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THE ART OF 
 THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE ART OF 
 THE MOYING PICTURE 
 
 BY 
 VACHEL LINDSAY 
 
 We are no other than a moving row 
 Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go 
 Round with this sun-illumined lantern held 
 In midnight by the Master of the Show. 
 
 — FlTZGEBALD. 
 
 Neijj gorft 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
COPYBIQHT, 1916, 
 
 bt the maomillan company. 
 
 Set up and clectrotyped. Published December, 1915. 
 
 J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 

 DeMcateD 
 
 TO 
 
 GEORGE MATHER RICHARDS 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 THE AET STUDENT DATS WE SPENT TOGETHER WHEN 
 
 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM WAS 
 
 OUR PICTURE-DRAMA 
 
 333769 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THIS OUTLINE IS PROPOSED AS A BASIS 
 FOR PHOTOPLAY CRITICISM IN AMERICA 
 
 I. The Point of View .... 
 
 11. The Photoplay of Action . 
 
 III. The Intimate Photoplay 
 
 IV. The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor 
 V. The Picture of Crowd Splendor 
 
 VI. The Picture of Patriotic Splendor 
 
 VII. The Picture of Religious Splendor 
 
 VIII. Sculpt uRE-iN-MoTioN .... 
 
 IX. Painting-in-Motion .... 
 
 X. Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in 
 
 Motion 
 
 XL Architecture-in-Motion 
 
 XII. Thirty Differences between the Photo 
 
 plays and the Stage 
 
 XIII. Hieroglyphics 
 
 1 
 8 
 
 17 
 30 
 39 
 51 
 68 
 79 
 97 
 
 113 
 133 
 
 151 
 171 
 
 n. MORE PERSONAL SPECULATIONS AND 
 AFTERTHOUGHTS NOT BROUGHT FOR- 
 WARD SO DOGMATICALLY 
 
 XIV. The Orchestra, Conversation, and the 
 
 Censorship 189 
 
 vii 
 
VIU 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OHAPTKE 
 
 XV. The Substitute for the Saloon 
 
 XVI. California and America . 
 
 XVII. Progress and Endowment 
 
 XVIII. Architects as Crusaders 
 
 XIX. On Coming Forth by Day 
 
 XX. The Prophet-Wizard . 
 
 XXI. The Acceptable Year of the Lord 
 
 PAGB 
 
 207 
 217 
 225 
 244 
 252 
 261 
 277 
 
THE ART OF 
 THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 This book is primarily for photoplay au- 
 diences. It might be entitled : *'How to Clas- 
 sify and Judge the Current Films." But 
 I desire as well that the work shall have its 
 influence upon producers, scenario-writers, act- 
 ors, and those who are about to prepare and 
 endow pictures for special crusades. 
 
 While many leading players and producers 
 are mentioned, I do not presume to attempt a 
 rigid roll of honor, but rather to supply a way 
 of approach to the moving picture field. 
 
 Many of the productions discussed are but 
 recently on the market, or lately reissued. 
 In such neighborhoods as the book has the 
 honor to be read enterprising local managers 
 might combine to send for them, in the order 
 named. 
 
 According to this work, there are three types 
 
 B 1 
 
^ IHE ART OF THte MOVING PICTURE 
 
 of photoplays : pictures of (1) Action, (2) 
 Intimacy, and (3) Splendor. The Action Pic- 
 tures are those where the outpouring of physical 
 force at high speed is the main source of drama. 
 The Spoilers, from the novel of Rex Beach, is 
 an example. It is the chronicle of a fight for 
 a Klondike mine, played by William Farnum, 
 Kathlyn Williams, and others. The Intimate 
 Pictures are based on the ability to photo- 
 graph and magnify small groups, "close up." 
 They give us idyls, genre pictures, village 
 comedies, and the like. An example is Enoch 
 Arden, played by Alfred Paget and Lillian 
 Gish. The Splendor- Pictures may be sub- 
 divided into four sorts : (1) The Fairy Tale 
 Splendor is such a production as Cinderella, 
 played by Mabel Taliaferro. (2) The Patriotic 
 Splendor is such a one as Cabiria, a story 
 of ancient Italy. Gabriel D'Annunzio is the 
 writer and producer thereof. (3) The Crowd 
 Splendor is the panorama where the principal 
 dramatic asset is in showing the changing moods 
 of informal public gatherings, and putting the 
 different types of mobs and assemblies in con- 
 trast with one another while they wave their 
 characteristic flags, rags, or torches. Such 
 gatherings of men are found in The Italian, 
 
THE POINT OF VIEW 3 
 
 the leading part of which is acted by George 
 Beban. (4) The photoplay of Religious Splen- 
 dor is such a one as the Story of Thomas a 
 Becket. He dies in Canterbury Cathedral in 
 his priestly vestments, surrounded by long- 
 robed monks, a martyr-priest, defending his 
 order. 
 
 Action, intimacy, and splendor blend in every 
 kind of reel, but some one of these qualities is 
 dominant in each production. To keep his 
 action from becoming hysterical, the fastidious 
 scenario-writer or producer should study those 
 standard sculptures that are depicted in motion, 
 such as the work of Myron of the ancient time, 
 or MacMonnies of the present day. On the 
 other hand the maker of the Intimate Photoplay 
 should let his mind dwell upon the work of 
 such artists as the Dutch little Masters of 
 Painting. Here he finds interiors that are 
 close-up, well composed, delineated with a 
 realism that is quaint and kindly. But the 
 maker of Splendor Pictures could key them with 
 profit to standard mural painting and architec- 
 ture. And I go on to suggest in another chapter 
 that the makers of trick pictures of jumping 
 furniture and the like evolve them into real 
 fairy-tales, with fewer things moving, and give 
 
4 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 those things a ritualistic and architectural dig- 
 nity. And completing the analogy, my position 
 is that religious and patriotic pageants should 
 be in the mood of nature-cathedrals like Stone- 
 henge, or metropolitan Cathedrals, like Notre 
 Dame, ^hatever the actual materials and sub- 
 ject-matter. 
 
 In short, by my hypothesis. Action Pictures 
 are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate Pictures are 
 paintings-in-motion. Splendor Pictures are ar- 
 chitect ure-in-motion . 
 
 This work tries to show that whatever the 
 seeming emphasis on dramatic excitement, the 
 tendency of the best motion pictures is to 
 evolve quite a different thing; the mood of 
 the standard art gallery, the spirit of Tin- 
 toretto rather than that of Moliere. The ripe 
 -—photoplay is the art exhibition, plus action. 
 The speed limit is soon reached. But the limit 
 of pictorial beauty cannot be reached. This is 
 the substantial effect of the book to this point. 
 Then follows chapter twelve giving a summary 
 that is in part a review : thirty points of differ- 
 ence between the spoken drama and the photo- 
 play. 
 
 Then I endeavor to show a certain surprising 
 parallelism between Egyptian hieroglyphics 
 
THE POINT OF VIEW 5 
 
 and this new silent drama, a suggestion I 
 owe in its inception to my friend, James Oppen- 
 heim. The development of the argument is 
 confidently based on the diagram under the 
 word Alphabet in the Standard Dictionary. 
 Here ends the first and more dogmatic part of 
 the book. The principal headings thus far are 
 proposed as a basis for photoplay criticism in 
 America. 
 
 The rest of the work is a series of after- 
 thoughts and speculations not brought forward 
 so dogmatically. In this more informal section 
 I begin by airing my opinion that the best 
 censorship is a public feeling for beauty. To 
 this end the chapter advocates the acknowl- 
 edgment of the photoplay house as an art 
 gallery, the suppressing of the music, and 
 making the moving picture audience even more 
 conversational by taking a nightly ballot on 
 the favorite film or episode. 
 
 Then since the restitution of picture-writing 
 revives the cave-man point of view on a higher 
 plane, I advocate the endowment of certain 
 special films likely to be neglected by commerce, 
 films that this cave-man needs. 
 
 The various types of plays suggest particular 
 social thoughts. The Action Play, it seems to 
 
6 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 me, is especially adapted to the moral crusader. 
 The Intimate Play is adapted to endowment 
 and development by the pure aesthete, and is 
 tentatively recommended to the imagist poets. 
 Meditation in another field, that of the Crowd 
 Picture, brings me to the contemporary fact 
 that the cheap photoplay house is the best 
 known rival and eliminator of the slum saloon, 
 the erstwhile poor man's club. On this turns 
 some political speculation. 
 
 Then I show how California, as the natural 
 moving picture playground, has the possibility 
 of developing a unique cultural leverage upon 
 America. Then I bring forward the proposition 
 that the photoplay is such a good natural me- 
 dium for architectural propaganda that archi- 
 tects could use it to stimulate the rebuilding of 
 America into a sort of perpetual World's Fair, 
 if they had the courage of such persons as 
 Alexander, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon. In the 
 course of the effort to bring about a greater 
 range of Fairy-Tale and Religious Splendors I 
 advocate specifically a deeply considered rendi- 
 tion of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or as 
 it is better entitled : The Chapters on Coming 
 Forth by Day. 
 
 The last discourse is on the forecasters of a 
 
THE POINT OF VIEW 7 
 
 newer civilization, and shows how Jules Verne, 
 Edward Bellamy, and H. G. Wells need more 
 mystical and less mechanical successors when 
 we formulate our America of Tomorrow. And 
 maintaining that the photoplay cuts deeper 
 into some stratifications of society than the 
 newspaper or the book have ever gone, I try 
 to show that the destiny of America from many 
 aspects may be bound up in what the prophet- 
 wizards among her photoplaywrights and pro- 
 ducers mark out for her, for those things which 
 a whole nation dares to hope for, it may in the 
 end attain. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION 
 
 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 habitue 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 ex- 
 press 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 opportunity 
 
THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION 9 
 
 of this form. Many Action Pictures are in- 
 doors, 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 man- 
 ners and customs of the cave-men are detailed. 
 They live in picturesque caves. Their^Jialf- 
 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- 
 
10 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 des- 
 perately 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 Griflith masterpiece, 
 and every actor does sound work. The audi- 
 ence, 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 pro- 
 voke 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 proph- 
 esying 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 excel- 
 lent support. Their team-work makes them 
 worthy of chronicle: Thomas Santschi as 
 
THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION 11 
 
 McNamara, Kathlyn Williams as Cherry Ma- 
 lotte, Bessie Eyton as Helen Chester, Frank 
 Clark as Dextry, Wheeler Oakman as Broncho 
 Kid, and Jack McDonald as Slapjack. 
 
 There are, in The Spoilers, inspiriting ocean 
 scenes and mountain views. There are in- 
 teresting sketches of mining-camp manners 
 and customs. There is a well-acted love- 
 interest in it, and the element of the comrade- 
 ship 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 complica- 
 tions 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 re- 
 captured, 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 the 
 
12 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 maximum of speed in descending or ascending, 
 not to be jolted into insensibility .1 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 motor- 
 cycle 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 the 
 
THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION 13 
 
 films 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 are 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. 
 
14 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 pur- 
 ports 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 Caesar, 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. 
 
THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION 15 
 
 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 sec- 
 ondary 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 right- 
 ful owner. 
 
 In brief, the actors hurry through what would 
 be tremendous passions on the stage to re- 
 cover something that can be really photo- 
 graphed. 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 pri- 
 vate 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 char- 
 acter and humor amidst the tragedy, leaking 
 steam at every orifice. The original is in one of 
 
16 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the 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. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 
 
 If you are one of the ten thousand people 
 writing scenarios that have not been taken 
 as yet, if you desire advice that will enable you 
 to place your work, read along with this 
 volume The Technique of the Photoplay 
 by Epes Winthrop Sargent, to be had from 
 The Moving Picture World. That book shows 
 the devices whereby films akin to The 
 Spoilers are evolved. It tells how to develop 
 comedies and near-tragedies that are their 
 cousins. Further acquaintance with this inter- 
 esting practical field may be had by subscribing 
 to The Moving Picture World. It is a trade- 
 weekly primarily for operators of theatres the 
 country over, but with items for all the people 
 interested in the field. These chapters that we 
 are developing together, friend reader, bring the 
 artistic and not the commercial ruler to the meas- 
 uring of the business. I hope that the fifty people 
 who are manufacturing successful scenarios will 
 o 17 
 
18 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 think it worth their while to read further into 
 these discourses for advice that I dare to hope, 
 when combined with their practical sense, will 
 have some influence in shaping their art. And 
 I hope that some of the ten thousand who 
 emulate them may be led by certain passages 
 in this book nearer to the artistic side of the 
 thing without destroying their commercial 
 chances. The goal of the scenario- writer, be 
 he commercially successful, or not, should be 
 to manage his own scenarios, — be an author- 
 producer. Not until he is in that commanding 
 position will he be as well placed to work out 
 his ideas as is the routine short-story writer or 
 novelist. Further discussion of the producer's 
 position is found in chapter twelve. In brief, 
 he is the beginning and the end of the real 
 photoplay, and the scenario-writer should be 
 willing to be his slave only long enough to 
 learn to invade his studio and replace him. 
 
 A bit of personal history may throw light on 
 the method of approach in this book. I used 
 to be one of a combined group of advanced 
 students from the Art Students' League, the 
 New York School of Art and the National 
 Academy School, who assembled weekly for 
 several winters in the Metropolitan Museum, 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 19 
 
 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 man- 
 kind. 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 stand- 
 ards 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 photo- 
 graphic 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 pic- 
 ture or perhaps it is against the front line of 
 
20 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the 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 win- 
 dow. 
 
 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 some- 
 thing essentially false in what we see, no matter 
 how the stage manager fills in with old boxes, 
 broken chairs, and the like. But the photo- 
 play 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 loafers 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 21 
 
 in 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 ball-rooms 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 pas- 
 sions, such as black hate, transcendent love, 
 devouring ambition, but rather the half re- 
 laxed or gently restrained moods of human 
 creatures. It gives also our idiosyncrasies. It 
 is gossip in extremis. It is apt to chronicle our 
 
22 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 petty 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 parad- 
 ing 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 re- 
 member 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 important 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 23 
 
 place in my memory comes from the first pic- 
 ture 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 a 
 
24 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 higher 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 re- 
 turned to Springfield. 
 
 The mood of the original poem is approxi- 
 mated. The story is told with fireside friend- 
 liness. The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by 
 happy children gives us many a genre paint- 
 ing on the theme of domesticity. It is a photo- 
 graphic 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 pro- 
 duction has a mood of its own. Seen several 
 months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye- 
 memory more than that particular piece of 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 25 
 
 Tennyson'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 chap- 
 ter 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 hun- 
 dred delicately toned photographs hung in logi- 
 cal 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 one 
 
26 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 should 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 our- 
 selves to it, and then like good democrats 
 await discoveries. Punch and Judy is the sim- 
 plest form of marionette performance, and the 
 marionette has a place in every street in his- 
 tory 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 al- 
 ready, 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. 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 27 
 
 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.f^ Not on 
 account of the Daniel Frohman style of han- 
 dling 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 centuries 
 
28 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 ago 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. Mac- 
 Monnies. 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 argu- 
 ment I have but betrayed myseK as Mary's in- 
 fatuated 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- 
 
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY 29 
 
 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 suflficient delicate 
 graduation, emphasis, and contrast. Her plots 
 have been but sugared nonsense, or swash- 
 buckling 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." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MOTION PICTURE OF FAIRY SPLENDOR 
 
 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 ki- 
 netoscope 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 cyclopsean 
 cloud, bending forest, storm-hung mountain. 
 In like manner it can put on the screen great 
 impersonal mobs of men. It can give us tre- 
 mendous armies, moving as oceans move. The 
 pictures of Fairy Splendor, Crowd Splendor, 
 Patriotic Splendor, and Religious Splendor are 
 but the embodiments of these backgrounds. 
 
 80 
 
FAIRY SPLENDOR 31 
 
 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 Repub- 
 lic 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 some- 
 what 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. 
 
32 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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. 
 
 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 child- 
 hood has always wanted his furniture to do 
 such things. Arthur names his blade Excali- 
 
FAIRY SPLENDOR 33 
 
 bur. It becomes a person. The man in the 
 Arabian tale speaks to the magic carpet. It 
 carries him whithersoever he desires. This 
 yearning for personaHty in furniture begins 
 to be crudely worked upon in the so-called 
 trick-scenes. The typical commercialized com- 
 edy 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 Pathe 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 porce- 
 lains 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 joy- 
 ous and curious spectacle is to behold the shoes 
 
34 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 walking 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 gen- 
 eral 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 dust- 
 pan 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 dis- 
 appear 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. Cer- 
 tainly 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. 
 
FAIRY SPLENDOR 35 
 
 Moving Day is at present too crassly ma- 
 terial. 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 en- 
 gine in the second chapter, is apt to be the hero 
 in most any sort of photoplay while the pro- 
 ducer 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 dis- 
 ciplined till it has fewer tricks, and those 
 more human and yet more fanciful, the pro- 
 ducer 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. 
 
36 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 is the best film fairy-tale the present writer 
 remembers. It has more of the fireside won- 
 der-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 en- 
 ables 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 Kwan- 
 non and other tales that are rich, unused mov- 
 ing 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 as 
 
FAIRY SPLENDOR 37 
 
 Sessue Hayakawa. Such things go further / 
 than peace treaties. Dooming a talent like 
 that of Mr. Hayakawa to the task of inter- 
 preting 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 j 
 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 recollec- 
 tions. The dullest hero is given glorious visual- 
 izing power. Note the " fadeaway " at the begin- 
 ning 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 the 
 
38 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 indestructible 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 an- 
 other plane, in the tenth chapter : " Furni- 
 ture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 
 
 Henceforth the reader will use his dis- 
 cretion 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 market-place. Only GriflSth and his close 
 disciples can do these as well as most 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. 
 
40 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 Moliere's Tar- 
 tuffe, and what audience would bear its mere 
 stage-business? Imagine the scene in which 
 lago poisons Othello's mind against Desdemona, 
 conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of 
 the difference between Shakespeare and Sheri- 
 dan Knowles in the film ? Or between Shake- 
 speare'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, visualiza- 
 tion 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 admi- 
 
PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 41 
 
 rably 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 Bork- 
 man, though Borkman is a dramatic master- 
 piece, and Milton could not write an effective 
 play." 
 
 Note in especial what Shaw says about nar- 
 rative, 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 senti- 
 ment 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. 
 
42 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 repre- 
 sents 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. 
 
PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 43 
 
 The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the 
 suffering slum mother. They are not special- 
 ized 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 com- 
 rades 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 conse- 
 quence 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. 
 
44 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 him- 
 self. 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 a 
 
PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 45 
 
 standard. 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 pro- 
 gramme 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 pains- 
 taking films are apt to be five or six reels of 
 twenty minutes each. These have the ad- 
 vantage that if they please at all, one can see 
 them again at once without sitting through 
 irrelevant slap-stick 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 through- 
 out 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 suc- 
 cession 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 incon- 
 
46 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 tinent 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 lago, 
 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. lago and Othello and Lear, whatever 
 their offices in their governments, are essen- 
 tially private persons, individuals in 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 after- 
 ward 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 prob- 
 ably 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 Negro 
 
PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 47 
 
 Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road 
 as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff. 
 Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (imper- 
 sonated 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 help- 
 less 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 audi- 
 ence, 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 unadulterated 
 
48 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Griffith, 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 hydro- 
 phobia 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 Ed- 
 wards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, 
 James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are South- 
 ern 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 down 
 
PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR 49 
 
 before 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 inter- 
 preted 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 rhythmi- 
 cally like the sea. Then is delineated the rise of 
 the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already 
 spoken. For comment on the musical accom- 
 paniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the 
 fourteenth chapter entitled "The Orchestra, 
 Conversation and the Censorship." 
 
 In the future development of motion pic- 
 tures 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 he 
 
50 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 goes 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 Imagina- 
 tion about People; Speakinft ^s One of the 
 Crowd ; Touching the Imagination of Crowds." 
 Films in the spirit of these pities 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 pour- 
 ing streets of men will become sacred in each 
 
 1 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." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 
 
 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 land- 
 scape of the nation is shown, and that in 
 the beginning. The hero (acted by Sessue 
 Hayakawa), living in the heart of Paris, repre- 
 sents 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 great 
 
 51 
 
52 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 devotion to her is the important human rela- 
 tion 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 can- 
 not 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 im- 
 pression of the play is that Japanese patriot- 
 ism is a peculiar and fearful thing. The par- 
 ticular 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 in- 
 different things. The details of the hero's 
 last quarrel with the heroine and the precise 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 53 
 
 thoughts that went with it are mujQBed by the 
 inability to speak. The power of the play is 
 in the adequate style the man represents the col- 
 ony. Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japan- 
 ese tales more adapted to the films. We 
 should have stories of lyeyasu 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 ver- 
 sion, 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 land- 
 scape. 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, some- 
 
54 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 thing 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, al- 
 most in a literal sense. 
 
 Going back to the illustration of the engine, 
 in chapter two, the non-human thing is a per- 
 sonality, 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 be- 
 comes 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 Cleo- 
 patra, 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 stage 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 55 
 
 standpoint, 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 fail- 
 ures. 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 Latin legions. Every- 
 thing 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 momen- 
 tum of this immense resource. The half a 
 score of leading characters, with the costumes, 
 gestiu*es, and aspects of gods, are after all 
 
56 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 works of the taxidermist. They are stuffed 
 gods. They conduct a silly nickelodeon ro- 
 mance 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 senti- 
 mentalizes about them. He adds side-elabo- 
 rations of the plot that would require much 
 time to make clear, and a hard working novel- 
 ist 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 pre- 
 sumably 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. 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 57 
 
 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 sug- 
 gestions. 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. 
 
58 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Judith of Bethulia and The Battle Hymn 
 of the Republic have impressed me as the 
 two most significant photoplays I have ever 
 encountered. They may be classed with equal 
 justice as religious or patriotic productions. 
 But for reasons which will appear, The Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic will be classed as a 
 film of devotion and Judith as a patriotic one. 
 The latter was produced by D. W. Griflith, 
 and released by the Biograph Company in 1914. 
 The original stage drama was once played 
 by the famous Boston actress, Nance O'Neil. 
 It is the work of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. 
 The motion picture scenario, when Griffith 
 had done with it, had no especial Aldrich 
 flavor, though it contained several of the char- 
 acters and events as Aldrich conceived them. 
 It was principally the old apocryphal story 
 plus the genius of Griffith and that inner cir- 
 cle of players whom he has endowed with much 
 of his point of view. 
 
 This is his cast of characters : — 
 
 Judith Blanche Sweet 
 
 Holof ernes .... Henry Walthall 
 
 His servant .... J. J. Lance 
 
 Captain of the 1 xr ti /I 
 Guards J 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 59 
 
 Judith's maid . . . Miss Bruce 
 General of the 
 
 C. H. Mailes 
 
 Jews 
 
 J Messrs. Oppleman and 
 X riesLS • • * • • * \ -p , 
 
 [ Lestina 
 
 Nathan Robert Harron 
 
 Naomi Mae Marsh 
 
 Keeper of the slaves 1 .,„ , _, 
 t TT 1 t f' Alfred Paget 
 
 tor Holofernes j 
 
 ^, r • • • Lillian Gish 
 
 mother J 
 
 The Biograph Company advertises the pro- 
 duction with the following Barnum and Bailey 
 enumeration: "In four parts. Produced in 
 California. Most expensive Biograph ever pro- 
 duced. More than one thousand people and 
 about three hundred horsemen. The following 
 were built expressly for the production : a replica 
 of the ancient city of Bethulia ; the mammoth 
 wall that protected Bethulia ; a faithful repro- 
 duction of the ancient army camps, embody- 
 ing all their barbaric splendor and dances; 
 chariots, battering rams, scaling ladders, archer 
 towers, and other special war paraphernalia of 
 the period. 
 
 " The following spectacular effects : the storm- 
 
60 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 ing of the walls of the city of Bethulia; 
 the hand-to-hand conflicts; the death-defying 
 chariot charges at break-neck speed ; the rear- 
 ing and plunging horses infuriated by the din of 
 battle; the wonderful camp of the terrible 
 Holofernes, equipped with rugs brought from 
 the far East ; the dancing girls in their exhibi- 
 tion of the exquisite and peculiar dances of 
 the period ; the routing of the command of the 
 terrible Holofernes, and the destruction of 
 the camp by fire. And overshadowing all, 
 the heroism of the beautiful Judith." 
 
 This advertisement should be compared 
 with the notice of Your Girl and Mine tran- 
 scribed in the seventeenth chapter. 
 
 But there is another point of view by which 
 this Judith of Bethulia production may be 
 approached, however striking the advertising 
 notice. 
 
 There are four sorts of scenes alternated : 
 (1) the particular history of Judith; (2) the 
 gentle courtship of Nathan and Naomi, types 
 of the inhabitants of Bethulia; (3) pictures 
 of the streets, with the population flowing 
 like a sluggish river ; (4) scenes of raid, camp, 
 and battle, interpolated between these, tying 
 the whole together. The real plot is the bal- 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 61 
 
 anced alternation of all the elements. So many 
 minutes of one, then so many minutes of 
 another. As was proper, very little of the 
 tale was thrown on the screen in reading matter, 
 and no climax was ever a printed word, but 
 always an enthralling tableau. 
 
 The particular history of Judith begins 
 with the picture of her as the devout widow. 
 She is austerely garbed, at prayer for her city, 
 in her own quiet house. Then later she is 
 shown decked for the eyes of man in the camp 
 of Holof ernes, where all is Assyrian glory. 
 Judith struggles between her unexpected love 
 for the dynamic general and the resolve to 
 destroy him that brought her there. In 
 either type of scene, the first gray and 
 silver, the other painted with Paul Veronese 
 splendor, Judith moves with a delicate delib- 
 eration. Over her face the emotions play 
 like winds on a meadow lake. Holofernes is 
 the composite picture of all the Biblical heathen 
 chieftains. His every action breathes power. 
 He is an Assyrian bull, a winged lion, and a god 
 at the same time, and divine honors are paid 
 to him every moment. 
 
 Nathan and Naomi are two Arcadian lovers. 
 In their shy meetings they express the life of 
 
62 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the normal Bethulia. They are seen among 
 the reapers outside the city or at the well near 
 the wall, or on the streets of the ancient town. 
 They are generally doing the things the crowd 
 behind them is doing, meanwhile evolving 
 their own little heart affair. Finally when 
 the Assyrian comes down like a wolf on the 
 fold, the gentle Naomi becomes a prisoner in 
 Holofernes' camp. She is in the foreground, 
 a representative of the crowd of prisoners. 
 Nathan is photographed on the wall as the 
 particular defender of the town in whom we 
 are most interested. 
 
 The pictures of the crowd's normal activ- 
 ities avoid jerkiness and haste. They do 
 not abound in the boresome self-conscious 
 quietude that some producers have substituted 
 for the usual twitching. Each actor in the 
 assemblies has a refreshing equipment in gentle 
 gesticulation; for the manners and customs 
 of Bethulia must needs be different from 
 those of America. Though the population 
 moves together as a river, each citizen is quite 
 preoccupied. To the furthest corner of the 
 picture, they are egotistical as human beings. 
 The elder goes by, in theological conversa- 
 tion with his friend. He thinks his theology is 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 63 
 
 important. The mother goes by, all absorbed 
 in her child. To her it is the only child in the 
 world. 
 
 Alternated with these scenes is the terrible 
 rush of the Assyrian army, on to exploration, 
 battle, and glory. The speed of their setting out 
 becomes actual, because it is contrasted with 
 the deliberation of the Jewish town. At length 
 the Assyrians are along those hills and valleys 
 and below the wall of defence. The popula- 
 tion is on top of the battlements, beating them 
 back the more desperately because they are 
 separated from the water-supply, the wells 
 in the fields where once the lovers met. In a 
 lull in the siege, by a connivance of the elders, 
 Judith is let out of a little door in the wall. 
 And while the fortune of her people is most 
 desperate she is shown in the quiet shelter of 
 the tent of Holof ernes. Sinuous in grace, 
 tranced, passionately in love, she has forgotten 
 her peculiar task. She is in a sense Bethulia 
 itself, the race of Israel made over into a 
 woman, while Holofernes is the embodiment 
 of the besieging army. Though in a quiet 
 tent, and on the terms of love, it is the es- 
 sential warfare of the hot Assyrian blood and 
 the pure and peculiar Jewish thoroughbredness. 
 
64 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Blanche Sweet as Judith is indeed dignified 
 and ensnaring, the more so because in her 
 abandoned quarter of an hour the Jewish 
 sanctity does not leave her. And her aged 
 woman attendant, coming in and out, sentinel 
 and conscience, with austere face and lifted 
 finger, symbolizes the fire of Israel that shall 
 yet awaken within her. When her love for 
 her city and God finally becomes paramount, 
 she shakes off the spell of the divine honors 
 which she has followed all the camp in accord- 
 ing to that living heathen deity Holofernes, 
 and by the very transfiguration of her figure 
 and countenance we know that the deliverance 
 of Israel is at hand. She beheads the dark 
 Assyrian. Soon she is back in the city, by 
 way of the little gate by which she emerged. 
 The elders receive her and her bloody trophy. 
 
 The people who have been dying of thirst 
 arise in a final whirlwind of courage. Bereft 
 of their military genius, the Assyrians flee 
 from the burning camp. Naomi is delivered 
 by her lover Nathan. This act is taken by 
 the audience as a type of the setting free of all 
 the captives. Then we have the final return 
 of the citizens to their town. As for Judith, 
 hers is no crass triumph. She is shown in her 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 65 
 
 gray and silvery room in her former widow's 
 dress, but not the same woman. There is 
 thwarted love in her face. The sword of 
 sorrow is there. But there is also the prayer 
 of thanksgiving. She goes forth. She is hailed 
 as her city's deliverer. She stands among the 
 nobles like a holy candle. 
 
 Providing the picture may be preserved in its 
 original delicacy, it has every chance to retain 
 a place in the affections of the wise, if a hum- 
 ble pioneer of criticism may speak his honest 
 mind. 
 
 Though in this story the archaic flavor is 
 well-preserved, the way the producer has pic- 
 tured the population at peace, in battle, in 
 despair, in victory gives me hope that he or 
 men like unto him will illustrate the Amer- 
 ican patriotic crowd-prophecies. We must 
 have Whitmanesque scenarios, based on moods 
 akin to that of the poem By Blue Ontario's 
 Shore. The possibility of showing the entire 
 American population its own face in the Mirror 
 Screen has at last come. Whitman brought 
 the idea of democracy to our sophisticated 
 literati, but did not persuade the democracy 
 itself to read his democratic poems. Sooner 
 or later the kinetoscope will do what he could 
 
66 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 not, bring the nobler side of the equaHty idea 
 to the people who are so crassly equal. 
 
