In the whole experience of
the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the
cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to
the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of saints
standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to
visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects
which were pictured was not great. And in the East, where the spirit
of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of
concrete things was even more meager, and for that reason perhaps the
faculty of practical decision was by so much reduced. In the western
world, however, during the last few centuries there has been an
enormous increase in the volume and scope of secular description, the
word picture, the narrative, the illustrated narrative, and finally
the moving picture and, perhaps, the talking picture.
Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which
the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They
seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human
meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind
conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture,
requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But
on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting,
and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.
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