Chapter IX—­Painting-in-Motion, being a continuation on a higher terrace of chapter three, The Intimate Photoplay.  Charlie Chaplin has intimate and painter’s qualities in his acting, and he makes himself into a painting or an etching in the midst of furious slapstick.  But he has been in no films that were themselves paintings.  The argument of this chapter has been carried much further in Freeburg’s book, The Art of Photoplay Making.

Chapter X—­Furniture, Trappings, and Inventions in Motion, being a continuation of the chapter on Fairy Splendor.  In this field we find one of the worst failures of the commercial films, and their utterly unimaginative corporation promoters.  Again I must refer them to such fairy books as those of Padraic Colum, where neither sword nor wing nor boat is found to move, except for a fairy reason.

I have just returned this very afternoon from a special showing of the famous imported film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Some of the earnest spirits of the Denver Art Association, finding it was in storage in the town, had it privately brought forth to study it with reference to its bearing on their new policies.  What influence it will have in that most vital group, time will show.

Meanwhile it is a marvellous illustration of the meaning of this chapter and the chapter on Fairy Splendor, though it is a diabolical not a beneficent vitality that is given to inanimate things.  The furniture, trappings, and inventions are in motion to express the haunted mind, as in Griffith’s Avenging Conscience, described pages 121 through 132.  The two should be shown together in the same afternoon, in the Art Museum study rooms.  Caligari is undoubtedly the most important imported film since that work of D’Annunzio, Cabiria, described pages 55 through 57.  But it is the opposite type of film.  Cabiria is all out-doors and splendor on the Mediterranean scale.  In general, imported films do not concern Americans, for we have now a vast range of technique.  All we lack is the sense to use it.

The cabinet of Caligari is indeed a cabinet, and the feeling of being in a cell, and smothered by all the oppressions of a weary mind, does not desert the spectator for a minute.

The play is more important, technically, than in its subject-matter and mood.  It proves in a hundred new ways the resources of the film in making all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act at all, the leading actors in the films.  But they need not necessarily act to a diabolical end.  An angel could have as well been brought from the cabinet as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have been a work of beneficence and health and healing.  I could not help but think that the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could have been acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case and great sarcophagus.  The wings of Isis and Nephthys could have been spread over the sky instead of the oppressive walls of the crooked city.  Lights instead of shadows could have been made actors and real hieroglyphic inscriptions instead of scrawls.