Just between the intolerable accompaniment by printed or spoken words on the one side and the perfectly welcome rendering of emotionally fitting music on the other, we find the noises with which the photoplay managers like to accompany their performances.  When the horses gallop, we must hear the hoofbeats, if rain or hail is falling, if the lightning flashes, we hear the splashing or the thunderstorm.  We hear the firing of a gun, the whistling of a locomotive, ships’ bells, or the ambulance gong, or the barking dog, or the noise when Charlie Chaplin falls downstairs.  They even have a complicated machine, the “allefex,” which can produce over fifty distinctive noises, fit for any photoplay emergency.  It will probably take longer to rid the photoplay of these appeals to the imagination than the explanations of the leaders, but ultimately they will have to disappear too.  They have no right to existence in a work of art which is composed of pictures.  In so far as they are simply heightening the emotional tension, they may enter into the music itself, but in so far as they tell a part of the story, they ought to be ruled out as intrusions from another sphere.  We might just as well improve the painting of a rose garden by bathing it in rose perfume in order that the spectators might get the odor of the roses together with the sight of them.  The limitations of an art are in reality its strength and to overstep its boundaries means to weaken it.

It may be more open to discussion whether this same negative attitude ought to be taken toward color in the photoplay.  It is well-known what wonderful technical progress has been secured by those who wanted to catch the color hues and tints of nature in their moving pictures.  To be sure, many of the prettiest effects in color are even today produced by artificial stencil methods.  Photographs are simply printed in three colors like any ordinary color print.  The task of cutting those many stencils for the thousands of pictures on a reel is tremendous, and yet these difficulties have been overcome.  Any desired color effect can be obtained by this method and the beauty of the best specimens is unsurpassed.  But the difficulty is so great that it can hardly become a popular method.  The direct photographing of the colors themselves will be much simpler as soon as the method is completely perfected.  It can hardly be said that this ideal has been reached today.  The successive photographing through three red, green, and violet screens and the later projection of the pictures through screens of these colors seemed scientifically the best approach.  Yet it needed a multiplication of pictures per second which offered extreme difficulty, besides an extraordinary increase of expense.  The practical advance seems more secure along the line of the so-called “kinemacolor.”  Its effects are secured by the use of two screens only, not quite satisfactory, as true blue impressions have to suffer and the reddish and greenish ones are emphasized.  Moreover the eye is sometimes disturbed by big flashes of red or green light.  Yet the beginnings are so excellent that the perfect solution of the technical problem may be expected in the near future.  Would it be at the same time a solution of the esthetic problem?