ting of complex character. But the
chief demand is that the characters remain consistent, that the action
be developed according to inner necessity and that the characters
themselves be in harmony with the central idea of the plot. However, as
soon as we insist on unity we have no right to think only of the action
which gives the content of the play. We cannot make light of the form.
As in music the melody and rhythms belong together, as in painting not
every color combination suits every subject, and as in poetry not every
stanza would agree with every idea, so the photoplay must bring action
and pictorial expression into perfect harmony. But this demand repeats
itself in every single picture. We take it for granted that the painter
balances perfectly the forms in his painting, groups them so that an
internal symmetry can be felt and that the lines and curves and colors
blend into a unity. Every single picture of the sixteen thousand which
are shown to us in one reel ought to be treated with this respect of the
pictorial artist for the unity of the forms.

_The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in
moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and
causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and
which reach complete isolation from the practical world through the
perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance._

CHAPTER X

THE DEMANDS OF THE PHOTOPLAY

We have found the general formula for the new art of the photoplay. We
may turn our attention to some consequences which are involved in this
general principle and to some esthetic demands which result from it.
Naturally the greatest of all of them is the one for which no specific
prescription can be given, namely the imaginative talent of the scenario
writer and the producer. The new art is in that respect not different
from all the old arts. A Beethoven writes immortal symphonies; a
thousand conductors are writing symphonies after the same pattern and
after the same technical rules and yet not one survives the next day.
What the great painter or sculptor, composer or poet, novelist or
dramatist, gives from the depth of his artistic personality is
interesting and significant; and the unity of form and content is
natural and perfect. What untalented amateurs produce is trivial and
flat; the relation of form and content is forced; the unity of the whole
is incomplete. Between these two extreme