The 1915 edition was used by Victor O. Freeburg as one of the text-books in the Columbia University School of Journalism, in his classes in photoplay writing. I was invited several times to address those classes on my yearly visits to New York. I have addressed many other academic classes, the invitation being based on this book. Now I realize that those who approach the theory from the general University standpoint, or from the history of the drama, had best begin with Freeburg's book, for he is not only learned in both matters, but presents the special analogies with skill. Freeburg has an excellent education in the history of music, and some of the happiest passages in his work relate the photoplay to the musical theory of the world, as my book relates it to the general Art Museum point of view of the world. Emphatically, my book belongs in the Art Institutes as a beginning, or in such religious and civic bodies as think architecturally. From there it must work its way out. Of course those bodies touch on a thousand others.
The work is being used as one basis of the campaign for the New Denver Art Museum, and I like to tell the story of how George W.Eggers of Denver first began to apply the book when the Director of the Art Institute, Chicago, that it may not seem to the merely University type of mind a work of lost abstractions. One of the most gratifying recognitions I ever received was the invitation to talk on the films in Fullerton Hall, Chicago Art Institute. Then there came invitations to speak at Chicago University, and before the Fortnightly Club, Chicago, all around 1916-17. One difficulty was getting the film toprovemy case from out the commercial whirl. I talked at these three and other places, but hardly knew how to go about crossing the commercial bridge. At last, with the cooperation of Director Eggers, we staged, in the sacred precincts of Fullerton Hall, Mae Marsh in The Wild Girl of the Sierras. The film was in battered condition, and was turned so fast I could not talk with it satisfactorily and fulfil the well-known principles of chapter fourteen. But at least I had converted one Art Institute Director to the idea that an ex-student of the Institute could not only write a book about painting-in-motion, but the painting could be shown in an Art Museum as promise of greater things in this world. It took a deal of willand breaking of precedent, on the part of all concerned, to show this film, The Wild Girl of the Sierras, and I retired from the field a long time. But now this same Eggers is starting, in Denver, an Art Museum from its very foundations, but on the same constructive scale. So this enterprise, in my fond and fatuous fancy, is associated with the sweet Mae Marsh as The Wild Girl of the Sierras—one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever put into screen or fable.
For about one year, off and on, I had the honor to be the photoplay critic of The New Republic, this invitation also based on the first edition of this book. Looking back upon that experience I am delighted to affirm that not only The New Republic constituency but the world of the college and the university where I moved at that time, while at loss for a policy, were not only willing but eager to take the films with seriousness.
But when I was through with all these dashes into the field, and went back to reciting verses again, no one had given me any light as to who should make the disinterested, non-commercial film for these immediate times, the film that would class, in our civilization, withThe New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly or the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson. That is, the production not for the trade, but for the soul. Anita Loos, that good crusader, came out several years ago with the flaming announcement that there was now hope, since a school of films had been heavily endowed for the University of Rochester. The school was to be largely devoted to producing music for the photoplay, in defiance of chapter fourteen. But incidentally there were to be motion pictures made to fit good music. Neither music nor films have as yet shaken the world.
I liked this Rochester idea. I felt that once it was started the films would take their proper place and dominate the project, disinterested non-commercial films to be classed with the dramas so well stimulated by the great drama department under Professor Baker of Harvard.
As I look back over this history I see that the printed page had counted too much, and the real forces of the visible arts in America had not been definitely enlisted. They should take the lead. I would suggest as the three people to interview first on building any ArtMuseum Photoplay project: Victor Freeburg, with his long experience of teaching the subject in Columbia, and John Emerson and Anita Loos, who are as brainy as people dare to be and still remain in the department store film business. No three people would more welcome opportunities to outline the idealistic possibilities of this future art. And a well-known American painter was talking to me of a midnight scolding Charlie Chaplin gave to some Los Angeles producer, in a little restaurant, preaching the really beautiful film, and denouncing commerce like a member of Coxey's illustrious army. And I have heard rumors from all sides that Charlie Chaplin has a soul. He is the comedian most often proclaimed an artist by the fastidious, and most often forgiven for his slapstick. He is praised for a kind of O. Henry double meaning to his antics. He is said to be like one of O. Henry's misquotations of the classics. He looks to me like that artist Edgar Poe, if Poe had been obliged to make millions laugh. I do not like Chaplin's work, but I have to admit the good intentions and the enviable laurels. Let all the Art Museums invite him in, as tentative adviser, if not a chastened performer. Let him be given asgood a chance as Mae Marsh was given by Eggers in Fullerton Hall. Only let him come in person, not in film, till we hear him speak, and consider his suggestions, and make sure he has eaten of the mystic Amaranth Apples of Johnny Appleseed.
Let us assume, friendly reader, that it is eight o'clock in the evening when you make yourself comfortable in your den, to peruse this chapter. I want to tell you about the Action Film, the simplest, the type most often seen. In the mind of the habitué of the cheaper theatre it is the only sort in existence. It dominates the slums, is announced there by red and green posters of the melodrama sort, and retains its original elements, more deftly handled, in places more expensive. The story goes at the highest possible speed to be still credible. When it is a poor thing, which is the case too often, the St. Vitus dance destroys the pleasure-value. The rhythmic quality of the picture-motions is twitched to death. In the bad photoplay even the picture of an express train more than exaggerates itself. Yet when the photoplay chooses to behave it can reproduce a race far more joyously than the stage. On that fact is based the opportunityof this form. Many Action Pictures are indoors, but the abstract theory of the Action Film is based on the out-of-door chase. You remember the first one you saw where the policeman pursues the comical tramp over hill and dale and across the town lots. You remember that other where the cowboy follows the horse thief across the desert, spies him at last and chases him faster, faster, faster, and faster, and finally catches him. If the film was made in the days before the National Board of Censorship, it ends with the cowboy cheerfully hanging the villain; all details given to the last kick of the deceased.
