Do this with each most energetic classic till your imagination flags. I

do not want to be too dogmatic, but it seems to me this is one way to

evolve real Action Plays. It would, perhaps, be well to substitute this

for the usual method of evolving them from old stage material or

newspaper clippings.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a noble modern group, the Mares of

Diomedes, by the aforementioned Gutzon Borglum. It is full of material

for the meditations of a man who wants to make a film of a stampede. The

idea is that Hercules, riding his steed bareback, guides it in a circle.

He is fascinating the horses he has been told to capture. They are held

by the mesmerism of the circular path and follow him round and round till

they finally fall from exhaustion. Thus the Indians of the West capture

wild ponies, and Borglum, a far western man, imputes the method to

Hercules. The bronze group shows a segment of this circle. The whirlwind

is at its height. The mares are wild to taste the flesh of Hercules.

Whoever is to photograph horses, let him study the play of light and

color and muscle-texture in this bronze. And let no group of horses ever

run faster than these of Borglum.

An occasional hint of a Michelangelo figure or gesture appears for a

flash in the films. Young artist in the audience, does it pass you by?

Open your history of sculpture again and look at the usual list of

Michelangelo groups. Suppose the seated majesty of Moses should rise,

what would be the quality of the action? Suppose the sleeping figures of

the Medician tombs should wake, or those famous slaves should break their

bands, or David again hurl the stone. Would not their action be as heroic

as their quietness? Is it not possible to have a Michelangelo of

photoplay sculpture? Should we not look for him in the fulness of time?

His figures might come to us in the skins of the desert island solitary,

or as cave men and women, or as mermaids and mermen, and yet have a force

and grandeur akin to that of the old Italian.

Rodin's famous group of the citizens of Calais is an example of the

expression of one particular idea by a special technical treatment. The

producer who tells a kindred story to that of the siege of Calais, and

the final going of these humble men to their doom, will have a hero-tale

indeed. It will be not only sculpture-in-action, but a great Crowd

Picture. It begins to be seen that the possibilities of monumental

achievement in the films transcend the narrow boundaries of the Action

Photoplay. Why not conceptions as heroic as Rodin's Hand of God, where

the first pair are clasped in the gigantic fingers of their maker in the

clay from which they came?

Finally, I desire in moving pictures, not the stillness, but the majesty

of sculpture. I do not advocate for the photoplay the mood of the Venus

of Milo. But let us turn to that sister of hers, the great Victory of

Samothrace, that spreads her wings at the head of the steps of the

Louvre, and in many an art gallery beside. When you are appraising a new

film, ask yourself: "Is this motion as rapid, as godlike, as the sweep of

the wings of the Samothracian?" Let her be the touchstone of the Action

Drama, for nothing can be more swift than the winged Gods, nothing can be

more powerful than the oncoming of the immortals.

CHAPTER IX

PAINTING-IN-MOTION

This chapter is founded on the delicate effects that may be worked out

from cosy interior scenes, close to the camera. It relates directly to

chapter three.

While the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture may be in high sculptural

relief, its characteristic manifestations are in low relief. The

situations show to better advantage when they seem to be paintings rather

than monumental groups.

Turn to your handful of motion picture magazines and mark the

illustrations that look the most like paintings. Cut them out. Winnow

them several times. I have before me, as a final threshing from such an

experiment, five pictures. Each one approximates a different school.

Here is a colonial Virginia maiden by the hearth of the inn. Bending over

her in a cherishing way is the negro maid. On the other side, the

innkeeper shows a kindred solicitude. A dishevelled traveller sleeps

huddled up in the corner. The costume of the man fades into the velvety

shadows of the wall. His face is concealed. His hair blends with the soft

background. The clothing of the other three makes a patch of light gray.

Added to this is the gayety of special textures: the turban of the

negress, a trimming on the skirt of the heroine, the silkiness of the

innkeeper's locks, the fabric of the broom in the hearthlight, the

pattern of the mortar lines round the bricks of the hearth. The tableau

is a satisfying scheme in two planes and many textures. Here is another

sort of painting. The young mother in her pretty bed is smiling on her

infant. The cot and covers and flesh tints have gentle scales of

difference, all within one tone of the softest gray. Her hair is quite

dark. It relates to the less luminous black of the coat of the physician

behind the bed and the dress of the girl-friend bending over her. The

nurse standing by the doctor is a figure of the same gray-white as the

bed. Within the pattern of the velvety-blacks there are as many subtle

gradations as in the pattern of the gray-whites. The tableau is a

satisfying scheme in black and gray, with practically one non-obtrusive

texture throughout.

Here is a picture of an Englishman and his wife, in India. It might be

called sculptural, but for the magnificence of the turban of the rajah

who converses with them, the glitter of the light round his shoulders,

and the scheme of shadow out of which the three figures rise. The

arrangement remotely reminds one of several of Rembrandt's semi-oriental

musings.

Here is a picture of Mary Pickford as Fanchon the Cricket. She is in the

cottage with the strange old mother. I have seen a painting in this mood

by the Greek Nickolas Gysis.

The Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, the photoplay of

painting-in-motion, need not be indoors as long as it has the

native-heath mood. It is generally keyed to the hearthstone, and keeps

quite close to it. But how well I remember when the first French

photoplays began to come. Though unintelligent in some respects, the

photography and subject-matter of many of them made one think of that

painter of gentle out-of-door scenes, Jean Charles Cazin. Here is our

last clipping, which is also in a spirit allied to Cazin. The heroine,

accompanied by an aged shepherd and his dog, are in the foreground. The

sheep are in the middle distance on the edge of the river. There is a

noble hill beyond the gently flowing water. Here is intimacy and

friendliness in the midst of the big out of doors.

If these five photo-paintings were on good paper enlarged to twenty by

twenty-four inches, they would do to frame and hang on the wall of any

study, for a month or so. And after the relentless test of time, I would

venture that some one of the five would prove a permanent addition to the

household gods.

Hastily made photographs selected from the films are often put in front

of the better theatres to advertise the show. Of late they are making

them two by three feet and sometimes several times larger. Here is a

commercial beginning of an art gallery, but not enough pains are taken to

give the selections a complete art gallery dignity. Why not have the most

beautiful scenes in front of the theatres, instead of those alleged to be

the most thrilling? Why not rest the fevered and wandering eye, rather

than make one more attempt to take it by force?

Let the reader supply another side of the argument by looking at the

illustrations in any history of painting. Let him select the pictures

that charm him most, and think of them enlarged and transferred bodily to

one corner of the room, as he has thought of the sculpture. Let them take

on motion without losing their charm of low relief, or their serene

composition within the four walls of the frame. As for the motion, let it

be a further extension of the drawing. Let every gesture be a bolder but

not less graceful brush-stroke.

The Metropolitan Museum has a Van Dyck that appeals equally to one's sense

of beauty and one's feeling for humor. It is a portrait of James Stuart,

Duke of Lennox, and I cannot see how the author-producer-photographer can

look upon it without having it set his imagination in a glow. Every small

town dancing set has a James like this. The man and the greyhound are the

same witless breed, the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed

elegance alone. Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a

greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly

convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the

meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well be imagined.

Conjure up a scene in the hereditary hall after a hunt (or golf

tournament), in which a man like this Duke of Lennox has a noble parley

with his lady (or dancing partner), she being a sweet and stupid swan (or

a white rabbit) by the same sign that he is a noble and stupid greyhound.

Be it an ancient or modern episode, the story could be told in the tone

and with well-nigh the brushwork of Van Dyck.

Then there is a picture my teachers, Chase and Henri, were never weary of

praising, the Girl with the Parrot, by Manet. Here continence in nervous

force, expressed by low relief and restraint in tone, is carried to its

ultimate point. I should call this an imagist painting, made before there

were such people as imagist poets. It is a perpetual sermon to those that

would thresh around to no avail, be they orators, melodramatists, or

makers of photoplays with an alleged heart-interest.

Let us consider Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington. This painter's

notion of personal dignity has far more of the intellectual quality than

Van Dyck. He loves to give us stately, able, fairly conscientious gentry,

rather than overdone royalty. His work represents a certain mood in

design that in architecture is called colonial. Such portraits go with

houses like Mount Vernon. Let the photographer study the flat blacks in

the garments. Let him note the transparent impression of the laces and

flesh-tints that seem to be painted on glass, observing especially the

crystalline whiteness of the wigs. Let him inspect also the

silhouette-like outlines, noting the courtly self-possession they convey.

Then let the photographer, the producer, and the author, be they one man

or six men, stick to this type of picturization through one entire

production, till any artist in the audience will say, "This photoplay was

painted by a pupil of Gilbert Stuart"; and the layman will say, "It looks

like those stately days." And let us not have battle, but a Mount Vernon

fireside tale.

Both the Chicago and New York museums contain many phases of one same

family group, painted by George de Forest Brush. There is a touch of the

hearthstone priestess about the woman. The force of sex has turned to the

austere comforting passion of motherhood. From the children, under the

wings of this spirit, come special delicate powers of life. There is

nothing tense or restless about them, yet they embody action, the beating

of the inner fire, without which all outer action is mockery.

Hearthstone tales keyed to the mood and using the brush stroke that

delineates this especial circle would be unmistakable in their

distinction.

Charles W. Hawthorne has pictures in Chicago and New York that imply the

Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay. The Trousseau in the Metropolitan Museum

shows a gentle girl, an unfashionable home-body with a sweetly sheltered

air. Behind her glimmers the patient mother's face. The older woman is

busy about fitting the dress. The picture is a tribute to the qualities

of many unknown gentlewomen. Such an illumination as this, on faces so

innocently eloquent, is the light that should shine on the countenance of

the photoplay actress who really desires greatness in the field of the

Intimate Motion Picture. There is in Chicago, Hawthorne's painting of

Sylvia: a little girl standing with her back to a mirror, a few blossoms

in one hand and a vase of flowers on the mirror shelf. It is as sound a

composition as Hawthorne ever produced. The painting of the child is

another tribute to the physical-spiritual textures from which humanity is

made. Ah, you producer who have grown squeaky whipping your people into

what you called action, consider the dynamics of these figures that

would be almost motionless in real life. Remember there must be a

spirit-action under the other, or all is dead.

Yet that soul may be the muse of Comedy. If Hawthorne and his kind are

not your fashion, turn to models that have their feet on the earth

always, yet successfully aspire. Key some of your intimate humorous

scenes to the Dutch Little Masters of Painting, such pictures as Gerard

Terburg's Music Lesson in the Chicago Art Institute. The thing is as well

designed as a Dutch house, wind-mill, or clock. And it is more elegant

than any of these. There is humor enough in the picture to last one reel

through. The society dame of the period, in her pretty raiment, fingers

the strings of her musical instrument, while the master stands by her

with the baton. The painter has enjoyed the satire, from her elegant

little hands to the teacher's well-combed locks. It is very plain that

she does not want to study music with any sincerity, and he does not

desire to develop the ability of this particular person. There may be a

flirtation in the background. Yet these people are not hollow as gourds,

and they are not caricatured. The Dutch Little Masters have indulged in

numberless characterizations of mundane humanity. But they are never so

preoccupied with the story that it is an anecdote rather than a picture.

