 | CHAPTER VI The art of the moving picture, |  |
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
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 machinelike
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
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 manœuvre
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
to parallel the splendors of Cabiria
and Judith of Bethulia, and to excel them, let
us have Whitmanesque scenarios based on
moods like that of By Blue Ontario's Shore,
The Salute au Monde, and The Passage to
India. Then the people's message will reach
the people at last.
The average Crowd Picture will cling close
to the streets that are, and the usual Patriotic
Picture will but remind us of nationality as it
is at present conceived and aflame, and the
Religious Picture will for the most part
be close to the standard orthodoxies. The
final forms of these merge into each other,
though they approach the heights by different
avenues. We Americans should look for the
great photoplay of tomorrow, that will mark
a decade or a century, that prophesies of the
flags made one, the crowds in brotherhood.
| CHAPTER VI The art of the moving picture, | |