Moving Picture World (Jan-Mar 1915)

956 THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD February 13. 1915 Pickle-Faced Pessimism By Louis Reeves Harrison. /r-» /f-QVING PICTURES," says Walter P. Eaton in \\/\ the Atlantic, "are capable of expressing more ■^^ -^ personality than a static photograph, but please try to imagine in them the princely quality of ForbesRobertson's Hamlet, that concrete emanation of a lofty ideal." Mr. Eaton is sincere. He has written a number of essays on problems and performances of the American stage, sharply criticising the men responsible for syndicate standards, "the majority of them utterly devoid of artistic sensibility," "utterly unfitted to control the destinies of a Fine Art, utterly unfitted to shoulder the responsibilities of influencing the thoughts, tastes, the emotions of a vast portion of the public." He thus referred to men in control of theatrical productions, yet it does not seem to have occurred to him that a like condition could exist in the younger art of producing motion pictures. "After seeing many — hundreds and hundreds, as I have done," he continues, "experience tells you that only the skeleton of narrative is possible and usually that narrative is utterly banal." Long devotion to critical work of theatrical methods has saturated Mr. Eaton with his subject. To him, an actor in the role of Hamlet represents the concrete emanation of a lofty ideal, whatever that may be. To him American idealism draws its material from the performance of some Broadway favorite. The fact that he lives in a little world explains why the theatrical critic cannot realize modes of thought and modes of thought-expression different from his own. No writer of broad and logical mind would be guilty of generalizing from false premises, from contrasting one art with another. That he fails to discriminate between a pictured representation and that which dribbles through words, even to discriminate between an art and its examples, is shown in every line. "There can be no Shakespeare in the movies," Eaton deplores. "No Shaw, no Booth, no Jefferson, no Gilbert and Sullivan, no Johann Strauss, no Julia Marlowe or Mrs. Fiske. What does it matter if such as these latter players act before the screen? 'Mrs. Fiske in Tess' is announced in the motion-picture houses, but you almost weep when you witness that travesty on her poignant art." This is rather a bizarre grouping. One does not expect either Sir Arthur Sullivan or Johann Strauss to find expression through other medium than that of music. If Booth and Jefferson had hem adequately portrayed in action by moving pictures, their fame would not have suffered. They were men of striking personality, and it is just that personality which Mr. Eaton admits can be transferred to the screen. Mrs. Fiske has doubtless appeared in roles not suited to her on the stage, and I have seen theatrical presentations of Shakespeare's plays that would make the Immortal Bard turn over in his grave. What have any of them to do with a medium of expression that IS not of utterance and not of the artificial stage ? I do not claim that the production of moving pictures is an absolutely free art. There is no such thing. Transcendent freedom is in conflict with all experience. Mr. Eaton has often described theatrical conditions which are in poor accord with our finest ideals, and these conditions were links in the chain of causes which led to the development of a new art. Then moving pictures depend upon performers who can visualize tliuught and emotion, many of them trained to act on the stage. The popularity of moving pictures is contingent upon a sum of preceding conditions, but the art of their development is along lineof freedom from stage methods and traditions. "They have a cruel realism," Mr. Eaton says of the pictures, "which at once dulls the imagination and destroys the illusive romance of art." All the strangeness of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmosphere, distance of space and time, that prove endlessly fascinating to the fifteen millions of people whc attend the picture shows every day seem to be lost on the pessimist. He can see nothing but the crudeness of an art that has only a few years instead of two thousand Ijehind its evolution. He does not realize that the deail weight of realism so long oppressing other mediums ha> resulted in a reaction, that a new romance has bred from the forces which destroyed the old, reaching out through the mysteries of science into new realms. Common peoi>lc have faith in the medium despite tlie faulty examples. "A nobler want of man," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is served by Nature, namely, the love of beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, tlie mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and fnr themselves, a pleasure arising from art, time, form, color, motion and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists as light is the first of painters." "Words are perverted to stand for things which are not ; a paper currency employed where there is no bullion in the vaults." Emerson was not writing of the "movies'' nor was Edward Garden Craig in his work "(^n the Art of the Theatre," when he said, "To me there is ever something more seemly in man v^'hen he invents an instrument which is outside his person, and through that instrument translates his message." "Art which shall spring from movement will be the ,first and final belief of the world ; and 1 like to dream that for the first time in the world men and women shall achieve this thing together." How fresh, how beautiful it would be! And as this is a new beginning it lies before men and women of the ne.xt centuries as a vast possibility. Get on with the thought of the invention of an instrument by which you can bring movement before our eyes. When you have reached this point in your developments, you need have no further fear of hiding your feeling or your opinion. You will have risen above the theater and entered into something beyond it." It is quite true that many screen portrayals do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it. That is less due to the limitations of the art than to the limitations of those now responsible for its worst specimens. Therefore, critical writers who have seen a few hundred crude examples of a young art rush into print with pessimistic promulgations of which they will not be proud when they come to grasp the magnitude of their subject. I might remind JNIr. Eaton, for one, to listen to himself at his best when in "Confessions of a Critic," he says, "Art exists in answer to a human need, for humanity." Present interpretation in this youngest of arts is not perfect, but it is well to remember that no interpretation in any art is final. None is a whole sphere of feeling and cycle of t'.iought.