It is, first of all, a piece of elegant painting-fabric. Next it is a

scrap of Dutch philosophy or aspiration.

Let Whistler turn over in his grave while we enlist him for the cause of

democracy. One view of the technique of this man might summarize it thus:

fastidiousness in choice of subject, the picture well within the frame,

low relief, a Velasquez study of tones and a Japanese study of spaces.

Let us, dear and patient reader, particularly dwell upon the spacing. A

Whistler, or a good Japanese print, might be described as a kaleidoscope

suddenly arrested and transfixed at the moment of most exquisite

relations in the pieces of glass. An Intimate Play of a kindred sort

would start to turning the kaleidoscope again, losing fine relations only

to gain those which are more exquisite and novel. All motion pictures

might be characterized as _space measured without sound, plus time

measured without sound_. This description fits in a special way the

delicate form of the Intimate Motion Picture, and there can be studied

out, free from irrelevant issues.

As to _space measured without sound_. Suppose it is a humorous

characterization of comfortable family life, founded on some Dutch Little

Master. The picture measures off its spaces in harmony. The triangle

occupied by the little child's dress is in definite relation to the

triangle occupied by the mother's costume. To these two patterns the

space measured off by the boy's figure is adjusted, and all of them are

as carefully related to the shapes cut out of the background by the

figures. No matter how the characters move about in the photoplay, these

pattern shapes should relate to one another in a definite design. The

exact tone value of each one and their precise nearness or distance to

one another have a deal to do with the final effect.

We go to the photoplay to enjoy right and splendid picture-motions, to

feel a certain thrill when the pieces of kaleidoscope glass slide into

new places. Instead of moving on straight lines, as they do in the

mechanical toy, they progress in strange curves that are part of the very

shapes into which they fall.

Consider: first came the photograph. Then motion was added to the

photograph. We must use this order in our judgment. If it is ever to

evolve into a national art, it must first be good picture, then good

motion.

Belasco's attitude toward the stage has been denounced by the purists

because he makes settings too large a portion of his story-telling, and

transforms his theatre into the paradise of the property-man. But this

very quality of the well spaced setting, if you please, has made his

chance for the world's moving picture anthology. As reproduced by Jesse

K. Lasky the Belasco production is the only type of the old-line drama

that seems really made to be the basis of a moving picture play. Not

always, but as a general rule, Belasco suffers less detriment in the

films than other men. Take, for instance, the Belasco-Lasky production of

The Rose of the Rancho with Bessie Barriscale as the heroine. It has many

highly modelled action-tableaus, and others that come under the

classification of this chapter. When I was attending it not long ago,

here in my home town, the fair companion at my side said that one scene

looked like a painting by Sorolla y Bastida, the Spaniard. It is the

episode where the Rose sends back her servant to inquire the hero's

name. As a matter of fact there were Sorollas and Zuloagas all through

the piece. The betrothal reception with flying confetti was a satisfying

piece of Spanish splendor. It was space music indeed, space measured

without sound. Incidentally the cast is to be congratulated on its

picturesque acting, especially Miss Barriscale in her impersonation of

the Rose.

It is harder to grasp the other side of the paradox, picture-motions

considered as _time measured without sound_. But think of a lively and

humoresque clock that does not tick and takes only an hour to record a

day. Think of a noiseless electric vehicle, where you are looking out of

the windows, going down the smooth boulevard of Wonderland. Consider a

film with three simple time-elements: (1) that of the pursuer, (2) the

pursued, (3) the observation vehicle of the camera following the road and

watching both of them, now faster, now slower than they, as the

photographer overtakes the actors or allows them to hurry ahead. The

plain chase is a bore because there are only these three time-elements.

But the chase principle survives in every motion picture and we simply

need more of this sort of time measurement, better considered. The more

the non-human objects, the human actors, and the observer move at a

varying pace, the greater chances there are for what might be called

time-and-space music.

No two people in the same room should gesture at one mechanical rate, or

lift their forks or spoons, keeping obviously together. Yet it stands to

reason that each successive tableau should be not only a charming

picture, but the totals of motion should be an orchestration of various

speeds, of abrupt, graceful, and seemingly awkward progress, worked into

a silent symphony.

Supposing it is a fisher-maiden's romance. In the background the waves

toss in one tempo. Owing to the sail, the boat rocks in another. In the

foreground the tree alternately bends and recovers itself in the breeze,

making more opposition than the sail. In still another time-unit the

smoke rolls from the chimney, making no resistance to the wind. In

another unit, the lovers pace the sand. Yet there is one least common

multiple in which all move. This the producing genius should sense and

make part of the dramatic structure, and it would have its bearing on the

periodic appearance of the minor and major crises.

Films like this, you say, would be hard to make. Yes. Here is the place

to affirm that the one-reel Intimate Photoplay will no doubt be the form

in which this type of time-and-space music is developed. The music of

silent motion is the most abstract of moving picture attributes and will

probably remain the least comprehended. Like the quality of Walter

Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or that of Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual

Beauty, it will not satisfy the sudden and the brash.

* * * * *

The reader will find in his round of the picture theatres many single

scenes and parts of plays that elucidate the title of this chapter. Often

the first two-thirds of the story will fit it well. Then the producers,

finding that, for reasons they do not understand, with the best and most

earnest actors they cannot work the three reels into an emotional climax,

introduce some stupid disaster and rescue utterly irrelevant to the

character-parts and the paintings that have preceded. Whether the alleged

thesis be love, hate, or ambition, cottage charm, daisy dell sweetness,

or the ivy beauty of an ancient estate, the resource for the final punch

seems to be something like a train-wreck. But the transfiguration of the

actors, not their destruction or rescue, is the goal. The last moment of

the play is great, not when it is a grandiose salvation from a burning

house, that knocks every delicate preceding idea in the head, but a

tableau that is as logical as the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty after

the hero has explored all the charmed castle.

CHAPTER X

FURNITURE, TRAPPINGS, AND INVENTIONS IN MOTION

The Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Pictures,

paintings-in-motion, the Splendor Pictures, many and diverse. It seems

far-fetched, perhaps, to complete the analogy and say they are

architecture-in-motion; yet, patient reader, unless I am mistaken, that

assumption can be given a value in time without straining your

imagination.

Landscape gardening, mural painting, church building, and furniture

making as well, are some of the things that come under the head of

architecture. They are discussed between the covers of any architectural

magazine. There is a particular relation in the photoplay between Crowd

Pictures and landscape conceptions, between Patriotic Films and mural

paintings, between Religious Films and architecture. And there is just as

much of a relation between Fairy Tales and furniture, which same is

discussed in this chapter.

Let us return to Moving Day, chapter four. This idea has been represented

many times with a certain sameness because the producers have not thought

out the philosophy behind it. A picture that is all action is a plague,

one that is all elephantine and pachydermatous pageant is a bore, and,

most emphatically, a film that is all mechanical legerdemain is a

nuisance. The possible charm in a so-called trick picture is in

eliminating the tricks, giving them dignity till they are no longer such,

but thoughts in motion and made visible. In Moving Day the shoes are the

most potent. They go through a drama that is natural to them. To march

without human feet inside is but to exaggerate themselves. It would not

be amusing to have them walk upside down, for instance. As long as the

worn soles touch the pavement, we unconsciously conjure up the character

of the absent owners, about whom the shoes are indeed gossiping. So let

the remainder of the furniture keep still while the shoes do their best.

Let us call to mind a classic fairy-tale involving shoes that are

magical: The Seven Leagued Boots, for example, or The Enchanted

Moccasins, or the footwear of Puss in Boots. How gorgeous and embroidered

any of these should be, and at a crisis what sly antics they should be

brought to play, without fidgeting all over the shop! Cinderella's

Slipper is not sufficiently the heroine in moving pictures of that story.

It should be the tiny leading lady of the piece, in the same sense the

mighty steam-engine is the hero of the story in chapter two. The peasants

when they used to tell the tale by the hearth fire said the shoe was made

of glass. This was in mediæval Europe, at a time when glass was much more

of a rarity. The material was chosen to imply a sort of jewelled

strangeness from the start. When Cinderella loses it in her haste, it

should flee at once like a white mouse, to hide under the sofa. It should

be pictured there with special artifice, so that the sensuous little foot

of every girl-child in the audience will tingle to wear it. It should

move a bit when the prince comes frantically hunting his lady, and peep

out just in time for that royal personage to spy it. Even at the

coronation it should be the centre of the ritual, more gazed at than the

crown, and on as dazzling a cushion. The final taking on of the slipper

by the lady should be as stately a ceremony as the putting of the circlet

of gold on her aureole hair. So much for Cinderella. But there are novel

stories that should be evolved by preference, about new sorts of magic

shoes.

We have not exhausted Moving Day. The chairs kept still through the

Cinderella discourse. Now let them take their innings. Instead of having

all of them dance about, invest but one with an inner life. Let its

special attributes show themselves but gradually, reaching their climax

at the highest point of excitement in the reel, and being an integral

part of that enthusiasm. Perhaps, though we be inventing a new

fairy-tale, it will resemble the Siege Perilous in the Arthurian story,

the chair where none but the perfect knight could sit. A dim row of

flaming swords might surround it. When the soul entitled to use this

throne appears, the swords might fade away and the gray cover hanging in

slack folds roll back because of an inner energy and the chair might turn

from gray to white, and with a subtle change of line become a throne.

The photoplay imagination which is able to impart vital individuality to

furniture will not stop there. Let the buildings emanate conscious life.

The author-producer-photographer, or one or all three, will make into a

personality some place akin to the House of the Seven Gables till the

ancient building dominates the fancy as it does in Hawthorne's tale.

There are various ways to bring about this result: by having its outlines

waver in the twilight, by touches of phosphorescence, or by the passing

of inexplicable shadows or the like. It depends upon what might be called

the genius of the building. There is the Poe story of The Fall of the

House of Usher, where with the death of the last heir the castle falls

crumbling into the tarn. There are other possible tales on such terms,

never yet imagined, to be born to-morrow. Great structures may become in

sort villains, as in the old Bible narrative of the origin of the various

languages. The producer can show the impious Babel Tower, going higher

and higher into the sky, fascinating and tempting the architects till a

confusion of tongues turns those masons into quarrelling mobs that become

departing caravans, leaving her blasted and forsaken, a symbol of every

Babylon that rose after her.

