In The Art of the Moving Picture Lindsay proposes that cinemas must replace saloons (235-244), as V. M. Dement'ev, "an extremely reactionary politician", proposed in Russia during the same year, and as Lev Trotsky, perhaps not so reactionary, was to propose eight years after that. Lindsay proclaims that Denver, Colorado (or maybe Santa Fe, New Mexico or Springfield, Illinois) will be cultural centers of the future (24-28; 305-317). He outlines a film that is to climax with the spirit of Springfield descending through the clouds (175-177). He declares that he was the first poet to write verse about May Marsh, Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet (4). And he says that architects should make movies as part of a plan for that profession to seize control of the direction of American life (272-279).
But he also compares film to hieroglyphics in two chapters which make it quite clear that he has a sense of the significance of film as image-language which in some ways prefigures French and Soviet theory (199-216: 280-288). Far from being a "fanciful flight", as a neighbor is supposed to have called it, this insight permeates his entire text, determining, for example, the principal differences between stage and screen, and dictating the poet's insistence on the emotional distance effected by the moving picture image by comparison with such direct experiences as those the theater provides (179-198). Moreover, Lindsay's interminable comparisons between specific hieroglyphs and specific movie pictures is underpinned by an understanding of existence as a forest of images not unlike that advanced in Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (first English edition, 1911).
And when Lindsay classifies films, as he does in the first part of the book, he does so according to a most intriguing system which, it seems to me, suggests the dimensions of an understanding of the cinema shared by few others. He advances a triadic schema which, as he represents it, initially appears bedeviled by a confusion of levels. First he places "the Action Film . . . based on the out-of-door chase" (37), in some sense the foundation for the other two and the ur-form of motion picture. "The Intimate Motion Picture" which has "its photographic basis in the close-up interior scene" is described next (58), followed by "the Photoplay of Splendor . . . based on the fact that the kinetoscope can take in the most varied of out-of-door landscapes" (58).
The apparent confusion here is between the Action (chase) of the first category and the Affects (Intimacy, Splendor) of the second and third, and it is a confusion which Lindsay neither recognizes nor (overtly) resolves.
Yet the confusion may be more apparent than real. When Lindsay comes to elaborate his categories he extends the Action Film to "sculpture-in-motion", the Intimate Photoplay to "painting-in-motion" and Splendor Pictures to "architecture-in-motion". With the addition of the idea of sculpture, which Lindsay quite definitely limits to full human figures, the implied frame of the Action Picture seems to me to become as fully manifested as those of the Intimate and Splendor varieties. The three types of film correspond, "metaphorically" or phenomenologically, to three interrelated camera distances which we would understand these days roughly as medium shot, close-up and long shot.
I have to insist upon the historical circumstances of our understanding because it is clear that for Lindsay the distances are greater than is commonly our experience. As he remembers his viewing in 1915, most action is shown in long shot, intimacy is achieved in the middle distance and the effect of splendor is obtained in vast panoramas, that is, in extra-long shots.
But it is also the case that in Lindsay we are dealing, not with an empirical perception of discrete units, but with an overall phenomenological sense: a classification that extends to whole films, that is to say, of large units of meaning--not of single shots, strictly speaking. So his is a broad system of genres based more upon the visual and experiential sense one makes of films than upon, say, their narrative properties.
Ultimately it seems to be the interval between the implied distances of the three kinds of image which gives each one a place in Lindsay's thinking, not specific, measurable lengths between the lens and what is before it. The Action Picture is described in terms of audience perception and involvement along the pattern of a detective story: something disappears from the visual field, provoking a chain of sensations leading to its recuperation. Lindsay stresses the affective distance of this process: a sense of being removed from the emotions of the participants, yet close enough to visually comprehend all that occurs. Later he places The Typhoon (1914) a film mainly of interiors, in the Splendor group ("Patriotic Splendor") because of the feeling it evokes, when the implied camera distance of its settings (interiors) would seem to ally it with the Intimate Pictures (79-81). Sensations of near, far and midpoint are what is being expressed here, combinations of Percept and Affect.
Indeed, the sense of space of these categories is dominated by feeling rather than actual distance, that is, they are Percepts based upon Affects. At first, it may seem that Action again is the odd one out, inasmuch as action is not the name of a feeling. Yet action does evoke feeling, and Lindsay does deal with Action Pictures in affective terms, albeit as affects of distance. He assigns them the color red and relates them more than once to the experience of speed and a supposed American "speed-mania" (41; 193) as well as to the chase, detection and suspense. Excitement, thrills, curiosity, seem appropriate descriptors for the emotions promoted by Action Pictures and implicitly associated in Lindsay's typology with the experience of the space of middle distance.
Both distance and feeling, the twin axes of Lindsay's system, refer to the relation of spectators and screen images, suggesting that the cinema from earliest times has called forth crude phenomenological responses even for such scientific enterprises as taxonomy. Lindsay cannot avoid the viewer, cannot approach films except through the viewing experience. Not too long ago this would have been considered a key weakness of The Art of the Moving Picture, rendering it too "impressionistic" to be of use for film theory. Of course that would not be the case today.