 The photoplay penetrates in our land to 
 the haunts of the wildest or the dullest. The 
 isolated prospector rides twenty miles to see 
 the same film that is displayed on Broadway. 
 There is not a civilized or half-civilized land 
 but may read the Whitmanesque message 
 in time, if once it is put on the films with power. 
 Photoplay theatres are set up in ports where 
 sailors revel, in heathen towns where gentlemen 
 adventurers are willing to make one last throw 
 with fate. 
 
 On the other hand, as a recorder Whitman 
 approaches the wildest, rawest American mate- 
 rial and conquers it, at the same time keeping 
 his nerves in the state in which Swinburne 
 wrote Only the Song of Secret Bird, or 
 Lanier composed The Ballad of Trees and 
 The Master. J. W. Alexander's portrait of 
 Whitman in the Metropolitan Museum, New 
 York, is not too sophisticated. The out-of- 
 door profoundness of this poet is far richer 
 than one will realize unless he has just 
 returned from some cross-country adventure 
 afoot. Then if one reads breathlessly by the 
 page and the score of pages, there is a glory 
 
PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR 67 
 
 transcendent. For films of American pa- 
 triotism to parallel the splendors of Cabiria 
 and Judith of Bethulia, and to excel them, let 
 us have Whitmanesque scenarios based on 
 moods like that of By Blue Ontario's Shore, 
 The Salute au Monde, and the Passage to 
 India. Then the people's message will reach 
 the people at last. 
 
 The average Crowd Picture will cling close 
 to the streets that are, and the usual Patriotic 
 Picture will but remind us of nationality as it 
 is at present conceived and aflame, and the 
 Religious Picture will for the most part 
 be close to the standard orthodoxies. The 
 final forms of these merge into each other, 
 though they approach the heights by different 
 avenues. We Americans should look for the 
 great photoplay of tomorrow, that will mark 
 a decade or a century, that prophesies of the 
 flags made one, the crowds in brotherhood. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 
 
 As far as the photoplay is concerned, religious 
 emotion is a form of crowd-emotion. In the 
 most conventional and rigid church sense this 
 phase can be conveyed more adequately by 
 the motion picture than by the stage. There 
 is little, of course, for the anti-ritualist in the 
 art-world anywhere. The thing that makes 
 cathedrals real shrines in the eye of the reverent 
 traveller makes them, with their religious pro- 
 cessions and the like, impressive in splendor- 
 films. 
 
 For instance, I have long remembered the 
 essentials of the film. The Death of Thomas 
 Becket. It may not compare in technique to 
 some of our present moving picture achieve- 
 ments, but the idea must have been particularly 
 adapted to the film medium. The story has 
 stayed in my mind with great persistence, not 
 only as a narrative, but as the first hint to me 
 that orthodox religious feeling has here an un- 
 developed field. 
 
 68 
 
RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 69 
 
 Greene tells the story in this way, in his 
 History of the English People : — 
 
 "Four knights of the King's court, stirred 
 to outrage by a passionate outburst of their 
 master's wrath, crossed the sea and on the 
 twenty-ninth of December forced their way into 
 the Archbishop's palace. After a stormy par- 
 ley with him in his chamber they withdrew to 
 arm. Thomas was hurried by his clerks into 
 the cathedral, but as he reached the steps 
 leading from the transept into the choir his 
 pursuers burst in from the cloisters. 'Where,' 
 cried Reginald Fitzurse, 'is the traitor, 
 Thomas Becket?' *Here am I, no traitor, 
 but a priest of God,' he replied. And again 
 descending the steps he placed himself with 
 his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. . . . 
 The brutal murder was received with a thrill 
 of horror throughout Christendom. Miracles 
 were wrought at the martyr's tomb, 
 etc. . . ." 
 
 It is one of the few deaths in moving pictures 
 that have given me the sense that I was watch- 
 ing a tragedy. Most of them affect one, if 
 they have any effect, like exhibits in an art 
 gallery, as does Joseph Israels' oil painting, 
 Alone in the World. We admire the tech- 
 
70 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE^ 
 
 nique, and as for emotion, we feel the pictur- 
 esqueness only. But here the church procession, 
 the robes, the candles, the vaulting overhead, 
 the whole visualized cathedral mood has the 
 power over the reverent eye it has in life, and 
 a touch more. 
 
 It is not a private citizen who is struck down. 
 Such a taking off would have been but nomi- 
 nally impressive, no matter how well acted. 
 Private deaths in the films, to put it another 
 way, are but narrative statements. It is not 
 easy to convey their spiritual significance. 
 Take, for instance, the death of John Goderic, 
 in the film version of Gilbert Parker's The 
 Seats of the Mighty. The major leaves this 
 world in the first third of the story. The photo- 
 play use of his death is, that he may whisper in 
 the ear of Robert Moray to keep certain letters 
 of La Pompadour well hidden. The fact that 
 it is the desire of a dying man gives sharp- 
 ness to his request. Later in the story Moray 
 is hard-pressed by the villain for those same 
 papers. Then the scene of the death is flashed 
 for an instant on the screen, representing the 
 hero's memory of the event. It is as though 
 he should recollect and renew a solemn oath. 
 The docimients are more important than John 
 
RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 71 
 
 Goderic. His departure is but one of their 
 attributes. So it is in any film. There is no 
 emotional stimulation, in the final departure of 
 a non-public character to bring tears, such tears 
 as have been provoked by the novel or the stage 
 over the death of Sidney Carton or Faust's 
 Marguerite or the like. 
 
 All this, to make sharper the fact that the 
 murder of Becket the archbishop is a climax. 
 The great Church and hierarchy are profaned. 
 The audience feels the same thrill of horror that 
 went through Christendom. We understand 
 why miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb. 
 
 In the motion pictures the entrance of a child 
 into the world is a mere family episode, not a 
 climax, when it is the history of private people. 
 For instance, several little strangers come into 
 the story of Enoch Arden. They add beauty, 
 and are links in the chain of events. Still 
 they are only one of many elements of idyllic 
 charm in the village of Annie. Something 
 that in real life is less valuable than a child is 
 the goal of each tiny tableau, some coming 
 or departure or the like that affects the total 
 plot. But let us imagine a production that 
 would chronicle the promise to Abraham, and 
 the vision that came with it. Let the film 
 
72 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 show the final gift of Isaac to the aged Sarah, 
 even the boy who is the beginning of a race that 
 shall be as the stars of heaven and the sands 
 of the sea for multitude. This could be made 
 a pageant of power and glory. The crowd- 
 emotions, patriotic fires, and religious exulta- 
 tions on which it turns could be given in noble 
 procession and the tiny fellow on the pillow 
 made the mystic centre of the whole. The 
 story of the coming of Samuel, the dedicated 
 little prophet, might be told on similar terms. 
 
 The real death in the photoplay is the rit- 
 ualistic death, the real birth is the ritualistic 
 birth, and the cathedral mood of the motion 
 picture which goes with these and is close to 
 these in many of its phases, is an inexhaustible 
 resource. 
 
 The film corporations fear religious questions, 
 lest offence be given to this sect or that. So 
 let such denominations as are in the habit of 
 cooperating, themselves take over this medium, 
 not gingerly, but whole-heartedly, as in medi- 
 aeval time the hierarchy strengthened its hold 
 on the people with the marvels of Romanesque 
 and Gothic architecture. This matter is fur- 
 ther discussed in the seventeenth chapter, en- 
 titled "Progress and Endowment." 
 
RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 73 
 
 But there is a field wherein the commercial 
 man will not be accused of heresy or sacrilege, 
 which builds on ritualistic birth and death and 
 elements akin thereto. This the established 
 producer may enter without fear. Which 
 brings us to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, 
 issued by the American Vitagraph Company in 
 1911. This film should be studied in the High 
 Schools and Universities till the canons of art 
 for which it stands are established in America. 
 The director was Larry Trimble. All honor 
 to him. 
 
 The patriotism of The Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic, if taken literally, deals with certain 
 aspects of the Civil War. But the picture is 
 transfigured by so marked a devotion, that it is 
 the main illustration in this work of the reli- 
 gious photoplay. 
 
 The beginning shows President Lincoln in 
 the White House brooding over the lack of 
 response to his last call for troops. (He is 
 impersonated by Ralph Ince.) He and Julia 
 Ward Howe are looking out of the window on a 
 recruiting headquarters that is not busy. (Mrs. 
 Howe is impersonated by Julia S. Gordon.) 
 Another scene shows an old mother in the West 
 refusing to let her son enlist. (This woman 
 
74 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 is impersonated by Mrs. Maurice.) The father 
 has died in the war. The sword hangs on the 
 wall. Later Julia Ward Howe is shown in her 
 room asleep at midnight, then rising in a trance 
 and writing the Battle Hymn at a table by the 
 bed. 
 
 The pictures that might possibly have passed 
 before her mind during the trance are thrown 
 upon the screen. The phrases they illustrate 
 are not in the final order of the poem, but in 
 the possible sequence in which they went on 
 the paper in the first sketch. The dream 
 panorama is not a literal discussion of aboli- 
 tionism or states' rights. It illustrates rather 
 the Hebraic exultation applied to all lands and 
 times. "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the 
 coming of the Lord " ; a gracious picture of the 
 nativity. (Edith Storey impersonates Mary the 
 Virgin.) "I have seen him in the watchfires 
 of a hundred circling camps" and "They have 
 builded him an altar in the evening dews and 
 damps" — for these are given symbolic pageants 
 of the Holy Sepulchre crusaders. 
 
 Then there is a visible parable, showing a 
 marketplace in some wicked capital, neither 
 Babylon, Tyre, nor Nineveh, but all of them 
 in essential character. First come spectacles 
 
RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 75 
 
 of rejoicing, cruelty, and waste. Then from 
 Heaven descend flood and fire, brimstone and 
 lightning. It is like the judgment of the 
 Cities of the Plain. Just before the overthrow, 
 the line is projected upon the screen : "He hath 
 loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift 
 sword." Then the heavenly host becomes grad- 
 ually visible upon the air, marching toward the 
 audience, almost crossing the footlights, and 
 blowing their solemn trumpets. With this 
 picture the line is given us to read : "Our God 
 is marching on." This host appears in the 
 photoplay as often as the refrain sweeps into 
 the poem. The celestial company, its imper- 
 ceptible emergence, its spiritual power when in 
 the ascendant, is a thing never to be forgotten, 
 a tableau that proves the motion picture a 
 great religious instrument. 
 
 Then comes a procession indeed. It is as 
 though the audience were standing at the side 
 of the throne at Doomsday looking down the 
 hill of Zion toward the little earth. There is a 
 line of those who are to be judged, leaders 
 from the beginning of history, barbarians with 
 their crude weapons, classic characters, Csesar 
 and his rivals for fame; mediaeval figures in- 
 cluding Dante meditating ; later figures, Riche- 
 
76 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 lieu, Napoleon. Many people march toward 
 the strange glorifying eye of the camera, growing 
 larger than men, filling the entire field of vision, 
 disappearing when they are almost upon us. 
 The audience weighs the worth of their work to 
 the world as the men themselves with down- 
 cast eyes seem to be doing also. The most 
 thrilling figure is Tolstoi in his peasant smock, 
 coming after the bitter egotists and conquerors. 
 (The impersonation is by Edward Thomas.) I 
 shall never forget that presence marching up 
 to the throne invisible with bowed head. This 
 procession is to illustrate the line: "He is 
 sifting out the hearts of men before his Judg- 
 ment Seat." Later Lincoln is pictured on the 
 steps of the White House. It is a quaint 
 tableau, in the spirit of the old-fashioned 
 Roger's group. Yet it is masterful for all that. 
 Lincoln is taking the chains from a cowering 
 slave. This tableau is to illustrate the line: 
 "Let the hero born of woman crush the ser- 
 pent with his heel." Now it is the end of the 
 series of visions. It is morning in Mrs. Howe's 
 room. She rises. She is filled with wonder to 
 find the poem on her table. 
 
 Written to the rousing glory-tune of John 
 Brown's Body the song goes over the North 
 
RELIGIOUS SPLENDOR 77 
 
 like wildfire. The far-off home of the widow 
 is shown. She and the boy read the famous 
 chant in the morning news column. She takes 
 the old sword from the wall. She gives it to 
 her son and sends him to enlist with her bless- 
 ing. In the next picture Lincoln and Mrs. Howe 
 are looking out of the window where was once 
 the idle recruiting tent. A new army is pour- 
 ing by, singing the words that have rallied the 
 nation. Ritualistic birth and death have been 
 discussed. This film might be said to illustrate 
 ritualistic birth, death, and resurrection. 
 
 The writer has seen hundreds of productions 
 since this one. He has described it from 
 memory. It came out in a time when the 
 American people paid no attention to the pro- 
 ducer or the cast. It may have many technical 
 crudities by present-day standards. But the 
 root of the matter is there. And Springfield 
 knew it. It was brought back to our town 
 many times. It was popular in both the fash- 
 ionable picture show houses and the cheapest, 
 dirtiest hole in the town. It will soon be re- 
 issued by the Vitagraph Company. Every 
 student of American Art should see this film. 
 
 The same exultation that went into it, the 
 faculty for commanding the great spirits of 
 
78 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 history and making visible the unseen powers 
 of the air, should be applied to Crowd Pictures 
 which interpret the non-sectarian prayers of the 
 broad human race. 
 
 The pageant of Religious Splendor is the final 
 photoplay form in the classification which this 
 work seeks to establish. Much of what follows 
 will be to reenforce the heads of these first 
 discourses. Further comment on the Religious 
 Photoplay may be found in the eleventh chap- 
 ter, entitled " Architecture-in-Motion." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 
 
 The outline is complete. Now to reenforce 
 it. Pictures of Action Intimacy and Splendor 
 are the foundation colors in the photoplay, as 
 red, blue, and yellow are the basis of the rainbow. 
 Action Films might be called the red section; 
 Intimate Motion Pictures, being colder and 
 quieter, might be called blue; and Splendor 
 Photoplays called yellow, since that is the hue 
 of pageants and sunshine. 
 
 Another way of showing the distinction is 
 to review the types of gesture. The Action 
 Photoplay deals with generalized pantomime : 
 the gesture of the conventional policeman in 
 contrast with the mannerism of the stereo- 
 typed preacher. The Intimate Film gives us 
 more elusive personal gestures : the difference 
 between the table manners of two preachers in 
 the same restaurant, or two policemen. A mark 
 of the Fairy Play is the gesture of incantation, 
 the sweep of the arm whereby Mab would 
 
 79 
 
80 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 transform a prince into a hawk. The other 
 Splendor Films deal with the total gestures of 
 crowds : the pantomime of a torch- waving 
 mass of men, the drill of an army on the march, 
 or the bending of the heads of a congregation 
 receiving the benediction. 
 
 Another way to demonstrate the thesis is to 
 use the old classification of poetry : dramatic, 
 lyric, epic. The Action Play is a narrow form 
 of the dramatic. The Intimate Motion Pic- 
 ture is an equivalent of the lyric. In the 
 seventeenth chapter it is shown that one type 
 of the Intimate might be classed as imagist. 
 And obviously the Splendor Pictures are the 
 equivalent of the epic. 
 
 But perhaps the most adequate way of show- 
 ing the meaning of this outline is to say that 
 the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the In- 
 timate Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the 
 Fairy Pageant, along with the rest of the Splen- 
 dor Pictures, may be described as architecture- 
 in-motion. This chapter will discuss the bear- 
 ing of the phrase sculpture-in-motion. It will 
 relate directly to chapter two. 
 ^^^ First, gentle and kindly reader, let us dis- 
 cuss sculpture in its most literal sense; after 
 that, less realistically, but perhaps more ade- 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 81 
 
 quately. Let us begin with Annette Keller- 
 man in Neptune's Daughter. This film has 
 a crude plot constructed to show off Annette's 
 various athletic resources. It is good photog- 
 raphy, and a big idea so far as the swimming 
 episodes are concerned. An artist haunted 
 by picture-conceptions equivalent to the 
 musical thoughts back of Wagner's Rhine- 
 maidens could have made of Annette, in her 
 mermaid's dress, a notable figure. Or a story 
 akin to the mermaid tale of Hans Christian 
 Andersen, or Matthew Arnold's poem of the 
 forsaken merman, could have made this pic- 
 turesque witch of the salt water truly significant, 
 and still retained the most beautiful parts of 
 the photoplay as it was exhibited. It is an 
 exceedingly irrelevant imagination that shows 
 her in other scenes as a duellist, for instance, 
 because forsooth she can fence. As a child of 
 the ocean, half fish, half woman, she is indeed 
 convincing. Such mermaids as this have 
 haunted sailors, and lured them on the rocks 
 to their doom, from the day the siren sang 
 till the hour the Lorelei sang no more. The 
 scene with the baby mermaid, when she swims 
 with the pretty creature on her back, i^ irre- 
 sistible. Why are our managers so mechanical ? 
 
82 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Why do they flatten out at the moment the 
 fancy of the tiniest reader of fairy-tales begins 
 to be alive ? Most of Annette's support were 
 stage dummies. Neptune was a lame Santa 
 Claus with cotton whiskers. 
 
 But as for the bearing of the film on this 
 chapter : the human figure is within its rights 
 whenever it is as free from self -consciousness as 
 was the life-radiating Annette in the heavenly 
 clear waters of Bermuda. On the other hand, 
 Neptune and his pasteboard diadem and 
 wooden-pointed pitckfork, should have put on 
 his dressing-gown and retired. As a toe dancer 
 in an alleged court scene, on land, Annette 
 was a mere simperer. Possibly Pavlowa as a 
 swimmer in Bermuda waters would have been 
 as much of a mistake. Each queen to her 
 kingdom. 
 
 For living, moving, sculpture, the human eye 
 requires a costume and a part in unity with 
 the meaning of that particular figure. There 
 is the Greek dress of Mordkin in the arrow 
 dance. There is Annette's breast covering of 
 shells, and wonderful flowing mermaid hair, 
 clothing her as the midnight does the moon. 
 The new costume freedom of the photoplay 
 allows such limitation of clothing as would be 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 83 
 
 probable when one is honestly in touch with 
 wild nature and preoccupied with vigorous 
 exercise. Thus the cave-man and desert island 
 narratives, though seldom well done, when pro- 
 duced with verisimilitude, give an opportunity 
 for the native human frame in the logical 
 wrappings of reeds and skins. But those who 
 in a silly hurry seek excuses, are generally 
 merely ridiculous, like the barefoot man who 
 is terribly tender about walking on the pebbles, 
 or the wild man who is white as celery or 
 grass under a board. There is no short cut 
 to vitality. 
 
 A successful literal use of sculpture is in the 
 film Oil and Water. Blanche Sweet is the 
 leader of the play within a play which occu- 
 pies the first reel. Here the Olympians and 
 the Muses, with a grace that we fancy was 
 Greek, lead a dance that traces the story 
 of the spring, summer, and autumn of life. 
 Finally the supple dancers turn gray and old 
 and die, but not before they have given us a 
 vision from the Ionian islands. The play 
 might have been inspired from reading Keats' 
 Lamia, but is probably derived from the work 
 of Isadora Duncan. This chapter has here- 
 after only a passing word or two on literal 
 
84 THE ART OF THE MO^^NG PICTURE 
 
 sculptural effects. It has more in mind the 
 carver's attitude toward all that passes before 
 the eye. 
 
 The sculptor George Gray Barnard is re- 
 sponsible for none of the views in this dis- 
 course, but he has talked to me at length about 
 his sense of discovery in watching the most 
 ordinary motion pictures, and his delight in 
 following them with their endless combinations 
 of masses and flowing surfaces. 
 
 The little far-away people on the old- 
 fashioned speaking stage, do not appeal to the 
 plastic sense in this way. They are, by com- 
 parison, mere bits of pasteboard with sweet 
 voices, while, on the other hand, the photoplay 
 foreground is full of dumb giants. The bodies 
 of these giants are in high sculptural relief. 
 Where the lights are quite glaring and the 
 photography is bad, many of the figures are 
 as hard in their impact on the eye as lime- 
 white plaster-casts, no matter what the cloth- 
 ing. There are several passages of this sort 
 in the otherwise beautiful Enoch Arden, where 
 the shipwrecked sailor is depicted on his 
 desert island in the glaring sun. 
 
 What materials should the photoplay figures 
 suggest ? There are as many possible materials 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 85 
 
 as there are subjects for pictures and tone 
 schemes to be considered. But we will take 
 for illustration wood, bronze, and marble, since 
 they have been used in the old sculptural 
 art. 
 
 There is found in most art shows a type of 
 carved wood gargoyle where the work and the 
 subject are at one, not only in the color of 
 the wood, but in the way the material masses 
 itself, in bulk betrays its qualities. We will 
 suppose a moving picture humorist who is 
 in the same mood as the carver. He chooses 
 a story of quaint old ladies, street gamins, and 
 fat aldermen. Imagine the figures with the 
 same massing and interplay suddenly invested 
 with life, yet giving to the eye a pleasure kindred 
 to that which is found in carved wood, and 
 bringing to the fancy a similar humor. 
 
 Or there is a type of Action Story where the 
 mood of the figures is that of bronze, with the 
 aesthetic resources of that metal : its elasticity ; 
 its emphasis on the tendon, ligament, and bone, 
 rather than on the muscle; and an attribute 
 that we will call the panther-like quality. Her- 
 mon A. MacNeil has a memorable piece of work 
 in the yard of the architect Shaw, at Lake 
 Forest, Illinois. It is called "The Sun Vow." 
 
86 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 A little Indian is shooting toward the sun, while 
 the old warrior, crouching immediately behind 
 him, follows with his eye the direction of the 
 arrow. Few pieces of sculpture come readily 
 to mind that show more happily the qualities 
 of bronze as distinguished from other materials. 
 To imagine such a group done in marble, carved 
 wood, or Delia Robbia ware is to destroy the 
 very image in the fancy. 
 
 The photoplay of the American Indian should 
 in most instances, be planned as bronze in action. 
 The tribes should not move so rapidly that 
 the panther-like elasticity is lost in the riding, 
 running, and scalping. On the other hand, the 
 aborigines should be far from the temperateness 
 of marble. 
 
 Mr. Edward S. Curtis, the super-photographer, 
 has made an Ethnological collection of photo- 
 graphs of our American Indians. This work 
 of a life-time, a supreme art achievement, shows 
 the native as a figure in bronze. Mr. Curtis' 
 photoplay. The Land of the Head Hunters 
 (World Film Corporation), a romance of the 
 Indians of the North- West, abounds in noble 
 bronzes. 
 
 I have gone through my old territories as an 
 Art student, in the Chicago xArt Institute and 
 
SCULPTUEE-IN-MOTION 87 
 
 the Metropolitan Museum, of late, in special 
 excursions, looking for sculpture, painting, and 
 architecture that might be the basis for the 
 photoplays of the future. 
 
 The Bacchante of Frederick MacMonnies is 
 in bronze in the Metropolitan Museum and in 
 bronze replica in the Boston Museum of Fine 
 Arts. There is probably no work that more 
 rejoices the hearts of the young art students in 
 either city. The youthful creature illustrates 
 a most joyous leap into the air. She is high on 
 one foot with the other knee lifted. She holds 
 a bunch of grapes full-arm's length. Her baby, 
 clutched in the other hand, is reaching up with 
 greedy mouth toward the fruit. The bacchante 
 body is glistening in the light. This is joy-in- 
 bronze as the Sun Vow is power-in-bronze. 
 This special story could not be told in another 
 medium. I have seen in Paris a marble copy 
 of this bacchante. It is as though it were 
 done in soap. On the other hand, many of the 
 renaissance Italian sculptors have given us 
 children in marble in low relief, dancing like 
 lilies in the wind. They could not be put into 
 bronze. 
 
 The plot of the Action Photoplay is literally 
 or metaphorically a chase down the road or a 
 
88 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 hurdle-race. It might be well to consider how 
 typical figures for such have been put into carved 
 material. There are two bronze statues that 
 have their replicas in all museums. They are 
 generally one on either side of the main hall, 
 towering above the second-story balustrade. 
 First, the statue of Gattamelata, a Venetian 
 general, by Donatello. The original is in 
 Padua. Then there is the figure of Bartol- 
 ommeo CoUeoni. The original is in Venice. 
 It is by Verrocchio and Leopardi. These 
 equestrians radiate authority. There is more 
 action in them than in any cowboy hordes I 
 have ever beheld zipping across the screen. 
 Look upon them and ponder long, prospective 
 author-producer. Even in a simple chase-pic- 
 ture, the speed must not destroy the chance to 
 enjoy the modelling. If you would give us 
 mounted legions, destined to conquer, let any 
 one section of the film, if it is stopped and 
 studied, be grounded in the same bronze con- 
 ception. The Assyrian commanders in Grif- 
 fith's Judith would, without great embarrass- 
 ment, stand this test. 
 
 But it may not be the pursuit of an enemy 
 we have in mind. It may be a spring celebra- 
 tion, horsemen in Arcadia, going to some 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 89 
 
 happy tournament. Where will we find our 
 precedents for such a cavalcade? Go to any 
 museum. Find the Parthenon room. High 
 on the wall is the copy of the famous marble 
 frieze of the young citizens who are in the pro- 
 cession in praise of Athena. Such a rhythm 
 of bodies and heads and the feet of proud steeds, 
 and above all the profiles of thoroughbred 
 youths, no city has seen since that day. The 
 delicate composition relations, ever varying, 
 ever refreshing, amid the seeming sameness of 
 formula of rider behind rider, have been the 
 delight of art students the world over, and shall 
 so remain. No serious observer escapes the 
 exhilaration of this company. Let it be studied 
 by the author-producer though it be but an 
 idyl in disguise that his scenario calls for: 
 merry young farmers hurrying to the State 
 Fair parade, boys making all speed to the 
 political rally. 
 
 Buy any three moving picture magazines 
 you please. Mark the illustrations that are 
 massive, in high relief, with long lines in their 
 edges. Cut out and sort some of these. I 
 have done it on the table where I write. After 
 throwing away all but the best specimens, I 
 have four different kinds of sculpture. First, 
 
90 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 behold the inevitable cowboy. He is on a 
 ramping horse, filling the entire outlook. The 
 steed rears, while facing us. The cowboy waves 
 his hat. There is quite such an animal by 
 Frederick MacMonnies, wrought in bronze, 
 set up on a gate to a park in Brooklyn. It is 
 not the identical color of the photoplay ani- 
 mal, but the bronze elasticity is the joy in 
 both. 
 
 Here is a scene of a masked monk, carrying 
 off a fainting girl. The hero intercepts him. 
 The figures of the lady and the monk are in 
 suflScient sculptural harmony to make a formal 
 sculptural group for an art exhibition. The 
 picture of the hero, strong, with well-massed 
 surfaces, is related to both. The fact that he 
 is in evening dress does not alter his monu- 
 mental quality. All three are on a stone bal- 
 cony that relates itself to the general largeness 
 of spirit in the group, and the semi-classic dress 
 of the maiden. No doubt the title is : The 
 Morning Following the Masquerade Ball. This 
 group could be made in unglazed clay, in four 
 colors. 
 
 Here is an American lieutenant with two 
 ladies. The three are suddenly alert over the 
 approach of the villain, who is not yet in the 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 91 
 
 picture. In costume it is an everyday group, 
 but those three figures are related to one an- 
 other, and the trees behind them, in simple 
 sculptural terms. The lieutenant, as is to be 
 expected, looks forth in fierce readiness. One 
 girl stands with clasped hands. The other 
 points to the danger. The relations of these 
 people to one another may seem merely dramatic 
 to the superficial observer, but the power of the 
 group is in the fact that it is monumental. I 
 could imagine it done in four different kinds 
 of rare tropical wood, carved unpolished. 
 
 Here is a scene of storm and stress in an office 
 where the hero is caught with seemingly in- 
 criminating papers. The table is in confusion. 
 The room is filling with people, led by one 
 accusing woman. Is this also sculpture ? Yes. 
 The figures are in high relief. Even the surfaces 
 of the chairs and the littered table are massive, 
 and the eye travels without weariness, as it 
 should do in sculpture, from the hero to the furi- 
 ous woman, then to the attorney behind her, 
 then to the two other revilers, then to the crowd 
 in three loose rhythmic ranks. The eye makes 
 this journey, not from space to space, or fabric to 
 fabric, but first of all from mass to mass. It 
 is sculpture, but it is the sort that can be done 
 
92 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 in no medium but the moving picture itself, 
 and therefore it is one goal of this argument. 
 
 But there are several other goals. One of 
 the sculpturesque resources of the photoplay 
 is that the human countenance can be magni- 
 fied many times, till it fills the entire screen. 
 Some examples are in rather low relief, portraits 
 approximating certain painters. But if they 
 are on sculptural terms, and are studies of the 
 faces of thinking men, let the producer make a 
 pilgrimage to Washington for his precedent. 
 There, in the rotunda of the capitol, is the face 
 of Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum. It is one of the 
 eminently successful attempts to get at the se- 
 cret of the countenance by enlarging it much, and 
 concentrating the whole consideration there. 
 
 The photoplay producer, seemingly with- 
 out taking thought, is apt to show a sculp- 
 tural sense in giving us Newfoundland fisher- 
 men, clad in oilskins. The background may 
 have an unconscious Winslow Homer remi- 
 niscence. In the foreground our hardy heroes 
 fill the screen, and dripping with sea-water 
 become wave-beaten granite, yet living creatures 
 none the less. Imagine some one chapter from 
 the story of Little Em'ly in David Copperfield, 
 retold in the films. Show us Ham Peggotty 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 
 
 and old Mr. Peggotty in colloquy over their 
 nets. There are many powerful bronze groups 
 to be had from these two, on to the heroic and 
 unselfish death of Ham, rescuing his enemy in 
 storm and lightning. 
 
 I have seen one rich picture of alleged canni- 
 bal tribes. It was a comedy about a missionary. 
 But the aborigines were like living ebony and 
 silver. That was long ago. Such things come 
 too much by accident. The producer is not 
 sufficiently aware that any artistic element in 
 his list of productions that is allowed to go wild, 
 that has not had full analysis, reanalysis, and 
 final conservation, wastes his chance to attain 
 supreme mastery. 
 
 Open your history of sculpture, and dwell 
 upon those illustrations which are not the nor- 
 mal, reposeful statues, but the exceptional, 
 such as have been listed for this chapter. 
 Imagine that each dancing, galloping, or fight- 
 ing figure comes down into the room life-size. 
 Watch it against a dark curtain. Let it go 
 through a series of gestures in harmony with 
 the spirit of the original conception, and as 
 rapidly as possible, not to lose nobility. If 
 you have the necessary elasticity, imagine 
 the figures wearing the costumes of another 
 
94 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 period, yet retaining in their motions the same 
 essential spirit. Combine them in your mind 
 with one or two kindred figures, enlarged till 
 they fill the end of the room. You have now 
 created the beginning of an Action Photoplay in 
 your own fancy. 
 
