All is dark and an excellent orchestra is playing a Beethoven symphony.
The attendant flashes you to your seat with her torch, you tumble over
a subaltern, and murmur to yourself, with Musset’s Fantasio, “Quelles
solitudes que tous ces corps humains!” For that is the first odd thing
that strikes you about the movies; the psychology of the audience is not
collective, but individual. You are not aware of your neighbour, who is
shrouded from your gaze, and you take your pleasure alone. Thus you are
rid of the “contagion of the crowd,” the claims of human sympathy, the
imitative impulse, and thrown in upon yourself, a hermit at the mercy of
the hallucinations that beset the solitary. You never applaud, for that
is a collective action. What with the soothing flow of the music, the
darkness, and the fact that your eye is fixed on one bright spot, you
are in the ideal condition for hypnotism. But the suspected presence of
others, vague shadows hovering near you, give your mood the last touch of
the uncanny. You are a prisoner in Plato’s cave or in some crepuscular
solitude of Maeterlinck. Anything might happen.
According to the programme what happens is called _The Prodigal Wife_.
Her husband is a doctor and she pines for gaiety while he is busy at
the hospital. It is her birthday and he has forgotten to bring her her
favourite roses, which are in fact offered to her by another gentleman
with more leisure and a better memory. Our own grievance against the
husband, perhaps capricious, is his appalling straw hat—but then we
equally dislike the lovers tail-coat, so matters are even, and the lady’s
preference of No. 2 to No. 1 seems merely arbitrary. Anyhow, she goes
off with No. 2 in a motor-car, “all out,” leaving the usual explanatory
letter behind her, which is thrown on the screen for all of us to gloat
over.
Here let me say that this profuse exhibition on the screen of all the
correspondence in the case, letters, telegrams, copies of verses, last
wills and testaments, the whole _dossier_, strikes me as a mistake. It
under-values the intelligence of the audience, which is quite capable
of guessing what people are likely to write in the given circumstances
without being put to the indelicacy of reading it. As it is, you no
sooner see some one handling a scrap of paper than you know you are going
to have the wretched scrawl thrust under your nose. As if we didn’t know
all about these things! As if it wouldn’t be pleasanter to leave the
actual text to conjecture! I remember in _Rebellious Susan_ there is a
packet of compromising letters shown to interested parties, whose vague
comments, “Well, after _that_,” etc., sufficiently enlighten us without
anything further. But now, when Lady Macbeth reads her lord’s letter, up
it goes on the screen, blots and all. This is an abuse of the film, which
finds it easier to exhibit a letter than to explain why it came to be
written. As things are, the lady seems to have eloped in a hurry without
sufficient grounds. No. 2 presents his roses, and, hey presto! the car
is round the corner. No. 1 takes it very nobly, hugs his abandoned babe
to his bosom, and pulls long faces (obligingly brought nearer the camera
to show the furrows). The mother’s sin shall ever be hidden from the
innocent child, and to see the innocent child innocently asking, “Where’s
muvver?” and being answered with sad headshakes from the bereaved parent
(now bang against the camera) is to bathe in sentimental photography up
to the neck.
Thereafter the innocent child grows like (and actually inside) a rosebud
till, as the petals fall off, she is revealed as a buxom young woman—the
familiar photographic trick of showing one thing _through_ another being
here turned to something like poetic advantage. But then the film again
bolts with the theme. There is running water and a boat, things which
no film can resist. Away go the girl and her sweetheart on a river
excursion, loosening the painter, jumping in, shoving off, performing,
in short, every antic which in photography can be compassed with a
stream and a boat. We have forgotten all about the prodigal wife. But
here she is again, her hair in grey _bandeaux_ and her lips, as the
relentless camera shows you at short range, rouged with a hard outline.
She has returned to her old home as the family nurse. For there is now
another innocent babe, the doctor’s grandchild, to wax and wane with
the advancing and receding camera, and to have its little “nightie”
blown realistically by the usual wind as it stands on the stair-head.
The doctor himself is as busy as ever, making wonderful pharmacological
discoveries (newspaper extracts exhibited on the screen) in a laboratory
blouse and dictating the results (notes shown on the screen) to an
enterprising reporter.
And here there is another “rushed” elopement. “The art of drama,”
said Dumas, “is the art of preparations.” But nothing has prepared us
(save, perhaps, heredity) for the sudden freak of the prodigal wife’s
daughter in running away with a lover so vague that you see only his
hat (another hideous straw—_il ne manquait que ca_!) and the glow of
his cigarette-end. Family nurse to the rescue! Tender expostulations,
reminders about the innocent babe, and nick-of-time salvation of the
“intending” runaway. Ultimate meeting of nurse and doctor; he is all
forgiveness, but prodigal wives are not to be forgiven like that. No, she
must go out into the snow, and you see her walking down the long path,
dwindling, dwindling, from a full-sized nurse into a Euclidean point.
To sum up. The camera would do better if it would learn self-denial and
observe the law of artistic economy, keep its people consistently in one
plane and out of boats and motor cars, _soigner_ its crises a little
more, and avoid publishing correspondence. And it should slacken its pace
a bit. You may take the Heraclitean philosophy—πάντα χωρεῖ—a little too
literally. The movies would be all the more moving for moving slower.
For the real fun of rapid motion, appropriately used, give me _Mutt
and Jeff_. Mutt, buried in the sand, with a head like an egg, prompts
an ostrich to lay another egg, from which emerges a brood of little
ostriches. Jeff goes out to shoot them, but his shots glance off in
harmless wreaths of smoke. When Mutt and Jeff exchange ideas you see them
actually travelling like an electric spark along the wire, from brain to
brain. The ostrich hoists Mutt out of the sand by the breeches. Collapse
of Jeff. It suggests a drawing by Caran d’Ache in epileptic jerks. The
natural history pictures, too, the deer and the birds, strike one as
admirable examples of what animated photography can do for us in the
way of instruction as well as amusement.... And the orchestra has been
playing all this time, Beethoven and Mozart, a “separate ecstasy.” And
again I stumble over the subaltern, and wonder to find people moving so
slowly in Piccadilly Circus.