Photoplay Magazine, January 1921 (anuary 1921)

A Corot woods, composed by Everett Shinn for "Polly of the Circus.'' Enter—the Artist Into the realm of light and shadow—the king- ed f5 dom of which they are the rightful heirs—come the artists, distinguished ushers of a new era. By KENNETH MACGOWAN PRODUCERS of motion pictures, having brought nearly all the great dramatic artists and celebrated authors to the screen, are now signing up pictorial and scenic artists of international standing. The International forces have annexed Joseph Urban, designer of scenery for the Metropolitan Opera House, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Broadway productions ranging from Shakespeare to musical comedy. Already some of the fruits of his art have reached the screen and enriched it. as for example in the only master- piece of that company. "Humoresque"*. Paramount has signed the magazine illustrator and portraitist, Penrhyn Stanlaws, and the distinguished architect and decorator, Paul Chalfin. Max Reinhardt, greatest of German producers and master of half a dozen fine stage artists, is coming over to make movies of great pictorial appeal. The era of the artist in pictures has come. What have been the steps in its development? What lies in the future? The art of the screen is various. It is story. It is action. It is acting. It is characterization. It is personality. It is idea. But above all it is picture. The skill of story teller, director, actor, film editor is vital; but just as vital is the skill of the pictorial artist. Out of the pictures come story, action, acting, characterization, personality, idea. If the pictures are not good pictures, it will be so much harder for the story to be a good story, the actor a good actor, or the film a good film. The individual picture is the essence of the movies. It is bound to be. so long as light is the final, neces- sary, single essential of the camera. And so long as the picture hold s its unique place, the artist hold his. * An article on Mr. Urban's contributions to screen art appeared in the October issue of this Magazine. Thus far it is a place won by accident. Its progress has been the progress of men unbound by tradition and convention, meeting new opportunities and seizing them. In ten years it has led the screen to accomplishments in setting an atmosphere, which the stage only haltingly attempted under the proddings of Craig and Appia. It was from the warm skies of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, that the first impulse to beauty came. The Italians found castles and palaces to photograph and the marvelous southern sun to dramatize them. California with the same endowment of the essentials of screen beauty—light and shadow —built its own castles. And soon California went one vital step farther. It began to foreswear the economy of open-air stages and to bring the electric light into a darkened studio. Hitherto the direct sunlight and the Californian hills had made "exteriors" marvelous. But "interiors"—flimsy rooms set up on open stages and lit economically, but with a flat glare, by the sunlight filtered through a cotton roof—remained bare and uninteresting. They needed shadow. One day an innovator supplied it. My first recollection of this new beauty is the dungeon of Maciste in "Cabiria," and a great black body straining against the bars of a bright window. My second is the ship's hold in "Peer Gynt," which Lasky's sister-corporation, the Morosco company, made for Cyril Maude. The thing that I saw there was a thing I had never seen in the theater—faces and dim walls lit from a single flaring lamp. Those tense faces were shadowed with a drama that lay deep in the lines of lips and eyes, and leapt out with each slightest movement. Then—in a literal flash—came "Lasky Lighting." Farrar's "Carmen" was the vehicle. Cecil de Mille, once a common- 73