The Photoplay | Page 9

can be stopped at
any moment and the turning renewed only after some complete change
has been made on the stage any substitution can be carried out without
the public knowing of the break in the events. We see a man walking to
the edge of a steep rock, leaving no doubt that it is a real person, and
then by a slip he is hurled down into the abyss below. The film does not
indicate that at the instant before the fall the camera has been stopped
and the actor replaced by a stuffed dummy which begins to tumble
when the movement of the film is started again. But not only dummies
of the same size can be introduced. A little model brought quite near to
the camera may take the place of the large real object at a far distance.
We see at first the real big ship and can convince ourselves of its reality
by seeing actual men climbing up the rigging. But when it comes to the
final shipwreck, the movement of the film is stopped and the camera
brought near to a little tank where a miniature model of the ship takes
up the rôle of the original and explodes and really sinks to its
two-feet-deep watery grave.
While, through this power to make impossible actions possible,
unheard of effects could be reached, all still remained in the outer
framework of the stage. The photoplay showed a performance, however
rapid or unusual, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new

perspective was opened when the managers of the film play introduced
the "close-up" and similar new methods. As every friend of the film
knows, the close-up is a scheme by which a particular part of the
picture, perhaps only the face of the hero or his hand or only a ring on
his finger, is greatly enlarged and replaces for an instant the whole
stage. Even the most wonderful creations, the great historical plays
where thousands fill the battlefields or the most fantastic caprices
where fairies fly over the stage, could perhaps be performed in a theater,
but this close-up leaves all stagecraft behind. Suddenly we see not
Booth himself as he seeks to assassinate the president, but only his
hand holding the revolver and the play of his excited fingers filling the
whole field of vision. We no longer see at his desk the banker who
opens the telegram, but the opened telegraphic message itself takes his
place on the screen for a few seconds, and we read it over his shoulder.
It is not necessary to enumerate still more changes which the
development of the art of the film has brought since the days of the
kinetoscope. The use of natural backgrounds, the rapid change of
scenes, the intertwining of the actions in different scenes, the changes
of the rhythms of action, the passing through physically impossible
experiences, the linking of disconnected movements, the realization of
supernatural effects, the gigantic enlargement of small details: these
may be sufficient as characteristic illustrations of the essential trend.
They show that the progress of the photoplay did not lead to a more and
more perfect photographic reproduction of the theater stage, but led
away from the theater altogether. Superficial impressions suggest the
opposite and still leave the esthetically careless observer in the belief
that the photoplay is a cheap substitute for the real drama, a theater
performance as good or as bad as a photographic reproduction allows.
But this traditional idea has become utterly untrue. 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? This right to
independent recognition has so far been ignored. Practically everybody
who judged the photoplays from the esthetic point of view remained at

the old comparison between the film and the graphophone. The
photoplay is still something which simply imitates the true art of the
drama on the stage. May it not be, on the contrary, that it does not
imitate or replace anything, but is in itself an art as different from that
of the theater as the painter's art is different from that of the sculptor?
And may it not be high time, in the interest of theory and of practice, to
examine the esthetic conditions which would give independent rights to
the new art? If this is really the situation, it must be a truly fascinating
problem, as it would give the chance to watch the art in its first
unfolding. A new esthetic