One of the best Action Pictures is an old Griffith Biograph, recently reissued, the story entitled "Man's Genesis." In the time when cave-men-gorillas had no weapons, Weak-Hands (impersonated by Robert Harron) invents the stone club. He vanquishes his gorilla-like rival, Brute-Force (impersonated by Wilfred Lucas). Strange but credible manners and customs of the cave-men are detailed. They live in picturesque caves. Their half-monkey gestures are wonderful to see. But these things are beheld on the fly. It is the chronicle of a race between the brain of Weak-Hands and the body of the other, symbolized by the chasing of poor Weak-Hands in and out among the rocks until the climax. Brain desperately triumphs. Weak-Hands slays Brute-Force with the startling invention. He wins back his stolen bride, Lily-White (impersonated by Mae Marsh). It is a Griffith masterpiece, and every actor does sound work. The audience, mechanical Americans, fond of crawling on their stomachs to tinker their automobiles, are eager over the evolution of the first weapon from a stick to a hammer. They are as full of curiosity as they could well be over the history of Langley or the Wright brothers.
The dire perils of the motion pictures provoke the ingenuity of the audience, not their passionate sympathy. When, in the minds of the deluded producers, the beholders should be weeping or sighing with desire, they are prophesying the next step to one another in worldly George Ade slang. This is illustrated in another good Action Photoplay: the dramatization of The Spoilers. The original novel was written by Rex Beach. The gallant William Farnum as Glenister dominates the play. He has excellent support. Their team-work makes them worthy of chronicle: Thomas Santschi asMcNamara, Kathlyn Williams as Cherry Malotte, Bessie Eyton as Helen Chester, Frank Clark as Dextry, Wheeler Oakman as Bronco Kid, and Jack McDonald as Slapjack.
There are, in The Spoilers, inspiriting ocean scenes and mountain views. There are interesting sketches of mining-camp manners and customs. There is a well-acted love-interest in it, and the element of the comradeship of loyal pals. But the chase rushes past these things to the climax, as in a policeman picture it whirls past blossoming gardens and front lawns till the tramp is arrested. The difficulties are commented on by the people in the audience as rah-rah boys on the side lines comment on hurdles cleared or knocked over by the men running in college field-day. The sudden cut-backs into side branches of the story are but hurdles also, not plot complications in the stage sense. This is as it should be. The pursuit progresses without St. Vitus dance or hysteria to the end of the film. There the spoilers are discomfited, the gold mine is recaptured, the incidental girls are won, in a flash, by the rightful owners.
These shows work like the express elevators in the Metropolitan Tower. The ideal is themaximum of speed in descending or ascending, not to be jolted into insensibility. There are two girl parts as beautifully thought out as the parts of ladies in love can be expected to be in Action Films. But in the end the love is not much more romantic in the eye of the spectator than it would be to behold a man on a motorcycle with the girl of his choice riding on the same machine behind him. And the highest type of Action Picture romance is not attained by having Juliet triumph over the motorcycle handicap. It is not achieved by weaving in a Sherlock Holmes plot. Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each one of these swift glimpses: when it is a race, but with a proper and golden-linked grace from action to action, and the goal is the most beautiful glimpse in the whole reel.
In the Action Picture there is no adequate means for the development of any full grown personal passion. The distinguished character-study that makes genuine the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance. People are but types, swiftly moved chessmen. More elaborate discourse on this subject may be found in chapter twelve on the differences between thefilms and the stage. But here, briefly: the Action Pictures are falsely advertised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy. But though the actors glower and wrestle and even if they are the most skilful lambasters in the profession, the audience gossips and chews gum.
Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.
To make the elevator go faster than the one in the Metropolitan Tower is to destroy even this emotion. To elaborate unduly any of the agonies or seductions in the hope of arousing lust, love, hate, or hunger, is to produce on the screen a series of misplaced figures of the order Frankenstein.
How often we have been horrified by these galvanized and ogling corpses. These are the things that cause the outcry for more censors. It is not that our moral codes are insulted, but what is far worse, our nervous systems are temporarily racked to pieces. These wriggling half-dead men, these over-bloody burglars, are public nuisances, no worse and no better than dead cats being hurled about by street urchins.
The cry for more censors is but the cry for the man with the broom. Sometimes it is a matter as simple as when a child is scratching with a pin on a slate. While one would not have the child locked up by the chief of police, after five minutes of it almost every one wants to smack him till his little jaws ache. It is the very cold-bloodedness of the proceeding that ruins our kindness of heart. And the best Action Film is impersonal and unsympathetic even if it has no scratching pins. Because it is cold-blooded it must take extra pains to be tactful. Cold-blooded means that the hero as we see him on the screen is a variety of amiable or violent ghost. Nothing makes his lack of human charm plainer than when we as audience enter the theatre at the middle of what purports to be the most passionate of scenes when the goal of the chase is unknown to us and the alleged "situation" appeals on its magnetic merits. Here is neither the psychic telepathy of Forbes Robertson's Cæsar, nor the fire-breath of E.H. Sothern's Don Quixote. The audience is not worked up into the deadly still mob-unity of the speaking theatre. We late comers wait for the whole reel to start over and the goal to be indicated in the preliminary,before we can get the least bit wrought up. The prize may be a lady's heart, the restoration of a lost reputation, or the ownership of the patent for a churn. In the more effective Action Plays it is often what would be secondary on the stage, the recovery of a certain glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. And to begin, we are shown a clean-cut picture of said glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. Then when these disappear from ownership or sight, the suspense continues till they are again visible on the screen in the hands of the rightful owner.
