 | CHAPTER XVII The art of the moving picture, |  |
CHAPTER XVII
PROGRESS AND ENDOWMENT
The moving picture goes almost as far as
journalism into the social fabric in some ways,
further in others. Soon, no doubt, many a
little town will have its photographic news-press.
We have already the weekly world-news
films from the big centres.
With local journalism will come devices for
advertising home enterprises. Some staple
products will be made attractive by having
film-actors show their uses. The motion pictures
will be in the public schools to stay.
Text-books in geography, history, zoölogy,
botany, physiology, and other sciences will be
illustrated by standardized films. Along with
these changes, there will be available at certain
centres collections of films equivalent to the
Standard Dictionary and the Encyclopædia
Britannica.
And sooner or later we will have a straight-out
capture of a complete film expression by
impudent motion picture will be relegated to
the leisure hours with yellow journalism.
Photoplay libraries are inevitable, as active
if not as multitudinous as the book-circulating
libraries. The oncoming machinery and expense
of the motion picture is immense.
Where will the money come from? No one
knows. What the people want they will get.
The race of man cannot afford automobiles,
but has them nevertheless. We cannot run
away into non-automobile existence or nonsteam-engine
or non-movie life long at a time.
We must conquer this thing. While the more
stately scientific and educational aspects just
enumerated are slowly on their way, the artists
must be up and about their ameliorative work.
Every considerable effort to develop a noble
idiom will count in the final result, as the
writers of early English made possible the
language of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.
We are perfecting a medium to be used as
long as Chinese ideographs have been. It
will no doubt, like the Chinese language, record
in the end massive and classical treatises, imperial
chronicles, law-codes, traditions, and
religious admonitions. All this by the motion
the photoplay, a much more limited
thing, a form of art.
What shall be done in especial by this generation
of idealists, whose flags rise and go down,
whose battle line wavers and breaks a thousand
times? What is the high quixotic splendid
call? We know of a group of public-spirited
people who advocate, in endowed films, "safety
first," another that champions total abstinence.
Often their work seems lost in the mass of
commercial production, but it is a good beginning.
Such citizens take an established studio
for a specified time and at the end put on the
market a production that backs up their particular
idea. There are certain terms between
the owners of the film and the proprietors of
the studio for the division of the income, the
profits of the cult being spent on further
propaganda. The product need not necessarily
be the type outlined in chapter two, The Photoplay
of Action. Often some other sort might
establish the cause more deeply. But most of
the propaganda films are of the action variety,
because of the dynamic character of the people
who produce them. Fired by fanatic zeal, the
auto speeds faster, the rescuing hero runs harder,
jumpy, all that the audience may be converted.
Here if anywhere meditation on the actual resources
of charm and force in the art is a fitting
thing. The crusader should realize that it is
not a good Action Play nor even a good argument
unless it is indeed the Winged Victory
sort. The gods are not always on the side of
those who throw fits.
There is here appended a newspaper description
of a crusading film, that, despite the implications
of the notice, has many passages
of charm. It is two-thirds Action Photoplay,
one-third Intimate-and-friendly. The notice
does not imply that at times the story takes
pains to be gentle. This bit of writing is all
too typical of film journalism.
"Not only as an argument for suffrage but
as a play with a story, a punch, and a mission,
'Your Girl and Mine' is produced under the
direction of the National Woman's Suffrage
Association at the Capitol to-day.
"Olive Wyndham forsook the legitimate
stage for the time to pose as the heroine of
the play. Katherine Kaelred, leading lady of
'Joseph and his Brethren,' took the part of a
woman lawyer battling for the right. Sydney
as the hero of the experiment. John Charles
and Katharine Henry played the villain and
the honest working girl. About three hundred
secondaries were engaged along with the principals.
"It is melodrama of the most thrilling sort,
in spite of the fact that there is a moral concealed
in the very title of the play. But who
is worried by a moral in a play which has an
exciting hand-to-hand fight between a man
and a woman in one of the earliest acts, when
the quick march of events ranges from a wedding
to a murder and an automobile abduction scene
that breaks all former speed-records. 'The
Cause' comes in most symbolically and poetically,
a symbolic figure that 'fades out' at
critical periods in the plot. Dr. Anna Howard
Shaw, the famous suffrage leader, appears
personally in the film.
