Screen Gems

“ In approaching the conclusion of the first half of this series of articles which has given, inadequately and sketchily, a bird’s-eye view of the past and present of the movie as a purveyor of amusement, the writer finds himself turning to other fields of endeavor in which the screen is pushing forward as a pioneer with the hope in his heart, amounting to a certainty, that the screen drama in America is upon the threshold of a great and glorious future. Revolutionary changes in the photo-drama are being brought about by methods arousing intense scientific and technical interest. ”

“ Let us simply add that the kind of rest we have in mind is never the rest of inaction, of sleep, or of death; it is rather a dynamic repose. Just as the still portions of the motion picture may be active upon the spectator’s mind, so the motions may be reposeful while they are both at work and at play. Such harmony of pictorial motions on the screen is not too high an ideal for the lovers of the cinema. ”

“ The rightness of the spectacle film is implicit8 in its name: the screen is a place on which things can be seen, and so long as a film depends upon the eye it is right for the screen—and whether it is right in any other regard depends upon taste and judgment and skill. Omit as irrelevant the news reels, animated cartoons, educational and travel films—all of them good; omit equally those printed jokes and clippings from the Literary Digest which are at once the greatest trial and error of the screen. ”

“ Our new understanding will give us greater enjoyment of the pictorial beauty which even now comes to the screen, and the rumor of that enjoyment, sounding through the studios, will assure of us of still greater beauty in the future. ”

“ Save there is sweetness round my heart and the world a screen
Of interwoven mystery to a world unseen.
Can one drink the air, can one seize the sea, can one grasp the fire?
Even so intangible to me the answer to my desire.
The elements we feel and see shift and drift and suspire
And we therein behind the screen, with glimmering brains that tire. ”

“ Such a man praises a photoplay if it presents a “rattling good story,” and expects no thrill from the cinema composer’s conjuring with shifting patterns and evanescent tones. At least he would say something to that effect if you argued the matter with him. But he would be mistaken in his self-analysis, for even a prosaic person really enjoys the decorative rhythmical quality in a picture, though he may not be conscious of doing so. And every spectator can get the richest beauty from the screen only when the pictorial motions play as well as they work. ”

“ And yet, Sir, if a cheese-scoop were your guide, these cavities must needs be circular.
Lun. They were so at the first—but, like the fickle Moon, my guardian satellite, I change as I go on. Oh, the rapture, Sir, of that wild moment! And did I reveal the Mighty Secret! Never, never! Day by day, week by week, behind a wooden screen, I wrought out that vision of beauty. The world came and went, and knew not of it. Oh, the ecstasy, when yesterday the Screen was swept away, and the Vision was a Reality! ”

“ Let the motion picture look like a motion picture of life, and not like life itself. Let the mobilization of characters in a photoplay start fancies and stir emotions finer and deeper than any which we can experience by observing our neighbors or by reading sensational newspapers. Let the lights and shadows on the screen, the lines and shapes, the patterns and movements suggest to our imaginations richer beauties than186 those which are actually shown to our eyes. Let the motion picture become as romantic as music, and yet remain equally consistent with reality and truth. ”

“ The novice may attach little or no importance to this initial move in the creation of a photoplay, but study and the experience that comes with practical analysis and the actual work of plot-building will lend emphasis to the statement that no single consideration demands more careful and thoughtful attention. Let us assume that when the drop-curtain rises in a motion picture theatre and the shadow action commences, the audience is looking, not at figures projected upon a screen, but through a window into the private lives of fictitious characters around whom the plot is woven. ”

“ The screen is a mirror in which the race can see itself as it has been and as it is, and a tongue, comprehended of all men, that might, if it rises to its great mission, bring salvation to the world.
“A lighthouse of the past, a university of universities, a fountain of all revealed knowledge, inculcated through a medium understood of all men, a 212Mecca for the pilgrims of progress from all comers of the earth,”—that is my dream, and, for having dreamed it, I know that I am a better man. ”

“ In other words, neither the scenario writer nor the motion picture director can ever know definitely in advance just what the finished work will look like to us in the theater. If we are aware of these handicaps, it may help us to understand why ugliness so often slips through to the screen, but it will not permit us to tolerate that ugliness. We, as spectators and critics, must forever insist that the photoplay makers master their art, no matter how difficult the mastery may be. ”

“ Yet we can blend the whole123 scene into a single rhythm by suffusing all its elements with the warm glow of the furnace and by playing over them all the same movement of quivering light and shadow. This vibrant, welding beauty which lady and laborer and machine may have in common, while still retaining their individual dramatic significance, will thus give the touch of art to a motion picture which might otherwise be merely a crude photographic record of an incident in a story. ”

“ But the ‘make-up’ of the motion-picture theater screen differs in that only one thing may be presented at a time. If an advertising film is unfolded, you have no other alternative in the darkened hall than to give it your attention. ”

“ As a medium for drama the screen is only just beginning to break away from the influences that controlled it when it first set out on its career as a pioneer in a new art, namely, the silent presentation of plays and stories. It is still necessary for us who enjoy a photoplay of real merit to exercise care at the entrance to a movie theatre lest we be confronted presently by a screen drama unworthy the attention of intelligent observers. ”

“ What more natural thing than to put on the biggest TV show of all, and at the same time take the bow out of our shoulders, the kink out of our necks, and restore the focus of our eyes to the natural one of infinity? The whole sky was going to become one gigantic television screen, in perfect focus, in full (how full we never imagined until we saw it!) ”

