Here is a scene of storm and stress in an office where the hero is caught with seemingly incriminating papers.  The table is in confusion.  The room is filling with people, led by one accusing woman.  Is this also sculpture?  Yes.  The figures are in high relief.  Even the surfaces of the chairs and the littered table are massive, and the eye travels without weariness, as it should do in sculpture, from the hero to the furious woman, then to the attorney behind her, then to the two other revilers, then to the crowd in three loose rhythmic ranks.  The eye makes this journey, not from space to space, or fabric to fabric, but first of all from mass to mass.  It is sculpture, but it is the sort that can be done in no medium but the moving picture itself, and therefore it is one goal of this argument.

But there are several other goals.  One of the sculpturesque resources of the photoplay is that the human countenance can be magnified many times, till it fills the entire screen.  Some examples are in rather low relief, portraits approximating certain painters.  But if they are on sculptural terms, and are studies of the faces of thinking men, let the producer make a pilgrimage to Washington for his precedent.  There, in the rotunda of the capitol, is the face of Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum.  It is one of the eminently successful attempts to get at the secret of the countenance by enlarging it much, and concentrating the whole consideration there.

The photoplay producer, seemingly without taking thought, is apt to show a sculptural sense in giving us Newfoundland fishermen, clad in oilskins.  The background may have an unconscious Winslow Homer reminiscence.  In the foreground our hardy heroes fill the screen, and dripping with sea-water become wave-beaten granite, yet living creatures none the less.  Imagine some one chapter from the story of Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, retold in the films.  Show us Ham Peggotty and old Mr. Peggotty in colloquy over their nets.  There are many powerful bronze groups to be had from these two, on to the heroic and unselfish death of Ham, rescuing his enemy in storm and lightning.

I have seen one rich picture of alleged cannibal tribes.  It was a comedy about a missionary.  But the aborigines were like living ebony and silver.  That was long ago.  Such things come too much by accident.  The producer is not sufficiently aware that any artistic element in his list of productions that is allowed to go wild, that has not had full analysis, reanalysis, and final conservation, wastes his chance to attain supreme mastery.

Open your history of sculpture, and dwell upon those illustrations which are not the normal, reposeful statues, but the exceptional, such as have been listed for this chapter.  Imagine that each dancing, galloping, or fighting figure comes down into the room life-size.  Watch it against a dark curtain.  Let it go through a series of gestures in harmony with the spirit of the original conception, and as rapidly as possible, not to lose nobility.  If you have the necessary elasticity, imagine the figures wearing the costumes of another period, yet retaining in their motions the same essential spirit.  Combine them in your mind with one or two kindred figures, enlarged till they fill the end of the room.  You have now created the beginning of an Action Photoplay in your own fancy.