"'Your Girl and Mine' is a big play with a
big mission built on a big scale. It is a whole
evening's entertainment, and a very interesting
evening at that." Here endeth the newspaper
notice. Compare it with the Biograph advertisement
of Judith in chapter six.
There is nothing in the film that rasps like
give the street-atmosphere through which our
Woman's Suffrage Joan of Arcs move to conquest
and glory with unstained banners.
The obvious amendments to the production
as an instrument of persuasion are two. Firstly
there should be five reels instead of six, every
scene shortened a bit to bring this result.
Secondly, the lieutenant governor of the state,
who is the Rudolf Rassendyll of the production,
does not enter the story soon enough, and
is too James K. Hacketty all at once. We are
jerked into admiration of him, rather than ensnared.
But after that the gentleman behaves
more handsomely than any of the distinguished
lieutenant governors in real life the present
writer happens to remember. The figure of
Aunt Jane, the queenly serious woman of
affairs, is one to admire and love. Her effectiveness
without excess or strain is in itself an
argument for giving woman the vote. The
newspaper notice does not state the facts in
saying the symbolical figure "fades out" at
critical periods in the plot. On the contrary,
she appears at critical periods, clothed in white,
solemn and royal. She comes into the groups
with an adequate allurement, pointing the moral
The two children for whom the contest is fought
are winsome little girls. By the side of their
mother in the garden or in the nursery they
are a potent argument for the natural rights
of femininity. The film is by no means ultraæsthetic.
The implications of the clipping are
correct to that degree. But the resources of
beauty within the ready command of the advising
professional producer are used by the
women for all they are worth. It could not
be asked of them that they evolve technical
novelties.
Yet the figures of Aunt Jane and the Goddess
of Suffrage are something new in their fashion.
Aunt Jane is a spiritual sister to that unprecedented
woman, Jane Addams, who went to
the Hague conference for Peace in the midst of
war, which heroic action the future will not
forget. Aunt Jane does justice to that breed
of women amid the sweetness and flowers and
mere scenario perils of the photoplay story. The
presence of the "Votes for Women" figure is
the beginning of a line of photoplay goddesses
that serious propaganda in the new medium
will make part of the American Spiritual
Hierarchy. In the imaginary film of Our
Architecture-in-Motion, a kindred divinity is
presumed to stand by the side of the statue
when it first reaches the earth.
High-minded graduates of university courses
in sociology and schools of philanthropy, devout
readers of The Survey, The Chicago
Public, The Masses, The New Republic, La
Follette's, are going to advocate increasingly,
their varied and sometimes contradictory
causes, in films. These will generally be produced
by heroic exertions in the studio, and
much passing of the subscription paper outside.
Then there are endowments already in existence
that will no doubt be diverted to the
photoplay channel. In every state house, and
in Washington, D.C., increasing quantities of
dead printed matter have been turned out
year after year. They have served to kindle
various furnaces and feed the paper-mills a
second time. Many of these routine reports
will remain in innocuous desuetude. But one-fourth
of them, perhaps, are capable of being
embodied in films. If they are scientific
demonstrations, they can be made into realistic
motion picture records. If they are exhortations,
a moral, brothers of the film Your Girl and
Mine. The appropriations for public printing
should include such work hereafter.
The scientific museums distribute routine
pamphlets that would set the whole world
right on certain points if they were but read
by said world. Let them be filmed and started.
Whatever the congressman is permitted to
frank to his constituency, let him send in the
motion picture form when it is the expedient
and expressive way.
When men work for the high degrees in the
universities, they labor on a piece of literary
conspiracy called a thesis which no one outside
the university hears of again. The gist of this
research work that is dead to the democracy,
through the university merits of thoroughness,
moderation of statement, and final touch of
discovery, would have a chance to live and grip
the people in a motion picture transcript, if not
a photoplay. It would be University Extension.
The relentless fire of criticism which the
heads of the departments would pour on the
production before they allowed it to pass would
result in a standardization of the sense of scientific
fact over the land. Suppose the film has
along with the name of the young graduate
whose thesis it is. He would have a chance
to reflect credit on the university even as much
as a foot-ball player.
Large undertakings might be under way, like
those described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion.
But these would require much
more than the ordinary outlay for thesis
work, less, perhaps, than is taken for Athletics.
Lyman Howe and several other world-explorers
have already set the pace in the more human
side of the educative film. The list of
Mr. Howe's offerings from the first would
reveal many a one that would have run the
gantlet of a university department. He
points out a new direction for old energies,
whereby professors may become citizens.
Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing,
be allowed to ponder over scientific truth. He
is at present the victim of the alleged truth of
the specious and sentimental variety of photograph.
It gives the precise edges of the coat
or collar of the smirking masher and the exact
fibre in the dress of the jumping-jack. The
eye grows weary of sharp points and hard edges
that mean nothing. All this idiotic precision
cause of science and abated everywhere else.
The edges in art are as mysterious as in science
they are exact.
Some of the higher forms of the Intimate
Moving Picture play should be endowed by
local coteries representing their particular region.
Every community of fifty thousand has
its group of the cultured who have heretofore
studied and imitated things done in the big
cities. Some of these coteries will in exceptional
cases become creative and begin to express
their habitation and name. The Intimate
Photoplay is capable of that delicacy and that
informality which should characterize neighborhood
enterprises.
The plays could be acted by the group who,
season after season, have secured the opera
house for the annual amateur show. Other
dramatic ability could be found in the high-schools.
There is enough talent in any place
to make an artistic revolution, if once that
region is aflame with a common vision. The
spirit that made the Irish Players, all so racy
of the soil, can also move the company of local
photoplayers in Topeka, or Indianapolis, or
Denver. Then let them speak for their town,
steadily, in little fancies, genre pictures, developing
a technique that will finally make
magnificence possible.
There was given not long ago, at the Illinois
Country Club here, a performance of The
Yellow Jacket by the Coburn Players. It at
once seemed an integral part of this chapter.
The two flags used for a chariot, the bamboo
poles for oars, the red sack for a decapitated
head, etc., were all convincing, through a direct
resemblance as well as the passionate acting.
They suggest a possible type of hieroglyphics to
be developed by the leader of the local group.
Let the enthusiast study this westernized
Chinese play for primitive representative
methods. It can be found in book form, a most
readable work. It is by G. C. Hazelton, Jr.,
and J. H. Benrimo. The resemblance between
the stage property and the thing represented
is fairly close. The moving flags on each side of
the actor suggest the actual color and progress
of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence.
The red sack used for a bloody head
has at least the color and size of one. The
dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the
length of an infant of the age described and
hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agricultural
implement.
The evening's list of properties is economical,
filling one wagon, rather than three. Photographic
realism is splendidly put to rout by
powerful representation. When the villager
desires to embody some episode that if realistically
given would require a setting beyond
the means of the available endowment, and
does not like the near-Egyptian method, let
him evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols.
The Yellow Jacket was written after long
familiarity with the Chinese Theatre in San
Francisco. The play is a glory to that city as
well as to Hazleton and Benrimo. But every
town in the United States has something as
striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man
who keeps the eye of his soul open. It has its
Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society,
its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice
of the Peace court, its free school for the teaching
of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its fire-engine
house, its milliner's shop. All these
could be made visible in photoplays as flies are
preserved in amber.
Edgar Lee Masters looked about him and
as wonderful as Noah's Ark, or Adam naming
the animals, by supplying honest inscriptions
to the headstones. Such stories can be told
by the Chinese theatrical system as well. As
many different films could be included under
the general title: "Seven Old Families, and
Why they Went to Smash." Or a less ominous
series would be "Seven Victorious Souls." For
there are triumphs every day under the drab
monotony of an apparently defeated town:
conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners.
Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral
for this chapter because there was conscience
behind it. First: the rectitude of the Chinese
actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic
tradition alive, a tradition that was bequeathed
from the ancient generations. Then the artistic
integrity of the men who readapted the tradition
for western consumption, and their religious
attitude that kept the high teaching
and devout feeling for human life intact in the
play. Then the zeal of the Drama League that
indorsed it for the country. Then the earnest
work of the Coburn Players who embodied it
devoutly, so that the whole company became
dear friends forever.
