The Photoplay | Page 6

o'clock in the afternoon, the public of London at ten
o'clock of the same day saw the ceremony on the screen in a moving
picture twelve minutes in length. The distance between the two places
is two hundred miles. The film was seven hundred and fifty feet long. It
had been developed and printed in a special express train made up of
long freight cars transformed into dark rooms and fitted with tanks for
the developing and washing and with a machine for printing and drying.
Yet on the whole the current events were slowly losing ground even in
Europe, while America had never given such a large share of interest to
this rival of the newspaper. It is claimed that the producers in America
disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the
events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the

steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the
great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the
trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the
movements of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action
of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the
world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost
disappeared, the moving picture man has inherited all his courage,
patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure.
A greater photographic achievement, however, than the picturing of the
social and historic events was the marvelous success of the
kinematograph with the life of nature. No explorer in recent years has
crossed distant lands and seas without a kinematographic outfit. We
suddenly looked into the most intimate life of the African wilderness.
There the elephants and giraffes and monkeys passed to the waterhole,
not knowing that the moving picture man was turning his crank in the
top of a tree. We followed Scott and Shackleton into the regions of
eternal ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the
height of the aëroplane, and every child in Europe knows now the
wonders of Niagara. But the kinematographer has not sought nature
only where it is gigantic or strange; he follows its path with no less
admirable effect when it is idyllic. The brook in the woods, the birds in
their nest, the flowers trembling in the wind have brought their charm
to the delighted eye more and more with the progress of the new art.
But the wonders of nature which the camera unveils to us are not
limited to those which the naked eye can follow. The technical progress
led to the attachment of the microscope. After overcoming tremendous
difficulties, the scientists succeeded in developing a microscope
kinematography which multiplies the dimensions a hundred thousand
times. We may see on the screen the fight of the bacteria with the
microscopically small blood corpuscles in the blood stream of a
diseased animal. Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the
life of nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in
the outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and
blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few
seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks

it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days
and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. New interest for
geography and botany and zoölogy has thus been aroused by these
developments, undreamed of in the early days of the kinematograph,
and the scientists themselves have through this new means of technique
gained unexpected help for their labors.
The last achievement in this universe of photoknowledge is "the
magazine on the screen." It is a bold step which yet seemed necessary
in our day of rapid kinematoscopic progress. The popular printed
magazines in America had their heydey in the muckraking period about
ten years ago. Their hold on the imagination of the public which wants
to be informed and entertained at the same time has steadily decreased,
while the power of the moving picture houses has increased. The
picture house ought therefore to take up the task of the magazines
which it has partly displaced. The magazines give only a small place to
the news of the day, a larger place to articles in which scholars and men
of public life discuss significant problems. Much American history in
the last two decades was deeply influenced by the columns of the
illustrated magazines. Those men who reached the millions by such
articles cannot overlook the fact--they may approve or condemn it--that
the masses of today prefer to be taught by pictures rather than by words.
The audiences are assembled anyhow. Instead of feeding