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Like the Little Theater Movement — the Little Cinema Idea is Spreading Rapidly. Film Guilds Are Sprouting Everywhere and Picture Patrons Are Taking Up the New Art of the Future
By Matthew Josephson
The Rise LITTLE
UNDER the surface, one of the most exciting events of the year in motion pictures has been the spread of the "little cinema" idea. We have had our art theaters and theater guilds ; now we are to have Film Guilds and "salons of the cinema."
"A little theater for the films in every community, reviving and introducing only the best American and foreign pictures. Minority of true screen devotees to be organized. Skeptics to be converted." So run the manifestoes of these new film-phobes and pioneers.
The intelligentsia is taking up the films. Society is taking them up too —
Decla Bioscop
Here is a scene from the German production of "Cinderella," made
by Ufa. The actress playing the title-role is Helga Thomas. The
picture was first shown in America by Film Associates
34
not as a secret sin, but frankly avowedly, as the New Art of tht Future !
Invited to one of these "film art evenings," I elbowed my waj into a pretentious theater lobby thru a cultured mob in evening dress and eight-cylinder cars, b was more like Carnegie Hall or Russian Ballet night at the Metropolitan Opera: artists, professors, all the younger generation and the smart "New Yorkers" were there talking at the top of their voices. As the great foreign film with its famous stars went on the screen, there was wild applause ; or, hisses, laughter, organized cheering as some new wrinkle or fandangle appeared on this ultramodern screen. Verily, like a first night at the Opera! And here were — well several hundred people who had paid some ten dollars in advance to see a few films that were heralded as examples of the modern art of the cinema, not because there were specimens of feminine or masculine pulchritude displayed therein.
They've Come to Stay
Observing this new movement toward "little cinemas" for artistic and seriously wrought pictures, I have been struck not so much by the strangeness of the idea as by its vitality, its staying power. This season we are to have four "little cinemas" in New York instead of two ; and a chain of them in other large cities such as Boston, .Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles.
The idea of little theaters for exhibiting new, experimental, and unpopular films offers so many possibilities for the future, (if it persist* and grows as it seems to be doing), that it is time to look over the field and meet some of the leading figures of this movement which has started from the outside.
Symon Gould, the mainspring of the International Film Arts Guild, has. for instance, never been connected with any of the big producing companies. His group has been the most successful, the most aggressive. It has gained a foothold on Broadway and is at the very moment regaling chosen audiences of New York
Dudley Murphy is one of the figures in the art-film movement. He is home talent which has absorbed the ideas about modern art that are current in Europe
.