The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 3

like newspapers, and as
George Ade says:--"Nothing is so dead as yesterday's newspaper." But
the first newspapers, and the first imprints of Addison's Spectator, and
the first Almanacs of Benjamin Franklin, and the first broadside ballads
and the like, are ever collected and remembered. And the lists of films
given in books two and three of this work are the only critical and
carefully sorted lists of the early motion pictures that I happen to know
anything about. I hope to be corrected if I am too boastful, but I boast
that my lists must be referred to by all those who desire to study these
experiments in their beginnings. So I let them remain, as still vivid in

the memory of all true lovers of the photoplay who have watched its
growth, fascinated from the first. But I would add to the list of Action
Films of chapter two the recent popular example, Douglas Fairbanks in
The Three Musketeers. That is perhaps the most literal "Chase-Picture"
that was ever really successful in the commercial world. The story is
cut to one episode. The whole task of the four famous swordsmen of
Dumas is to get the Queen's token that is in the hands of Buckingham
in England, and return with it to Paris in time for the great ball. It is one
long race with the Cardinal's guards who are at last left behind. It is the
same plot as Reynard the Fox, John Masefield's poem--Reynard
successfully eluding the huntsmen and the dogs. If that poem is ever
put on in an Art Museum film, it will have to be staged like one of
Æsop's Fables, with a man acting the Fox, for the children's delight.
And I earnestly urge all who would understand the deeper significance
of the "chase-picture" or the "Action Picture" to give more thought to
Masefield's poem than to Fairbanks' marvellous acting in the school of
the younger Salvini. The Mood of the intimate photoplay, chapter three,
still remains indicated in the current films by the acting of Lillian Gish
and Mary Pickford, when they are not roused up by their directors to
turn handsprings to keep the people staring. Mary Pickford in particular
has been stimulated to be over-athletic, and in all her career she has
been given just one chance to be her more delicate self, and that was in
the almost forgotten film:--A Romance of the Redwoods. This is one of
the serious commercial attempts that should be revived and studied, in
spite of its crudities of plot, by our Art Museums. There is something
of the grandeur of the redwoods in it, in contrast to the sustained
Botticelli grace of "Our Mary."
I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet,
Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh. I am the one poet who wrote them
songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put
on the screen, or the name of their director. Woman's clubs are always
asking me for bits of delicious gossip about myself to fill up literary
essays. Now there's a bit. There are two things to be said for those
poems. First, they were heartfelt. Second, any one could improve on
them.

In the fourth chapter of book two I discourse elaborately and formally
on The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor. And to this carefully
balanced technical discourse I would add the informal word, this New
Year's Day, that this type is best illustrated by such fairy-tales as have
been most ingratiatingly retold in the books of Padraic Colum, and
dazzlingly illustrated by Willy Pogany. The Colum-Pogany School of
Thought is one which the commercial producers have not yet
condescended to illustrate in celluloid, and it remains a special
province for the Art Museum 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. Remember the brevity of
Lincoln's Gettysburg address....
And so my commentary, New Year's Day, 1922, proceeds, using for
points of more and more extensive departure the refrains and old
catch-phrases of books two and three.
Chapter V
--The Picture of Crowd Splendor, being the type illustrated by Griffith's
Intolerance.
Chapter VI
--The Picture of Patriotic Splendor, which was illustrated by all the
War Films, the one most recently approved and accepted by the public
being The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Chapter VII
--The Picture of Religious Splendor, which has no examples, that
remain in the memory with any sharpness