# The Invention of the Spectator: How has Early film Spectatorship shaped Audience and Reception Theory. Selected Writings (1900s-1910s)

Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

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Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb. The Invention of the Spectator: How has Early film Spectatorship shaped Audience and Reception Theory. Selected Writings (1900s-1910s). OpenCulture Academic Publishing, 2024, 979-104311178-5. 10.5281/zenodo.14315753. hal-04826096

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (ed.)

THE INVENTION OF
THE SPECTATOR

HOW HAS EARLY FILM SPECTATORSHIP SHAPED
AUDIENCE AND RECEPTION THEORY

Selected Writings 1900s-1910s
# THE INVENTION OF THE SPECTATOR
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
FRÉDÉRIC GIMELLO-MESPLOMB

# THE INVENTION OF THE SPECTATOR

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

How has early film spectatorship shaped audience and reception theory

Selected Writings (1900s-1910s)
First published in 2024 by OpenCulture Academic Publishing
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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for helpful discussions with a number of graduate students and faculty members in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at Avignon University (France).

"The Bioscope" extracts and quotations are with permission. The Bioscope was a blog on early and silent cinema, with an emphasis on research and audience studies active in the early 2010's. The Bioscope is no longer active, but you can find on its online archive nearly 1,400 posts on all aspects of silent film published from February 2007 to August 2012.

The author also acknowledges :

Abderrahim Benslimane, Djazaira Berkouk, Olivier Blaise, Bérénice Bonhomme, Colin Burnett, Bruno Caillé, Jean Cluzel, Morgan Corriou, Jean-Pierre Costa, Laurent Creton, Jean Davallon, Jean-François Diana, Jean-Louis Dufour, Isabelle Duval, Jean-Yves Le Déhaut, Emmanuel Ethis, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Anika Falkert, Maristella Faticenti, Carole Faure, Sandrine Fdida, Mathieu Feryn, Béatrice Fleury, Christlord Foreste, Marie-Pierre Fourquet-Courbet, Edyta Galecka, Cyrielle Garson, Sébastien Genvo, Madelena Gonzalez, Hana Gottesdiener, Philippe Goudard, Roxane Hamery, So-Hee Han, Guy Hebeler, Jean-Marc Huart,
François Hurard, Laurent Jullier, Serge Kauffmann, Kira Kitsopanidou, Pascal Laborderie, Paul Lacoste, Claire Lahuerta, Bernard Lamizet, Emmanuel Laurentin, Hélène Laurichesse, Jean-Marc Leveratto, Stéphanie Louis, Vincent Lowy, Nathalie Macé, Sophie Malbec, Damien Malinas, Luc Massou, Sarah Matelot, Philippe Met, Charlie Michael, Nolwen Mingant, Frédéric Monier, Fabrice Montebello, Mohamed Morchid, Pierre Morelli, Olivier Moëschler, Jammie Gnoc Nguyen, Giang Pen N'Guyen, Richard Barton Palmer, Emmanuel Pedler, Milica Pejanovic, Nicolas Pelissier, Frank Petit, Sandra Poitevin, Katalin Pór, Daniel Raichvarg, Graham Ranger, Paola Ranzini, Paul Rasse, Linda Ravez, Franck Renucci, Anthony Rescigno, Florence Robine, Fabrice Rochelandet, Anne-Florence Rémy, Eric Sanjuan, Mariana Medeiros Seixas, Brigitte Simonot, Sophie Taillan, Christel Taillibert, Olivier Thévenin, Jean-Christophe Vilotte, Ana Vinuela, Jacques Walter, JianLin Wei, Dominique Wolton, Hervé Zénouda
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.

— “The Face of Garbo,” Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers [Farrar, Straus (1986), pg. 56]

Roland Barthes
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# Contents

<table><tr><td><i>Acknowledgments</i></td><td>v</td></tr><tr><td><i>Text Insert</i></td><td>vii</td></tr><tr><td><i>Foreword</i></td><td>xi</td></tr></table>

