tch patriotism. They made the picture a
memorial. It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett's novel The Queen's Quair.
Evidently all the actors were fused by some noble managerial mood.
There can be no doubt that so able a group have evolved many good films
that have escaped me. But though I did go again and again, never did I
see them act with the same deliberation and distinction, and I laid the
difference to a change in the state of mind of the producer. Even
baseball players must have managers. A team cannot pick itself, or it
surely would. And this rule may apply to the stage. But by comparison to
motion picture performers, stage-actors are their own managers, for they
have an approximate notion of how they look in the eye of the audience,
which is but the human eye. They can hear and gauge their own voices.
They have the same ears as their listeners. But the picture producer
holds to his eyes the seven-leagued demon spy-glass called the
kinetoscope, as the audience will do later. The actors have not the least
notion of their appearance. Also the words in the motion picture are not
things whose force the actor can gauge. The book under the table is one
word, the dog behind the chair is another, the window curtain flying in
the breeze is another.
This chapter has implied that the performers were but paint on the
canvas. They are both paint and models. They are models in the sense that
the young Ellen Terry was the inspiration for Watts' Sir Galahad. They
resemble the persons in private life who furnish the basis for novels.
Dickens' mother was the original of Mrs. Nickleby. His father entered
into Wilkins Micawber. But these people are not perpetually thrust upon
us as Mr. and Mrs. Dickens. We are glad to find them in the Dickens
biographies. When the stories begin, it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we
want, and the Charles Dickens atmosphere.
The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the
films. The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those
who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique. What is adapted
to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression
in another. The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but
half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.
Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people
who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should
take hold of the super-p
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