There are fables where the rocks and the mountains speak. Emerson has

given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a quarrel. The

Mountain called the Squirrel "Little Prig." And then continues a clash of

personalities more possible to illustrate than at first appears. Here we

come to the second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature seems so

unmanageable in his physical aspect that some actor must be substituted

who will embody the essence of him. To properly illustrate the quarrel of

the Mountain and the Squirrel, the steep height should quiver and heave

and then give forth its personality in the figure of a vague smoky giant,

capable of human argument, but with oak-roots in his hair, and Bun,

perhaps, become a jester in squirrel's dress.

Or it may be our subject matter is a tall Dutch clock. Father Time

himself might emerge therefrom. Or supposing it is a chapel, in a

knight's adventure. An angel should step from the carving by the door: a

design that is half angel, half flower. But let the clock first tremble a

bit. Let the carving stir a little, and then let the spirit come forth,

that there may be a fine relation between the impersonator and the thing

represented. A statue too often takes on life by having the actor

abruptly substituted. The actor cannot logically take on more personality

than the statue has. He can only give that personality expression in a

new channel. In the realm of letters, a real transformation scene,

rendered credible to the higher fancy by its slow cumulative movement, is

the tale of the change of the dying Rowena to the living triumphant

Ligeia in Poe's story of that name. Substitution is not the fairy-story.

It is transformation, transfiguration, that is the fairy-story, be it a

divine or a diabolical change. There is never more than one witch in a

forest, one Siege Perilous at any Round Table. But she is indeed a witch

and the other is surely a Siege Perilous.

We might define Fairy Splendor as furniture transfigured, for without

transfiguration there is no spiritual motion of any kind. But the phrase

"furniture-in-motion" serves a purpose. It gets us back to the earth for

a reason. Furniture is architecture, and the fairy-tale picture should

certainly be drawn with architectural lines. The normal fairy-tale is a

sort of tiny informal child's religion, the baby's secular temple, and it

should have for the most part that touch of delicate sublimity that we

see in the mountain chapel or grotto, or fancy in the dwellings of

Aucassin and Nicolette. When such lines are drawn by the truly

sophisticated producer, there lies in them the secret of a more than

ritualistic power. Good fairy architecture amounts to an incantation in

itself.

If it is a grown-up legend, it must be more than monumental in its lines,

like the great stone face of Hawthorne's tale. Even a chair can reach

this estate. For instance, let it be the throne of Wodin, illustrating

some passage in Norse mythology. If this throne has a language, it speaks

with the lightning; if it shakes with its threat, it moves the entire

mountain range beneath it. Let the wizard-author-producer climb up from

the tricks of Moving Day to the foot-hills where he can see this throne

against the sky, as a superarchitect would draw it. But even if he can

give this vision in the films, his task will not be worth while if he is

simply a teller of old stories. Let us have magic shoes about which are

more golden dreams than those concerning Cinderella. Let us have stranger

castles than that of Usher, more dazzling chairs than the Siege Perilous.

Let us have the throne of Liberty, not the throne of Wodin.

There is one outstanding photoplay that I always have in mind when I

think of film magic. It illustrates some principles of this chapter and

chapter four, as well as many others through the book. It is Griffith's

production of The Avenging Conscience. It is also an example of that rare

thing, a use of old material that is so inspired that it has the dignity

of a new creation. The raw stuff of the plot is pieced together from the

story of The Tell-tale Heart and the poem Annabel Lee. It has behind it,

in the further distance, Poe's conscience stories of The Black Cat, and

William Wilson. I will describe the film here at length, and apply it to

whatever chapters it illustrates.

An austere and cranky bachelor (well impersonated by Spottiswoode Aitken)

brings up his orphan nephew with an awkward affection. The nephew is

impersonated by Henry B. Walthall. The uncle has an ambition that the boy

will become a man of letters. In his attempts at literature the youth is

influenced by Poe. This brings about the Poe quality of his dreams at the

crisis. The uncle is silently exasperated when he sees his boy's

writing-time broken into, and wasted, as he thinks, by an affair with a

lovely Annabel (Blanche Sweet). The intimacy and confidence of the lovers

has progressed so far that it is a natural thing for the artless girl to

cross the gardens and after hesitation knock at the door. She wants to

know what has delayed her boy. She is all in a flutter on account of the

overdue appointment to go to a party together. The scene of the pretty

hesitancy on the step, her knocking, and the final impatient tapping with

her foot is one of the best illustrations of the intimate mood in

photoplay episodes. On the girl's entrance the uncle overwhelms her and

the boy by saying she is pursuing his nephew like a common woman of the

town. The words actually burst through the film, not as a melodramatic,

but as an actual insult. This is a thing almost impossible to do in the

photoplay. This outrage in the midst of an atmosphere of chivalry is one

of Griffith's master-moments. It accounts for the volcanic fury of the

nephew that takes such trouble to burn itself out afterwards. It is not

easy for the young to learn that they must let those people flay them for

an hour who have made every sacrifice for them through a life-time.

This scene of insult and the confession scene, later in this film, moved

me as similar passages in high drama would do; and their very rareness,

even in the hands of photoplay masters, indicates that such purely

dramatic climaxes cannot be the main asset of the moving picture. Over

and over, with the best talent and producers, they fail.

The boy and girl go to the party in spite of the uncle. It is while on

the way that the boy looks on the face of a stranger who afterwards mixes

up in his dream as the detective. There is a mistake in the printing

here. There are several minutes of a worldly-wise oriental dance to amuse

the guests, while the lovers are alone at another end of the garden. It

is, possibly, the aptest contrast with the seriousness of our hero and

heroine. But the social affair could have had a better title than the one

that is printed on the film "An Old-fashioned Sweetheart Party." Possibly

the dance was put in after the title.

The lovers part forever. The girl's pride has had a mortal wound. About

this time is thrown on the screen the kind of a climax quite surely

possible to the photoplay. It reminds one, not of the mood of Poe's

verse, but of the spirit of the paintings of George Frederick Watts. It

is allied in some way, in my mind, with his "Love and Life," though but a

single draped figure within doors, and "Love and Life" are undraped

figures, climbing a mountain.

The boy, having said good-by, remembers the lady Annabel. It is a crisis

after the event. In his vision she is shown in a darkened passageway, all

in white, looking out of the window upon the moonlit sky. Simple enough

in its elements, this vision is shown twice in glory. The third replica

has not the same glamour. The first two are transfigurations into

divinity. The phrase thrown on the screen is "The moon never beams

without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee." And the sense

of loss goes through and through one like a flight of arrows. Another

noble picture, more realistic, more sculpturesque, is of Annabel mourning

on her knees in her room. Her bended head makes her akin to "Niobe, all

tears."

The boy meditating on a park-path is meanwhile watching the spider in his

web devour the fly. Then he sees the ants in turn destroy the spider.

These pictures are shown on so large a scale that the spiderweb fills the

end of the theatre. Then the ant-tragedy does the same. They can be

classed as particularly apt hieroglyphics in the sense of chapter

thirteen. Their horror and decorative iridescence are of the Poe sort.

It is the first hint of the Poe hieroglyphic we have had except the black

patch over the eye of the uncle, along with his jaundiced, cadaverous

face. The boy meditates on how all nature turns on cruelty and the

survival of the fittest.

He passes just now an Italian laborer (impersonated by George Seigmann).

This laborer enters later into his dream. He finally goes to sleep in his

chair, the resolve to kill his uncle rankling in his heart.

The audience is not told that a dream begins. To understand that, one

must see the film through twice. But it is perfectly legitimate to

deceive us. Through our ignorance we share the young man's

hallucinations, entering into them as imperceptibly as he does. We think

it is the next morning. Poe would start the story just here, and here the

veritable Poe-esque quality begins.

After debate within himself as to means, the nephew murders his uncle and

buries him in the thick wall of the chimney. The Italian laborer

witnesses the death-struggle through the window. While our consciences

are aching and the world crashes round us, he levies black-mail. Then

for due compensation the Italian becomes an armed sentinel. The boy fears

detection.

Yet the foolish youth thinks he will be happy. But every time he runs to

meet his sweetheart he is appalled by hallucinations over her shoulder.

The cadaverous ghost of the uncle is shown on the screen several times.

It is an appearance visible to the young man and the audience only. Later

the ghost is implied by the actions of the guilty one. We merely imagine

it. This is a piece of sound technique. We no more need a dray full of

ghosts than a dray full of jumping furniture.

The village in general has never suspected the nephew. Only two people

suspect him: the broken-hearted girl and an old friend of his father.

This gentleman puts a detective on the trail. (The detective is

impersonated by Ralph Lewis.) The gradual breakdown of the victim is

traced by dramatic degrees. This is the second case of the thing I have

argued as being generally impossible in a photoplay chronicle of a

private person, and which the considerations of chapter twelve indicate

as exceptional. We trace the innermost psychology of one special citizen

step by step to the crisis, and that path is actually the primary

interest of the story. The climax is the confession to the detective.

With this self-exposure the direct Poe-quality of the technique comes to

an end. Moreover, Poe would end the story here. But the Poe-dream is set

like a dark jewel in a gold ring, of which more anon.

Let us dwell upon the confession. The first stage of this

conscience-climax is reached by the dramatization of The Tell-tale Heart

reminiscence in the memory of the dreaming man. The episode makes a

singular application of the theories with which this chapter begins. For

furniture-in-motion we have the detective's pencil. For trappings and

inventions in motion we have his tapping shoe and the busy clock

pendulum. Because this scene is so powerful the photoplay is described in

this chapter rather than any other, though the application is more

spiritual than literal. The half-mad boy begins to divulge that he thinks

that the habitual ticking of the clock is satanically timed to the

beating of the dead man's heart. Here more unearthliness hovers round a

pendulum than any merely mechanical trick-movements could impart. Then

the merest commonplace of the detective tapping his pencil in the same

time--the boy trying in vain to ignore it--increases the strain, till the

audience has well-nigh the hallucinations of the victim. Then the bold

tapping of the detective's foot, who would do all his accusing without

saying a word, and the startling coincidence of the owl hoot-hooting

outside the window to the same measure, bring us close to the final

breakdown. These realistic material actors are as potent as the actual

apparitions of the dead man that preceded them. Those visions prepared

the mind to invest trifles with significance. The pencil and the pendulum

conducting themselves in an apparently everyday fashion, satisfy in a far

nobler way the thing in the cave-man attending the show that made him

take note in other centuries of the rope that began to hang the butcher,

the fire that began to burn the stick, and the stick that began to beat

the dog.

Now the play takes a higher demoniacal plane reminiscent of Poe's Bells.

The boy opens the door. He peers into the darkness. There he sees them.

They are the nearest to the sinister Poe quality of any illustrations I

recall that attempt it. "They are neither man nor woman, they are neither

brute nor human; they are ghouls." The scenes are designed with the

architectural dignity that the first part of this chapter has insisted

wizard trappings should take on. Now it is that the boy confesses and the

Poe story ends.