“ The editor, the director and the actor must understand from your scenario exactly what action, interpretation and suggestion your words are intended to convey. Many big ideas, striking situations and splendid scenes never see the light of the screen because of the photoplaywright’s poverty of expression.
A broad vocabulary hesitates at no flight of inspiration, no matter how transcending; it falters at no wave of emotion, no matter how profound; it pauses at no thought, no matter how beautiful. ”

“ The screen, with its new cloth, is so arranged that, its banality destroyed by degrees, beings and things stripped by a caprice of lightning, nothing is left standing but the idea, naked or veiled in its sole, essential mysteriousness. ”

“ How does the director of a motion picture make sure that pleasing motion will appear upon the screen? Does he alter, or select, his subjects? Does he choose his point of view? Does he patiently wait for the right moment? Or must beauty come by accident, as music might come from a cat’s running over the keyboard of a piano? ”

“ And, therefore, if the financial investment in each film and in popular magazines were not so exorbitant as to require instant and widespread popularity, men of spirit and imagination would be able to use the screen and the periodical, as one might dream of their being used, to enlarge and to refine, to verify and criticize the repertory of images with which our imaginations work. ”

“ It is not discouraging to discover a fault, so long as we see that it is one which might have been avoided. We want to make it plain in this chapter that, although the movies sometimes hurt the eyes, it is never due to any necessity. It is a fact that pictures on the screen, when properly made, are always pleasing to the spectators’ eyes. And he who does not accept this as a fundamental proposition can hardly come by any large faith in the future of the photoplay as art.
But we must make a few more eye tests for beauty. ”

“ Treasures often lie in unsuspected places. Nearly every common-place film on the screen contains some beauty by accident, some unexpected charm, some unforseen “punch,” something the director never dreamed of, which outshines the very beauty which he aimed to18 produce. And whenever a thoughtful person is stirred by such accidental beauty he is delighted to think that such a thing is possible. In the exceptional films, he knows, such effects are produced by design instead of by chance. It is better business, and it is better art. ”

“ No other art, not even music, contains so great a number of varied parts as the motion picture. To fuse all of these parts into a single harmonious whole requires knowledge and skill and happy inspiration, yet fusion must take place in the cinema composition itself in order that the spectator may be spared the143 annoyance of trying to unify in his own mind the ill-adjusted factors on the screen. ”

“ The appeal that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and spiritual life of the people.
Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. ”

“ It seems, therefore, that in artistic matters moderation is a good thing, is, in fact, necessary to produce real beauty. But moderation in the movies is not yet28 a widely accepted gospel. Too often we find that the dazzling flood of rays from a strong searchlight blazes over several square yards of the silver screen, while at the same moment, on adjoining parts of the same screen hang the deep shades of night. ”

“ In the minds of all creatures a screen intervenes as it were and hides the perfect manifestation from view. The moment that is removed, everything is settled; whatever you want, whatever you will desire, will come to pass. ”

“ The screen is not a retreat for hackneyed, broken-down plots that failed of a sale everywhere else, nor is it likely to pay you for the idea that you dash off in a few idle moments. True enough, you can see many mediocre stories, many trashy ones, when you attend the picture theater, but the aspirant for success should not take the worst specimens for his ideal. ”

“ If I look upon a motion picture as a kind of substitute for some stage play or novel, it seems to me a poor thing, only a substitute for something better; but if I look upon it as something real in itself, a new form of pictorial art in which things have somehow been conjured into significant motion, then I get many a glimpse of touching beauty, and I always see a great range of possibilities for richer beauties in future examples of this new art. Then I see the motion picture as the equal of any of the elder arts. ”

“ Enough has now been said to illustrate how design in a picture can control our attention during the pauses and arrested moments on the screen, and by so doing can relieve the eyes of unnecessary, wasteful work and give unity and emphasis to the message of the picture. But still other powers reside in design. While it hastens our grasp of meanings, and even accentuates those meanings, it can affect the mind in other ways that are still more important. And if we delve deeper into these ways we shall come out with a clearer vision of the artistic possibilities of the movies. ”

“ Source of the silver screen of existence, which Hollywood ingeniously reflects with a silver screen of its own on which appear the animated shadows of thespians, whose fine art makes fiction seem truth, so differently from many of us poor preachers who succeed only in making truth seem fiction ”

“ The screen may commit—yes, frequently has committed—mayhem, assault and battery and actual murder upon the revered form of some great masterpiece of narrative literature; but you who are well-read, you who love the “old melodious lays that softly melt the ages through,” and the tales told by the great romancers, pause before you recklessly indict a new art, groping its way toward a full realization of its possibilities and powers. ”

“ Suppose we endeavor to isolate four of these mysterious qualities in art and call them poignancy, appeal to the imagination, exquisiteness, and reserve.
Any one who goes frequently to the movies must have felt more than once a certain poignancy, a strange fascination in some pictorial arrangement, in some curiously appealing movement on the screen. ”

“ Lincoln asserted that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but 97at one period it seemed as if the screen were stubbornly endeavoring to perform this miracle. A picture-play, whatsoever might have been its origin, succumbed, as a rule, to a tendency to underrate the general intelligence, the power of memory, and the knowledge of life and human nature possessed by the average movie audience. ”