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The Melodrama of Shadows
ed East Side room. The scene was being filmed for Rupert Hughes' story of New York life, "Empty Pock"ets," Between directorial moments Mr. Br en on outlined his ideas on the picture play.
"The motionpicture camera is the greatest melodramatist of them all," he said. "The photo play may rind its way to a new dramatic language— as it must shortly — through the melodrama.
"On the spoken stage melodrama has come to mean a form of theatrical story-telling in which the characters are developed by the situations. That is, they are puppets put
through a chain of exciting incidents. The word melodrama is now defined as something 'unnatural in situation /or action.' By drama, we have come to mean just the reverse — situations growing out of the thoughts, moods, and feelings of the characters themselves.
"The very limitations of the theater seem to have brought about this division. The dramatist has to observe the limits of the stage. If he is starting out to tell a story of sweeping action, he has no time to work out the mental nuances which bring about this action. An act can contain so much — and no more. Again, the playwright who attempts the so-called drama must devote the limited period of his three or four
One of the most recent photographs of Mr, Brenon, who believes the screen will eclipse the stage in many ways.
acts to unfolding the mental processes of his characters. The action must largely take place off stage, to be brought out by the dialogue.
"The photo play, on the other hand, sweeps through a story with tremendous speed. If the story calls for a railroad wreck, we see the wreck before our very eyes. Then, too, we see the face of the engineer just before the accident. We know just what he is thinking. The cut-back has just carried us back to his little home. We know what causes the wreck. We see the rails spiked. We know just what the wreckers have thought. "The photo play can carry one through a dozen big situations where the stage melodrama can achieve only one well-developed big scene. But, best of all, in the movies we see each worked up to gradually. Enemies of the screen declare that the photo play can talk only in action. Only recently Brander Matthews again presented this charge. 'He (the director) can take "Hamlet" above the violent melodrama out of which Shakespeare made it,' says Mr. Matthews. 'He can take "Macbeth," which has a good story picturesquely set forth, and he can show the succession of incidents with the utmost splendor. But he cannot show what gives all its value to this external shell of episode. He