When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes down 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 interpreted in especial for us by the two young people in the seats nearest, and the freezing horror of the treason sweeps from the Ford's Theatre audience to the real audience beyond them. The real crowd touched with terror beholds its natural face in the glass.

Later come the pictures of the rioting negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea. Then is delineated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already spoken. For comment on the musical accompaniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the fourteenth chapter entitled "The Orchestra, Conversation and the Censorship."

In the future development of motion pictures mob-movements of anger and joy will go through fanatical and provincial whirlwinds into great national movements of anger and joy.

A book by Gerald Stanley Lee that has a score of future scenarios in it, a book that might well be dipped into by the reader before he 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 Imagination about People; Speaking as One of the Crowd; Touching the Imagination of Crowds." Films in the spirit of these titles would help to make world-voters of us all.

The World State is indeed far away. But as we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other's eyes, in pictures and in fact.

A further discussion of this theme on other planes will be found in the eleventh chapter, entitled "Architecture-in-Motion," and the fifteenth chapter, entitled "The Substitute for the Saloon."



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 landscape of the nation is shown, and that in the beginning. The hero (acted by Sessue Hayakawa), living in the heart of Paris, represents the far-off Empire. He is making a secret military report. He is a responsible member of a colony of Japanese gentlemen. The bevy of them appear before or after his every important action. He still represents this crowd when alone.

The unfortunate Parisian heroine, unable to fathom the mystery of the fanatical hearts of the colony, ventures to think that her love for the Japanese hero and his equally great devotion to her is the important human relation on the horizon. She flouts his obscure work, pits her charms against it. In the end there is a quarrel. The irresistible meets the immovable, and in madness or half by accident, he kills the girl.

The youth is protected by the colony, for he alone can make the report. He is the machine-like representative of the Japanese patriotic formula, till the document is complete. A new arrival in the colony, who obviously cannot write the book, confesses the murder and is executed. The other high fanatic dies soon after, of a broken heart, with the completed manuscript volume in his hand. The one impression of the play is that Japanese patriotism is a peculiar and fearful thing. The particular quality of the private romance is but vaguely given, for such things in their rise and culmination can only be traced by the novelist, or by the gentle alternations of silence and speech on the speaking stage, aided by the hot blood of players actually before us.

Here, as in most photoplays, the attempted lover-conversations in pantomime are but indifferent things. The details of the hero's last quarrel with the heroine and the precise thoughts that went with it are muffled by the inability to speak. The power of the play is in the adequate style the man represents the colony. Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japanese tales more adapted to the films. We should have stories of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi, written from the ground up for the photoplay theatre. We should have the story of the Forty-seven Ronin, not a Japanese stage version, but a work from the source-material. We should have legends of the various clans, picturizations of the code of the Samurai.

The Typhoon is largely indoors. But the Patriotic Motion Picture is generally a landscape. This is for deeper reasons than that it requires large fields in which to manoeuvre armies. Flags are shown for other causes than that they are the nominal signs of a love of the native land.

In a comedy of the history of a newspaper, the very columns of the publication are actors, and may be photographed oftener than the human hero. And in the higher realms this same tendency gives particular power to the panorama and trappings. It makes the natural and artificial magnificence more than a narrative, more than a color-scheme, something other than a drama. In a photoplay by a master, when the American flag is shown, the thirteen stripes are columns of history and the stars are headlines. The woods and the templed hills are their printing press, almost in a literal sense.

Going back to the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same elementary stubbornness with which the oak resists the storm or the cliff resists the wave.

* * * * *

Let the reader consider Antony and Cleopatra, the Cines film. It was brought to America from Italy by George Klein. This and several ambitious spectacles like it are direct violations of the foregoing principles. True, it glorifies Rome. It is equivalent to waving the Italian above the Egyptian flag, quite slowly for two hours. From the stage 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 failures. With obvious defects as a producer, D'Annunzio appreciates spectacular symbolism. He has an instinct for the strange and the beautifully infernal, as they are related to decorative design. Therefore he is able to show us Carthage indeed. He has an Italian patriotism that amounts to frenzy. So Rome emerges body and soul from the past, in this spectacle. He gives us the cruelty of Baal, the intrepidity of the Roman legions. Everything Punic or Italian in the middle distance or massed background speaks of the very genius of the people concerned and actively generates their kind of lightning.

