Film

“ Each film on the object-glass of character obscures the heavenly vision, but to the prepared and translucent life truth undiscernible by others breaks upon the reverent gaze, and the beatific vision is revealed to the pure in heart. ”

“ Nor is that a good film which is understood only by the aesthetic soul. To be good, satisfactory, excellent, a film must carry along with it and enrapture all, those whose [xviii] hearts are simple and those whose hearts are intricate, complex, full of intertwined sensations. To do this is hard. If and when done, it is done through the medium of great art. ”

“ Nevertheless, the motion film of all lands, whether it be American or European, makes its appeal to human beings every one of whom has two eyes in his head and a heart in his breast. Nor is this all. Every individual man, wherever he may chance to live or whatever his origin may be, has one fundamental ambition, one basic goal: joy, beauty, adventure. Perhaps I have succeeded in saying a few things regarding the general nature of the motion picture which may be helpful by way of showing how a successful picture is built up and produced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When a piece of fiction—no matter whether it be a short story, a serial or a novel—appears, an endeavor should be made to arrange with a film concern that the photoplay should appear simultaneously with it in fiction form. ”

“ All that can come to light in the film, and particularly in film adaptations, is the sensual soul of an action. From this it is evident that when a bit of literature is adapted to the screen, the adapter is obliged to set up a quite different objective from that which the original poet had in mind. ”

“ After a director has carefully composed a series of scenes so that the motions and patterns and textures and tones dissolve, from one moment to the next, in a rhythmical flow, regardless of how the story may have shifted its setting, we do not want some film doctor to come along and break that unity into pieces for the sake of a few jokes, or near-jokes, or for a few words of schoolroom wisdom or of sentimental gush. ”

“ Let us stray for a frivolous moment into the realms of art, since the word art is claimed for what we know as the "film." This discovery went as it pleased for a few years in the hands of inventors and commercial agents. In these few years such a raging taste for cowboy, crime, and Chaplin films has been developed, that a Commission which has just been sitting on the matter finds that the public will not put up with more than a ten per cent. proportion of educational film in the course of an evening's entertainment. ”

“ Conventions of film, as a medium with its own characteristics, started to be experienced relatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis in the process of freeing itself from the constraints of literacy. Films are an appropriate medium for integration of the visual, the aural, and motion. People can record on film some of their most intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record to fast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience of filming is an experience with space and time in their interrelationship. ”

“ In the direction of a serial, each chapter of which is usually told in two thousand feet of film, or two-fifths as much as is allotted the average feature picture, the director is faced with the necessity of making every foot of film contain either plot interest or action interest. Pictorial beauty, characterization, atmosphere, 132qualities which sometimes assist the interest of a feature picture to a great extent, are discarded from the slightest contemplation in the direction of a serial, even as similar elements are discarded in the writing of the magazine serial story. ”

“ Footage: The amount of film consumed in the making of an individual scene, insert, or the entire picture.
Frame: See Film.
Idea: An incident, or a situation, that suggests a plot; in other words, the plot "germ."
Insert: Anything introduced into the film to aid in telling the story or to explain a point of the plot. "Leaders" are also inserts; but, as generally used, inserts refers to letters, telegrams, newspaper paragraphs or personals, or any matter other than cut-ins, or dialogue, inserted into the film during the progress of a scene, thus becoming practically a part of that scene. ”

“ “It would make a good film, the story that you have recounted to me there—but it bears no sort of resemblance to everyday life.”
“I admit that I haven’t gone into all the details, but—”
“You have gone further—you have ignored them magnificently. ”

“ In this respect the cinematograph producer is far better off than his rival on the real stage. Situations, scenes, and episodes incapable of production by the latter, can be produced very simply on the film. Novels, short stories, plays, the Bible, Greek inscriptions, inventions, little episodes and incidents in everyday life—anything and everything is grist for his mill. Of course, fashions change just as in any other phase of our complex life. ”

“ Fairy-tales need not be more than one-tenth of a reel long. Some of the best fairy-tales in the whole history of man can be told in a breath. And the best motion picture story for fifty years may turn out to be a reel ten minutes long. Do not let the length of the commercial film tyrannize over your mind, O young art museum photoplay director. ”

“ The children of to-day are such habitual Cinema-goers that too much cinematograph is to be discouraged, but the film used in proper perspective in the schools will excite and increase interest in science, industry, art, geography, travel, history, biography and literature. ”

“ The more fastidious photoplay audience that uses the hieroglyphic hypothesis in analyzing the film before it, will acquire a new tolerance and understanding of the avalanche of photoplay conceptions, and find a promise of beauty in what have been properly classed as mediocre and stereotyped productions. ”

“ The logical follow-up medium for your film is the motion-picture publication field, for every fan takes regularly at least one publication devoted to photoplays, and the cover of national magazine or periodical you have in mind may only catch his eye at the news-stand. ”

“ In a theatre, you know, if you saw a knight riding through a forest, the effect would be managed by making the scenery slide backwards past him; and in a cinema it could all be shortened up by increasing the pace or leaving out part of the film. ”

“ What do we mean by film adaptation? We mean the separation of the sensual action from all the rest. The feelings, transfigured through pure intellect in the original poetry, are lifted from their initial surroundings. Adapt a poem of the spiritual soul in this way and a journalese tract is the result. ”

“ This volume is a résumé of what has been done in film-land, and the author advances numerous original ideas that will be read with interest and profit by educationists generally, [17] library authorities, social-reformers, and cinema-goers collectively. It is not a technical work, but the technics of the art of film production are also dealt with. After studying this volume the reader will doubtless accept Mr. Wrigley’s contention that “the film is the coming apostle of education.”
Walter A. Briscoe. ”

“ If the work is skilfully performed the results are distinctly pleasing and effective. After one288 has been watching brilliant black and white pictures, the introduction of a coloured film comes as a restful interlude to the eyes. ”

“ Some day they will realize that the public really loves simple drama more than they do sensational spectacle.
3. THE MANUSCRIPT (a) Technique—In fiction the deeds need only be probable; in photodrama they must be actually performable, because the audience must see them. For the photoplay must show whatever is vital. Keep your captions down to 15 words at the most, and your inserts to 20, as every word means a foot of film. Tell how your characters shall act, leave to the director where and how they enter and exit. ”

“ The film, having, as it certainly does, fewer means of expression at its immediate command [158] than the legitimate stage, and depending for its appeal upon an audience that is, as a rule, less cultured, dare not overlook, slight, or neglect a single means that might help it in its effort to bring out strong effects. Is dramatic suspense or tension inartistic? Quite the contrary; it is the best proof we have of artistic ability, for we may search the art canons of the civilized world and we will never find a rule to the effect that art must be tiring and tiresome. ”

“ This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted 59 part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about Steel or The River. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. ”

“ A film is best inspected by rewinding it slowly from one reel onto another, gripping it with a gentle pressure, and allowing it to run between the fingers. This method will catch all splices and also all split films. ”

“ And even those who select this volume as their first venture in becoming acquainted with our heroines must well know how the film pictures look from the front of the screen.
To the uninitiated I might say that in making picture plays a company, somewhat like a regular theatrical organization, is gotten together. The play is decided upon, but instead of the acts taking place before an audience they are enacted before a camera and a man who acts as director, or manager. ”

“ In this dilemma the progressive manufacturer has joyfully hailed the advent of the motion picture film which enables him to display every step in the manufacture of the machine or articles, and every phase of its operation. ”

“ Subtle emotions it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this, because she thought that he thought that.’ (If a cinema company will film The Golden Bowl, I will burn seven candles as an offering to the Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave to the play and the novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. ”

“ What the drama may safely give to the smaller and generally older audiences which it draws may not be suitable from any point of view, either 225of art or of moral influence, for the coarser and more pronounced representation of the moving picture. There is a place for film presentation that is unique and it may easily become the greatest educational agency in all recreational life. ”

“ THE FILM-PLAY PRODUCER AT WORK.
Rehearsing at the Edison Cinematograph Theatre. This picture shows the stage setting, the powerful battery of electric top-lights for illuminating the scene, and the electrically driven camera.
By this method also the stage-manager compels the actors and actresses to interpret his ideas, which he regards as suiting the man in the street. The members of the company have no opportunity to thrust their own impressions before the camera. ”

“ Moving pictures and photo plays are famous the world over, and in this line of books the reader is given a full description of how the films are made—the scenes of little dramas, indoors and out, trick pictures to satisfy the curious, soul-stirring pictures of city affairs, life in the Wild West, among the cowboys and Indians, thrilling rescues along the seacoast, the daring of picture hunters in the jungle among savage beasts, and the great risks run in picturing conditions in a land of earthquakes. ”

“ An editorial in Motography says: "The best motion picture dramas produced today are reproductions of literary classics. These films do not achieve immortality; they merely further assure the immortality of the original work. ”

“ In the first place there has to be a play to be "filmed," or taken. It may be a parlor drama an outdoor scene—anything from a burning building to a flood. With the play decided on, the actors and actresses for the different parts are selected and carefully rehearsed. This is necessary as the camera is instantaneous and one false move or gestures may spoil the film.
Next comes the selection of the location for the various scenes. Indoor ones are comparatively easy, for the scenic artist can build almost anything. ”

“ The reader gets a clear idea of how the films are made and he is immensely entertained with the accounts of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the vast movie villages—manners and customs unique in many respects. ”

“ That the imperfect films of the first decades offered only imperfect, at times even repellent, pictures, is altogether natural. The intellectuals of all nations, and those who had schooled their eye and their heart on the perfection and beauty of the [60] old and established arts, were terrified, if not horrified, at and by the unlicked antics of this new contraption. They saw in the motion picture nothing more than a machine to entertain, chiefly to amuse, the populace. ”