of the photoplay animal, but the bronze
elasticity is the joy in both.

Here is a scene of a masked monk, carrying off a fainting girl. The hero
intercepts him. The figures of the lady and the monk are in sufficient
sculptural harmony to make a formal sculptural group for an art
exhibition. The picture of the hero, strong, with well-massed surfaces,
is related to both. The fact that he is in evening dress does not alter
his monumental quality. All three are on a stone balcony that relates
itself to the general largeness of spirit in the group, and the
semi-classic dress of the maiden. No doubt the title is: The Morning
Following the Masquerade Ball. This group could be made in unglazed clay,
in four colors.

Here is an American lieutenant with two ladies. The three are suddenly
alert over the approach of the villain, who is not yet in the picture.
In costume it is an everyday group, but those three figures are related
to one another, and the trees behind them, in simple sculptural terms.
The lieutenant, as is to be expected, looks forth in fierce readiness.
One girl stands with clasped hands. The other points to the danger. The
relations of these people to one another may seem merely dramatic to the
superficial observer, but the power of the group is in the fact that it
is monumental. I could imagine it done in four different kinds of rare
tropical wood, carved unpolished.

Here is a scene of storm and stress in an office where the hero is caught
with seemingly incriminating papers. The table is in confusion. The room
is filling with people, led by one accusing woman. Is this also
sculpture? Yes. The figures are in high relief. Even the surfaces of the
chairs and the littered table are massive, and the eye travels without
weariness, as it should do in sculpture, from the hero to the furious
woman, then to the attorney behind her, then to the two other revilers,
then to the crowd in three loose rhythmic ranks. The eye makes this
journey, not from space to space, or fabric to fabric, but first of all
from mass to mass. It is sculpture, but it is the sort that can be done
in no medium but the moving picture itself, and therefore it is one goal
of this argument.

But there are several other goals. One of the sculpturesque resources of
the photoplay is that the human countenance can be magnified many times,
till it fills the entire screen. Some examples are in rather low relief,
portraits approximating certain painters.