Then comes what the photoplay people call the punch. It is discussed at

the end of chapter nine. It is a kind of solar plexus blow to the

sensibilities, certainly by this time an unnecessary part of the film.

Usually every soul movement carefully built up to where the punch begins

is forgotten in the material smash or rescue. It is not so bad in this

case, but it is a too conventional proceeding for Griffith.

The boy flees interminably to a barn too far away. There is a siege by a

posse, led by the detective. It is veritable border warfare. The Italian

leads an unsuccessful rescue party. The unfortunate youth finally hangs

himself. The beautiful Annabel bursts through the siege a moment too

late; then, heart broken, kills herself. These things are carried out by

good technicians. But it would have been better to have had the suicide

with but a tiny part of the battle, and the story five reels long instead

of six. This physical turmoil is carried into the spiritual world only

by the psychic momentum acquired through the previous confession scene.

The one thing with intrinsic pictorial heart-power is the death of

Annabel by jumping off the sea cliff.

Then comes the awakening. To every one who sees the film for the first

time it is like the forgiveness of sins. The boy finds his uncle still

alive. In revulsion from himself, he takes the old man into his arms. The

uncle has already begun to be ashamed of his terrible words, and has

prayed for a contrite heart. The radiant Annabel is shown in the early

dawn rising and hurrying to her lover in spite of her pride. She will

bravely take back her last night's final word. She cannot live without

him. The uncle makes amends to the girl. The three are in the

inconsistent but very human mood of sweet forgiveness for love's sake,

that sometimes overtakes the bitterest of us after some crisis in our

days.

The happy pair are shown, walking through the hills. Thrown upon the

clouds for them are the moods of the poet-lover's heart. They look into

the woods and see his fancies of Spring, the things that he will some day

write. These pageants might be longer. They furnish the great climax.

They make a consistent parallel and contrast with the ghoul-visions that

end with the confession to the detective. They wipe that terror from the

mind. They do not represent Poe. The rabbits, the leopard, the fairies,

Cupid and Psyche in the clouds, and the little loves from the hollow

trees are contributions to the original poetry of the eye.

Finally, the central part of this production of the Avenging Conscience

is no dilution of Poe, but an adequate interpretation, a story he might

have written. Those who have the European respect for Poe's work will be

most apt to be satisfied with this section, including the photographic

texture which may be said to be an authentic equivalent of his prose. How

often Poe has been primly patronized for his majestic quality, the wizard

power which looms above all his method and subject-matter and furnishes

the only reason for its existence!

For Griffith to embroider this Poe Interpretation in the centre of a

fairly consistent fabric, and move on into a radiant climax of his own

that is in organic relation to the whole, is an achievement indeed. The

final criticism is that the play is derivative. It is not built from new

material in all its parts, as was the original story. One must be a

student of Poe to get its ultimate flavor. But in reading Poe's own

stories, one need not be a reader of any one special preceding writer to

get the strange and solemn exultation of that literary enchanter. He is

the quintessence of his own lonely soul.

Though the wizard element is paramount in the Poe episode of this film,

the appeal to the conscience is only secondary to this. It is keener than

in Poe, owing to the human elements before and after. The Chameleon

producer approximates in The Avenging Conscience the type of mystic

teacher, discussed in the twentieth chapter: "The Prophet-Wizard."

CHAPTER XI

ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION

This chapter is a superstructure upon the foundations of chapters five,

six, and seven.

I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of the photoplays that

while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the

other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human.

By an extension of this principle, non-human tones, textures, lines, and

spaces take on a vitality almost like that of flesh and blood. It is

partly for this reason that some energy is hereby given to the matter of

reënforcing the idea that the people with the proper training to take the

higher photoplays in hand are not veteran managers of vaudeville

circuits, but rather painters, sculptors, and architects, preferably

those who are in the flush of their first reputation in these crafts. Let

us imagine the centres of the experimental drama, such as the Drama

League, the Universities, and the stage societies, calling in people of

these professions and starting photoplay competitions and enterprises.

Let the thesis be here emphasized that the architects, above all, are the

men to advance the work in the ultra-creative photoplay. "But few

architects," you say, "are creative, even in their own profession."

Let us begin with the point of view of the highly trained pedantic young

builder, the type that, in the past few years, has honored our landscape

with those paradoxical memorials of Abraham Lincoln the railsplitter,

memorials whose Ionic columns are straight from Paris. Pericles is the

real hero of such a man, not Lincoln. So let him for the time surrender

completely to that great Greek. He is worthy of a monument nobler than

any America has set up to any one. The final pictures may be taken in

front of buildings with which the architect or his favorite master has

already edified this republic, or if the war is over, before some

surviving old-world models. But whatever the method, let him study to

express at last the thing that moves within him as a creeping fire, which

Americans do not yet understand and the loss of which makes the classic

in our architecture a mere piling of elegant stones upon one another. In

the arrangement of crowds and flow of costuming and study of tableau

climaxes, let the architect bring an illusion of that delicate flowering,

that brilliant instant of time before the Peloponnesian war. It does not

seem impossible when one remembers the achievements of the author of

Cabiria in approximating Rome and Carthage.

Let the principal figure of the pageant be the virgin Athena, walking as

a presence visible only to us, yet among her own people, and robed and

armed and panoplied, the guardian of Pericles, appearing in those streets

that were herself. Let the architect show her as she came only in a

vision to Phidias, while the dramatic writers and mathematicians and

poets and philosophers go by. The crowds should be like pillars of

Athens, and she like a great pillar. The crowds should be like the

tossing waves of the Ionic Sea and Athena like the white ship upon the

waves. The audiences in the tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields

on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by the wind, and Athena the

one sower and reaper. Crowds should descend the steps of the Acropolis,

nymphs and fauns and Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, yet

flowing like a white cataract down into the town, bearing with them

Athena, their soul. All this in the Photoplay of Pericles.

No civic or national incarnation since that time appeals to the poets

like the French worship of the Maid of Orleans. In Percy MacKaye's book,

The Present Hour, he says on the French attitude toward the war:--

"Half artist and half anchorite,

Part siren and part Socrates,

Her face--alluring fair, yet recondite--

Smiled through her salons and academies.

"Lightly she wore her double mask,

Till sudden, at war's kindling spark,

Her inmost self, in shining mail and casque,

Blazed to the world her single soul--Jeanne d'Arc!"

To make a more elaborate showing of what is meant by

architecture-in-motion, let us progress through the centuries and suppose

that the builder has this enthusiasm for France, that he is slowly

setting about to build a photoplay around the idea of the Maid.

First let him take the mural painting point of view. Bear in mind these

characteristics of that art: it is wall-painting that is an organic part

of the surface on which it appears: it is on the same lines as the

building and adapted to the colors and forms of the structure of which it

is a part.

The wall-splendors of America that are the most scattered about in

inexpensive copies are the decorations of the Boston Public Library. Note

the pillar-like quality of Sargent's prophets, the solemn dignity of

Abbey's Holy Grail series, the grand horizontals and perpendiculars of

the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The last is the orthodox mural painter of

the world, but the other two will serve the present purpose also. These

architectural paintings if they were dramatized, still retaining their

powerful lines, would be three exceedingly varied examples of what is

meant by architecture-in-motion. The visions that appear to Jeanne d'Arc

might be delineated in the mood of some one of these three painters. The

styles will not mix in the same episode.

A painter from old time we mention here, not because he was orthodox, but

because of his genius for the drawing of action, and because he covered

tremendous wall-spaces with Venetian tone and color, is Tintoretto. If

there is a mistrust that the mural painting standard will tend to destroy

the sense of action, Tintoretto will restore confidence in that regard.

As the Winged Victory represents flying in sculpture, so his work is the

extreme example of action with the brush. The Venetians called him the

furious painter. One must understand a man through his admirers. So

explore Ruskin's sayings on Tintoretto.

I have a dozen moving picture magazine clippings, which are in their

humble way first or second cousins of mural paintings. I will describe

but two, since the method of selection has already been amply indicated,

and the reader can find his own examples. For a Crowd Picture, for

instance, here is a scene at a masquerade ball. The glitter of the

costumes is an extension of the glitter of the candelabra overhead. The

people are as it were chandeliers, hung lower down. The lines of the

candelabra relate to the very ribbon streamers of the heroine, and the

massive wood-work is the big brother of the square-shouldered heroes in

the foreground, though one is a clown, one is a Russian Duke, and one is

Don Cæsar De Bazan. The building is the father of the people. These

relations can be kept in the court scenes of the production of Jeanne

d'Arc.

Here is a night picture from a war story in which the light is furnished

by two fires whose coals and brands are hidden by earth heaped in front.

The sentiment of tenting on the old camp-ground pervades the scene. The

far end of the line of those keeping bivouac disappears into the

distance, and the depths of the ranks behind them fade into the thick

shadows. The flag, a little above the line, catches the light. One great

tree overhead spreads its leafless half-lit arms through the gloom.

Behind all this is unmitigated black. The composition reminds one of a

Hiroshige study of midnight. These men are certainly a part of the

architecture of out of doors, and mysterious as the vault of Heaven. This

type of a camp-fire is possible in our Jeanne d'Arc.

These pictures, new and old, great and unknown, indicate some of the

standards of judgment and types of vision whereby our conception of the

play is to be evolved.

By what means shall we block it in? Our friend Tintoretto made use of

methods which are here described from one of his biographers, W. Roscoe

Osler: "They have been much enlarged upon in the different biographies as

the means whereby Tintoretto obtained his power. They constituted,

however, his habitual method of determining the effect and general

grouping of his compositions. He moulded with extreme care small models

of his figures in wax and clay. Titian and other painters as well as

Tintoretto employed this method as the means of determining the light and

shade of their design. Afterwards the later stages of their work were

painted from the life. But in Tintoretto's compositions the position and

arrangement of his figures as he began to dwell upon his great

conceptions were such as to render the study from the living model a

matter of great difficulty and at times an impossibility.... He ...

modelled his sculptures ... imparting to his models a far more complete

character than had been customary. These firmly moulded figures,

sometimes draped, sometimes free, he suspended in a box made of wood, or

of cardboard for his smaller work, in whose walls he made an aperture to

admit a lighted candle.... He sits moving the light about amidst his

assemblage of figures. Every aspect of sublimity of light suitable to a

Madonna surrounded with angels, or a heavenly choir, finds its miniature

response among the figures as the light moves.

"This was the method by which, in conjunction with a profound study of

outward nature, sympathy with the beauty of different types of face and

varieties of form, with the many changing hues of the Venetian scene,

with the great laws of color and a knowledge of literature and history,

he was able to shadow forth his great imagery of the intuitional world."

This method of Tintoretto suggests several possible derivatives in the

preparation of motion pictures. Let the painters and sculptors be now

called upon for painting models and sculptural models, while the

architect, already present, supplies the architectural models, all three

giving us visible scenarios to furnish the cardinal motives for the

acting, from which the amateur photoplay company of the university can

begin their interpretation.