The principals do not carry out the momentum of this immense resource. The half a score of leading characters, with the costumes, gestures, and aspects of gods, are after all works of the taxidermist. They are stuffed gods. They conduct a silly nickelodeon romance while Carthage rolls on toward her doom. They are like sparrows fighting for grain on the edge of the battle.

The doings of his principals are sufficiently evident to be grasped with a word or two of printed insert on the films. But he sentimentalizes about them. He adds side-elaborations of the plot that would require much time to make clear, and a hard working novelist to make interesting. We are sentenced to stop and gaze long upon this array of printing in the darkness, just at the moment the tenth wave of glory seems ready to sweep in. But one hundred words cannot be a photoplay climax. The climax must be in a tableau that is to the eye as the rising sun itself, that follows the thousand flags of the dawn.

In the New York performance, and presumably in other large cities, there was also an orchestra. Behold then, one layer of great photoplay, one layer of bad melodrama, one layer of explanation, and a final cement of music. It is as though in an art museum there should be a man at the door selling would-be masterly short-stories about the paintings, and a man with a violin playing the catalogue. But for further discourse on the orchestra read the fourteenth chapter.

I left Cabiria with mixed emotions. And I had to forget the distressful eye-strain. Few eyes submit without destruction to three hours of film. But the mistakes of Cabiria are those of the pioneer work of genius. It has in it twenty great productions. It abounds in suggestions. Once the classic rules of this art-unit are established, men with equal genius with D'Annunzio and no more devotion, will give us the world's masterpieces. As it is, the background and mass-movements must stand as monumental achievements in vital patriotic splendor.

D'Annunzio is Griffith's most inspired rival in these things. He lacks Griffith's knowledge of what is photoplay and what is not. He lacks Griffith's simplicity of hurdle-race plot. He lacks his avalanche-like action. The Italian needs the American's health and clean winds. He needs his foregrounds, leading actors, and types of plot. But the American has never gone as deep as the Italian into landscapes that are their own tragedians, and into Satanic and celestial ceremonials.

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. Griffith, 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 characters and events as Aldrich conceived them. It was principally the old apocryphal story plus the genius of Griffith and that inner circle of players whom he has endowed with much of his point of view.

This is his cast of characters:—

Judith Blanche Sweet Holofernes Henry Walthall His servant J.J. Lance Captain of the Guards H. Hyde Judith's maid Miss Bruce General of the Jews C.H. Mailes Priests Messrs. Oppleman and Lestina Nathan Robert Harron Naomi Mae Marsh Keeper of the slaves for Holofernes Alfred Paget The Jewish mother Lillian Gish

The Biograph Company advertises the production with the following Barnum and Bailey enumeration: "In four parts. Produced in California. Most expensive Biograph ever produced. 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 reproduction of the ancient army camps, embodying 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 storming of the walls of the city of Bethulia; the hand-to-hand conflicts; the death-defying chariot charges at break-neck speed; the rearing 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 exhibition 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 transcribed 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 balanced 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 Holofernes, 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 deliberation. 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 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 activities 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 conversation with his friend. He thinks his theology is 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 population 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 Holofernes. 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 essential warfare of the hot Assyrian blood and the pure and peculiar Jewish thoroughbredness.

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 according 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 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 humble pioneer of criticism may speak his honest mind.

Though in this story the archaic flavor is well-preserved, the way the producer has pictured the population at peace, in battle, in despair, in victory gives me hope that he or men like unto him will illustrate the American 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 not, bring the nobler side of the equality 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 material 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 transcendent. For films of American patriotism 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 to-morrow, 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 processions 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 with some of our present moving picture achievements, 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 undeveloped field.