TOWARD AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF AUDIENCES 1

1 London Audiences of the Cinématographe 3

2 Living pictures 9

3 The psychology of theatre audiences 13

4 Movies as an educational force 39

5 Writing the Photoplay 49

6 Technique of the Photoplay 61

7 Practical Cinematography 65

8 The Photoplay (Master's thesis, 1914) 71

9 The Art of the Moving Picture 73

10 Psychology of the Screen 81

11 Movie Advertising viewed by a Fan 89

12 Psychology of the movies 97

13 Developing Your Plot 103
REGULATING AUDIENCES 109

14 Motion picture education 111

15 The Cinema: Its Present and Future 117

16 Entertaining Hospital Patients by Film 125

17 Regulating Film as an Entertainment 129

18 The Social Legislation of Motion Pictures 137

A SOCIOLOGY OF EARLY AUDIENCES 147

19 Studying Audiences 149

20 A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience 153

21 How Workingmen spend their spare time 173

22 The photoplay: A psychological study 179

23 Psychology of the Cinema Audience 189

About the Author 207
Foreword

THE 1910S: PIONEERING INSIGHTS INTO CINEMA
AUDIENCES STUDIES

Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

This book endeavors to unearth the earliest texts, often over-
looked or obscure, about the discourse on cinema audiences. We
aspire to challenge the prevailing notion that views these pio-
neering texts from the pre-1920s era as rudimentary attempts,
primarily focused on either compiling lists of cinema spectators
or delineating their socio-demographic profiles. Contrary to this
perception, we aim to demonstrate that these initial writings on
audiences have significantly shaped subsequent endeavors, ulti-
mately contributing to establishing a comprehensive theory of au-
diences—a still delineating and defining field.

Drawing from key texts such as Elsaesser and Barker's *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative* (1990), we argue that these early efforts were deeply intertwined with the immense social, economic and cultural transformations reshaping the fabric of modern life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rise of industrial capitalism, urbanization and new forms of industrial labor reorganized experiences of work and leisure in profound ways. Meanwhile,
technological innovations from mass printing to photography and
moving pictures gave birth to new mass media forms and con-
sumer products catering to emerging urban populations.

In this heady milieu of social flux, the introduction of cinema
sparked intense debate across many spheres. On one hand, movies
were embraced by some progressive reformers as a powerful poten-
tial tool for mass education, enculturation and even social control
of the working classes and new immigrant populations. Advocates
highlighted cinema's ability to transmit ideas, cultural values and
modes of behavior in an attractive entertainment format resonant
with modern urban sensibilities.

Simultaneously, moralists and conservative voices, as discussed
in Hansen's *Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film*
(1991), sounded alarms about movies' potential to corrupt and de-
grade public tastes, spur delinquency, and undermine traditional
social structures - a fear particularly potent when it came to their
impacts on children and lower classes seen as susceptible to such
influences. Gunning (1986) suggests that early cinema was a site
of negotiation, where audiences, filmmakers, and exhibitors inter-
acted to shape the medium's conventions and possibilities.

Musser (1990) further argues that the cinema was not just a pas-
sive receptacle for the audience's gaze, but an active participant
in the construction of meaning. The cinema was a space of social
interaction, where audiences could engage with the film and each
other, shaping the viewing experience and the film's interpreta-
tion. Staiger (2005) highlights the role of the cinema as a site of cul-
tural exchange. The cinema was not just a place to watch films but
a space where different cultures, classes, and genders could inter-
act, negotiate, and influence each other. This aspect of the cinema
experience, often overlooked in traditional film studies, is crucial
to understanding the complex dynamics of early cinema audiences.
This polarized context, situated within the birth of consumer
capitalism's reorganization of private and public life, spurred so-
ciological, psychological, cultural, and even anthropological in-
quiries into cinema as a vital new social force and emergent
moviegoing as a pattern of modern life.

Scholars across disciplines interrogated who was attending
movies, why they were drawn to this new mass experience, and
what psychological, ideological or behavioral effects could result.

Starting in the 1910s, pioneering academics explored this new
movie audience's social composition and motivations through
ethnographic methods, providing foundational studies of
moviegoing habits that would lead to more complex interdiscipli-
nary analyses during the subsequent peak periods of widespread
movie attendance in the 1930s-1940s. These later landmark studies,
such as the Payne Fund research, investigated how different types
of films influenced the psychology, identities, worldviews, and
even delinquent behavior of specific audience groups like children/
adolescents or marginalized communities. Such inquiries drew on
an interdisciplinary array of emergent theoretical frameworks
from sociology, psychology, anthropology, and nascent communi-
cation studies.

Notable examples include the works of sociologists like Her-
bert Blumer (1900-1987), as well as pioneering ethnographic stud-
ies by Emilie Altenloh and the Payne Fund Studies, conducted
in the 1920s-1930s, which examined the effects of movies on chil-
dren and adolescents from integrated psychological, sociological,
anthropological and emerging media effects perspectives (Jowett
et al., 1996; Butsch, 2000).

