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 theseshould 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 heraureole 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 aquarrel. 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 personalitythan 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 filmmagic. 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 naturalthing 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, indicatesthat 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 pathis 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 tappinghis 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 norhuman; 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 turmoilis 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 furnishthe 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, aswas 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."
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 thestage 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 elegantstones 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 andOlympians, 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!"
"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 ofview. 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 withVenetian 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 thepeople. 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 waxfigures 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 mereinformation 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 thepoets 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 tableauhas 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 sparklingchains, 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 transfiguredpresence 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.
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 occurredthree 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, andgenerally 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.