Just as the Action Picture has its photographic basis or fundamental metaphor in the long chase down the highway, so the Intimate Film has its photographic basis in the fact that any photoplay interior has a very small ground plan, and the cosiest of enclosing walls.  Many a worth-while scene is acted out in a space no bigger than that which is occupied by an office boy’s stool and hat.  If there is a table in this room, it is often so near it is half out of the picture or perhaps it is against the front line of the triangular ground-plan.  Only the top of the table is seen, and nothing close up to us is pictured below that.  We in the audience are privileged characters.  Generally attending the show in bunches of two or three, we are members of the household on the screen.  Sometimes we are sitting on the near side of the family board.  Or we are gossiping whispering neighbors, of the shoemaker, we will say, with our noses pressed against the pane of a metaphoric window.

Take for contrast the old-fashioned stage production showing the room and work table of a shoemaker.  As it were the whole side of the house has been removed.  The shop is as big as a banquet hall.  There is something essentially false in what we see, no matter how the stage manager fills in with old boxes, broken chairs, and the like.  But the photoplay interior is the size such a work-room should be.  And there the awl and pegs and bits of leather, speaking the silent language of picture writing, can be clearly shown.  They are sometimes like the engine in chapter two, the principal actors.

Though the Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay may be carried out of doors to the row of loafers in front of the country store, or the gossiping streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness of the interior.

The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cosy.  These are to be classed as out-of-door scenery so far as theory goes, and are to be discussed under the head of Splendor Pictures.  Masses of human beings pour by like waves, the personalities of none made plain.  The only definite people are the hero and heroine in the foreground, and maybe one other.  Though these three be in ball-costume, the little triangle they occupy next to the camera is in sort an interior, while the impersonal guests behind them conform to the pageant principles of out-of-doors, and the dancers are to the main actor as is the wind-shaken forest to the charcoal-burner, or the bending grain to the reaper.

The Intimate Motion Picture is the world’s new medium for studying, not the great passions, such as black hate, transcendent love, devouring ambition, but rather the half relaxed or gently restrained moods of human creatures.  It gives also our idiosyncrasies.  It is gossip in extremis.  It is apt to chronicle our petty little skirmishes, rather than our feuds.  In it Colin Clout and his comrades return.