Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1924)

Kosloff Talks on Pantomime 89 sands of players besides the principals. 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' we gave many times. Each gesture of each player in that mob was the outgrowth of arduous training. From seven until twelve each night the audience would sit, rapt in attention, so clearcut was each expression in its simplicity, though the play was wordless. "It is because we have no trained screen pantomimists that the pantomimic picture is impossible. Americans are taught to hide deep, genuine emotions, to sugar coat realities. Your girls: exquisite, of appealing personality ; but they know not the real meanings of feelings, nor how to shade their expression of emotion. There is no place where they may go to learn. The stage? There they are taught a set of tricks, awkward and unavailable upon the screen. They are but the product' of artificial teaching." Conducting a ballet school in Los Angeles, Kosloff has for his pupils in dancing many celebrated stars, whom' he has helped in small measure in teaching them grace, carriage, flexibility of movement. Three hundred of his girls appeared in the Biblical sequences of "The Ten Commandments." "But pantomime? Ah, there is another thing. Me, I am but one man, seeking to pioneer, lacking save in a few instances encouragement. The thing cannot be done in a day —your actors err through impatience. I entered the Imperial Ballet School at six. I made my debut at sixteen. Ten long years I spent in gruelling practice, in study of the arts. Yet these lovely, little American girls expect after a few small roles to become stars. Momentary sensations are made by public interest, but real stars are products of long training. "Give me half a hundred girls and boys in whom I perceive the raw_ fundamentals of dramatic feeling ; give me ten years, give me the proper artists to assist me; give me above all— and what I doubt that I can have at present — the unbounded ambition, the great desire to learn, of those novitiates who would contribute ten years to their education. And at the end of that time I would present to the film public some genuine actors. "That will come. The screen must establish a fundamental pantomimic training of its own, to suit its individual needs, not by borrowing. But that cannot be done until it mellows into maturity and begins to build slowly its heritage of pantomime for future screen generations to draw upon. In three, four, generations will the screen produce many great artists, and not before." A strange, gifted heritage is Kosloff's. He comes of Kosloff in his studio. an ancient Tatar family that in the ninth century ruled the vast steppes, the hidden fastnesses, of the valley of the Volga. Dispersed by invaders, his people wandered, forming part of the fighting nomadic Genghis Khan tribe. That vivid heritage of the Kazan Tatar chieftains gives him in Hollywood's eyes a colorful glamour. That blood stirs in him with a certain rugged force. He is Mongol, Slav. But no. he is nothing and, contrarily, he is everything — rather, the embodiment of the knowledge that knows no native hearth, that grows by assimilation. There is something vividly elemental about him. You want to brush aside the petty terms in which you characterize the screen players for public print ; you feel that you must begin all over again on a clean slate to imprint some substance of that solid ground work of his mind. About him. too. is an aura of tragic fires in whose caldron his gravity, his temperament, were bred. A heritage of barbaric warfare, something ruthless in his quiet insistence. A memory perhaps in those narContinued on page 103