cottage, field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation between three places rather than three persons.  By alternating the picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy.  When two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects rather than their voices.  The collector presents a bill:  the adventurer shows him the door.  The boy plucks a rose:  the girl accepts it.  Moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.

The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he is getting nowhere, but still helpless, puts the climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the screen.  Sentences should be used to show changes of time and place and a few such elementary matters before the episode is fully started.  The climax of a motion picture scene cannot be one word or fifty words.  As has been discussed in connection with Cabiria, the crisis must be an action sharper than any that has gone before in organic union with a tableau more beautiful than any that has preceded:  the breaking of the tenth wave upon the sand.  Such remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in the main chase of the photoplay film are but guide-posts in the race toward the goal.  They should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be laboriously lifted and lowered while the horses stop, mid-career.

The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to the soul through the silence, requires no quotation from Keats to explain her, though Keats is the equivalent in verse.  Her setting in the great French Museum is enough.  We do not know that her name is Venus.  She is thought by many to be another statue of Victory.  We may some day evolve scenarios that will require nothing more than a title thrown upon the screen at the beginning, they come to the eye so perfectly.  This is not the only possible sort, but the self-imposed limitation in certain films might give them a charm akin to that of the Songs without Words.

The stage audience is a unit of three hundred or a thousand.  In the beginning of the first act there is much moving about and extra talk on the part of the actors, to hold the crowd while it is settling down, and enable the late-comer to be in his seat before the vital part of the story starts.  If he appears later, he is glared at.  In the motion picture art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of vision.  The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling without breaking the spell.  There is no spell, in the stage sense, to break.  People can climb over each other’s knees to get in or out.  If the picture is political, they murmur war-cries to one another.  If the film suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each other with the richest sewing society report.