 | CHAPTER V The art of the moving picture, |  |
CHAPTER V
THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR
Henceforth the reader will use his discretion
as to when he will read the chapter
and when he will go to the picture show to
verify it.
The shoddiest silent drama may contain
noble views of the sea. This part is almost
sure to be good. It is a fundamental resource.
A special development of this aptitude in
the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity,
not metaphorically but literally: the whirling
of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving
masses of people in balconies, hat-waving
political ratification meetings, ragged glowering
strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in
the market-place. Only Griffith and his close
disciples can do these as well as almost any
manager can reproduce the ocean. Yet the sea
of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to
the Pacific, Atlantic, or Mediterranean. It
takes this new invention, the kinetoscope,
By the law of compensation, while the motion
picture is shallow in showing private passion,
it is powerful in conveying the passions of
masses of men. Bernard Shaw, in a recent
number of the Metropolitan, answered several
questions in regard to the photoplay. Here
are two bits from his discourse: —
"Strike the dialogue from Molière's Tartuffe,
and what audience would bear its mere
stage-business? Imagine the scene in which
Iago poisons Othello's mind against Desdemona,
conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of
the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan
Knowles in the film? Or between Shakespeare's
Lear and any one else's Lear? No, it
seems to me that all the interest lies in the
new opening for the mass of dramatic talent
formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of
one sort or another that do not matter in the
picture-theatre. . . ."
"Failures of the spoken drama may become
the stars of the picture palace. And there
are the authors with imagination, visualization
and first-rate verbal gifts who can write
novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them
write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably
narrative and epic, but physically impracticable
on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a
far better film than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman,
though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece,
and Milton could not write an effective
play."
Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative,
epic, and Paradise Lost. He has in mind,
no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and
angels. This is one kind of a Crowd Picture.
There is another sort to be seen where George
Beban impersonates The Italian in a film of
that title, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener
Sullivan. The first part, taken ostensibly in
Venice, delineates the festival spirit of the people
on the bridges and in gondolas. It gives out
the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness.
Then comes the vineyard, the crowd sentiment
of a merry grape-harvest, then the
massed emotion of many people embarking
on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to
their kindred on the piers, then the drama
of arrival in New York. The wonder of the
steerage people pouring down their proper
gangway is contrasted with the conventional
at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above.
of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance,
then the life of the East Side, from the
policeman to the peanut-man, and including
the bar tender, for the crowd is treated on two
separate occasions.
It is hot weather. The mobs of children
follow the ice-wagon for chips of ice. They
besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling
wagon quite closely, rejoicing to have their
clothes soaked. They gather round the fireplug
that is turned on for their benefit, and
again become wet as drowned rats.
Passing through these crowds are George
Beban and Clara Williams as The Italian
and his sweetheart. They owe the force of
their acting to the fact that they express each
mass of humanity in turn. Their child is
born. It does not flourish. It represents in an
acuter way another phase of the same child-struggle
with the heat that the gamins indicate
in their pursuit of the water-cart.
Then a deeper matter. The hero represents
in a fashion the adventures of the whole
Italian race coming to America: its natural
southern gayety set in contrast to the drab
East Side. The gondolier becomes boot-black.
suffering slum mother. They are not specialized
characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp
in the Novels of Thackeray.
Omitting the last episode, the entrance into
the house of Corrigan, The Italian is a strong
piece of work.
Another kind of Crowd Picture is The Battle,
an old Griffith Biograph, first issued in 1911,
before Griffith's name or that of any actor
in films was advertised. Blanche Sweet is
the leading lady, and Charles H. West the
leading man. The psychology of a bevy of
village lovers is conveyed in a lively sweethearting
dance. Then the boy and his comrades
go forth to war. The lines pass between
hand-waving crowds of friends from the entire
neighborhood. These friends give the sense
of patriotism in mass. Then as the consequence
of this feeling, as the special agents to
express it, the soldiers are in battle. By the
fortunes of war the onset is unexpectedly near
to the house where once was the dance.