The very coining of the terms “sociology of the cinema” and “so-
ciology of audiences” by a handful of prescient academics in the
1910s reflected this inherently multidisciplinary approach to grap-
pling with the new phenomenon of movies as modern life. How-
ever, this initial caution in narrating disciplinary boundaries was
rapidly transcended as audience research quickly evolved in tan-
dem with the swiftly commercializing film industry's own eco-
nomic interests and the exigencies of the World War era. Early
scholars' keen observations regarding nuances of audience demo-
graphics, differing reception strategies, and the commercial impor-
tance of accurately studying and incorporating spectators' desires
into marketing, promotion and narrative strategies displayed a so-
phisticated understanding of the emerging spectatorial dynamics
at play.

Groundbreaking works like Emilie Altenloh’s “Zur Soziologie des Kino” (1914) mined Veblenian theories of status and leisure consumption, ethnographic methods from anthropology, and avant-garde aesthetic concepts like the “cinema of attractions” to anatomize working-class movie spectators’ experiences in Mannheim. This landmark study highlighted how movies provided an affordable escape into fantasy and insight into aspirational lifestyles, theorizing their power to both subvert and reinscribe class and gender norms. Influential texts like the British Cinema Commission Report (1917) consolidated moralistic, educational, psychological and national security perspectives in assessing the social impacts of movies and regulation through censorship (Rae, 2019; Staiger, 1992).

The overarching goal of this volume is to establish a critical in-
tellectual genealogy linking these early, interdisciplinary attempts
at theorizing the new subjective experiences and social dynamics
of movie spectatorship, to the subsequent canonical works and
robust conceptual frameworks advanced by pioneering film theo-
rists of the 1920s-1930s like Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim,
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and others. Too often, the
historiography of film theory leaps from recognizing Münsterberg's seminal 1916 psychological study "The Photoplay" to crediting the later Weimar and Frankfurt School philosophers with first grappling with cinema as a consequential modern art form worthy of rigorous aesthetics, perception theory and ideology critique.

However, this book seeks to recuperate and highlight the crucial, if underexplored, proto-theoretical groundwork and interdisciplinary foundation laid by the scattered writings, ethnographies, psychological studies, economic analyses and reception surveys produced in the 1910s by researchers across academia, industry and government. While inherently limited by their pragmatic aims and lack of coherent unifying frameworks, these hard-to-classify exploratory texts provided vital early framings of spectators' pivotal roles as active meaners in the cinematic experience. They advanced germinal theoretical concepts like the "attractions" model of viewer engagement, established methodologies for empirically studying audiences, and began articulating how movies could serve as dreamworlds channeling desires, shaping socialization, and constructing new cultural subjectivities beyond mere demographic categories.

A significant factor long obscuring these proto-theoretical contributions has been the decidedly uncanonical, "grey literature" nature of the primary sources - overwhelmingly comprised of doctoral dissertations, commissioned industry marketing surveys, educational pamphlets, local censorship rulings and limited-circulation reports by civic groups. Nevertheless, closely analyzing these first-hand records of how audiences were consuming, interpreting and even contesting movies in their initial decades reveals a rich genealogy of thought that should be engaged with and built upon by any comprehensive study of the dynamic
spectatorial phenomenon, rather than treated as a mere historical
preface.

Over the past half-century, academic film studies and histories
of cinema have produced an immense body of invaluable schol-
arship tracing the technological innovations, artistic movements,
industry practices, and key works and figures underlying the evo-
lutionary development of movies into a mature mass art form and
commercial behemoth. However, the intellectual history chart-
ing the diverse origins and progression of theories grappling with
the spectator's changing roles and relationships to those cinematic
forms has remained relatively underdeveloped. This volume aims
to enrich that parallel history of spectatorship theory as an in-
terdisciplinary trajectory uniting disciplines like aesthetic philos-
ophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political economy
around the pivotal social and cultural implications of movie-going
as a modern experience.

This thematic inquiry engaged pioneering thinkers in tangen-
tial fields since the 1910s, accelerating after World War 1 as movies
transitioned into a dominant mass entertainment tied to new
practices of commercialization, marketing, and questions of pro-
paganda. It necessarily intersected with economic interests sur-
rounding the rapidly-consolidating and internationalizing film
industry, the technological standardizations allowing for stream-
lined systems of production and distribution, as well as pressing
institutional issues around regulating audience access and the need
to empirically study movie impacts on attitudes and behaviors.

Well before figures like Münsterberg, Walter Benjamin, or the
Frankfurt School thinkers, interdisciplinary scholars had initiated
research programs theorizing moviegoing habits through ethno-
graphies and surveys, studying Hollywood marketing's appeals to
spectatorial desires, analyzing censorship rulings for how they con-
structed systems of representation, and attempting to map cin-
ema's ideological dimensions by examining its effects on specific
demographic groups. While limited by empiricist methods, lo-
calized data sets and lack of unifying paradigms, this scattered
proto-theory cumulatively displayed an emerging recognition that
movies necessitated understanding the spectator's critical role in
constructing experiences and meanings.

