Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1918)

A rt Versus In these days of parlous critics, Entertainment, disdainful scoffers and starworshipping mobs, the pessimist rises in our midst to say: "The public doesn't want art; it wants entertainment." Which, if it were wholly true, would mean that as a practical measure the search for the realities of life through the photoplay is hopeless; the people seek to escape life through illusion. Once upon a time novelist Edwin LeFevre said this, through the co lumns of the New York Sun: "It must be plain to everybody that the trouble with American writers is American readers. Writers are forced to be clever in order to write for people who refuse to think, but wish to be amused. Excepting in industrial matters, Americans are superficial. Being a nation of 'doers,' there must be 'something doing' all the time. I find the average American more interested in incident than in character, more in plot than character analysis, more tickled by the humor of a phrase than by the humor of a situation. Intellectually that means nothing worse than juv enility, and we may outgrow it. More serious is the fact, to be noted in any democracy, that we are not interested in human beings, but in supermen." There is only one thing more dangerous than a lie, and that is half a truth. The whole truth is that no really fine picture has failed of an appreciative audience, and that overproduction — the sheer inability of creative genius to strike fire on schedule — is the main though not sole reason that the majority of photoplays are of too light and casual a character to be classed as art — factful commentaries on life. The American public is to be condemned because of its habitual tolerance. In England a dramatist or an actor who fails of appreciation is apt to be liberally booed, in France he is hissed, and in Italy they are apt to throw things at him. The American loves punishment. He is apt to accept a stupid picture philosophically, sleep through it — and come back the following Tuesday night for more. There is something in Mr. LeFevre's allegation of our juvenility. We have been juvenile — very. But the change in world-politics is not greater than our present change of viewpoint. The war is making us over. "Foreigner" is a word being torpedoed out of every dictionary. The splendid realities, the bright heroisms and the dark sorrows of life are being pounded into a mighty nation which for forty years had known nothing save complacent security, neighborhood society, and the material impulse to "get on in the world." "Art" was something that idlers took on as a sort of fancy veneer. Now we are learning that art is only the expression of humanity with the throttle open, the voice of those whose spirits as well as bodies are mounting the heights. We are doing more than hunting the Hun in France. We are hunting and finding the soul of America. The Last Man. One of the most impressive of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather's new cartoons is a scene of the last moments of twilight in no-man's land. The Huns, behind their barricade of earth and wire, are invisible. A gaunt Briton or two, crouching on the fire-step, peers through the dusk of the terrible area between. A skeleton tree lifts its dead arms in protest. In the west a single band of light is all that remains of the dying day. But against that band, left out in the shellground in gay defiance of all hates and all deaths, stands the dauntless little figure of — literally — the last man. He is only cardboard, but he seems to have the properties of life. Charlie Chaplin. 1? A Film "The social value of motion pictures Survey. *s beginning to be universally recognized," says The New York ' Times, "and it is probable that before long organized and comprehensive machinery for developing it to its full usefulness will be in operation." The Photoplay League of America is one such engine of artis tic democracy. Another is the remarkable "Survey" of civic motion pictures just completed by the New York Public Library, and published as "Special Report No. 2, of the Municipal Reference Library." The energe tic compiler was Miss Ina Clement; the publisher, Dorsey W. Hyde, Jr., the librarian. Miss Clement's survey covers all civic pictures which she has been able to find, to date, available for use by institutions and municipalities, with information as to where each can be obtained. Her classifications are made under these headings : Americanization, child welfare, crime and criminals, education, fire protection and prevention, gardening, health problems, milk supply, municipal government, police, public utilities, public works, recreation, roads and pavements, safety, sanitation, social service, tuberculosis, and miscellaneous subjects.