Moving Picture World (Jul-Sep 1912)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD ii The Comparative Latitude of the Picture Play (Continued from page 22.) scenes, instead of four; and this is technically an immeasurable advantage. Instead of constraining his characters to meet at a certain place at a certain moment, he may visit them at different moments in the various places where they choose to be. In this freedom the moving picture play resembles those earlier types of drama which flourished before the stage restricted its range of narrative by adopting a definite scenic setting. Students of the history of the theater will discern a close analogy between the moving picture play and that type of chronicle history which was developed in the early Elizabethan period and was utilized repeatedly by Shakespeare. The battle episodes of Shakespeare's histories, vivid with alarums and excursions, wherein the scene shifts momentarily from one part of the field of conflict to another* and the characters make a rapid transit before the eye, launching hasty, incoherent lines in passing, could be suggested more emphatically by the kinematograph than on the modern scenery-encumbered stage. Furthermore, the moving picture possesses a notable advantage over the contemporary regular drama in its ability to alter in the fraction of a second the point of view from which the story shall be loqked upon. As soon as a character has passed through a certain door the scene may be shifted from the room that he has left to the room that he has entered, and the eye may follow him all through the house from the cellar to attic without any loss of time. The new art of the moving picture play is the only one of all the many arts of narrative which makes it possible for the observer to follow with the actual eye the passage of a character through a mile or more of space. In this new form of artistic presentation, a person may walk, run, ride, drive, sail, swim or fly for any distance, and yet be accompanied through his entire transit by the actual eye of the observer. This fact offers to the artist who devises a scenario for the kinematograph many possibilities of narrative which lie far beyond the range of the writer for the restricted stage of the ordinary drama. In this freedom in handling place and time and in shifting the point of view, the moving picture play resembles the novel much more nearly than it resembles the regular drama. The solitary horseman, dear to Scott and Cooper, could not be shown upon the stage, but he might easily be represented on the screen. If we draw on our imagination we may readily adduce a more emphatic illustration of this point. "Treasure Island," for example, could not possibly be dramatized for presentation in the regular theater, because the interest of the action is dependent on its rapid change of place from hour to hour; but the entire story, from the outset to the end, could be told in moving pictures; and many of the scenes, since their appeal to the imagination is mostly visual, would be even more effective on the screen than on the printed page. In handling the element of action, the moving picture play is more successful than the novel, since its appeal is made directly to the eye instead of to the imagination, and it is scarcely less successful than the drama. In handling the element of setting, it is overwhelmingly superior not only to the novel but to the drama as well. In dealing with interiors, the moving-picture play remains on a par with the regular drama; but in dealing with scenes set out of doors, it passes far beyond the reach of the roofed and stationary stage. In the modern theater, the Forest of Arden is nothing but a huddled conglomeration of canvas trees; but in the moving picture play, scenes like those between Shakespeare's idyllic lovers may be performed in an actual forest, drifting from place to place among trees that sift the sunlight and flutter their leafy branches in the breeze. The kinematograph is especially successful in rendering effects of moving air and water. On the stage the sea can be suggested only by a crude and bungling mechanism, but in the moving picture play a scene may pass upon an actual sandy beach, with league-long, round-back breakers creaming on the shore. Boats always look silly on the stage; but the kinematograph may fluently represent the paddling of a canoe past bend after bend of rippling river. Animals, also, which can never be trusted to behave naturally in the theater, may be used as important agents in the plot when the scene is conducted actually out of doors. To the mind of the most contemporary artists the element of setting is not the least significant of the three necessary elements of narrative; and it is therefore an exceedingly important point that criticism is forced to concede that the local environment of a story may be exhibited more truly and more vividly in the moving picture play than in any of the older types of narrative. It is only in handling the element of character that the new art is at a disadvantage in competing with the novel and the drama. The many expedients that the dramatist and the novelist may use for delineating character are reduced in the moving picture play to one. What people are may be suggested only by what they do; by their deeds, and only by their deeds, we know them. In drawing character, the moving picture play offers a strict confinement of range in characters owing to inability to use the spoken word. Only a small minority of those innumerable characteristics which are compounded into any individual human temperament express themselves naturally in action which is obvious to the eye. Here, then — in handling the element of character — lies the weakness of the moving picture play, considered technically as a type of narrative— just as in handling that other element of setting lies its strength. This analysis makes it possible for us to define the type of story which may be most completently represented by the kinematograph. Obviously the most desirable narrative material for a moving picture play is material in which the elements of action and setting are paramount, and the element of character subsidiary— in other words, a story in which incident treads upon the heels of incident and the action rushes