To the actor of the moving pictures, on the other hand, the temptation offers itself to overcome the deficiency by a heightening of the gestures and of the facial play, with the result that the emotional expression becomes exaggerated.  No friend of the photoplay can deny that much of the photoart suffers from this almost unavoidable tendency.  The quick marchlike rhythm of the drama of the reel favors this artificial overdoing, too.  The rapid alternation of the scenes often seems to demand a jumping from one emotional climax to another, or rather the appearance of such extreme expressions where the content of the play hardly suggests such heights and depths of emotion.  The soft lights are lost and the mental eye becomes adjusted to glaring flashes.  This undeniable defect is felt with the American actors still more than with the European, especially with the French and Italian ones with whom excited gestures and highly accentuated expressions of the face are natural.  A New England temperament forced into Neapolitan expressions of hatred or jealousy or adoration too easily appears a caricature.  It is not by chance that so many strong actors of the stage are such more or less decided failures on the screen.  They have been dragged into an art which is foreign to them, and their achievement has not seldom remained far below that of the specializing photoactor.  The habitual reliance on the magic of the voice deprives them of the natural means of expression when they are to render emotions without words.  They give too little or too much; they are not expressive, or they become grotesque.

Of course, the photoartist profits from one advantage.  He is not obliged to find the most expressive gesture in one decisive moment of the stage performance.  He can not only rehearse, but he can repeat the scene before the camera until exactly the right inspiration comes, and the manager who takes the close-up visage may discard many a poor pose before he strikes that one expression in which the whole content of the feeling of the scene is concentrated.  In one other respect the producer of the photoplay has a technical advantage.  More easily than the stage manager of the real theater he can choose actors whose natural build and physiognomy fit the role and predispose them for the desired expression.  The drama depends upon professional actors; the photoplay can pick players among any group of people for specific roles.  They need no art of speaking and no training in delivery.  The artificial make-up of the stage actors in order to give them special character is therefore less needed for the screen.  The expression of the faces and the gestures must gain through such natural fitness of the man for the particular role.  If the photoplay needs a brutal boxer in a mining camp, the producer will not, like the stage manager, try to transform a clean, neat, professional actor into a vulgar brute, but he will sift the Bowery until he has found some creature who looks as if he came