The Public Arts

Gilbert Seldes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000680034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1956 and then again in 1994. Seldes can be viewed as a pioneer of popularising and giving value to popular culture in his various publications since 1924. The Public Arts first published in 1956 starts with a letter to Jimmy Durante and Edward R. Murrow in which Seldes suggests that news and entertainment are 'part of one field' and that 'the lively arts and the mass media are two aspects of the same phenomenon' which can be captured in the term 'the public arts'. Popular culture refers to the world of situation comedies, comic strips, MTV. radio and television talk shows, football games, standup comedians, mystery stories, popular romance novels, and so on. Elite culture refers to operas, ballets, classical music, masterworks of painting and sculpture, serious novels and plays and other art forms that require, generally speaking, relatively sophisticated sensibilities. Many critics now argue that it is now unauthenticated to argue that popular culture and elite culture are different.

1 THE REVOLUTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780429339325-1

This book is fundamentally the story of a revolution. For convenience, the beginning of that revolution can be placed in the late summer of 1929, when millions of Americans, with more money to spend on recreation than they had ever had before, spent nothing because they were staying home to be entertained by the Amos ’n’ Andy radio program.

That revolution is still going on, affecting our lives in a hundred different ways, providing us with new forms of entertainment which are at the same time new instruments of communication, their power so great that they impose on us the positive obligation to control and direct them. Like all fundamental changes in society, this revolution has many aspects. The one I am concerned with is the transformation of those entertainments which once could properly be called “the lively arts” into “the public arts,” and it is a pleasant paradox that this transformation begins with the arrival of entertainment, via radio, into the privacy of the home. Until that moment entertainment had been individual; from that moment it began to be universal. It had been needed and it became indispensable, as much a part of the American household as the telephone and, when radio developed into television, more cherished than the motorcar. When payments lapsed in installment buying, the TV set was the last item to be sacrificed. It had become what entertainment had never been before—a free and continuous and integrated part of the daily home life of an entire nation.

We can measure the extent of the revolution by a little exercise of the imagination. Think of a prosperous merchant in 1910 coming home to hear from his wife that the servants would all leave unless they had a small orchestra and a comedian to entertain them at their work. And then quickly think of a cook being told today that she couldn’t have a radio in the kitchen.

There had been omens of change for many years. The appetite for entertainment had been growing, and the machinery for duplicating the printed page, the phonograph record and eventually the motionpicture film brought quantity production into the field. But the comic strip and the popular fiction magazine and the recorded recitation or ragtime tune were read and heard individually, and the motion picture, seen by hundreds of thousands in theaters scattered over the entire country, still had the quality of earlier entertainment. People went to the movie house when they had the time and the money, or let their children go as a reward for good behavior. Going to the movies became a habit—but one still had to go and to pay. A fully realized form of entertainment in an egalitarian democracy had to be so inexpensive as to appear to be free and had to be enjoyed by millions of people at the same time.

The American people became aware of radio as an instrument of communication when Station KDKA in Pittsburgh announced the election of Harding in 1920. A few years later it was so far on its way to becoming the first universal entertainment that churches postponed midweek gatherings and movie houses delayed their evening shows long enough for people to listen to the Amos ’n ’ Andy program at home or, in many places, announced that the program would be heard before the beginning of Bible class or the feature picture. That change—from radio as a carrier of news and ideas to radio as a virtually endless entertainment—is another aspect of the revolution. One factor in radio’s conquest of the American people was the publicity it acquired. People who had no receivers read about the stunts and triumphs of the new invention and began to hear names of people and odd phrases like “I’se regusted” in the conversations around them. In that respect the movies had done at least as well. As far back as 1916 Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford ran a headline race to be the first to sign a million-dollar contract. The fan magazine and the clubs of idolaters came into being and were not matched in radio until the crooner began to enchant the bobby-soxer. The movies anticipated radio also in side effects—in providing models of behavior. It was never proved that they turned children into delinquents, but when Clark Gable removed his shirt in a movie and showed his bare skin the sale of undershirts dropped so low that manufacturers begged the star to let himself be seen in one in a later picture, and when two stars toasted each other in pink champagne the stock of this wine was immediately exhausted. These trifles were symptomatic. The movies reached one of their summits of extravagance during the 1920s and reflected and also exaggerated a kind of opulent standard of life, so that ideals of excellence and of ways of living were affected by what we saw on the screen.

