It is harder to grasp the other side of the paradox, picture-motions considered as time measured without sound.  But think of a lively and humoresque clock that does not tick and takes only an hour to record a day.  Think of a noiseless electric vehicle, where you are looking out of the windows, going down the smooth boulevard of Wonderland.  Consider a film with three simple time-elements:  (1) that of the pursuer, (2) the pursued, (3) the observation vehicle of the camera following the road and watching both of them, now faster, now slower than they, as the photographer overtakes the actors or allows them to hurry ahead.  The plain chase is a bore because there are only these three time-elements.  But the chase principle survives in every motion picture and we simply need more of this sort of time measurement, better considered.  The more the non-human objects, the human actors, and the observer move at a varying pace, the greater chances there are for what might be called time-and-space music.

No two people in the same room should gesture at one mechanical rate, or lift their forks or spoons, keeping obviously together.  Yet it stands to reason that each successive tableau should be not only a charming picture, but the totals of motion should be an orchestration of various speeds, of abrupt, graceful, and seemingly awkward progress, worked into a silent symphony.

Supposing it is a fisher-maiden’s romance.  In the background the waves toss in one tempo.  Owing to the sail, the boat rocks in another.  In the foreground the tree alternately bends and recovers itself in the breeze, making more opposition than the sail.  In still another time-unit the smoke rolls from the chimney, making no resistance to the wind.  In another unit, the lovers pace the sand.  Yet there is one least common multiple in which all move.  This the producing genius should sense and make part of the dramatic structure, and it would have its bearing on the periodic appearance of the minor and major crises.

Films like this, you say, would be hard to make.  Yes.  Here is the place to affirm that the one-reel Intimate Photoplay will no doubt be the form in which this type of time-and-space music is developed.  The music of silent motion is the most abstract of moving picture attributes and will probably remain the least comprehended.  Like the quality of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, or that of Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, it will not satisfy the sudden and the brash.

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The reader will find in his round of the picture theatres many single scenes and parts of plays that elucidate the title of this chapter.  Often the first two-thirds of the story will fit it well.  Then the producers, finding that, for reasons they do not understand, with the best and most earnest actors they cannot work the three reels into an emotional climax, introduce some stupid disaster and rescue utterly irrelevant