­er­ties of cin­e­ma, har­ness the mak­ing of images to sto­ry­telling by way of lit­er­a­ture,” pre­sum­ably fail­ing to under­stand that “the cinema’s dis­tinc­tive pow­er involves cre­at­ing a new kind of visu­al expe­ri­ence.”

“It is only when we give up try­ing to con­nect the pic­tures with the book,” writes Woolf, “that we guess from some acci­den­tal scene — like the gar­den­er mow­ing the lawn — what the cin­e­ma might do if left to its own devices.” Nine­ty years lat­er, many cinephiles still dream of that gar­den­er mow­ing the lawn, await­ing the day that cin­e­ma gets left to its own devices to ful­fill the vast cre­ative and artis­tic promise only occa­sion­al­ly explored by the film­mak­ers. Woolf likens them to a “sav­age tribe” who, “instead of find­ing two bars of iron to play with, had found scat­ter­ing the seashore fid­dles, flutes, sax­o­phones, trum­pets, grand pianos by Erard and Bech­stein, and had begun with incred­i­ble ener­gy, but with­out know­ing a note of music, to ham­mer and thump upon them all at the same time.” Cin­e­ma devel­oped rapid­ly in the day of Dr. Cali­gari, and has devel­oped in cer­tain ways since, but its great­est expres­sions lie ahead — an obser­va­tion as true now as when Woolf, with slight dis­ap­point­ment but nev­er­the­less great expec­ta­tion, first made it. You can read here sem­i­nal essay, “The Cin­e­ma,” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, the Influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film (1920)

Vir­ginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Vir­ginia Woolf

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A cou­ple Christ­mases ago, we fea­tured the sto­ry of how Ayn Rand helped the FBI “iden­ti­fy” It’s a Won­der­ful Life as a piece of com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da, which does make one won­der: what kind of movie would she have Amer­i­ca watch instead? We know exact­ly what kind, since, in 1947, the author of The Foun­tain­head and Atlas Shrugged, nev­er one to shrink from the task of explain­ing her ideas, wrote the “Screen Guide for Amer­i­cans,” accord­ing to Pale­o­fu­ture, a pam­phlet meant for dis­tri­b­u­tion to Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers in order to make them aware of what she saw as a com­mu­nist push to poi­son the movies with anti-Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy.

“The pur­pose of the Com­mu­nists in Hol­ly­wood, Rand writes, “is not the pro­duc­tion of polit­i­cal movies open­ly advo­cat­ing Com­mu­nism. Their pur­pose is to cor­rupt our moral premis­es by cor­rupt­ing non-polit­i­cal movies — by intro­duc­ing small, casu­al bits of pro­pa­gan­da into inno­cent sto­ries — thus mak­ing peo­ple absorb the basic premis­es of Col­lec­tivism by indi­rec­tion and impli­ca­tion.” And so, to coun­ter­act the sub­tly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic pow­er of It’s a Won­der­ful Life and its ilk, she pro­pos­es fight­ing fire with fire, issu­ing these thir­teen cor­rec­tive film­mak­ing com­mand­ments:

