The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

MM The Educational Screen all. They are tolerant, but it is a tired nice. "The persons who have controlled the so-called artistic end of pictures have been in tunny cases people who have failed in the theatre. They have not known enough or inquired enough into things to succeed in the theatre, and so, just as the unset- tled and the failures drift to new gold fields to try their luck, they drifted to the movie in the mushroom days of growth where, as a matter of fact, in that period when the now giant industry was stirring there was greater need for imagination and information and correct projection on the part of the director or producer than has ever been in the theatre." As elements of promise, the writer names a few screen* actors who can be justly called artists—Pickford, Chaplin, Fair- banks, Jannings. (One is a bit startled to see him include Lillian Gish also!) ". . . These people whose popularity has endured have something to give the camera which is as exclusively their own as it is indefinable. . . . Mary Pickford is successful because she is authentic. . . . Chaplin has it, too, but in a dif- ferent way. . . . Before Fairbanks re- leased The Three Musketeers he had put in years of work. He was not masquerad- ing like so many film actors when they get into clothes of another period. He had something of the quality that Emil Jan- nings had in the invading German film, Passion. Jannings did not have to pretend he was a king. He knew that he was." As to the cure for the present and the line of development for the future Mr. Barrymore says: "What the pictures need is not more regulation but more imagination. . . . Any girl in a ten-cent store in a small western town can 'psyche' a movie from seeing a third of it. ■. . . With so much that is good in acting: and in scenery, why are the movies usually so mediocre? . . . There is relatively no imagination." This is the least satisfactory part of the whole article though it was evidently in- tended as the most important. Mr. Bar- rymore utters this word, "imagination," with the air of saying something highly significant, yet it is all but meaningless for lack of definition. In a crude am lawless way imagination is rampant in th< movies, but that is exactly the kind til is not wanted. A higher grade of imal nation should be brought to bear on th< work—imagination controlled and directij by taste and restraint (unknown quality on the screen for the most part), by re| intelligence. Doubtless Mr. Barrymori means this imagination that results irm culture, not from the mere explosion o animal cells in the brain, but he does no say so. Again the writer insists upon the dis tinct difference between the two med& stage and screen, and declares that th artistic progress of the latter will depea upon recognition of this fact. "Even now, in the plastic sense, the po* sibilities of the screen seem to me to % more allied with the story-telling qualitie of painting than with any other art. Bti too often the screen play, instead of stick ing to pictorial narrative, has aped, not th artof the theatre but the tricks of theatri calism. "There is room in the movies for botl writers and directors of a very differcf sort, and this will be clearer in the futufij Most of the people now in the pictures ar a great deal better than they were, becaj they have had to be. The early direct J and writers made the whole process J ridiculous, and evolved such a lot of ab surdity which they called "technic," tha their successors, in order to be listened! at all or to be taken seriously, were for<H to be very different. Even so, it seems t< me any vast improvement is more likely J come from without the film world." But when all is said, John Barrymor has unmistakable faith in an artistic fu ture for the screen—which is most refresl ing by contrast with the opinions of man; other eminent members of the theatric and literary professions. "Men of greater education and expert ence need not look down upon working & the movies. "When someone comes along who thqir oughly seeps himself in the groundwork ill the ^ movies and figures it all out matbe matically, as Ibsen and Pinero did in th