There was a gentleman in Molière, frequently mentioned since and now
for my need to be unblushingly mentioned again, who said to another
gentleman, about never mind what, that _le temps ne fait rien à
l’affaire_. But Molière belonged to that effete art the “spoken
drama,” which we learn, from America, has sunk to be used mainly as
an advertisement of the play which is subsequently to be filmed out
of it. He wrote in the dark or pre-film ages, and could not know what
an all-important part _le temps_ was to play in _l’affaire_ of the
film. Among its innumerable and magnificent activities the film is an
instructor of youth, and it seems, from a letter which the Rev. Dr.
Lyttelton has written to _The Times_, it instructs at a pace which
is a little too quick for the soaring human boy. “Elephants,” the
reverend Doctor pathetically complains, “are shown scuttling about like
antelopes,” and so the poor boy mixes up antelopes and elephants and gets
his zoology all wrong. I should myself have innocently supposed that this
magical acceleration of pace is one of the great charms of the film for
the boy. It not only provides him with half-a-dozen pictures in the time
it would have taken him to read one of them in print (to say nothing of
his being saved the trouble of reading, learning the alphabet, and other
pedagogic nuisances altogether), but it offers him something much more
exciting and romantic than his ordinary experience. He knows that at the
Zoo elephants move slowly, but here on the film they are taught, in the
American phrase, to “step lively,” and are shown scuttling about like
antelopes. A world wherein the ponderous and slow elephant is suddenly
endowed by the magician’s wand with the lightness and rapidity of the
antelope—what enhancement for boys, aye, and for grown-ups too!
Indeed, it seems to me that the greatest achievement of the film is its
triumph over time. Some amateurs may find its chief charm in the perfect
“Cupid’s bow” of its heroines’ mouths; others in the remarkable English
prose of its explanatory accompaniments; others, again, in its exquisite
humour of protagonists smothered in flour or soap-lather or flattened
under runaway motor-cars. I admit the irresistible fascination of these
delights and can quite understand how they come to be preferred to the
high-class opera company which has been introduced at the Capitol, New
York, to entertain “between pictures.” But I still think the prime merit
of the film—the real reason for which last year more than enough picture
films to encircle the earth at the Equator left the United States of
America for foreign countries—lies in its ability to play as it will
with time. The mere acceleration of pace (which is the ordinary game it
plays)—the fierce galloping of horses across prairies, the miraculous
speed of motor-cars, elephants scuttling about like antelopes—gives a
sharp sense of exhilaration, of victory over sluggish nature. And even
here there is an educational result that ought to console Dr. Lyttelton.
The rate of plant growth is multiplied thousands of times so that we are
enabled actually to see the plants growing, expanding from bud to flower
under our eyes. But there is also the retardation of pace, which is even
more wonderful. A diver is shown plunging into the water and swimming at
a rate which allows the minutest movement of the smallest muscle to be
clearly seen. This is an entirely beautiful thing; but I should suppose
that the film, by its power of exhibiting movements naturally too quick
for the eye at whatever slower rate is desired, must have extraordinary
use for scientific investigations. This, at any rate, is a better use for
the film than that sometimes claimed for it in the field of morality.
I look with suspicion on those films, as I do on those “spoken” plays,
that propose to do us good by exhibiting the details of this or that
“social evil.” Some philanthropic societies, I believe, have introduced
such pictures in all good faith. But many of their producers are, like
the others, merely out to make money, and in every case I imagine their
patrons to be drawn to them not by any moral impulse, but by a prurient
curiosity—the desire to have a peep into the forbidden.
But to return to the question of time. It has its importance, too, in
the “spoken drama,” but it ceases to be a question of visible pace. You
cannot make real men and women scuttle about like antelopes. You can only
play tricks with the clock. The act-drop is invaluable for getting your
imaginary time outstripping your real time:—
jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.
In a moment it bridges over for you the gap between youth and age, as
in _Sweethearts_. But there is another way of playing tricks with the
clock, by making it stand still for some of your personages, while it
ticks regularly for the rest. A. E. W. Mason, in one of his stories, gave
an extra quarter of an hour now and then to one of the characters—that
is to say, the clock stopped for them during that period, but not for
him—and while _outside_ time, so to speak, he could do all sorts of
things (if I remember rightly he committed a murder) without risk of
detection. But the great magician of this kind is Barrie. The heroine
of his _Truth about the Russian Dancers_ had a sudden desire for an
infant, and within a half-hour was delivered of one; a remarkably rapid
case of _parthenogenesis_. The infant was carried out and returned the
next moment a child of ten. “He grows apace,” said somebody. These
were cases of the clock galloping. With the heroine of _Mary Rose_ on
the island it stands still, so that she returns twenty-five years later
to her family precisely the same girl as she left them. We all know
what pathetic effects Barrie gets out of this trick with the clock.
But he has, of course, to assume supernatural intervention to warrant
them. And there you have the contrast with the film. In the “spoken
drama,” poor, decrepit old thing, they appeal to that silly faculty,
the human imagination; whereas the film has only to turn some wheels
quicker or slower and it is all done for you, under your nose, without
any imagination at all. Elephants are scuttling about like antelopes
and divers plunging into the water at a snail’s pace. No wonder that,
according to our New York advices, “film magnates have made so much
money that they have been able to buy chains of theatres throughout the
country,” and that “everybody talks films in the United States.”