THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY

Let us take for our platform this sentence:  The motion picture art is A great high art, not A process of commercial manufacture.  The people I hope to convince of this are (1) The great art museums of America, including the people who support them in any way, the people who give the current exhibitions there or attend them, the art school students in the corridors below coming on in the same field; (2) the departments of English, of the history of the drama, of the practice of the drama, and the history and practice of “art” in that amazingly long list of our colleges and universities to be found, for instance, in the World Almanac; (3) the critical and literary world generally.  Somewhere in this enormous field, piled with endowments mountain high, it should be possible to establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine art.  Readers who do not care for the history of any art, readers who have neither curiosity nor aspiration in regard to any of the ten or eleven muses who now dance around Apollo, such shabby readers had best lay the book down now.  Shabby readers do not like great issues.  My poor little sermon is concerned with a great issue, the clearing of the way for a critical standard, whereby the ultimate photoplay may be judged.  I cannot teach office-boys ways to make “quick money” in the “movies.”  That seems to be the delicately implied purpose of the mass of books on the photoplay subject.  They are, indeed, a sickening array.  Freeburg’s book is one of the noble exceptions.  And I have paid tribute elsewhere to John Emerson and Anita Loos.  They have written a crusading book, and many crusading articles.

After five years of exceedingly lonely art study, in which I had always specialized in museum exhibits, prowling around like a lost dog, I began to intensify my museum study, and at the same time shout about what I was discovering.  From nineteen hundred and five on I did orate my opinions to a group of advanced students.  We assembled weekly for several winters in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, for the discussion of the masterpieces in historic order, from Egypt to America.  From that standpoint, the work least often found, hardest to make, least popular in the street, may be in the end the one most treasured in a world-museum as a counsellor and stimulus of mankind.  Throughout this book I try to bring to bear the same simple standards of form, composition, mood, and motive that we used in finding the fundamental exhibits; the standards which are taken for granted in art histories and schools, radical or conservative, anywhere.

Again we assume it is eight o’clock in the evening, friend reader, when the chapter begins.

Just as the Action Picture has its photographic basis or fundamental metaphor in the long chase down the highway, so the Intimate Film has its photographic basis in the fact that any photoplay interior has a very small ground plan, and the cosiest of enclosing walls.  Many a worth-while scene is acted out in a space no bigger than that which is occupied by an office boy’s stool and hat.  If there is a table in this room, it is often so near it is half out of the picture or perhaps it is against the front line of the triangular ground-plan.  Only the top of the table is seen, and nothing close up to us is pictured below that.  We in the audience are privileged characters.  Generally attending the show in bunches of two or three, we are members of the household on the screen.  Sometimes we are sitting on the near side of the family board.  Or we are gossiping whispering neighbors, of the shoemaker, we will say, with our noses pressed against the pane of a metaphoric window.

Take for contrast the old-fashioned stage production showing the room and work table of a shoemaker.  As it were the whole side of the house has been removed.  The shop is as big as a banquet hall.  There is something essentially false in what we see, no matter how the stage manager fills in with old boxes, broken chairs, and the like.  But the photoplay interior is the size such a work-room should be.  And there the awl and pegs and bits of leather, speaking the silent language of picture writing, can be clearly shown.  They are sometimes like the engine in chapter two, the principal actors.

Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay may be carried out of doors to the row of loafers in front of the country store, or the gossiping streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness of the interior.

The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cosy.  These are to be classed as out-of-door scenery so far as theory goes, and are to be discussed under the head of Splendor Pictures.  Masses of human beings pour by like waves, the personalities of none made plain.  The only definite people are the hero and heroine in the foreground, and maybe one other.  Though these three be in ball-costume, the little triangle they occupy next to the camera is in sort an interior, while the impersonal guests behind them conform to the pageant principles of out-of-doors, and the dancers are to the main actor as is the wind-shaken forest to the charcoal-burner, or the bending grain to the reaper.

The Intimate Motion Picture is the world’s new medium for studying, not the great passions, such as black hate, transcendent love, devouring ambition, but rather the half relaxed or gently restrained moods of human creatures.  It gives also our idiosyncrasies.  It is gossip in extremis.  It is apt to chronicle our petty little skirmishes, rather than our feuds.  In it Colin Clout and his comrades return.

The Intimate Photoplay should not crowd its characters.  It should not choke itself trying to dramatize the whole big bloody plot of Lorna Doone, or any other novel with a dozen leading people.  Yet some gentle episode from the John Ridd farm, some half-chapter when Lorna and the Doones are almost forgotten, would be fitting.  Let the duck-yard be parading its best, and Annie among the milk-pails, her work for the evening well nigh done.  The Vicar of Wakefield has his place in this form.  The Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture might very well give humorous moments in the lives of the great, King Alfred burning the cakes, and other legendary incidents of him.  Plato’s writings give us glimpses of Socrates, in between the long dialogues.  And there are intimate scraps in Plutarch.

Prospective author-producer, do you remember Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, and Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors?  Can you not attain to that informal understanding in pictorial delineations of such people?

The photoplay has been unjust to itself in comedies.  The late John Bunny’s important place in my memory comes from the first picture in which I saw him.  It is a story of high life below stairs.  The hero is the butler at a governor’s reception.  John Bunny’s work as this man is a delightful piece of acting.  The servants are growing tipsier downstairs, but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears, frozen into sobriety by his glance.  At the last moment this god of the basement catches them at their worst and gives them a condescending but forgiving smile.  The lid comes off completely.  He himself has been imbibing.  His surviving dignity in waiting on the governor’s guests is worthy of the stage of Goldsmith and Sheridan.  This film should be reissued in time as a Bunny memorial.

