Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb-Jul 1912)

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Motion Pictures in Europe By DOROTHY DONNELL Moving Pictures in Rome — what a contrast! Hoary ruins and ragtime, the Coliseum and the Biograph ! But, most appropriately, the theater was adorned with tall marble columns and a great flight of stone steps that suggested trailing togas and sandaled feet. Such a theater the ancient Roman might have entered on his way to the Baths of Titus, or as he rattled home in his chariot from a hard day's work in the Senate House. Indeed, it seemed so much like going to the Temple of Minerva to see Moving Pictures, or expecting vaudeville in the catacombs, that we hesitated before entering. Perhaps this was just another " sight," and we were distinctly weary of sight-seeing and a bit homesick ; but, no — there were the red and yellow posters of cowboy heroes on bucking broncos, and lovely Indian maidens, looking as familiar here in this hot, sleepy Roman square as they do on Fourteenth Street, in spite of the strange words in the voweled Italian tongue above them. A cowboy by any other name would be as thrilling ! So in we went. Indoors, the classic illusion vanished. We were shown to comfortable leather chairs by a dark, smiling usher. The programs were printed in Italian, French and English, but the explanations of the pictures were all startlingly foreign. The somewhat limited Italian vocabulary that we had collected so far being ' ' quanta costa" and "gratia," we had to depend entirely upon the pictures themselves for the story, and I had never realized before how perfectly pantomime can supply the lack of words. The films were all of American make and American subject matter, picturing a sky-scraper in the making on Broadway, a Kentucky feud and a Western round-up. 164 But it was the audience that interested us most. There were Italian ladies in low-necked velvet gowns and diamond-bright hands. The men with them bowed them into their seats with faultless politeness — and sat beside them during the entire performance with their hats on! Dingy street laborers with red neckkerchiefs rubbed elbows with gentlemen in correct evening dress. And such a responsive audience! They sighed at the pathetic parting of Cowboy Jim and his white-haired mother, laughed when the fat policeman kist Mary Jane and received a frying pan on his head, and hissed threateningly when the villain in topboots tied the sheriff's daughter to a log in the sawmill. The pianist was an artist — all Italians are artists in some way — and his music shaded off from gay to grave to the movement of the pictures, more sympathetically than I have ever heard it done in America. From Rome on, we watched eagerly for the Motion Pictures and never failed to find them, tho not in such quantities as in America. In Florence the principal picture theater was on one of the level, sunny squares, where the pigeons tumble musically about the crumbling stucco of the Monastery of Savonarola. In Venice we were rowed to the Pathe Freres in a gondola across the Grand Canal. The Apollo Theater in Lucerne is on a back street beyond the big arcade and the brilliantly colored postcard booths. Here the seats are divided in Continental fashion into first, second, and third class, with a varying scale of prices. A small boy with a dark-lantern guided us to our seats by throwing a circle of light on the floor. A chime of bells tinkled when the pictures were changed, but