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