 Do this with each most energetic classic till 
 your imagination flags. I do not want to be 
 too dogmatic, but it seems to me this is one 
 way to evolve real Action Plays. It would, 
 perhaps, be well to substitute this for the usual 
 method of evolving them from old stage ma- 
 terial or newspaper clippings. 
 
 There is in the Metropolitan Museum a 
 noble modern group, the Mares of Diomedes, 
 by the aforementioned Gutzon Borglum. It 
 is full of material for the meditations of a man 
 who wants to make a film of a stampede. 
 The idea is that Hercules, riding his steed bare- 
 back, guides it in a circle. He is fascinating the 
 horses he has been told to capture. They are 
 held by the mesmerism of the circular path 
 and follow him round and round till they finally 
 fall from exhaustion. Thus the Indians of the 
 West capture wild ponies, and Borglum, a far 
 western man, imputes the method to Hercules. 
 The bronze group shows a segment of this 
 
SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION 95 
 
 circle. The whirlwind is at its height. The 
 mares are wild to taste the flesh of Hercules. 
 Whoever is to photograph horses let him 
 study the play of light and color and muscle- 
 texture in this bronze. And let no group of 
 horses ever run faster than these of Borglum. 
 
 An occasional hint of a Michelangelo figure 
 or gesture appears for a flash in the films. 
 Young artist in the audience, does it pass you 
 by ? Open your history of sculpture again and 
 look at the usual list of Michelangelo groups. 
 Suppose the seated majesty of Moses should 
 rise, what would be the quality of the action? 
 Suppose the sleeping figures of the Medician 
 tombs should wake, or those famous slaves 
 should break their bands, or David again hurl 
 the stone .^ Would not their action be as 
 heroic as their quietness.'^ Is it not possible 
 to have a Michelangelo of photoplay sculp- 
 ture.^ Should we not look for him in the ful- 
 ness of time.f^ His figures might come to us 
 in the skins of the desert island solitary, or as 
 cave men and women, or as mermaids and 
 mermen, and yet have a force and grandeur 
 akin to that of the old Italian. 
 
 Rodin's famous group of the citizens of Calais 
 is an example of the expression of one particu- 
 
96 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 lar idea by a special technical treatment. The 
 producer who tells a kindred story to that of 
 the siege of Calais, and the final going of these 
 humble men to their doom, will have a hero-tale 
 indeed. It will be not only sculpture-in-action, 
 but a great Crowd Picture. It begins to be 
 seen that the possibilities of monumental 
 achievement in the films transcend the narrow 
 boundaries of the Action Photoplay. Why not 
 conceptions as heroic as Rodin's Hand of God, 
 where the first pair are clasped in the gigantic 
 fingers of their maker in the clay from which 
 they came ? 
 
 Finally, I desire in moving pictures, not the 
 stillness, but the majesty of sculpture. I do 
 not advocate for the photoplay the mood of 
 the Venus of Milo. But let us turn to that 
 sister of hers, the great Victory of Samothrace, 
 that spreads her wings at the head of the steps 
 of the Louvre, and in many an art gallery beside. 
 When you are appraising a new film, ask your- 
 self: "Is this motion as rapid, as godlike, as 
 the sweep of the wings of the Samothracian ? " 
 Let her be the touchstone of the Action Drama, 
 for nothing can be more swift than the winged 
 Gods, nothing can be more powerful than the 
 oncoming of the immortals. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAINTING-IN-MOTION 
 
 This chapter is founded on the delicate effects 
 that may be worked out from cosy interior 
 scenes, close to the camera. It relates directly 
 to chapter three. 
 
 While the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Pic- 
 ture may be in high sculptural relief, its char- 
 acteristic manifestations are in low relief. The 
 situations show to better advantage when they 
 seem to be paintings rather than monumental 
 groups. 
 
 Turn to your handful of motion picture 
 magazines and mark the illustrations that look 
 the most like paintings. Cut them out. Win- 
 now them several times. I have before me, as a 
 final threshing from such an experiment, five 
 pictures. Each one approximates a different 
 school. 
 
 Here is a colonial Virginia maiden by the 
 hearth of the inn. Bending over her in a 
 cherishing way is the negro maid. On the 
 
 H 97 
 
98 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 other side, the innkeeper shows a kindred solici- 
 tude. A dishevelled traveller sleeps huddled 
 up in the corner. The costume of the man 
 fades into the velvety shadows of the wall. 
 His face is concealed. His hair blends with 
 the soft background. The clothing of the other 
 three makes a patch of light gray. Added to 
 this is the gayety of special textures : the 
 turban of the negress, a trimming on the skirt 
 of the heroine, the silkiness of the innkeeper's 
 locks, the fabric of the broom in the hearth- 
 light, the pattern of the mortar lines round the 
 bricks of the hearth. The tableau is a satisfy- 
 ing scheme in two planes and many textures. 
 Here is another sort of painting. The young 
 mother in her pretty bed is smiling on her 
 infant. The cot and covers and flesh tints 
 have gentle scales of difference, all within one 
 tone of the softest gray. Her hair is quite 
 dark. It relates to the less luminous black of 
 the coat of the physician behind the bed and the 
 dress of the girl-friend bending over her. The 
 nurse standing by the doctor is a figure of the 
 same gray- white as the bed. Within the pat- 
 tern of the velvety-blacks there are as many 
 subtle gradations as in the pattern of the 
 gray-whites. The tableau is a satisfying 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 99 
 
 scheme in black and gray, with practically one 
 non-obtrusive texture throughout. 
 
 Here is a picture of an Englishman and his 
 wife, in India. It might be called sculptural, 
 but for the magnificence of the turban of the 
 rajah who converses with them, the glitter of 
 the light round his shoulders, and the scheme 
 of shadow out of which the three figures rise. 
 The arrangement remotely reminds one of 
 several of Rembrandt's semi-oriental musings. 
 
 Here is a picture of Mary Pickford as Fan- 
 chon the Cricket. She is in the cottage with 
 the strange old mother. I have seen a paint- 
 ing in this mood by the Greek Nickolas Gysis. 
 
 The Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, 
 the photoplay of painting-in-motion, need 
 not be indoors as long as it has the native- 
 heath mood. It is generally keyed to the 
 hearth-stone, and keeps quite close to it. But 
 how well I remember when the first French 
 photoplays began to come. Though unintel- 
 ligent in some respects, the photography and 
 subject-matter of many of them made one 
 think of that painter of gentle out-of-door 
 scenes, Jean Charles Cazin. Here is our last 
 clipping, which is also in a spirit allied to Cazin. 
 The heroine, accompanied by an aged shepherd 
 
100 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 and his dog, are in the foreground. The sheep 
 are in the middle distance on the edge of the 
 river. There is a noble hill beyond the gently 
 flowing water. Here is intimacy and friend- 
 liness in the midst of the big out of doors. 
 
 If these five photo-paintings were on good 
 paper enlarged to twenty by twenty -four inches, 
 they would do to frame and hang on the wall 
 of any study, for a month or so. And after the 
 relentless test of time, I would venture that 
 some one of the five would prove a permanent 
 addition to the household gods. 
 
 Hastily made photographs selected from the 
 films are often put in front of the better theatres 
 to advertise the show. Of late they are making 
 them two by three feet and sometimes several 
 times larger. Here is a commercial beginning 
 of an art gallery, but not enough pains are 
 taken to give the selections a complete art 
 gallery dignity. Why not have the most beau- 
 tiful scenes in front of the theatres, instead 
 of those alleged to be the most thrilling ? Why 
 not rest the fevered and wandering eye, rather 
 than make one more attempt to take it by force ? 
 
 Let the reader supply another side of the 
 argument by looking at the illustrations in 
 any history of painting. Let him select the 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 101 
 
 pictures that charm him most, and think of 
 them enlarged and transferred bodily to one 
 corner of the room, as he has thought of the 
 sculpture. Let them take on motion without 
 losing their charm of low relief, or their serene 
 composition within the four walls of the 
 frame. As for the motion, let it be a further 
 extension of the drawing. Let every gesture 
 be a bolder, but not less graceful brush-stroke. 
 
 The Metropolitan Museum has a Van Dyke 
 that appeals equally to one's sense of beauty 
 and one's feeling for humor. It is a portrait 
 of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, and I can- 
 not see how the author-producer-photographer 
 can look upon it without having it set his 
 imagination in a glow. Every small town 
 dancing set has a James like this. The man 
 and the greyhound are the same witless 
 breed, the kind that achieve a result by their 
 clean-limbed elegance alone. Van Dyke has 
 painted the two with what might be called a 
 greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling 
 that is nothing but courtly convention and 
 strut to the point of genius. He is as far from 
 the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as 
 could well be imagined. 
 
 Conjure up a scene in the hereditary hall 
 
102 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 after a hunt (or golf tournament), in which 
 a man like this Duke of Lennox has a noble 
 parley with his lady (or dancing partner), she 
 being a sweet and stupid swan (or a white 
 rabbit) by the same sign that he is a noble and 
 stupid greyhound. Be it an ancient or modern 
 episode, the story could be told in the tone 
 and with well-nigh the brushwork of Van Dyke. 
 
 Then there is a picture my teachers. Chase 
 and Henri, were never weary of praising, the 
 Girl with the Parrot, by Manet. Here con- 
 tinence in nervous force, expressed by low re- 
 lief and restraint in tone, is carried to its ulti- 
 mate point. I should call this an imagist 
 painting, made before there were such people 
 as imagist poets. It is a perpetual sermon to 
 those that would thresh around to no avail, be 
 they orators, melodramatists, or makers of 
 photoplays with an alleged heart-interest. 
 
 Let us consider Gilbert Stuart's portrait of 
 Washington. This painter's notion of personal 
 dignity has far more of the intellectual quality 
 than Van Dyke. He loves to give us stately, 
 able, fairly conscientious gentry, rather than 
 overdone royalty. His work represents a cer- 
 tain mood in design that in architecture is 
 called colonial. Such portraits go with houses 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 103 
 
 like Mount Vernon. Let the photographer 
 study the flat blacks in the garments. Let 
 him note the transparent impression of the laces 
 and flesh-tints that seem to be painted on glass, 
 observing especially the crystalline whiteness 
 of the wigs. Let him inspect also the silhouette- 
 like outlines, noting the courtly self-possession 
 they convey. Then let the photographer, the 
 producer, and the author, be they one man or 
 six men, stick to this type of picturization 
 through one entire production, till any artist 
 in the audience will say, "This photoplay was 
 painted by a pupil of Gilbert Stuart" ; and the 
 layman will say, "It looks like those stately 
 days." And let us not have battle, but a 
 Mount Vernon fireside tale. 
 
 Both the Chicago and New York museums 
 contain many phases of one same family 
 group, painted by George De Forest Brush. 
 There is a touch of the hearthstone priestess 
 about the woman. The force of sex has turned 
 to the austere comforting passion of mother- 
 hood. From the children, under the wings 
 of this spirit, come special delicate powers of 
 life. There is nothing tense or restless about 
 them, yet they embody action, the beating of 
 the inner fire, without which all outer action is 
 
104 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 mockery. Hearthstone tales keyed to the 
 mood and using the brush stroke that deHneates 
 this especial circle would be unmistakable in 
 their distinction. 
 
 Charles W. Hawthorne has pictures in 
 Chicago and New York that imply the Inti- 
 mate-and-friendly Photoplay. The Trousseau 
 in the Metropolitan Museum shows a gentle 
 girl, an unfashionable home-body with a 
 sweetly sheltered air. Behind her glimmers 
 the patient mother's face. The older woman 
 is busy about fitting the dress. The picture 
 is a tribute to the qualities of many unknown 
 gentlewomen. Such an illumination as this, on 
 faces so innocently eloquent, is the light that 
 should shine on the countenance of the photo- 
 play actress who really desires greatness in the 
 field of the Intimate Motion Picture. There 
 is in Chicago, Hawthorne's painting of Sylvia : 
 a little girl standing with her back to a mirror, 
 a few blossoms in one hand and a vase of flowers 
 on the mirror shelf. It is as sound a compo- 
 sition as Hawthorne ever produced. The paint- 
 ing of the child is another tribute to the 
 physical-spiritual textures from which humanity 
 is made. Ah, you producer who have grown 
 squeaky whipping your people into what you 
 
 -*.■- 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 105 
 
 called action, consider the dynamics of these 
 figures that] would be almost motionless in 
 real life. Remember there must be a spirit- 
 action under the other, or all is dead. 
 
 Yet that soul may be the muse of Comedy. 
 If Hawthorne and his kind are not your fashion, 
 turn to models that have their feet on the 
 earth always, yet successfully aspire. Key 
 some of your intimate humorous scenes to 
 the Dutch Little Masters of painting, such 
 pictures as Gerard Terburg's Music Lesson in 
 the Chicago Art Institute. The thing is as 
 well designed as a Dutch house, wind-mill, or 
 clock. And it is more elegant than any of 
 these. There is humor enough in the picture 
 to last one reel through. The society dame 
 of the period, in her pretty raiment, fingers the 
 strings of her musical instrument, while the 
 master stands by her with the baton. The 
 painter has enjoyed the satire, from her elegant 
 little hands to the teacher's well-combed locks. 
 It is very plain that she does not want to study 
 music with any sincerity, and he does not 
 desire to develop the ability of this particular 
 person. There may be a flirtation in the back- 
 ground. Yet these people are not hollow as 
 gourds, and they are not caricatured. The 
 
106 THE ART OF THE MOVmG PICTURE 
 
 Dutch Little Masters have indulged in number- 
 less characterizations of mundane humanity. 
 But they are never so preoccupied with the 
 story that it is an anecdote rather than a 
 picture. It is, first of all, a piece of elegant 
 painting-fabric. Next it is a scrap of Dutch 
 philosophy or aspiration. 
 
 Let Whistler turn over in his grave while 
 we enlist him for the cause of democracy. One 
 view of the technique of this man might 
 summarize it thus : fastidiousness in choice 
 of subject, the picture well within the frame, 
 low relief, a Velasquez study of tones and a 
 Japanese study of spaces. Let us, dear and 
 patient reader, particularly dwell upon the 
 spacing. A Whistler, or a good Japanese 
 print, might be described as a kaleidoscope 
 suddenly arrested and transfixed at the moment 
 of most exquisite relations in the pieces of glass. 
 An Intimate Play of a kindred sort would 
 start to turning the kaleidoscope again, losing 
 fine relations only to gain those which are more 
 exquisite and novel. All motion pictures might 
 be characterized as sjpace measured without 
 sound, plus time measured without sound. 
 This description fits in a special way the deli- 
 cate form of the Intimate Motion Picture, 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 107 
 
 and there can be studied out, free from irrele- 
 vant issues. 
 
 As to space measured without sound. Sup- 
 pose it is a humorous characterization of 
 comfortable family life, founded on some 
 Dutch Little Master. The picture measures 
 off its spaces in harmony. The triangle occu- 
 pied by the little child's dress is in definite re- 
 lation to the triangle occupied by the mother's 
 costume. To these two patterns the space 
 measured off by the boy's figure is adjusted, 
 and all of them are as carefully related to the 
 shapes cut out of the background by the 
 figures. No matter how the characters move 
 about in the photoplay these pattern shapes 
 should relate to one another in a definite de- 
 sign. The exact tone value of each one and 
 their precise nearness or distance to one an- 
 other has a deal to do with the final effect. 
 
 We go to the photoplay to enjoy right and 
 splendid picture-motions, to feel a certain 
 thrill when the pieces of kaleidoscope glass slide 
 into new places. Instead of moving on straight 
 lines, as they do in the mechanical toy, they 
 progress in strange curves that are part of 
 the very shapes into which they fall. 
 
 Consider : first came the photograph. Then 
 
108 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 motion was added to the photograph. We 
 must use this order in our judgment. If it 
 is ever to evolve into a national art, it must 
 first be good picture, then good motion. 
 
 Belasco's attitude toward the stage has been 
 denounced by the purists because he makes 
 settings too large a portion of his story-telling, 
 and transforms his theatre into the paradise 
 of the property-man. But this very quality 
 of the well spaced setting, if you please, has 
 made his chance for the world's moving picture 
 anthology. As reproduced by Jesse K. Lasky 
 the Belasco production is the only type of the 
 old-line drama that seems really made to be 
 the basis of a moving picture play. Not al- 
 ways, but as a general rule, Belasco suffers less 
 detriment in the films than other men. Take, 
 for instance, the Belasco-Lasky production of 
 The Rose of the Rancho with Bessie Barriscale 
 as the heroine. It has many highly modelled 
 action-tableaus, and others that come under 
 the classification of this chapter. When I was 
 attending it not long ago, here in my home 
 town, the fair companion at my side said that 
 one scene looked like a painting by Sorrola y 
 Bastida, the Spaniard. It is the episode where 
 the Rose sends back her servant to inquire 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 109 
 
 the hero's name. As a matter of fact there 
 were Sorrolas and Zueloagas all through the 
 piece. The betrothal reception with flying 
 confetti was a satisfying piece of Spanish splen- 
 dor. It was space music indeed, space 
 measured without sound. Incidentally the 
 cast is to be congratulated on its picturesque 
 acting, especially Miss Barriscale in her im- 
 personation of the Rose. 
 
 It is harder to grasp the other side of the 
 paradox, picture-motions considered as time 
 measured without sound. But think of a 
 lively and humoresque clock that does not tick 
 and takes only an hour to record a day. Think 
 of a noiseless electric vehicle, where you are 
 looking out of the windows, going down the 
 smooth boulevard of Wonderland. Consider 
 a film with three simple time-elements : (1) 
 that of the pursuer, (2) the pursued, (3) the 
 observation vehicle of the camera following 
 the road and watching both of them, now 
 faster, now slower than they, as the photog- 
 rapher overtakes the actors or allows them to 
 hurry ahead. The plain chase is a bore be- 
 cause there are only these three time-elements. 
 But the chase principle survives in every 
 motion picture and we simply need more of this 
 
110 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 sort of time measurement, better considered. 
 The more the non-human objects, the human 
 actors, and the observer move at a varying 
 pace, the greater chances there are for what 
 might be called time-and-space music. 
 
 No two people in the same room should ges- 
 ture at one mechanical rate, or lift their forks 
 or spoons, keeping obviously together. Yet it 
 stands to reason that each successive tableau 
 should be not only a charming picture, but the 
 totals of motion should be an orchestration of 
 various speeds, of abrupt, graceful, and seem- 
 ingly awkward progress, worked into a silent 
 symphony. 
 
 Supposing it is a fisher-maiden's romance. 
 In the background the waves toss in one tempo. 
 Owing to the sail, the boat rocks in another. 
 In the foreground the tree alternately bends 
 and recovers itself in the breeze, making more 
 opposition than the sail. In still another 
 time-unit the smoke rolls from the chimney, 
 making no resistance to the wind. In another 
 unit, the lovers pace the sand. Yet there 
 is one least common multiple in which all 
 move. This the producing genius should 
 sense and make part of the dramatic struc- 
 ture, and it would have its bearing on the 
 
PAINTING-IN-MOTION 111 
 
 periodic appearance of the minor and major 
 crises. 
 
 Films like this, you say, would be hard to 
 make. Yes. Here is the place to affirm that 
 the one-reel Intimate Photoplay will no doubt 
 be the form in which this type of time-and- 
 space music is developed. The music of silent 
 motion is the most abstract of moving picture 
 attributes and will probably remain the least 
 comprehended. Like the quality of Walter 
 Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or that of 
 Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, it will 
 not satisfy the sudden and the brash. 
 
 The reader will find in his round of the pic- 
 ture theatres many single scenes and parts of 
 plays that elucidate the title of this chapter. 
 Often the first two-thirds of the story will fit 
 it well. Then the producers, finding that, for 
 reasons they do not understand, with the best 
 and most earnest actors they cannot work the 
 three reels into an emotional climax, introduce 
 some stupid disaster and rescue utterly ir- 
 relevant to the character-parts and the paint- 
 ings that have preceded. Whether the alleged 
 thesis be love, hate, or ambition, cottage charm, 
 daisy dell sweetness, or the ivy beauty of an 
 
112 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 ancient estate, the resource for the final punch 
 seems to be something like a train-wreck. 
 But the transfiguration of the actors, not their 
 destruction or rescue, is the goal. The last 
 moment of the play is great, not when it is 
 a grandiose salvation from a burning house, 
 that knocks every delicate preceding idea in 
 the head, but a tableau that is as logical as 
 the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty after 
 the hero has explored all the charmed castle. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 FURNITURE, TRAPPINGS, AND INVENTIONS IN 
 MOTION 
 
 The Action Pictures are sculpture-in-mo- 
 tion, the Intimate Pictures, paintings-in-mo- 
 tion, the Splendor Pictures, many and diverse. 
 It seems far-fetched, perhaps, to complete the 
 analogy and say they are architecture-in- 
 motion; yet, patient reader, unless I am mis- 
 taken, that assumption can be given a value 
 in time without straining your imagination. 
 
 Landscape gardening, mural painting, church 
 building, and furniture making as well, are 
 some of the things that come under the head 
 of architecture. They are discussed between 
 the covers of any architectural magazine. 
 There is a particular relation in the photo- 
 play between Crowd Pictures and landscape 
 conceptions, between Patriotic Films and mural 
 paintings, between Religious Films and archi- 
 tecture. And there is just as much of a 
 relation between Fairy Tales and furniture, 
 which same is discussed in this chapter. 
 I lis 
 
114 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 with- 
 out human feet inside is but to exaggerate them- 
 selves. It would not be amusing to have them 
 walk upside down, for instance. As long as 
 the worn soles touch the pavement, we un- 
 consciously conjure up the character of the 
 absent owners, about whom the shoes are 
 indeed gossiping. So let the remainder of the 
 furniture keep still while the shoes do their 
 best. Let us call to mind a classic fairy-tale 
 involving shoes that are magical : The Seven 
 Leagued Boots, for example, or The Enchanted 
 Moccasins, or the footwear of Puss in Boots. 
 How gorgeous and embroidered any of these 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 115 
 
 should be, and at a crisis what sly antics they 
 should be brought to play, without fidgeting 
 all over the shop ! Cinderella's Slipper is 
 not sufficiently the heroine in moving pictures 
 of that story. It should be the tiny leading 
 lady of the piece, in the same sense the mighty 
 steam-engine is the hero of the story in chapter 
 two. The peasants when they used to tell the 
 tale by the hearth fire said the shoe was made 
 of glass. This was in mediaeval 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 per- 
 sonage to spy it. Even at the coronation it 
 should be the centre of the ritual, more gazed 
 at than the crown, and on as dazzling a 
 cushion. The final taking on of the slipper 
 by the lady should be as stately a ceremony 
 as the putting of the circlet of gold on her 
 
116 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 aureole hair. So much for Cinderella. But 
 there are novel stories that should be evolved 
 by preference, about new sorts of magic shoes. 
 
 We have not exhausted Moving Day. The 
 chairs kept still through the Cinderella dis- 
 course. 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 grad- 
 ually, 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 Ar- 
 thurian story, the chair where none but the 
 perfect knight could sit. A dim row of flam- 
 ing 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 en- 
 ergy 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-photog- 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 117 
 
 rapher, or one or all three, will make into a 
 personality some place akin to the House of 
 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 pass- 
 ing 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 
 tomorrow. Great structures may become in 
 sort villains, as in the old Bible narrative of 
 the origin of the various languages. The pro- 
 ducer can show the impious Babel Tower, going 
 higher and higher into the sky, fascinating and 
 tempting the architects till a confusion of 
 tongues turns those masons into quarrelling 
 mobs that become departing caravans, leaving 
 her blasted and forsaken, a symbol of every 
 Babylon that rose after her. 
 
 There are fables where the rocks and the 
 mountains speak. Emerson has given us one 
 where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a 
 
118 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 quarrel. The Mountain called the Squirrel 
 "Little Prig." And then continues a clash 
 of personalities more possible to illustrate 
 than at first appears. Here we come to the 
 second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature 
 seems so unmanageable in his physical aspect 
 that some actor must be substituted who 
 will embody the essence of him. To properly 
 illustrate the quarrel of the Mountain and the 
 Squirrel, the steep height should quiver and 
 heave and then give forth its personality in 
 the figure of a vague smoky giant, capable of 
 human argument, but with oak-roots in his 
 hair, and Bun, perhaps, become a jester in 
 squirrel's dress. 
 
 Or it may be our subject matter is a tall Dutch 
 clock. Father Time himself might emerge there- 
 from. Or supposing it is a chapel, in a knight's 
 adventure. An angel should step from the carv- 
 ing 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 re- 
 lation 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 personaHty 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 119 
 
 than the statue has. He can only give that per- 
 sonaHty 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 
 Legia in Poe's story of that name. Substitu- 
 tion is not the fairy-story. It is transforma- 
 tion, 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 " f urniture-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 archi- 
 tectural lines. The normal fairy-tale is a sort 
 of tiny informal child's religion, the baby's sec- 
 ular 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 Nicolete. 
 
120 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 When such lines are drawn by the truly sophis- 
 ticated producer, there lies in them the secret 
 of a more than ritualistic power. Good fairy 
 architecture amounts to an incantation in itself. 
 
 If it is a grown-up legend, it must be more 
 than monumental in its lines, like the great 
 stone face of Hawthorne's tale. Even a chair 
 can reach this estate. For instance, let it be 
 the throne of Wodin, illustrating some passage 
 in Norse mythology. If this throne has a 
 language, it speaks with the lightning; if it 
 shakes with its threat, it moves the entire 
 mountain range beneath it. Let the wizard- 
 author-producer climb up from the tricks of 
 Moving Day to the foot-hills where he can see 
 this throne against the sky, as a superarchitect 
 would draw it. But even if he can give this 
 vision in the films, his task will not be worth 
 while if he is simply a teller of old stories. Let 
 us have magic shoes about which are more golden 
 dreams than those concerning Cinderella. Let 
 us have stranger castles than that of Usher, 
 more dazzling chairs than the Siege Perilous. 
 Let us have the throne of Liberty, not the 
 throne of Wodin. 
 
 There is one outstanding photoplay that I 
 always have in mind when I think of film 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 121 
 
 magic. It illustrates some principles of this 
 chapter and chapter four, as well as many 
 others through the book. It is GriflSth's pro- 
 duction of The Avenging Conscience. It is also 
 an example of that rare thing, a use of old ma- 
 terial 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 con- 
 science 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 im- 
 personated by Spottiswoode Aitken) brings 
 up his orphan nephew with an awkward affec- 
 tion. The nephew is impersonated by Henry 
 B. Walthall. The uncle has an ambition that 
 the boy will become a man of letters. In his 
 attempts at literature the youth is influenced 
 by Poe. This brings about the Poe quality of 
 his dreams at the crisis. The uncle is silently 
 exasperated when he sees his boy's writing- 
 time broken into, and wasted, as he thinks, 
 by an affair with a lovely Annabel (Blanche 
 Sweet). The intimacy and confidence of the 
 lovers has progressed so far that it is a natural 
 
122 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 thing for the artless girl to cross the gardens 
 and after hesitation knock at the door. She 
 wants to know what has delayed her boy. 
 She is all in a flutter on account of the overdue 
 appointment to go to a party together. The 
 scene of the pretty hesitancy on the step, her 
 knocking, and the final impatient tapping with 
 her foot is one of the best illustrations of the 
 intimate mood in photoplay episodes. On the 
 girl's entrance the uncle overwhelms her and 
 the boy by saying she is pursuing his nephew 
 like a common woman of the town. The words 
 actually burst through the film, not as a melo- 
 dramatic, but as an actual insult. This is a 
 thing almost impossible to do in the photo- 
 play. This outrage in the midst of an 
 atmosphere of chivalry is one of Griflfith's 
 master-moments. It accounts for the vol- 
 canic 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 lifetime. 
 
 This scene of insult and the confession scene, 
 later in this film, moved me as similar passages 
 in high drama would do ; and their very rareness,* 
 even in the hands of photoplay masters, indicates 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 123 
 
 that such purely dramatic climaxes cannot be 
 the main asset of the moving picture. Over and 
 over, with the best talent and producers, they 
 fail. 
 
 The boy and girl go to the party in spite of 
 the uncle. It is while on the way that the boy 
 looks on the face of a stranger who afterwards 
 mixes up in his dream as the detective. There 
 is a mistake in the printing here. There are 
 several minutes of a worldly-wise oriental dance 
 to amuse the guests, while the lovers are alone 
 at another end of the garden. It is, possibly, 
 the aptest contrast with the seriousness of 
 our hero and heroine. But the social affair 
 could have had a better title than the one that 
 is printed on the film "An Old-fashioned 
 Sweetheart Party." Possibly the dance was 
 put in after the title. 
 
 The lovers part forever. The girl's pride 
 has had a mortal wound. About this time is 
 thrown on the screen the kind of a climax 
 quite surely possible to the photoplay. It 
 reminds one, not of the mood of Poe's verse, 
 but of the spirit of the paintings of George 
 Frederick Watts. It is allied in some way, in 
 my mind, with his "Love and Life," though 
 but a single draped figure within doors, and 
 
124 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 " 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 Anna- 
 bel 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 mean- 
 while 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 spider web 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. 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 125 
 
 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 
 atory 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- 
 
126 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 mail. Then for due compensation the Italian 
 becomes an armed sentinel. The boy fears 
 detection. 
 
 Yet the foolish youth thinks he will be 
 happy. But every time he runs to meet his 
 sweetheart he is appalled by hallucinations 
 over her shoulder. The cadaverous ghost of 
 the uncle is shown on the screen several times. 
 It is an appearance visible to the young man 
 and the audience only. Later the ghost is 
 implied by the actions of the guilty one. We 
 merely imagine it. This is a piece of sound 
 technique. We no more need a dray full of 
 ghosts than a dray full of jumping furniture. 
 
 The village in general has never suspected 
 the nephew. Only two people suspect him : 
 the broken-hearted girl and an old friend of his 
 father. This gentleman puts a detective on the 
 trail. (The detective is impersonated by Ralph 
 Lewis.) The gradual breakdown of the victim 
 is traced by dramatic degrees. This is the 
 second case of the thing I have argued as being 
 generally impossible in a photoplay chronicle of 
 a private person, and which the considerations 
 of chapter twelve indicate as exceptional. We 
 trace the innermost psychology of one special 
 citizen step by step to the crisis, and that path 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 127 
 
 is actually the primary interest of the story. 
 The climax is the confession to the detective. 
 With this self -exposure the direct Poe-quality of 
 the technique comes to an end. Moreover, Poe 
 would end the story here. But the Poe-dream 
 is set like a dark jewel in a gold ring, of which 
 more anon. 
 
