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