CHAPTER III

THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY

Let us take for our platform this sentence:  The motion picture art is A great high art, not A process of commercial manufacture.  The people I hope to convince of this are (1) The great art museums of America, including the people who support them in any way, the people who give the current exhibitions there or attend them, the art school students in the corridors below coming on in the same field; (2) the departments of English, of the history of the drama, of the practice of the drama, and the history and practice of “art” in that amazingly long list of our colleges and universities—­to be found, for instance, in the World Almanac; (3) the critical and literary world generally.  Somewhere in this enormous field, piled with endowments mountain high, it should be possible to establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine art.  Readers who do not care for the history of any art, readers who have neither curiosity nor aspiration in regard to any of the ten or eleven muses who now dance around Apollo, such shabby readers had best lay the book down now.  Shabby readers do not like great issues.  My poor little sermon is concerned with a great issue, the clearing of the way for a critical standard, whereby the ultimate photoplay may be judged.  I cannot teach office-boys ways to make “quick money” in the “movies.”  That seems to be the delicately implied purpose of the mass of books on the photoplay subject.  They are, indeed, a sickening array.  Freeburg’s book is one of the noble exceptions.  And I have paid tribute elsewhere to John Emerson and Anita Loos.  They have written a crusading book, and many crusading articles.

After five years of exceedingly lonely art study, in which I had always specialized in museum exhibits, prowling around like a lost dog, I began to intensify my museum study, and at the same time shout about what I was discovering.  From nineteen hundred and five on I did orate my opinions to a group of advanced students.  We assembled weekly for several winters in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, for the discussion of the masterpieces in historic order, from Egypt to America.  From that standpoint, the work least often found, hardest to make, least popular in the street, may be in the end the one most treasured in a world-museum as a counsellor and stimulus of mankind.  Throughout this book I try to bring to bear the same simple standards of form, composition, mood, and motive that we used in finding the fundamental exhibits; the standards which are taken for granted in art histories and schools, radical or conservative, anywhere.

Again we assume it is eight o’clock in the evening, friend reader, when the chapter begins.