This is one of the distinctive marks by which we recognize the public arts. And because other arts of high quality are not so marked, they are outside the scope of this book. The pleasurable art of the musical show, more beautifully practiced here than anywhere else in the world, has only the slightest public effect, and on the whole it seems to me that all our music (except when it is broadcast) is in the same class. The phenomenon of “rock ’n’ roll” has, to be sure, been observed by the law. State police have kept their eyes on roadhouses where the young enthusiasts for this music congregate, but only to make sure that illegal liquor is not added to the excitement of the songs. On the other hand, the suspicion that the “comic” horror book is an active contributor to juvenile delinquency would bring it directly into my field and would be, in contrast to the arts treated here, the only one that has no charm, no skill, no merit of any kind, imposing itself on public attention by its unredeemed vulgarity, the suspicion of its viciousness, and its unquestioned popularity. As the only positive question it brings up—the question of censorship—rises also in connection with television and the movies, I have preferred to treat it there. Whether the horror book actually is a contributor to juvenile delinquency is not a question I can usefully discuss.

All the other greatly popular entertainments have style and wit and intelligence—not all of them in the same degree, to be sure. All of them are interesting to the adult mind. And one of them has, at different times, given promise of becoming the single really new art of our time. The story of the movies is not conclusive; on the other hand, it is not ended.

Certainly it is the proper place to begin.

2 THE LOVELY ART: MOVEMENT

DOI: 10.4324/9780429339325-2

Twenty-five years after the movies began to talk, a reputation began to solidify into a phrase: “the one incontestable genius of the screen.” It was applied to Charlie Chaplin. It became familiar and irritating, like the parentheses in Time: Charles (“The Incontestable”) Chaplin.

He might himself have noted that the phrase grew common just at the time when political and religious boycotts had ruined one of his best pictures; he might have been pleased that the same estimate was put on record by Samuel Goldwyn, who sympathized little with those ideas which eventually forced Chaplin into exile from the United States. Not by Mr. Goldwyn, but by many others, the phrase was only a prelude to an attack on his private life. Irony is not a prime constituent in Chaplin’s temperament, and he would have found small satisfaction in the added circumstance that the tribute was usually based on those silent or semi-silent pictures which are now museum pieces. There can be, however, a low compensation in being reduced to a cliche, for these same museun pieces, especially the full-length features, make a sizable fortune for Chaplin when reissued with musical accompaniment, and, although avarice is not so marked a trait in him as his detractors assert, he is entided to one satisfaction: the proceeds from the reissue of City Lights, after a boycott had killed Monsieur Verdoux, made it possible for Chaplin to finance Limelight. It is now difficult for many people to think of him as an artist; they have been told by critics and headline-writers and occasionally by Chaplin himself that he is a political figure. I make my guess that in the fullness of time he will return to his original place—pre-eminendy the creative genius of the popular arts.

One other figure moves forward on the screen of our memory: Greta Garbo. Enigmatical as Chaplin is plain, reserved as he is aggressive, she is parallel and opposite to him in this also: as he is the great genius who fully expressed himself on the screen, she haunts us as the image of unfulfilled, eternally possible, unrealized greatness. If Hollywood had a collective conscience, a sense of something like guilt would fall upon it whenever her name was mentioned, but perhaps not of actual guilt because there is no proof that film was the only right medium for Garbo, that she had talent greater than the screen ever used. What she did have was not always well used; between her own temperament, as perceived by her directors, and the needs of her studio, many pictures were spoiled and many others were left undone. It is as if professionally she died young, her talents still scattered, never in a single picture completely focused, matured, beyond criticism—but having left on us an impression of matchless grandeur waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect movie, to reveal itself. In any long-range view of the movies, these two images, of Garbo and Chaplin, zoom toward us until they fill almost the entire screen of our memory. But this distorts the picture, because if we focus sharply on them alone, everything in the background will be fuzzy and the contours blurred. To get a clear and comprehensive view we must think not so much of what these two individuals were, but rather what they witnessed—not so much what they did for the movies as what the movies made it possible for them to do.