For instance, the pioneering works of figures like the poet Vachel Lindsay in “The Art of the Moving Picture” (1915) and Terry Ramsaye’s seminal history “A Million and One Nights” (1926) explored cinema’s artistic, cultural and industrial dimensions through the lens of emerging fan cultures and shifts in working-class leisure patterns enabled by Fordist capitalism - foreshadowing theoretical interest in ideology, reception and media’s socio-economic contexts (Koszarski, 1994; Staiger, 2005).

By excavating and interweaving these historically overlooked or
marginalized sources, the present volume reconstructs an archaeol-
ogy of early interdisciplinary efforts to account for the subjective
experiences, psychological dynamics and socio-cultural impacts
of cinema as an unprecedented media-technological phenomenon
provoking fascination and anxiety. Collectively, these writings by
academics, educators, social critics, journalists, policymakers, and
industry insiders laid the vital conceptual groundwork for the-
orizing the spectator’s pivotal positionality and meaning-making
role before such inquiries cohered into more sustained disciplinary
paradigms.

The book's three-part structure illuminates how interdiscipli-
nary strands coalesced into tendrils of audience theory:

* Part I chronicles the perceptual shift from conceiving spectators as passive recipients to recognizing their agency as
interpreters actively co-creating cinematic meaning, as de-
lineated through early script manuals, writings on visual
pleasure by figures like Vachel Lindsay, and psychological
studies of film's immersive effects on attention and identifi-
cation.

* Part II explores how public institutions' concerns around cinema's potential social impacts catalyzed initiatives to regulate and educate audience behavior, merging discourse strands from public policy, educational theory, cultural criticism, religious censorship advocacy and other normative spheres contending with movies' semiotic construction of representations.

* Finally, Part III's case studies showcase pioneering attempts at systematic, empirical audience research transcending purely demographic surveys, as in sociological fieldwork on moviegoing cultures and studies of films' ideological functions across marginalized communities. Works like Emilie Altenloh's pathbreaking "Zur Soziologie des Kino" and the exhaustive survey "The Audience" presaged central methodologies and theoretical paradigms of later reception studies and effects research.

By critically recuperating these buried genealogies, the book elucidates how scattered, uncoordinated lines of interdisciplinary inquiry coalesced into the intellectual foundations for theories of audiences, spectatorship, subjective engagement, and reception that remain vital for comprehending the viewers' pivotal role in constructing meanings, ideologies, and identities within evolving media experiences. While inherently rudimentary, limited by empiricist methods, and lacking unifying theoretical architecture, these pre-disciplinary investigations laid the conceptual bedrock
for grappling with cinema as a new modern phenomenon neces-
sitating new analytical frameworks for the spectator's meaning-
making agency as an active, interpreting subject within larger
social, economic, technological and ideological matrices. Recog-
nizing and building upon such overlooked proto-theoretical ori-
gins enriches understanding of the diverse, interdisciplinary roots
informing subsequent traditions of audience and reception theory
and media studies.

Prof. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

Avignon, Summer 2024

Notes:

* Elsaesser, Thomas, and Adam Barker, eds. *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative*. London: BFI, 1990.

* Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." *Wide Angle* 8.3/4 (1986): 63-70.

* Hansen, Miriam. *Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

* Musser, Charles. *The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907*. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

* Staiger, Janet. *Media Reception Studies*. New York: NYU Press, 2005.
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
TOWARD AN
ARCHAEOLOGY
OF AUDIENCES
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

London Audiences of the
Cinématographe

Although unwilling to quarrel with William Shakspere about his statement that the rose would smell as sweet under any other name, I can't help thinking that “Cinématographe” is a nasty word for busy people. It has a terrifying effect upon the man in the street who calls an entertainment a “show.” But it must be confessed that, despite its name, M. Lumière's invention is one that will ultimately emulate the telegraph and telephone in usefulness. Instantaneous photography developed to a surprising extent is, apparently, the secret of the Cinématographe. Photographs of a moving scene taken at the rate of fifteen per second, and thrown on to a screen through the machine at the same rapid rate, enable the eye to retain one image until the successor is presented. The result is a moving picture of the event, scrupulously exact in detail, whose importance it would be difficult to overestimate.

