Photoplay

“ He sits among miles of films which he cuts, joins, runs through his projecting machine, and cuts and joins again. He knows that pictorial beauty does not come to the screen merely because the camera itself is a wonderful instrument. He knows, what so many critics are beginning to discover, that “the photography” may be excellent in a film, while its pictorial composition is atrocious. He knows first and last and always that, unless he makes his photoplay fundamentally pleasing to the eyes of the spectator, he can never give it the magic power of graphic art. ”

“ Just as between the two covers of a magazine artistic stories stand side by side with instructive essays, scientific articles, or discussions of the events of the day, the photoplay is accompanied by a kinematoscopic rendering of reality in all its aspects. Whatever in nature or in social life interests the human understanding or human curiosity comes to the mind of the spectator with an incomparable intensity when not a lifeless photograph but a moving picture brings it to the screen. ”

“ It may be the task of a particular art to force all into one steady development between the walls of one room, but every letter and every telephone call to the room remind us even then that other developments with other settings are proceeding in the same instant. The soul longs for this whole interplay, and the richer it is in contrasts, the more satisfaction may be drawn from our simultaneous presence in many quarters. The photoplay alone gives us our chance for such omnipresence. ”

“ The music artist peoples the imagination of his audience with a glorious phantasmagoria. There is a music of vision that delights the beholder of motion and action, typifying life, health and sanity. We have only to give photoplay art its premise and we may find it ranked among the muses. In artistic photodrama we perceive with the ears of the heart and the soul, gifted, it would seem, with a new soul organ. The day of the skilled spectator must follow the dawn of the art of the ideal interpreter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true that the dramatic content of a photoplay may sometimes seem so real that the beholder forgets where he is and responds with such natural feelings as fear and triumph, love and hate, pride, selfish desire and hope; but it is also true that the pictorial form of a photoplay, that is, the mere arrangement of the substance, considered apart from its meaning, can arouse strange, pleasurable emotions which are peculiar to the enjoyment of art. ”

“ Just between the intolerable accompaniment by printed or spoken words on the one side and the perfectly welcome rendering of emotionally fitting music on the other, we find the noises with which the photoplay managers like to accompany their performances. When the horses gallop, we must hear the hoofbeats, if rain or hail is falling, if the lightning flashes, we hear the splashing or the thunderstorm. ”

“ The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique. What is adapted to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression in another. The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.
Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should take hold of the super-photoplay. ”

“ We may tolerate the photoplay because, by the inexpensive technical method which allows an unlimited multiplication of the performances, it brings at least a shadow of the theater to the masses who cannot afford to see real actors. But the cultivated mind might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and chromo prints and graphophone music than the moving pictures with their complete failure to give us the essentials of the real stage. ”

“ The spectator at a photoplay entertainment must be able promptly and easily to discover who your characters are, what kind of people they are, what they plan to do, how they succeed or fail, and, in fact, must "get" the whole story entirely from what he sees the actors in the picture do, with the slight assistance of a few explanatory leaders, or sub-titles, and, perhaps, such inserts as a letter, a newspaper cutting, a telegram, or some such device, flashed for a moment on the screen. ”

“ The art of the photoplay has developed so many new features of its own, features which have not even any similarity to the technique of the stage that the question arises: is it not really a new art which long since left behind the mere film reproduction of the theater and which ought to be acknowledged in its own esthetic independence? ”

“ In setting about to write a photoplay, we are dealing with persons, places and things of which the audience has no previous knowledge. Therefore, right at the start we must introduce our characters to the spectators, familiarize them with the environment in which the story is set, tell them of such past occurrences as have a direct bearing upon the story that is to follow—and interest and entertain them from the very first moment. ”

“ In the photoplay the whole emphasis lies on the picture and its composition is left entirely to the producing artist.
But the scenario writer must not only have talent for dramatic invention and construction; he must be wide awake to the uniqueness of his task, that is, he must feel at every moment that he is writing for the screen and not for the stage or for a book. ”

“ We have sought the aim which underlies all artistic creation and were led in this search to paths which seem far away from our special problem, the art of the photoplay. Yet we have steadily come nearer to it. We had to go the longer way because there can be no other method to reach a decision concerning the esthetic value and significance of the photoplay. We must clearly see what art in general aims at if we want to recognize the relative standing of the film art and the art of the theater. ”