Green 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 parley 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 watching a tragedy. Most of them affect one, if they have any effect, like exhibits in an art gallery, as does Josef Israels' oil painting, Alone in the World. We admire the technique, and as for emotion, we feel the picturesqueness 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 nominally 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 photoplay 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 sharpness 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 documents are more important than John 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 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 exaltations 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 ritualistic 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 mediaeval time the hierarchy strengthened its hold on the people with the marvels of Romanesque and Gothic architecture. This matter is further discussed in the seventeenth chapter, entitled "Progress and Endowment."

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 religious 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 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 abolitionism 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 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 gradually 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 imperceptible 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, Caesar and his rivals for fame; mediaeval figures including Dante meditating; later figures, Richelieu, 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 downcast 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 Judgment Seat." Later Lincoln is pictured on the steps of the White House. It is a quaint tableau, in the spirit of the old-fashioned Rogers 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 serpent 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 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 blessing. 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 pouring 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 producer 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 fashionable picture show houses and the cheapest, dirtiest hole in the town. It will soon be reissued 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 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 chapter, 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 stereotyped 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 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 Picture 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 showing the meaning of this outline is to say that the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the Fairy Pageant, along with the rest of the Splendor Pictures, may be described as architecture-in-motion. This chapter will discuss the bearing of the phrase sculpture-in-motion. It will relate directly to chapter two.

First, gentle and kindly reader, let us discuss sculpture in its most literal sense: after that, less realistically, but perhaps more adequately. Let us begin with Annette Kellerman in Neptune's Daughter. This film has a crude plot constructed to show off Annette's various athletic resources. It is good photography, 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 picturesque 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, is irresistible. Why are our managers so mechanical? 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 pitchfork, 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 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 produced 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 occupies 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 hereafter only a passing word or two on literal sculptural effects. It has more in mind the carver's attitude toward all that passes before the eye.

The sculptor George Gray Barnard is responsible for none of the views in this discourse, 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 comparison, 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 clothing. 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 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. Hermon 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." 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 Della 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 photographs 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 Art Institute and 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 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 Bartolommeo Colleoni. 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-picture, 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 conception. The Assyrian commanders in Griffith's Judith would, without great embarrassment, stand this test.

But it may not be the pursuit of an enemy we have in mind. It may be a spring celebration, horsemen in Arcadia, going to some 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 procession 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, 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 animal, 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 sufficient 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 monumental quality. All three are on a stone balcony 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 picture. In costume it is an everyday group, but those three figures are related to one another, 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 incriminating 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 furious 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 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 magnified 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 secret of the countenance by enlarging it much, and concentrating the whole consideration there.

The photoplay producer, seemingly without taking thought, is apt to show a sculptural sense in giving us Newfoundland fishermen, clad in oilskins. The background may have an unconscious Winslow Homer reminiscence. 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 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 cannibal 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 normal, reposeful statues, but the exceptional, such as have been listed for this chapter. Imagine that each dancing, galloping, or fighting 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 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 material 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 bareback, 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 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 sculpture? Should we not look for him in the fulness of time? 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 particular 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 yourself: "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 Picture may be in high sculptural relief, its characteristic 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. Winnow 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 other side, the innkeeper shows a kindred solicitude. 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 hearthlight, the pattern of the mortar lines round the bricks of the hearth. The tableau is a satisfying 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 pattern of the velvety-blacks there are as many subtle gradations as in the pattern of the gray-whites. The tableau is a satisfying 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 Fanchon the Cricket. She is in the cottage with the strange old mother. I have seen a painting 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 hearthstone, and keeps quite close to it. But how well I remember when the first French photoplays began to come. Though unintelligent 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 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 friendliness 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 beautiful 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 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 Dyck 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 cannot 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 Dyck 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 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 Dyck.

Then there is a picture my teachers, Chase and Henri, were never weary of praising, the Girl with the Parrot, by Manet. Here continence in nervous force, expressed by low relief and restraint in tone, is carried to its ultimate 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 Dyck. He loves to give us stately, able, fairly conscientious gentry, rather than overdone royalty. His work represents a certain mood in design that in architecture is called colonial. Such portraits go with houses 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 motherhood. 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 mockery. Hearthstone tales keyed to the mood and using the brush stroke that delineates this especial circle would be unmistakable in their distinction.

