
THE CINEMA
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
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. But these philosophers have
presumably forgotten the movies. They
have never seen the savages of the twentieth
century watching the pictures. They haven
ever sat themselves in front of the screen
and thought how, for all the clothes on their
backs and the carpets at their feet, no great
distance separates them from those bright-
eyed naked men who knocked two bars of
iron together and heard in that clangour a
foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case of course are so
highly wrought and so covered over with
accretions of alien matter that it is extremely
difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is
hubble bubble, swarm and chaos. We are
peering over the edge of a cauldron in which
fragments seem to simmer; and now and
again some vast shape heaves and seems
about to haul itself up out of chaos and the
savage in us starts forward with delight.
Yet, to begin with, the art of the cinema
seems a simple and even a stupid art. That
is the king shaking hands with a football
team; that is Sir Thomas Lipton's yacht; that
is Jack Horner winning the Grand National.
The eye licks it all up instantaneously and
the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down
to watch things happening without bestirring
itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the
English unaesthetic eye, is a simple mechan-
ism, which takes care that the body does
not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain
with toys and sweetmeats and can be trusted
to go on behaving like a competent nurse-
maid until the brain comes to the conclusion
that it is time to wake up. What is its sur-
prise then to be roused suddenly in the midst
of its agreeable somnolence and asked for
help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye
says to the brain, 'Something is happening
[new column]
which I do not in the least understand. You
are needed.' Together they look at the
King, the boat, the horse, and the brain sees
at once that they have taken on a quality
which does not belong to the simple photo-
graph of real life. They have become not
more beautiful, in the sense in which pic-
tures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our
vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more
real, or real with a different reality from
that which we perceive in daily life? We
behold them as they are when we are not
there. We see life as it is when we have no
part in it. As we gaze we seem to be re-
moved from the pettiness of actual existence,
its cares, its conventions. The horse will not
knock us down. The King will not grasp our
hands. The wave will not wet our feet.
Watching the antics of our kind from this
post of vantage we have time to feel pity and
amusement, to generalize, to endow one man
with the attributes of the race; watching boats
sail and waves break we have time to open
the whole of our mind wide to beauty and
to register on top of this the queer sensation
—beauty will continue to be beautiful whether
we behold it or not. Further, all this hap-
pened, we are told, ten years ago. We are
beholding a world which has gone beneath the
waves. Brides are emerging from the
Abbey; ushers are ardent; mothers are tear-
ful; guests are joyful; and it is all over and
done with. The war opened its chasm at
the feet of all this innocence and ignorance.
But it was thus that we danced and pirou-
etted, thus that the sun shone and the clouds
scudded, up to the very end. The brain adds
all this to what the eye sees upon the screen.
But the picture-makers seem dissatisfied
with these obvious sources of interest—the
the wonders of the actual world, flights of gulls,
or ships on the Thames; the fascination of
contemporary life—the Mile End Road,
Piccadilly Circus. They want to be improv-
ing, altering, making an art of their own—
314
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
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. But these philosophers have
presumably forgotten the movies. They
have never seen the savages of the twentieth
century watching the pictures. They haven
ever sat themselves in front of the screen
and thought how, for all the clothes on their
backs and the carpets at their feet, no great
distance separates them from those bright-
eyed naked men who knocked two bars of
iron together and heard in that clangour a
foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case of course are so
highly wrought and so covered over with
accretions of alien matter that it is extremely
difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is
hubble bubble, swarm and chaos. We are
peering over the edge of a cauldron in which
fragments seem to simmer; and now and
again some vast shape heaves and seems
about to haul itself up out of chaos and the
savage in us starts forward with delight.
Yet, to begin with, the art of the cinema
seems a simple and even a stupid art. That
is the king shaking hands with a football
team; that is Sir Thomas Lipton's yacht; that
is Jack Horner winning the Grand National.
The eye licks it all up instantaneously and
the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down
to watch things happening without bestirring
itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the
English unaesthetic eye, is a simple mechan-
ism, which takes care that the body does
not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain
with toys and sweetmeats and can be trusted
to go on behaving like a competent nurse-
maid until the brain comes to the conclusion
that it is time to wake up. What is its sur-
prise then to be roused suddenly in the midst
of its agreeable somnolence and asked for
help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye
says to the brain, 'Something is happening
[new column]
which I do not in the least understand. You
are needed.' Together they look at the
King, the boat, the horse, and the brain sees
at once that they have taken on a quality
which does not belong to the simple photo-
graph of real life. They have become not
more beautiful, in the sense in which pic-
tures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our
vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more
real, or real with a different reality from
that which we perceive in daily life? We
behold them as they are when we are not
there. We see life as it is when we have no
part in it. As we gaze we seem to be re-
moved from the pettiness of actual existence,
its cares, its conventions. The horse will not
knock us down. The King will not grasp our
hands. The wave will not wet our feet.
Watching the antics of our kind from this
post of vantage we have time to feel pity and
amusement, to generalize, to endow one man
with the attributes of the race; watching boats
sail and waves break we have time to open
the whole of our mind wide to beauty and
to register on top of this the queer sensation
—beauty will continue to be beautiful whether
we behold it or not. Further, all this hap-
pened, we are told, ten years ago. We are
beholding a world which has gone beneath the
waves. Brides are emerging from the
Abbey; ushers are ardent; mothers are tear-
ful; guests are joyful; and it is all over and
done with. The war opened its chasm at
the feet of all this innocence and ignorance.
But it was thus that we danced and pirou-
etted, thus that the sun shone and the clouds
scudded, up to the very end. The brain adds
all this to what the eye sees upon the screen.
But the picture-makers seem dissatisfied
with these obvious sources of interest—the
the wonders of the actual world, flights of gulls,
or ships on the Thames; the fascination of
contemporary life—the Mile End Road,
Piccadilly Circus. They want to be improv-
ing, altering, making an art of their own—
314