Today perhaps the most pertinent feature of Lindsay's analysis is in some ways the most prescient and the most dated: the elaborate attention he devotes to the films of Splendor. He describes no less than six sub- and sub-sub-categories of these (Fairy, Crowd, Patriotic, Religious, Things-in-motion and Architecture-in-motion). Yellow is the color of films of this group "since that is the hue of pageants and sunshine" (107). These are the films of the imagination--and the grandeur of what they show is matched by the grandeur of their ideas and feelings. Vast space must needs be the result of vast conception. Indeed, it would seem take a mind of spatial cast to infer overarching spiritual value from towering vistas. Nowadays spectacle, while drawing renewed attention from theorists, continues to provoke resistance in sensibilities firmly tied to the culture of the psychological novel. The spectacular qualities of films by Cecil B. DeMille, David Lean, Leni Reifenstahl, Stephen Spielberg are discussed as symptoms of infantile regression or worse--when they are discussed at all.
Reasons for suspecting spectacle are doubtless as old as Aristotle. Splendor is only something to look at: a what, not a how or why. It tells us nothing; it gratifies our mere senses. By the same token, the feelings to which it may give rise (awe, fervor, dedication) lack complexity and depth: they are great, but simple--or perhaps simple because they are great--finally somehow too big to be human in a time when divinity is dead. These are the fascinations of fascism, the dehumanization of art: totalitarianism, politics as aesthetics. Lindsay never subscribes for one moment to the kind of thinking that would diminish his own grandiose ambitions. He makes Splendor a kind of culmination of the other film types, and a redemptive quality on its own. "The shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea," he tells us, "This part is almost sure to be good. It is a fundamental resource" (67).
The Action Film, on the other hand, is characterized by what happens in it rather than by what is displayed by it. Here Lindsay insists upon alternation and repetition. This space is in the process of construction as we watch; it is linear and goal-seeking (the chase must have an ending). All of these are properties some contemporary theorists have attributed to classical Hollywood narratives. Lindsay's Action space is, however, also frenetic and given to diversion--the space of the Jazz Age, perhaps, or of the American cinema viewed from Europe then, or by Paul Virilio later. Space-time indeed.
In contrast to the yellow space of the thing (Splendor) and the red space of the deed (Action), the space of Intimacy is blue, entirely at the service of feeling. It is a space in which the way things and deeds are shown is of more moment than the things and deeds themselves. Lindsay, whose sentimentality is most obvious when he is projecting a sunny, optimistic attitude, wants to call these films "Intimate-and-friendly". In this type of film we will positively swill in affection, "the half-relaxed or gently restrained moods of human creatures" (49). But it is also the locus of a certain kind of comedy based on character, idiosyncracies, foibles. Despite appeals to snugness and cosiness, Lindsay is careful to remind readers that "it is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms" (53). It is universal feeling, thus, not the particular human spirit, that is projected in Intimate films.
The categories of Lindsay's system presume one another. At one level, almost every shot of every film will demonstrate facets of each of the three categories inasmuch as almost every shot of every film will show something in motion and in a certain way. In the chapter on Intimacy Lindsay describes an imaginary shot of a ball which combines all three modes (49). And when he comes to propose an ideal film, he mixes all three types in equal quantities, seven sequences of each (169-171). It should be a matter of balance, of proportion, which determines into what category a given film or sequence fails. Not, then, something which can be assessed "objectively", but a question of taste and sensibility, thus of culture and history--determined by difference, not by the same.
I have endeavored to explain Lindsay's classification system as though he made it up for himself out of the encounter between poet and dancing machine. But it is possible that this is not correct--or, at least, that it is not the whole truth. Elements of Lindsay's descriptions of Action, Intimacy and Splendor bear intriguing resemblances to the signs described in Charles Saunders Peirce's "Logic as Semiotic" as Icons, Indices or Symbols (102-103; 104-115). Peirce's trichotomous classification is surely known well enough not to warrant detailed exposition here, and Lindsay's application of it, if that is indeed what happens, is no more than rudimentary. All the same, Lindsay's Action Pictures seem perfectly Iconic, no more and no less than what they appear to be; the connection between the signs on the screen and their objects are unmediated, as they are in Peirce's Icons. And Intimacy, according to Lindsay, is achieved by a film's indicating feelings--via the closeness and homey furnishing of a room, for example. The referent is not "on the screen", but is connected to what appears there by skeins of affect. This inferred, mediated, yet material connection is precisely what characterizes Indices for Peirce.
The relation of Peirce's Symbols to Lindsay's Splendor is not so direct. Symbols are the products of convention; meaning in them is almost entirely indirect or arbitrary, established through a rule of some sort. As it happens, Splendor is the only category in which Lindsay consistently deploys such "symbolic" terms. The films used as examples of Action and Intimacy are discussed as though what is represented in them is entirely straightforward. However, when it comes to dealing with The Italian (1914) as an example of "Crowd Splendor", Lindsay notes that the two leading players "express each mass of humanity in turn" and that "the hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America" (70, my emphasis). Some skill in interpretation is evidently required for films of Splendor, certain subcategories of which assert belief in a world that is not quite the same as the everyday one that goes without saying. Patriotism, religion and fantasy demand a symbolic universe of true meanings detached from mundane action and feeling, pointing always towards utopia.
The Action file displays still images abducted from the following films and intended to stand for the following notions: