Motion picture

“ We experiment in the motion picture, though not so much from a mere love of the novel as from a settled conviction that in this field we still have a great deal to learn; we are still undecided about a great number of things.
There is hardly a theme on earth or in the moon with which we have not concerned ourselves; we have conjured the things of the earth and the stars up before the film camera and had them remain there until their pictures were at our disposal. We have descended into the dusty tombs of prehistoric times; we have adapted the stories of foreign countries to the screen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The task of the motion picture is quite similar to the task of music: to serve a generation that has strong feelings. Where music, however, excites and incites a general and indefinite feeling (whose compass reaches from the tortures of the ego to the all-embracing feeling of the godhead itself) through tones, the motion picture assembles its fullness on the earthly world of emotions. ”

“ At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together.
For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of countless millions of men, women and children. ”

“ And every film will have this artistic and commercial success which glows with real passion because it has been wrung from powerful feeling. The art, the very soul of the motion picture, cherishes no desire for subtle, intellectual form or forms. ”

“ 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 motion picture reaches, teaches and preaches to more people in America than all the schools, churches, books, magazines and newspapers put together, and when it teaches, it does it in a vivid way that live people like. ”

“ Mimic art calls for a sharp milieu, a pronounced environment. Since the descriptive power of the gesture does not extend beyond the hidden contents of the human soul, the figures of an unenvironed motion picture would float about in empty space.
The world of the spoken drama is limited to the cubic feet of space within the theater; the motion picture, on the contrary, has the world for its field; it moves in perfect freedom. The camera follows the actor wherever he may go. ”

“ And in any single section of the motion picture the fixed design and the movement, the accentuation and the harmony, the work and the play, must be co-ordinated and all this technique must itself be subordinate to spontaneous enduring inspiration. Without such mastery no movie-maker can ever win to the far goal of art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The main wheel in the machinery of film art has been found; the technical bases which decide the limits to which the accomplishments and achievements of the motion pictures may hope to go, these are known. Just as brush and colors, or hammer and chisel, each inartistic means in themselves, circumscribe the arts which they aid in creating, and set up a vigorous resistance to an alien or irrelevant aid, just so does the moving picture mechanism become indignant at the intrusion of any and every foreign contrivance or figuration the essential being of which is beyond its natural control. ”

“ We are not now speaking of such qualities as unity, emphasis, balance, and rhythm. They are indeed fundamental needs in pictorial composition, and yet a photoplay may have all of those qualities without possessing any strong appeal as art. A motion picture, like a painting, must possess other, more subtle, qualities if it is to make any lasting impression upon our souls. ”

“ Unless you are already a successful fiction writer when you first determine to write photoplays it is not going too far to assert that you have never yet really watched a motion picture. You have witnessed many, but only the playwright and the theatrical man may be said to watch plays, whether on the stage or on the screen, with every faculty alert and receptive, ready to pounce on any suggestion, any bit of stage business, any scenic effect, or any situation, that they may legitimately copy or enlarge upon for their respective uses. ”

“ 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 camera’s eye may roam the world for subjects; its range equals that of the newspaper or magazine. The stage and literature, travel, science, news and advertising, all are open to the motion picture. The photoplay, presenting a visualized story, is the most popular form, for the public heeds quickest the call of entertainment. But serious students of the motion picture believe that, in time, its purely amusement features will be dwarfed by the development along lines that may be roughly grouped under the heading “educational.” ”

“ The curse of the motion-picture industry is that in every audience there are from six to seven young women with adenoids who will insist on reading out the titles as they are flashed on the screen, filling the rest of the customers with harsh thoughts and dreams of murder. ”

“ To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can go to school. ”

“ And this development, this evolution, has to do not merely with the perfecting of the art itself, but with the enjoyment that is derivable and derived from the art. Our eyes are becoming keener in the detection of gestures and mimicry; our imaginations are growing sharper, even clairvoyant; they are rapidly becoming able to read the language of pictures and movement. When the motion picture was still in its infancy, its actors assumed and employed the shrill and tinny pathos of the pantomime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the moving picture, on the other hand, a thousand possibilities still lie quite on the surface, ready, indeed longing, for fulfilment. The great creator can think, feel, and dream new and novel features [xiii] without falling into despair at the thought of what has already been done. Becoming mindful of the past is not a painful occupation for him. Indeed, the motion picture may be compared to a starry heaven that stretches out before our upturned eyes, awaiting the creative ken of the celestial investigator. ”

“ Here we have this great instrument, the motion picture, the fourth largest industry in the United States, attended daily by ten million people, and in ten days by a hundred million, capable of interpreting the largest conceivable ideas that come within the range of the plastic arts, and those ideas have not been supplied. ”

“ You and I, and Dug and Henry, in the last analysis, are the bosses of the whole motion-picture industry. The movies are made for us. If we do not like the kind that is shown, the movie people will try to please us by showing another kind. ”

“ A work, consequently, the sensual action of which is so strong that a masterful, and dignified, motion picture can be made from it, may be adapted to the screen.
To transform a creation of the human mind and soul which constitutes, judged from every conceivable point of view, a work of real and great art from the sphere in which it originally stood, and in which it was originally created, to [148] another sphere, and into another species of art, is always more or less sacrilegious. ”

“ The marvelous development of the motion picture and the important place it has won in the heart of the entire civilized world have attracted an interest never before attained in so short a time by any form of amusement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This “sixteen” is a cabalistic figure in motion pictures. There are sixteen photographs on each foot of film. For average work the camera-man photographs the pictures at the rate of sixteen to the second, and they are shown on the screen in the picture theater at the same speed.
When the camera-man turns the crank at the side of his camera two independent mechanisms are affected by the operation, the shutter and the device for feeding the film. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fortunately, however, the general film public, the one that patronizes the average and paying motion picture, is essentially more refined than the Apache. The more refined spectator cannot be captivated so easily and persistently by the sensational tension that lasts for a moment as he can by the pleasure derivable and derived from lengthier and more enduring amusement. ”

“ Nothing is too difficult for the motion-picture man, and he has never proposed a feat so daring but what he could find plenty of actors willing to take the necessary parts. Battles, scenes from history, sessions of Congress, railroad wrecks, earthquakes and hundreds of other spectacles have been planned, staged and acted out by the makers of cinematograph films, while, of course, all the plays that we see on the screen are planned and carefully rehearsed before they are photographed. ”

“ The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. ”

“ But when we are shown a motion picture which has been made with the camera pointing downward, so that a level thing, like a plain or the surface of the sea, appears standing on end, then we like to see the points of interest so distributed that the various parts of the screen seem to be proportionally filled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The proportion of motion-picture goers in this country is one to every five inhabitants, and, however it may work out in your town, it is practically certain that the majority of men, women and children spend their evenings at the motion-picture show. ”

“ There must be laws of pictorial motion, just as there are laws of color, design, modelling, architectural construction, all of which appeal to the eye without visible motion. And, since the motion picture can capture and combine and reproduce a greater variety of moving things than was ever before possible in the history of art, it seems particularly important that we make earnest efforts to find out under what laws these manifold motions may be organized into art.
In studying the movies one might easily come to the conclusion that some directors aim only to make motions life-like. ”