I want to take a long view of the movies and I know that it is bound to be distorted by nostalgia, by my own commitment to them, from their earliest days, as a lovely art. To prevent myself from losing perspective entirely, I am going to put in the foreground a close view of the movies as they were in a recent year, at a moment of crisis: the last full year before the coming of the wide screen and three-dimensional effects—the year 1952. The pictures in the running for the Academy Awards included Come Back, Little Sheba and The Member of the Wedding; most of the lists of the best pictures of that year mentioned The Quiet Man, Chaplin’s Limelight, and High Noon; still current were Five Fingers and The Four poster; just gone was Cry, the Beloved Country. Omitting all importations, even from England, these pictures carry with them a distinct sense of quality, and I note that a certain response to quality can be counted on, for one of the shrewdest and most intelligent satirical comedies of the past twenty years, Bom Yesterday, and a tragic picture with an intensely personal outlook on life, A Streetcar Named Desire, were among the five pictures of 1951 which had grossed over $4,00,000 in two years—the others being spectacles and musicals. The continuing slogan of the industry is that “movies are better than ever,” which does not prove that they are good enough; but even the critical can feel that the best movies are extremely good. And in light entertainment that lacks prestige but gives delight to the judicious, the level is also good; the average in 1952 was a little low only because the studios had discovered that they must finance themselves with Technicolored spectacles and proceeded to make more of them than the available talents could justify. Goaded by television, the movie industry showed more vigor than it had for many years, and even before the new lenses and new screens arrived, signs of strength and willpower were visible.

This sense of present goodness in the movies has to be kept in the foreground by anyone who thinks about the glories of the past. A mawkish lament is not the proper tribute to the silent picture. The right tribute is enough: the silents put their stamp on and gave their character to the movie with sound, and so, in the process of change, they were the decisive creative element in television as entertainment.

Looking back not on what has been recorded, by myself and others, about the old movies, but on a kind of composite reel that forms in the memory, I find at first a feeling of dismay, a doubt whether they were as wonderful as they seemed ten years after they had vanished. They should have left a multitude of enduring images, not Chaplin and Garbo alone. They did, of course; the flash of genius around these two blinds us momentarily and it takes a little time to see Mabel Normand, all mischief and delight, and William S. Hart with his cold eyes, and Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford and the Keystone Cops and Harold Lloyd and Theda Bara and Valentino and Poia Negri. But even when we have enumerated all these and a hundred more who were in some degree world images, we know that something still eludes us. These men and women we admired, but the movies we loved.

This profound affection, universal and enduring, is unique in human experience. Fortunate people love what they do, their work or their play. A few love the arts they come to know well, as people genuinely love music; they love the novels of one writer, they become addicts of a special kind of fiction and would rather read a bad mystery story than none at all. But all these are private and special forms of love, whereas the love felt for the movies by one generation after another among all the peoples of the world was instant and whole, it was for everything the movies were, it was love of the essential and almost indefinable thing the movies offered. Nothing like this emotion has been inspired by radio or by television, and I think it would be interesting if the reasons were discovered because we might learn something valid about human nature in the process. I shall not try to do the work, which would require a team of researchers: a psychologist, an aesthetician, a sociologist, and a banker, for instance. I make my guess after observing the variations in the visual art as practiced first by the silent movies, then by movies with sound, and finally by television. I would like to think that the movies are universally loved precisely because they are a subtle and complex form of art, but I cannot prove this, so I settle for another explanation: the movies are loved because they are the first form of fiction presented visually in which the way of telling the story anticipates all the needs of the spectator before he is aware of them—in a sense, the way the story is told does all the work for the spectator and gives him the highly satisfactory sense of exercising a divine power. How that is done is another matter; at the moment, I would like to trace the course of this true love between the people of the world and the movies—which was more than a love affair and gave the lie to the old axiom, because it did run smooth.

It began with the sense of wonder when the workers walked out of the Lumiere factory and were made immortal on film.* And wonder remained in spite of all the stupidities and corruptions visited upon the screen. It was the shock of recognition, not between men of genius, but between common men and their fellows; from the begin*The strip still exists. I saw it in Canada in 1952. ning and for many years the wonder and delight of the movies was that they moved, and the spasmodic jerks of the first movies were just enough different from the human gait to give the last essential element—the movies were true to life, but they were not life itself.

