The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 4

in 1922, except The Faith
Healer, founded on the play by William Vaughn Moody, the poet, with
much of the directing and scenario by Mrs. William Vaughn Moody,

and a more talked-of commercial film, The Miracle Man. But not until
the religious film is taken out of the commercial field, and allowed to
develop unhampered under the Church and the Art Museum, will the
splendid religious and ritualistic opportunity be realized.
Chapter VIII
--Sculpture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument of chapter
two. The Photoplay of Action. Like the Action Film, this aspect of
composition is much better understood by the commercial people than
some other sides of the art. Some of the best of the William S. Hart
productions show appreciation of this quality by the director, the
photographer, and the public. Not only is the man but the horse allowed
to be moving bronze, and not mere cowboy pasteboard. Many of the
pictures of Charles Ray make the hero quite a bronze-looking
sculpturesque person, despite his yokel raiment.
Chapter IX
--Painting-in-Motion, being a continuation on a higher terrace of
chapter three, The Intimate Photoplay. Charlie Chaplin has intimate
and painter's qualities in his acting, and he makes himself into a
painting or an etching in the midst of furious slapstick. But he has been
in no films that were themselves paintings. The argument of this
chapter has been carried much further in Freeburg's book, The Art of
Photoplay Making.
Chapter X
--Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion, being a continuation
of the chapter on Fairy Splendor. In this field we find one of the worst
failures of the commercial films, and their utterly unimaginative
corporation promoters. Again I must refer them to such fairy books as
those of Padraic Colum, where neither sword nor wing nor boat is
found to move, except for a fairy reason.
I have just returned this very afternoon from a special showing of the

famous imported film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Some of the earnest
spirits of the Denver Art Association, finding it was in storage in the
town, had it privately brought forth to study it with reference to its
bearing on their new policies. What influence it will have in that most
vital group, time will show.
Meanwhile it is a marvellous illustration of the meaning of this chapter
and the chapter on Fairy Splendor, though it is a diabolical not a
beneficent vitality that is given to inanimate things. The furniture,
trappings, and inventions are in motion to express the haunted mind, as
in Griffith's Avenging Conscience, described pages 121 through 132.
The two should be shown together in the same afternoon, in the Art
Museum study rooms. Caligari is undoubtedly the most important
imported film since that work of D'Annunzio, Cabiria, described pages
55 through 57. But it is the opposite type of film. Cabiria is all
out-doors and splendor on the Mediterranean scale. In general,
imported films do not concern Americans, for we have now a vast
range of technique. All we lack is the sense to use it.
The cabinet of Caligari is indeed a cabinet, and the feeling of being in a
cell, and smothered by all the oppressions of a weary mind, does not
desert the spectator for a minute.
The play is more important, technically, than in its subject-matter and
mood. It proves in a hundred new ways the resources of the film in
making all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act
at all, the leading actors in the films. But they need not necessarily act
to a diabolical end. An angel could have as well been brought from the
cabinet as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have
been a work of beneficence and health and healing. I could not help but
think that the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could
have been acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case
and great sarcophagus. The wings of Isis and Nephthys could have
been spread over the sky instead of the oppressive walls of the crooked
city. Lights instead of shadows could have been made actors and real
hieroglyphic inscriptions instead of scrawls.
As it was, the alleged insane man was more sensible than most motion

picture directors, for his scenery acted with him, and not according to
accident or silly formula. I make these points as an antidote to the
general description of this production by those who praise it.
They speak of the scenery as grotesque, strained, and experimental, and
the plot as sinister. But this does not get to the root of the matter. There
is rather the implication in most of the criticisms and praises that the
scenery is abstract. Quite the contrary is the case. Indoors looks like
indoors.