Cinema Chair?

Reviewers snorted, professors sniffed, the lay public was mildly interested, when Cinema Producer Robert T. Kane last week offered $5,000 annually to the first of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Chicago and Columbia Universities that should agree to establish a Chair in Cinematography.

Producer Kane had various reasons for making the offer, reasons real, subconscious and attributed. The ones he himself laid stress on were:

1) "We in the industry, are paying genius prices to mediocrity. . . . We have got to bring into the business good minds . . . willing to study the camera and its possibilities as well as its limitations."

2) "The parasitic scheme of attempting to reduce novels and stage plays to the screen play, will not do. We have a new and a distinct device for dramatic expression and no one seems to know what to do with it."

3) "We shall all find a definite rise in the general tone of moving pictures."

Producer Kane visualized lecture courses conducted by camera men, directors, scenarists, players. He would throw open his studios to the specializing undergraduates, as laboratories. He exhorted other producers to offer other chairs.

Needless to say, other producers kept silent. Nor did any college president march to Producer Kane's office. Every one sat back mulling it over, saying things like this:

"It is too much, however, to hope that some of the old time actresses of real ability might be substituted for the fly-by-nights of the beauty contests."--Boston Transcript.

"This is noble, but not exciting. For what substance has it? The serious-minded and highly specialized young men . . . would be quite likely to find themselves waiting for employment until the moving pictures cater to serious-minded and highly specialized audiences."--The New York World.

It looked as though Producer Kane would have to pick a recipient himself and conduct his experiment without the enthusiastic support of any one. Though surely such visionaries as Poet Vachel Lindsay were largely on his side. The latter, archaeologist and artist, has been a student of the cinema since its earliest days. He clearly sees Cinematography as the national art-form it indubitably is. Nearly ten years ago he was persuading the Art Institute of Denver to share that view, take up the art form, develop and preserve it.

*The Art of the Moving Picture--Vachel Lindsay--MacMillan; 1915, 1922.