Talking pictures : how they are made, how to appreciate them (c. 1937)

Talking Pictures their own genre, there is not enough flesh and blood to fashion men and women who dramatically love, hate, and fight. Beauty of words in the photoplay cannot take the place of pictured reality. A stage play is more closely akin to a picture than a novel, but as we shall see, the play is now, and always will remain, a much more distant cousin of the photoplay than is commonly believed. The play, or drama, is a combination of words and movement spoken and acted by actors and actresses, who are before us in flesh and blood. This secures for the drama considerable psychological advantage. But for twenty-odd centuries this advantage has been offset by disadvantages, the major of which is the matter of movement. Everything that happens must take place within three walls, and within the stage area of the theatre being used at the moment. For companies traveling between theatres this area may shrink one third, or be quadrupled. Before a new sequence may start in a new setting, action must halt, and the curtain drop. The audience then waits while the set is changed. The methods of staging contemporary plays have been greatly facilitated by revolving stages, by modern lighting devices, and by more portable settings. But the stage, despite the modernity of its technique, must depend largely upon the unities of time, action, and place, laws concerning which are an inseparable part of its heritage from ancient Greece, from the schools of drama. The screen is almost wholly free from the various compulsions of these laws, and, because of this fact, has developed remarkable dramatic devices exclu [58]