For episodes that follow the precedent of the simple Action Film tiny wax

models of the figures, toned and costumed to the heart's delight, would

tell the high points of the story. Let them represent, perhaps, seven

crucial situations from the proposed photoplay. Let them be designed as

uniquely in their dresses as are the Russian dancers' dresses, by Léon

Bakst. Then to alternate with these, seven little paintings of episodes,

designed in blacks, whites, and grays, each representing some elusive

point in the intimate aspects of the story. Let there be a definite

system of space and texture relations retained throughout the set.

The models for the splendor scenes would, of course, be designed by the

architect, and these other scenes alternated with and subordinated to his

work. The effects which he would conceive would be on a grander scale.

The models for these might be mere extensions of the methods of those

others, but in the typical and highest let us imagine ourselves going

beyond Tintoretto in preparation.

Let the principal splendor moods and effects be indicated by actual

structures, such miniatures as architects offer along with their plans of

public buildings, but transfigured beyond that standard by the light of

inspiration combined with experimental candle-light, spot-light,

sunlight, or torchlight. They must not be conceived as stage arrangements

of wax figures with harmonious and fitting backgrounds, but as

backgrounds that clamor for utterance through the figures in front of

them, as Athens finds her soul in the Athena with which we began. These

three sorts of models, properly harmonized, should have with them a

written scenario constructed to indicate all the scenes between. The

scenario will lead up to these models for climaxes and hold them together

in the celestial hurdle-race.

We have in our museums some definite architectural suggestions as to the

style of these models. There are in Blackstone Hall in the Chicago Art

Institute several great Romanesque and Gothic portals, pillars, and

statues that might tell directly upon certain settings of our Jeanne

d'Arc pageant. They are from Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, the

Abbey church of St. Gilles, the Abbey of Charlieu, the Cathedral of

Amiens, Notre Dame at Paris, the Cathedral of Bordeaux, and the Cathedral

of Rheims. Perhaps the object I care for most in the Metropolitan Museum,

New York, is the complete model of Notre Dame, Paris, by M. Joly. Why was

this model of Notre Dame made with such exquisite pains? Certainly not as

a matter of mere information or cultivation. I venture the first right

these things have to be taken care of in museums is to stimulate to new

creative effort.

I went to look over the Chicago collection with a friend and poet Arthur

Davison Ficke. He said something to this effect: "The first thing I see

when I look at these fragments is the whole cathedral in all its original

proportions. Then I behold the mediæval marketplace hunched against the

building, burying the foundations, the life of man growing rank and

weedlike around it. Then I see the bishop coming from the door with his

impressive train. But a crusade may go by on the way to the Holy Land. A

crusade may come home battered and in rags. I get the sense of life, as

of a rapid in a river flowing round a great rock."

The cathedral stands for the age-long meditation of the ascetics in the

midst of battling tribes. This brooding architecture has a

blood-brotherhood with the meditating, saint-seeing Jeanne d'Arc.

There is in the Metropolitan Museum a large and famous canvas painted by

the dying Bastien-Lepage;--Jeanne Listening to the Voices. It is a

picture of which the technicians and the poets are equally enamored. The

tale of Jeanne d'Arc could be told, carrying this particular peasant girl

through the story. And for a piece of architectural pageantry akin to the

photoplay ballroom scene already described, yet far above it, there is

nothing more apt for our purpose than the painting by Boutet de Monvel

filling the space at the top of the stair at the Chicago Art Institute.

Though the Bastien-Lepage is a large painting, this is many times the

size. It shows Joan's visit at the court of Chinon. It is big without

being empty. It conveys a glitter which expresses one of the things that

is meant by the phrase: Splendor Photoplay. But for moving picture

purposes it is the Bastien-Lepage Joan that should appear here, set in

dramatic contrast to the Boutet de Monvel Court. Two valuable neighbors

to whom I have read this chapter suggest that the whole Boutet de Monvel

illustrated child's book about our heroine could be used on this grand

scale, for a background.

The Inness room at the Chicago Art Institute is another school for the

meditative producer, if he would evolve his tribute to France on American

soil. Though no photoplay tableau has yet approximated the brush of

Inness, why not attempt to lead Jeanne through an Inness landscape? The

Bastien-Lepage trees are in France. But here is an American world in

which one could see visions and hear voices. Where is the inspired camera

that will record something of what Inness beheld?

Thus much for the atmosphere and trappings of our Jeanne d'Arc scenario.

Where will we get our story? It should, of course, be written from the

ground up for this production, but as good Americans we would probably

find a mass of suggestions in Mark Twain's Joan of Arc.

Quite recently a moving picture company sent its photographers to

Springfield, Illinois, and produced a story with our city for a

background, using our social set for actors. Backed by the local

commercial association for whose benefit the thing was made, the

resources of the place were at the command of routine producers.

Springfield dressed its best, and acted with fair skill. The heroine was

a charming débutante, the hero the son of Governor Dunne. The Mine

Owner's Daughter was at best a mediocre photoplay. But this type of

social-artistic event, that happened once, may be attempted a hundred

times, each time slowly improving. Which brings us to something that is

in the end very far from The Mine Owner's Daughter. By what scenario

method the following film or series of films is to be produced I will not

venture to say. No doubt the way will come if once the dream has a

sufficient hold.

I have long maintained that my home-town should have a goddess like

Athena. The legend should be forthcoming. The producer, while not

employing armies, should use many actors and the tale be told with the

same power with which the productions of Judith of Bethulia and The

Battle Hymn of the Republic were evolved. While the following story may

not be the form which Springfield civic religion will ultimately take, it

is here recorded as a second cousin of the dream that I hope will some

day be set forth.

Late in an afternoon in October, a light is seen in the zenith like a

dancing star. The clouds form round it in the approximation of a circle.

Now there becomes visible a group of heads and shoulders of presences

that are looking down through the ring of clouds, watching the star, like

giant children that peep down a well. The jewel descends by four

sparkling chains, so far away they look to be dewy threads of silk. As

the bright mystery grows larger it appears to be approaching the treeless

hill of Washington Park, a hill that is surrounded by many wooded ridges.

The people come running from everywhere to watch. Here indeed will be a

Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean. Flying machines

appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round

as they go up, trying to reach the slowly descending plummet.

* * * * *

At last, while the throng cheers, one bird-man has attained it. He brings

back his message that the gift is an image, covered loosely with a

wrapping that seems to be of spun gold. Now the many aviators whirl round

the descending wonder, like seagulls playing about a ship's mast. Soon,

amid an awestruck throng, the image is on the hillock. The golden chains,

and the giant children holding them there above, have melted into threads

of mist and nothingness. The shining wrapping falls away. The people look

upon a seated statue of marble and gold. There is a branch of

wrought-gold maple leaves in her hands. Then beside the image is a

fluttering transfigured presence of which the image seems to be a

representation. This spirit, carrying a living maple branch in her hand,

says to the people: "Men and Women of Springfield, this carving is the

Lady Springfield sent by your Lord from Heaven. Build no canopy over her.

Let her ever be under the prairie-sky. Do her perpetual honor." The

messenger, who is the soul and voice of Springfield, fades into the

crowd, to emerge on great and terrible occasions.

This is only one story. Round this public event let the photoplay

romancer weave what tales of private fortune he will, narratives bound up

with the events of that October day, as the story of Nathan and Naomi is

woven into Judith of Bethulia.

Henceforth the city officers are secular priests of Our Lady Springfield.

Their failure in duty is a profanation of her name. A yearly pledge of

the first voters is taken in her presence like the old Athenian oath of

citizenship. The seasonal pageants march to the statue's feet, scattering

flowers. The important outdoor festivals are given on the edge of her

hill. All the roads lead to her footstool. Pilgrims come from the Seven

Seas to look upon her face that is carved by Invisible Powers. Moreover,

the living messenger that is her actual soul appears in dreams, or

visions of the open day, when the days are dark for the city, when her

patriots are irresolute, and her children are put to shame. This spirit

with the maple branch rallies them, leads them to victories like those

that were won of old in the name of Jeanne d'Arc or Pallas Athena

herself.

CHAPTER XII

THIRTY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PHOTOPLAYS AND THE STAGE

The stage is dependent upon three lines of tradition: first, that of

Greece and Rome that came down through the French. Second, the English

style, ripened from the miracle play and the Shakespearian stage. And

third, the Ibsen precedent from Norway, now so firmly established it is

classic. These methods are obscured by the commercialized dramas, but

they are behind them all. Let us discuss for illustration the Ibsen

tradition.

Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant. He must be read aloud.

He stands for the spoken word, for the iron power of life that may be

concentrated in a phrase like the "All or nothing" of Brand. Though Peer

Gynt has its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in through the ear

alone. He can be acted in essentials from end to end with one table and

four chairs in any parlor. The alleged punch with which the "movie"

culminates has occurred three or ten years before the Ibsen curtain goes

up. At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might

inscribe on the curtain "This the magnificent moving picture cannot

achieve." Likewise after every successful film described in this book

could be inscribed "This the trenchant Ibsen cannot do."

But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town. The humor of the prospect was

the sort too deep for tears. My pastor and I reread the William Archer

translation that we might be alert for every antithesis. Together we went

to the services. Since then the film has been furiously denounced by the

literati. Floyd Dell's discriminating assault upon it is quoted in

Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret Anderson prints a

denunciation of it in a recent number of The Little Review. But it is not

such a bad film in itself. It is not Ibsen. It should be advertised "The

Iniquities of the Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a Palatial

Setting."

Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his son, shows the men much as

Ibsen outlines their characters. Of course the only way to be Ibsen is to

be so precisely. In the new plot all is open as the day. The world is

welcome, and generally present when the man or his son go forth to see

the elephant and hear the owl. Provincial hypocrisy is not implied. But

Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere of secrecy for his human

volcanoes to burst through in the end.

Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her intelligent and sensitive

countenance that she has a conception of that character. She does not

always have the chance to act the woman written in her face, the tart,

thinking, handsome creature that Ibsen prefers. Nigel Debrullier looks

the buttoned-up Pastor Manders, even to caricature. But the crawling,

bootlicking carpenter, Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a respectable,

guileless man with an income. And his wife and daughter are helpless,

conventional, upper-class rabbits. They do not remind one of the saucy

originals.

The original Ibsen drama is the result of mixing up five particular

characters through three acts. There is not a situation but would go to

pieces if one personality were altered. Here are two, sadly tampered

with: Engstrand and his daughter. Here is the mother, who is only

referred to in Ibsen. Here is the elder Alving, who disappears before

the original play starts. So the twenty great Ibsen situations in the

stage production are gone. One new crisis has an Ibsen irony and psychic

tension. The boy is taken with the dreaded intermittent pains in the back

of his head. He is painting the order that is to make him famous: the

King's portrait. While the room empties of people he writhes on the

floor. If this were all, it would have been one more moving picture

failure to put through a tragic scene. But the thing is reiterated in

tableau-symbol. He is looking sideways in terror. A hairy arm with

clutching demon claws comes thrusting in toward the back of his neck. He

writhes in deadly fear. The audience is appalled for him.