“ Despite the fact that it is the same in name as a division of stage drama, a photoplay scene is by no means identical with a stage play scene. An apt parallel may be drawn by saying that while a stage scene is all that is seen and acted in one setting without dropping the curtain, a photoplay scene is all of the setting and action that is photographed without stopping or changing the position of the camera. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We read more publicity “dope” about a woman who can do a hundred “stunts” in five reels than about one who can strike a single enthralling pose, and can return to it again and again until it becomes as unforgettable as a masterpiece of sculpture.
The photoplay needs repetition, especially because of the fact that any pictorial motion or moment must by its very nature vanish while we look. Hence, unless all other circumstances are especially favorable for emphasis, such a motion or moment may vanish from our minds as well as from the screen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An author who is anonymous has said "While the story may have for a plot a subject involving complication, or mystery, each scene must be easily understood, or the audience, taxed by trying to fathom motives or emotions with which it is unfamiliar, or with which it is not in sympathy, loses the thread of the story, and consequently pronounces the photoplay lacking in interest. Remembering the brevity of the film drama, compactness and simplicity in every feature are to be desired. It does not require a great cast of characters nor unusually spectacular scenic work to produce the big idea. ”

“ When we have recognized the special traits of the traditional arts we shall be better prepared to ask whether the methods of the photoplay do not characterize this film creation also as a full-fledged art, coördinated with the older forms of beauty.
We saw that the aim of every art is to isolate some object of experience in nature or social life in such a way that it becomes complete in itself, and satisfies by itself every demand which it awakens. ”

“ Also we must reject the theory that the artistic7 quality of a photoplay can be guaranteed by engaging so-called art directors who design backgrounds or select natural settings for the action of the film story. The picture which we see on the screen consists not of backgrounds alone; it is rather an ever-varying design of moving figures combined with a fixed or changing background. If an art director limits his work to the preparation of material environment of photoplay action, he is, by definition, responsible only for the place-element in the motion picture. ”

“ Success has crowned every effort to improve the photostage; the better the plays are the more the audience approves them. The most ambitious companies are the most flourishing ones. There must be inner values which make the photoplay so extremely attractive and even fascinating.
To a certain degree the mere technical cleverness of the pictures even today holds the interest spellbound as in those early days when nothing but this technical skill could claim the attention. We are still startled by every original effect, even if the mere showing of movement has today lost its impressiveness. ”

“ 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 invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the stone age. And the cave-men and women of our slums seem to be the people most affected by this novelty, which is but an expression of the old in that spiral of life which is going higher while seeming to repeat the ancient phase. ”

“ Both the social and the natural backgrounds are the real setting for the development of the chief character in the story. These features can easily be transferred to the photoplay and for this reason some picturized novels have had the advantage over the photoplay cut from the drama. The only true conclusion must remain, however, that neither drama nor novel is sufficient for the film scenarios. The photopoet must turn to life itself and must remodel life in the artistic forms which are characteristic of his particular art. ”

“ The fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on the screen is established. The high degree of their suggestibility during those hours in the dark house may be taken for granted. Hence any wholesome influence emanating from the photoplay must have an incomparable power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national soul. From this point of view the boundary lines between the photoplay and the merely instructive moving pictures with the news of the day or the magazine articles on the screen become effaced. ”

“ Any possible credit to me, therefore, must be accorded to my conception of the new sort of photoplay as a systematic performance rather than as a sporadic spectacle. Indeed, I was to find out later that even this idea was not an exclusive visitation. ”

“ In selecting a point of attack or beginning, the photoplaywright is confronted with the task of skillfully forming a link between the outside occurrences that have gone before and those which are witnessed by the audience as integral parts of the photoplay itself. He must decide at just what time and place and under exactly what circumstances the audience may commence snooping into the lives of the characters whose dramatic relations carry them through smiles, tears and suspense for an indefinite period. ”

“ Realistic and idealistic, practical and romantic, historical and modern topics are fit material for the art of the photoplay. Its world is as unlimited as that of literature, and the same is true of the style of treatment. The humorous, if it is true humor, the tragic, if it is true tragedy, the gay and the solemn, the merry and the pathetic, the half-reel and the five-reel play, all can fulfill the demands of the new art. ”