headlong through a hurried succession of objective events, set preferably out of doors. It will be noticed at once that whereas this definition utterly fails to fit the modern regular drama, it almost exactly fits the traditional romantic novel of adventure. If we revert to an illustration that has already been adduced, we shall observe that this definition of what is necessary in a moving picture play, points directly to that traditional type of narrative that Stevenson revivified in "Treasure Island." In fact, a re-reading of Stevenson's "Gossip on Romance" will give us a very vivid sense of the sources of interest and charm of which the moving picture play is particularly capable. What Stevenson says in place of the romantic novel of adventure may be applied with equal justice to that new art which did not spring into existence until after he was dead. "The story," he says, "should repeat itself as a thousand colored pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, untroubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and confession, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. For my part I like a story to begin with an old wayside inn, where toward the close of the year 17 — , several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute instinct. Contentment is three parts of life, they say, but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life, where the interest turns, not on the slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theater exists solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is possible to build upon this ground the most lively, beautiful and buoyant tales." Here, in the words of a great artist in narrative, we have a clear and comprehensive statement of the possibilities that lie open to the maker of the moving picture play. He cannot contend with the dramatist in working out those problems of conscience which cenfront the will; he cannot compete with the novelist in analyzing characters; but he may tell with a vividness beyond the reach of their last visual expedients of appeal, "the most lively, beautiful and buoyant tales," in which the interest is centered not in "eloquence or character or thought" but in "some quality of the brute instinct." It is evident, therefore, that the moving picture play is not a play to be despised or ignored by serious criticism. It represents, in fact — to look upon it from a historical point of view — a revolution to an earlier and more perennially refreshing mode of narrative than that which lately has assumed domain over the novel and the drama. The moving picture play carries us back to the boyish age of the great art of telling tales, when stories were narrated nakedly as stories, instead of being sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. One can hardly imagine Mr. Henry James devising a successful scenario for the kinematograph; but the Shakespeare who wrote "Richard III," and the Homer who wrote the "Odyssey," would experience no difficulty in fulfilling the requirements. It is only very recently that the masters of the art of fiction have made war upon the optic nerve and exalted the objective over the subjective. Our modern interest in those intimate phases of character which refuse to reveal themselves in action is certainly sophisticated and excessive. It is therefore with a feeling somewhat of relief that we notice that the newest of all the arts of narrative— the moving picture play — disembarrasses its stories of psychologising, and tells them in the free and boyish spirit that vivified the epic, the drama, and the novel throughout the centuries before the world grew old. It is not at all surprising that the moving picture play has driven out of existence the cheap type of popular melodrama. The reason is not merely that the moving picture show could undersell the regular theater and offer a performance for five cents instead of for ten, twenty and thirty cents. In the old history of the world, no art, however cheap, has ever annihilated a more expensive art which was basically better than itself. The real reason for the triumph of the moving picture play is the purely critical reason that it offered a more artistic type of narrative than the old popular melodrama. In cheap melodrama, all that was worth while was the vividness and the variety of the incidents, the characters did not count, except as puppets in the plot; and the dialogue, crude and frequently absurd, was 'more a bother than a help. In abolishing dialogue the moving picture show relieved the cheap drama of its weakest element; it could suggest character with' less obvious falsification than the actual popular drama; and k could easily excel it in the presentation of incidents, both on the score of variety and on the score of vividness. The greater portion of the moving picture plays which may now be seen are fulfilling more completely than heretofore the high artistic aims of which they are indubitably capable. WARNERS' FEATURES. Messrs. A. and H. Warner, doing business under the firm name of Warners' Features, with offices in the Exchange Building, 45th St., New York, have each left the city for about two weeks, in which time they will visit all the large cities between New York and Chicago, for the purpose of studying the feature film market. In an interview with Mr. A. Warner, senior member of the firm, the Moving Picture World representative was given an idea as to the future policy of the firm. Instead of disposing of their feature productions on the state right basis as heretofore, it is their intention to rent feature subjects direct to the exhibitor. With the new renting system it will be possible for the Warner Co. to furnish an exclusive feature program and, in order to further insure this, they have already established branch offices in many of the large cities. Two large studios, with a well-equipped plant behind each, have been leased by the Warner Company for the production of two and three-reel features which, when added to their imported product, will afford a substantial foundation for the operation of the new feature film renting department. A cordial invitation is extended to the trade to visit the new and handsomely appointed offices of Warners' Features on the eighth floor of 145 West 45th St., New York City.