 Let us dwell upon the confession. The first 
 stage of this conscience-climax is reached by 
 the dramatization of the "Tell-tale Heart" 
 reminiscence in the memory of the dreaming 
 man. The episode makes a singular applica- 
 tion of the theories with which this chapter 
 begins. For furniture-in-motion we have the 
 detective's pencil. For trappings and inven- 
 tions 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 ap- 
 plication is more spiritual than literal. The 
 half-mad boy begins to divulge that he thinks 
 that the habitual ticking of the clock is sa- 
 tanically timed to the beating of the dead 
 man's heart. Here more unearthliness hovers 
 round a pendulum than any merely mechani- 
 cal trick-movements could impart. Then the 
 merest commonplace of the detective^ tapping 
 
128 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 his pencil in the same time — the boy trying 
 in vain to ignore it — increases the strain, till 
 the audience has well-nigh the hallucinations 
 of the victim. Then the bold tapping of the 
 detective's foot, who would do all his accusing 
 without saying a word, and the startling coin- 
 cidence 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 pendu- 
 lum conducting themselves in an apparently 
 everyday fashion, satisfy in a far nobler way the 
 thing in the cave-man attending the show that 
 made him take note in other centuries of the 
 rope that began to hang the butcher, the fire 
 that began to burn the stick, and the stick that 
 began to beat the dog. 
 
 Now the play takes a higher demoniacal 
 plane reminiscent of Poe's Bells. The boy 
 opens the door. He peers into the darkness. 
 There he sees them. They are the nearest 
 to the sinister Poe quality of any illustrations 
 I recall that attempt it. "They are neither 
 man nor woman, they are neither brute nor 
 
FURNITURE AND INVENTIONS 129 
 
 human ; they are ghouls." The scenes are de- 
 signed 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 war- 
 fare. The Italian leads an unsuccessful rescue 
 party. The unfortunate youth finally hangs 
 himself. The beautiful Annabel bursts through 
 the siege a moment too late; then, heart 
 broken, kills herself. These things are. carried 
 out by good technicians. But it would have 
 been better to have had the suicide with but 
 a tiny part of the battle, and the story five 
 reels long instead of six. This physical turmoil 
 
130 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 is carried into the spiritual world only by the 
 psychic momentum acquired through the previ- 
 ous confession scene. The one thing with in- 
 trinsic 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 bit- 
 terest of us after some crisis in our days. 
 
 The happy pair are shown, walking through 
 the hills. Thrown upon the clouds for them 
 are the moods of the poet-lover's heart. They 
 look into the woods and see his fancies of 
 Spring, the things that he will some day write. 
 These pageants might be longer. They furnish 
 
FURNITURE AND mVENTIONS 131 
 
 the great climax. They make a consistent 
 parallel and contrast with the ghoul-visions 
 that end with the confession to the detective. 
 They wipe that terror from the mind. They 
 do not represent Poe. The rabbits, the leop- 
 ard, 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 Inter- 
 pretation in the centre of a fairly consistent 
 fabric, and move on into a radiant climax 
 of his own that is in organic relation to the 
 whole, is an achievement indeed. The final 
 criticism is that the play is derivative. It is 
 not built from new material in all its parts, as 
 
132 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 was the original story. One must be a student 
 of Poe to get its ultimate flavor. But in read- 
 ing 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 ele- 
 ments before and after. The Chameleon pro- 
 ducer approximates in The Avenging Conscience 
 the type of mystic teacher, discussed in the 
 twentieth chapter : " The Prophet- Wizard." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 
 
 This chapter is a superstructure upon the 
 foundations of chapters five, six, and seven. 
 
 I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, 
 of the photoplays that while the actors tend to 
 become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on 
 the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and 
 mechanisms tend to become human. By an 
 extension of this principle, non-human tones, 
 textures, lines, and spaces take on a vital- 
 ity almost like that of flesh and blood. It is 
 partly for this reason that some energy is 
 hereby given to the matter of reenf orcing 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, pref- 
 erably those who are in the flush of their first 
 reputation in these crafts. Let us imagine 
 the centres of the experimental drama, such as 
 the Drama League, the Universities, and the 
 
 188 
 
134 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 stage societies, calling in people of these profes- 
 sions 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 photo- 
 play. "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 what- 
 ever the method, let him study to express at 
 last the thing that moves within him as a creep- 
 ing fire, which Americans do not yet under- 
 stand and the loss of which makes the classic 
 in our architecture a mere piling of elegant 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 135 
 
 stones upon one another. In the arrange- 
 ments 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 Pelo- 
 ponnesian war. It does not seem impossible 
 when one remembers the achievements of the 
 author of Cabiria in approximating Rome and 
 Carthage. 
 
 Let the principal figure of the pageant be the 
 virgin Athena, walking as a presence visible 
 only to us, yet among her own people, and 
 robed and armed and panoplied, the guardian of 
 Pericles, appearing in those streets that were 
 herself. Let the architect show her as she 
 came only in a vision to Phidias, while the 
 dramatic writers and mathematicians and poets 
 and philosophers go by. The crowds should be 
 like pillars of Athens, and she like a , great 
 pillar. The crowds should be like the tossing 
 waves of the Ionic Sea and Athena like the white 
 ship upon the waves. The audiences in the 
 tragedies should be shown like wheat-fields 
 on the hill-sides, always stately yet blown by 
 the wind, and Athena the one sower and 
 reaper. Crowds should descend the steps 
 of the Acropolis, nymphs and fauns and 
 
136 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Olympians, carved as it were from the marble, 
 yet flowing like a white cataract down into 
 the town, bearing with them Athena, their 
 soul. All this in the Photoplay of Pericles. 
 
 No civic or national incarnation since that 
 time appeals to the poets like the French 
 worship of the Maid of Orleans. In Percy 
 MacKaye's book, The Present Hour, he says 
 on the French attitude toward the war : — 
 
 ' ."* '-^ -' .' ''\ 3, 
 "Half artist and half anchorite. 
 
 Part siren and part Socrates, 
 
 Her face — alluring fair, yet recondite — 
 
 Smiled through her salons and academies. 
 
 Lightly she wore her double mask. 
 Till sudden, at war's kindling spark. 
 Her inmost self, in shining mail and casque. 
 Blazed to the world her single soul — Jeanne 
 d' Arc!" 
 
 To make a more elaborate showing of what 
 is meant by architecture-in-motion, let us 
 progress through the centuries and suppose 
 that the builder has this enthusiasm for France, 
 that he is slowly setting about to build a 
 photoplay around the idea of the Maid. 
 
 First let him take the mural painting point of 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 137 
 
 view. Bear in mind these characteristics of that 
 art : it is wall-painting that is an organic part 
 of the surface on which it appears : it is on 
 the same lines as the building and adapted to 
 the colors and forms of the structure of which 
 it is a part. 
 
 The wall-splendors of America that are the 
 most scattered about in inexpensive copies 
 are the decorations of the Boston Public 
 Library. Note the pillar-like quality of Sar- 
 gent's prophets, the solemn dignity of Abbey's 
 Holy Grail series, the grand horizontals and 
 perpendiculars of the work of Puvis de Cha- 
 vannes. 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 retain- 
 ing their powerful lines, would be three exceed- 
 ingly varied examples of what is meant by 
 architecture-in-motion. The visions that ap- 
 pear 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 be- 
 cause he covered tremendous wall-spaces with 
 
138 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Venetian tone and color, is Tintoretto. If there 
 is a mistrust that the mural painting standard 
 will tend to destroy the sense of action, Tin- 
 toretto 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 de- 
 scribe but two, since the method of selection has 
 already been amply indicated, and the reader 
 can find his own examples. For a Crowd Pic- 
 ture, for instance, here is a scene at a mas- 
 querade ball. The glitter of the costumes is 
 an extension of the glitter of the candelabra 
 overhead. The people are as it were chande- 
 liers, 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 Csesar 
 De Bazan. The building is the father of the 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 139 
 
 people. These relations can be kept in the 
 court scenes of the production of Jeanne 
 d'Arc. 
 
 Here is a night picture from a war story 
 in which the light is furnished by two fires 
 whose coals and brands are hidden by earth 
 heaped in front. The sentiment of tenting 
 on the old camp-ground pervades the scene. 
 The far end of the line of those keeping 
 bivouac disappears into the distance, and the 
 depths of the rank's 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 un- 
 known, indicate some of the standards of judg- 
 ment and types of vision whereby our concep- 
 tion 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. 
 
140 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 W. Roscoe Osier: **They have been much en- 
 larged upon in the different biographies as 
 the means whereby Tintoretto obtained his 
 power. They constituted, however, his habit- 
 ual method of determining the effect and gen- 
 eral 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 liv- 
 ing model a matter of great difficulty and at 
 times an impossibility. . . . He . . . mod- 
 elled his sculptures . . . imparting to his 
 models a far more complete character than had 
 been customary. These firmly moulded figures, 
 sometimes draped, sometimes free, he sus- 
 pended 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 sublim- 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 141 
 
 ity of light suitable to a Madonna surrounded 
 with angels, or a heavenly choir, finds its minia- 
 ture response among the figures as the light 
 moves. 
 
 ** This was the method by which, in con- 
 junction 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 car- 
 dinal 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. 
 
142 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Let them represent, perhaps, seven crucial situa- 
 tions from the proposed photoplay. Let them 
 be designed as uniquely in their dresses as are 
 the Russian dancers' dresses, by Leon Bakst. 
 Then to alternate with these, seven little paint- 
 ings of episodes, designed in blacks, whites, 
 and grays y each representing some elusive point 
 in the intimate aspects of the story. Let there 
 be a definite system of space and texture rela- 
 tions 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 subor- 
 dinated to his work. The effects which he 
 would conceive would be on a grander scale. 
 The models for these might be mere exten- 
 sions 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 minia- 
 tures as architects offer along with their plans 
 of public buildings, but transfigured beyond 
 that standard by the light of inspiration com- 
 bined with experimental candle-light, spot- 
 light, sunlight, or torchlight. They must not 
 be conceived as stage arrangements of wax 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 143 
 
 figures with harmonious and fitting back- 
 grounds, 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 archi- 
 tectural 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 .f^ Certainly not as a matter of mere 
 
144 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 information or cultivation. I venture the first 
 right these things have to be taken care of in 
 museums is to stimulate to new creative effort. 
 
 I went to look over the Chicago collection 
 with a friend and poet Arthur Davison Ficke. 
 He said something to this effect: "The first 
 thing I see when I look at these fragments 
 is the whole cathedral in all its original pro- 
 portions. Then I behold the mediaeval market- 
 place 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 medi- 
 tation 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 
 Le Page ; — Jeanne Listening to the Voices. 
 It is a picture of which the technicians and the 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 145 
 
 poets are equally enamored. The tale of Jeanne 
 d'Arc could be told, carrying this particular 
 peasant girl through the story. And for a 
 piece of architectural pageantry akin to the 
 photoplay ball-room 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 Le Page 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 ex- 
 presses one of the things that is meant by the 
 phrase : Splendor Photoplay. But for moving 
 picture purposes it is the Bastien Le Page Joan 
 that should appear here, set in dramatic con- 
 trast 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 Iness room at the Chicago Art Institute 
 is another school for the meditative producer, 
 if he would evolve his tribute to France on 
 American soil. Though no photoplay tableau 
 
146 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 has yet approximated the brush of Iness, why 
 not attempt to lead Jeanne through an Iness 
 landscape? The Bastien Le Page 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 Iness beheld ? 
 
 Thus much for the atmosphere and trap- 
 pings of our Jeanne d'Arc scenario. Where 
 will we get our story .^ It should, of course, 
 be written from the ground up for this pro- 
 duction, 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 back- 
 ground, 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 pro- 
 ducers. Springfield dressed its best, and acted 
 with fair skill. The heroine was a charming 
 debutant, 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 at- 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 147 
 
 tempted 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 fol- 
 lowing 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 Re- 
 public 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, watch- 
 ing the star, like giant children that peep down 
 a well. The jewel descends by four sparkling 
 
148 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 chains, so far away they look to be dewy threads 
 of silk. As the bright mystery grows larger it 
 appears to be approaching the treeless hill of 
 Washington Park, a hill that is surrounded by 
 many wooded ridges. The people come run- 
 ning 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 hold- 
 ing them there above, have melted into threads 
 of mist and nothingness. The shining wrap- 
 ping falls away. The people look upon a seated 
 statue of marble and gold. There is a branch 
 of wrought-gold maple leaves in her hands. 
 Then beside the image is a fluttering transfigured 
 
ARCHITECTURE-IN-MOTION 149 
 
 presence of which the image seems to be a 
 representation. This spirit, carrying a living 
 maple branch in her hand says to the people : 
 "Men and Women of Springfield, this carving 
 is the Lady Springfield sent by your Lord from 
 Heaven. Build no canopy over her. Let her 
 ever be under the prairie-sky. Do her per- 
 petual 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 fes- 
 tivals 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, 
 
150 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren are put to shame. This spirit with the 
 maple branch rallies them, leads them to vic- 
 tories like those that were won of old in the 
 name of Jeanne d'Arc or Pallas Athena herself. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THIRTY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PHOTO- 
 PLAYS AND THE STAGE 
 
 The stage is dependent upon three lines of 
 tradition : first, that of Greece and Rome that 
 came down through the French. Second, the 
 English style, ripened from the miracle play 
 and the Shakespearian stage. And third, the 
 Ibsen precedent from Norway, now so firmly 
 established it is classic. These methods are 
 obscured by the commercialized dramas, but 
 they are behind them all. Let us discuss for 
 illustration the Ibsen tradition. 
 
 Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant. 
 He must be read aloud. He stands for the 
 spoken word, for the iron power of life that 
 may be concentrated in a phrase like the *'A11 
 or nothing" of Brand. Though Peer Gynt has 
 its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in 
 through the ear alone. He can be acted in 
 essentials from end to end with one table and 
 four chairs in any parlor. The alleged punch 
 with which the " movie " culminates has occurred 
 
 151 
 
152 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 three or ten years before the Ibsen curtain goes 
 up. At the close of every act of the dramas of 
 this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain 
 "This the magnificent moving picture cannot 
 achieve." Likewise after every successful film 
 described in this book could be inscribed "This 
 the trenchant Ibsen cannot do." 
 
 But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town. 
 The humor of the prospect was the sort too 
 deep for tears. My pastor and I reread the 
 William Archer translation that we might be 
 alert for every antithesis. Together we went 
 to the services. Since then the film has been 
 furiously denounced by the literati. Floyd 
 Dell's discriminating assault upon it is quoted 
 in Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret 
 Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent 
 number of The Little Review. But it is not 
 such a bad film in itself. It is not Ibsen. It 
 should be advertised "The Iniquities of the 
 Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a 
 Palatial Setting." 
 
 Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his 
 son, shows the men much as Ibsen outlines 
 their characters. Of course the only way to be 
 Ibsen is to be so precisely. In the new plot all 
 is open as the day. The world is welcome, and 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 153 
 
 generally present when the man or his son go 
 forth to see the elephant and hear the owl. 
 Provincial hypocrisy is not implied. But 
 Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere 
 of secrecy for his human volcanoes to burst 
 through in the end. 
 
 Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her 
 intelligent and sensitive countenance that she 
 has a conception of that character. She does 
 not always have the chance to act the woman 
 written in her face, the tart, thinking, handsome 
 creature that Ibsen prefers. Nigel Debrullier 
 looks the buttoned-up pastor Manders, even to 
 caricature. But the crawling, bootlicking car- 
 penter, Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a re- 
 spectable, 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 be- 
 
154 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 fore 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 re- 
 frain, 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 CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 155 
 
 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 me- 
 dium. 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 exi- 
 gency. 
 
156 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 He brings to one's mind the tearful book, 
 much loved in childhood, Parted at the Altar, 
 or Why Was it Thus? And four able actors 
 have the task of telling the audience by facial 
 expression only, that they have been struck by 
 moral lightning. They stand in a row, fac- 
 ing the people, endeavoring to make the crisis 
 of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing 
 melodrama. 
 
 The final death of young Alving is depicted 
 with an approximation of Ibsen's mood. But 
 the only ways to suggest such feelings in 
 silence, do not convey them in full to the 
 audience, but merely narrate them. Wherever 
 in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the 
 slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay 
 we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant 
 work. Instead there are endless writhings and 
 rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but 
 destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen. 
 
 Up past the point of the clutching hand this 
 film is the prime example for study for the 
 person who would know once for all the dif- 
 ferences between the photoplays and the stage 
 dramas. Along with it might be classed Mrs. 
 Fiske's decorative moving picture Tess, in 
 which there is every determination to convey 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 157 
 
 the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without her 
 voice and breathing presence. To people who 
 know her well it is a surprisingly good tintype 
 of our beloved friend, for the family album. 
 The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere 
 to be found. There are two moments of 
 dramatic life set among many of delicious 
 pictorial quality : when Tess baptizes her 
 child, and when she smooths its little grave 
 with a wavering hand. But in the stage- ver- 
 sion the dramatic poignancy begins with the 
 going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends. 
 
 The prime example of complete failure is 
 Sarah Bernhardt's Camille. It is indeed a 
 tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every 
 group entire, and taken at full length. Much 
 space is occupied by the floor and the over- 
 head portions of the stage setting. It lasts as 
 long as would the spoken performance, and 
 wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine 
 said conversation if we can. It might be com- 
 pared to watching Camille from the top gallery 
 through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped 
 with cotton. 
 
 It would be well for the beginning student to 
 find some way to see the first two of these 
 three, or some other attempts to revamp the 
 
158 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 classic, for instance Mrs. Fiske's painstaking 
 reproduction of Vanity Fair, bearing in mind 
 the list of differences which this chapter now 
 furnishes. 
 
 There is no denying that many stage man- 
 agers who have taken up photoplays are strug- 
 gling with the Shakespearian French and Nor- 
 wegian traditions in the new medium. Many 
 of the moving pictures discussed in this book 
 are rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith 
 of Bethulia, is a pronounced success. But in 
 order to be real photoplays the stage dramas 
 must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out 
 and upside down. The successful motion pic- 
 ture expresses itself through mechanical devices 
 that are being evolved every hour. Upon 
 those many new bits of machinery are founded 
 novel methods of combination in another field 
 of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic. 
 But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, 
 begin by making curious miniatures of stage 
 presentations. They try to have most things as 
 before. Later they take on the moving picture 
 technique in a superficial way, but they, and 
 the host of talented actors in the prime of life 
 and Broadway success, retain the dramatic 
 state of mind. 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 159 
 
 It is a principle of criticism, the world over, 
 that the distinctions between the arts must be 
 clearly marked, even by those who afterwards 
 mix those arts. Take, for instance, the perpet- 
 ual quarrel between the artists and the half -edu- 
 cated about literary painting. Whistler fought 
 that battle in England. He tried to beat it 
 into the head of John Bull that a painting is 
 one thing, a mere illustration for a story another 
 thing. But the novice is always stubborn. 
 To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign 
 languages, therefore just alike. The book 
 illustration may be said to come in through 
 the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagina- 
 tion. And the other is effective with no title 
 at all. The scenario writer who will study to 
 the bottom of the matter in Whistler's Gentle 
 Art of Making Enemies will be equipped to 
 welcome the distinction between the old-fash- 
 ioned stage, where the word rules, and the photo- 
 play, where splendor and ritual are all. It is 
 not the same distinction, but a kindred one. 
 
 But let us consider the details of the matter. 
 The stage has its exits and entrances at the 
 side and back. The standard photoplays have 
 their exits and entrances across the imaginary 
 
160 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 footlight line, even in the most stirring mob 
 and battle scenes. In Judith of Bethulia, 
 though the people seem to be coming from 
 everywhere and going everywhere, when we 
 watch close, we see that the individuals enter 
 at the near right-hand corner and exit at the 
 near left-hand corner, or enter at the near 
 left-hand corner and exit at the near right- 
 hand corner. 
 
 Consider the devices whereby the stage actor 
 holds the audience as he goes out at the side 
 and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides. 
 With what studious preparation he ripens his 
 quietness, if he goes out that way. In the 
 new contraption, the moving picture, the hero 
 or villain in exit strides past the nose of the 
 camera, growing much bigger than a human 
 being, marching toward us as though he would 
 step on our heads, disappearing when largest. 
 There is an explosive power about the mildest 
 motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or 
 the reverse. The people left in the scene are 
 pygmies compared with each disappearing 
 Cyclops. Likewise, when the actor enters again, 
 his mechanical importance is overwhelming. 
 Therefore, for his first entrance the motion 
 picture star does not require the preparations 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 161 
 
 that are made on the stage. The support does 
 not need to warm the spectators to the problem, 
 then talk them into surrender. 
 
 When the veteran stage-producer as a begin- 
 ning photoplay producer tries to give us a dia- 
 logue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull 
 no one follows. He does not realize that his \ 
 camera-born opportunity to magnify persons 
 and things instantly, to interweave them as 
 actors on one level, to alternate scenes at the 
 slightest whim, are the big substitutes for dia- 
 logue. By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after 
 flash : cottage, field, mountain-top, field, moun- 
 tain-top, cottage, we have a conversation between 
 three places rather than three persons. By 
 alternating the picture of a man and the check 
 he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When two 
 people talk to each other, it is by lifting and 
 lowering objects rather than their voices. The 
 collector presents a bill : the adventurer shows 
 him the door. The boy plucks a rose : the girl 
 accepts it. Moving objects, not moving lips, 
 make the words of the photoplay. 
 
 The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he 
 is getting nowhere, but still helpless, puts the 
 climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the 
 climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the 
 
162 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 screen. Sentences should be used to show 
 changes of time and place and a few such 
 elementary matters before the episode is fully 
 started. The climax of a motion picture scene 
 •cannot be one word or fifty words. As has been 
 discussed in connection with Cabiria, the cri- 
 sis must be an action sharper than any that has 
 gone before in organic union with a tableau more 
 beautiful than any that has preceded : the break- 
 ing of the tenth wave upon the sand. Such 
 remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in 
 the main chase of the photoplay film are but 
 guide-posts in the race toward the goal. They 
 should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be 
 laboriously lifted and lowered while the horses 
 stop, mid-career. 
 
 The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to 
 the soul through the silence, requires no quota- 
 tion from Keats to explain her, though Keats 
 is the equivalent in verse. Her setting in the 
 great French Museum is enough. We do not 
 know that her name is Venus. She is thought 
 by many to be another statue of Victory. 
 We may some day evolve scenarios that will 
 require nothing more than a title thrown upon 
 the screen at the beginning, they come to the 
 eye so perfectly. This is not the only possible 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 163 
 
 sort, but the self-imposed limitation in certain 
 films might give them a charm akin to that of 
 the Songs without Words. 
 
 The stage audience is a unit of three hundred 
 or a thousand. In the beginning of the first 
 act there is much moving about and extra 
 talk on the part of the actors, to hold the crowd 
 while it is settling down, and enable the late- 
 comer to be in his seat before the vital part 
 of the story starts. If he appears later, he 
 is glared at. In the motion picture art gallery, 
 on the other hand, the audience is around two 
 hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only 
 crime is to obstruct the line of vision. The 
 high-school girls can do a moderate amount of 
 giggling without breaking the spell. There is 
 no spell, in the stage sense, to break. People 
 can climb over each other's knees to get in or 
 out. If the picture is political, they murmur 
 war-cries to one another. If the film suggests 
 what some of the neighbors have been doing, 
 they can regale each other with the richest 
 sewing society report. 
 
 The people in the motion picture audience 
 total about two hundred, any time, but they 
 come in groups of two or three at no specified 
 hour. The newcomers do not, as in Vaudeville, 
 
164 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 make themselves part of a jocular army. 
 Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama. 
 If they disapprove, there is grumbling under 
 their breath, but no hissing. I have never 
 heard an audience in a photoplay theatre clap 
 its hands even when the house was bursting 
 with people. Yet they often see the film 
 through twice. When they have had enough, 
 they stroll home. They manifest their favor- 
 able verdict by sending some other member of 
 the family to "see the picture." If the people 
 so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may 
 ask the man at the door if he is going to bring 
 it back. That is the moving picture kind of 
 cheering. 
 
 It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned 
 stage actor was rendered unimportant by his 
 scenery. But the motion picture actor is but 
 the mood of the mob or the landscape or the 
 department store behind him, reduced to a 
 single hieroglyphic. 
 
 The stage-interior is large. The motion- 
 picture interior is small. The stage out-of- 
 door scene is at best artificial and little and is 
 generally at rest, or its movement is tainted 
 with artificiality. The waves dash, but not 
 dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly. 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 165 
 
 The motion picture out-of-door scene is as big 
 as the universe. And only pictures of the 
 Sahara are without magnificent motion. 
 
 The photoplay is as far from the stage on the 
 one hand as it is from the novel on the other. 
 Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the 
 short story, or the lyric poem. The key- words 
 of the stage are passion and character; of 
 the photoplay, splendor and speed. The stage 
 in its greatest power deals with pity for some 
 one especially unfortunate, with whom we grow 
 well acquainted; with some private revenge 
 against some particular despoiler; traces the 
 beginning and culmination of joy based on the 
 gratification of some preference, or love for some 
 person, whose charm is all his own. The drama 
 is concerned with the slow inevitable approaches 
 to these intensities. On the other hand, the 
 motion picture, though often appearing to deal 
 with these things, as a matter of fact uses 
 substitutes, many of which have been listed. 
 But to review : its first substitute is the excite- 
 ment of speed-mania stretched on the framework 
 of an obvious plot. Or it deals with delicate 
 informal anecdote as the short story does, or 
 fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or great 
 surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic 
 
166 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 outlooks, or miraculous beings made visible. 
 And the further it gets from Euripides, Ibsen, 
 Shakespeare, or Moliere — the more it becomes 
 like a mural painting from which flashes of 
 lightning come — the more it realizes its genius. 
 Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker 
 are almost wasting their genius on the theatre. 
 The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet 
 for their type of imagination. 
 
 The typical stage performance is from two 
 hours and a half upward. The movie show 
 generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and 
 forty minutes. And it should last but three 
 reels, that is, an hour. Edgar Poe said there 
 was no such thing as a long poem. There is 
 certainly no such thing as a long moving pic- 
 ture masterpiece. 
 
 The stage-production depends most largely 
 upon the power of the actors, the movie show 
 upon the genius of the producer. The per- 
 formers and the dumb objects are on equal 
 terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is 
 bad for the stage because the minor parts are 
 smothered and the situations distorted to give 
 the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the motion 
 pictures because it obscures the producer. 
 While the leading actor is entitled to his glory. 
 
THE CONTRAST WITH THE STAGE 169 
 
 original of Mrs. Nickleby. His father entered 
 into Wilkins Micawber. But these people are 
 not perpetually thrust upon us as Mr. and Mrs. 
 Dickens. We are glad to find them in the 
 Dickens biographies. When the stories begin, 
 it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we want, and 
 the Charles Dickens atmosphere. 
 
 The photoplays of the future will be writ- 
 ten from the foundations for the films. 
 The soundest actors, photographers, and pro- 
 ducers will be those who emphasize the points 
 wherein the photoplay is unique. WTiat is 
 adapted to complete expression in one art 
 generally secures but half expression in another. 
 The supreme photoplay will give us things 
 that have been but half expressed in all other 
 mediums allied to it. 
 
 Once this principle is grasped there is every 
 reason why the same people who have inter- 
 ested themselves in the advanced experimental 
 drama should take hold of the super-photo- 
 play. The good citizens who can most 
 easily grasp the distinction should be there to 
 perpetuate the higher welfare of these institu- 
 tions side by side. This parallel develop- 
 ment should come, if for no other reason, because 
 the two arts are still roughly classed together 
 
170 THE ART OF MOVING THE PICTURE 
 
 by the public. The elect cannot teach the 
 public what the drama is till they show them 
 precisely what the photoplay is and is not. 
 Just as the university has departments of both 
 History and English teaching in amity, each 
 one rlluminating the work of the other, so these 
 two forms should live in each other's sight in 
 fine and friendly contrast. At present they 
 are in blind and jealous warfare. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 HIEROGLYPHICS 
 
 I HAVE read this chapter to a pretty neighbor 
 who has approved of the preceding portions of 
 the book, whose mind, therefore, I cannot but 
 respect. My neighbor classes this discussion 
 of hieroglyphics as a fanciful flight rather 
 than a sober argument. I submit the verdict, 
 then struggle against it while you read. 
 
 The invention of the photoplay is as great 
 a step as was the beginning of picture-writing 
 in the stone age. And the cave-men and 
 women of our slums seem to be the people most 
 affected by this novelty, which is but an ex- 
 pression of the old in that spiral of life which is 
 going higher while seeming to repeat the an- 
 cient phase. 
 
 There happens to be here on the table a 
 book on Egypt by Rawlinson that I used to 
 thumb long ago. A footnote says : "The font 
 of hieroglyphic type used in this work contains 
 eight hundred forms. But there are many other 
 
 171 
 
172 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 forms beside." There is more light on Egypt in 
 later works than in Rawlins on, b ut the state- 
 ment quoted will serve for our text. 
 
 Several complex methods of making visible 
 scenarios are listed in this work. Here is one 
 that is mechanically simple. Let the man search- 
 ing for tableau combinations, even if he is of 
 the practical commercial type, prepare himself 
 with eight hundred signs from Egypt. He can 
 construct the outlines of his scenarios by placing 
 these little pictures in rows. It may not be 
 impractical to cut his hundreds of them from 
 black cardboard and shuffle them on his table 
 every morning. The list will contain all ele- 
 mentary and familiar things. Let him first 
 give the most literal meaning to the patterns. 
 Then if he desires to rise above the commercial 
 field, let him turn over each cardboard, making 
 the white undersurface uppermost, and there 
 write a more abstract meaning of the hiero- 
 glyphic, one that has a fairly close relation to his 
 way of thinking about the primary form. From 
 a proper balance of primary and secondary 
 meanings photoplays with souls could come. 
 Not that he must needs become an expert 
 Egyptologist. Yet it would profit any photo- 
 play man to study to think like the Egyptians, 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 173 
 
 the great picture-writing people. There is as 
 much reason for this course as for the Bible 
 student's apprenticeship in Hebrew. 
 
 Hieroglyphics can prove their worth, even 
 without the help of an Egyptian history. 
 Humorous and startling analogies can be 
 pointed out by opening the Standard Diction- 
 ary, page fifty-nine. Look under the word 
 alphabet. There is the diagram of the evolu- 
 tion of inscriptions from the Egyptian and 
 Phoenician idea of what letters should be, on 
 through the Greek and Roman systems. 
 