In brief, the actors hurry through what would be tremendous passions on the stage to recover something that can be really photographed. For instance, there came to our town long ago a film of a fight between Federals and Confederates, with the loss of many lives, all for the recapture of a steam-engine that took on more personality in the end than private or general on either side, alive or dead. It was based on the history of the very engine photographed, or else that engine was given in replica. The old locomotive was full of character and humor amidst the tragedy, leaking steam at every orifice. The original is in one ofthe Southern Civil War museums. This engine in its capacity as a principal actor is going to be referred to more than several times in this work.
The highest type of Action Picture gives us neither the quality of Macbeth or Henry Fifth, the Comedy of Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew. It gives us rather that fine and special quality that was in the ink-bottle of Robert Louis Stevenson, that brought about the limitations and the nobility of the stories of Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and the New Arabian Nights.
This discussion will be resumed on another plane in the eighth chapter: Sculpture-in-Motion.
Having read thus far, why not close the book and go round the corner to a photoplay theatre? Give the preference to the cheapest one.The Action Picture will be inevitable. Since this chapter was written, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks have given complete department store examples of the method, especially Chaplin in the brilliantly constructed Shoulder Arms, and Fairbanks in his one great piece of acting, in The Three Musketeers.
Let us take for our platform this sentence: THE MOTION PICTURE ART IS A GREAT HIGH ART, NOT A PROCESS OF COMMERCIAL MANUFACTURE. The people I hope to convince of this are (1) The great art museums of America, including the people who support them in any way, the people who give the current exhibitions there or attend them, the art school students in the corridors below coming on in the same field; (2) the departments of English, of the history of the drama, of the practice of the drama, and the history and practice of "art" in that amazingly long list of our colleges and universities—to be found, for instance, in the World Almanac; (3) the critical and literary world generally. Somewhere in this enormous field, piled with endowments mountain high, it should be possible to establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine art. Readers who donot care for the history of any art, readers who have neither curiosity nor aspiration in regard to any of the ten or eleven muses who now dance around Apollo, such shabby readers had best lay the book down now. Shabby readers do not like great issues. My poor little sermon is concerned with a great issue, the clearing of the way for a critical standard, whereby the ultimate photoplay may be judged. I cannot teach office-boys ways to make "quick money" in the "movies." That seems to be the delicately implied purpose of the mass of books on the photoplay subject. They are, indeed, a sickening array. Freeburg's book is one of the noble exceptions. And I have paid tribute elsewhere to John Emerson and Anita Loos. They have written a crusading book, and many crusading articles.
After five years of exceedingly lonely art study, in which I had always specialized in museum exhibits, prowling around like a lost dog, I began to intensify my museum study, and at the same time shout about what I was discovering. From nineteen hundred and five on I did orate my opinions to a group of advanced students. We assembled weekly for several winters in the Metropolitan Museum,New York, for the discussion of the masterpieces in historic order, from Egypt to America. From that standpoint, the work least often found, hardest to make, least popular in the street, may be in the end the one most treasured in a world-museum as a counsellor and stimulus of mankind. Throughout this book I try to bring to bear the same simple standards of form, composition, mood, and motive that we used in finding the fundamental exhibits; the standards which are taken for granted in art histories and schools, radical or conservative, anywhere.
Again we assume it is eight o'clock in the evening, friend reader, when the chapter begins.
Just as the Action Picture has its photographic basis or fundamental metaphor in the long chase down the highway, so the Intimate Film has its photographic basis in the fact that any photoplay interior has a very small ground plan, and the cosiest of enclosing walls. Many a worth-while scene is acted out in a space no bigger than that which is occupied by an office boy's stool and hat. If there is a table in this room, it is often so near it is half out of the picture or perhaps it is against the front line ofthe triangular ground-plan. Only the top of the table is seen, and nothing close up to us is pictured below that. We in the audience are privileged characters. Generally attending the show in bunches of two or three, we are members of the household on the screen. Sometimes we are sitting on the near side of the family board. Or we are gossiping whispering neighbors, of the shoemaker, we will say, with our noses pressed against the pane of a metaphoric window.
Take for contrast the old-fashioned stage production showing the room and work table of a shoemaker. As it were the whole side of the house has been removed. The shop is as big as a banquet hall. There is something essentially false in what we see, no matter how the stage manager fills in with old boxes, broken chairs, and the like. But the photoplay interior is the size such a work-room should be. And there the awl and pegs and bits of leather, speaking the silent language of picture writing, can be clearly shown. They are sometimes like the engine in chapter two, the principal actors.
Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay may be carried out of doors to the row of loafersin front of the country store, or the gossiping streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness of the interior.
The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cosy. These are to be classed as out-of-door scenery so far as theory goes, and are to be discussed under the head of Splendor Pictures. Masses of human beings pour by like waves, the personalities of none made plain. The only definite people are the hero and heroine in the foreground, and maybe one other. Though these three be in ball-costume, the little triangle they occupy next to the camera is in sort an interior, while the impersonal guests behind them conform to the pageant principles of out-of-doors, and the dancers are to the main actor as is the wind-shaken forest to the charcoal-burner, or the bending grain to the reaper.
The Intimate Motion Picture is the world's new medium for studying, not the great passions, such as black hate, transcendent love, devouring ambition, but rather the half relaxed or gently restrained moods of human creatures. It gives also our idiosyncrasies. It is gossipin extremis. It is apt to chronicle ourpetty little skirmishes, rather than our feuds. In it Colin Clout and his comrades return.
