Some of the higher forms of the Intimate Moving Picture play should be endowed by local coteries representing their particular region.  Every community of fifty thousand has its group of the cultured who have heretofore studied and imitated things done in the big cities.  Some of these coteries will in exceptional cases become creative and begin to express their habitation and name.  The Intimate Photoplay is capable of that delicacy and that informality which should characterize neighborhood enterprises.

The plays could be acted by the group who, season after season, have secured the opera house for the annual amateur show.  Other dramatic ability could be found in the high-schools.  There is enough talent in any place to make an artistic revolution, if once that region is aflame with a common vision.  The spirit that made the Irish Players, all so racy of the soil, can also move the company of local photoplayers in Topeka, or Indianapolis, or Denver.  Then let them speak for their town, not only in great occasional enterprises, but steadily, in little fancies, genre pictures, developing a technique that will finally make magnificence possible.

There was given not long ago, at the Illinois Country Club here, a performance of The Yellow Jacket by the Coburn Players.  It at once seemed an integral part of this chapter.

The two flags used for a chariot, the bamboo poles for oars, the red sack for a decapitated head, etc., were all convincing, through a direct resemblance as well as the passionate acting.  They suggest a possible type of hieroglyphics to be developed by the leader of the local group.

Let the enthusiast study this westernized Chinese play for primitive representative methods.  It can be found in book form, a most readable work.  It is by G.C.  Hazelton, Jr., and J.H.  Benrimo.  The resemblance between the stage property and the thing represented is fairly close.  The moving flags on each side of the actor suggest the actual color and progress of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence.  The red sack used for a bloody head has at least the color and size of one.  The dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the length of an infant of the age described and wears the general costume thereof.  The farmer’s hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agricultural implement.

The evening’s list of properties is economical, filling one wagon, rather than three.  Photographic realism is splendidly put to rout by powerful representation.  When the villager desires to embody some episode that if realistically given would require a setting beyond the means of the available endowment, and does not like the near-Egyptian method, let him evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols.