untain-top, cottage, we have a conversation
between three places rather than three persons. By alternating the
picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When
two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects
rather than their voices. The collector presents a bill: the adventurer
shows him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it. Moving
objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.

The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he is getting nowhere, but
still helpless, puts the climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the
climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the screen. Sentences should
be used to show changes of time and place and a few such elementary
matters before the episode is fully started. The climax of a motion
picture scene cannot be one word or fifty words. As has been discussed in
connection with Cabiria, the crisis must be an action sharper than any
that has gone before in organic union with a tableau more beautiful than
any that has preceded: the breaking of the tenth wave upon the sand. Such
remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in the main chase of the
photoplay film are but guide-posts in the race toward the goal. They
should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be laboriously lifted and
lowered while the horses stop, mid-career.

The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to the soul through the silence,
requires no quotation from Keats to explain her, though Keats is the
equivalent in verse. Her setting in the great French Museum is enough. We
do not know that her name is Venus. She is thought by many to be another
statue of Victory. We may some day evolve scenarios that will require
nothing more than a title thrown upon the screen at the beginning, they
come to the eye so perfectly. This is not the only possible sort, but
the self-imposed limitation in certain films might give them a charm akin
to that of the Songs without Words.

The stage audience is a unit of three hundred or a thousand. In the
beginning of the first act there is much moving about and extra talk on
the part of the actors, to hold the crowd while it is settling down, and
enable the late-comer to be in his seat before the vital part of the
story starts. If he appears later, he is glared at. In the motion picture
art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and
these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of
visi