often
so near it is half out of the picture or perhaps it is against the front
line of the triangular ground-plan. Only the top of the table is seen,
and nothing close up to us is pictured below that. We in the audience are
privileged characters. Generally attending the show in bunches of two or
three, we are members of the household on the screen. Sometimes we are
sitting on the near side of the family board. Or we are gossiping
whispering neighbors, of the shoemaker, we will say, with our noses
pressed against the pane of a metaphoric window.

Take for contrast the old-fashioned stage production showing the room and
work table of a shoemaker. As it were the whole side of the house has
been removed. The shop is as big as a banquet hall. There is something
essentially false in what we see, no matter how the stage manager fills
in with old boxes, broken chairs, and the like. But the photoplay
interior is the size such a work-room should be. And there the awl and
pegs and bits of leather, speaking the silent language of picture
writing, can be clearly shown. They are sometimes like the engine in
chapter two, the principal actors.

Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay may be carried out of doors to
the row of loafers in front of the country store, or the gossiping
streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness
of the interior.

The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed
ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cosy. These are to be
classed as out-of-door scenery so far as theory goes, and are to be
discussed under the head of Splendor Pictures. Masses of human beings
pour by like waves, the personalities of none made plain. The only
definite people are the hero and heroine in the foreground, and maybe one
other. Though these three be in ball-costume, the little triangle they
occupy next to the camera is in sort an interior, while the impersonal
guests behind them conform to the pageant principles of out-of-doors, and
the dancers are to the main actor as is the wind-shaken forest to the
charcoal-burner, or the bending grain to the reaper.

The Intimate Motion Picture is the world's new medium for studying, not
the great passions, such as black hate, transcendent love, devouring
ambition, but rather the half relaxed or gently restrained moods of human
creatures. It gives also our idiosyncrasies. It is gossip _in extremis_.
It is apt to chronicle our petty littl