This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered

for the whispered refrain: "Ghosts," in the original masterpiece. This

hand should also be reiterated as a refrain, three times at least, before

this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening. It appears but the

once, and has no chance to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics of

the piece, as it should be, to realize its full power.

The father's previous sins have been acted out. The boy's consequent

struggle with the malady has been traced step by step, so the play should

end here. It would then be a rough equivalent of the Ibsen irony in a

contrary medium. Instead of that, it wanders on through paraphrases of

scraps of the play, sometimes literal, then quite alien, on to the

alleged motion picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from the

machine. There is no doctor on the stage in the original Ghosts. But

there is a physician in the Doll's House, a scientific, quietly moving

oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.

Is this photoplay physician such a one? The boy and his half-sister are

in their wedding-clothes in the big church. Pastor Manders is saying the

ceremony. The audience and building are indeed showy. The doctor charges

up the aisle at the moment people are told to speak or forever hold their

peace. He has tact. He simply breaks up the marriage right there. He does

not tell the guests why. But he takes the wedding party into the pastor's

study and there blazes at the bride and groom the long-suppressed truth

that they are brother and sister. Always an orotund man, he has the

Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency.

He brings to one's mind the tearful book, much loved in childhood, Parted

at the Altar, or Why Was it Thus? And four able actors have the task of

telling the audience by facial expression only, that they have been

struck by moral lightning. They stand in a row, facing the people,

endeavoring to make the crisis of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing

melodrama.

The final death of young Alving is depicted with an approximation of

Ibsen's mood. But the only ways to suggest such feelings in silence, do

not convey them in full to the audience, but merely narrate them.

Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of

hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will

do trenchant work. Instead there are endless writhings and rushings

about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of

Ibsen.

Up past the point of the clutching hand this film is the prime example

for study for the person who would know once for all the differences

between the photoplays and the stage dramas. Along with it might be

classed Mrs. Fiske's decorative moving picture Tess, in which there is

every determination to convey the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without

her voice and breathing presence. To people who know her well it is a

surprisingly good tintype of our beloved friend, for the family album.

The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere to be found. There are two moments

of dramatic life set among many of delicious pictorial quality: when Tess

baptizes her child, and when she smooths its little grave with a wavering

hand. But in the stage-version the dramatic poignancy begins with the

going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends.

The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt's Camille. It is

indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and

taken at full length. Much space is occupied by the floor and the

overhead portions of the stage setting. It lasts as long as would the

spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said

conversation if we can. It might be compared to watching Camille from the

top gallery through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped with cotton.

It would be well for the beginning student to find some way to see the

first two of these three, or some other attempts to revamp the classic,

for instance Mrs. Fiske's painstaking reproduction of Vanity Fair,

bearing in mind the list of differences which this chapter now furnishes.

There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays

are struggling with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian traditions in

the new medium. Many of the moving pictures discussed in this book are

rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith of Bethulia, is a pronounced

success. But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be

overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down. The successful

motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being

evolved every hour. Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded

novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic

logic, but tableau logic. But the old-line managers, taking up

photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations.

They try to have most things as before. Later they take on the moving

picture technique in a superficial way, but they, and the host of

talented actors in the prime of life and Broadway success, retain the

dramatic state of mind.

It is a principle of criticism, the world over, that the distinctions

between the arts must be clearly marked, even by those who afterwards mix

those arts. Take, for instance, the perpetual quarrel between the artists

and the half-educated about literary painting. Whistler fought that

battle in England. He tried to beat it into the head of John Bull that a

painting is one thing, a mere illustration for a story another thing. But

the novice is always stubborn. To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign

languages, therefore just alike. The book illustration may be said to

come in through the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagination. And

the other is effective with no title at all. The scenario writer who will

study to the bottom of the matter in Whistler's Gentle Art of Making

Enemies will be equipped to welcome the distinction between the

old-fashioned stage, where the word rules, and the photoplay, where

splendor and ritual are all. It is not the same distinction, but a

kindred one.

* * * * *

But let us consider the details of the matter. The stage has its exits

and entrances at the side and back. The standard photoplays have their

exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the

most stirring mob and battle scenes. In Judith of Bethulia, though the

people seem to be coming from everywhere and going everywhere, when we

watch close, we see that the individuals enter at the near right-hand

corner and exit at the near left-hand corner, or enter at the near

left-hand corner and exit at the near right-hand corner.

Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he

goes out at the side and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides.

With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out

that way. In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain

in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a

human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads,

disappearing when largest. There is an explosive power about the mildest

motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse. The people left

in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing cyclops.

Likewise, when the actor enters again, his mechanical importance is

overwhelming. Therefore, for his first entrance the motion picture star

does not require the preparations that are made on the stage. The

support does not need to warm the spectators to the problem, then talk

them into surrender.

When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries

to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one

follows. He does not realize that his camera-born opportunity to magnify

persons and things instantly, to interweave them as actors on one level,

to alternate scenes at the slightest whim, are the big substitutes for

dialogue. By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: cottage,

field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation

between three places rather than three persons. By alternating the

picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When

two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects

rather than their voices. The collector presents a bill: the adventurer

shows him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it. Moving

objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.

The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he is getting nowhere, but

still helpless, puts the climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the

climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the screen. Sentences should

be used to show changes of time and place and a few such elementary

matters before the episode is fully started. The climax of a motion

picture scene cannot be one word or fifty words. As has been discussed in

connection with Cabiria, the crisis must be an action sharper than any

that has gone before in organic union with a tableau more beautiful than

any that has preceded: the breaking of the tenth wave upon the sand. Such

remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in the main chase of the

photoplay film are but guide-posts in the race toward the goal. They

should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be laboriously lifted and

lowered while the horses stop, mid-career.

The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to the soul through the silence,

requires no quotation from Keats to explain her, though Keats is the

equivalent in verse. Her setting in the great French Museum is enough. We

do not know that her name is Venus. She is thought by many to be another

statue of Victory. We may some day evolve scenarios that will require

nothing more than a title thrown upon the screen at the beginning, they

come to the eye so perfectly. This is not the only possible sort, but

the self-imposed limitation in certain films might give them a charm akin

to that of the Songs without Words.

The stage audience is a unit of three hundred or a thousand. In the

beginning of the first act there is much moving about and extra talk on

the part of the actors, to hold the crowd while it is settling down, and

enable the late-comer to be in his seat before the vital part of the

story starts. If he appears later, he is glared at. In the motion picture

art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and

these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of

vision. The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling

without breaking the spell. There is no spell, in the stage sense, to

break. People can climb over each other's knees to get in or out. If the

picture is political, they murmur war-cries to one another. If the film

suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each

other with the richest sewing society report.

The people in the motion picture audience total about two hundred, any

time, but they come in groups of two or three at no specified hour. The

newcomers do not, as in Vaudeville, make themselves part of a jocular

army. Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama. If they

disapprove, there is grumbling under their breath, but no hissing. I have

never heard an audience in a photoplay theatre clap its hands even when

the house was bursting with people. Yet they often see the film through

twice. When they have had enough, they stroll home. They manifest their

favorable verdict by sending some other member of the family to "see the

picture." If the people so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may ask

the man at the door if he is going to bring it back. That is the moving

picture kind of cheering.

It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned stage actor was rendered

unimportant by his scenery. But the motion picture actor is but the mood

of the mob or the landscape or the department store behind him, reduced

to a single hieroglyphic.

The stage-interior is large. The motion-picture interior is small. The

stage out-of-door scene is at best artificial and little and is generally

at rest, or its movement is tainted with artificiality. The waves dash,

but not dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly. The motion

picture out-of-door scene is as big as the universe. And only pictures of

the Sahara are without magnificent motion.

The photoplay is as far from the stage on the one hand as it is from the

novel on the other. Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the

short story, or the lyric poem. The key-words of the stage are _passion_

and _character_; of the photoplay, _splendor_ and _speed_. The stage in

its greatest power deals with pity for some one especially unfortunate,

with whom we grow well acquainted; with some private revenge against some

particular despoiler; traces the beginning and culmination of joy based

on the gratification of some preference, or love for some person, whose

charm is all his own. The drama is concerned with the slow, inevitable

approaches to these intensities. On the other hand, the motion picture,

though often appearing to deal with these things, as a matter of fact

uses substitutes, many of which have been listed. But to review: its

first substitute is the excitement of speed-mania stretched on the

framework of an obvious plot. Or it deals with delicate informal anecdote

as the short story does, or fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or

great surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic outlooks, or

miraculous beings made visible. And the further it gets from Euripides,

Ibsen, Shakespeare, or Molière--the more it becomes like a mural painting

from which flashes of lightning come--the more it realizes its genius.

Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker are almost wasting their

genius on the theatre. The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet for

their type of imagination.

The typical stage performance is from two hours and a half upward. The

movie show generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and forty

minutes. And it should last but three reels, that is, an hour. Edgar Poe

said there was no such thing as a long poem. There is certainly no such

thing as a long moving picture masterpiece.

The stage-production depends most largely upon the power of the actors,

the movie show upon the genius of the producer. The performers and the

dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is

bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the

situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the

motion pictures because it obscures the producer. While the leading actor

is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should

not overshadow the latest inspirations of the creator of the films.

The display of the name of the corporation is no substitute for giving

the glory to the producer. An artistic photoplay is not the result of a

military efficiency system. It is not a factory-made staple article, but

the product of the creative force of one soul, the flowering of a spirit

that has the habit of perpetually renewing itself.

Once I saw Mary Fuller in a classic. It was the life and death of Mary

Queen of Scots. Not only was the tense, fidgety, over-American Mary

Fuller transformed into a being who was a poppy and a tiger-lily and a

snow-queen and a rose, but she and her company, including Marc

Macdermott, radiated the old Scotch patriotism. They made the picture a

memorial. It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett's novel The Queen's Quair.

Evidently all the actors were fused by some noble managerial mood.

There can be no doubt that so able a group have evolved many good films

that have escaped me. But though I did go again and again, never did I

see them act with the same deliberation and distinction, and I laid the

difference to a change in the state of mind of the producer. Even

baseball players must have managers. A team cannot pick itself, or it

surely would. And this rule may apply to the stage. But by comparison to

motion picture performers, stage-actors are their own managers, for they

have an approximate notion of how they look in the eye of the audience,

which is but the human eye. They can hear and gauge their own voices.

