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I AM going to discard, so far as this article is concerned, any consideration of my letters and correspondents as such, and discuss a more general issue in the moving-picture field. We cannot take the movies too seriously these days. In the course of a year or so they will become the chief artistic resource of so very many people that their effect, inasmuch as they are the medium of communication to so limitless a public, is necessarily destined to be a matter for national concern. This has been more or less clearly indicated already by the prevalence of that tendency among our lawmakers, near lawmakers, and busybodies, which may be described briefly as the "censorship" habit..
The real truth of the matter is, that all those who have a professional interest in the moving-picture game should concentrate their attention on their public, on the business of supplying that same public with what it wants, letting the "censorship" movement look out for itself. Give the public what it wants, and the public will look out for the censors and make them behave and confine their activities within reasonable and proper limits. Now, what does the public want?
That is so large a question that I do not care to plunge into it offhand. The <7A
general tendencies of the past, however, have been ably dealt with and commented upon in a book which has recently come to my attention. This same book, with no slight degree of insight, also ventures to point out the way of the future. The contents of this book, "The Art of the Moving Picture," by Vachel Lindsay, I wish to outline within the scope of a brief review in the hope that my readers and correspondents may be provoked thereby into making some interesting and illuminating comments on motion pictures in general.
Mr. Lindsay, who, I am given to understand, is an art critic of no mean measure of perspicacity and judgment, divides moving-picture plays into three kinds. There are the plays (i) of Action, (2) of Intimacy, and (3) of Splendor. This last-named kind the author subdivides into plays founded on fairy tales, on patriotic themes, into crowd pictures wherein the "dramatic asset is in showing changing moods of informal public gatherings; putting different types of mobs in contrast," and into plays of splendor with a religious signification.
This analysis of Mr. Lindsay's seems to me a fairly accurate one, and before I go further I want to ask my readers to express to me their prefer