Screenland (Oct 1923-Mar 1924)

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Screen Has too Much Style Chaplin and the New Technique THE appearance of Charlie Chaplin's first serious film, A Woman of Paris, has piqued our interest. The critics have hailed it as the first step towards the new technique of the screen. If we may believe the current commentors, Mr. Chaplin has made the first real step towards the bigger and better screen play so dear to Merton and other well-wishers of the screen films. Actually, Chaplin has done nothing new. A Woman of Paris is a straight-forward screen drama minus all the flapdoodle with which directors have come to deck it out. The old Griffith short pictures were of the Woman of Paris school. Then the films began their march along the road of the spectacular and the decorative. A Woman of Paris really presents nothing new in technique — but it lops off the unessentials which have been smothering our film plays. Chaplin isn't a pioneer, but he is doing the screen a real service in pointing out how far we have slipped from the real purpose of the screenplay. We congratulate Chaplin upon A Woman of Paris. He tells his story directly and concisely — with pictures. And that is the real technique of the photoplay. Style — but no Punch \ INCE the early days of Griffith, before the films began to build Babylons, silent plays were headed in the right direction. Not that the screen should disregard the spectacular. But it isn't necessary to tell every celluloid story with de luxe trimmings. As the screen has progressed, we have gone in strongly for style. We have acquired perfection of workmanship but we have come to forget the heart. Our skill in telling a story has developed towards a flawless pinnacle, but we have come to forget that life moves at haphazard, with crazy side-steps and awkward jumps every now and then. So our screen has come to acquire silken gloves — and to lose its punch. We have much perfection of lighting, of studio detail and of photography. All these things spell style of picture making. What we need is punch. Oddly, Chaplin, by stepping back some ten years, may lead the way to the film play of tomorrow. I *^HE other day Charles Evan Hughes made a speech in Do Films Libel Our Land? which he stated that our film plays libeled the United States in that they "perniciously distorted" our life for presentation in other lands. "I wish indeed that that important educational instrument, the motion picture, was not so frequently used in foreign countries to give forth impressions of American life," he said. "It is most discouraging to reflect upon the extent to which the best efforts of educators and the men of public affairs are thwarted by the subtle influence of a pernicious distortion among other peoples with respect to the way in which our people live and the prevalence here of vice and crime." Mr. Hughes happens to be secretary of state and his remarks consequently gained a bit of newspaper space. Some of our screen executives were tempted to take the comment to heart but somehow we can only view it as another instance of our great American sport of attacking something without knowing anything about it. Of course, the screen doesn't libel America. Personally, we think the screen paints the land in too rosy colors. Doesn't it present our native life as revolving pleasantly around a curious assortment of be-curled and be-muscled dumb bells. How are we to stem the tide of immigration if ihe films go on showing our beaches peopled with Sennett bathing cuties, if our simplest home life is continually presented as taking place in lavish railroad station interiors and de luxe gardens, if all America appears to spend its evenings diving in private bathing pools? Secretary Hughes ought not to worry about our films libeling our life. To our way of thinking they're bringing over new citizens under false pretenses. Portraying Life Under Restrictions F the screen actually became a caustic commentary upon our life, it would be much more worth while. But with ministers protesting about any of their guild being shown on the screen in any guise, with every religious denomination shrieking against anything about its creed being touched upn, with censors trimming stories here, there and everywhere, it is well nigh impossible to do anything of dramatic consequence in the films these days. Until the films have as much latitude as the stage and literature they can not become a vital art. True, the screen is revealing growing pains here and there. A Woman of Paris is a sign that the screenplay is growing up. Maybe Anna Christie will be another. We are wondering just how America will receive them. The Screenplay and Poetry Bl ROOM, that radical magazine of the arts, has just issued a screen number. The result is surprising. For instance, one can find a Frenchman, Philippe Soupault, writing of Los Angeles as a "city of singular dreams and of tormenting realities." Moreover, M. Soupault declares that the drama and poetry of France — and of the world — has been given new life by the cinema since Chaplin came into his own. "With a strike of his cane, such a singular magician was he, Charlie Chaplin was able to give an extraordinary vigor, an incredible superiority to the American movies." And M. Soupault continues: "The 'U. S. A.' cinema has thrown light on all the beauty of our time, all the mystery of modern mechanics. But the light it had projected was so simple, so natural, so little affected that it was hardly noticed. It was, however, one of the greatest and most important artistic discoveries. Everything was revivified with a single stroke." Another Book on The Movies 'AMUEL GOLDWYN has written the story of his life. Mary Pickford has written of her early days. Even Ma Talmadge is credited — on the title page, anyway — with the authorship of a book about her daughters. And now comes Tamar Lane with another tome. It's called What's Wrong with the Movies, and in it Mr. Lane proves — to his own satisfaction — that darn near everything is the matter. Which is very possible. We often think that way upon emerging from a movie theater. Mr. Lane laments the fact that the screen has no philanthropists, no martyrs, no salf-sacrificing geniuses, and no real leaders — but that, if any one dares to cast a single slurring word