The first French film strip was an actuality; the first American strip to scandalize the country was a piece of fiction, a kiss lasting something less than a minute; before the movies were out of their teens, they were delinquent—a championship prize fight was re-enacted and offered as the original event, as a few years later a movie purporting to be a record of Theodore Roosevelt’s explorations was shown (with Lew Dockstader impersonating the President). But the true line of development was held, and The Great Train Robbery (a compendium of the cinematic art as it existed in 1903) led the way to The Birth of a Nation in 1915. By that time the dominant types had been established: the picture of sentimental drama, as with Mary Pickford; the Western with Broncho Billy and Tom Mix; the slapstick comedy with the Keystone Cops; the sex picture with Theda Bara. Bathing beauties and the star system and inflated salaries and censorship and lengthy features, including the imported Quo Vadis in nine reels, and, in big cities, downtown “showcase” houses with elaborate “presentations”— there were even attempts at color and synchronized sound. By 1916 the movies had completed their first cycle, the experimental one, and set all their patterns; during the next ten years they consolidated their position. In a chronology of the movies prepared by the authoritative Motion Picture Herald, all but two of the notable events between 1916 and 1926 are concerned with mergers, real estate, circuits, patents, and the like. The two exceptions are the appearance of Valentino and the personal scandals of 1922 which brought Will Hays to Hollywood and so laid the groundwork for “self”-censorship.

In this period, also, the industry developed most of its more interesting faults. Its cardinal sin—the creation of the movie personality with or without talent—was forced upon it by the public. The instinct of the front office was to identify the stars with the studio, so we had the Biograph Girl and the Gaumont Girl and the Keystone Bathing Beauties, but the public kept writing in for the names and eventually we had them— and the fan magazine was around the corner. Soon another factor had been added: money. We have suffered the inflation that followed two wars, but a million dollars a year is still a lot of money; the first two people in the United States whose publicized wages were a million a year were Chaplin and Mary Pickford—and they got theirs when dollars were gold. No elaborate press-agentry was needed to make movie millionaires famous, and when, presendy, stars began to have love affairs and after love affairs scandals, and when murder and mystery were piled upon all this, the appetite of the American for intimacy with the stars seemed natural and proper. We have lavished our affections and money on artificially created personalities who have given far less in return than some of the gods of the movies.

The fan magazine and the star system fed each other, and together they had their effect on all phases of the movie business. Stories were bought and altered to fit stars who either could render no character but their own on the screen or became identified with one kind of personality and were afraid (with ample reason) that their loyal fans would not want to see them in another image. The really loyal fan— the founder of clubs to promote the success of one star by the process of tearing down all others, the fan who later turned to crooners and cryers—would not let Mary Pickford play a man’s mistress because that would make Mary immoral; the process of identification of actress with character was virtually complete. The consequence was that even the few players who could create characters were restricted; the only ones allowed to show any range were of the second order of stardom and almost always in the higher age-brackets. Economically, one consequence was that a studio might lose a million dollars if its efforts failed to put over a star; another was the guara...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition Page
• Biographical Note Page
• To Edward R. Murrow and Jimmy Durante Page
• 1 The Revolution
• 2 The Lovely Art: Movement
• 3 The Lovely Art: Sound
• 4 The Lovely Art: Magic
• 5 The Lovely Art: Space
• 6 The Useful Art
• 7 Sounds and Echoes
• 8 Personality Business
• 9 The Threshold of Entertainment
• 10 The Anatomy of Misery
• 11 Domestic Manners in the 49th State
• 12 “What a Work Is Man!”
• 13 The Incomparable Bing
• 14 The Prevalence of Comedy
• 15 The Good-Bad Berle
• 16 Ave, Vale, and Wait
• 17 Mr. Benny
• 18 The Gleason Case
• 19 “Me and the Camera and the Folks . . ."
• 20 “What’ll We Do for Laughs, Celeste?”
• 21 The 52-Minute Hour
• 22 The Consequences of Time
• 23 Blessed Necessity
• 24 The Situations of Edward R. Murrow
• 25 A Primer of Problems
• 26 Rights and Duties I: Freedom of the Air
• 27 Rights and Duties II: The Right to Persuade
• 28 Rights and Duties III: The Limitations of Freedom
• 29 Problems of Power I: The Politics of Color
• 30 Problems of Power II: The Ultra-Highs
• 31 Problems of Power III: Programs for Pay
• 32 Problems of Power IV: The Educational Nexus
• 33 A New Approach
• 34 The Trinity of the Arts
• 35 The Public Arts