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might be the developments of the cinema, its paramount destiny lay in the realm of fantasy and idealism.
Such, at any rate, was the vision of the seers of that day. That the promise of their vision has not been realized is no discredit to them. Every justification was theirs. The promise was patently implicit in the early cinema, and, moreover, its warranty remains as an inherence in the cinema of to-day, albeit now heavily overlaid with prosaic dramatism. Certainly no craft or art yet invented has ever approached the motion picture in its unique ability to visualize the illusorv or transcendental. Itself a creature of illusion — the mental deceit of motion — it is potentially the most resourceful and effective creator of illusion ever placed at the service of romanticism.
How, then, does it happen that with the growth of the cinema its exceptional usefulness in the field of imagery has been progressively ignored ? Why has not the world's abundant and ever appealing literature in this extensive domain been translated into film — its fairy tales, its myths, its legends, its fables, its folklore, its poetic idealities, together with its never ending output of whimsy and fantasy?
The answer lies not in the unimaginativeness of the producers, but in the cinema itself. Cronus-like, it has devoured its own offspring. The possibilities born of its first efforts have been swallowed up in its evolving sophistication. As a creator of illusion it has produced so artful a deception of reality that it to-day presents the paradox of having destroyed the very virtue by which this accomplishment has been achieved. At all events, the public no' longer accepts it in its illusional capacity. It has become transformed from an actuator into a mirror of the animated substantialities of life; and the more closely it approximates a true reflection, in story, in personalities and in naturalness of effects, the stronger becomes its popular attraction, with a corresponding further submergence of its primal character.
In the beginning and for a number of years it was nothing other than frankly true to its origin. Its initial attempts at coherent picture stories were characteristicallv illusive, fantastic, magical. With the improvement of dramatic technique and the introduction of professional actors, its original presentments gave way to others of less fanciful conception. Verisimilitude took the place of phantasv. Yet even here for a time illusion lingered as a passable incident, in the form of picturized thoughts, memories and restrospective scenes, with now and then a touch of the spectral, only to be eventually discarded in obedience to the growing exactions of realism.
Nevertheless, unaware of the psychological factor that has motivated the evolution of the cinema, producers have time and again during recent years undertaken the filming of Arabiani Nights stories and other like imaginative creations of perennial popularity. To the producer, as well as the man on the street, the motion picture has appeared to be an ideal