Moving Picture World (Apr-Jun 1917)

400 THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD. April 21, 1917 "A Menace to the Drama? >> By Louis Reeves Harrison ii \ RE the movies a menace to the drama?" asks r\ Brander Matthews in a magazine article so entitled. He answers the question with that dangerous plausibility to be expected from men more familiar with their medium of expression than their subject matter and with an air of authority intended to carry conviction, the innocent confidence of a long established reputation in another field of criticism revealing itself at every stage of his argument. With due respect for the status of Mr. Matthews as a scholarly writer on all that pertains to the drama, he does little more than grope carefully, like an intelligent blind man on ground unfamiliar. He quotes the plaintive wail of W. D. Howells that "the gross and palpable triumph of the picture show goes to the theater and bids against it for the artist's liberty, their individuality, their initiative. From men and women it turns them to automatons — it buys their beauty and power for a moment of the film, extinguishing the soul in them." Could anything be more depressing? Unless we are to disregard well-authenticated testimony that actors have ever been willing to have their photographs given publicity it would seem as though the highly respectable antique of fiction is both woefully and willfully mistaken. Whether the "artist" is photographed in some arrested and minutely fractional phase of interpretation or in some continuous revelation of thought and feeling seems to resolve itself simply into a question as to whether he is to be immortalized as a dead one or as a live one. It is well within the bounds of conservative statement to say that the soulless representation is not that of the movie, to which the novelist is unaccustomed, but of the still picture which he has come to accept as a matter of course. From such evidences of misconception, it is a pleasure to turn to the more vigorous opinion of Brander Matthews. He deftly disposes of Howells by reminding him that the "theater" is not the "drama." "The drama," says Matthews, "is an art; and the theater is a commercial enterprise." "The theater can rely on the review, the socalled comic opera ; it can fill its program with song and dance, with acrobatics, with trained animals, and with all the other possibilities of the variety show. In so far as the moving picture has forced itself into a prominent place among these non-dramatic entertainments, it is not in any way invading the field of the drama." "In so far" saves Professor Matthews. He is careful in many other statements and generous enough to grant that "So tar as mere pictorial story-telling is concerned the drama is outclassed." Now comes a point of view which is so common that it has been that of a very large number of producers. Mr. Matthews concedes that moving pictures outclass the melodrama because of their greater scope of action, but he denies that they can ever "convince the taste and console the spirit" as does, at least supposedly, the drama. Ordinary prudence would suggest that no such broad statements be made of any art of expression, particularly of one in its early throes of evolution. All that the moving picture can do to a masterpiece of Shakespeare is to rob it of its vitality and reduce it to the purely spectacular level of "The Birth of a Nation." To imagine for a moment that the limitations of an art are those of its early examples is one of those common errors which have always led to erroneous opinion, the more deplorable in a case like this because it is entertained by a man of influence. "The Birth of a Nation" is frankly spectacular. It is not so much of an example of what can be done as of what has been done, and the use of it as an illustration by Mr. Matthews is on a par with holding up spectacular drama as representative of the entire art. Mr. Matthews falls once more before he gets his bearings and finds his way out of the darkness and that is in saying that moving pictures fail to "convince the taste and console the spirit." Whose taste and whose spirit? There are several millions of intelligent people among the five or ten millions who attend the picture shows every day. The men who engrossed on scrolls of parchment were proud of their craft and deplored the advent of printing, belittled it because it was addressed to common people, just as moving pictures are belittled by craftsmen who now use the printed page. But Mr. Matthews picks himself up and catches a glimpse of light which leads him to more rational conclusions. "The inexorable limitations of the story told on the screen forbid the deviser of a pictureplay to do much more than tell a story picturesquely. He must be simple and clear, swift and direct." "It is likely that the differentiation between the real play (which must have a story, no doubt, but which has also a soul) and the picture play will increase and become more obvious as the managers of the movies cease to borrow the plots of plays and devote themselves to stories compounded in accord with the possibilities and limitations of their own special art. As they accept these limitations and as they develop these possibilities the apparent rivalry between the drama and the moving picture will lessen, and each will be left in possession of its own special field." No man of broad vision, who has had opportunity to thoroughly grasp the production and exposition of moving pictures has ever considered them as rivaling the drama. Neither a desire for strife nor aim to surpass the drama was associated with motion picture production. It was almost invariably undertaken and developed in response to a popular demand so great as to be overwhelming at times. In greedy haste to meet that demand producers have been careless in the selection of subjects and prodigal in treatment of themes no longer vital, but, on the other hand, those same producers have accomplished artistic wonders far beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated. Just now there may be isolated instances where the filming of a play may rival the stage presentation, but they are so few and insignificant that they scarcely deserve mention. On the other hand, especially among people who lack interest in the drama, moving pictures are arousing an entirely new and sympathetic appreciation of the drama, not merely as a form of entertainment, but as an art. The new art has drawn on the older one for much of its vigor and charm, it is true, along with some faulty traditions and crass theatricalism, but the differentiation of which Mr. Matthews speaks is growing every day. Picturization of the finer kinds of drama, as Mr. Matthews contends, may always be inadequate and unsatisfactory, but he suggests the natural remedy. The shrewder of the makers of motion pictures are strenuously seeking for original stories, invented by men who have mastered the new art of telling tales by visual means alone, who can devise plots in complete accord with the marvelous possibilities of this new art and who can so plan them as to minimize its limitation. In the hands of these pioneers it will explore its own field more searchingly.