They have the same ears as their listeners. But the picture producer

holds to his eyes the seven-leagued demon spy-glass called the

kinetoscope, as the audience will do later. The actors have not the least

notion of their appearance. Also the words in the motion picture are not

things whose force the actor can gauge. The book under the table is one

word, the dog behind the chair is another, the window curtain flying in

the breeze is another.

This chapter has implied that the performers were but paint on the

canvas. They are both paint and models. They are models in the sense that

the young Ellen Terry was the inspiration for Watts' Sir Galahad. They

resemble the persons in private life who furnish the basis for novels.

Dickens' mother was the original of Mrs. Nickleby. His father entered

into Wilkins Micawber. But these people are not perpetually thrust upon

us as Mr. and Mrs. Dickens. We are glad to find them in the Dickens

biographies. When the stories begin, it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we

want, and the Charles Dickens atmosphere.

The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the

films. The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those

who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique. What is adapted

to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression

in another. The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but

half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.

Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people

who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should

take hold of the super-photoplay. The good citizens who can most easily

grasp the distinction should be there to perpetuate the higher welfare of

these institutions side by side. This parallel development should come,

if for no other reason, because the two arts are still roughly classed

together by the public. The elect cannot teach the public what the drama

is till they show them precisely what the photoplay is and is not. Just

as the university has departments of both History and English teaching in

amity, each one illuminating the work of the other, so these two forms

should live in each other's sight in fine and friendly contrast. At

present they are in blind and jealous warfare.

CHAPTER XIII

HIEROGLYPHICS

I have read this chapter to a pretty neighbor who has approved of the

preceding portions of the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but

respect. My neighbor classes this discussion of hieroglyphics as a

fanciful flight rather than a sober argument. I submit the verdict, then

struggle against it while you read.

The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of

picture-writing in the stone age. And the cave-men and women of our slums

seem to be the people most affected by this novelty, which is but an

expression of the old in that spiral of life which is going higher while

seeming to repeat the ancient phase.

There happens to be here on the table a book on Egypt by Rawlinson that I

used to thumb long ago. A footnote says: "The font of hieroglyphic type

used in this work contains eight hundred forms. But there are many other

forms beside." There is more light on Egypt in later works than in

Rawlinson, but the statement quoted will serve for our text.

Several complex methods of making visible scenarios are listed in this

work. Here is one that is mechanically simple. Let the man searching for

tableau combinations, even if he is of the practical commercial type,

prepare himself with eight hundred signs from Egypt. He can construct the

outlines of his scenarios by placing these little pictures in rows. It

may not be impractical to cut his hundreds of them from black cardboard

and shuffle them on his table every morning. The list will contain all

elementary and familiar things. Let him first give the most literal

meaning to the patterns. Then if he desires to rise above the commercial

field, let him turn over each cardboard, making the white undersurface

uppermost, and there write a more abstract meaning of the hieroglyphic,

one that has a fairly close relation to his way of thinking about the

primary form. From a proper balance of primary and secondary meanings

photoplays with souls could come. Not that he must needs become an expert

Egyptologist. Yet it would profit any photoplay man to study to think

like the Egyptians, the great picture-writing people. There is as much

reason for this course as for the Bible student's apprenticeship in

Hebrew.

Hieroglyphics can prove their worth, even without the help of an Egyptian

history. Humorous and startling analogies can be pointed out by opening

the Standard Dictionary, page fifty-nine. Look under the word _alphabet_.

There is the diagram of the evolution of inscriptions from the Egyptian

and Phoenician idea of what letters should be, on through the Greek and

Roman systems.

In the Egyptian row is the picture of a throne, [Illustration] that has

its equivalent in the Roman letter C. And a throne has as much place in

what might be called the moving-picture alphabet as the letter C has in

ours. There are sometimes three thrones in this small town of Springfield

in an evening. When you see one flashed on the screen, you know instantly

you are dealing with royalty or its implications. The last one I saw that

made any particular impression was when Mary Pickford acted in Such a

Little Queen. I only wished then that she had a more convincing throne.

Let us cut one out of black cardboard. Turning the cardboard over to

write on it the spirit-meaning, we inscribe some such phrase as The

Throne of Wisdom or The Throne of Liberty.

Here is the hieroglyphic of a hand: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the

letter D. The human hand, magnified till it is as big as the whole

screen, is as useful in the moving picture alphabet as the letter D in

the printed alphabet. This hand may open a lock. It may pour poison in a

bottle. It may work a telegraph key. Then turning the white side of the

cardboard uppermost we inscribe something to the effect that this hand

may write on the wall, as at the feast of Belshazzar. Or it may represent

some such conception as Rodin's Hand of God, discussed in the

Sculpture-in-motion chapter.

Here is a duck: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter Z. In the

motion pictures this bird, a somewhat z-shaped animal, suggests the

finality of Arcadian peace. It is the last and fittest ornament of the

mill-pond. Nothing very terrible can happen with a duck in the

foreground. There is no use turning it over. It would take Maeterlinck or

Swedenborg to find the mystic meaning of a duck. A duck looks to me like

a caricature of an alderman.

Here is a sieve: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, H. A sieve placed on

the kitchen-table, close-up, suggests domesticity, hired girl humors,

broad farce. We will expect the bride to make her first cake, or the

flour to begin to fly into the face of the intrusive ice-man. But, as to

the other side of the cardboard, the sieve has its place in higher

symbolism. It has been recorded by many a sage and singer that the

Almighty Powers sift men like wheat.

Here is the picture of a bowl: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the

letter K. A bowl seen through the photoplay window on the cottage table

suggests Johnny's early supper of bread and milk. But as to the white

side of the cardboard, out of a bowl of kindred form Omar may take his

moonlit wine, or the higher gods may lift up the very wine of time to the

lips of men, as Swinburne sings in Atalanta in Calydon.

Here is a lioness: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter L. The

lion or lioness creeps through the photoplay jungle to give the primary

picture-word of terror in this new universal alphabet. The present writer

has seen several valuable lions unmistakably shot and killed in the

motion pictures, and charged up to profit and loss, just as

steam-engines or houses are sometimes blown up or burned down. But of

late there is a disposition to use the trained lion (or lioness) for all

sorts of effects. No doubt the king and queen of beasts will become as

versatile and humbly useful as the letter L itself: that is, in the

commonplace routine photoplay. We turn the cardboard over and the lion

becomes a resource of glory and terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or

deathless courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in Ulalume calls the Lair

of the Lion.

Here is an owl: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter M. The only

use of the owl I can record is to be inscribed on the white surface. In

The Avenging Conscience, as described in chapter ten, the murderer marks

the ticking of the heart of his victim while watching the swinging of the

pendulum of the old clock, then in watching the tapping of the

detective's pencil on the table, then in the tapping of his foot on the

floor. Finally a handsome owl is shown in the branches outside

hoot-hooting in time with the action of the pencil, and the pendulum, and

the dead man's heart.

But here is a wonderful thing, an actual picture that has lived on,

retaining its ancient imitative sound and form: [Illustration] the

letter N, the drawing of a wave, with the sound of a wave still within

it. One could well imagine the Nile in the winds of the dawn making such

a sound: "NN, N, N," lapping at the reeds upon its banks. Certainly the

glittering water scenes are a dominant part of moving picture Esperanto.

On the white reverse of the symbol, the spiritual meaning of water will

range from the metaphor of the purity of the dew to the sea as a sign of

infinity.

Here is a window with closed shutters: [Illustration] Latin equivalent,

the letter P. It is a reminder of the technical outline of this book. The

Intimate Photoplay, as I have said, is but a window where we open the

shutters and peep into some one's cottage. As to the soul meaning in the

opening or closing of the shutters, it ranges from Noah's opening the

hatches to send forth the dove, to the promises of blessing when the

Windows of Heaven should be opened.

Here is the picture of an angle: [Illustration] Latin equivalent, Q.

This is another reminder of the technical outline. The photoplay

interior, as has been reiterated, is small and three-cornered. Here the

heroine does her plotting, flirting, and primping, etc. I will leave the

spiritual interpretation of the angle to Emerson, Swedenborg, or

Maeterlinck.

Here is the picture of a mouth: [Illustration] Latin equivalent, the

letter R. If we turn from the dictionary to the monuments, we will see

that the Egyptians used all the human features in their pictures. We do

not separate the features as frequently as did that ancient people, but

we conventionalize them as often. Nine-tenths of the actors have faces as

fixed as the masks of the Greek chorus: they have the hero-mask with the

protruding chin, the villain-frown, the comedian-grin, the fixed

innocent-girl simper. These formulas have their place in the broad

effects of Crowd Pictures and in comedies. Then there are sudden

abandonments of the mask. Griffith's pupils, Henry Walthall and Blanche

Sweet, seem to me to be the greatest people in the photoplays: for one

reason their faces are as sensitive to changing emotion as the surfaces

of fair lakes in the wind. There is a passage in Enoch Arden where Annie,

impersonated by Lillian Gish, another pupil of Griffith, is waiting in

suspense for the return of her husband. She changes from lips of waiting,

with a touch of apprehension, to a delighted laugh of welcome, her head

making a half-turn toward the door. The audience is so moved by the

beauty of the slow change they do not know whether her face is the size

of the screen or the size of a postage-stamp. As a matter of fact it

fills the whole end of the theatre.

Thus much as to faces that are not hieroglyphics. Yet fixed facial

hieroglyphics have many legitimate uses. For instance in The Avenging

Conscience, as the play works toward the climax and the guilty man is

breaking down, the eye of the detective is thrown on the screen with all

else hid in shadow, a watching, relentless eye. And this suggests a

special talisman of the old Egyptians, a sign called the Eyes of Horus,

meaning the all-beholding sun.

Here is the picture of an inundated garden: [Illustration] Latin

equivalent, the letter S. In our photoplays the garden is an ever-present

resource, and at an instant's necessity suggests the glory of nature, or

sweet privacy, and kindred things. The Egyptian lotus garden had to be

inundated to be a success. Ours needs but the hired man with the hose,

who sometimes supplies broad comedy. But we turn over the cardboard, for

the deeper meaning of this hieroglyphic. Our gardens can, as of old, run

the solemn range from those of Babylon to those of the Resurrection.

If there is one sceptic left as to the hieroglyphic significance of the

photoplay, let him now be discomfited by page fifty-nine, Standard

Dictionary. The last letter in this list is a lasso: [Illustration]. The

equivalent of the lasso in the Roman alphabet is the letter T. The crude

and facetious would be apt to suggest that the equivalent of the lasso in

the photoplay is the word trouble, possibly for the hero, but probably

for the villain. We turn to the other side of the symbol. The noose may

stand for solemn judgment and the hangman, it may also symbolize the

snare of the fowler, temptation. Then there is the spider web, close kin,

representing the cruelty of evolution, in The Avenging Conscience.

This list is based on the rows of hieroglyphics most readily at hand. Any

volume on Egypt, such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude of

suggestions for the man inclined to the idea.

