The Art of the Moving Picture Part 3

Though the photoplay fairy-tale may rise to exquisite heights, it begins with pictures akin to this rhyme. Mankind in his childhood has always wanted his furniture to do such things. Arthur names his blade Excalibur. It becomes a person. The man in the Arabian tale speaks to the magic carpet. It carries him whithersoever he desires. This yearning for personality in furniture begins to be crudely worked upon in the so-called trick-scenes. The typical commercialized comedy of this sort is Moving Day. Lyman H. Howe, among many excellent reels of a different kind, has films allied to Moving Day.

But let us examine at this point, as even more typical, an old Pathe Film from France. The representatives of the moving-firm are sent for. They appear in the middle of the room with an astonishing jump. They are told that this household desires to have its goods and hearthstone G.o.ds transplanted two streets east. The agents salute. They disappear. Yet their wireless orders are obeyed with a military crispness. The books and newspapers climb out of the window. They go soberly down the street. In their wake are the dishes from the table. Then the more delicate porcelains climb down the shelves and follow. Then follow the hobble-de-hoy kitchen dishes, then the chairs, then the clothing, and the carpets from over the house. The most joyous and curious spectacle is to behold the shoes walking down the boulevard, from father's large boots to those of the youngest child. They form a complete satire of the family, yet have a masterful air of their own, as though they were the most important part of a human being.

The new apartment is shown. Everything enters in procession. In contrast to the general certainty of the rest, one or two pieces of furniture grow confused trying to find their places. A plate, in leaping upon a high shelf, misses and falls broken. The broom and dustpan sweep up the pieces, and consign them to the dustbin. Then the human family comes in, delighted to find everything in order. The moving agents appear and salute. They are paid their fee. They salute again and disappear with another gigantic leap.

The ability to do this kind of a thing is fundamental in the destinies of the art. Yet this resource is neglected because its special province is not understood. "People do not like to be tricked," the manager says.

Certainly they become tired of mere contraptions. But they never grow weary of imagination. There is possible many a highly imaginative fairy-tale on this basis if we revert to the sound principles of the story of the old lady and the pig.

Moving Day is at present too cra.s.sly material. It has not the touch of the creative imagination. We are overwhelmed with a whole van of furniture. Now the mechanical or non-human object, beginning with the engine in the second chapter, is apt to be the hero in most any sort of photoplay while the producer remains utterly unconscious of the fact. Why not face this idiosyncrasy of the camera and make the non-human object the hero indeed? Not by filling the story with ropes, buckets, fire-brands, and sticks, but by having these four unique. Make the fire the loveliest of torches, the water the most graceful of springs. Let the rope be the humorist. Let the stick be the outstanding hero, the D'Artagnan of the group, full of queer gestures and hoppings about. Let him be both polite and obdurate. Finally let him beat the dog most heroically.

Then, after the purely trick-picture is disciplined till it has fewer tricks, and those more human and yet more fanciful, the producer can move on up into the higher realms of the fairy-tale, carrying with him this riper workmanship.

Mabel Taliaferro's Cinderella, seen long ago, is the best film fairy-tale the present writer remembers. It has more of the fireside wonder-spirit and Hallowe'en-witch-spirit than the Cinderella of Mary Pickford.

There is a j.a.panese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, who takes the leading part with Blanche Sweet in The Clew, and is the hero in the film version of The Typhoon. He looks like all the actors in the old j.a.panese prints. He has a general dramatic equipment which enables him to force through the stubborn screen such stagy plays as these, that are more worth while in the speaking theatre. But he has that atmosphere of pictorial romance which would make him a valuable man for the retelling of the old j.a.panese legends of Kwannon and other tales that are rich, unused moving picture material, tales such as have been hinted at in the gleaming English of Lafcadio Hearn. The j.a.panese genius is eminently pictorial. Rightly viewed, every j.a.panese screen or bit of lacquer is from the Ancient Asia Columbus set sail to find.

It would be a n.o.ble thing if American experts in the j.a.panese principles of decoration, of the school of Arthur W. Dow, should tell stories of old j.a.pan with the a.s.sistance of such men as Sessue Hayakawa. Such things go further than peace treaties. Dooming a talent like that of Mr. Hayakawa to the task of interpreting the j.a.panese spy does not conduce to accord with j.a.pan, however the technique may move us to admiration. Let such of us as are at peace get together, and tell the tales of our happy childhood to one another.

