Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

He looks pale now, drawn. His fingers toy with a forgotten champagne glass. Another log collapses in the fireplace, releasing a train of sparks, a cataract of glowing embers. He takes out a cigar, places it between his lips, and Yukio is there with a match. Chance takes a few tranquillizing puffs.

“When I left that nickelodeon, I took something important away with me. The knowledge that the new century was going to be a century governed by images, that the spirit of the age would express itself in an endless train of images, one following upon the other with the speed of the steam locomotive that was the darling of the last century and symbolized all its aspirations. I knew that all those Boston Brahmins I had been raised among, the Cabots, Lodges, and Lowells who held themselves aloof from childish photoplays and who forbade their children to attend them, were nothing more than dumb fish insensible to currents which were capable of sweeping them to their destruction. And while they clung blindly to the past, their Irish chauffeurs and gardeners were learning the language of the new century in the nickelodeon, were learning to think and feel in the language of pictures. Have you noticed how many Irishmen direct pictures?”

I don’t contradict him and state the obvious, that the Cabots, Lowells, and Lodges still seem very much securely in the seats of power, and that the Irish are still cleaning the Cabot crystal and driving the Lodges around in their swanky automobiles. All I say is, “The only Irishman I know in pictures is Mr. Fitzsimmons.”

Chance doesn’t register this comment; he’s already pressing on. “When President Woodrow Wilson was given a private screening of The Birth of a Nation , he declared it was ‘History written in lightning.’ The metaphor is fitting. Think of what we all remember of that picture. Battle scenes. The assassination of Lincoln. Lee surrendering to Grant. The stirring ride of the Ku Klux Klan. Sitting through Griffith’s picture is like sitting through one of those dark summer nights when a thunderstorm breaks: instants of brilliant illumination when the things which flash before your eyes – a tree waving in the wind, a river in spate, your bedroom chair – burn into your brain in a way they never would in the steady, even light of day. There is no logical explanation as to why or how this happens. Images take root in your mind, hot and bright, like an image on a photoplate. Once they etch themselves there, they can’t be obliterated, can’t be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there’s no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What’s up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can’t control the flow of images the way you can control a book – by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember.”

I am getting interested in what Chance has to say. It must show in my face; he leans forward in his chair, lowering his voice. “Birth became America’s history lesson on the Civil War. For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted in Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in Wyoming. The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed of; one big classroom stretching from Maine to California, an entire nation sitting at Griffith’s feet. In New York alone, eight hundred thousand people saw Birth , more people than there are students in all the colleges in all the states of the Union. Think about it, Harry. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Griffith is the Great Educator. Whatever bits of history the average American knows, he’s learned from Griffith. Griffith marks the birth of spiritual Americanism.”

“And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?”

“Perhaps it can’t be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.” Chance shoots me a victorious look. “You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!”

“I see,” I say.

“And yet,” says Chance with the air of a man divulging a great confidence, “everywhere I look, I see little evidence of that spirit in American pictures. Do you know the reason, Harry?” He reaches in his pocket and produces a piece of paper which he lays on the table, methodically smoothing out its creases. “I asked Fitz to do some research for me. Into the heads of the major studios.” He begins to read from the paper. “Adolph Zukor and Fox were born in Hungary. Warner and Goldwyn in Poland. Selznick and Mayer in Russia. Laemmle in Germany. There is the answer why the American movie industry is in such a sorry state. Europeans making our movies for us. Goldwyn hiring English writers. Adolph Zukor offering us Queen Elizabeth , with Sarah Bernhardt as star. A French actress playing an English queen. Which he follows with The Prisoner of Zenda. European kitsch.” He refolds the paper and tucks it out of sight under his plate. “The classroom of the American spirit is now located in the movie house. Americans go to the pictures two and three times a week. Griffith made the American Iliad , I intend to make the American Odyssey. The story of an American Odysseus, a westerer, a sailor of the plains, a man who embodies the raw vitality of America, the raw vitality which is our only salvation in the days which lie ahead. Perhaps Shorty McAdoo is my Odysseus. Do you think it’s possible?”

I shake my head. “It’s too early to say – maybe.”

Chance sits musing. “I have seen things abroad. I have seen Europe rediscovering the spirit of the primitive, the life source by which nations live and die; I have seen them grasping the power of images. Last year Mussolini marched his Blackshirts on Rome and the government, the army folded. The government possessed all the material force necessary to prevail, and yet they gave way to a few thousand men with pistols in their pockets. Why? Because Mussolini orchestrated a stream of images more potent than artillery manned by men without spiritual conviction. Thousands of men in black shirts marching the dusty roads, clinging to trains, piling into automobiles. They passed through the countryside like film through a projector, enthralling onlookers. And when Rome fell, Mussolini paraded his Blackshirts through the city, before the cameras, so they could be paraded over and over again, as many times as necessary, trooped through every movie house from Tuscany to Sicily, burning the black shirt and the silver death’s head into every Italian’s brain. Imagine if Lenin learns the trick. Imagine what would happen to us.”