i6 



HORSES AND MOVEMENT 



as the camera sees. This is manifestly wrong, for, as 

 has already been said, the camera cannot record move- 

 ment. It never sees it. It arrests the effect of a 

 moment, selecting instantaneous aspects only, thus pro- 

 ducing a stationary condition which is the negation of 

 movement itself. 



" But photography does produce a vivid sense of 

 movement," the reader will perhaps exclaim. " Look 

 at the cinematograph ! " Exactly — the cinematograph 

 is the best proof of the camera's incapacity. For since 

 a single photograph cannot, like a drawing, express move- 

 ment of itself, the cinematograph is compelled to use 

 them by hundreds, projecting their images in rapid 

 sequence on the screen so that the eye may actually 

 follow their variations across its surface through a period 

 of time. The cinematograph does not attempt to 

 summarize impressions of movement as the artist must. 

 It expresses like by like, creating a fresh series of vary- 

 ing impressions which are reminiscent of the original 

 impressions of the living scene from which the films were 

 taken, reviving in their sequence the actual rhythms, 

 obscurities, indefiniteness, distortions and emphasis" of 

 certain things which we should have seen for ourselves 

 in nature. For if properly controlled it hides the 

 camera's records of the stiff momentary attitudes 



invisible to us through which the limbs of the dancer 

 or the greyhound pass, by merging them in the graceful 

 rhythms which result therefrom, just as in nature the 

 actual attitudes are hidden in the grace of the dancer 

 and the greyhound. 



Art cannot use movement to represent movement. 

 It has to render it in the fixed and unchanging materials 

 in which the painter or the sculptor works, and in which 

 indeed lies his strength. For the artist's purpose is not 

 to reconstruct nature, but to communicate his own emo- 

 tion and interest to others, whether his art be real- 

 istic and imitative or an abstraction not recognizably 

 connected with natural appearance. 



If it is the representation of movement that the 

 artist attempts, his task at first sight appears similar 

 to the summing-up of an air in music in a single chord. 

 This comparison is hardly fair, however, for the eye of the 

 spectator who is looking at a work, of art does not em- 

 brace the whole at once, staring fixedly at one central 

 point, but travels about its surface, so that the artist has 

 a considerable area at his disposal over which he can 

 lead the spectator's eye in such a manner as to produce 

 the desired effect upon him. The quotation from Rodin, 

 given further on, in which he explains how the eye is led 

 across his statue is a good instance of this principle. 