Charles W. Hawthorne has pictures in Chicago and New York that imply the Intimate-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 photoplay 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 composition as Hawthorne ever produced. The painting 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 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 background. Yet these people are not hollow as gourds, and they are not caricatured. The Dutch Little Masters have indulged in numberless 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 space measured without sound, plus time measured without sound. This description fits in a special way the delicate form of the Intimate Motion Picture, and there can be studied out, free from irrelevant issues.

As to space measured without sound. Suppose 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 occupied by the little child's dress is in definite relation 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 design. The exact tone value of each one and their precise nearness or distance to one another have 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 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 always, 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 Sorolla y Bastida, the Spaniard. It is the episode where the Rose sends back her servant to inquire the hero's name. As a matter of fact there were Sorollas and Zuloagas all through the piece. The betrothal reception with flying confetti was a satisfying piece of Spanish splendor. 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 impersonation 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 photographer overtakes the actors or allows them to hurry ahead. The plain chase is a bore because there are only these three time-elements. But the chase principle survives in every motion picture and we simply need more of this 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 gesture 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 seemingly 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 structure, and it would have its bearing on the 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 picture 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 irrelevant to the character-parts and the paintings that have preceded. Whether the alleged thesis be love, hate, or ambition, cottage charm, daisy dell sweetness, or the ivy beauty of an 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-motion, the Intimate Pictures, paintings-in-motion, 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 mistaken, 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 photoplay between Crowd Pictures and landscape conceptions, between Patriotic Films and mural paintings, between Religious Films and architecture. And there is just as much of a relation between Fairy Tales and furniture, which same is discussed in this chapter.

Let us return to Moving Day, chapter four. This idea has been represented many times with a certain sameness because the producers have not thought out the philosophy behind it. A picture that is all action is a plague, one that is all elephantine and pachydermatous pageant is a bore, and, most emphatically, a film that is all mechanical legerdemain is a nuisance. The possible charm in a so-called trick picture is in eliminating the tricks, giving them dignity till they are no longer such, but thoughts in motion and made visible. In Moving Day the shoes are the most potent. They go through a drama that is natural to them. To march without human feet inside is but to exaggerate themselves. It would not be amusing to have them walk upside down, for instance. As long as the worn soles touch the pavement, we unconsciously conjure up the character of the absent owners, about whom the shoes are indeed gossiping. So let the remainder of the furniture keep still while the shoes do their best. Let us call to mind a classic fairy-tale involving shoes that are magical: The Seven Leagued Boots, for example, or The Enchanted Moccasins, or the footwear of Puss in Boots. How gorgeous and embroidered any of these 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 personage to spy it. Even at the coronation it should be the centre of the ritual, more gazed at than the crown, and on as dazzling a cushion. The final taking on of the slipper by the lady should be as stately a ceremony as the putting of the circlet of gold on her 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 discourse. Now let them take their innings. Instead of having all of them dance about, invest but one with an inner life. Let its special attributes show themselves but gradually, reaching their climax at the highest point of excitement in the reel, and being an integral part of that enthusiasm. Perhaps, though we be inventing a new fairy-tale, it will resemble the Siege Perilous in the Arthurian story, the chair where none but the perfect knight could sit. A dim row of flaming swords might surround it. When the soul entitled to use this throne appears, the swords might fade away and the gray cover hanging in slack folds roll back because of an inner energy and the chair might turn from gray to white, and with a subtle change of line become a throne.

The photoplay imagination which is able to impart vital individuality to furniture will not stop there. Let the buildings emanate conscious life. The author-producer-photographer, or one or all three, will make into a personality some place akin to the House of the Seven Gables till the ancient building dominates the fancy as it does in Hawthorne's tale. There are various ways to bring about this result: by having its outlines waver in the twilight, by touches of phosphorescence, or by the passing of inexplicable shadows or the like. It depends upon what might be called the genius of the building. There is the Poe story of The Fall of the House of Usher, where with the death of the last heir the castle falls crumbling into the tarn. There are other possible tales on such terms, never yet imagined, to be born to-morrow. Great structures may become in sort villains, as in the old Bible narrative of the origin of the various languages. The producer can show the impious Babel Tower, going higher and higher into the sky, fascinating and tempting the architects till a confusion of tongues turns those masons into quarrelling mobs that become departing caravans, leaving her blasted and forsaken, a symbol of every Babylon that rose after her.

