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well-trodden psychological paths in his job of entertainment. The very character of his product forces him to seek a large audience; it costs him a great deal to manufacture movies. Therefore he must please enough people to make his business pay, to cover not only these great costs of production, but a margin of profit as well. These costs have a varied source. The crowd must be given beautiful women, handsome, heroic-looking men, enchanting clothes of the latest style, massive, realistic settings. The producer must be able to command the genii to transport his audiences into all the strange corners of the earth. No fantasy may be beyond him. To make any drastic change in this accepted program of pleasure is to gamble at least a hundred thousand dollars; it is often from a quarter of a million dollars upward.

There is no reason to believe that the movies will be any different so long as existence runs on its present plan. People who live and love, have emotions, make fools of themselves, and do a few generous things in the midst of many selfish ones, will always be enthralled by the spectacle of other people living and loving, sacrificing for others, failing and succeeding. It encourages them to go on living. Life seldom shows these processes in all their completion; the movies always carry them out to the very end. It cannot be expected they will desert these fundamental themes. They may learn to tell their stories more skilfully; they will undoubtedly improve and enrich their method of presentation; they will be less stupid, and will find new ways of enhancing the illusion of life; once in a while they will develop a great artist like Chaplin, who can

touch intimately a dozen common things, tragic and comic, in the lives of every one with a turn of his head: but they will go on telling the same kinds of stories. More and more millions will find satisfaction and escape in them. Instead of getting away from platitudes, the movies will be more securely bound by them, limited to them. They will pay the penalty of satisfying the democratic, middle-class audience, which is America. They will go on being simple, straightforward, conventional in their treatment of characters and situations, reducing life to fairy-tale formulæ, and free from esthetic complexity in form.

§ 2

The mistake of most of the dissenters is in their failure to see that the movies are chiefly a social and economic phenomenon, while they demand that they have all the capacities of a fine art. Yet the extension of popular education and the widening limits of leisure have not changed the fact that the fine arts, as distinguished from the popular arts, are not supported by great crowds of human beings. are aristocratic in their environment; they are nourished by the few, and made for them. Any generation is fortunate if it bears one fundamental great work of art in its time—a work that touches equally the broad chords and the finest strings of the imagination. For anything less than that each division of society falls back on its own kind of satisfaction.

They

Symphony orchestras and operahouses were established by royal courts, and maintained by them; they still pursue their protected and delicate existence under the kindly shade of wealth. The art of painting lives out

a meager career anywhere in the modern world, protected by state and private patronage. The theater is emancipated, but it still must gamble to survive. Even in these days of its prosperity one entertainment may catch the plenitude of public favor and fifty fail.

The fine art of the motion-picture expression by means of the motioncamera as apart from telling fairystories for a public seeking a way out of reality-has scarcely been born. Its birth will depend on two factors. One will be the systematic use of motion photography as a means of expression by men and women who are trained in the ways of imaginative creation. The other will be the organization of a public trained to appreciate it and interested in expression in this form. The theater has already achieved these ends. In the last five years New York has developed a better theater audience than either London or Paris. Plays of high artistic quality run to capacity for a season and establish records in attendance not exceeded even by those entertainments built on a stereotyped popular pattern.

New York to-day presents a satisfaction for every taste in the theater, whatever its degree. But it is not to be assumed that this conversion to a high standard of intelligence and taste is a sudden miraculous achievement. Every popular art draws its best inspiration from the obscure creation of independent, free-thinking persons or amateur groups. Modern art has many examples. A handful of Frenchmen in the seventies flooded the art of painting with light and color and a new basic sense of form. Likewise much that is distinguished in the American theater stems directly from

the little theater movement. The Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players provided the playground which developed the talents of Robert Edmond Jones, Eugene O'Neill, and others like them. Even the Follies owe these pioneers a debt that can scarcely be measured. They in turn have a family tree that reaches back to Paris and Moscow and Berlin.

$3

It is absurd to say that men and women are fundamentally different anywhere. anywhere. At bottom every human wants to be lifted out of himself, made to feel he is important, that as a human being he counts largely in the scheme of things. But the quarrel the highbrow has with the movies is that for him they fail to accomplish these ends. Tragedy ennobles some persons because it shows them how much they can bear and still go on living; it dignifies them in the realization that they are stronger than life. But the movies are rarely tragic. They stop short of it, and fall into the sloppy sea of sentimentality. Satire and high comedy give the cultivated man a sense of superiority; they disclose the absurdity of life. But the movies are seldom satiric; they cannot afford the comedy of ideas. The high-brow appreciates the flattery of an evident faith in his power to imagine. He does not want the story-teller to be too literal, as if the audience could not be trusted to wing its way briefly alone through the spaces of the imagination. The movies, however, ignore the high-brow; they must aim at literal minds in order to survive.

It seems plain, therefore, that the people who do not like motion-pictures as they are and want something else

will have to make it for themselves. The theater has at least set them an intelligent example. Indeed, it is not impossible to foresee the organization of experimental groups in New York and Los Angeles, composed of professional persons looking for an arena in which they can experiment with an art which is still to be defined. The New York Theater Guild, self-governing, coöperative, and self-financing, might serve as a pattern for this kind of undertaking. Such an organization will find its economic problems comparatively simple. It will not be burdened with the involved cumulative expenses of a studio equipped to manufacture fifty or a hundred pictures a year. It will be free from the extraordinary costs involved in a fierce competition to rent pictures to sixteen thousand commercial exhibitors. Being chiefly interested in beauty, these experimenters will recognize the kinship of the art of motion photography to painting. They will want to disclose a deeper truth than exists in surface realities; they will discard wood and mortar, brick and stone, for canvas, hangings, and curtains. The creative genius of motion will reject massive imitations of reality, and will compound his effects out of lines, light, and nothingness. He will correspondingly decrease the costs of production.

A nation-wide amateur organization growing out of such a movement might find at once a potential audience which the professional movie-producer and distributor has never touched. But a movement of this kind will spread further, once it has shown the commercial producer how to achieve beauty at a low cost. The hope of development of the art of expression by motion photography lives in the

differentiation of audiences. And the great mass cannot be divided until ways are devised to purvey adequate entertainment at a price appropriate to each group. For instance, when special movies can be made cheaply enough to depend solely upon an audience of children, the problem of censorship will be virtually solved. There is already a conspicuous tendency in the field of exhibition to build chains of theaters which will house movies of extraordinary quality. This may be only the democratic amusement of the early days on a large scale. It may be, on the other hand, the beginning of an attempt to select an audience ready to recognize the motion-picture as worth an evening of close intellectual attention. It may promise the serious presentation of life in a new form of expression, comparable in austerity of content, depth of meaning, and artistry of presentation to such a play as Tolstoy's "Redemption" or St. John Ervine's "John Ferguson" on the stage.

In form and structure, expression by the motion-camera is more like music than anything else. It streams before the eye as music streams before the ear; it is in a constant state of becoming. But experiments such as I have outlined-experiments in the style of the narrative, comparable to modern experiments in pure form in the other arts, must await a producer free to take advantage of every scope the art offers, without limitation by a crowd looking only for fairy-tales. It is not until this free opportunity is provided that artists will begin to create genuinely for expression on the screen. Composers for the camera will arise as separate from the popular art of the movies as Wagner and Debussy were apart from the music-hall.

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