 | CHAPTER III The art of the moving picture, |  |
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 interesting
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 measuring
of the business. I hope that the fifty people
who are manufacturing successful scenarios will
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,
order, from Egypt to America. From that
standpoint, the work least often found, hardest
to make, least popular in the street, may be
in the end the one most treasured in a world-museum
as a counsellor and stimulus of mankind.
Throughout this book I try to bring
to bear the same simple standards of form,
composition, mood, and motive that we used
in finding the fundamental exhibits; the standards
which are taken for granted in art
histories and schools, radical or conservative,
anywhere.
Again we assume it is eight o'clock in the
evening, friend reader, when the chapter
begins.
Just as the Action Picture has its photographic
basis or fundamental metaphor in the
long chase down the highway, so the Intimate
Film has its photographic basis in the fact that
any photoplay interior has a very small ground
plan, and the cosiest of enclosing walls. Many
a worth-while scene is acted out in a space no
bigger than that which is occupied by an office
boy's stool and hat. If there is a table in this
room, it is often so near it is half out of the picture
or perhaps it is against the front line of
the table is seen, and nothing close up to us is
pictured below that. We in the audience are
privileged characters. Generally attending the
show in bunches of two or three, we are members
of the household on the screen. Sometimes we
are sitting on the near side of the family board.
Or we are gossiping whispering neighbors, of
the shoemaker, we will say, with our noses
pressed against the pane of a metaphoric window.
Take for contrast the old-fashioned stage
production showing the room and work table
of a shoemaker. As it were the whole side
of the house has been removed. The shop
is as big as a banquet hall. There is something
essentially false in what we see, no matter
how the stage manager fills in with old boxes,
broken chairs, and the like. But the photoplay
interior is the size such a work-room should
be. And there the awl and pegs and bits of
leather, speaking the silent language of picture
writing, can be clearly shown. They are
sometimes like the engine in chapter two, the
principal actors.
Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay
may be carried out of doors to the row of loafers
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 passions,
such as black hate, transcendent love,
devouring ambition, but rather the half relaxed
or gently restrained moods of human
creatures. It gives also our idiosyncrasies. It
is gossip in extremis. It is apt to chronicle our
In it Colin Clout and his comrades return.
The Intimate Photoplay should not crowd
its characters. It should not choke itself trying
to dramatize the whole big bloody plot of Lorna
Doone, or any other novel with a dozen leading
people. Yet some gentle episode from the
John Ridd farm, some half-chapter when
Lorna and the Doones are almost forgotten,
would be fitting. Let the duck-yard be parading
its best, and Annie among the milk-pails,
her work for the evening well nigh done. The
Vicar of Wakefield has his place in this form.
The Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture
might very well give humorous moments in
the lives of the great, King Alfred burning the
cakes, and other legendary incidents of him.
Plato's writings give us glimpses of Socrates,
in between the long dialogues. And there are
intimate scraps in Plutarch.
Prospective author-producer, do you remember
Landor's Imaginary Conversations, and
Lang's Letters to Dead Authors? Can you
not attain to that informal understanding in
pictorial delineations of such people?
The photoplay has been unjust to itself in
comedies. The late John Bunny's important
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
are seldom given us in this world.
The most successful motion picture drama
of the intimate type ever placed before mine
eyes was Enoch Arden, produced by Cabanne.
Lillian Gish takes the part of Annie, Alfred
Paget impersonates Enoch Arden, and Wallace
Reid takes the part of Philip Ray. The play
is in four reels of twenty minutes each. It
should have been made into three reels by
shortening every scene just a bit. Otherwise
it is satisfying, and I and my friends have
watched it through many times as it has returned
to Springfield.
The mood of the original poem is approximated.
The story is told with fireside friendliness.
The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by
happy children gives us many a genre painting
on the theme of domesticity. It is a photographic
rendering in many ways as fastidious
as Tennyson's versification. The scenes on the
desert island are some of them commonplace.
The shipwreck and the like remind one of
other photoplays, but the rest of the production
has a mood of its own. Seen several
months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory
more than that particular piece of
Perhaps this is because it is pleasing
to me as a theorist. It is a sound example
of the type of film to which this chapter
is devoted. If you cannot get your local
manager to bring Enoch Arden, reread that
poem of Tennyson's and translate it in your
own mind's eye into a gallery of six hundred
delicately toned photographs hung in logical
order, most of them cosy interior scenes,
some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead
in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely
fair. Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general
gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic
English fisher-village, and you will get an
approximate conception of what we mean by
the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or
the Intimate Picture, as I generally call it,
for convenience.
