There is no clan to-day more purely devoted to art for art’s sake than the Imagist clan.  An Imagist film would offer a noble challenge to the overstrained emotion, the over-loaded splendor, the mere repetition of what are at present the finest photoplays.  Now even the masterpieces are incontinent.  Except for some of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith’s beginning, there is nothing of Doric restraint from the best to the worst.  Read some of the poems of the people listed above, then imagine the same moods in the films.  Imagist photoplays would be Japanese prints taking on life, animated Japanese paintings, Pompeian mosaics in kaleidoscopic but logical succession, Beardsley drawings made into actors and scenery, Greek vase-paintings in motion.

Scarcely a photoplay but hints at the Imagists in one scene.  Then the illusion is lost in the next turn of the reel.  Perhaps it would be a sound observance to confine this form of motion picture to a half reel or quarter reel, just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or quarter page.  A series of them could fill a special evening.

The Imagists are colorists.  Some people do not consider that photographic black, white, and gray are color.  But here for instance are seven colors which the Imagists might use:  (1) The whiteness of swans in the light. (2) The whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. (3) The color of a sunburned man in the light. (4) His color in a gentle shadow. (5) His color in a deeper shadow. (6) The blackness of black velvet in the light. (7) The blackness of black velvet in a deep shadow.  And to use these colors with definite steps from one to the other does not militate against an artistic mystery of edge and softness in the flow of line.  There is a list of possible Imagist textures which is only limited by the number of things to be seen in the world.  Probably only seven or ten would be used in one scheme and the same list kept through one production.

The Imagist photoplay will put discipline into the inner ranks of the enlightened and remind the sculptors, painters, and architects of the movies that there is a continence even beyond sculpture and that seas of realism may not have the power of a little well-considered elimination.

The use of the scientific film by established institutions like schools and state governments has been discussed.  Let the Church also, in her own way, avail herself of the motion picture, whole-heartedly, as in mediaeval time she took over the marvel of Italian painting.  There was a stage in her history when religious representation was by Byzantine mosaics, noble in color, having an architectural use, but curious indeed to behold from the standpoint of those who crave a sensitive emotional record.  The first paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, giving these formulas a touch of life, were hailed with joy by all Italy.  Now the Church Universal has an opportunity to establish her new painters if she will.  She has taken over in the course of