The boy is at first a coward. He enters
the old familiar door. He appeals to the girl
to hide him, and for the time breaks her heart.
He goes forth a fugitive not only from battle,
he rallies. He brings a train of powder wagons
through fires built in his path by the enemy's
scouts. He loses every one of his men, and
all but the last wagon, which he drives himself.
His return with that ammunition saves
the hard-fought day.
And through all this, glimpses of the battle
are given with a splendor that only Griffith
has attained.
Blanche Sweet stands as the representative
of the bevy of girls in the house of the dance,
and the whole body social of the village. How
the costumes flash and the handkerchiefs wave
around her! In the battle the hero represents
the cowardice that all the men are resisting
within themselves. When he returns, he is
the incarnation of the hardihood they have
all hoped to display. Only the girl knows he
was first a failure. The wounded general
honors him as the hero above all. Now she
is radiant, she cannot help but be triumphant,
though the side of the house is blown out by a
shell and the dying are everywhere.
This one-reel work of art has been reissued
of late by the Biograph Company. It should
be kept in the libraries of the Universities as a
sense that in order to see a favorite the student
must wait through five other reels of a mixed programme
that usually is bad. That is the reason
one-reel masterpieces seldom appear now. The
producer in a mood to make a special effort wants
to feel that he has the entire evening, and that
nothing before or after is going to be a bore or
destroy the impression. So at present the painstaking
films are apt to be five or six reels of
twenty minutes each. These have the advantage
that if they please at all, one can see
them again at once without sitting through
irrelevant slap-stick work put there to fill out
the time. But now, having the whole evening
to work in, the producer takes too much time
for his good ideas. I shall reiterate throughout
this work the necessity for restraint.
A one hour programme is long enough for
any one. If the observer is pleased, he will
sit it through again and take another hour.
There is not a good film in the world but is
the better for being seen in immediate succession
to itself. Six-reel programmes are a
weariness to the flesh. The best of the old
one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more
in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent
It would pay a manager to hang out a sign:
"This show is only twenty minutes long, but
it is Griffith's great film 'The Battle.'"
But I am digressing. To continue the contrast
between private passion in the theatre and
crowd-passion in the photoplay, let us turn to
Shaw again. Consider his illustration of Iago,
Othello, and Lear. These parts, as he implies,
would fall flat in motion pictures. The minor
situations of dramatic intensity might in many
cases be built up. The crisis would inevitably
fail. Iago and Othello and Lear, whatever
their offices in their governments, are essentially
private persons, individuals in extremis.
If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself
suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic
tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward
that it was a fight between only two or
three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to
analyze what they stood for. They were probably
representatives of groups or races that had
been pursuing each other earlier in the film.
Otherwise the conflict, however violent,
appealed mainly to the sense of speed.
So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could
better be called The Overthrow of Negro
as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff.
Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated
by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku
Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas
Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann).
The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless
white maiden. The white leader, Col.
Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B.
Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as
representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara.
He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his
face till the crisis has passed. The wrath of
the Southerner against the blacks and their
Northern organizers has been piled up through
many previous scenes. As a result this rescue
is a real climax, something the photoplays that
trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.
The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture
in a triple sense. On the films, as in the audience,
it turns the crowd into a mob that is
either for or against the Reverend Thomas
Dixon's poisonous hatred of the negro.
Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his
authors. Wherever the scenario shows traces
of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas
Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated
The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather
stagy Simon Legree: in his avowed views a deal
like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia
in the latter end of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to
prove that Legree was not a fictitious character.
Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards,
George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page,
James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern
men in Mr. Griffith's class. I recommend
their works to him as a better basis for future
Southern scenarios.
The Birth of a Nation has been very properly
denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by
Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others.
But it is still true that it is a wonder in its
Griffith sections. In its handling of masses
of men it further illustrates the principles
that made notable the old one-reel Battle film
described in the beginning of this chapter. The
Battle in the end is greater, because of its
self-possession and concentration: all packed
into twenty minutes.
When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln
(impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes down
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
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 V The art of the moving picture, | |