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26 ANCIENT HISTORY
children and animals were; he was only a reincarnation of our old friend the clown, complete with stooge. These two, borrowed from the circus ring, are the most ancient figures in all the history of the theatre. But the specific art of the clown and comedian had no possibility of further development in the ring and on the music-hall stage. The wider space required for a development of their style was provided by the open-air play, of which the film was a photographic image.
The first such films had a stereotyped ending, no less standardized than the final kiss of the later film-with-the-happyending. The stereotyped finale of the old slapstick comedy was a general rush. The hero gets into hot water and runs away; he is pursued by one man, by two men, by thirty men and finally by every single character in the film, irrespective of whether they had anything to do with the fugitive or not. A human avalanche was let loose, carrying everything before it in a senseless and purposeless rush. This movement, quite divorced as it was from the story, amused people; they saw in it the essence of the motion picture and in fact the substrata of human life.
In the course of the subsequent development of film art the slapstick comedy still remained a hardy perennial, just as children and animals never ceased to be popular film characters. Thus a definite variety of film art with a distinctive style of its own was born before the specific new method of film art and the new form-language of the film was developed. What is the explanation for this?
The photographed play had a peculiarity distinguishing it from the five stage : it was silent. With the subsequent development of the silent film the place of the dialogue was taken by a detailed, expressive play of features and gestures, shown in close-up. In the beginning the motion picture was mute even as to facial expression, for the scenes were seen as a whole, in long shot, as in the theatre. Hence it was necessary to act in dumb-show, with exaggerated grotesque gestures which could be seen from a distance and which, if seen now, make an irresistibly amusing impression on the spectators. Thus one of the deficiencies of the primitive motion picture, its muteness, served as a style-creating element through the comic