French Literature Reviews - 2026
V. Lindsay, From Cave to Pyramid: Writings on Cinema (1914-1925)
Art and Visual Culture
Bibliographic reference: Vachel Lindsay - De la caverne à la pyramide. Ecrits sur le cinéma (1914-1925), Klincksieck, collection "Librairie Klincksieck, série arts-esthétique", 2012. EAN13: 9782252038383.
"Edison is the new Gutenberg. He invented the new printing press," wrote Vachel Lindsay in 1914, in the first-ever book dedicated to cinema. This poet's work invites a nascent medium to earn its own respect, suggesting the very principles that would establish it among the arts.
It bears witness to Lindsay's militant conviction: from Platonic myth and the tentative steps of cave painting to the iconic and verbal beauties of Egyptian hieroglyphs, everything urges modern man to "think in images" and prompts America to recognize in cinema the only possible grammar for the lexicon of its national imagination.
To this foundational work (The Art of the Moving Picture), the present edition adds articles by Lindsay published in The New Republic in 1917, along with extensive excerpts from the manuscript of a second, previously unpublished book.
Published on April 13, 2012
Vachel Lindsay stands among the earliest American writers to engage critically with the emerging medium of film, positioning moving pictures within a deep historical lineage of visual communication. By drawing parallels between cinematic art and ancient forms such as cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphs, early twentieth-century writers sought to articulate a distinct aesthetic vocabulary for the screen. Such efforts reflected broader intellectual inquiries into how mechanical reproduction and mass visual culture might shape modern perception, national identity, and artistic expression during a period of rapid technological change in the United States and Europe.
This volume collects Lindsay's pioneering text The Art of the Moving Picture alongside contemporaneous articles from The New Republic and extensive manuscript excerpts from a second, unpublished book on cinema. Readers interested in early film theory, the intersection of poetry and visual media, or the reception of silent cinema in American letters may find this French-language edition relevant for tracing the foundations of cinematic criticism.