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Page 6
Yet that power of the moving pictures to supplement the school room and
the newspaper and the library by spreading information and knowledge is,
after all, secondary to their general task, to bring entertainment and
amusement to the masses. This is the chief road on which the forward
march of the last twenty years has been most rapid. The theater and the
vaudeville and the novel had to yield room and ample room to the play of
the flitting pictures. What was the real principle of the inner
development on this artistic side? The little scenes which the first
pictures offered could hardly have been called plays. They would have
been unable to hold the attention by their own contents. Their only
charm was really the pleasure in the perfection with which the apparatus
rendered the actual movements. But soon touching episodes were staged,
little humorous scenes or melodramatic actions were played before the
camera, and the same emotions stirred which up to that time only the
true theater play had awakened. The aim seemed to be to have a real
substitute for the stage. The most evident gain of this new scheme was
the reduction of expenses. One actor is now able to entertain many
thousand audiences at the same time, one stage setting is sufficient to
give pleasure to millions. The theater can thus be democratized.
Everybody's purse allows him to see the greatest artists and in every
village a stage can be set up and the joy of a true theater performance
can be spread to the remotest corner of the lands. Just as the
graphophone can multiply without limit the music of the concert hall,
the singer, and the orchestra, so, it seemed, would the photoplay
reproduce the theater performance without end.
Of course, the substitute could not be equal to the original. The color
was lacking, the real depth of the objective stage was missing, and
above all the spoken word had been silenced. The few interspersed
descriptive texts, the so-called "leaders," had to hint at that which
in the real drama the speeches of the actors explain and elaborate. It
was thus surely only the shadow of a true theater, different not only as
a photograph is compared with a painting, but different as a photograph
is compared with the original man. And yet, however meager and
shadowlike the moving picture play appeared compared with the
performance of living actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication
was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go
forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the
attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its
Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels
on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new
triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to
Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the
possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any thinkable theater
performance was proven for all time.
But while this movement to reproduce stage performances went on,
elements were superadded which the technique of the camera allowed but
which would hardly be possible in a theater. Hence the development led
slowly to a certain deviation from the path of the drama. The difference
which strikes the observer first results from the chance of the camera
man to set his scene in the real backgrounds of nature and culture. The
stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean and, if need be, can
move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is
his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is
played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and
the surf is foaming about the actors. The theater has its painted
villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape
backgrounds. But here the theater, in spite of the reality of the
actors, appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of
the street scenes and of the foreign crowds in which the camera man
finds his local color.
But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole
background can be changed in the moving pictures. Reinhardt's revolving
stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and had
shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before. Yet how
slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine changes of the
photoplays. This changing of background is so easy for the camera that
at a very early date this new feature of the plays was introduced. At
first it served mostly humorous purposes. The public of the crude early
shows enjoyed the flashlike quickness with which it could follow the
eloper over the roofs of the town, upstairs and down, into cellar and
attic, and jump into the auto and race over the country roads until the
culprit fell over a bridge into the water and was caught by the police.
This slapstick humor has by no means disappeared, but the rapid change
of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of much higher aims.
The development of an artistic plot has been brought to possibilities
which the real drama does not know, by allowing the eye to follow the
hero and heroine continuously from place to place. Now he leaves his
room, now we see him passing along the street, now he enters the house
of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now she is hurrying to
the library of her father, now they all go to the garden: ever new
stage settings sliding into one another. Technical difficulties do not
stand in the way. A set of pictures taken by the camera man a thousand
miles away can be inserted for a few feet in the film, and the audience
sees now the clubroom in New York, and now the snows of Alaska and now
the tropics, near each other in the same reel.
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