This chapter is ended. You will of course expect to be exhorted to visit some photoplay emporium. But you need not look for fairy-tales. They are much harder to find than they should be. But you can observe even in the advertis.e.m.e.nts and cartoons the technical elements of the story of the old lady and the pig. And you can note several other things that show how much more quickly than on the stage the borderline of All Saints' Day and Hallowe'en can be crossed. Note how easily memories are called up, and appear in the midst of the room. In any plays whatever, you will find these apparitions and recollections. The dullest hero is given glorious visualizing power. Note the "fadeaway" at the beginning and the end of the reel, whereby all things emerge from the twilight and sink back into the twilight at last. These are some of the indestructible least common denominators of folk stories old and new. When skilfully used, they can all exercise a power over the audience, such as the crystal has over the crystal-gazer.

But this discussion will be resumed, on another plane, in the tenth chapter: "Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion."

CHAPTER V

THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR

Henceforth the reader will use his discretion as to when he will read the chapter and when he will go to the picture show to verify it.

The shoddiest silent drama may contain n.o.ble views of the sea. This part is almost sure to be good. It is a fundamental resource.

A special development of this apt.i.tude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally: the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving ma.s.ses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, d.i.c.kering people in the marketplace. Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean. Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, Atlantic, or Mediterranean. It takes this new invention, the kinetoscope, to bring us these panoramic drama-elements. By the law of compensation, while the motion picture is shallow in showing private pa.s.sion, it is powerful in conveying the pa.s.sions of ma.s.ses of men.

Bernard Shaw, in a recent number of the Metropolitan, answered several questions in regard to the photoplay. Here are two bits from his discourse:--

"Strike the dialogue from Moliere's Tartuffe, and what audience would bear its mere stage-business? Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons Oth.e.l.lo's mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film? Or between Shakespeare's Lear and any one else's Lear? No, it seems to me that all the interest lies in the new opening for the ma.s.s of dramatic talent formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of one sort or another that do not matter in the picture-theatre...."

"Failures of the spoken drama may become the stars of the picture palace.

And there are the authors with imagination, visualization and first-rate verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could not write an effective play."

Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative, epic, and Paradise Lost.

He has in mind, no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and angels. This is one kind of a Crowd Picture.

There is another sort to be seen where George Beban impersonates The Italian in a film of that t.i.tle, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener Sullivan. The first part, taken ostensibly in Venice, delineates the festival spirit of the people on the bridges and in gondolas. It gives out the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness. Then comes the vineyard, the crowd sentiment of a merry grape-harvest, then the ma.s.sed emotion of many people embarking on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to their kindred on the piers, then the drama of arrival in New York. The wonder of the steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the conventional at-home-ness of the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers above. Then we behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is treated on two separate occasions.

It is hot weather. The mobs of children follow the ice-wagon for chips of ice. They besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling wagon quite closely, rejoicing to have their clothes soaked. They gather round the fire-plug that is turned on for their benefit, and again become wet as drowned rats.

Pa.s.sing through these crowds are George Beban and Clara Williams as The Italian and his sweetheart. They owe the force of their acting to the fact that they express each ma.s.s of humanity in turn. Their child is born. It does not flourish. It represents in an acuter way another phase of the same child-struggle with the heat that the gamins indicate in their pursuit of the water-cart.

Then a deeper matter. The hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America: its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side. The gondolier becomes boot-black. The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother. They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the Novels of Thackeray.

Omitting the last episode, the entrance into the house of Corrigan, The Italian is a strong piece of work.

Another kind of Crowd Picture is The Battle, an old Griffith Biograph, first issued in 1911, before Griffith's name or that of any actor in films was advertised. Blanche Sweet is the leading lady, and Charles H.

West the leading man. The psychology of a bevy of village lovers is conveyed in a lively sweet-hearting dance. Then the boy and his comrades go forth to war. The lines pa.s.s between hand-waving crowds of friends from the entire neighborhood. These friends give the sense of patriotism in ma.s.s. Then as the consequence of this feeling, as the special agents to express it, the soldiers are in battle. By the fortunes of war the onset is unexpectedly near to the house where once was the dance.