By some such ladder of conscience as this
can the local scenario be endowed, written,
acted, filmed, and made a real part of the community
life. The Yellow Jacket was a drama,
not a photoplay. This chapter does not urge
that it be readapted for a photoplay in San
Francisco or anywhere else. But a kindred
painting-in-motion, something as beautiful and
worthy and intimate, in strictly photoplay
terms, might well be the flower of the work of
the local groups of film actors.
Harriet Monroe's magazine, "Poetry" (Chicago),
has given us a new sect, the Imagists: —
Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, John Gould
Fletcher, Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint, D. H.
Lawrence, and others. They are gathering
followers and imitators. To these followers I
would say: the Imagist impulse need not be
confined to verse. Why would you be imitators
of these leaders when you might be creators
in a new medium? There is a clear parallelism
between their point of view in verse and
the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay, especially
when it is developed from the standpoint of the
last part of chapter nine, space measured without
sound plus time measured without sound.
There is no clan to-day more purely devoted
An Imagist film would offer a noble challenge
to the overstrained emotion, the overloaded
splendor, the mere repetition of what
are at present the finest photoplays. Now
even the masterpieces are incontinent. Except
for some of the old one-reel Biographs
of Griffith's beginning, there is nothing of Doric
restraint from the best to the worst. Read
some of the poems of the people listed above,
then imagine the same moods in the films.
Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints
taking on life, animated Japanese paintings,
Pompeian mosaics in kaleidoscopic but logical
succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors
and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion.
Scarcely a photoplay but hints at the Imagists
in one scene. Then the illusion is lost
in the next turn of the reel. Perhaps it would
be a sound observance to confine this form of
motion picture to a half reel or quarter reel,
just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or
quarter page. A series of them could fill a
special evening.
The Imagists are colorists. Some people do
not consider that photographic black, white,
and gray are color. But here for instance are
(1) The whiteness of swans in the light. (2) The
whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. (3) The
color of a sunburned man in the light. (4) His
color in a gentle shadow. (5) His color in a
deeper shadow. (6) The blackness of black
velvet in the light. (7) The blackness of black
velvet in a deep shadow. And to use these
colors with definite steps from one to the other
does not militate against an artistic mystery
of edge and softness in the flow of line. There
is a list of possible Imagist textures which is
only limited by the number of things to be
seen in the world. Probably only seven or
ten would be used in one scheme and the same
list kept through one production.
The Imagist photoplay will put discipline
into the inner ranks of the enlightened and
remind the sculptors, painters, and architects
of the movies that there is a continence even
beyond sculpture and that seas of realism may
not have the power of a little well-considered
elimination.
The use of the scientific film by established
institutions like schools and state governments
has been discussed. Let the Church also, in
her own way, avail herself of the motion picture,
over the marvel of Italian painting. There
was a stage in her history when religious representation
was by Byzantine mosaics, noble
in color, having an architectural use, but curious
indeed to behold from the standpoint of those
who crave a sensitive emotional record. The
first paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, giving
these formulas a touch of life, were hailed with
joy by all Italy. Now the Church Universal
has an opportunity to establish her new painters
if she will. She has taken over in the course of
history, for her glory, miracle plays, Romanesque
and Gothic architecture, stained glass
windows, and the music of St. Cecilia's organ.
Why not this new splendor? The Cathedral
of St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights,
should establish in its crypt motion pictures
as thoroughly considered as the lines of that
building, if possible designed by the architects
thereof, with the same sense of permanency.
This chapter does not advocate that the
Church lay hold of the photoplays as one more
medium for reillustrating the stories of the
Bible as they are given in the Sunday-school
papers. It is not pietistic simpering that will
feed the spirit of Christendom, but a steady
original motion picture artists. Let the Church
follow the precedent which finally gave us Fra
Angelico, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo
da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio,
Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and
the rest.
Who will endow the successors of the present
woman's suffrage film, and other great crusading
films? Who will see that the public documents
and university researches take on the
form of motion pictures? Who will endow the
local photoplay and the Imagist photoplay?
Who will take the first great measures to insure
motion picture splendors in the church?
Things such as these come on the winds of
to-morrow. But let the crusader look about
him, and where it is possible, put in the diplomatic
word, and coöperate with the Gray
Norns.
| CHAPTER XVII The art of the moving picture, | |