The Intimate Photoplay should not crowd its characters. It should not choke itself trying to dramatize the whole big bloody plot of Lorna Doone, or any other novel with a dozen leading people. Yet some gentle episode from the John Ridd farm, some half-chapter when Lorna and the Doones are almost forgotten, would be fitting. Let the duck-yard be parading its best, and Annie among the milk-pails, her work for the evening well nigh done. The Vicar of Wakefield has his place in this form. The Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture might very well give humorous moments in the lives of the great, King Alfred burning the cakes, and other legendary incidents of him. Plato's writings give us glimpses of Socrates, in between the long dialogues. And there are intimate scraps in Plutarch.
Prospective author-producer, do you remember Landor's Imaginary Conversations, and Lang's Letters to Dead Authors? Can you not attain to that informal understanding in pictorial delineations of such people?
The photoplay has been unjust to itself in comedies. The late John Bunny's importantplace in my memory comes from the first picture in which I saw him. It is a story of high life below stairs. The hero is the butler at a governor's reception. John Bunny's work as this man is a delightful piece of acting. The servants are growing tipsier downstairs, but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears, frozen into sobriety by his glance. At the last moment this god of the basement catches them at their worst and gives them a condescending but forgiving smile. The lid comes off completely. He himself has been imbibing. His surviving dignity in waiting on the governor's guests is worthy of the stage of Goldsmith and Sheridan. This film should be reissued in time as a Bunny memorial.
So far as my experience has gone, the best of the comedians is Sidney Drew. He could shine in the atmosphere of Pride and Prejudice or Cranford. But the best things I have seen of his are far from such. I beg the pardon of Miss Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell while I mention Who's Who in Hogg's Hollow, and A Regiment of Two. Over these I rejoiced like a yokel with a pocketful of butterscotch and peanuts. The opportunities to laugh on ahigher plane than this, to laugh like Olympians, are seldom given us in this world.
The most successful motion picture drama of the intimate type ever placed before mine eyes was Enoch Arden, produced by Cabanne.
Lillian Gish takes the part of Annie, Alfred Paget impersonates Enoch Arden, and Wallace Reid takes the part of Philip Ray. The play is in four reels of twenty minutes each. It should have been made into three reels by shortening every scene just a bit. Otherwise it is satisfying, and I and my friends have watched it through many times as it has returned to Springfield.
The mood of the original poem is approximated. The story is told with fireside friendliness. The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by happy children gives us many a genre painting on the theme of domesticity. It is a photographic rendering in many ways as fastidious as Tennyson's versification. The scenes on the desert island are some of them commonplace. The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays, but the rest of the production has a mood of its own. Seen several months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular piece ofTennyson's fills word-imagination and word-memory. Perhaps this is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist. It is a sound example of the type of film to which this chapter is devoted. If you cannot get your local manager to bring Enoch Arden, reread that poem of Tennyson's and translate it in your own mind's eye into a gallery of six hundred delicately toned photographs hung in logical order, most of them cosy interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair. Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate Picture, as I generally call it, for convenience.
It is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human. But the haughty, who scorn the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy show. And they think that of course oneshould not take seriously anything so cheap in price and so appealing to the cross-roads taste. But it is very well to begin in the Punch-and-Judy-show state of mind, and reconcile ourselves to it, and then like good democrats await discoveries. Punch and Judy is the simplest form of marionette performance, and the marionette has a place in every street in history just as the dolls' house has its corner in every palace and cottage. The French in particular have had their great periods of puppet shows; and the Italian tradition survived in America's Little Italy, in New York for many a day; and I will mention in passing that one of Pavlowa's unforgettable dance dramas is The Fairy Doll. Prospective author-producer, why not spend a deal of energy on the photoplay successors of the puppet-plays?
We have the queen of the marionettes already, without the play.
One description of the Intimate-and-friendly Comedy would be the Mary Pickford kind of a story. None has as yet appeared. But we know the Mary Pickford mood. When it is gentlest, most roguish, most exalted, it is a prophecy of what this type should be, not only in the actress, but in the scenario and setting.
Mary Pickford can be a doll, a village belle, or a church angel. Her powers as a doll are hinted at in the title of the production: Such a Little Queen. I remember her when she was a village belle in that film that came out before producers or actors were known by name. It was sugar-sweet. It was called: What the Daisy Said. If these productions had conformed to their titles sincerely, with the highest photoplay art we would have had two more examples for this chapter.
Why do the people love Mary? Not on account of the Daniel Frohman style of handling her appearances. He presents her to us in what are almost the old-fashioned stage terms: the productions energetic and full of painstaking detail but dominated by a dream that is a theatrical hybrid. It is neither good moving picture nor good stage play. Yet Mary could be cast as a cloudy Olympian or a church angel if her managers wanted her to be such. She herself was transfigured in the Dawn of Tomorrow, but the film-version of that play was merely a well mounted melodrama.
Why do the people love Mary? Because of a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood. Botticelli painted her portrait many centuriesago when by some necromancy she appeared to him in this phase of herself. There is in the Chicago Art Institute at the top of the stairs on the north wall a noble copy of a fresco by that painter, the copy by Mrs. MacMonnies. It is very near the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In the picture the muses sit enthroned. The loveliest of them all is a startling replica of Mary.
The people are hungry for this fine and spiritual thing that Botticelli painted in the faces of his muses and heavenly creatures. Because the mob catch the very glimpse of it in Mary's face, they follow her night after night in the films. They are never quite satisfied with the plays, because the managers are not artists enough to know they should sometimes put her into sacred pictures and not have her always the village hoyden, in plays not even hoydenish. But perhaps in this argument I have but betrayed myself as Mary's infatuated partisan.