There are fables where the rocks and the mountains speak. Emerson has given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a 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 therefrom. Or supposing it is a chapel, in a knight's adventure. An angel should step from the carving by the door: a design that is half angel, half flower. But let the clock first tremble a bit. Let the carving stir a little, and then let the spirit come forth, that there may be a fine relation between the impersonator and the thing represented. A statue too often takes on life by having the actor abruptly substituted. The actor cannot logically take on more personality than the statue has. He can only give that personality expression in a new channel. In the realm of letters, a real transformation scene, rendered credible to the higher fancy by its slow cumulative movement, is the tale of the change of the dying Rowena to the living triumphant Ligeia in Poe's story of that name. Substitution is not the fairy-story. It is transformation, transfiguration, that is the fairy-story, be it a divine or a diabolical change. There is never more than one witch in a forest, one Siege Perilous at any Round Table. But she is indeed a witch and the other is surely a Siege Perilous.

We might define Fairy Splendor as furniture transfigured, for without transfiguration there is no spiritual motion of any kind. But the phrase "furniture-in-motion" serves a purpose. It gets us back to the earth for a reason. Furniture is architecture, and the fairy-tale picture should certainly be drawn with architectural lines. The normal fairy-tale is a sort of tiny informal child's religion, the baby's secular temple, and it should have for the most part that touch of delicate sublimity that we see in the mountain chapel or grotto, or fancy in the dwellings of Aucassin and Nicolette. When such lines are drawn by the truly sophisticated producer, there lies in them the secret of a more than ritualistic power. Good fairy architecture amounts to an incantation in itself.

If it is a grown-up legend, it must be more than monumental in its lines, like the great stone face of Hawthorne's tale. Even a chair can reach this estate. For instance, let it be the throne of Wodin, illustrating some passage in Norse mythology. If this throne has a language, it speaks with the lightning; if it shakes with its threat, it moves the entire mountain range beneath it. Let the wizard-author-producer climb up from the tricks of Moving Day to the foot-hills where he can see this throne against the sky, as a superarchitect would draw it. But even if he can give this vision in the films, his task will not be worth while if he is simply a teller of old stories. Let us have magic shoes about which are more golden dreams than those concerning Cinderella. Let us have stranger castles than that of Usher, more dazzling chairs than the Siege Perilous. Let us have the throne of Liberty, not the throne of Wodin.

There is one outstanding photoplay that I always have in mind when I think of film magic. It illustrates some principles of this chapter and chapter four, as well as many others through the book. It is Griffith's production of The Avenging Conscience. It is also an example of that rare thing, a use of old material that is so inspired that it has the dignity of a new creation. The raw stuff of the plot is pieced together from the story of The Tell-tale Heart and the poem Annabel Lee. It has behind it, in the further distance, Poe's conscience stories of The Black Cat, and William Wilson. I will describe the film here at length, and apply it to whatever chapters it illustrates.

An austere and cranky bachelor (well impersonated by Spottiswoode Aitken) brings up his orphan nephew with an awkward affection. The nephew is impersonated by Henry B. Walthall. The uncle has an ambition that the boy will become a man of letters. In his attempts at literature the youth is influenced by Poe. This brings about the Poe quality of his dreams at the crisis. The uncle is silently exasperated when he sees his boy's writing-time broken into, and wasted, as he thinks, by an affair with a lovely Annabel (Blanche Sweet). The intimacy and confidence of the lovers has progressed so far that it is a natural 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 melodramatic, but as an actual insult. This is a thing almost impossible to do in the photoplay. This outrage in the midst of an atmosphere of chivalry is one of Griffith's master-moments. It accounts for the volcanic fury of the nephew that takes such trouble to burn itself out afterwards. It is not easy for the young to learn that they must let those people flay them for an hour who have made every sacrifice for them through a life-time.

