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Their managers may have the best intentions to give better plays; and yet they are unable to do so because the scenario literature has so far nothing which can be compared with the master works of the drama; and nothing of this higher type can be expected or hoped for until the creation of photoplays is recognized as worthy of the highest ideal endeavor.
It is a perpetual sermon to those that would thresh around to no avail, be they orators, melodramatists, or makers of photoplays with an alleged heart-interest. Let us consider Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington. This painter's notion of personal dignity has far more of the intellectual quality than Van Dyck.
Newspaper reporters never tire of getting me to talk about hieroglyphics in their relation to the photoplays, and always give me respectful headlines on the theme.
The emotional expression in the photoplays is therefore often more natural in the small rôles which the outsiders play than in the chief parts of the professionals who feel that they must outdo nature. But our whole consideration so far has been onesided and narrow.
I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human. By an extension of this principle, non-human tones, textures, lines, and spaces take on a vitality almost like that of flesh and blood.
The stage has its exits and entrances at the side and back. The standard photoplays have their exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the most stirring mob and battle scenes.
They were not shown in order to match the colors in a ribbon store. For the news pictures of the day the "kinemacolor" and similar schemes are excellent. But when we come to photoplays the question is no longer one of technique; first of all we stand before the problem: how far does the coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the photoplay?
But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole background can be changed in the moving pictures. Reinhardt's revolving stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and had shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before. Yet how slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine changes of the photoplays.
Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay may be carried out of doors to the row of loafers in front of the country store, or the gossiping streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness of the interior. The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cosy.
Then if he desires to rise above the commercial field, let him turn over each cardboard, making the white undersurface uppermost, and there write a more abstract meaning of the hieroglyphic, one that has a fairly close relation to his way of thinking about the primary form. From a proper balance of primary and secondary meanings photoplays with souls could come.
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