So let there be recorded here the name of another actress who is always in the intimate-and-friendly mood and adapted to close-up interiors, Marguerite Clark. She is endowed by nature to act, in the same film, the eight-year-old village pet, the irrepressible sixteen-year-old, and finally the shining bride of twenty. But no production in which she acts that has happened to come under my eye has done justice to these possibilities. The transitions from one of these stages to the other are not marked by the producer with sufficient delicate graduation, emphasis, and contrast. Her plots have been but sugared nonsense, or swashbuckling ups and downs. She shines in a bevy of girls. She has sometimes been given the bevy.
But it is easier to find performers who fit this chapter, than to find films. Having read so far, it is probably not quite nine o'clock in the evening. Go around the corner to the nearest theatre. You will not be apt to find a pure example of the Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, but some one or two scenes will make plain the intent of the phrase. Imagine the most winsome tableau that passes before you, extended logically through one or three reels, with no melodramatic interruptions or awful smashes. For a further discussion of these smashes, and other items in this chapter, read the ninth chapter, entitled "Painting-in-Motion."
Again, kind reader, let us assume it is eight o'clock in the evening, for purposes of future climax which you no doubt anticipate.
Just as the Action Motion Picture has its photographic basis in the race down the high-road, just as the Intimate Motion Picture has its photographic basis in the close-up interior scene, so the Photoplay of Splendor, in its four forms, is based on the fact that the kinetoscope can take in the most varied of out-of-door landscapes. It can reproduce fairy dells. It can give every ripple of the lily-pond. It can show us cathedrals within and without. It can take in the panorama of cyclopæan cloud, bending forest, storm-hung mountain. In like manner it can put on the screen great impersonal mobs of men. It can give us tremendous armies, moving as oceans move. The pictures of Fairy Splendor, Crowd Splendor, Patriotic Splendor, and Religious Splendor are but the embodiments of these backgrounds.
And a photographic corollary quite useful in these four forms is that the camera has a kind of Hallowe'en witch-power. This power is the subject of this chapter.
The world-old legends and revelations of men in connection with the lovely out of doors, or lonely shrines, or derived from inspired crusading humanity moving in masses, can now be fitly retold. Also the fairy wand can do its work, the little dryad can come from the tree. And the spirits that guard the Republic can be seen walking on the clouds above the harvest-fields.
But we are concerned with the humblest voodooism at present.
Perhaps the world's oldest motion picture plot is a tale in Mother Goose. It ends somewhat in this fashion:—
The old lady said to the cat:—"Cat, cat, kill rat.Rat will not gnaw rope,Rope will not hang butcher,Butcher will not kill ox,Ox will not drink water,Water will not quench fire,Fire will not burn stick,Stick will not beat dog,Dog will not bite pig,Pig will not jump over the stile,And I cannot get home to-night."
The old lady said to the cat:—"Cat, cat, kill rat.Rat will not gnaw rope,Rope will not hang butcher,Butcher will not kill ox,Ox will not drink water,Water will not quench fire,Fire will not burn stick,Stick will not beat dog,Dog will not bite pig,Pig will not jump over the stile,And I cannot get home to-night."
By some means the present writer does not remember, the cat was persuaded to approach the rat. The rest was like a tale of European diplomacy:—
The rat began to gnaw the rope,The rope began to hang the butcher,The butcher began to kill the ox,The ox began to drink the water,The water began to quench the fire,The fire began to burn the stick,The stick began to beat the dog,The dog began to bite the pig,The frightened little pig jumped over the stile,And the old lady was able to get home that night.
The rat began to gnaw the rope,The rope began to hang the butcher,The butcher began to kill the ox,The ox began to drink the water,The water began to quench the fire,The fire began to burn the stick,The stick began to beat the dog,The dog began to bite the pig,The frightened little pig jumped over the stile,And the old lady was able to get home that night.
Put yourself back to the state of mind in which you enjoyed this bit of verse.
Though the photoplay fairy-tale may rise to exquisite heights, it begins with pictures akin to this rhyme. Mankind in his childhood has always wanted his furniture to do such things. Arthur names his blade Excalibur. It becomes a person. The man in the Arabian tale speaks to the magic carpet. It carries him whithersoever he desires. This yearning for personality in furniture begins to be crudely worked upon in the so-called trick-scenes. The typical commercialized comedy of this sort is Moving Day. Lyman H. Howe, among many excellent reels of a different kind, has films allied to Moving Day.
But let us examine at this point, as even more typical, an old Pathé Film from France. The representatives of the moving-firm are sent for. They appear in the middle of the room with an astonishing jump. They are told that this household desires to have its goods and hearthstone gods transplanted two streets east. The agents salute. They disappear. Yet their wireless orders are obeyed with a military crispness. The books and newspapers climb out of the window. They go soberly down the street. In their wake are the dishes from the table. Then the more delicate porcelains climb down the shelves and follow. Then follow the hobble-de-hoy kitchen dishes, then the chairs, then the clothing, and the carpets from over the house. The most joyous and curious spectacle is to behold the shoeswalking down the boulevard, from father's large boots to those of the youngest child. They form a complete satire of the family, yet have a masterful air of their own, as though they were the most important part of a human being.
The new apartment is shown. Everything enters in procession. In contrast to the general certainty of the rest, one or two pieces of furniture grow confused trying to find their places. A plate, in leaping upon a high shelf, misses and falls broken. The broom and dustpan sweep up the pieces, and consign them to the dustbin. Then the human family comes in, delighted to find everything in order. The moving agents appear and salute. They are paid their fee. They salute again and disappear with another gigantic leap.
The ability to do this kind of a thing is fundamental in the destinies of the art. Yet this resource is neglected because its special province is not understood. "People do not like to be tricked," the manager says. Certainly they become tired of mere contraptions. But they never grow weary of imagination. There is possible many a highly imaginative fairy-tale on this basis if we revert to the sound principles of the story of the old lady and the pig.
Moving Day is at present too crassly material. It has not the touch of the creative imagination. We are overwhelmed with a whole van of furniture. Now the mechanical or non-human object, beginning with the engine in the second chapter, is apt to be the hero in most any sort of photoplay while the producer remains utterly unconscious of the fact. Why not face this idiosyncrasy of the camera and make the non-human object the hero indeed? Not by filling the story with ropes, buckets, fire-brands, and sticks, but by having these four unique. Make the fire the loveliest of torches, the water the most graceful of springs. Let the rope be the humorist. Let the stick be the outstanding hero, the D'Artagnan of the group, full of queer gestures and hoppings about. Let him be both polite and obdurate. Finally let him beat the dog most heroically.
Then, after the purely trick-picture is disciplined till it has fewer tricks, and those more human and yet more fanciful, the producer can move on up into the higher realms of the fairy-tale, carrying with him this riper workmanship.
Mabel Taliaferro's Cinderella, seen long ago,is the best film fairy-tale the present writer remembers. It has more of the fireside wonder-spirit and Hallowe'en-witch-spirit than the Cinderella of Mary Pickford.
There is a Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, who takes the leading part with Blanche Sweet in The Clew, and is the hero in the film version of The Typhoon. He looks like all the actors in the old Japanese prints. He has a general dramatic equipment which enables him to force through the stubborn screen such stagy plays as these, that are more worth while in the speaking theatre. But he has that atmosphere of pictorial romance which would make him a valuable man for the retelling of the old Japanese legends of Kwannon and other tales that are rich, unused moving picture material, tales such as have been hinted at in the gleaming English of Lafcadio Hearn. The Japanese genius is eminently pictorial. Rightly viewed, every Japanese screen or bit of lacquer is from the Ancient Asia Columbus set sail to find.
It would be a noble thing if American experts in the Japanese principles of decoration, of the school of Arthur W. Dow, should tell stories of old Japan with the assistance of such men asSessue Hayakawa. Such things go further than peace treaties. Dooming a talent like that of Mr. Hayakawa to the task of interpreting the Japanese spy does not conduce to accord with Japan, however the technique may move us to admiration. Let such of us as are at peace get together, and tell the tales of our happy childhood to one another.
This chapter is ended. You will of course expect to be exhorted to visit some photoplay emporium. But you need not look for fairy-tales. They are much harder to find than they should be. But you can observe even in the advertisements and cartoons the technical elements of the story of the old lady and the pig. And you can note several other things that show how much more quickly than on the stage the borderline of All Saints' Day and Hallowe'en can be crossed. Note how easily memories are called up, and appear in the midst of the room. In any plays whatever, you will find these apparitions and recollections. The dullest hero is given glorious visualizing power. Note the "fadeaway" at the beginning and the end of the reel, whereby all things emerge from the twilight and sink back into the twilight at last. These are some of theindestructible least common denominators of folk stories old and new. When skilfully used, they can all exercise a power over the audience, such as the crystal has over the crystal-gazer.
But this discussion will be resumed, on another plane, in the tenth chapter: "Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion."
Henceforth the reader will use his discretion as to when he will read the chapter and when he will go to the picture show to verify it.
The shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea. This part is almost sure to be good. It is a fundamental resource.
A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally: the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the marketplace. Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean. Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, Atlantic, or Mediterranean. It takes this new invention, the kinetoscope,to bring us these panoramic drama-elements. By the law of compensation, while the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of men. Bernard Shaw, in a recent number of the Metropolitan, answered several questions in regard to the photoplay. Here are two bits from his discourse:—
"Strike the dialogue from Molière's Tartuffe, and what audience would bear its mere stage-business? Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons Othello's mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film? Or between Shakespeare's Lear and any one else's Lear? No, it seems to me that all the interest lies in the new opening for the mass of dramatic talent formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of one sort or another that do not matter in the picture-theatre...."
"Failures of the spoken drama may become the stars of the picture palace. And there are the authors with imagination, visualization and first-rate verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could not write an effective play."
Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative, epic, and Paradise Lost. He has in mind, no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and angels. This is one kind of a Crowd Picture.
There is another sort to be seen where George Beban impersonates The Italian in a film of that title, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener Sullivan. The first part, taken ostensibly in Venice, delineates the festival spirit of the people on the bridges and in gondolas. It gives out the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness. Then comes the vineyard, the crowd sentiment of a merry grape-harvest, then the massed emotion of many people embarking on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to their kindred on the piers, then the drama of arrival in New York. The wonder of the steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the conventional at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above.Then we behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is treated on two separate occasions.
It is hot weather. The mobs of children follow the ice-wagon for chips of ice. They besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling wagon quite closely, rejoicing to have their clothes soaked. They gather round the fire-plug that is turned on for their benefit, and again become wet as drowned rats.
Passing through these crowds are George Beban and Clara Williams as The Italian and his sweetheart. They owe the force of their acting to the fact that they express each mass of humanity in turn. Their child is born. It does not flourish. It represents in an acuter way another phase of the same child-struggle with the heat that the gamins indicate in their pursuit of the water-cart.
Then a deeper matter. The hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America: its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side. The gondolier becomes boot-black.The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother. They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the Novels of Thackeray.