This scene of insult and the confession scene, later in this film, moved me as similar passages in high drama would do; and their very rareness, even in the hands of photoplay masters, indicates 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 "Love and Life" are undraped figures, climbing a mountain.

The boy, having said good-by, remembers the lady Annabel. It is a crisis after the event. In his vision she is shown in a darkened passageway, all in white, looking out of the window upon the moonlit sky. Simple enough in its elements, this vision is shown twice in glory. The third replica has not the same glamour. The first two are transfigurations into divinity. The phrase thrown on the screen is "The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee." And the sense of loss goes through and through one like a flight of arrows. Another noble picture, more realistic, more sculpturesque, is of Annabel mourning on her knees in her room. Her bended head makes her akin to "Niobe, all tears."

The boy meditating on a park-path is meanwhile watching the spider in his web devour the fly. Then he sees the ants in turn destroy the spider. These pictures are shown on so large a scale that the spiderweb fills the end of the theatre. Then the ant-tragedy does the same. They can be classed as particularly apt hieroglyphics in the sense of chapter thirteen. Their horror and decorative iridescence are of the Poe sort. It is the first hint of the Poe hieroglyphic we have had except the black patch over the eye of the uncle, along with his jaundiced, cadaverous face. The boy meditates on how all nature turns on cruelty and the survival of the fittest.

He passes just now an Italian laborer (impersonated by George Seigmann). This laborer enters later into his dream. He finally goes to sleep in his chair, the resolve to kill his uncle rankling in his heart.

The audience is not told that a dream begins. To understand that, one must see the film through twice. But it is perfectly legitimate to deceive us. Through our ignorance we share the young man's hallucinations, entering into them as imperceptibly as he does. We think it is the next morning. Poe would start the story just here, and here the veritable Poe-esque quality begins.

After debate within himself as to means, the nephew murders his uncle and buries him in the thick wall of the chimney. The Italian laborer witnesses the death-struggle through the window. While our consciences are aching and the world crashes round us, he levies black-mail. Then for due compensation the Italian becomes an armed sentinel. The boy fears detection.

Yet the foolish youth thinks he will be happy. But every time he runs to meet his sweetheart he is appalled by hallucinations over her shoulder. The cadaverous ghost of the uncle is shown on the screen several times. It is an appearance visible to the young man and the audience only. Later the ghost is implied by the actions of the guilty one. We merely imagine it. This is a piece of sound technique. We no more need a dray full of ghosts than a dray full of jumping furniture.

The village in general has never suspected the nephew. Only two people suspect him: the broken-hearted girl and an old friend of his father. This gentleman puts a detective on the trail. (The detective is impersonated by Ralph Lewis.) The gradual breakdown of the victim is traced by dramatic degrees. This is the second case of the thing I have argued as being generally impossible in a photoplay chronicle of a private person, and which the considerations of chapter twelve indicate as exceptional. We trace the innermost psychology of one special citizen step by step to the crisis, and that path 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 application of the theories with which this chapter begins. For furniture-in-motion we have the detective's pencil. For trappings and inventions in motion we have his tapping shoe and the busy clock pendulum. Because this scene is so powerful the photoplay is described in this chapter rather than any other, though the application is more spiritual than literal. The half-mad boy begins to divulge that he thinks that the habitual ticking of the clock is satanically timed to the beating of the dead man's heart. Here more unearthliness hovers round a pendulum than any merely mechanical trick-movements could impart. Then the merest commonplace of the detective tapping 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 coincidence of the owl hoot-hooting outside the window to the same measure, bring us close to the final breakdown. These realistic material actors are as potent as the actual apparitions of the dead man that preceded them. Those visions prepared the mind to invest trifles with significance. The pencil and the pendulum conducting themselves in an apparently everyday fashion, satisfy in a far nobler way the thing in the cave-man attending the show that made him take note in other centuries of the rope that began to hang the butcher, the fire that began to burn the stick, and the stick that began to beat the dog.