on the screen. The more ambitious picture
corporations have clearly recognized this demand and show their new
plays with exact suggestions for the choice of musical pieces to be
played as accompaniment. The music does not tell a part of the plot and
does not replace the picture as words would do, but simply reenforces
the emotional setting. It is quite probable, when the photoplay art has
found its esthetic recognition, that composers will begin to write the
musical score for a beautiful photoplay with the same enthusiasm with
which they write in other musical forms.

Just between the intolerable accompaniment by printed or spoken words on
the one side and the perfectly welcome rendering of emotionally fitting
music on the other, we find the noises with which the photoplay managers
like to accompany their performances. When the horses gallop, we must
hear the hoofbeats, if rain or hail is falling, if the lightning
flashes, we hear the splashing or the thunderstorm. We hear the firing
of a gun, the whistling of a locomotive, ships' bells, or the ambulance
gong, or the barking dog, or the noise when Charlie Chaplin falls
downstairs. They even have a complicated machine, the "allefex," which
can produce over fifty distinctive noises, fit for any photoplay
emergency. It will probably take longer to rid the photoplay of these
appeals to the imagination than the explanations of the leaders, but
ultimately they will have to disappear too. They have no right to
existence in a work of art which is composed of pictures. In so far as
they are simply heightening the emotional tension, they may enter into
the music itself, but in so far as they tell a part of the story, they
ought to be ruled out as intrusions from another sphere. We might just
as well improve the painting of a rose garden by bathing it in rose
perfume in order that the spectators might get the odor of the roses
together with the sight of them. The limitations of an art are in
reality its strength and to overstep its boundaries means to weaken it.

It may be more open to discussion whether this same negative attitude
ought to be taken toward color in the photoplay. It is well-known what
wonderful technical progress has been secured by those who wanted to
catch the color hues and tints of nature in their moving pictures. To be
sure, many of the prettiest effects in color are even today produced by
artificial stencil methods. Photographs are simply printed in three
c