It is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays
that human beings tend to become dolls and
mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to
become human. But the haughty, who scorn
the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of
the feeling that they are being seduced into
going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy
show. And they think that of course one
price and so appealing to the cross-roads taste.
But it is very well to begin in the Punch-and-Judy-show
state of mind, and reconcile ourselves
to it, and then like good democrats
await discoveries. Punch and Judy is the simplest
form of marionette performance, and the
marionette has a place in every street in history
just as the dolls' house has its corner in
every palace and cottage. The French in
particular have had their great periods of puppet
shows; and the Italian tradition survived in
America's Little Italy, in New York for many
a day; and I will mention in passing that one
of Pavlowa's unforgettable dance dramas is
The Fairy Doll. Prospective author-producer,
why not spend a deal of energy on the
photoplay successors of the puppet-plays?
We have the queen of the marionettes already,
without the play.
One description of the Intimate-and-friendly
Comedy would be the Mary Pickford kind of a
story. None has as yet appeared. But we
know the Mary Pickford mood. When it is
gentlest, most roguish, most exalted, it is a
prophecy of what this type should be, not only
in the actress, but in the scenario and setting.
Mary Pickford can be a doll, a village belle,
or a church angel. Her powers as a doll are
hinted at in the title of the production: Such
a Little Queen. I remember her when she
was a village belle in that film that came out
before producers or actors were known by
name. It was sugar-sweet. It was called:
What the Daisy Said. If these productions
had conformed to their titles sincerely, with
the highest photoplay art we would have had
two more examples for this chapter.
Why do the people love Mary? Not on
account of the Daniel Frohman style of handling
her appearances. He presents her to us
in what are almost the old-fashioned stage
terms: the productions energetic and full of
painstaking detail but dominated by a dream
that is a theatrical hybrid. It is neither
good moving picture nor good stage play. Yet
Mary could be cast as a cloudy Olympian or a
church angel if her managers wanted her to be
such. She herself was transfigured in the Dawn
of Tomorrow, but the film-version of that play
was merely a well mounted melodrama.
Why do the people love Mary? Because of
a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood.
Botticelli painted her portrait many centuries
to him in this phase of herself. There is in
the Chicago Art Institute at the top of the
stairs on the north wall a noble copy of a
fresco by that painter, the copy by Mrs. MacMonnies.
It is very near the Winged Victory
of Samothrace. In the picture the muses sit
enthroned. The loveliest of them all is a
startling replica of Mary.
The people are hungry for this fine and
spiritual thing that Botticelli painted in the
faces of his muses and heavenly creatures.
Because the mob catch the very glimpse of it
in Mary's face, they follow her night after
night in the films. They are never quite
satisfied with the plays, because the managers
are not artists enough to know they should
sometimes put her into sacred pictures and not
have her always the village hoyden, in plays
not even hoydenish. But perhaps in this argument
I have but betrayed myself as Mary's infatuated
partisan.
So let there be recorded here the name of
another actress who is always in the intimate-and-friendly
mood and adapted to close-up
interiors, Marguerite Clark. She is endowed
by nature to act, in the same film, the eight-year-old
and finally the shining bride of twenty.
But no production in which she acts that has
happened to come under my eye has done
justice to these possibilities. The transitions
from one of these stages to the other are not
marked by the producer with sufficient delicate
graduation, emphasis, and contrast. Her plots
have been but sugared nonsense, or swashbuckling
ups and downs. She shines in a bevy
of girls. She has sometimes been given the
bevy.
But it is easier to find performers who fit
this chapter, than to find films. Having read so
far, it is probably not quite nine o'clock in the
evening. Go around the corner to the nearest
theatre. You will not be apt to find a pure
example of the Intimate-and-friendly Moving
Picture, but some one or two scenes will make
plain the intent of the phrase. Imagine the
most winsome tableau that passes before you,
extended logically through one or three reels,
with no melodramatic interruptions or awful
smashes. For a further discussion of these
smashes, and other items in this chapter,
read the ninth chapter, entitled "Painting-in-Motion."
| CHAPTER III The art of the moving picture, | |