The soul of the moving picture (1924)

Record Details:

Title:
The soul of the moving picture
Date:
1924
Publisher:
New York : E. P. Dutton & Company
Volume:
The soul of the moving picture
Leaf #:
000158
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
December 21, 2023
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104 The Soul of the Moving Picture be attempted. A good film, other things being equal, is created when two adequately endowed writers, one of whom can depict action, the other of whom can arrange the scenes, rub elbows in a common and mutual effort. When it is done in this fashion, the film glows with the fire of creative genius and is altogether vivacious. From an artistic point of view, there is but one way to solve the problem of the film writer, and that is to have the author — as Griffith, Lubitsch, and a number of others are doing — stage and produce their own works. The idea of the action has been crystallized in their souls in a thousand pictures. No other person, however gifted he may be and be his intentions the very best, can appreciate the picture even approximately as well as the author himself who dreamed it into existence. But if the film author has no ability as a director, the only course left open to him is to submit his scenario to a second party, or at least the germ, the central idea of it. The only thing this second party can then do is to raise a strange flower from the seed the author sowed. A sympathetic understanding of the two artists, in this case, is a wish that has not yet been fulfilled. For the two artists to work at random, to say nothing of working against each other, is to create con