 In the Egyptian row is the picture of a 
 throne, ^ that has its equivalent in the Roman 
 letter C. And a throne has as much place in 
 what might be called the moving-picture 
 alphabet as the, letter C has in ours. There 
 are sometimes three thrones in this small town 
 of Springfield in an evening. When you see 
 one flashed on the screen, you know instantly 
 you are dealing with royalty or its implications. 
 The last one I saw that made any particular im- 
 pression was when Mary Pickf ord acted in Such 
 a Little Queen. I only wished then that she had 
 a more convincing throne. Let us cut one out 
 of black cardboard. Turning the cardboard 
 over to write on it the spirit-meaning, we in- 
 
174 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 scribe some such phrase as The Throne of 
 Wisdom or The Throne of Liberty. 
 
 Here is the hieroglyphic of a hand: 4|||i» 
 Roman equivalent, the letter D. The human 
 hand, magnified till it is as big as the whole 
 screen, is as useful in the moving picture al- 
 phabet as the letter D in the printed alphabet. 
 This hand may open a lock. It may pour 
 poison in a bottle. It may work a telegraph 
 key. Then turning the white side of the card- 
 board uppermost we inscribe something to the 
 effect that this hand may write on the wall, 
 as at the feast of Belshazzar. Or it may rep- 
 resent some such conception as Rodin's Hand 
 of God, discussed in the Sculpture-in-motion 
 chapter. 
 
 Here is a duck : gtf Roman equivalent, the 
 letter Z. In the motion pictures this bird, 
 a somewhat z-shaped animal, suggests the 
 finality of Arcadian peace. It is the last 
 and fittest ornament of the mill-pond. Noth- 
 ing very terrible can happen with a duck in the 
 foreground. There is no use turning it over. 
 It would take Maeterlinck or Swedenborg to 
 find the mystic meaning of a duck. A duck 
 looks to me like a caricature of an alder- 
 man. 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 175 
 
 Here is a sieve : ^ Roman equivalent, H. 
 
 A sieve placed on the kitchen-table, close-up, 
 suggests domesticity, hired girl humors, broad 
 farce. We will expect the bride to make her 
 first cake, or the flour to begin to fly into the 
 face of the intrusive ice-man. But, as to the 
 other side of the cardboard, the sieve has its 
 place in higher symbolism. It has been re- 
 corded by many a sage and singer that the 
 Almighty Powers sift men like wheat. 
 
 Here is the picture of a bowl : "^iVMP^ 
 Roman equivalent, the letter K. A bowl 
 seen through the photoplay window on the 
 cottage table suggests Johnny's early supper 
 of bread and milk. But as to the white side 
 of the cardboard, out of a bowl of kindred 
 form Omar may take his moonlit wine, or 
 the higher gods may lift up the very wine of 
 time to the lips of men, as Swinburne sings in 
 Atlanta in Calydon. 
 
 Here is a lioness : Jtttlk Roman equivalent, 
 the letter L. The lion or lioness creeps through 
 the photoplay jungle to give the primary 
 picture-word of terror in this new universal 
 alphabet. The present writer has seen 
 several valuable lions unmistakably shot and 
 killed in the motion pictures, and charged up 
 
176 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 to profit and loss, just as steam-engines or 
 houses are sometimes blown up or burned down. 
 But of late there is a disposition to use the 
 trained lion (or lioness) for all sorts of effects. 
 No doubt the king and queen of beasts will 
 become as versatile and humbly useful as the 
 letter L itself : that is, in the commonplace 
 routine photoplay. We turn the cardboard over 
 and the lion becomes a resource of glory and 
 terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or death- 
 less courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in 
 Ulalume calls the Lair of the Lion. 
 
 Here is an owl : ^ Roman equivalent, the 
 letter M. The only use of the owl I can 
 record is to be inscribed on the white surface. 
 In The Avenging Conscience, as described in 
 chapter ten, the murderer marks the ticking 
 of the heart of his victim while watching the 
 swinging of the pendulum of the old clock, then 
 in watching the tapping of the detective's 
 pencil on the table, then in the tapping of 
 his foot on the floor. Finally a handsome owl 
 is shown in the branches outside hoot-hooting 
 in time with the action of the pencil, and the 
 pendulum, and the dead man's heart. 
 
 But here is a wonderful thing, an actual pic- 
 ture that has lived on, retaining its ancient 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 177 
 
 imitative sound and form : ^^^^^^^^^ the 
 letter N, the drawing of a wave, with the sound 
 of a wave still within it. One could well im- 
 agine the Nile in the winds of the dawn making 
 such a sound : "NN, N, N," lapping at the reeds 
 upon its banks. Certainly the glittering water 
 scenes are a dominant part of moving picture 
 Esperanto. On the white reverse of the sym- 
 bol, the spiritual meaning of water will range 
 from the metaphor of the purity of the dew to 
 the sea as a sign of infinity. 
 
 Here is a window with closed shutters: U 
 
 Latin equivalent, the letter P. It is a reminder 
 of the technical outline of this book. The 
 Intimate Photoplay, as I have said, is but a 
 window where we open the shutters and peep 
 into some one's cottage. As to the soul 
 meaning in the opening or closing of the 
 shutters, it ranges from Noah's opening the 
 hatches to send forth the dove, to the promises 
 of blessing when the Windows of Heaven should 
 be opened. 
 ^ Here is the picture of an angle : JM Latin 
 
 equivalent, Q. This is another reminder of the 
 technical outline. The photoplay interior, as 
 has been reiterated, is small and three-cornered. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Here the heroine does her plotting, flirting, and 
 primping, etc. I will leave the spiritual inter- 
 pretation of the angle to Emerson, Swedenborg, 
 or Maeterlinck. 
 
 Here is the picture of a mouth : ^flHP^ Latin 
 equivalent, the letter R. If we turn from the 
 dictionary to the monuments, we will see that 
 the Egyptians used all the human features in 
 their pictures. We do not separate the features 
 as frequently as did that ancient people, but we 
 conventionalize them as often. Nine-tenths of 
 the actors have faces as fixed as the masks of 
 the Greek chorus : they have the hero-mask with 
 the protruding chin, the villain-frown, the come- 
 dian-grin, the fixed innocent-girl simper. These 
 formulas have their place in the broad effects 
 of Crowd Pictures and in comedies. Then there 
 are sudden abandonments of the mask. Grif- 
 fith's pupils Henry Walthall and Blanche Sweet 
 seem to me to be the greatest people in the photo- 
 plays : for one reason their faces are as sensitive 
 to changing emotion as the surfaces of fair lakes 
 in the wind. There is a passage in Enoch Arden 
 where Annie, impersonated by Lillian Gish, an- 
 other pupil of GrijQSth, is waiting in suspense 
 for the return of her husband. She changes 
 from lips of waiting, with a touch of appre- 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 179 
 
 hension, to a delighted laugh of welcome, her 
 head making a half -turn toward the door. 
 The audience is so moved by the beauty of the 
 slow change they do not know whether her face 
 is the size of the screen or the size of a postage- 
 stamp. As a matter of fact it fills the whole 
 end of the theatre. 
 
 Thus much as to faces that are not hiero- 
 glyphics. Yet fixed facial hieroglyphics have 
 many legitimate uses. For instance in The 
 Avenging Conscience, as the play works toward 
 the climax and the guilty man is breaking down, 
 the eye of the detective is thrown on the screen 
 with all else hid in shadow, a watching, re- 
 lentless eye. And this suggests a special talis- 
 man of the old Egyptians, a sign called the 
 Eyes of Horus, meaning the all-beholding sun. 
 
 Here is the picture of an inundated garden : 
 2^lijj^ Latin equivalent, the letter S. In our 
 photoplays the garden is an ever-present re- 
 source, and at an instant's necessity suggests 
 the glory of nature, or sweet privacy, and 
 kindred things. The Egyptian lotus garden had 
 to be inundated to be a success. Ours needs 
 but the hired man with the hose, who some- 
 times supplies broad comedy. But we turn over 
 the cardboard, for the deeper meaning of this 
 
180 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 hieroglyphic. Our gardens can, as of old, run 
 the solemn range from those of Babylon to those 
 of the Resurrection. 
 
 If there is one sceptic left as to the hiero- 
 glyphic significance of the photoplay, let him 
 now be discomfited by page fifty -nine. Standard 
 Dictionary. The last letter in this list is a 
 lasso: ^. The equivalent of the lasso in 
 the Roman alphabet is the letter T. The 
 crude and facetious would be apt to suggest 
 that the equivalent of the lasso in the photo- 
 play is the word trouble, possibly for the hero, 
 but probably for the villain. We turn to the 
 other side of the symbol. The noose may stand 
 for solemn judgment and the hangman, it may 
 also symboHze the snare of the fowler, tempta- 
 tion. Then there is the spider web, close kin, 
 representing the cruelty of evolution, in The 
 Avenging Conscience. 
 
 This list is based on the rows of hieroglyphics 
 most readily at hand. Any volume on Egypt, 
 such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude 
 of suggestions for the man inclined to the idea. 
 
 If this system of pasteboard scenarios is 
 taken literally, I would like to suggest as a 
 beginning rule that in a play based on twenty 
 hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the black 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 181 
 
 realistic signs with obvious meanings, and only 
 one of them white and inexplicably strange. It 
 has been proclaimed further back in this treatise 
 that there is only one witch in every wood. 
 And to illustrate further, there is but one 
 scarlet letter in Hawthorne's story of that name, 
 but one wine-cup in all of Omar, one Bluebird 
 in Maeterlinck's play. 
 
 I do not insist that the prospective author- 
 producer adopt the hieroglyphic method as a 
 routine, if he but consents in his meditative 
 hours to the point of view that it implies. 
 
 The more fastidious photoplay audience 
 that uses the hieroglyphic hypothesis in an- 
 alyzing the film before it, will acquire a new 
 tolerance and understanding of the avalanche 
 of photoplay conceptions, and find a promise 
 of beauty in what have been properly classed 
 as mediocre and stereotyped productions. 
 
 The nineteenth chapter has a discourse on 
 the Book of the Dead. As a connecting link 
 with that chapter the reader will note that one 
 of the marked things about the Egyptian wall- 
 paintings, pictures on the mummy-case wrap- 
 pings, papyrus inscriptions, and architectural 
 conceptions, is that they are but enlarged 
 hieroglyphics, while the hieroglyphics are but 
 
182 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 reduced fac-similes of these. So when a few 
 characters are once understood, the highly 
 colored Egyptian wall-paintings of the same 
 things are understood. The hieroglyphic of 
 Osiris is enlarged when they desire to represent 
 him in state. The hieroglyphic of the soul as 
 a human-headed hawk may be in a line of writ- 
 ing no taller than the capitals of this book. 
 Immediately above may be a big painting of 
 the soul, the same hawk placed with the proper 
 care with reference to its composition on the 
 wall, a pure decoration. 
 
 The transition from reduction to enlargement 
 and back again is as rapid in Egypt as in the 
 photoplay. It follows, among other things, that 
 in Egypt, as in China and Japan, literary style 
 and mere penmanship and brushwork are to 
 be conceived as inseparable. No doubt the 
 Egyptian scholar was the man who could not 
 only compose a poem, but write it down with 
 a brush. Talent for poetry, deftness in inscrib- 
 ing, and skill in mural painting were probably 
 gifts of the same person. The photoplay goes 
 back to this primitive union in styles. 
 
 The stages from hieroglyphics through Phoe- 
 nician and Greek letters to ours, are of no par- 
 ticular interest here. But the fact that hiero- 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 18S 
 
 glyphics can evolve is important. Let us hope 
 that our new picture-alphabets can take on 
 richness and significance, as time goes on, with- 
 out losing their literal values. They may 
 develop into something more all-pervading, 
 yet more highly wrought, than any written 
 speech. Languages when they evolve produce 
 stylists, and we will some day distinguish the 
 different photoplay masters as we now delight 
 in the separate tang of O. Henry and Mark 
 Twain and Howells. When these are ancient 
 times, we will have scholars and critics learned 
 in the flavors of early moving picture tradi- 
 tions with their histories of movements and 
 schools, their grammars, and anthologies. 
 
 Now some words as to the Anglo-Saxon lan- 
 guage and its relation to pictures. In England 
 and America our plastic arts are but beginning. 
 Yesterday we were preeminently a word-civiliza- 
 tion. England built her mediaeval cathedrals, 
 but they left no legacy among craftsmen. Art 
 had to lean on imported favorites like Van 
 Dyke till the days of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the 
 founding of the Royal Society. Consider that 
 the friends of Reynolds were of the circle of 
 Doctor Johnson. Literary tradition had grown 
 old. Then England had her beginning of land- 
 
184 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 scape gardening. Later she saw the rise of 
 Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their ir- 
 idescent successors. Still to-day in England 
 the average leading citizen matches word 
 against word, — using them as algebraic for- 
 mulas, — rather than picture against picture, 
 when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves 
 of his mind. To step into the Art world is to 
 step out of the beaten path of British dreams. 
 Shakespeare is still king, not Rossetti, nor 
 yet Christopher Wren. Moreover, it was the 
 book-reading colonial who led our rebellion 
 against the very royalty that founded the 
 Academy. The public-speaking American wrote 
 the Declaration of Independence. It was not 
 the work of the painting or cathedral-building 
 Englishman. We were led by Patrick Henry, 
 the orator, Benjamin Franklin, the printer. 
 
 The more characteristic America became, the 
 less she had to do with the plastic arts. The 
 emigrant-train carried many a Bible and Dic- 
 tionary packed in beside the guns and axes. 
 It carried the Elizabethan writers, ^Esop's 
 Fables, Blackstone's Commentaries, the re- 
 vised statutes of Indiana, Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
 Progress, Parson Weems' Life of Washington. 
 But, obviously, there was no place for the Elgin 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 185 
 
 marbles. Giotto's tower could not be loaded 
 in with the dried apples and the seedcorn. 
 
 Yesterday morning, though our arts were 
 growing every day, we were still more of a 
 word-civilization than the English. Our ar- 
 chitectural, painting, and sculptural history is 
 concerned with men now living, or their imme- 
 diate predecessors. And even such work as 
 we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy. 
 This is the more a cause for misgiving because, 
 in a democracy, the arts, like the political 
 parties, are not founded till they have touched 
 the county chairman, the ward leader, the 
 individual voter. The museums in a democracy 
 should go as far as the public libraries. Every 
 town has its library. There are not twenty 
 Art museums in the land. 
 
 Here then comes the romance of the photo- 
 play. A tribe that has thought in words since 
 the days that it worshipped Thor and told 
 legends of the cunning of the tongue of Loki, 
 suddenly begins to think in pictures. The 
 leaders of the people, and of culture, scarcely 
 know the photoplay exists. But in the remote 
 villages the players mentioned in this work 
 are as well known and as fairly understood 
 in their general psychology as any candidates 
 
186 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 for president bearing political messages. There 
 is many a babe in the proletariat not over 
 four years old who has received more pic- 
 tures into its eye than it has had words enter 
 its ear. The young couple go with their first- 
 born and it sits gaping on its mother's knee. 
 Often the images are violent and unseemly, a 
 chaos of rawness and squirm, but scattered 
 through the experience is a delineation of the 
 world. Pekin and China, Harvard and Mas- 
 sachusetts, Portland and Oregon, Benares and 
 India, become imaginary playgrounds. By 
 the time the hopeful has reached its geog- 
 raphy lesson in the public school it has trav- 
 elled indeed. Almost any word that means a 
 picture in the text of the geography or history 
 or third reader is apt to be translated uncon- 
 sciously into moving picture terms. In the 
 next decade, simply from the development of 
 the average eye, cities akin to the beginnings of 
 [Florence will be born among us as surely as 
 Chaucer came, upon the first ripening of the 
 English tongue, after Csedmon and Beowulf. 
 Sculptors, painters, architects, and park 
 gardeners who now have their followers by 
 the hundreds will have admirers by the hun- 
 dred thousand. The voters will respond to 
 
HIEROGLYPHICS 187 
 
 the aspirations of these artists as the back- 
 woodsmen followed Poor Richard's Almanac, 
 or the trappers in their coon-skin caps were 
 fired to patriotism by Patrick Henry. 
 
 This ends the second section of the book. 
 Were it not for the passage on The Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic, the chapters thus far 
 might be entitled : "an open letter to Griffith 
 and the producers and actors he has trained." 
 Contrary to my prudent inclinations, he is 
 the star of the piece, except on one page where 
 he is the villain. This stardom came about 
 slowly. In making the final revision, looking 
 up the producers of the important reels, espe- 
 cially those from the beginning of the photo- 
 play business, numbers of times the photoplays 
 have turned out to be the work of this former 
 leading man of Nance O'Neil. 
 
 No one can pretend to a full knowledge of the 
 films. They come faster than rain in April. 
 It would take a man every day of the year, 
 working day and night, to see all that come to 
 Springfield. But in the photoplay world, as I 
 understand it, D. W. Griffith is the king-figure. 
 
 So far, in this work I have endeavored to keep 
 to the established dogmas of Art. I hope that 
 
 / 
 
188 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the main lines of the argument will appeal to 
 the people who have classified and related the 
 beautiful works of man that have preceded the 
 moving pictures. Let the reader make his own 
 essay on the subject for the local papers and send 
 the clipping to me. The next photoplay book 
 that may appear from this hand may be con- 
 strued to meet his point of view. It will try to 
 agree or disagree in clear language. Many a 
 controversy must come before a method of criti- 
 cism is fully established. 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 At this point I climb from the oracular plat- 
 form and go down through my own chosen 
 underbrush for haphazard adventure. I re- 
 nounce the platform. Whatever it may be 
 that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray 
 of willow, if you do not want it, throw it 
 over the edge of the hill, without ado, to the 
 birds or squirrels or kine, and do not include 
 it in your controversial discourse. It is not a 
 part of the dogmatic system of photoplay criti- 
 cism. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE ORCHESTRA, CONVERSATION, AND THE 
 CENSORSHIP 
 
 Whenever the photoplay is mixed in the 
 same programme with vaudeville, the moving 
 picture part of the show suffers. The film is 
 rushed through, it is battered, it flickers more 
 than commonly, it is a little out of focus. The 
 house is not built for it. The owner of the 
 place cannot manage an art gallery with a circus 
 on his hands. It takes more brains than one 
 man possesses to pick good vaudeville talent 
 and bring good films to the town at the same 
 time. The best motion picture theatres are 
 built for photoplays alone. But they make 
 one mistake. 
 
 Almost every motion picture theatre has its 
 orchestra, pianist, or mechanical piano. The 
 perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no 
 sound but the hum of the conversing audience. 
 If this is too ruthless a theory, let the music be 
 played at the intervals between programmes, 
 
 189 
 
190 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 while the advertisements are being flung upon 
 the screen, the lights are on, and the people 
 coming in. 
 
 If there is something more to be done on the 
 part of the producer to make the film a telling 
 one, let it be a deeper study of the pictorial 
 arrangement, with the tones more carefully 
 balanced, the sculpture vitalized. This is 
 certainly better than to have a raw thing bul- 
 lied through with a music-programme, furnished 
 to bridge the weak places in the construction. 
 A picture should not be released till it is com- 
 pletely thought out. A producer with this 
 goal before him will not have the time or brains 
 to spare to write music that is as closely and 
 delicately related to the action as the action is 
 to the background. And unless the tunes are 
 at one with the scheme they are an intrusion. 
 Perhaps the moving picture maker has a twin 
 brother almost as able in music, who possesses 
 the faculty of subordinating his creations to 
 the work of his more brilliant coadjutor. How 
 are they going to make a practical national 
 distribution of the accompaniment .f^ In the 
 metropolitan theatres Cabiria carried its own 
 musicians and programme with a rich if feverish 
 result. In the Birth of a Nation, music was 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 191 
 
 used that approached imitative sound devices. 
 Also the orchestra produced a substitute for 
 old-fashioned stage suspense by long drawn- 
 out syncopations. The finer photoplay values 
 were thrown askew. Perhaps these two per- 
 formances could be successfully vindicated in 
 musical policy. But such a defence proves 
 nothing in regard to the typical film. Imagine 
 either of these put on in Rochester, Illinois, 
 population one hundred souls. The reels run 
 through as well as on Broadway or Michigan 
 Avenue, but the local orchestra cannot play the 
 music furnished in annotated sheets as skil- 
 fully as the local operator can turn the reel (or 
 watch the motor turn it!). 
 
 The big social fact about the moving picture 
 is that it is scattered like the newspaper. Any 
 normal accompaniment thereof must likewise be 
 adapted to being distributed everywhere. The 
 present writer has seen, here in his home place, 
 population sixty thousand, all the films discussed 
 in this book but Cabiria and the Birth of a 
 Nation. It is a photoplay paradise, the spoken 
 theatre is practically banished. Unfortunately ^ 
 the local moving picture managers think it 
 necessary to have orchestras. The musicians 
 they can secure make tunes that are most 
 
192 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 squalid and horrible. With fathomless imbe- 
 cility, hoochey koochey strains are on the 
 air while heroes are dying. The Miserere is 
 in our ears when the lovers are reconciled. 
 Ragtime is imposed upon us while the old 
 mother prays for her lost boy. Sometimes the 
 musician with this variety of sympathy aban- 
 dons himself to thrilling improvisation. 
 
 My thoughts on this subject began to take 
 form several years ago, when the film this book 
 has much praised. The Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic, came to town. The proprietor of 
 one theatre put in front of his shop a twenty- 
 foot sign "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, 
 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, brought back by 
 special request." He had probably read Julia 
 Ward Howe's name on the film forty times 
 before the sign went up. His assistant, I pre- 
 sume his daughter, played "In the Shade of 
 the Old Apple Tree" hour after hour, while 
 the great film was rolling by. Many old soldiers 
 were coming to see it. I asked the assistant 
 why she did not play and sing the Battle Hymn. 
 She said they "just couldn't find it." Are the 
 distributors willing to send out a musician with 
 each film ? 
 
 Many of the Springfield producers are quite 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 193 
 
 able and enterprising, but to ask for music with 
 photoplays is like asking the man at the news 
 stand to write an editorial while he sells you 
 the paper. The picture with a great orchestra 
 in a far-off metropolitan Opera House, may 
 be classed by fanatic partisanship with Grand 
 Opera. But few can get at it. It has nothing 
 to do with Democracy. 
 
 Of course people with a mechanical imagina- 
 tion, and no other kind, begin to suggest the 
 talking moving picture at this point, or the 
 phonograph or the mechanical piano. Let us 
 discuss the talking moving picture only. That 
 disposes of the others. 
 
 If the talking moving picture becomes a re- 
 liable mirror of the human voice and frame, 
 it will be the basis of such a separate art that 
 none of the photoplay precedents will apply. 
 It will be the phono'play, not the photoplay. 
 It will be unpleasant for a long time. This 
 book is a struggle against the non-humanness 
 of the undisciplined photograph. Any film is 
 correct, realistic, forceful, many times before it 
 is charming. The actual physical storage- 
 battery of the actor is many hundred miles 
 away. As a substitute, the human quality 
 must come in the marks of the presence of the 
 
194 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 producer. The entire painting must have his 
 brush-work. If we compare it to a love-letter it 
 must be in his handwriting rather than worked 
 on a typewriter. If he puts his autograph into 
 the film, it is after a fierce struggle with the 
 uncanny scientific quality of the camera's work. 
 His genius and that of the whole company of 
 actors is exhausted in the task. 
 
 The raw phonograph is likewise unmagnetic. 
 Would you set upon the shoulders of the troupe 
 of actors the additional responsibility of put- 
 ting an adequate substitute for human mag- 
 netism in the phonographic disk.f^ The voice 
 that does not actually bleed, that contains no 
 heart-beats, fails to meet the emergency. Few 
 people have wept over a phonographic selec- 
 tion from Tristan and Isolde. They are moved 
 at the actual performance. Why.^^ Look 
 at the opera singer after the last act. His 
 eyes are burning. His face is flushed. His 
 pulse is high. Reaching his hotel room, he is 
 far more weary than if he had sung the opera 
 alone there. He has given out of his brain- 
 fire and blood-beat the same magnetism that 
 leads men in battle. To speak of it in the 
 crassest terms, this resource brings him a hun- 
 dred times more salary than another man with 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 195 
 
 just as good a voice can command. The out- 
 put that leaves him drained at the end of the 
 show cannot be stored in the phonograph ma- 
 chine. That device is as good in the morning 
 as at noon. It ticks like a clock. 
 
 To perfect the talking moving picture, human 
 magnetism must be put into the mirror-screen 
 and into the clock. Not only is this impera- 
 tive, but clock and mirror must be harmonized, 
 one gently subordinated to the other. Both 
 cannot rule. In the present talking moving 
 picture the more highly developed photoplay is 
 dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the wake 
 of the screaming savage phonograph. No talk- 
 ing machine on the market reproduces conver- 
 sation clearly unless it be elaborately articulated 
 in unnatural tones with a stiff interval between 
 each question and answer. Real dialogue goes 
 to ruin. 
 
 The talking moving picture came to our 
 town. We were given for one show a line of 
 minstrels facing the audience, with the inter- 
 locutor repeating his immemorial question, 
 and the end-man giving the immemorial 
 answer. Then came a scene in a blacksmith 
 shop where certain well-differentiated rackets 
 were carried over the footlights. No one heard 
 
196 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the blacksmith, unless he stopped to shout 
 straight at us. 
 
 The phonoplay can quite possibly reach some 
 divine goal, but it will be after the speak- 
 ling powers of the phonograph excel the pho- 
 tographing powers of the reel, and then the 
 pictures will be brought in as comment and 
 ornament to the speech. The pictures will 
 be held back by the phonograph as long as it is 
 more limited in its range. The pictures are at 
 present freer and more versatile without it. 
 If the phonoplay is ever established, since it 
 will double the machinery, it must needs double 
 its prices. It will be the illustrated phono- 
 graph, in a more expensive theatre. 
 
 The orchestra is in part a blundering effort 
 by the local manager to supply the human- 
 magnetic element which he feels lacking in the 
 pictures on which the producer has not left 
 his autograph. But there is a much more 
 economic and magnetic accompaniment, the 
 before-mentioned buzzing commentary of the 
 audience. There will be some people who 
 disturb the neighbors in front, but the average 
 crowd has developed its manners in this partic- 
 ular, and when the orchestra is silent, murmurs 
 like a pleasant brook. 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 197 
 
 Local manager, why not an advertising cam- 
 paign in your town that says : "Beginning Mon- 
 day and henceforth, ours shall be known as the 
 Conversational Theatre " ? At the door let each 
 person be handed the following card : — 
 
 "You are encouraged to discuss the picture 
 with the friend who accompanies you to this 
 place. Conversation, of course, must be suffi- 
 ciently subdued not to disturb the stranger who 
 did not come with you to the theatre. If you 
 are so disposed, consider your answers to these 
 questions : What play or part of a play given 
 in this theatre did you like most to-day ? What 
 the least? What is the best picture you have 
 ever seen anywhere ? What pictures, seen here 
 this month, shall we bring back.^^" Here give 
 a list of the recent productions, with squares 
 to mark by the Australian ballot system : ap- 
 proved or disapproved. The cards with their 
 answers could be slipped into the ballot-box 
 at the door as the crowd goes out. 
 
 It may be these questions are for the ex- 
 ceptional audiences in residence districts. Per- 
 haps with most crowds the last interrogation 
 is the only one worth while. But by gathering 
 habitually the answers to that alone the place 
 would get the drift of its public, realize its 
 
198 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 genius, and become an art-gallery, the people 
 bestowing the blue ribbons. The photoplay 
 theatres have coupon contests and balloting 
 already : the most popular young lady, money 
 prizes to the best vote-getter in the audience, 
 etc. Why not ballot on the matter in hand ? 
 
 If the cards are sent out by the big pro- 
 ducers, a referendum could be secured that 
 would be invaluable in arguing down to rigid 
 censorship, and enable them to make their own 
 private censorship more intelligent. Various 
 styles of experimental cards could be tried till 
 the vital one is found. 
 
 There is growing up in this country a clan of 
 half -formed moving picture critics. The pres- 
 ent stage of their work is indicated by the elo- 
 quent notice describing Your Girl and Mine, 
 in the chapter on Progress and Endowment. 
 The metropolitan papers give their photo- 
 play reporters as much space as the theatrical 
 critics. Here in my home town the twelve 
 moving picture places take one half a page of 
 chaotic notices daily. The country is being 
 badly led by professional photoplay news- 
 writers who do not know where they are going, 
 but are on the way. 
 
 But they aptly describe the habitual attend- 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 199 
 
 ants as moving picture fans. The fan at the 
 photoplay, as at the base-ball grounds, is 
 neither a low-brow nor a high-brow. He is an 
 enthusiast who is as stirred by the charge of 
 the photographic cavalry as by the home runs 
 that he watches from the bleachers. In both 
 places he has the privilege of comment while 
 the game goes on. In the photoplay theatre 
 it is not so vociferous, but as keenly felt. Each 
 person roots by himself. He has his own judg- 
 ment, and roasts the umpire : who is the keeper 
 of the local theatre : or the producer, as the case 
 may be. If these opinions of the fan can be 
 collected and classified, an informal censorship 
 is at once established. The photoplay report- 
 ers can then take the enthusiasts in hand and 
 lead them to a realization of the finer points 
 in awarding praise and blame. Even the sport- 
 ing pages have their expert opinions with due 
 influence on the betting odds. Out of the 
 work of the photoplay reporters let a super- 
 structure of art criticism be reared in peri- 
 odicals like the Century, Harper's, Scribner's, 
 The Atlantic, The Craftsman, and the architec- 
 tural magazines. These are our natural custo- 
 dians of art. They should reproduce the most 
 exquisite tableaus, and be as fastidious in their 
 
200 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 selection of them as they are in the current 
 examples of the other arts. Let them spread the 
 news when photoplays keyed to the Rem- 
 brandt mood arrive. The reporters for the 
 newspapers should get their ideas and refresh- 
 ment in such places as the Ryerson Art Library 
 of the Chicago Art Institute. They should 
 begin with such books as Richard Muther's 
 History of Modern Painting, John C. Van 
 Dyke's Art for Art's Sake, Marquand and 
 Frothingham's History of Sculpture, A. D. F. 
 Hamlin's History of Architecture. They should 
 take the business of guidance in this new world 
 as a sacred trust, knowing they have the power 
 to influence an enormous democracy. 
 
 The moving picture journals and the literati 
 are in straits over the censorship question. The 
 literati side with the managers, on the princi- 
 ples of free speech and a free press. But few of 
 the aesthetically super-wise are persistent fans. 
 They rave for freedom, but are not, as a general 
 thing, living back in the home town. They do 
 not face the exigency of having their summer 
 and winter amusement spoiled day after day. 
 
