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Updated: June 29, 2025
The particular quality of the private romance is but vaguely given, for such things in their rise and culmination can only be traced by the novelist, or by the gentle alternations of silence and speech on the speaking stage, aided by the hot blood of players actually before us. Here, as in most photoplays, the attempted lover-conversations in pantomime are but indifferent things.
First, Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, the oldest city in the United States, the richest in living traditions, and with the oldest and the newest architecture in the United States; not a stone or a stick of it standardized, a city with a soul, Jerusalem and Mecca and Benares and Thebes for any artist or any poet of America's future, or any one who would dream of great cities born of great architectural photoplays, or great photoplays born of great cities.
Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker are almost wasting their genius on the theatre. The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet for their type of imagination. The typical stage performance is from two hours and a half upward. The movie show generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and forty minutes. And it should last but three reels, that is, an hour.
Not only the news pictures and the scientific demonstrations but also the photoplays can lead young and old to ever new regions of knowledge. The curiosity and the imagination of the spectators will follow gladly. Yet even in the intellectual sphere the dangers must not be overlooked. They are not positive.
It takes more brains than one man possesses to pick good vaudeville talent and bring good films to the town at the same time. The best motion picture theatres are built for photoplays alone. But they make one mistake. Almost every motion picture theatre has its orchestra, pianist, or mechanical piano. The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience.
Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic. But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations. They try to have most things as before.
He feels as if he were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal energies. The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly be transformed into photoplays.
The larger part of the film literature of today is certainly harmful in this sense. The intellectual background of most photoplays is insipid.
It has its Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society, its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice of the Peace court, its free school for the teaching of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its fire-engine house, its milliner's shop. All these could be made visible in photoplays as flies are preserved in amber.
He can look over all the periodicals in the local book-store in fifteen minutes. He can select the one he wants, take this bit of printed matter home, go through the contents, find the three articles he prefers, get an evening of reading out of them, and be happy. Every day as many photoplays come to our town as magazines come to the book-store in a week or a month.
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