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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FILM
excellent example, which shows clearly how mistaken were the ideas of the pioneer directors, was to be seen in the Comedie Frangaise films of 1908. Members of this celebrated institution were persuaded to perform famous scenes from several of the French classic dramas, including episodes from Tartuffe and Phedre, and to act them as they would on the stage, exaggerating their gestures into the lens of the camera. It was calculated by the promoters of the scheme that the appeal of the well-known scenes coupled with the popularity of the celebrated actors and actresses would achieve a wide success. The fallacy of the idea is obvious, of course, and the result was quite ineffectual. But it suggested to Adolf Zukor the great possibilities of famous plays and famous players, which, as is now well-known, developed into Famous-Players and later into the Famous-PlayersLasky Film Corporation, one of the biggest producing concerns in the world. From the time of the Comedie Frangaise effort onwards, it became a natural course of events to appropriate subjects and persons hallowed by public approval, with complete disregard of their suitability, and to adapt them to the screen. This process is as common, if not commoner, to-day as it ever was. Stage stars are filling the film studios because of the dialogue cinema; any bestseller novel is bought for the screen; any name that comes into the public eye is snapped up for the movies. What of Elinor Glyn, Aimee Macpherson, Philip Yale Drew, and in the past Jack Dempsey, Georges Carpentier, and Steve Donoghue?
Gradually the acted story became the raison d'etre of the film. Stage technique was modified, the gesture still being used in relation to the spoken word, and 'acting' became one of the necessary talents of the movie star. Upon this type of stagey performance, good photographic looks and the power of suggesting sexual passion has the infamous star-system of America grown up, a system that has been slavishly copied in this country. Quite frankly, this sort of thing is not film at all but merely 'living photography.'
Despite all opposition, the natural tendencies of a medium inevitably assert themselves, and, in the case of the film, some of its simpler resources began to show at an early stage. This was not due, however, to any deep thinking on the part of the 'fur dealers and clothes-men,' but to a natural course of development. They were to be found principally in the slapstick comedy, the melodramatic
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