Omitting the last episode, the entrance into the house of Corrigan, The Italian is a strong piece of work.
Another kind of Crowd Picture is The Battle, an old Griffith Biograph, first issued in 1911, before Griffith's name or that of any actor in films was advertised. Blanche Sweet is the leading lady, and Charles H. West the leading man. The psychology of a bevy of village lovers is conveyed in a lively sweet-hearting dance. Then the boy and his comrades go forth to war. The lines pass between hand-waving crowds of friends from the entire neighborhood. These friends give the sense of patriotism in mass. Then as the consequence of this feeling, as the special agents to express it, the soldiers are in battle. By the fortunes of war the onset is unexpectedly near to the house where once was the dance.
The boy is at first a coward. He enters the old familiar door. He appeals to the girl to hide him, and for the time breaks her heart. He goes forth a fugitive not only from battle,but from her terrible girlish anger. But later he rallies. He brings a train of powder wagons through fires built in his path by the enemy's scouts. He loses every one of his men, and all but the last wagon, which he drives himself. His return with that ammunition saves the hard-fought day.
And through all this, glimpses of the battle are given with a splendor that only Griffith has attained.
Blanche Sweet stands as the representative of the bevy of girls in the house of the dance, and the whole body social of the village. How the costumes flash and the handkerchiefs wave around her! In the battle the hero represents the cowardice that all the men are resisting within themselves. When he returns, he is the incarnation of the hardihood they have all hoped to display. Only the girl knows he was first a failure. The wounded general honors him as the hero above all. Now she is radiant, she cannot help but be triumphant, though the side of the house is blown out by a shell and the dying are everywhere.
This one-reel work of art has been reissued of late by the Biograph Company. It should be kept in the libraries of the Universities as astandard. One-reel films are unfortunate in this sense that in order to see a favorite the student must wait through five other reels of a mixed programme that usually is bad. That is the reason one-reel masterpieces seldom appear now. The producer in a mood to make a special effort wants to feel that he has the entire evening, and that nothing before or after is going to be a bore or destroy the impression. So at present the painstaking films are apt to be five or six reels of twenty minutes each. These have the advantage that if they please at all, one can see them again at once without sitting through irrelevant slapstick work put there to fill out the time. But now, having the whole evening to work in, the producer takes too much time for his good ideas. I shall reiterate throughout this work the necessity for restraint. A one hour programme is long enough for any one. If the observer is pleased, he will sit it through again and take another hour. There is not a good film in the world but is the better for being seen in immediate succession to itself. Six-reel programmes are a weariness to the flesh. The best of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent six-reel displays give us in two hours. It would pay a manager to hang out a sign: "This show is only twenty minutes long, but it is Griffith's great film 'The Battle.'"
But I am digressing. To continue the contrast between private passion in the theatre and crowd-passion in the photoplay, let us turn to Shaw again. Consider his illustration of Iago, Othello, and Lear. These parts, as he implies, would fall flat in motion pictures. The minor situations of dramatic intensity might in many cases be built up. The crisis would inevitably fail. Iago and Othello and Lear, whatever their offices in their governments, are essentially private persons, individualsin extremis. If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to analyze what they stood for. They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film. Otherwise the conflict, however violent, appealed mainly to the sense of speed.
So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of NegroRule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff. Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed. The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.
The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense. On the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon's poisonous hatred of the negro.
Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulteratedGriffith, which is half the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree: in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character.
Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr. Griffith's class. I recommend their works to him as a better basis for future Southern scenarios.
The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others. But it is still true that it is a wonder in its Griffith sections. In its handling of masses of men it further illustrates the principles that made notable the old one-reel Battle film described in the beginning of this chapter. The Battle in the end is greater, because of its self-possession and concentration: all packed into twenty minutes.
When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes downbefore the assassin, it is a master-scene. He falls as the representative of the government and a thousand high and noble crowd aspirations. The mimic audience in the restored Ford's Theatre rises in panic. This crowd is interpreted in especial for us by the two young people in the seats nearest, and the freezing horror of the treason sweeps from the Ford's Theatre audience to the real audience beyond them. The real crowd touched with terror beholds its natural face in the glass.
Later come the pictures of the rioting negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea. Then is delineated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already spoken. For comment on the musical accompaniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the fourteenth chapter entitled "The Orchestra, Conversation and the Censorship."
In the future development of motion pictures mob-movements of anger and joy will go through fanatical and provincial whirlwinds into great national movements of anger and joy.
A book by Gerald Stanley Lee that has a score of future scenarios in it, a book that might well be dipped into by the reader before hegoes to such a play as The Italian or The Battle, is the work which bears the title of this chapter: "Crowds."
Mr. Lee is far from infallible in his remedies for factory and industrial relations. But in sensitiveness to the flowing street of humanity he is indeed a man. Listen to the names of some of the divisions of his book: "Crowds and Machines; Letting the Crowds be Good; Letting the Crowds be Beautiful; Crowds and Heroes; Where are we Going? The Crowd Scare; The Strike, an Invention for making Crowds Think; The Crowd's Imagination about People; Speaking as One of the Crowd; Touching the Imagination of Crowds." Films in the spirit of these titles would help to make world-voters of us all.
The World State is indeed far away. But as we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other's eyes, in pictures and in fact.
A further discussion of this theme on other planes will be found in the eleventh chapter, entitled "Architecture-in-Motion," and the fifteenth chapter, entitled "The Substitute for the Saloon."
The Patriotic Picture need not necessarily be in terms of splendor. It generally is. Beginning the chronicle is one that waves no banners.
