Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

THIS IS THE SEASON of travel tickets and passports. The best ticket to happiness and the most valid passport to adventure is a membership card in the Amateur Cinema League. With League membership cards in their pockets we can guarantee that cinematic travelers will be thrown out of a greater number of places marked "No photographs permitted" than they could possibly be thrown out of if they did not have them. This sentence is rugged but explicit. A prudent traveler provides in advance for his sudden exits. Here is the ideal means. WHO SAID THAT moviemaking is not gaining ground ? We, personally, were ten minutes late to the office this morning because we stopped at Bryant Park to watch an early robin arriving with his spring luggage including an amateur camera. As we passed on he was getting a closeup of a well-known Library pigeon. The pigeon gave every evidence of being flattered by the attention shown to him. CONCLUSION of the report of the League's Department of Atavistic Research on the Origin of the Film Hound: "The origin of the specimen submitted for analysis is not susceptible of direct tracing. These tentative conclusions are more in the nature of hypotheses than of historiographical pronouncements. They are in conformity with the best modern practice which can classify everything from barratry to bassoon playing as proceeding either from an instinct or a complex— generally suppressed. "Without becoming involved in the case histories and graphs which are to be found in the appendix of this report, we assert that the complex which distinguishes the film hound from the saxaphone spaniel or the radio rodent is a bifurcation or offshoot from the nomadic instinct." We guess he means that moviemakers are great travelers. PRACTICE SENTENCE for cinematographic typists: "Pack My Box with Five Dozen Movie Films." IT HAS an unhappy ending so it must be art," said a critic recently about a new photoplay. We always suspected that Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends well" belonged in the custard pie group and that if he had not produced so unhappy a holocaust in Hamlet he would have been one of the Congreve-Wycherly also-rans. TIME TO TRAVEL ALTHOUGH OUR CLOCK on this page stands at ten past three we are reliably informed that "there is honey still for tea" which reminds us that a reel or two of telephotic closeups of a philanthropic bee serving the great purpose of flower love would provide that discreet measure of sex appeal to which amateur films and photoplays may safely aspire. UNLIMITED MOTION dramatically applied" is the concise definition supplied by a League member to state the fundamental essential required to make the photoplay a new art form. By this he means that action in the photoplay is independent of a proscenium arch, independent of time, of space, of gravity, of muscular limitations and that it can follow the imagination without hindrance. If this action is applied in harmony with dramatic instinct a new art form is brought into existence. ECSTATIC COMMENT of a recently acquired member of the League: "Before I obtained my membership card I was a still photographer. I am still a photographer although I am no longer a still photographer. In fact. I cannot keep still any longer but must tell the world that, by means of my membership card, I have been introduced to the most engaging form of sport I have ever known. I sold my great-grandfather's gold watch to buy a camera. I resigned from five clubs in order to equip myself with accessories. I have established a foundation — from the profits of my sausage business ■ — which provides me a steady income to buy films. My wife has not spoken to me for three weeks. My children have asked that a guardian be appointed to administer my estate. I have broken with all of my former habits and associates. But I count these sacrifices as nothing compared to the wonderful fellowship that I have won, through my membership card, with my fellow nuts." BY PRODUCING a paradoxical purposelessness the punch of this page is pointed prominently to one idea — and we might as well stop trying to be clever about it any longer, because we really have a single track mind. Send Us That Membership Today Five.