But for technical study for Art Schools, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more profitable.  It shows how masterpieces can be made, with the second-hand furniture of any attic.  But I hope fairy-tales, not diabolical stories, will come from these attics.  Fairy-tales are inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not willing to stop to tell them.  Lillian Gish could be given wings and a wand if she only had directors and scenario writers who believed in fairies.  And the same can most heartily be said of Mae Marsh.

Chapter XI—­Architecture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument about the Splendor Pictures, in chapters five, six, and seven.  This is an element constantly re-illustrated in a magnificent but fragmentary way by the News Films.  Any picture of a seagull flying so close to the camera that it becomes as large as a flying machine, or any flying machine made by man and photographed in epic flight captures the eye because it is architecture and in motion, motion which is the mysterious fourth dimension of its grace and glory.  So likewise, and in kind, any picture of a tossing ship.  The most superb example of architecture-in-motion in the commercial history of the films is the march of the moving war-towers against the walls of Babylon in Griffith’s Intolerance.  But Griffith is the only person so far who has known how to put a fighting soul into a moving tower.

The only real war that has occurred in the films with the world’s greatest war going on outside was Griffith’s War Against Babylon.  The rest was news.

Chapter XII—­Thirty Differences between the Photoplays and the Stage.  The argument of the whole of the 1915 edition has been accepted by the studios, the motion picture magazines, and the daily motion picture columns throughout the land.  I have read hundreds of editorials and magazines, and scarcely one that differed from it in theory.  Most of them read like paraphrases of this work.  And of all arguments made, the one in this chapter is the one oftenest accepted in its entirety.  The people who dominate the films are obviously those who grew up with them from the very beginning, and the merely stage actors who rushed in with the highest tide of prosperity now have to take second rank if they remain in the films.  But most of these have gone back to the stage by this time, with their managers as well, and certainly this chapter is abundantly proved out.

Chapter XIII—­Hieroglyphics.  One of the implications of this chapter and the one preceding is that the fewer words printed on the screen the better, and that the ideal film has no words printed on it at all, but is one unbroken sheet of photography.  This is admitted in theory in all the studios now, though the only film of the kind ever produced of general popular success was The Old Swimmin’ Hole, acted by Charles Ray.  If I remember, there was not one word on the screen, after the cast of characters was given.  The whole story was clearly and beautifully told by Photoplay Hieroglyphics.  For this feature alone, despite many defects of the film, it should be studied in every art school in America.