 Extremists among the pious are railing 
 against the moving pictures as once they 
 railed against novels. They have no notion 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 201 
 
 that this institution is penetrating to the last 
 backwoods of our civilization, where its pres- 
 ence is as hard to prevent as the rain. But 
 some of us are destined to a reaction, almost 
 as strong as the obsession. The religionists 
 will think they lead it. They will be self- 
 deceived. Moving picture nausea is already 
 taking hold of numberless people, even when 
 they are in the purely pagan mood. Forced 
 by their limited purses, their inability to buy 
 a Ford car, and the like, they go in their loneli- 
 ness to film after film till the whole world seems 
 to turn on a reel. When they are again at home, 
 they see in the dark an imaginary screen with 
 tremendous pictures, whirling by at a horribly 
 accelerated pace, a photoplay dehrium tremens. 
 Faster and faster the reel turns in the back of 
 their heads. When the moving picture sea-sick- 
 ness is upon one, nothing satisfies but the quietest 
 out of doors, the companionship of the gentlest 
 of real people. The non-movie-life has charms 
 such as one never before conceived. The worn 
 citizen feels that the cranks and legislators can 
 do what they please to the producers. He is 
 through with them. 
 
 The moving picture business men do not 
 realize that they have to face these nervous 
 
202 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 J 
 
 conditions in their erstwhile friends. They 
 flatter themselves they are being pursued by 
 some reincarnations of Anthony Comstock. 
 There are several reasons why photoplay corpo- 
 rations are callous, along with the sufficient 
 one that they are corporations. 
 
 First, they are engaged in a financial orgy. 
 Fortunes are being found by actors and man- 
 agers faster than they were dug up in 1849 and 
 1850 in California. Forty-niner lawlessness of 
 soul prevails. They talk each other into a 
 lordly state of mind. All is dash and experi- 
 ment. Look at the advertisements in the 
 leading moving picture magazines. They are 
 like the praise of oil stock or Per una. They 
 bawl about films founded upon little classics. 
 They howl about plots that are ostensibly from 
 the soberest of novels, whose authors they blas- 
 phemously invoke. They boo and blow about 
 twisted, callous scenarios that are bad imita- 
 tions of the world's most beloved lyrics. 
 
 The producers do not realize the mass effect 
 of the output of the business. It appears to 
 many as a sea of unharnessed photography : 
 sloppy conceptions set forth with sharp edges 
 and irrelevant realism. The jumping, twitch- 
 ing, cold-blooded devices, day after day, create 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 203 
 
 the aforesaid sea-sickness, that has nothing to 
 do with the questionable subject. When on 
 top of this we come to the picture that is actu- 
 ally insulting, we are up in arms indeed. It is 
 supplied by a corporation magnate removed 
 from his audience in location, fortune, interest, 
 and mood : an absentee landlord. I was trying 
 to convert a talented and noble friend to the 
 films. The first time we went there was a 
 prize-fight between a black and a white man, 
 not advertised, used for a filler. I said it was 
 queer, and would not happen again. The 
 next time my noble friend was persuaded to 
 go, there was a cock-fight, incidental to a 
 Cuban romance. The third visit we beheld a 
 lady who was dying for five minutes, rolling her 
 eyes about in a way that was fearful to see. 
 The convert was not made. 
 
 It is too easy to produce an unprovoked 
 murder, an inexplicable arson, neither led up 
 to nor followed by the ordinary human history 
 of such acts, and therefore as arbitrary as the 
 deeds of idiots or the insane. A villainous 
 hate, an alleged love, a violent death, are flashed 
 at us, without being in any sort of tableau logic. 
 The public is ceaselessly played upon by tact- 
 less devices. Therefore it howls, just as chil- 
 
204 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 dren in the nursery do when the awkward 
 governess tries the very thing the diplomatic 
 governess, in reasonable time, may bring about. 
 The producer has the man in the audience 
 who cares for the art peculiarly at his mercy. 
 Compare him with the person who wants to 
 read a magazine for an evening. He can 
 look over all the periodicals in the local book- 
 store in fifteen minutes. He can select the 
 one he wants, take this bit of printed matter 
 home, go through the contents, find the three 
 articles he prefers, get an evening of reading 
 out of them, and be happy. Every day as 
 many photoplays come to our town as maga- 
 zines come to the book-store in a week or a 
 month. There are good ones and bad ones 
 buried in the list. There is no way to sample 
 the films. One has to wait through the first 
 third of a reel before he has an idea of the 
 merits of a production, his ten cents is spent, 
 and much of his time is gone. It would take 
 five hours at least to find the best film in our 
 town for one day. Meanwhile, nibbling and 
 sampling, the seeker would run such a gauntlet 
 of plot and dash and chase that his eyes and 
 patience would be exhausted. Recently there 
 returned to the city for a day one of GriflSth's 
 
THE CENSORSHIP 205 
 
 best Biographs, The Last Drop of Water. It 
 was good to see again. In order to watch this 
 one reel twice I had to wait through five others 
 of unutterable miscellany. 
 
 Since the producers and theatre-managers 
 have us at their mercy, they are under every 
 obligation to consider our delicate susceptibili- 
 ties — granting the proposition that in an ideal 
 world we will have no legal censorship. As to 
 what to do in this actual nation, let the reader 
 follow what John Collier has recently written in 
 the Survey. Collier was the leading force in 
 founding the National Board of Censorship. As 
 a member of that volunteer extra-legal board 
 which is independent and high minded, yet 
 accepted by the leading picture companies, he 
 is able to discuss legislation in a manner which 
 the present writer cannot hope to match. Read 
 John Collier. But I wish to suggest that the 
 ideal censorship is that to which the daily press 
 is subject, the elastic hand of public opinion, if 
 the photoplay can be brought as near to news- 
 paper conditions in this matter as it is in some 
 others. 
 
 How does public opinion grip the journalist ? 
 The editor has a constant report from his 
 constituency. A popular scoop sells an extra 
 
206 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 at once. An attack on the wrong idol cancels 
 fifty subscriptions. People come to the oflBce 
 to do it, and say why. If there is a piece of 
 real news on the second page, and fifty letters 
 come in about it that night, next month 
 when that character of news reappears it gets 
 the front page. Some human peculiarities are 
 not mentioned, some phrases not used. The 
 total attribute of the blue-pencil man is diplo- 
 macy. But while the motion pictures come out 
 every day, they get their discipline months after- 
 wards in the legislation that insists on everything 
 but tact. A tentative substitute for the letters 
 that come to the editor, the personal call and 
 cancelled subscription, and the rest, is the 
 system of balloting on the picture, especially 
 the answer to the question, "What picture seen 
 here this month, or this week, shall we bring 
 back?" Experience will teach how to put 
 the queries. By the same system the public 
 might dictate its own cut-outs. Let us have 
 a democracy and a photoplay business work- 
 ing in daily rhythm. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON 
 
 This is a special commentary on chapter 
 five, The Picture of Crowd Splendor. It refers 
 as well to every other type of moving picture 
 that gets into the slum. But the masses have 
 an extraordinary ajQfinity for the Crowd Photo- 
 play. As has been said before, the mob comes 
 nightly to behold its natural face in the 
 glass. Politicians on the platform have swayed 
 the mass below them. But now, to speak in 
 an Irish way, the crowd takes the platform, and 
 looking down, sees itself swaying. The slums 
 are an astonishing assembly of cave-men crawl- 
 ing out of their shelters to exhibit for the 
 first time in history a common interest on a 
 tremendous scale in an art form. Below the 
 cliff caves were bar rooms in endless lines. 
 There are almost as many bar rooms to-day, 
 yet this new thing breaks the lines as nothing 
 else ever did. Often when a moving picture 
 house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or 
 the left declares bankruptcy. 
 
 207 
 
208 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Why do men prefer the photoplay to the 
 drinking place? For no pious reason, surely. 
 Now they have fire pouring into their eyes 
 instead of into their bellies. Blood is drawn 
 from the guts to the brain. Though the pic- 
 ture be the veriest mess, the light and move- 
 ment cause the beholder to do a little reptilian 
 thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper 
 enters the place, heavy as King Log. A 
 ditch-digger goes in, sick and surly. It is the 
 state of the body when many men drink them- 
 selves into insensibility. But here the light 
 is as strong in the eye as whiskey in the throat. 
 Along with the flare, shadow, and mystery, they 
 face the existence of people, places, costumes, 
 utterly novel. Immigrants are prodded by 
 these swords of darkness and light to guess at 
 the meaning of the catch-phrases and headlines 
 that punctuate the play. They strain to hear 
 their neighbors whisper or spell them out. 
 
 The photoplays have done something to re- 
 unite the lower-class families. No longer is 
 the fire-escape the only summer resort for big 
 and little folks. Here is more fancy and whim 
 than ever before blessed a hot night. Here, 
 under the wind of an electric fan, they witness 
 everything, from a burial in Westminster to the 
 
SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON 209 
 
 birthday parade of the ruler of the land of 
 Swat. 
 
 The usual saloon equipment to delight the 
 eye is one so-called "leg" picture of a woman, 
 a photograph of a prize-fighter, and some 
 colored portraits of goats to advertise various 
 brands of beer. Many times, no doubt, these 
 boys and young men have found visions of a 
 sordid kind while gazing on the actress, the 
 fighter, or the goats. But what poor material 
 they had in the wardrobes of memory for the 
 trimmings and habiliments of vision, to make 
 this lady into Freya, this prize-fighter into 
 Thor, these goats into the harnessed steeds 
 that drew his chariot! Man's dreams are re- 
 arranged and glorified memories. How could 
 these people reconstruct the torn carpets and 
 tin cans and waste-paper of their lives into my- 
 thology ? How could memories of Ladies' En- 
 trance squalor be made into Castles in Granada 
 or Carcassonne ? The things they drank to see, 
 and saw but grotesquely, and paid for terribly, 
 now roll before them with no after pain or pun- 
 ishment. The mumbled conversation, the socia- 
 bility for which they leaned over the tables, they 
 have here in the same manner with far more 
 to talk about. They come, they go home, men 
 
210 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 and women together, as casually and impulsively 
 as the men alone ever entered a drinking-place, 
 but discoursing now of far-off mountains and 
 star-crossed lovers. As Padraic Colum says in 
 his poem on the herdsman : — 
 
 " With thoughts on white ships 
 And the King of Spain's Daughter." 
 
 This is why the saloon on the right hand and 
 on the left in the slum is apt to move out when 
 the photoplay moves in. 
 
 But let us go to the other end of the temper- 
 ance argument. I beg to be allowed to relate a 
 personal matter. For some time I was a field- 
 worker for the Anti-Saloon League of Illinois, 
 being sent every Sunday to a new region to 
 make the yearly visit on behalf of the league. 
 Such a visitor is apt to speak to one church in a 
 village, and two in the country, on each excur- 
 sion, being met at the station by some leading 
 farmer-citizen of the section, and driven to these 
 points by him. The talk with this man was 
 worth it all to me. 
 
 The agricultural territory of the United States 
 is naturally dry. This is because the cross-roads 
 church is the only communal institution, and 
 the voice of the cross-roads pastor is for teeto- 
 
SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON 211 
 
 talism. The routine of the farm-hand, while by 
 no means ideal in other respects, keeps him from 
 craving drink as intensely as other toilers do. 
 A day's work in the open air fills his veins at 
 nightfall with an opiate of weariness instead of a 
 high-strung nervousness. The strong men of 
 the community are church elders, not through 
 fanaticism, but by right of leadership. Through 
 their office they are committed to prohibition. 
 So opposition to the temperance movement is 
 scattering. The Anti-Saloon League has organ- 
 ized these leaders into a nation-wide machine. 
 It sees that they get their weekly paper, instruct- 
 ing them in the tactics whereby local fights have 
 been won. A subscription financing the State 
 League is taken once a year. It counts on the 
 regular list of church benevolences. The state 
 officers come in to help on the critical local 
 fights. Any country politician fears their 
 non-partisan denunciation as he does political 
 death. The local machines thus backed are 
 incurable mugwumps, hold the balance of 
 power, work in both parties, and have voted 
 dry the agricultural territory of the United 
 States everywhere, by the township, county, 
 or state unit. 
 
 The only institutions that touch the same 
 
212 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 territory in a similar way are the Chautauquas 
 in the prosperous agricultural centres. These, 
 too, by the same sign are emphatically anti- 
 saloon in their propaganda, serving to intellec- 
 tualize and secularize the dry sentiment with- 
 out taking it out of the agricultural caste. 
 
 There is a definite line between our farm- 
 civilization and the rest. When a county 
 goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county- 
 seat. Such temperance people as are in the 
 court-house town represent the church-vote, 
 which is even then in goodly proportion a 
 retired-farmer vote. The larger the county 
 seat, the larger the non-church-going popula- 
 tion and the more stubborn the fight. The 
 majority of miners and factory workers are on 
 the wet side everywhere. The irritation caused 
 by the gases in the mines, by the dirty work 
 in the blackness, by the squalor in which the 
 company houses are built, turns men to drink 
 for reaction and lamplight and comradeship. 
 The similar fevers and exasperations of factory 
 life lead the workers to unstring their tense 
 nerves with liquor. The habit of snuggling up 
 close in factories, conversing often, bench by 
 bench, machine by machine, inclines them to 
 get together for their pleasures at the bar. 
 
SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON 213 
 
 In industrial America there is an anti-saloon 
 minority in moral sympathy with the temper- 
 ance wave brought in by the farmers. But 
 they are outstanding groups. Their leadership 
 seldom dries up a factory town or a mining re- 
 gion, with all the help the Anti-Saloon League 
 can give. 
 
 In the big cities the temperance movement 
 is scarcely understood. The choice residential 
 districts are voted dry for real estate reasons. 
 The men who do this, drink freely at their own 
 clubs or parties. The temperance question 
 would be fruitlessly argued to the end of time 
 were it not for the massive agricultural vote 
 rolling and roaring round each metropolis, 
 reawakening the town churches whose vote is 
 a pitiful minority but whose spokesmen are 
 occasionally strident. 
 
 There is a prophecy abroad that prohibition 
 will be the issue of a national election. If 
 the question is squarely put, there are enough 
 farmers and church-people to drive the saloon 
 out of legal existence. The woman's vote, a 
 little more puritanical than the men's vote, 
 will make the result sure. As one anxious for 
 this victory, I have often speculated on the 
 situation when all America is nominally dry. 
 
214 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 at the behest of the American farmer, the 
 American preacher, and the American woman. 
 When the use of alcohol is treason, what will 
 become of those all but unbroken lines of slum 
 saloons? No lesser force than regular troops 
 could dislodge them, with yesterday's intrench- 
 ment. 
 
 The entrance of the motion picture house 
 into the arena is indeed striking, the first enemy 
 of King Alcohol with real power where that king 
 has deepest hold. If every one of those saloon 
 doors is nailed up by the Chautauqua orators, 
 the photoplay archway will remain open. The 
 people will have a shelter where they can read- 
 just themselves, that offers a substitute for 
 many of the lines of pleasure in the groggery. 
 And a whole evening costs but a dime apiece. 
 Several rounds of drinks are expensive, but the 
 people can sit through as many repetitions of 
 this programme as they desire, for one entrance 
 fee. The dominant genius of the moving pic- 
 ture place is not a gentleman with a red nose 
 and an eye like a dead fish, but some producer 
 who, with all his faults, has given every person 
 in the audience a seven-leagued angel-and- 
 demon telescope. 
 
 Since I have announced myself a farmer and 
 
SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON 215 
 
 a puritan, let me here list the saloon evils not 
 yet recorded in this chapter. They are separate 
 from the catalogue of the individualistic woes of 
 the drunkard that are given in the Scripture. 
 The shame of the American drinking place 
 is the bar-tender who dominates its thinking. 
 His cynical and hardened soul wipes out a 
 portion of the influence of the public school, 
 the library, the self-respecting newspaper. A 
 stream rises no higher than its source, and 
 through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain 
 the group of tired men look upon all the states- 
 men and wise ones of the land. Though he 
 says worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by 
 endless reiteration, is the American slum oracle. 
 At the present the bar-tender handles the 
 neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city 
 politics. 
 
 So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the 
 moving picture man as a local social force. 
 Whatever his private character, the mere 
 formula of his activities makes him a better 
 type. He may not at first sway his group 
 in a directly political way, but he will make 
 himself the centre of more social ideals than 
 the bar-tender ever entertained. And he is 
 beginning to have as intimate a relation to 
 
216 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 his public as the bar-tender. In many cases he 
 stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and 
 is on conversing terms with his habitual cus- 
 tomers, the length of the afternoon and evening. 
 
 Voting the saloon out of the slums by voting 
 America dry, does not, as of old, promise to be 
 a successful operation that kills the patient. 
 In the past some of the photoplay magazines 
 have contained denunciations of the temper- 
 ance people for refusing to say anything in 
 behalf of the greatest practical enemy of the 
 saloon. But it is not too late for the dry forces 
 to repent. The Anti-Saloon League officers 
 and the photoplay men should ask each other 
 to dinner. More moving picture theatres in 
 doubtful territory will help make dry voters. 
 And wet territory voted dry will bring about 
 a greatly accelerated patronage of the photo- 
 play houses. There is every strategic reason 
 why these two forces should patch up a truce. 
 
 Meanwhile, the cave-man, reader of picture- 
 writing, is given a chance to admit light into 
 his mind, whatever he puts to his lips. Let 
 us look for the day, be it a puritan triumph or 
 not, when the sons and the daughters of the 
 slums shall prophesy, the young men shall see 
 visions, the old men dream dreams. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA 
 
 The moving picture captains of industry, 
 like the California gold finders of 1849, making 
 colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the 
 same glorious irresponsibility and occasional 
 need of the sheriff. They are Calif ornians 
 more literally than this. Around Los Angeles 
 the greatest and most characteristic moving 
 picture colonies are being built. Each photo- 
 play magazine has its California letter, telling of 
 the putting-up of new studios, and the transfer 
 of actors, with much slap-you-on-the-back per- 
 sonal gossip. This is the outgrowth of the fact 
 that every type of the photoplay but the inti- 
 mate is founded on some phase of the out-of- 
 doors. Being thus dependent, the plant can 
 best be set up where there is no winter. Be- 
 sides this, the Los Angeles region has the sea, 
 the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of 
 grove and field. Landscape and architecture 
 are sub-tropical. But for a description of 
 
 217 
 
218 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 California, ask any traveller or study the back- 
 ground of most any photoplay. 
 
 If the photoplay is the consistent utterance 
 of its scenes, if the actors are incarnations of 
 the land they walk upon, as they should be, 
 California indeed stands a chance to achieve 
 through the films an utterance of her own. 
 Will this land furthest west be the first to cap- 
 ture the inner spirit of this newest and most 
 curious of the arts? It certainly has the op- 
 portunity that comes with the actors, producers, 
 and equipment. Let us hope that every region 
 will develop the silent photographic pageant in 
 a local form as outlined in the chapter on Prog- 
 ress and Endowment. Already the California 
 sort, in the commercial channels, has become 
 the broadly accepted if mediocre national form. 
 People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 
 have often wished those gentlemen had moored 
 their bark in the region of Los Angeles rather 
 than Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been 
 founded there. At last that landing is 
 achieved. 
 
 Patriotic art students have discussed with 
 mingled irony and admiration the Boston 
 domination of the only American culture of 
 the nineteenth century, namely, literature. 
 
CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA 219 
 
 Indianapolis has had her day since then, 
 Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless 
 Boston still controls the text-book in English 
 and dominates our high schools. Ironic feel- 
 ings in this matter on the part of western men 
 are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate 
 cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest 
 hope of a healthful rivalry. They want new 
 romanticists and artists as indigenous to their 
 soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem 
 or Longfellow to the chestnuts of his native 
 heath. Whatever may be said of the patriarchs, 
 from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bron- 
 son Alcott, they were true sons of the New Eng- 
 land stone fences and meeting houses. They 
 could not have been born or nurtured anywhere 
 else on the face of the earth. 
 
 Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the 
 prospect that Los Angeles may become the 
 Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would 
 be better to say the Florence, because California 
 reminds one of colorful Italy more than of 
 any part of the United States. Yet there is a 
 difference. 
 
 The present-day man-in-the-street, man- 
 about-town Californian has an obvious mag- 
 nificence about him that is allied to the euca- 
 
220 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 lyptus tree, the pomegranate. California is a 
 gilded state. It has not the sordidness of gold, 
 as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment 
 of the natural ore that the ragged prospector 
 finds. The gold of California is the color of 
 the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite, 
 the hue of the golden gate that opens the sunset 
 way to mystic and terrible Cathay and Hindu- 
 stan. 
 
 The enemy of California says the state is 
 magnificent but thin. He declares it is as 
 though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian 
 piece of gilt paper, and he who dampens his 
 finger and thrusts it through finds an alkali 
 valley on the other side, the lonely prickly 
 pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted camp- 
 fire. He says the citizens of this state lack 
 the richness of an aesthetic and religious tradi- 
 tion. He says there is no substitute for time. 
 But even these things make for coincidence. 
 This apparent thinness California has in common 
 with the routine photoplay, which is at times 
 as shallow in its thought as the shadow it 
 throws upon the screen. This newness Cali- 
 fornia has in common with all photoplays. 
 It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art 
 to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together. 
 
CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA 221 
 
 Part of the thinness of California is not only 
 its youth, but the result of the physical fact 
 that the human race is there spread over so 
 many acres of land. They try not only to 
 count their mines and enumerate their palm 
 trees, but they count the miles of their sea- 
 coast, and the acres under cultivation and the 
 height of the peaks, and revel in large statistics 
 and the bigness generally, and forget how a few 
 men rattle around in a great deal of scenery. 
 They shout their statistics across the Rockies 
 and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi 
 Valley is non-existent to the Californian. His 
 fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast-line. 
 Through the geographical accident of separa- 
 tion by mountain and desert from the rest of 
 the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrah- 
 ing so assiduously that all variety in the voice 
 is lost. Then he tries gestures, and becomes 
 flamboyant, rococo. 
 
 These are the defects of the motion picture 
 qualities also. Its panoramic tendency runs 
 wild. As an institution it advertises itself 
 with the sweeping gesture. It has the same 
 passion for coast-line. These are not the sins 
 of New England. When, in the hands of 
 masters, they become sources of strength, they 
 
222 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 will be a different set of virtues from those of 
 New England. 
 
 There is no more natural place for the scat- 
 tering of confetti than this state, except the 
 moving picture scene itself. Both have a genius 
 for gardens and dancing and carnival. 
 
 When the Californian relegates the dramatic 
 to secondary scenes, both in his life and his 
 photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic 
 and lyric, he and this instrument may find their 
 immortality together as New England found 
 its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon 
 tide of Spring comes into California through 
 all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms 
 the lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest 
 garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder. But 
 the Californian cannot shout "orange blossoms, 
 orange blossoms ; heliotrope, heliotrope ! " He 
 cannot boom forth "roseleaves, roseleaves" so 
 that he does their beauties justice. Here is 
 where the photoplay can begin to give him a 
 more delicate utterance. And he can go on 
 into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor 
 Films into higher types, for the very name of 
 California is splendor. The California photo- 
 playwright can base his Crowd Picture upon 
 the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco. 
 
CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA 223 
 
 He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splen- 
 dors from something older and more magnificent 
 than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely : 
 the groves of the giant redwoods. 
 
 The campaign for a beautiful nation could 
 very well emanate from the west coast, where 
 with the slightest care grow up models for all 
 the world of plant arrangement and tree- 
 luxury. Our mechanical East is reproved, our 
 tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged 
 every time we look upon those garden paths 
 and forests. 
 
 It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of 
 the motion picture as our national text-book in 
 Art as Boston appropriated to herself the 
 guardianship of the national text-books of 
 Literature. If California has a shining soul, 
 and not merely a golden body, let her forget 
 her seventeen-year-old melodramatics, and 
 turn to her poets who understand the heart 
 underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the 
 dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, 
 the young star treader, George Sterling, that 
 son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the 
 seeds of better scenarios than California has 
 sent us. There are two poems by George 
 Sterling that I have had in mind for many a 
 
224 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 day as conceptions that should inspire mystic 
 films akin to them. These poems are The 
 Night Sentries and Tidal King of Nations. 
 
 But California can tell us stories that are 
 grim children of the tales of the wild Ambrose 
 Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten 
 Nora May French and the austere Edward 
 Rowland Sill. 
 I Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has in- 
 vented the new printing. The state that 
 realizes this may lead the soul of America, 
 day after to-morrow. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 
 
 The moving picture goes almost as far as 
 journalism into the social fabric in some ways, 
 further in others. Soon, no doubt, many a 
 little town will have its photographic news- 
 press. We have already the weekly world-news 
 films from the big centres. 
 
 With local journalism will come devices for 
 advertising home enterprises. Some staple 
 products will be made attractive by having 
 film-actors show their uses. The motion pic- 
 tures will be in the public schools to stay. 
 Text-books in geography, history, zoology, 
 botany, physiology, and other sciences will be 
 illustrated by standardized films. Along with 
 these changes, there will be available at certain 
 centres collections of films equivalent to the 
 Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica. 
 
 And sooner or later we will have a straight 
 out capture of a complete film expression by 
 
 Q 225 
 
226 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the serious forces of civilization. The merely 
 impudent motion picture will be relegated to 
 the leisure hours with yellow journalism. 
 Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active 
 if not as multitudinous as the book-circulating 
 libraries. The oncoming machinery and ex- 
 pense of the motion picture is immense. 
 Where will the money come from.^^ No one 
 knows. What the people want they will get. 
 The race of man cannot afford automobiles, 
 but has them nevertheless. We cannot run 
 away into non-automobile existence or non 
 steam-engine or non-movie life long at a time. 
 We must conquer this thing. While the more 
 stately scientific and educational aspects just 
 enumerated are slowly on their way, the artists 
 must be up and about their ameliorative work. 
 Every considerable effort to develop a noble 
 idiom will count in the final result, as the 
 writers of early English made possible the 
 language of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. 
 We are perfecting a medium to be used as 
 long as Chinese ideographs have been. It 
 will no doubt, like the Chinese language, record 
 in the end massive and classical treatises, im- 
 perial chronicles, law-codes, traditions, and 
 religious admonitions. All this by the motion 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 227 
 
 picture as a recording instrument, not neces- 
 sarily the photoplay, a much more limited 
 thing, a form of art. 
 
 What shall be done in especial by this genera- 
 tion of idealists, whose flags rise and go down, 
 whose battle line wavers and breaks a thou- 
 sand times ? WTiat is the high quixotic splendid 
 call? We know of a group of public-spirited 
 people who advocate, in endowed films, "safety 
 first," another that champions total abstinence. 
 Often their work seems lost in the mass of 
 commercial production, but it is a good begin- 
 ning. Such citizens take an established studio 
 for a specified time and at the end put on the 
 market a production that backs up their par- 
 ticular idea. There are certain terms between 
 the owners of the film and the proprietors of 
 the studio for the division of the income, the 
 profits of the cult being spent on further 
 propaganda. The product need not necessarily 
 be the type outlined in chapter two, The Photo- 
 play of Action. Often some other sort might 
 establish the cause more deeply. But most of 
 the propaganda films are of the action variety, 
 because of the dynamic character of the people 
 who produce them. Fired by fanatic zeal, the 
 auto speeds faster, the rescuing hero runs harder. 
 
228 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the stern policeman and sheriff become more 
 jumpy, all that the audience may be converted. 
 Here if anywhere meditation on the actual re- 
 sources of charm and force in the art is a fitting 
 thing. The crusader should realize that it is 
 not a good Action Play nor even a good argu- 
 ment unless it is indeed the Winged Victory 
 sort. The gods are not always on the side of 
 those who throw fits. 
 
 There is here appended a newspaper descrip- 
 tion of a crusading film, that, despite the im- 
 plications of the notice, has many passages 
 of charm. It is two-thirds Action Photoplay, 
 one-third Intimate-and-friendly. The notice 
 does not imply that at times the story takes 
 pains to be gentle. This bit of writing is all 
 too typical of film journalism. 
 
 "Not only as an argument for suffrage but 
 as a play with a story, a punch, and a mission, 
 'Your Girl and Mine' is produced under the 
 direction of the National Woman's Suffrage 
 Association at the Capitol to-day. 
 
 "Olive Wyndham forsook the legitimate 
 stage for the time to pose as the heroine of 
 the play. Katherine Kaelred, leading lady of 
 'Joseph and his Brethren,' took the part of a 
 woman lawyer battling for the right. Sydney 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 229 
 
 Booth, of the * Yellow Ticket' company posed 
 as the hero of the experiment. John Charles 
 and Katharine Henry played the villain and 
 the honest working girl. About three hundred 
 secondaries were engaged along with the prin- 
 cipals. 
 
 "It is melodrama of the most thrilling sort, 
 in spite of the fact that there is a moral con- 
 cealed in the very title of the play. But who 
 is worried by a moral in a play which has an 
 exciting hand-to-hand fight between a man 
 and a woman in one of the earliest acts, when 
 the quick march of events ranges from a wedding 
 to a murder and an automobile abduction scene 
 that breaks all former speed-records. *The 
 Cause' comes in most symbolically and poeti- 
 cally, a symbolic figure that 'fades out' at 
 critical periods in the plot. Dr. Anna Howard 
 Shaw, the famous suffrage leader, appears 
 personally in the film. 
 
 ***Your Girl and Mine' is a big play with a 
 big mission built on a big scale. It is a whole 
 evening's entertainment, and a very interesting 
 evening at that." Here endeth the newspaper 
 notice. Compare it with the Biograph ad- 
 vertisement of Judith in chapter six. 
 
 There is nothing in the film that rasps like 
 
230 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 this account of it. The cHpping serves to 
 give the street-atmosphere through which our 
 Woman's suffrage Joan of Arcs move to con- 
 quest and glory with unstained banners. 
 
 The obvious amendments to the production 
 as an instrument of persuasion are two. Firstly 
 there should be five reels instead of six, every 
 scene shortened a bit to bring this result. 
 Secondly, the lieutenant governor of the state, 
 who is the Rudolph Rassyndyl of the produc- 
 tion, does not enter the story soon enough, and 
 is too James K. Hacketty all at once. We are 
 jerked into admiration of him, rather than en- 
 snared. But after that the gentleman behaves 
 more handsomely than any of the distinguished 
 lieutenant governors in real life the present 
 writer happens to remember. The figure of 
 Aunt Jane, the queenly serious woman of 
 affairs, is one to admire and love. Her effec- 
 tiveness without excess or strain is in itself an 
 argument for giving woman the vote. The 
 newspaper notice does not state the facts in 
 saying the symbolical figure "fades out" at 
 critical periods in the plot. On the contrary, 
 she appears at critical periods, clothed in white, 
 solemn and royal. She comes into the groups 
 with an adequate allurement, pointing the moral 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 231 
 
 of each situation while she shines brightest. 
 The two children for whom the contest is fought 
 are winsome Httle girls. By the side of their 
 mother in the garden or in the nursery they 
 are a potent argument for the natural rights 
 of femininity. The film is by no means ultra- 
 aesthetic. The implications of the clipping are 
 correct to that degree. But the resources of 
 beauty within the ready command of the ad- 
 vising professional producer are used by the 
 women for all they are worth. It could not 
 be asked of them that they evolve technical 
 novelties. 
 
 Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess 
 of Suffrage are something new in their fashion. 
 Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that unprec- 
 edented woman, Jane Addams, who went to 
 the Hague conference for Peace in the midst of 
 war, which heroic action the future will not 
 forget. Aunt Jane does justice to that breed 
 of women amid the sweetness and flowers and 
 mere scenario perils of the photoplay story. The 
 presence of the "Votes for Women" figure is 
 the beginning of a line of photoplay goddesses 
 that serious propaganda in the new medium 
 will make part of the American Spiritual 
 Hierarchy. In the imaginary film of Our 
 
232 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Lady Springfield, described in the chapter on 
 Architecture-in-Motion, a kindred divinity is 
 presumed to stand by the side of the statue 
 when it first reaches the earth. 
 
 High-minded graduates of university courses 
 in sociology and schools of philanthropy, de- 
 vout readers of The Survey, The Chicago 
 Public, The Masses, The New Republic, La 
 FoUett's, are going to advocate increasingly, 
 their varied and sometimes contradictory 
 causes, in films. These will generally be pro- 
 duced by heroic exertions in the studio, and 
 much passing of the subscription paper out- 
 side. 
 
 Then there are endowments already in ex- 
 istence that will no doubt be diverted to the 
 photoplay channel. In every state house, and 
 in Washington, D.C., increasing quantities of 
 dead printed matter have been turned out 
 year after year. They have served to kindle 
 various furnaces and feed the paper-mills a 
 second time. Many of these routine reports 
 will remain in innocuous desuetude. But one- 
 fourth of them, perhaps, are capable of being 
 embodied in films. If they are scientific 
 demonstrations, they can be made into realistic 
 motion picture records. If they are exhorta- 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 233 
 
 tions, they can be transformed into plays with 
 a moral, brothers of the film Your Girl and 
 Mine. The appropriations for public print- 
 ing should include such work hereafter. 
 
 The scientific museums distribute routine 
 pamphlets that would set the whole world 
 right on certain points if they were but read 
 by said world. Let them be filmed and started. 
 Whatever the congressman is permitted to 
 frank to his constituency, let him send in the 
 motion picture form when it is the expedient 
 and expressive way. 
 
 When men work for the high degrees in the 
 universities, they labor on a piece of literary 
 conspiracy called a thesis which no one outside 
 the university hears of again. The gist of this 
 research work that is dead to the democracy, 
 through the university merits of thoroughness, 
 moderation of statement, and final touch of 
 discovery, would have a chance to live and grip 
 the people in a motion picture transcript, if not 
 a photoplay. It would be University Exten- 
 sion. The relentless fire of criticism which the 
 heads of the departments would pour on the 
 production before they allowed it to pass would 
 result in a standardization of the sense of scien- 
 tific fact over the land. Suppose the film has 
 
234 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the coat of arms of the University of Chicago 
 along with the name of the young graduate 
 whose thesis it is. He would have a chance 
 to reflect credit on the university even as much 
 as a foot-ball player. 
 
 Large undertakings might be under way, like 
 those described in the chapter on Architecture- 
 in-Motion. But these would require much 
 more than the ordinary outlay for thesis 
 work, less, perhaps, than is taken for Athletics. 
 Lyman Howe and several other world-explorers 
 have already set the pace in the more hu- 
 man side of the educative film. The list of 
 Mr. Howe's offerings from the first would 
 reveal many a one that would have run the 
 gauntlet of a university department. He 
 points out a new direction for old energies, 
 whereby professors may become citizens. 
 
 Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, 
 be allowed to ponder over scientific truth. He 
 is at present the victim of the alleged truth of 
 the specious and sentimental variety of photo- 
 graph. It gives the precise edges of the coat 
 or collar of the smirking masher and the exact 
 fibre in the dress of the jumping- jack. The 
 eye grows weary of sharp points and hard edges 
 that mean nothing. All this idiotic precision 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 235 
 
 is going to waste. It should be enlisted in the 
 cause of science and abated everywhere else. 
 The edges in art are as mysterious as in science 
 they are exact. 
 
 Some of the higher forms of the Intimate 
 Moving Picture play should be endowed by 
 local coteries representing their particular re- 
 gion. Every community of fifty thousand has 
 its group of the cultured who have heretofore 
 studied and imitated things done in the big 
 cities. Some of these coteries will in excep- 
 tional cases become creative and begin to ex- 
 press their habitation and name. The Intimate 
 Photoplay is capable of that delicacy and that 
 informality which should characterize neighbor- 
 hood enterprises. 
 
 The plays could be acted by the group who, 
 season after season, have secured the opera 
 house for the annual amateur show. Other 
 dramatic ability could be found in the high- 
 schools. There is enough talent in any place 
 to make an artistic revolution, if once that 
 region is aflame with a common vision. The 
 spirit that made the Irish Players, all so racy 
 of the soil, can also move the company of local 
 photoplayers in Topeka, or Indianapolis, or 
 Denver. Then let them speak for their town, 
 
236 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 not only in great occasional enterprises, but 
 steadily, in little fancies, genre pictures, de- 
 veloping a technique that will finally make 
 magnificence possible. 
 
 There was given not long ago, at the Illinois 
 Country Club here, a performance of The 
 Yellow Jacket by the Coburn Players. It at 
 once seemed an integral part of this chapter. 
 
 The two flags used for a chariot, the bamboo 
 poles for oars, the red sack for a decapitated 
 head, etc., were all convincing, through a direct 
 resemblance as well as the passionate acting. 
 They suggest a possible type of hieroglyphics to 
 be developed by the leader of the local group. 
 
 Let the enthusiast study this westernized 
 Chinese play for primitive representative 
 methods. It can be found in book form, a most 
 readable work. It is by G. C. Hazel ton, Jr., 
 and J. H. Benrimo. The resemblance between 
 the stage property and the thing represented 
 is fairly close. The moving flags on each side of 
 the actor suggest the actual color and progress 
 of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its mag- 
 nificence. The red sack used for a bloody head 
 has at least the color and size of one.* The 
 dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the 
 length of an infant of the age described and 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 237 
 
 wears the general costume thereof. The farm- 
 er's hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agri- 
 cultural implement. 
 
 The evening's list of properties is economical, 
 filling one wagon, rather than three. Photo- 
 graphic realism is splendidly put to rout by 
 powerful representation. When the villager 
 desires to embody some episode that if realis- 
 tically -given would require a setting beyond 
 the means of the available endowment, and 
 does not like the near-Egyptian method, let 
 him evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols. 
 
 The Yellow Jacket was written after long 
 familiarity with the Chinese Theatre in San 
 Francisco. The play is a glory to that city as 
 well as to Hazleton and Benrimo. But every 
 town in the United States has something as 
 striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man 
 who keeps the eye of his soul open. It has its 
 Ministerial Association, its boy's secret society, 
 its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice 
 of the Peace court, its free school for the teach- 
 ing of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its fire- 
 engine house, its milliner's shop. All these 
 could be made visible in photoplays as flies are 
 preserved in amber. 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters looked about him and 
 
238 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 discovered the village graveyard, and made it 
 as wonderful as Noah's ark, or Adam naming 
 the animals, by supplying honest inscriptions 
 to the headstones. Such stories can be told 
 by the Chinese theatrical system as well. As 
 many different films could be included under 
 the general title: "Seven Old Families, and 
 Why they Went to Smash." Or a less ominous 
 series would be "Seven Victorious Souls." For 
 there are triumphs every day under the drab 
 monotony of an apparently defeated town: 
 conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners. 
 Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral 
 for this chapter because there was conscience 
 behind it. First : the rectitude of the Chinese 
 actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic 
 tradition alive, a tradition that was bequeathed 
 from the ancient generations. Then the artistic 
 integrity of the men who readapted the tradi- 
 tion for western consumption, and their re- 
 ligious attitude that kept the high teaching 
 and devout feeling for human life intact in the 
 play. Then the zeal of the Drama League that 
 indorsed it for the country. Then the earnest 
 work of the Coburn Players who embodied it 
 devoutly, so that the whole company became 
 dear friends forever. 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 239 
 
 By some such ladder of conscience as this 
 can the local scenario be endowed, written, 
 acted, filmed, and made a real part of the com- 
 munity life. The Yellow Jacket was a drama, 
 not a photoplay. This chapter does not urge 
 that it be readapted for a photoplay in San 
 Francisco or anywhere else. But a kindred 
 painting-in-motion, something as beautiful and 
 worthy and intimate, in strictly photoplay 
 terms, might well be the flower of the work of 
 the local groups of film actors. 
 
 All the world is talking of the new sect of 
 poets, called the Imagists. They are led by 
 Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, John Gould 
 Fletcher, Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint, D. H. 
 Lawrence, and others. They are gathering 
 followers and imitators. To these followers I 
 would say : the Imagist impulse need not be 
 confined to verse. Why would you be imita- 
 tors of these leaders when you might be creators 
 in a new medium .^^ There is a clear parallel- 
 ism between their point of view in verse and 
 the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay, especially 
 when it is developed from the standpoint of the 
 last part of chapter nine, space measured with- 
 out sound plus time measured vnthout sound. 
 
 There is no clan to-day more purely devoted 
 
240 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 to art for art's sake than the Imagist clan. 
 An Imagist film would offer a noble chal- 
 lenge to the overstrained emotion, the over- 
 loaded splendor, the mere repetition of what 
 are at present the finest photoplays. Now 
 even the masterpieces are incontinent. Ex- 
 cept for some of the old one-reel Biographs 
 of Griffith's beginning, there is nothing of Doric 
 restraint from the best to the worst. Read 
 some of the poems of the people listed above, 
 then imagine the same moods in the films. 
 Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints 
 taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, 
 Pompeian mosaics in kaleidoscopic but logical 
 succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors 
 and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion. 
 
 Scarcely a photoplay but hints at the Im- 
 agists in one scene. Then the illusion is lost 
 in the next turn of the reel. Perhaps it would 
 be a sound observance to confine this form of 
 motion picture to a half reel or quarter reel, 
 just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or 
 quarter page. A series of them could fill a 
 special evening. 
 
 The imagists are colorists. Some people do 
 not consider that photographic black, white, 
 and gray are color. But here for instance are 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 241 
 
 seven colors which the Imagists might use : 
 (1) The whiteness of swans in the light. (2) The 
 whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. (3) The 
 color of a sunburned man in the light. (4) His 
 color in a gentle shadow. (5) His color in a 
 deeper shadow. (6) The blackness of black 
 velvet in the light. (7) The blackness of black 
 velvet in a deep shadow. And to use these 
 colors with definite steps from one to the other 
 does not militate against an artistic mystery 
 of edge and softness in the flow of line. There 
 is a list of possible Imagist textures which is 
 only limited by the number of things to be 
 seen in the world. Probably only seven or 
 ten would be used in one scheme and the same 
 list kept through one production. 
 
 The Imagist photoplay will put discipline 
 into the inner ranks of the enlightened and 
 remind the sculptors, painters, and architects 
 of the movies that there is a continence even 
 beyond sculpture and that seas of realism may 
 not have the power of a little well-considered 
 ehmination. 
 
 The use of the scientific film by established 
 institutions like schools and state governments 
 has been discussed. Let the church also, in 
 her own way, avail herself of the motion picture. 
 
242 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 whole-heartedly, as in mediaeval time she took 
 over the marvel of Italian painting. There 
 was a stage in her history when religious rep- 
 resentation was by Byzantine mosaics, noble 
 in color, having an architectural use, but curious 
 indeed to behold from the standpoint of those 
 who crave a sensitive emotional record. The 
 first paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, giving 
 these formulas a touch of life, were hailed with 
 joy by all Italy. Now the Church Universal 
 has an opportunity to establish her new painters 
 if she will. She has taken over in the course of 
 history, for her glory, miracle plays, Roman- 
 esque and Gothic architecture, stained glass 
 windows, and the music of St. Cecilia's organ. 
 Why not this new splendor.^ The Cathedral 
 of St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights, 
 should establish in its crypt motion pictures 
 as thoroughly considered as the lines of that 
 building, if possible designed by the architects 
 thereof, with the same sense of permanency. 
 
 This chapter does not advocate that the 
 Church lay hold of the photoplays as one more 
 medium for reillustrating the stories of the 
 Bible as they are given in the Sunday-school 
 papers. It is not pietistic simpering that will 
 feed the spirit of Christendom, but a steady 
 
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT 243 
 
 church-patronage of the most skilful and 
 original motion picture artists. Let the Church 
 follow the precedent which finally gave us Fra 
 Angelico, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Leo- 
 nardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Cor- 
 reggio, Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and 
 the rest. 
 
 Who will endow the successors of the present 
 woman's suffrage film, and other great crusad- 
 ing films ? Who will see that the public docu- 
 ments and university researches take on the 
 form of motion pictures ? Who will endow the 
 local photoplay and the Imagist photoplay? 
 Who will take the first great measures to insure 
 motion picture splendors in the church ? 
 
 Things such as these come on the winds of 
 to-morrow. But let the crusader look about 
 him, and where it is possible, put in the dip- 
 lomatic word, and cooperate with the Gray 
 Norns. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS 
 
 Many a worker sees his future America as a 
 Utopia, in which his own profession, achieving 
 dictatorship, alleviates the ills of men. The 
 militarist grows dithyrambic in showing how 
 war makes for the blessings of peace. The 
 economic teacher argues that if we follow his 
 political economy, none of us will have to econo- 
 mize. The church-fanatic says if all churches 
 will merge with his organization, none of them 
 will have to try to behave again. They will just 
 naturally be good. The physician hopes to 
 abolish the devil by sanitation. We have our 
 Utopias. Despite levity, the present writer 
 thinks that such hopes are among the most 
 useful things the earth possesses. 
 
 A normal man in the full tide of his activities 
 finds that a world-machinery could logically 
 be built up by his profession. At least in the 
 heyday of his working hours his vocation satis- 
 fies his heart. So he wants the entire human 
 
ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS 245 
 
 race to taste that satisfaction. Approximate 
 Utopias have been built from the beginning. 
 Many civilizations have had some dominant 
 craft to carry them the major part of the way. 
 The priests have made India. The classical 
 student has preserved Old China to its present 
 hour of new life. The samurai knights have 
 made Japan. Sailors have evolved the British 
 Empire. One of the enticing future Americas 
 is that of the architect. Let the architect ap- 
 propriate the photoplay as his means of prop- 
 aganda and begin. From its intrinsic genius 
 it can give his profession a start beyond all 
 others in dominating this land. Or such is one 
 of many speculations of the present writer. 
 
 The photoplay can speak the language of the 
 man who has a mind World's Fair size. That 
 we are going to have successive generations of 
 such builders may be reasonably implied from 
 past expositions. Beginning with Philadelphia 
 in 1876, and going on to San Francisco and San 
 Diego in 1915, nothing seems to stop us from 
 the habit. Let us enlarge this proclivity into 
 a national mission in as definite a movement, 
 as thoroughly thought out as the evolution of 
 the public school system, the formation of the 
 steel trust, and the like. After duly weighing 
 
246 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 all the world's fairs, let our architects set about 
 making the whole of the United States into a 
 permanent one. Supposing the date to begin 
 the erection be 1930. Till that time there 
 should be tireless if indirect; propaganda that 
 will further the architectural state of mind, 
 and later bring about the elucidation of the 
 plans while they are being perfected. For 
 many years this America, founded on the psy- 
 chology of the Splendor Photoplay, will be 
 evolving. It might be conceived as a going 
 concern at a certain date within the lives of 
 men now living, but it should never cease to 
 develop. 
 
 To make films of a more beautiful United 
 States is as practical and worth while a custom 
 as to make military spy maps of every inch 
 of a neighbor's territory, putting in each fence 
 and cross-roads. Those who would satisfy the 
 national pride with something besides battle 
 flags must give our people an objective as 
 shining and splendid as war when it is most 
 glittering, something Napoleonic, and with no 
 outward pretence of excessive virtue. We want 
 a substitute as dramatic internationally, yet 
 world-winning, friend making. If America is 
 to become the financial centre through no fault 
 
ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS 247 
 
 of her own, that fact must have a symbol other 
 than guns on the sea-coast. 
 
 If it is inexpedient for the architectural 
 patriarchs and their young hopefuls to take 
 over the films bodily, let a board of strategy 
 be formed who make it their business to eat 
 dinner with the scenario writers, producers, and 
 owners, conspiring with them in some practical 
 way. 
 
 Why should we not consider ourselves a 
 deathless Panama-Pacific Exposition on a coast- 
 to-coast scale ? Let Chicago be the transporta- 
 tion building, Denver the mining building. 
 Let Kansas City be the agricultural building 
 and Jacksonville, Florida, the horticultural 
 building, and so around the states. 
 
 Even as in mediaeval times men rode for hun- 
 dreds of miles through perils to the permanent 
 fairs of the free cities, the world-travellers will at- 
 tend this exhibit, and many of them will in the 
 end become citizens. Our immigration will be 
 something more than tide upon tide of raw labor. 
 The Architects would send forth publicity films 
 which are not only delineations of a future 
 Cincinnati, Cleveland, or St. Louis, but whole 
 counties and states and groups of states could 
 be planned at one time, with the development 
 
248 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 of their natural fauna, flora, and forestry. 
 Wherever nature has been rendered desolate 
 by industry or mere haste, there let the architect 
 and park-architect proclaim the plan. Wher- 
 ever she is still splendid and untamed, let her 
 not be violated. 
 
 America is in the state of mind where she 
 must visualize herself again. If it is not possible 
 to bring in the New Jerusalem to-day, by public 
 act, with every citizen eating bread and honey 
 under his vine and fig-tree, owning forty acres 
 and a mule, singing hymns and saying prayers 
 all his leisure hours, it is still reasonable to 
 think out tremendous things the American 
 people can do, in the light of what they have 
 done, without sacrificing any of their native 
 cussedness or kick. It was sprawling Chicago 
 that in 1893 achieved the White City. The 
 automobile routes bind the states together closer 
 than muddy counties were held in 1893. A 
 " Permanent World's Fair " may be a phrase dis- 
 tressing to the literal mind. Perhaps it would 
 be better to say "An Architect's America." 
 
 Let each city take expert counsel from the 
 architectural demigods how to tear out the 
 dirty core of its principal business square and 
 erect a combination of civic centre and per- 
 
ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS 249 
 
 manent and glorious bazaar. Let the public 
 debate the types of state flower, tree, and 
 shrub that are expedient, the varieties of vil- 
 lages and middle-sized towns, farm-homes, and 
 connecting parkways. 
 
 Sometimes it seems to me the American 
 expositions are as characteristic things as our 
 land has achieved. They went through without 
 hesitation. The difficulties of one did not deter 
 the erection of the next. The United States may 
 be in many things slack. Often the democracy 
 looks hopelessly shoddy. But it cannot be 
 denied that our people have always risen to the 
 dignity of these great architectural projects. 
 
 Once the population understands they are 
 dealing with the same type of idea on a grander 
 scale, they will follow to the end. We are not 
 proposing an economic revolution, or that 
 human nature be suddenly altered. If California 
 can remain in the World's Fair state of mind for 
 four or five years, and finally achieve such a splen- 
 did result, all the states can undertake a similar 
 project conjointly, and because of the momen- 
 tum of a nation moving together, remain in that 
 mind for the length of the life of a man. 
 
 Here we have this great instrument, the 
 motion picture, the fourth largest industry in 
 
250 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTUEE 
 
 the United States, attended daily by ten million 
 people, and in ten days by a hundred million, 
 capable of interpreting the largest conceivable 
 ideas that come within the range of the plastic 
 arts, and those ideas have not been supplied. 
 It is still the plaything of newly rich vaudeville 
 managers. The nation goes daily, through 
 intrinsic interest in the device, and is dosed with 
 such continued stories as the Adventures of 
 Kathlyn, What happened to Mary, and the 
 Million Dollar Mystery, stretched on through 
 reel after reel, week after week. Kathlyn 
 had no especial adventures. Nothing in par- 
 ticular happened to Mary. The million dollar 
 mystery was : why did the millionaires who 
 owned such a magnificent instrument descend 
 to such silliness and impose it on the people.'* 
 Why cannot our weekly story be henceforth 
 some great plan that is being worked out, whose 
 history will delight us.^^ For instance, every 
 stage of the building of the Panama Canal 
 was followed with the greatest interest in the 
 films. But there was not enough of it to keep 
 the films busy. 
 
 The great material projects are often easier 
 to realize than the little moral reforms. Beau- 
 tiful architectural undertakings, while appearing 
 
ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS 251 
 
 to be material, and succeeding by the laws of 
 American enterprise, bring with them the heal- 
 ing hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly 
 pious, but does more civilizing in its proper 
 hour than many sermons or laws. 
 
 The world seems to be in the hands of ad- 
 venturers. Why not this for the adventure of 
 the American architects .^^ If something akin 
 to this plan does not come to pass through 
 photoplay propaganda, it means there is no 
 American builder with the blood of Julius Caesar 
 in his veins. If there is the old brute lust for 
 empire left in any builder, let him awake. The 
 world is before him. 
 
 As for the other Utopians, the economist, 
 the physician, the puritan, as soon as the archi- 
 tects have won over the photoplay people, 
 let these others take sage counsel and ensnare 
 the architects. Is there a reform worth while 
 that cannot be embodied and enforced by a 
 builder's invention ? A mere city plan, carried 
 out, or the name or intent of a quasi-public 
 building and the list of offices within it may bring 
 about more salutary economic change than all 
 the debating and voting imaginable. So with- 
 out too much theorizing, why not erect our 
 new America and move into it ? 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 ON COMING FORTH BY DAY 
 
 If he will be so indulgent with his author, 
 let the reader approach the photoplay theatre 
 as though for the first time, having again a 
 new point of view. Here the poorest can pay 
 and enter from the glaring afternoon into the 
 twilight of an Ali B aba's cave. The dime 
 is the single open-sesame required. The half- 
 light wherein the audience is seated, by which 
 they can read in an emergency, is as bright 
 and dark as that of some candle-lit churches. 
 It reveals much in the faces and figures of 
 the audience that cannot be seen by common 
 day. Hard edges are the main things that 
 we lose. The gain is in all the delicacies of 
 modelling, tone-relations, form, and color. A 
 hundred evanescent impressions come and go 
 There is often a tenderness of appeal about the 
 most rugged face in the assembly. Humanity 
 takes on its sacred aspect. It is a crude mind 
 that would insist that these appearances are 
 
 252 
 
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY 253 
 
 not real, that the eye does not see them when 
 all eyes behold them. To say dogmatically 
 that any new thing seen by half-light is an illu- 
 sion, is like arguing that a discovery by the 
 telescope or microscope is unreal. If the ap- 
 pearances are beautiful besides, they are not 
 only facts, but assets in our lives. 
 
 Book-reading is not done in the direct noon- 
 sunlight. We retire to the shaded porch. It 
 takes two more steps toward quietness of light 
 to read the human face and figure. Many great 
 paintings and poems are records of things dis- 
 covered in this quietness of light. 
 
 It is indeed ironical in our Ali B aba's cave to 
 see sheer everydayness and hardness upon 
 the screen, the audience dragged back to the 
 street they have escaped. One of the inven- 
 tions to bring the twilight of the gathering into 
 brotherhood with the shadows on the screen is 
 a simple thing known to the trade as the fade- 
 away, that had its rise in a commonplace fashion 
 as a method of keeping the story from ending 
 with the white glare of the empty screen. As 
 a result of the device the figures in the first 
 episode emerge from the dimness and in the last 
 one go back into the shadow whence they came, 
 as foam returns to the darkness of an evening 
 
254 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 sea. In the imaginative pictures the prin- 
 ciple begins to be applied more largely, till 
 throughout the fairy story the figures float 
 in and out from the unknown, as fancies 
 should. This method in its simplicity counts 
 more to keep the place an Ali Baba's cave than 
 many a more complicated procedure. In luxu- 
 rious scenes it brings the soft edges of Correggio, 
 and in solemn ones a light and shadow akin 
 to the effects of Rembrandt. 
 
 Now we have a darkness on which we can 
 paint, an unspoiled twilight. We need not call 
 it the arabian's cave. There is a tomb we 
 might have definitely in mind, an Egyptian 
 burying-place where with a torch we might 
 enter, read the inscriptions, and see the illustra- 
 tions from the Book of the Dead on the wall, 
 or finding that ancient papyrus in the mummy- 
 case, unroll it and show it to the eager assembly, 
 and have the feeling of return. Man is an 
 Egyptian first, before he is any other type of 
 civilized being. The Nile flows through his 
 heart. So let this cave be Egypt, let us incline 
 ourselves to revere the unconscious memories 
 that echo within us when we see the hieroglyph- 
 ics of Osiris, and Isis. Egypt was our long 
 brooding youth. We built the mysteriousness 
 
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY ^55 
 
 of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it 
 into every line of the Sphinx. We thought al- 
 ways of the immemorial. 
 
 The reel now before us is the mighty judg- 
 ment roll dealing with the question of our 
 departure in such a way that any man who 
 beholds it will bear the impress of the admoni- 
 tion upon his heart forever. Those Egyptian 
 priests did no little thing, when amid their 
 superstitions they still proclaimed the Judg- 
 ment. Let no one consider himself ready for 
 death, till like the men by the Nile he can 
 call up every scene, face with courage every 
 exigency of the ordeal. 
 
 There is one copy of the Book of the Dead of 
 especial interest, made for the Scribe Ani, with 
 exquisite marginal drawings. Copies may be 
 found in our large libraries. The particular 
 fac-simile I had the honor to see was in the 
 Lenox Library, New York, several years ago. 
 Ani, according to the formula of the priest- 
 hood, goes through the adventures required of 
 a shade before he reaches the court of Osiris. 
 All the Egyptian pictures on tomb-wall and 
 temple are but enlarged picture-writing made 
 into tableaus. Through such tableaus Ani 
 mov^s. The Ani manuscript has so fascinated 
 
256 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 some of the Egyptologists that it is copied in 
 figures fifteen feet high on the walls of two of 
 the rooms of the British Museum. And you 
 can read the story eloquently told in Maspero. 
 
 Ani knocks at many doors in the underworld. 
 Monstrous gatekeepers are squatting on their 
 haunches with huge knives to slice him if he 
 cannot remember their names or give the right 
 password, or by spells the priests have taught 
 him, convince the sentinels that he is Osiris 
 himself. To further the illusion the name of 
 Osiris is inscribed on his breast. While he is 
 passing these perils his little wife is looking 
 on by a sort of clairvoyant sympathy, though 
 she is still alive. She is depicted mourning 
 him and embracing his mummy on earth at 
 the same time she accompanies him through the 
 shadows. 
 
 Ani ploughs and sows and reaps in the fields 
 of the underworld. He is carried past a dread- 
 ful place on the back of the cow Hathor. After 
 as many adventures as Browning's Childe 
 Roland he steps into the judgment-hall of 
 the gods. They sit in majestic rows. He 
 makes the proper sacrifices, and advances 
 to the scales of justice. There he sees his 
 own heart weighed against the ostrich-feather 
 
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY 257 
 
 of Truth, by the jackal-god Anubis, who has 
 already presided at his embalming. His own 
 soul, in the form of a human-headed hawk, 
 watches the ceremony. His ghost, which is 
 another entity, looks through the door with 
 his little wife. Both of them watch with tense 
 anxiety. The fate of every phase of his per- 
 sonality depends upon the purity of his heart. 
 
 Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster, 
 part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus. 
 This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found 
 corrupt. At last he is declared justified. 
 Thoth, the ibis-headed God of Writing, records 
 the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani 
 moves on past the baffled devourer, with the 
 mystic presence of his little wife rejoicing at 
 his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris. 
 She makes sacrifice with him there. The God 
 of the Dead is indeed a strange deity, a seated 
 semi-animated mummy, with all the appur- 
 tenances of royalty, and with the four sons of 
 Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives, 
 Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne 
 with their hands on his shoulders. 
 
 The justified soul now boards the boat in 
 which the sun rides as it journeys through the 
 night. He rises a glorious boatman in the 
 s 
 
258 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 morning, working an oar to speed the craft 
 through the high ocean of the noon sky. Hence- 
 forth he makes the eternal round with the sun. 
 Therefore in Ancient Egypt the roll was called, 
 not the Book of the Dead, but The Chapters 
 on Coming Forth by Day. 
 
 This book on motion pictures does not pro- 
 fess to be an expert treatise on Egyptology 
 as well. The learned folk are welcome to 
 amend the modernisms that have crept into 
 it. But the fact remains that something like 
 this story in one form or another held Egypt 
 spell-bound for many hundred years. It was 
 the force behind every mummification. It was 
 the reason for the whole Egyptian system of 
 life, death, and entombment, for the man not 
 embalmed could not make the journey. So the 
 explorer finds the Egyptian with a roll of this 
 papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast. 
 The soul needed to return for refreshment 
 periodically to the stone chamber, and the 
 mummy mutilated or destroyed could not en- 
 tertain the guest. Egypt cried out through 
 thousands of years for the ultimate resurrec- 
 tion of the whole man, his coming forth by day. 
 
 We need not fear that a story that so domi- 
 nated a race will be lost on modern souls when 
 
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY 259 
 
 vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that 
 some American prophet-wizard of the future 
 will give us this film in the spirit of an Egyp- 
 tian priest? 
 
 The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited 
 system of classics, bowed down before the 
 Egyptian hierarchy. That cult must have 
 had a fine personal authority and glamour to 
 master such men. The unseen mysteries were 
 always on the Egyptian heart as a burden and 
 a consolation, and though there may have 
 been jugglers in the outer courts of these 
 temples, as there have been in the courts of all 
 temples, no mere actor could make an Egyptian 
 priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a 
 regal enchantment in its lines, and the same 
 sesthetic-mystical power remains in their py- 
 lons and images under the blaze of the all- 
 revealing noonday sun. 
 
 Here is a nation, America, going for dreams 
 into caves as shadowy as the tomb of Queen 
 Thi. There they find too often, not that ancient 
 priestess and ruler, nor any of her kin, nor yet 
 Ani the scribe, nor yet any of the kings, but 
 shabby rags of fancy, or circuses that were 
 better in the street. 
 
 Because ten million people daily enter into 
 
260 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the cave, something akin to Egyptian wizardry, 
 certain national rituals, will be born. By 
 studying the matter of being an Egyptian 
 priest for a little while, the author-producer 
 may learn in the end how best to express and 
 satisfy the spirit-hungers that are peculiarly 
 American. It is sometimes out of the oldest 
 dream that the youngest vision is born. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE PROPHET-WIZARD 
 
 The whirlwind of cowboys and Indians with 
 which the photoplay began, came about because 
 this instrument, in asserting its genius, was 
 feeling its way toward the most primitive 
 forms of life it could find. 
 