The Typhoon, a film produced by Thomas H. Ince, is a story of the Japanese love of Nippon in which a very little of the landscape of the nation is shown, and that in the beginning. The hero (acted by Sessue Hayakawa), living in the heart of Paris, represents the far-off Empire. He is making a secret military report. He is a responsible member of a colony of Japanese gentlemen. The bevy of them appear before or after his every important action. He still represents this crowd when alone.
The unfortunate Parisian heroine, unable to fathom the mystery of the fanatical hearts of the colony, ventures to think that her love for the Japanese hero and his equally greatdevotion to her is the important human relation on the horizon. She flouts his obscure work, pits her charms against it. In the end there is a quarrel. The irresistible meets the immovable, and in madness or half by accident, he kills the girl.
The youth is protected by the colony, for he alone can make the report. He is the machine-like representative of the Japanese patriotic formula, till the document is complete. A new arrival in the colony, who obviously cannot write the book, confesses the murder and is executed. The other high fanatic dies soon after, of a broken heart, with the completed manuscript volume in his hand. The one impression of the play is that Japanese patriotism is a peculiar and fearful thing. The particular quality of the private romance is but vaguely given, for such things in their rise and culmination can only be traced by the novelist, or by the gentle alternations of silence and speech on the speaking stage, aided by the hot blood of players actually before us.
Here, as in most photoplays, the attempted lover-conversations in pantomime are but indifferent things. The details of the hero's last quarrel with the heroine and the precisethoughts that went with it are muffled by the inability to speak. The power of the play is in the adequate style the man represents the colony. Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japanese tales more adapted to the films. We should have stories of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi, written from the ground up for the photoplay theatre. We should have the story of the Forty-seven Ronin, not a Japanese stage version, but a work from the source-material. We should have legends of the various clans, picturizations of the code of the Samurai.
The Typhoon is largely indoors. But the Patriotic Motion Picture is generally a landscape. This is for deeper reasons than that it requires large fields in which to manoeuvre armies. Flags are shown for other causes than that they are the nominal signs of a love of the native land.
In a comedy of the history of a newspaper, the very columns of the publication are actors, and may be photographed oftener than the human hero. And in the higher realms this same tendency gives particular power to the panorama and trappings. It makes the natural and artificial magnificence more than a narrative, more than a color-scheme, something other than a drama. In a photoplay by a master, when the American flag is shown, the thirteen stripes are columns of history and the stars are headlines. The woods and the templed hills are their printing press, almost in a literal sense.
Going back to the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same elementary stubbornness with which the oak resists the storm or the cliff resists the wave.
Let the reader consider Antony and Cleopatra, the Cines film. It was brought to America from Italy by George Klein. This and several ambitious spectacles like it are direct violations of the foregoing principles. True, it glorifies Rome. It is equivalent to waving the Italian above the Egyptian flag, quite slowly for two hours. From the stagestandpoint, the magnificence is thoroughgoing. Viewed as a circus, the acting is elephantine in its grandeur. All that is needed is pink lemonade sold in the audience.
The famous Cabiria, a tale of war between Rome and Carthage, by D'Annunzio, is a prime example of a success, where Antony and Cleopatra and many European films founded upon the classics have been failures. With obvious defects as a producer, D'Annunzio appreciates spectacular symbolism. He has an instinct for the strange and the beautifully infernal, as they are related to decorative design. Therefore he is able to show us Carthage indeed. He has an Italian patriotism that amounts to frenzy. So Rome emerges body and soul from the past, in this spectacle. He gives us the cruelty of Baal, the intrepidity of the Roman legions. Everything Punic or Italian in the middle distance or massed background speaks of the very genius of the people concerned and actively generates their kind of lightning.
The principals do not carry out the momentum of this immense resource. The half a score of leading characters, with the costumes, gestures, and aspects of gods, are after allworks of the taxidermist. They are stuffed gods. They conduct a silly nickelodeon romance while Carthage rolls on toward her doom. They are like sparrows fighting for grain on the edge of the battle.
The doings of his principals are sufficiently evident to be grasped with a word or two of printed insert on the films. But he sentimentalizes about them. He adds side-elaborations of the plot that would require much time to make clear, and a hard working novelist to make interesting. We are sentenced to stop and gaze long upon this array of printing in the darkness, just at the moment the tenth wave of glory seems ready to sweep in. But one hundred words cannot be a photoplay climax. The climax must be in a tableau that is to the eye as the rising sun itself, that follows the thousand flags of the dawn.
In the New York performance, and presumably in other large cities, there was also an orchestra. Behold then, one layer of great photoplay, one layer of bad melodrama, one layer of explanation, and a final cement of music. It is as though in an art museum there should be a man at the door selling would-be masterly short-stories about the paintings,and a man with a violin playing the catalogue. But for further discourse on the orchestra read the fourteenth chapter.
I left Cabiria with mixed emotions. And I had to forget the distressful eye-strain. Few eyes submit without destruction to three hours of film. But the mistakes of Cabiria are those of the pioneer work of genius. It has in it twenty great productions. It abounds in suggestions. Once the classic rules of this art-unit are established, men with equal genius with D'Annunzio and no more devotion, will give us the world's masterpieces. As it is, the background and mass-movements must stand as monumental achievements in vital patriotic splendor.
D'Annunzio is Griffith's most inspired rival in these things. He lacks Griffith's knowledge of what is photoplay and what is not. He lacks Griffith's simplicity of hurdle-race plot. He lacks his avalanche-like action. The Italian needs the American's health and clean winds. He needs his foregrounds, leading actors, and types of plot. But the American has never gone as deep as the Italian into landscapes that are their own tragedians, and into Satanic and celestial ceremonials.