If this system of pasteboard scenarios is taken literally, I would like

to suggest as a beginning rule that in a play based on twenty

hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the black realistic signs with obvious

meanings, and only one of them white and inexplicably strange. It has

been proclaimed further back in this treatise that there is only one

witch in every wood. And to illustrate further, there is but one scarlet

letter in Hawthorne's story of that name, but one wine-cup in all of

Omar, one Bluebird in Maeterlinck's play.

I do not insist that the prospective author-producer adopt the

hieroglyphic method as a routine, if he but consents in his meditative

hours to the point of view that it implies.

The more fastidious photoplay audience that uses the hieroglyphic

hypothesis in analyzing the film before it, will acquire a new tolerance

and understanding of the avalanche of photoplay conceptions, and find a

promise of beauty in what have been properly classed as mediocre and

stereotyped productions.

The nineteenth chapter has a discourse on the Book of the Dead. As a

connecting link with that chapter the reader will note that one of the

marked things about the Egyptian wall-paintings, pictures on the

mummy-case wrappings, papyrus inscriptions, and architectural

conceptions, is that they are but enlarged hieroglyphics, while the

hieroglyphics are but reduced fac-similes of these. So when a few

characters are once understood, the highly colored Egyptian

wall-paintings of the same things are understood. The hieroglyphic of

Osiris is enlarged when they desire to represent him in state. The

hieroglyphic of the soul as a human-headed hawk may be in a line of

writing no taller than the capitals of this book. Immediately above may

be a big painting of the soul, the same hawk placed with the proper care

with reference to its composition on the wall, a pure decoration.

The transition from reduction to enlargement and back again is as rapid

in Egypt as in the photoplay. It follows, among other things, that in

Egypt, as in China and Japan, literary style and mere penmanship and

brushwork are to be conceived as inseparable. No doubt the Egyptian

scholar was the man who could not only compose a poem, but write it down

with a brush. Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in

mural painting were probably gifts of the same person. The photoplay goes

back to this primitive union in styles.

The stages from hieroglyphics through Phoenician and Greek letters to

ours, are of no particular interest here. But the fact that

hieroglyphics can evolve is important. Let us hope that our new

picture-alphabets can take on richness and significance, as time goes on,

without losing their literal values. They may develop into something more

all-pervading, yet more highly wrought, than any written speech.

Languages when they evolve produce stylists, and we will some day

distinguish the different photoplay masters as we now delight in the

separate tang of O. Henry and Mark Twain and Howells. When these are

ancient times, we will have scholars and critics learned in the flavors

of early moving picture traditions with their histories of movements and

schools, their grammars, and anthologies.

Now some words as to the Anglo-Saxon language and its relation to

pictures. In England and America our plastic arts are but beginning.

Yesterday we were preeminently a word-civilization. England built her

mediæval cathedrals, but they left no legacy among craftsmen. Art had to

lean on imported favorites like Van Dyck till the days of Sir Joshua

Reynolds and the founding of the Royal Society. Consider that the friends

of Reynolds were of the circle of Doctor Johnson. Literary tradition had

grown old. Then England had her beginning of landscape gardening. Later

she saw the rise of Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their iridescent

successors. Still to-day in England the average leading citizen matches

word against word,--using them as algebraic formulas,--rather than

picture against picture, when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves of

his mind. To step into the Art world is to step out of the beaten path of

British dreams. Shakespeare is still king, not Rossetti, nor yet

Christopher Wren. Moreover, it was the book-reading colonial who led our

rebellion against the very royalty that founded the Academy. The

public-speaking American wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was

not the work of the painting or cathedral-building Englishman. We were

led by Patrick Henry, the orator, Benjamin Franklin, the printer.

The more characteristic America became, the less she had to do with the

plastic arts. The emigrant-train carried many a Bible and Dictionary

packed in beside the guns and axes. It carried the Elizabethan writers,

Æsop's Fables, Blackstone's Commentaries, the revised statutes of

Indiana, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Parson Weems' Life of Washington.

But, obviously, there was no place for the Elgin marbles. Giotto's tower

could not be loaded in with the dried apples and the seedcorn.

Yesterday morning, though our arts were growing every day, we were still

more of a word-civilization than the English. Our architectural,

painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or

their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty

largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving

because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not

founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the

individual voter. The museums in a democracy should go as far as the

public libraries. Every town has its library. There are not twenty Art

museums in the land.

Here then comes the romance of the photoplay. A tribe that has thought in

words since the days that it worshipped Thor and told legends of the

cunning of the tongue of Loki, suddenly begins to think in pictures. The

leaders of the people, and of culture, scarcely know the photoplay

exists. But in the remote villages the players mentioned in this work are

as well known and as fairly understood in their general psychology as any

candidates for president bearing political messages. There is many a

babe in the proletariat not over four years old who has received more

pictures into its eye than it has had words enter its ear. The young

couple go with their first-born and it sits gaping on its mother's knee.

Often the images are violent and unseemly, a chaos of rawness and squirm,

but scattered through the experience is a delineation of the world. Pekin

and China, Harvard and Massachusetts, Portland and Oregon, Benares and

India, become imaginary playgrounds. By the time the hopeful has reached

its geography lesson in the public school it has travelled indeed. Almost

any word that means a picture in the text of the geography or history or

third reader is apt to be translated unconsciously into moving picture

terms. In the next decade, simply from the development of the average

eye, cities akin to the beginnings of Florence will be born among us as

surely as Chaucer came, upon the first ripening of the English tongue,

after Cædmon and Beowulf. Sculptors, painters, architects, and park

gardeners who now have their followers by the hundreds will have admirers

by the hundred thousand. The voters will respond to the aspirations of

these artists as the back-woodsmen followed Poor Richard's Almanac, or

the trappers in their coon-skin caps were fired to patriotism by Patrick

Henry.

* * * * *

This ends the second section of the book. Were it not for the passage on

The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the chapters thus far might be entitled:

"an open letter to Griffith and the producers and actors he has trained."

Contrary to my prudent inclinations, he is the star of the piece, except

on one page where he is the villain. This stardom came about slowly. In

making the final revision, looking up the producers of the important

reels, especially those from the beginning of the photoplay business,

numbers of times the photoplays have turned out to be the work of this

former leading man of Nance O'Neil.

No one can pretend to a full knowledge of the films. They come faster

than rain in April. It would take a man every day of the year, working

day and night, to see all that come to Springfield. But in the photoplay

world, as I understand it, D.W. Griffith is the king-figure.

So far, in this work I have endeavored to keep to the established dogmas

of Art. I hope that the main lines of the argument will appeal to the

people who have classified and related the beautiful works of man that

have preceded the moving pictures. Let the reader make his own essay on

the subject for the local papers and send the clipping to me. The next

photoplay book that may appear from this hand may be construed to meet

his point of view. It will try to agree or disagree in clear language.

Many a controversy must come before a method of criticism is fully

established.

* * * * *

BOOK III

MORE PERSONAL SPECULATIONS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS NOT BROUGHT

FORWARD SO DOGMATICALLY

At this point I climb from the oracular platform and go down through my

own chosen underbrush for haphazard adventure. I renounce the platform.

Whatever it may be that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray of willow,

if you do not want it, throw it over the edge of the hill, without ado,

to the birds or squirrels or kine, and do not include it in your

controversial discourse. It is not a part of the dogmatic system of

photoplay criticism.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ORCHESTRA, CONVERSATION, AND THE CENSORSHIP

Whenever the photoplay is mixed in the same programme with vaudeville,

the moving picture part of the show suffers. The film is rushed through,

it is battered, it flickers more than commonly, it is a little out of

focus. The house is not built for it. The owner of the place cannot

manage an art gallery with a circus on his hands. It takes more brains

than one man possesses to pick good vaudeville talent and bring good

films to the town at the same time. The best motion picture theatres are

built for photoplays alone. But they make one mistake.

Almost every motion picture theatre has its orchestra, pianist, or

mechanical piano. The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no

sound but the hum of the conversing audience. If this is too ruthless a

theory, let the music be played at the intervals between programmes,

while the advertisements are being flung upon the screen, the lights are

on, and the people coming in.

If there is something more to be done on the part of the producer to make

the film a telling one, let it be a deeper study of the pictorial

arrangement, with the tones more carefully balanced, the sculpture

vitalized. This is certainly better than to have a raw thing bullied

through with a music-programme, furnished to bridge the weak places in

the construction. A picture should not be released till it is completely

thought out. A producer with this goal before him will not have the time

or brains to spare to write music that is as closely and delicately

related to the action as the action is to the background. And unless the

tunes are at one with the scheme they are an intrusion. Perhaps the

moving picture maker has a twin brother almost as able in music, who

possesses the faculty of subordinating his creations to the work of his

more brilliant coadjutor. How are they going to make a practical national

distribution of the accompaniment? In the metropolitan theatres Cabiria

carried its own musicians and programme with a rich if feverish result.

In The Birth of a Nation, music was used that approached imitative sound

devices. Also the orchestra produced a substitute for old-fashioned stage

suspense by long drawn-out syncopations. The finer photoplay values were

thrown askew. Perhaps these two performances could be successfully

vindicated in musical policy. But such a defence proves nothing in regard

to the typical film. Imagine either of these put on in Rochester,

Illinois, population one hundred souls. The reels run through as well as

on Broadway or Michigan Avenue, but the local orchestra cannot play the

music furnished in annotated sheets as skilfully as the local operator

can turn the reel (or watch the motor turn it!).

The big social fact about the moving picture is that it is scattered like

the newspaper. Any normal accompaniment thereof must likewise be adapted

to being distributed everywhere. The present writer has seen, here in his

home place, population sixty thousand, all the films discussed in this

book but Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation. It is a photoplay paradise,

the spoken theatre is practically banished. Unfortunately the local

moving picture managers think it necessary to have orchestras. The

musicians they can secure make tunes that are most squalid and horrible.

With fathomless imbecility, hoochey koochey strains are on the air while

heroes are dying. The Miserere is in our ears when the lovers are

reconciled. Ragtime is imposed upon us while the old mother prays for her

lost boy. Sometimes the musician with this variety of sympathy abandons

himself to thrilling improvisation.

My thoughts on this subject began to take form several years ago, when

the film this book has much praised, The Battle Hymn of the Republic,

came to town. The proprietor of one theatre put in front of his shop a

twenty-foot sign "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Harriet Beecher

Stowe, brought back by special request." He had probably read Julia Ward

Howe's name on the film forty times before the sign went up. His

assistant, I presume his daughter, played "In the Shade of the Old Apple

Tree" hour after hour, while the great film was rolling by. Many old

soldiers were coming to see it. I asked the assistant why she did not

play and sing the Battle Hymn. She said they "just couldn't find it." Are

the distributors willing to send out a musician with each film?