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BOOK III

MORE PERSONAL SPECULATIONS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS NOT BROUGHT FORWARD SO DOGMATICALLY

At this point I climb from the oracular platform and go down through my own chosen underbrush for haphazard adventure.  I renounce the platform.  Whatever it may be that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray of willow, if you do not want it, throw it over the edge of the hill, without ado, to the birds or squirrels or kine, and do not include it in your controversial discourse.  It is not a part of the dogmatic system of photoplay criticism.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ORCHESTRA, CONVERSATION, AND THE CENSORSHIP

Whenever the photoplay is mixed in the same programme with vaudeville, the moving picture part of the show suffers.  The film is rushed through, it is battered, it flickers more than commonly, it is a little out of focus.  The house is not built for it.  The owner of the place cannot manage an art gallery with a circus on his hands.  It takes more brains than one man possesses to pick good vaudeville talent and bring good films to the town at the same time.  The best motion picture theatres are built for photoplays alone.  But they make one mistake.

Almost every motion picture theatre has its orchestra, pianist, or mechanical piano.  The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience.  If this is too ruthless a theory, let the music be played at the intervals between programmes, while the advertisements are being flung upon the screen, the lights are on, and the people coming in.

If there is something more to be done on the part of the producer to make the film a telling one, let it be a deeper study of the pictorial arrangement, with the tones more carefully balanced, the sculpture vitalized.  This is certainly better than to have a raw thing bullied through with a music-programme, furnished to bridge the weak places in the construction.  A picture should not be released till it is completely thought out.  A producer with this goal before him will not have the time or brains to spare to write music that is as closely and delicately related to the action as the action is to the background.  And unless the tunes are at one with the scheme they are an intrusion.  Perhaps the moving picture maker has a twin brother almost as able in music, who possesses the faculty of subordinating his creations to the work of his more brilliant coadjutor.  How are they going to make a practical national distribution of the accompaniment?  In the metropolitan theatres Cabiria carried its own musicians and programme with a rich if feverish result.  In The Birth of a Nation, music was used that approached imitative sound devices.  Also the orchestra produced a substitute for old-fashioned stage suspense by long drawn-out