1. Don’t take pol­i­tics light­ly. “To hire Com­mu­nists on the the­o­ry that ‘they won’t put over any pol­i­tics on me’ and then remain igno­rant and indif­fer­ent to the sub­ject of pol­i­tics, while the Reds are trained pro­pa­gan­da experts — is an atti­tude for which there can be no excuse.”
2. Don’t smear the free enter­prise sys­tem. “Don’t preach or imply that all pub­licly-owned projects are noble, human­i­tar­i­an under­tak­ings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly-owned—while preach­ing, at same time, that pri­vate prop­er­ty or the defense of pri­vate prop­er­ty rights is the expres­sion of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social self­ish­ness or evil.”
3. Don’t smear indus­tri­al­ists. “You, as a motion pic­ture pro­duc­er, are an indus­tri­al­ist. All of us are employ­ees of an indus­try which gives us a good liv­ing. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his bel­ly with acorns, then start­ed dig­ging to under­mine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our sym­bol.”
4. Don’t smear wealth. “If the vil­lain in your sto­ry hap­pens to be rich—don’t per­mit lines of dia­logue sug­gest­ing that he is the typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a whole social class, the sym­bol of all the rich. Keep it clear in your mind and in your script that his vil­lainy is due to his own per­son­al character—not to his wealth or class.”
5. Don’t smear the prof­it motive. “Don’t give to your char­ac­ters — as a sign of vil­lainy, as a damn­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic, a desire to make mon­ey. Nobody wants to, or should, work with­out pay­ment, and nobody does — except a slave.”
6. Don’t smear suc­cess. “It is the Com­mu­nists’ inten­tion to make peo­ple think that per­son­al suc­cess is some­how achieved at the expense of oth­ers and that every suc­cess­ful man has hurt some­body by becom­ing suc­cess­ful. It is the Com­mu­nists’ aim to dis­cour­age all per­son­al effort and to dri­ve men into a hope­less, dispir­it­ed, gray herd of robots who have lost all per­son­al ambi­tion, who are easy to rule, will­ing to obey and will­ing to exist in self­less servi­tude to the State.”
7. Don’t glo­ri­fy fail­ure. “While every man meets with fail­ure some­where in his life, the admirable thing is his courage in over­com­ing it — not the fact that he failed.”
8. Don’t glo­ri­fy deprav­i­ty. “Don’t drool over weak­lings as con­di­tioned ‘vic­tims of cir­cum­stances’ (or of ‘back­ground’ or of ‘soci­ety’) who ‘couldn’t help it.’ You are actu­al­ly pro­vid­ing an excuse and an ali­bi for the worst instincts in the weak­est mem­bers of your audi­ences.”
9. Don’t deify “the com­mon man.” “No self-respect­ing man in Amer­i­ca is or thinks of him­self as ‘lit­tle,’ no mat­ter how poor he might be. That, pre­cise­ly, is the dif­fer­ence between an Amer­i­can work­ing man and a Euro­pean serf.”
10. Don’t glo­ri­fy the col­lec­tive. “If you preach that it is evil to be dif­fer­ent — you teach every par­tic­u­lar group of men to hate every oth­er group, every minor­i­ty, every per­son, for being dif­fer­ent from them; thus you lay the foun­da­tion for race hatred.”
11. Don’t smear an inde­pen­dent man. “Remem­ber that Amer­i­ca is the coun­try of the pio­neer, the non-con­formist, the inven­tor, the orig­i­na­tor, the inno­va­tor. Remem­ber that all the great thinkers, artists, sci­en­tists were sin­gle, indi­vid­ual, inde­pen­dent men who stood alone, and dis­cov­ered new direc­tions of achieve­ment — alone.”
12. Don’t use cur­rent events care­less­ly. “It is a sad joke on Hol­ly­wood that while we shy away from all con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects on the screen, in order not to antag­o­nize any­body — we arouse more antag­o­nism through­out the coun­try and more resent­ment against our­selves by one cheap lit­tle smear line in the midst of some musi­cal com­e­dy than we ever would by a whole polit­i­cal trea­tise.”
13. Don’t smear Amer­i­can polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions. “It is true that there have been vicious Con­gress­men and judges, and politi­cians who have stolen elec­tions, just as there are vicious men in any pro­fes­sion. But if you present them in a sto­ry, be sure to make it clear that you are crit­i­ciz­ing par­tic­u­lar men — not the sys­tem. The Amer­i­can sys­tem, as such, is the best ever devised in his­to­ry. If some men do not live up to it — let us damn these men, not the sys­tem which they betray.”

Have any real motion pic­tures passed Rand’s pro-cap­i­tal­ist test? (Read her full pam­phlet here.) The film adap­ta­tion of The Foun­tain­head came out in 1949, and Rand her­self at first praised it as “more faith­ful to the nov­el than any oth­er adap­ta­tion of a nov­el that Hol­ly­wood has ever pro­duced.” But lat­er she turned against it, claim­ing to have “dis­liked the movie from begin­ning to end” and swear­ing nev­er again to sell her nov­els with­out reserv­ing the right to pick the direc­tor and screen­writer as well as to edit the film her­self. She did­n’t live to exer­cise those rights on Atlas Shrugged the movie, which came out as a tril­o­gy between 2011 and 2014, so we’ll nev­er know for sure if the movie met her strin­gent ide­o­log­i­cal stan­dards — but with Meta­crit­ic scores of 28%, 26%, and 9%, we can safe­ly assume they would­n’t meet her cin­e­mat­ic ones.

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Iden­ti­fy It’s a Won­der­ful Life as Com­mu­nist Pro­pa­gan­da

The Out­spo­ken Ayn Rand Inter­viewed by Mike Wal­lace (1959)

A Free Car­toon Biog­ra­phy of Ayn Rand: Her Life & Thought

Žižek Blames the US Gov­ern­ment Shut­down on Ayn Rand’s Acolytes Who Caused the 2008 Col­lapse

Ayn Rand’s Phi­los­o­phy and Her Resur­gence in 2012: A Quick Primer by Stan­ford His­to­ri­an Jen­nifer Burns

Ayn Rand’s Reviews of Children’s Movies: From Bam­bi to Frozen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.