Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 3, 2025
Today you and I are seen there quite often, and we find that our friends have been there, that they have given up the sneering pose and talk about the new photoplay as a matter of course.
Superficial impressions suggest the opposite and still leave the esthetically careless observer in the belief that the photoplay is a cheap substitute for the real drama, a theater performance as good or as bad as a photographic reproduction allows. But this traditional idea has become utterly untrue.
If the pictures are well taken and the projection is sharp and we sit at the right distance from the picture, we must have the same impression as if we looked through a glass plate into a real space. The photoplay is therefore poorly characterized if the flatness of the pictorial view is presented as an essential feature.
But in the beginning of that mystic November, the Soul of My City, named Avanel, would become as much a part of the city as Pallas Athena was Athens, and indeed I wrote into the book much of the spirit of the photoplay outlined, pages 147 through 150. With her tribe she incarnates all the mystic ideals of the Boones of Kentucky.
To perfect the talking moving picture, human magnetism must be put into the mirror-screen and into the clock. Not only is this imperative, but clock and mirror must be harmonized, one gently subordinated to the other. Both cannot rule. In the present talking moving picture the more highly developed photoplay is dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the wake of the screaming savage phonograph.
We approach the art of the film theater as if it stood entirely on its own ground, and extinguish all memory of the world of actors. We analyze the mental processes which this specific form of artistic endeavor produces in us. To begin at the beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which surrounds us.
A mere showing of human activity without will conflict might give very pleasant moving pictures of idyllic or romantic character or perhaps of practical interest. The result would be a kind of lyric or epic poem on the screen, or a travelogue or what not, but it would never shape itself into a photoplay as long as that conflict of human interests which the drama demands was lacking.
On the morning before they were to go Father would pound softly on the pillow by Mother's head and sing, "Wake up! It's a fine day and we're going to see a photoplay to-night!"
In every one of these aspects the photoplay succeeds in doing what the drama of the theater does not attempt.
DENVER, COLORADO, New Year's Day, 1922. Especially as Viewed from the Heights of the Civic Centre at Denver, Colorado, and the Denver Art Museum, Which Is to Be a Leading Feature of This Civic Centre In the second chapter of book two, on page 8, the theoretical outline begins, with a discussion of the Photoplay of Action.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking