Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

8. Now Playing: Silent Cinema and Picture-Book Montage

140 8 { Now Playing Silent Cinema and Picture-Book Montage nathalie op de beeck In 1926, after illustrating an edition of George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, children’s artist Dorothy P. Lathrop compared the artistic imagination and film spectatorship: “To think in terms of illustration is to put one’s self in a projection room, where the story unfolds in a series of pictures which leap into the mind as complete and as silently as if falling upon a moving picture screen. ‘The princess was lying motionless on her bed’—and suddenly there she is for the drawing. There are no ‘experiences.’ Only an intense effort to make tangible the intangible [. . .] . At any rate there is something very like magic back of it all” (38). Lathrop idealizes the imaginative process and with it the flickering cinematic image. Her projection-room metaphor likens the artist ’s consciousness to a projection booth and the artist’s physical process to cinematic recording and projection technology. Using an affirmative modernist analogy between body and machine, Lathrop indicates the pervasiveness of cinema in 1926. She also implies the creative uses to which technological apparatuses could be put, materially and metaphorically. She offers a utopian vision of production in which “an intense effort to make tangible the intangible” makes for a realization of “magic.” Lathrop compares an interrelated series of pictures, produced Nathalie op de Beeck { 141 by book illustrators like herself, to a set of film stills, parts of an indivisible sequence. When she refers to the unfolding of a fairy tale, her remarks suggest the pleasurable immediacy of film spectatorship. If the story requires a princess, Lathrop says, “Suddenly there she is for the drawing,” projected on the imagination as in the movie house and consequently spooled out upon the page. Lathrop’s artist is as much recorder as imaginative creator, her human ingenuity allied with the mechanical. Her comments acknowledge early cinema’s influence on artists’ and storytellers’ vocabularies, cinema’s fascinating ability to put even inanimate things in motion, and the reader’s ability to make sense in and of the gaps between still images. The imagination animates illustrated texts. As Lathrop indicates, modern picture books and illustrated texts parallel emergent technologies and early twentieth-century modes of communication, including animated cinema. Animation was by no means new in 1926, the era of the talking revolution in cinema, and neither were the sequential modes of comic strips, photoplays, and picture-book narratives. But American picture books came into their own in the early twentieth century, helped along by an increasing book-industry commitment to profitable juvenile publishing and by educators’ fears of a decline in storytelling and material folk traditions. At the time, picture books offered a comforting nod to read-aloud, tangible print culture, while representing the latest developments in printing, the current multimedia modes of storytelling, and the pleasurable distractions of modern life. The picture book, as it developed in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, was not (or not just) a throwback to premodern times.1 Instead, the modern picture book reflected and influenced the multiple media waxing and waning. By the time Lathrop made her remarks, people already had fully developed picture-book sequences at their fingertips.2 Readers could choose from books by Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter, W. W. Denslow, L. Leslie Brook, and William Nicholson, to name a few memorable examples.3 What remains, then, is to re-present sequential communication as it crossed over into newer technologies and to acknowledge changing modes of perception . Every transformative or new media provides the necessary contexts for the emergence of a new—although not necessarily improved or somehow better—media. As Tom Gunning writes, “The century-long pursuit of ‘animated pictures’ reveals cinema’s imbrication within new experiences of technology, time and visual representation” (“Animated Pictures” 318). One might make a similar statement about developments in comics and picture books. Like animation the picture book evolved as a narrative medium and art form, reflecting the ways its producers and consumers perceived temporality, interpreted imagery, and used the latest technical means of expression. This essay establishes a comparison between silent cinema and pictorial literature of the modern era, while acknowledging the limits to any comparison among media and urging attention to context (of picture books especially). Both silent cinema and pictorial literature deal in immediacy, montage, and early twentieth-century narrative forms, suggesting what...