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Epic Possibilities of the Film Marion F. Lanphier The University of Chicago I REMEMBER with no little plea- sure some of the keen comments upon the movies by one avowedly looking on as a casual stranger, un- used to the ways and methods of film production. Among her remarks con- cerning the occasional strength of re- strained pantomime together with the generally good though frequently bad aspects of the celluloid, Mrs. Gerould said, "But the movie drama has a more serious and varied future than that (slapstick). It is important. It must chuck—it ought to chuck—the Aristotelian unities overboard. The three unities have long since ceased to be sacred, yet the memory of them has over-shadowed the whole of European play-writing. Our serious drama has violated them, but it has never posi- tively contradicted them, flung them out of court. Unity of action has at least been kept, in most cases. Even unity of time has been stuck to; and, in rare cases of late, unity of place. There has been no virtue in discarding the three unities except the virtue that is made of necessity. But the screen play must discard them, in order to find itself. Unity of time and unity of place alike would kill the movies. Even unity of action is by no means neces- sary to it. At least, so it seems to me; but I am very strong for the picar- esque, the epic movie. Certainly, unity of action in the strictest dramatic sense is not a virtue in the screen play. 10 It is precisely the movie's chance tdj give the larger, looser texture of life itself. It does not, at its best, have to artificialize and recast life as does the well-made play. Its motto not only is, but dught to be, "Good-bye Aristotle!" . . . The drama, I fancy, will have to continue to be on speaking terms with him. . . . The movie is another mat- ter. It has its own quite different fu- ture ; and producer, director, actor and author will have to pull together to make that future artistically as well as commercially brilliant."* Sound though the judgment may be for some far future in moving picture art, it is at present dangerous advice; in fact, I venture to say entirely unde- sirable if the current movies are to be rescued. The cinema is a new field with limitless possibilities for disre- garding the unities of time and place if not actual space, but as yet it is a very definite composite, in its average manifestation, of the story of book and stage. I do not refer to adaptations of specific publications but to the type of material used in the three mediums. In the face of the indisputable recog- nition that the photoplay writer works in an altogether different medium with an altogether different mind-set, my statement seems fallacious. It is not. In the many, many stories that studios *"Movies" Gerould, in July, 1921. by Katherine Fullerton The Atlantic Monthly for