The boy is at first a coward. He enters the old familiar door. He appeals to the girl to hide him, and for the time breaks her heart. He goes forth a fugitive not only from battle, but from her terrible girlish anger.

But later he rallies. He brings a train of powder wagons through fires built in his path by the enemy's scouts. He loses every one of his men, and all but the last wagon, which he drives himself. His return with that ammunition saves the hard-fought day.

And through all this, glimpses of the battle are given with a splendor that only Griffith has attained.

Blanche Sweet stands as the representative of the bevy of girls in the house of the dance, and the whole body social of the village. How the costumes flash and the handkerchiefs wave around her! In the battle the hero represents the cowardice that all the men are resisting within themselves. When he returns, he is the incarnation of the hardihood they have all hoped to display. Only the girl knows he was first a failure.

The wounded general honors him as the hero above all. Now she is radiant, she cannot help but be triumphant, though the side of the house is blown out by a sh.e.l.l and the dying are everywhere.

This one-reel work of art has been reissued of late by the Biograph Company. It should be kept in the libraries of the Universities as a standard. One-reel films are unfortunate in this sense that in order to see a favorite the student must wait through five other reels of a mixed programme that usually is bad. That is the reason one-reel masterpieces seldom appear now. The producer in a mood to make a special effort wants to feel that he has the entire evening, and that nothing before or after is going to be a bore or destroy the impression. So at present the painstaking films are apt to be five or six reels of twenty minutes each.

These have the advantage that if they please at all, one can see them again at once without sitting through irrelevant slapstick work put there to fill out the time. But now, having the whole evening to work in, the producer takes too much time for his good ideas. I shall reiterate throughout this work the necessity for restraint. A one hour programme is long enough for any one. If the observer is pleased, he will sit it through again and take another hour. There is not a good film in the world but is the better for being seen in immediate succession to itself.

Six-reel programmes are a weariness to the flesh. The best of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent six-reel displays give us in two hours. It would pay a manager to hang out a sign: "This show is only twenty minutes long, but it is Griffith's great film 'The Battle.'"

But I am digressing. To continue the contrast between private pa.s.sion in the theatre and crowd-pa.s.sion in the photoplay, let us turn to Shaw again. Consider his ill.u.s.tration of Iago, Oth.e.l.lo, and Lear. These parts, as he implies, would fall flat in motion pictures. The minor situations of dramatic intensity might in many cases be built up. The crisis would inevitably fail. Iago and Oth.e.l.lo and Lear, whatever their offices in their governments, are essentially private persons, individuals _in extremis_. If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to a.n.a.lyze what they stood for. They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film. Otherwise the conflict, however violent, appealed mainly to the sense of speed.

So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff. Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has pa.s.sed.

The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.

The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense. On the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon's poisonous hatred of the negro.

Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree: in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unconsciously Mr.

Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fict.i.tious character.

Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr.

Griffith's cla.s.s. I recommend their works to him as a better basis for future Southern scenarios.

The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others. But it is still true that it is a wonder in its Griffith sections. In its handling of ma.s.ses of men it further ill.u.s.trates the principles that made notable the old one-reel Battle film described in the beginning of this chapter.

The Battle in the end is greater, because of its self-possession and concentration: all packed into twenty minutes.

When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes down before the a.s.sa.s.sin, it is a master-scene. He falls as the representative of the government and a thousand high and n.o.ble crowd aspirations. The mimic audience in the restored Ford's Theatre rises in panic. This crowd is interpreted in especial for us by the two young people in the seats nearest, and the freezing horror of the treason sweeps from the Ford's Theatre audience to the real audience beyond them.

The real crowd touched with terror beholds its natural face in the gla.s.s.

Later come the pictures of the rioting negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea. Then is delineated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already spoken. For comment on the musical accompaniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the fourteenth chapter ent.i.tled "The Orchestra, Conversation and the Censorship."

In the future development of motion pictures mob-movements of anger and joy will go through fanatical and provincial whirlwinds into great national movements of anger and joy.

A book by Gerald Stanley Lee that has a score of future scenarios in it, a book that might well be dipped into by the reader before he goes to such a play as The Italian or The Battle, is the work which bears the t.i.tle of this chapter: "Crowds."