So far as my experience has gone, the best of the comedians is Sidney Drew.  He could shine in the atmosphere of Pride and Prejudice or Cranford.  But the best things I have seen of his are far from such.  I beg the pardon of Miss Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell while I mention Who’s Who in Hogg’s Hollow, and A Regiment of Two.  Over these I rejoiced like a yokel with a pocketful of butterscotch and peanuts.  The opportunities to laugh on a higher plane than this, to laugh like Olympians, are seldom given us in this world.

The most successful motion picture drama of the intimate type ever placed before mine eyes was Enoch Arden, produced by Cabanne.

Lillian Gish takes the part of Annie, Alfred Paget impersonates Enoch Arden, and Wallace Reid takes the part of Philip Ray.  The play is in four reels of twenty minutes each.  It should have been made into three reels by shortening every scene just a bit.  Otherwise it is satisfying, and I and my friends have watched it through many times as it has returned to Springfield.

The mood of the original poem is approximated.  The story is told with fireside friendliness.  The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by happy children gives us many a genre painting on the theme of domesticity.  It is a photographic rendering in many ways as fastidious as Tennyson’s versification.  The scenes on the desert island are some of them commonplace.  The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays, but the rest of the production has a mood of its own.  Seen several months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular piece of Tennyson’s fills word-imagination and word-memory.  Perhaps this is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist.  It is a sound example of the type of film to which this chapter is devoted.  If you cannot get your local manager to bring Enoch Arden, reread that poem of Tennyson’s and translate it in your own mind’s eye into a gallery of six hundred delicately toned photographs hung in logical order, most of them cosy interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair.  Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate Picture, as I generally call it, for convenience.

It is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human.  But the haughty, who scorn the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy show.  And they think that of course one should not take seriously anything so cheap in price and so appealing to the cross-roads taste.  But it is very well to begin in the Punch-and-Judy-show state of mind, and reconcile ourselves to it, and then like good democrats await discoveries.  Punch and Judy is the simplest form of marionette performance, and the marionette has a place in every street in history just as the dolls’ house has its corner in every palace and cottage.  The French in particular have had their great periods of puppet shows; and the Italian tradition survived in America’s Little Italy, in New York for many a day; and I will mention in passing that one of Pavlowa’s unforgettable dance dramas is The Fairy Doll.  Prospective author-producer, why not spend a deal of energy on the photoplay successors of the puppet-plays?

We have the queen of the marionettes already, without the play.

One description of the Intimate-and-friendly Comedy would be the Mary Pickford kind of a story.  None has as yet appeared.  But we know the Mary Pickford mood.  When it is gentlest, most roguish, most exalted, it is a prophecy of what this type should be, not only in the actress, but in the scenario and setting.

Mary Pickford can be a doll, a village belle, or a church angel.  Her powers as a doll are hinted at in the title of the production:  Such a Little Queen.  I remember her when she was a village belle in that film that came out before producers or actors were known by name.  It was sugar-sweet.  It was called:  What the Daisy Said.  If these productions had conformed to their titles sincerely, with the highest photoplay art we would have had two more examples for this chapter.

Why do the people love Mary?  Not on account of the Daniel Frohman style of handling her appearances.  He presents her to us in what are almost the old-fashioned stage terms:  the productions energetic and full of painstaking detail but dominated by a dream that is a theatrical hybrid.  It is neither good moving picture nor good stage play.  Yet Mary could be cast as a cloudy Olympian or a church angel if her managers wanted her to be such.  She herself was transfigured in the Dawn of Tomorrow, but the film-version of that play was merely a well mounted melodrama.

Why do the people love Mary?  Because of a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood.  Botticelli painted her portrait many centuries ago when by some necromancy she appeared to him in this phase of herself.  There is in the Chicago Art Institute at the top of the stairs on the north wall a noble copy of a fresco by that painter, the copy by Mrs. MacMonnies.  It is very near the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  In the picture the muses sit enthroned.  The loveliest of them all is a startling replica of Mary.

The people are hungry for this fine and spiritual thing that Botticelli painted in the faces of his muses and heavenly creatures.  Because the mob catch the very glimpse of it in Mary’s face, they follow her night after night in the films.  They are never quite satisfied with the plays, because the managers are not artists enough to know they should sometimes put her into sacred pictures and not have her always the village hoyden, in plays not even hoydenish.  But perhaps in this argument I have but betrayed myself as Mary’s infatuated partisan.

So let there be recorded here the name of another actress who is always in the intimate-and-friendly mood and adapted to close-up interiors, Marguerite Clark.  She is endowed by nature to act, in the same film, the eight-year-old village pet, the irrepressible sixteen-year-old, and finally the shining bride of twenty.  But no production in which she acts that has happened to come under my eye has done justice to these possibilities.  The transitions from one of these stages to the other are not marked by the producer with sufficient delicate graduation, emphasis, and contrast.  Her plots have been but sugared nonsense, or swashbuckling ups and downs.  She shines in a bevy of girls.  She has sometimes been given the bevy.

But it is easier to find performers who fit this chapter, than to find films.  Having read so far, it is probably not quite nine o’clock in the evening.  Go around the corner to the nearest theatre.  You will not be apt to find a pure example of the Intimate-and-friendly Moving Picture, but some one or two scenes will make plain the intent of the phrase.  Imagine the most winsome tableau that passes before you, extended logically through one or three reels, with no melodramatic interruptions or awful smashes.  For a further discussion of these smashes, and other items in this chapter, read the ninth chapter, entitled “Painting-in-Motion.”