Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1924)

88 Kosloff conducting a class in his school of dancing. Kosloff Talks on Pantomime A training in which, he believes, is unfortunately lacking in preparing young people for screen acting. By Helen Ogden THE screen is sadly in need of pantomimic training. It is attempting to speak a borrowed language, when it should be formulating the alphabet of its own native tongue." No stripling achieving success in a blaze of glorified personality was speaking, but a man whose distinction is based upon knowledge accrued from years of study The speaker was Theodore Kosloff. We were talking on the cluttered Lasky stage near the "tin-can factory," one of the scenes for Cecil B. De Mille's "Triumph." Kosloff was playing an inconspicuous role, as usual, because De Mille alone will give him now and then opportunities to express some of his ideas for the screen's advancement. Small, lithe, every movement expressive, speaking slowly with a pronounced accent, Kosloff is in himself an interesting study. Personality alone, the thing so high lighted about other actors, is of no consequence to him. He is, instead, an expression of cumulative growth. In his train of thought, in his every word, is that feeling of solidity. "Pantomime is the technique of each feeling's expression. You understand a Tschaikowsky concerto, yes ? But without technical training can you translate that inward comprehension of it into music? "Pantomime has its exercises, its scales, as has the piano. The fingers of expression blunder when they seek, by skimming the surface of training, to translate that innate feeling into acting. "America has no great screen actors because she thinks of the public's sensational approval, of transitory success. To genuine development one must be willing to give years of study. Besides pantomime, an actor should understand thoroughly all the arts. At our Imperial Russian Ballet School in Moscow we were well grounded in music, in painting; from history we learned manners and customs and costuming of all the ages, and the points of view of all the peoples. That general knowledge gave us sentience, nuance, subtlety; our pantomimic training was the tool which we used to express that feeling and knowledge in gradations of acting. "A screen-training school?" Kosloff pursed doubtful lips. "A costly undertaking — and producers are not philanthropists. Mr. De Mille and I have many times discussed the idea. A man of keen perception, that one ; quickly he grasps thoughts, sees practical evolution of those ideas. Long he has wanted such an academy of motion-picture pantomime training, as a foundation for the screen's future. If from hundreds only one great actor is the product, as there is in dancing but one Pavlowa, the venture would be worth while. "But not now," he sighed. "The screen is yet young, compared to the generations of groundwork upon which the pantomimic training of the European stage has been built. Acting there has its traditions, its inheritance. The screen is so the opposite of the stage that not merely a different technique is needed, which only skims the surface. It goes back to the fundamental of thought transference, which has greater possibilities on the screen because of the close range and the dependence upon gestures without tonal inflection and the electric personal contact to get one's idea over. "Indeed that is the sole purpose of the motion picture— to say without titles. When an actor is skilled in pantomime he can say what he will with the muscles of his face, with his eyes, and the words on the screen would be but a repetition." Kosloff is the chancellor, the prime minister, of Cecil B. De Mille pictures. Every detail of background, of artistic investiture, of costuming, must meet with his approval. While De Mille, with whom he has worked for six years, has been receptive toward his ideas, he, too, realizes that the time for the purely pantomimic picture is not yet. "Not that the audience would fail to understand," Kosloff pointed out. "Do not underestimate the perception of the mass mind. Real pantomime is so perfectly expressive in its infinite shading that its meaning is plain. When the Russian actors gave their pantomimic performances a year or so ago in New York, the American audience sat spellbound. "In Russia years ago we presented — as they still do to-day — mammoth pantomimic productions, with thou