 Now there is a tendency for even wilder 
 things. We behold the half -draped figures 
 living in tropical islands or our hairy fore- 
 fathers acting out narratives of the stone age. 
 The moving picture conventionality permits 
 an abbreviation of drapery. If the primitive 
 setting is convincing, the figure in the grass- 
 robe or buffalo hide at once has its rights over 
 the healthful imagination. 
 
 There is in this nation of moving-picture-goers 
 a hunger for tales of fundamental life that are 
 not yet told. The cave-man longs with an 
 incurable homesickness for his ancient day. 
 One of the fine photoplays of primeval life is 
 
 861 
 
262 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 the story called Man's Genesis, described in 
 chapter two. 
 
 We face the exigency the world over of vast 
 instruments like national armies being played 
 against each other as idly and aimlessly as the 
 checker-men on the cracker-barrels of corner 
 groceries. And this invention, the kinetoscope, 
 which affects or will affect as many people as 
 the guns of Europe, is not yet understood in 
 its powers, particularly those of bringing back 
 the primitive in a big rich way. The primitive 
 is always a new and higher beginning to the 
 man who understands it. Not yet has the 
 producer learned that the feeling of the crowd 
 is patriarchal, splendid. He imagines the 
 people want nothing but a silly lark. 
 
 All this apparatus and opportunity, and no 
 immortal soul! Yet by faith and a study of 
 the signs we proclaim that this lantern of 
 wizard-drama is going to give us in time the 
 visible things in the fulness of their primeval 
 force, and some that have been for a long time 
 invisible. To speak in a metaphor, we are 
 going to have the primitive life of Genesis, then 
 all that evolution after: Exodus, Leviticus, 
 Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and 
 on to a new revelation of St. John. In this 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 263 
 
 adolescence of Democracy the history of man 
 is to be retraced, the same round on a higher 
 spiral of life. 
 
 Our democratic dream has been a middle- 
 class aspiration built on a bog of toil-soddened 
 minds. The piles beneath the castle of our 
 near-democratic arts were rotting for lack of 
 folk-imagination. The Man with the Hoe 
 had no spark in his brain. But now a light 
 is blazing. We can build the American soul 
 broad-based from the foundations. We can 
 begin with dreams the veriest stone-club warrior 
 can understand, and as far as an appeal to the 
 eye can do it, lead him in fancy through every 
 phase of life to the apocalyptic splendors. 
 
 This progress, according to the metaphor of 
 this chapter, will be led by prophet- wizards. 
 These were the people that dominated the cave- 
 men of old. But what, more specifically, are 
 prophet- wizards ? 
 
 Let us consider two kinds of present-day 
 people : scientific inventors, on the one hand, 
 and makers of art and poetry and the like, 
 on the other. The especial producers of art 
 and poetry that we are concerned with in this 
 chapter we will call prophet-wizards : men like 
 Albert Durer, Rembrandt, Blake, Elihu Vedder, 
 
264 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 Watts, Rossetti, Tennyson, Coleridge, Poe, 
 Maeterlinck, Yeats, Francis Thompson. 
 
 They have a certain unearthly fascination in 
 some one or many of their works. A few 
 other men might be added to the list. Most 
 great names are better described under other 
 categories, though as much beloved in their 
 own way. But these are especially adapted 
 to being set in opposition to a list of mechanical 
 inventors that might be called realists by con- 
 trast : the Wright brothers, and H. Pierpont 
 Langley, Thomas A. Edison, Charles Steinmitz, 
 John Hays Hammond, Hudson Maxim, Gra- 
 ham Bell. 
 
 The prophet-wizards are of various schools. 
 But they have a common tendency and charac- 
 ter in bringing forth a type of art peculiarly at 
 war with the realistic civilization science has 
 evolved. It is one object of this chapter to 
 show that, when it comes to a clash between 
 the two forces, the wizards should rule, and the 
 realists should serve them. 
 
 The two functions go back through history, 
 sometimes at war, other days in alliance. The 
 poet and the scientist were brethren in the 
 centuries of alchemy. Tennyson, bearing in 
 mind such a period, took the title of Merlin 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 265 
 
 in his veiled autobiography Merlin and the 
 Gleam. 
 
 Wizards and astronomers were one when 
 the angels sang in Bethlehem, ** Peace on Earth, 
 Good Will to Men." There came magicians, 
 saying, "Where is he that is born king of the 
 Jews, for we have seen his star in the east and 
 have come to worship him?" The modern 
 world in its gentler moments seems to take a 
 peculiar thrill of delight from these travellers, 
 perhaps realizing what has been lost from 
 parting with such gentle seers and secular 
 diviners. Every Christmas half the magazines 
 set them forth in richest colors, riding across 
 the desert, following the star to the same man- 
 ger where the shepherds are depicted. 
 
 Those wizard kings, whatever useless charms 
 and talismans they wore, stood for the unknown 
 quantity in spiritual life. A magician is a man 
 who lays hold on the unseen for the mere joy 
 of it, who steals, if necessary, the holy bread 
 and the sacred fire. He is often of the remnant 
 of an ostracized and disestablished priesthood. 
 He is a free-lance in the soul-world, owing 
 final allegiance to no established sect. The 
 fires of prophecy are as apt to descend upon 
 him as upon members of the established faith. 
 
266 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 He loves the mysterious for the beauty of it, 
 the wildness and the glory of it, and not always 
 to compel stiff-necked people to do right. 
 
 It seems to me that the scientific and poetic 
 functions of society should make common cause 
 again, if they are not, as in Merlin's time, 
 combined in one personality. They must rec- 
 ognize that they serve the same society, but 
 with the understanding that the prophetic func- 
 tion is the most important, the wizard vocation 
 the next, and the inventors' and realists' genius 
 important indeed, but the third considera- 
 tion. The war between the scientists and the 
 prophet-wizards has come about because of 
 the half-defined ambition of the scientists to 
 rule or ruin. They give us the steam-engine, 
 the skyscraper, the steam-heat, the flying ma- 
 chine, the elevated railroad, the apartment 
 house, the newspaper, the breakfast food, the 
 weapons of the army, the weapons of the 
 navy, and think that they have beautified our 
 existence. 
 
 Moreover some one rises at this point to 
 make a plea for the scientific imagination. 
 He says the inventor-scientists have brought 
 us the mystery of electricity, which is no hocus- 
 pocus, but a special manifestation of the Imma- 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 267 
 
 nent God within us and about us. He says 
 the student in the laboratory brought us the 
 X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the mystery of 
 radium, the mystery of all the formerly unhar- 
 nessed power of God which man is beginning 
 to gather into the hollow of his hand. 
 
 The one who pleads for the scientific imag- 
 ination points out that Edison has been called 
 the American Wizard. All honor to Edison and 
 his kind. And I admit specifically that Edison 
 took the first great mechanical step to give us 
 the practical kinetoscope and make it possible 
 that the photographs, even of inanimate objects 
 thrown upon the mirror-screen, may become 
 celestial actors. But the final phase of the 
 transfiguration is not the work of this inventor 
 or any other. As long as the photoplays are in 
 the hands of men like Edison they are mere 
 voodooism. We have nothing but Moving 
 Day, as heretofore described. It is only in 
 the hands of the prophetic photoplaywright 
 and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels 
 become as mysterious and dazzling to the think- 
 ing spirit as the wheels of Ezekiel in the first 
 chapter of his prophecy. One can climb into 
 the operator's box and watch the sword-like 
 stream of light till he is as dazzled in flesh 
 
268 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTIIRE 
 
 and spirit as the moth that burns its wings in 
 the lamp. But this is while a glittering vision 
 and not a mere invention is being thrown upon 
 the screen. 
 
 The scientific man can explain away the 
 vision as a matter of the technique of double 
 exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or 
 stopping down. And having reduced it to 
 terms and shown the process, he expects us 
 to become secular and casual again. But of 
 course the sun itself is a mere trick of heat and 
 light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the 
 man in the laboratory. To us it must be a fire 
 upon the altar. 
 
 Transubstantiation must begin. Our young 
 magicians must derive strange new pulse-beats 
 from the veins of the earth, from the sap 
 of the trees, from the lightning of the sky, 
 as well as the alchemical acids, metals, and 
 flames. Then they will kindle the beginning 
 mysteries for our cause. They will build up 
 a priesthood that is free, yet authorized to free- 
 dom. It will be established and disestablished 
 according to the intrinsic authority of the light 
 revealed. 
 
 Now for a closer view of this vocation. 
 
 The picture of Religious Splendor has its 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 269 
 
 obvious form in the delineation of Biblical 
 scenes, which, in the hands of the best com- 
 mercial producers, can be made as worth while 
 as the work of men like Tissot. Such films are 
 by no means to be thought of lightly. This sort 
 of work will remain in the minds of many of 
 the severely orthodox as the only kind of a 
 religious picture worthy of classification. But 
 there are many further fields. 
 
 Just as the wireless receiving station or the 
 telephone switchboard become heroes in the 
 photoplay, so Aaron's rod that confounded the 
 Egyptians, the brazen serpent that Moses up- 
 lifted in the wilderness, the ram's horn that 
 caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah 
 descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from 
 the chariot of fire, can take on a physical elec- 
 trical power and a hundred times spiritual 
 meaning that they could not have in the dead 
 stage properties of the old miracle play or the 
 realism of the Tissot school. The waterfall and 
 the tossing sea are dramatis personse in the 
 ordinary film romance. So the Red Sea over- 
 whelming Pharaoh, the fires of Nebuchadnezzar's 
 furnace sparing and sheltering the three holy 
 children, can become celestial actors. And 
 winged couriers can appear, in the pictures, 
 
270 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 with missions of import, just as an angel de- 
 scended to Joshua, saying, "As captain of the 
 host of the Lord am I now come." 
 
 The pure mechanic does not accept the 
 doctrine. "Your alleged supernatural appear- 
 ance," he says, "is based on such a simple fact 
 as this : two pictures can be taken on one 
 film." 
 
 But the analogy holds. Many primitive 
 peoples are endowed with memories that are 
 double photographs. The world faiths, based 
 upon centuries of these appearances, are 
 none the less to be revered because machine- 
 ridden men have temporarily lost the power 
 of seeing their thoughts as pictures in the air, 
 and for the time abandoned the task of adding 
 to tradition. 
 
 Man will not only see visions again, but 
 machines themselves, in the hands of prophets, 
 will see visions. In the hands of commercial 
 men they are seeing alleged visions, and the term 
 " vision " is a part of moving-picture studio slang, 
 unutterably cheapening religion and tradition. 
 When Confucius came, he said one of his tasks 
 was the rectification of names. The leaders 
 of this age should see that this word ''vision'^ 
 comes to mean something more than a piece 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 271 
 
 of studio slang. If it is the conviction of 
 serious minds that the mass of men shall never 
 again see pictures out of Heaven except through 
 such mediums as the kinetoscope lens, let all 
 the higher forces of our land courageously lay 
 hold upon this thing that saves us from per- 
 petual spiritual blindness. 
 
 When the thought of primitive man, embodied 
 in misty forms on the landscape, reached epic 
 proportions in the Greek, he saw the Olympians 
 more plainly than he beheld the Acropolis. 
 Myron, Polykleitos, Phidias, Scopas, Lysippus, 
 Praxiteles, discerned the gods and demigods 
 so clearly they afterward cut them from the 
 hard marble without wavering. Our guardian 
 angels of to-day must be as clearly seen and 
 nobly hewn. 
 
 A double mental vision is as fundamental 
 in human nature as the double necessity for 
 air and light. It is as obvious as that a thing 
 can be both written and spoken. We have 
 maintained that the kinetoscope in the hands 
 of artists is a higher form of picture writing. 
 In the hands of prophet-wizards it will be a 
 higher form of vision-seeing. 
 
 I have said that the commercial men are 
 seeing alleged visions. Take, for instance, the 
 
272 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 large Italian film that attempts to popularize 
 Dante. Though it has a scattering of noble 
 passages, and in some brief episodes it is an 
 enhancement of Gustave Dore, taking it as a 
 whole, it is a false thing. It is full of appari- 
 tions worked out with mechanical skill, yet 
 Dante's soul is not back of the fires and swords 
 of light. It gives to the uninitiated an out- 
 line of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno. 
 It has an encyclopaedic value. If Dante 
 himself had been the high director in the pleni- 
 tude of his resources, it might still have had 
 that hollo wness. A list of words making a 
 poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures 
 forming a photoplay may have an entirely 
 different outcome. It may be like trying to 
 see a perfume or listen to a taste. Religion 
 that comes in wholly through the eye has a 
 new world in the films, whose relation to the 
 old is only discovered by experiment and intui- 
 tion, patience and devotion. 
 
 But let us imagine the grandson of an Italian 
 immigrant to America, a young seer, trained 
 in the photoplay technique by the high Ameri- 
 can masters, knowing all the moving picture 
 resources as Dante knew Italian song and 
 mediaeval learning. Assume that he has a 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 273 
 
 genius akin to that of the Florentine. Let him 
 be a Modernist Catholic if you will. Let him 
 begin his message in the timber lands of Minne- 
 sota or the forests of Alaska. "In midway of 
 this our mortal life I found me in a gloomy 
 wood astray." Then let him paint new pic- 
 tures of just punishment beyond the grave, and 
 merciful rehabilitation and great reward. Let 
 his Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise be built of 
 those things which are deepest and highest in 
 the modern mind, yet capable of emerging in 
 picture-writing form. 
 
 Men are needed, therefore they will come. 
 And lest they come weeping, accursed, and 
 alone, let us ask, how shall we recognize them ? 
 There is no standard by which to discern the 
 true from the false prophet, except the mood 
 that is engendered by contemplating the mes- 
 sengers of the past. Every man has his own 
 roll call of noble magicians selected from the 
 larger group. But here are the names with 
 which this chapter began, with some words on 
 their work. 
 
 Albert Diirer is classed as a Renaissance 
 painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in 
 the early Romanesque savageness and strange- 
 ness. And the reader remembers Durer's 
 
274 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 brooding muse called Melancholia that so 
 obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. 
 But the wonder-quality went into nearly all 
 the Durer wood-cuts and etchings. Rem- 
 brandt is a prophet-wizard, not only in his 
 shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of holy 
 scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become 
 incantations. Other artists in the high tides 
 of history have had kindred qualities, but 
 coming close to our day, Elihu Vedder, the 
 American, the illustrator of the Rubaiyat, found 
 it a poem questioning all things, and his very 
 illustrations answer in a certain fashion with 
 winds of infinity, and bring the songs of Omar 
 near to the Book of Job. Vedder 's portraits 
 of Lazarus and Samson are conceptions that 
 touch the hem of the unknown. George Fred- 
 erick Watts was a painter of portraits of the 
 soul itself, as in his delineations of Burne-Jones 
 and Morris and Tennyson. 
 
 It is a curious thing that two prophet- wizards 
 have combined pictures and song. Blake and 
 Rossetti, whatever the failure of their technique, 
 never lacked in enchantment. Students of 
 the motion picture side of poetry would 
 naturally turn to such men for spiritual prec- 
 edents. Blake, that strange Londoner, in his 
 
THE PROPHET-WIZARD 275 
 
 book of Job, is the paramount example of the 
 enchanter doing his work with the engraving 
 tool in his hand. 
 
 Rossetti's Dante's Dream is a painting on 
 the edge of every poet's paradise. As for 
 the poetry of these two men, there are Blake's 
 Songs of Innocence, and Rossetti's Blessed 
 Damozel and his Burden of Nineveh. 
 
 As for the other poets, we have Coleridge, 
 the author of Christabel, that piece of winter 
 witchcraft, Kubla Khan, that oriental dazzle- 
 ment, and the Ancient Mariner, that most 
 English of all this list of enchantments. Of 
 Tennyson's work, besides Merlin and the 
 Gleam, there are the poems when the mantle 
 was surely on his shoulders : The Lady of 
 Shalott, The Lotus Eaters, Sir Galahad, and 
 St. Agnes' Eve. 
 
 Edgar Poe, always a magician, blends this 
 power with the prophetical note in the poem. 
 The Haunted Palace, and in the stories of Wil- 
 liam Wilson, The Black Cat and The Tell-tale 
 Heart. This prophet- wizard side of a man 
 otherwise a wizard only, has been well illus- 
 trated in The Avenging Conscience photoplay. 
 
 From Maeterlinck we have The Bluebird 
 and many another dream. I devoutly hope 
 
276 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 I will never see in the films an attempt to para- 
 phrase this master. But some disciple of his 
 should conquer the photoplay medium, giving 
 us great original works. 
 
 Yeats has bestowed upon us The Land of 
 Heart's Desire, The Secret Rose, and many 
 another piece of imaginative glory. Let us 
 hope that we may be spared any attempts to 
 hastily paraphrase his wonders for the motion 
 pictures. But the man that reads Yeats will 
 be better prepared to do his own work in the 
 films, or to greet the young new masters when 
 they come. 
 
 Finally, Francis Thompson, in The Hound 
 of Heaven, has written a song that the young 
 wizard may lean upon forevermore for private 
 guidance. It is composed of equal parts of 
 wonder and conscience. With this poem in 
 his heart, the roar of the elevated railroad will 
 be no more in his ears, and he will dream of 
 palaces of righteousness, and lead other men 
 to dream of them till the houses of mammon 
 fade away. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 
 
 Without airing my private theology I 
 earnestly request the most sceptical reader of 
 this book to assume that miracles in a Biblical 
 sense have occurred. Let him take it for 
 granted in the fashion of the strictly aesthetic 
 commentator who writes in sympathy with a 
 Fra Angelico painting, or as that great mod- 
 ernist, Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches 
 the problems of faith in the life of St. Francis. 
 Let him also assume, for the length of time 
 that he is reading this chapter if no longer, 
 that miracles, in a Biblical sense, as vivid and 
 as real to the body of the church, will again 
 occur two thousand years in the future : events 
 as wonderful as those others, twenty centuries 
 back. Let us anticipate that many of these 
 will be upon American soil. Particularly as 
 sons and daughters of a new country it is a 
 spiritual necessity for us to look forward to 
 traditions, because we have so few from the 
 
 277 
 
278 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 past identified with the six feet of black earth 
 beneath us. 
 
 The functions of the prophet whereby he 
 definitely painted future sublimities have been 
 too soon abolished in the minds of the wise. 
 Mere forecasting is left to the weather bureau 
 so far as a great section of the purely literary 
 and cultured are concerned. The term prophet 
 has survived in literature to be applied to men 
 like Carlyle : fiery spiritual leaders who speak 
 with little pretence of revealing to-morrow. 
 
 But in the street, definite forecasting of 
 future events is still the vulgar use of the term. 
 Dozens of sober historians predicted the present 
 war with a clean-cut story that was carried 
 out with much faithfulness of detail, considering 
 the thousand interests involved. They have 
 been called prophets in a congratulatory secular 
 tone by the man in the street. These felicita- 
 tions come because well-authorized merchants 
 in futures have been put out of countenance 
 from the days of Jonah and Balaam till now. 
 It is indeed a risky vocation. Yet there is 
 an undeniable line of successful forecasting 
 by the hardy, to be found in the Scripture and 
 in history. In direct proportion as these men 
 of fiery speech were free from sheer silliness. 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 279 
 
 their outlook has been considered and debated 
 by the gravest people round them. The heart 
 of man craves the seer. Take, for instance, the 
 promise of the restoration of Jerusalem in glory 
 that fills the latter part of the Old Testament. 
 It moves the Jewish Zionist, the true race-Jew, 
 to this hour. He is even now endeavoring 
 to fulfil the prophecy. 
 
 Consider the words of John the Baptist, 
 "One mightier than I cometh, the latchet of 
 whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose : 
 he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and 
 with fire." A magnificent foreshadowing, being 
 both a spiritual insight and the statement of 
 a great definite event. 
 
 The heeded seers of the civilization of this 
 our day have been secular in their outlook. 
 Perhaps the most striking was Karl Marx, in 
 the middle of the capitalistic system tracing its 
 development from feudalism and pointing out 
 as inevitable, long before they came, such 
 modern institutions as the Steel Trust and the 
 Standard Oil Company. It remains to be seen 
 whether the Marxian prophecy of the interna- 
 tional alliance of workingmen that is obscured 
 by the present conflict in Europe, and other of 
 his forecastings, will be ultimately verified. 
 
280 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 There have been secular teachers like Darwin, 
 who, by a scientific reconstruction of the past, 
 have implied an evolutionary future based on 
 the biological outlook. Deductions from the 
 teachings of Darwin are said to control those 
 who mould the international doings of Ger- 
 many and Japan. 
 
 There have been inventor-seers like Jules 
 Verne. In Twenty Thousand Leagues under 
 the Sea he dimly discerned the submarine. 
 There is a type of social prophet alHed to 
 Verne. Edward Bellamy, in Looking Back- 
 ward, reduced the world to a matter of pressing 
 the button, turning on the phonograph. It 
 was a combination of glorified department- 
 store and Coney Island, on a cooperative basis. 
 A seventeen-year-old boy from the country, 
 making his first visit to the Woolworth build- 
 ing in New York, and riding in the subway when 
 it is not too crowded, might be persuaded by an 
 eloquent city relative that this is Bellamy's 
 New Jerusalem. 
 
 A soul with a greater insight is H. G. Wells. 
 But he too, in spite of his humanitarian heart, 
 has, in a great mass of his work, the lab- 
 oratory imagination. Serious Americans pro- 
 nounce themselves beneficiaries of Wells* works. 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 281 
 
 and I confess myself edified and thoroughly 
 grateful. Nevertheless, one smells chemicals 
 in the next room when he reads most of Wells' 
 prophecies. The X-ray has moved that Eng- 
 lishman's mind more dangerously than moon- 
 light touches the brain of the chanting witch. 
 One striking and typical story is The Food 
 of the Gods. It is not only a fine speculation, 
 but a great parable. The reader may prefer 
 other tales. Many times Wells has gone into 
 his laboratory to invent our future, in the same 
 state of mind in which an automobile manu- 
 facturer works out an improvement in his car. 
 His disposition has greatly mellowed of late, in 
 this respect, but underneath he is the same 
 Wells. 
 
 Citizens of America, wise or foolish, when 
 they look into the coming days, have the sub- 
 marine mood of Verne, the press-the-button 
 complacency of Bellamy, the wireless tele- 
 graph enthusiasm of Wells. If they express 
 hopes that can be put into pictures with definite 
 edges, they order machinery piled to the skies. 
 They see the redeemed United States running 
 deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a 
 watch. 
 
 This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the 
 
282 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 imaginations of our people, they do not know 
 why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy. 
 Only to the young mechanical engineer does 
 such a hope express real Utopia. He can 
 always keep ahead of the devices that herald 
 its approach. No matter what day we attain 
 and how busy we are adjusting ourselves, he 
 can be moving on, inventing more to-morrows ; 
 ruling the age, not being ruled by it. 
 
 Because this Utopia is in the air, a goodly 
 portion of the precocious boys turn to mechani- 
 cal engineering. Youths with this bent are 
 the most healthful and inspiring young citizens 
 we have. They and their like will fulfil a 
 multitude of the hopes of men like Verne, 
 Bellamy, and Wells. 
 
 But if every mechanical inventor on earth 
 voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it 
 worked out, the real drama of prophecy and 
 fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the 
 human race, would remain uncompleted. 
 
 As Mrs. Browning says in Lady Geraldine's 
 Courtship : — 
 
 If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in 
 
 rising. 
 If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric 
 
 breath. 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 283 
 
 'Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power 
 
 comprising, 
 And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in 
 
 death. 
 
 St. John beheld the New Jerusalem coming 
 down out of Heaven prepared as a bride adorned 
 for her husband, not equipped as a touring 
 car varnished for its owner. 
 
 It is my hope that the moving picture 
 prophet-wizards will set before the world a 
 new group of pictures of the future. The 
 chapter on The Architect as a Crusader en- 
 deavors to show how, by proclaiming that 
 America will become a permanent World's 
 Fair, she can be made so within the lives of 
 men now living, if courageous architects have 
 the campaign in hand. There are other hopes 
 that look a long way further. They peer as 
 far into the coming day as the Chinese his- 
 torian looks into the past. And then they are 
 but halfway to the millennium. 
 
 Any standard illustrator could give us Verne 
 or Bellamy or Wells if he did his best. But 
 we want pictures beyond the skill of any de- 
 lineator in the old mediums, yet within the 
 power of the vnzard photoplay producer. Oh 
 you who are coming to-morrow, show us every- 
 
284 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 day America as it will be when we are only 
 halfway to the millennium yet thousands of 
 years in the future ! Tell what type of honors 
 men will covet, what property they will still 
 be apt to steal, what murders they will com- 
 mit, what the law court and the jail will be or 
 what will be the substitutes, how the newspaper 
 will appear, the office, the busy street. 
 
 Picture to America the lovers in her half- 
 millennium, when usage shall have become 
 iron-handed once again, when noble sweet- 
 hearts must break beautiful customs for the 
 sake of their dreams. Show us the gauntlet 
 of strange courtliness they must pass through 
 before they reach one another, obstacles brought 
 about by the immemorial distinctions of scholar- 
 ship gowns or service badges. 
 
 Make a picture of a world where machinery 
 is so highly developed it utterly disappeared 
 long ago. Show us the antique United States, 
 with ivy vines upon the popular socialist 
 churches, and weather-beaten images of so- 
 cialist saints in the niches of the doors. Show 
 us the battered fountains, the brooding uni- 
 versities, the dusty libraries. Show us houses 
 of administration with statues of heroes in 
 front of them and gentle banners flowing from 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 285 
 
 their pinnacles. Then paint pictures of the 
 oldest trees of the time, and tree-revering 
 ceremonies, with unique costumes and a special 
 priesthood. 
 
 Show us the marriage procession, the chris- 
 tening, the consecration of the boy and girl 
 to the state. Show us the political processions 
 and election riots. Show us the people with 
 their graceful games, their religious pantomimes. 
 Show us impartially the memorial scenes to 
 celebrate the great men and women, and the 
 funerals of the poor. And then moving on to- 
 ward the millennium itself, show America after 
 her victories have been won, and she has grown 
 old, as old as the Sphinx. Then give us the 
 Dragon and Armageddon and the Lake of Fire. 
 
 Author-producer-photographer, who would 
 prophesy, read the last book in the Bible, 
 not to copy it in form and color, but that its 
 power and grace and terror may enter into you. 
 Delineate in your own way, as you are led on 
 your own Patmos, the picture of our land 
 redeemed. After fasting and prayer, let the 
 Spirit conduct you till you see in definite line 
 and form the throngs of the brotherhood of 
 man, the colonnades where the arts are ex- 
 pounded, the gardens where the children dance. 
 
286 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 That which man desires, that will man 
 become. He largely fulfils his own prediction 
 and vision. Let him therefore have a care how 
 he prophesies and prays. We shall have a tin 
 heaven and a tin earth, if the scientists are 
 allowed exclusive command of our highest 
 hours. 
 
 Let us turn to Luke iv. 17. 
 
 "And there was delivered unto him the book 
 of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened 
 the book he found the place where it was 
 written : — 
 
 " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because 
 he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the 
 poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken- 
 hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, 
 and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at 
 liberty them that are bruised, to preach the 
 acceptable year of the Lord. 
 
 "And he closed the book, and he gave it 
 again to the minister, and sat down. And the 
 eyes of all them that were in the synagogue 
 were fastened on him. And he began to say 
 unto them: *This day is this Scripture ful- 
 filled in your ears.' 
 
 "And all bare him witness, and wondered 
 at the gracious words which proceeded out 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 287 
 
 of his mouth. And they said: 'Is not this 
 Joseph's son?'" 
 
 I am moved to think Christ fulj&lled that 
 prophecy because he had read it from child- 
 hood. It is my entirely personal speculation, 
 not brought forth dogmatically, that Scripture 
 is not so much inspired as it is curiously and 
 miraculously inspiring. 
 
 If the New Isaiahs of this time will write 
 their forecastings in photoplay hieroglyphics, 
 the children in times to come, having seen those 
 films from infancy, or their later paraphrases 
 in more perfect form, can rise and say, "This 
 day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." But 
 without prophecy there is no fulfilment, without 
 Isaiah there is no Christ. 
 
 America is often shallow in her dreams be- 
 cause she has no past in the European and 
 Asiatic sense. Our soil has no Roman coin 
 or buried altar or Buddhist tope. For this 
 reason multitudes of American artists have 
 moved to Europe, and only the most universal 
 of wars has driven them home. Year after 
 year Europe drained us of our beauty-lovers, 
 our highest painters and sculptors and the 
 like. They have come pouring home, confused 
 expatriates, trying to adjust themselves. It 
 
288 THE ART OF THE MOVING PICTURE 
 
 is time for the American craftsman and artist 
 to grasp the fact that we must be men enough 
 to construct a to-morrow that grows rich in 
 forecastings in the same way that the past of 
 Europe grows rich in sweet or terrible legends 
 as men go back into it. 
 
 Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, 
 endowers of exquisite films, sects using special 
 motion pictures for a predetermined end, all 
 you who are taking the work as a sacred trust, 
 I bid you God-speed. Let us resolve that 
 whatever America's to-morrow may be, she 
 shall have a day that is beautiful and not 
 crass, spiritual, not material. Let us resolve 
 that she shall dream dreams deeper than the 
 sea and higher than the clouds of heaven, 
 that she shall come forth crowned and trans- 
 figured with her statesmen and wizards and 
 saints and sages about her, with magic behind 
 her and miracle before her. 
 
 Pray that you be delivered from the tempta- 
 tion to cynicism and the timidities of orthodoxy. 
 Pray that the workers in this your glorious 
 new art be delivered from the mere lust of the 
 flesh and pride of life. Let your spirits out- 
 flame your burning bodies. 
 
ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD 289 
 
 ; Consider what it will do to your souls, if 
 you are true to your trust. Every year, 
 despite earthly sorrow and the punishment of 
 your mortal sins, despite all weakness and all 
 of Time's revenges upon you, despite Nature's 
 reproofs and the whips of the angels, new visions 
 will come, new prophecies will come. You 
 
 ; will be seasoned spirits in the eyes of the wise. 
 The record of your ripeness will be found in 
 your craftsmanship. You will be God's thor- 
 oughbreds. 
 
 4: 4: 4: 4: 4: 4: 
 
 It has come then, this new weapon of men, 
 and the face of the whole earth changes. In 
 after centuries its beginning will be indeed 
 remembered. 
 
 It has come, this new weapon of men, and 
 by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim 
 that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder. 
 
 VACHEL LINDSAY. 
 
 Springfield, Illinois, 
 Nov. 1, 1915. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America. 
 

 
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