The Photoplay | Page 7

them with
mere entertainment, why not give them food for serious thought? It
seemed therefore a most fertile idea when the "Paramount Pictograph"
was founded to carry intellectual messages and ambitious discussions
into the film houses. Political and economic, social and hygienic,
technical and industrial, esthetic and scientific questions can in no way
be brought nearer to the grasp of millions. The editors will have to take
care that the discussions do not degenerate into one-sided propaganda,
but so must the editors of a printed magazine. Among the scientists the
psychologist may have a particular interest in this latest venture of the
film world. The screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest
wide circles in psychological experiments and mental tests and in this
way to spread the knowledge of their importance for vocational
guidance and the practical affairs of life.

Yet that power of the moving pictures to supplement the school room
and the newspaper and the library by spreading information and
knowledge is, after all, secondary to their general task, to bring
entertainment and amusement to the masses. This is the chief road on
which the forward march of the last twenty years has been most rapid.
The theater and the vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and
ample room to the play of the flitting pictures. What was the real
principle of the inner development on this artistic side? The little
scenes which the first pictures offered could hardly have been called
plays. They would have been unable to hold the attention by their own
contents. Their only charm was really the pleasure in the perfection
with which the apparatus rendered the actual movements. But soon
touching episodes were staged, little humorous scenes or melodramatic
actions were played before the camera, and the same emotions stirred
which up to that time only the true theater play had awakened. The aim
seemed to be to have a real substitute for the stage. The most evident
gain of this new scheme was the reduction of expenses. One actor is
now able to entertain many thousand audiences at the same time, one
stage setting is sufficient to give pleasure to millions. The theater can
thus be democratized. Everybody's purse allows him to see the greatest
artists and in every village a stage can be set up and the joy of a true
theater performance can be spread to the remotest corner of the lands.
Just as the graphophone can multiply without limit the music of the
concert hall, the singer, and the orchestra, so, it seemed, would the
photoplay reproduce the theater performance without end.
Of course, the substitute could not be equal to the original. The color
was lacking, the real depth of the objective stage was missing, and
above all the spoken word had been silenced. The few interspersed
descriptive texts, the so-called "leaders," had to hint at that which in the
real drama the speeches of the actors explain and elaborate. It was thus
surely only the shadow of a true theater, different not only as a
photograph is compared with a painting, but different as a photograph
is compared with the original man. And yet, however meager and
shadowlike the moving picture play appeared compared with the
performance of living actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication
was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go

forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention
for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare
repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the
screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs.
In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and
Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of
giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater performance
was proven for all time.
But while this movement to reproduce stage performances went on,
elements were superadded which the technique of the camera allowed
but which would hardly be possible in a theater. Hence the
development led slowly to a certain deviation from the path of the
drama. The difference which strikes the observer first results from the
chance of the camera man to set his scene in the real backgrounds of
nature and culture. The stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean
and, if need be, can move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves;
and yet how far is his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures
when the scene is played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering
at their foot and the surf is foaming about the actors. The theater has its
painted villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape
backgrounds. But here the theater,