The columns of *The Sketch* are my confessional, and I do not hesitate to say that its long name kept me away from the hew invention when the scribes of London were bidden to its reception.
I saw the Cinématographe worked for the first time at the Em-
pire Theatre last Monday week. Ten pictures were presented. I take
one, "The Arrival of the Paris Express," as a type. A railway-sta-
tion is the subject of the first photograph thrown on the screen,
and, from flashes in all directions, it is evident that the effect is
sustained by rapidly continued exposures. In the distance there is
some smoke, then the engine of the express is seen, and in a few
seconds the train rushes in so quickly that, in common with most
of the people in the front rows of the stalls, I shift uneasily in my
seat and think of railway accidents. Then the train slows down and
stops, passengers alight, the bustle of the station is absolutely be-
fore us the figures are life-size. Old country women ascend and de-
scend some man jumps on to the platform, and then looks about
helplessly, until other passengers elbow him aside. It is such a scene
as I have often witnessed on a journey to or from the Riviera and,
in the darkened house, it stands out with a realism that seemingly
defies improvement. Granting, for the sake of argument, that this
picture took one minute to present, it represented nine hundred
photographs originally taken at the station in the same space of
time, and there was no palpable break in the continuity of the se-
ries. The effect on the audience was shown by the applause that
would not be silenced until the picture was presented again.
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Ticket for the Lumière Cinematographe in London (May 1896)</figcaption></figure>

M. Lumière's five-syllabled invention is yet in its infancy its possibilities are almost awe-inspiring. At present the photographs are no bigger than postage-stamps, and, thrown life-size on to the screen, they inevitably lose certain details. When practice has brought about perfection, where will the invention stop? Imagine it worked in connection with the phonograph. The past will become annihilated; our great Parliamentary debates, our monster meetings, our operatic and theatrical performances, will remain for ever, or even longer. I do not dare to think of the scientific and medical possibilities, but am content to dwell on the more popular ones. While the phonograph preserves the sounds, the Cin., &c., will do the rest. A trifle of about forty-five thousand exposures will preserve an Empire ballet intact for ever. Why did not M. Lumière arrange his invention before the exquisite Katrina became a thing of the past? Soon nothing that is beautiful will be mortal, and as
the song has become immortal through the phonograph, the ex-
quisite graces of the dance will be preserved by the new invention.
Would not Horace have modified his famous ode to Postumus had
he dreamt of such things as will soon be regarded as ordinary? I
have for the last week been imagining some of the many things
that will be represented or later. How splendidly a Spanish bull
fight could be shown!

The present exhibition at the Empire Theatre, where, by the
way, breathing-space is almost at a premium, is directed by M.
Trewey, and I felt that I must call on him, in the interests of hu-
manity at large, or rather, that large part of humanity given to
*Sketch* reading.

I found M. Trewey on the stage of the Empire, smiling for all he
is worth which is probably a large amount. No wonder he looked
pleased. A few hours before he had been visited at the Polytechnic
by the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, who had expressed their
delight with his entertainment.

"M. Lumiere, of Lyons," he said, is my oldest friend, and he gave
me the choice of the country in which I would show his invention.
Of course, I chose England. I had intended to retire from work al-
together, for" – and his eyes twinkled – "I have been a careful man
But I thought this work would be very light, so I took it. Now,
I never know a moment's rest, and I have promised the directors
here to give at least one new picture every week. As soon as the fine
weather sets in again," he went on, we shall do fresh work on the
racecourse, river, and similar places. We are not going to be idle."

And, as though to prove his words, M. Trewey, with a hurried
apology, bustled off to the centre of the stage with all the energy
and enthusiasm of a very young man. I noticed that the machine
was being rapidly prepared, and that one or two of the charming
corps de ballet had evidently obtained permission to see the per-
formance from the stage. Unfortunately for me, I was very much overdue at another house of entertainment. I could but sigh for the delight of the few occasions when my visits to Empire stageland have been longer. Then I departed.

**Source:** 'A Wonderful Invention: The Cinématographe of M. Lumière', *The Sketch*, 18 March 1896, p. 323
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

Living pictures

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

In presenting this book to my readers I feel the necessity of making a few remarks with regard to its scope. The subject of which it treats is, in earlier years, so bound up with researches on Persistence of Vision that I have been sorely tempted to stray into many
seductively interesting by paths. Limitations of time and space
have, however, exercised a certain influence, and I have been com-
pelled to restrict my work in absolute conformity with the title of
my book. Therefore, none of the interesting apparatus for demon-
strating persistence of vision find a place within these pages, nor
have the various theories on the subject been discussed. I have
somewhat reluctantly confined myself strictly to the description
and history of apparatus for producing the illusion of motion.
At the same time, my book (within its proper limits) commences
early, and, at the conclusion of a review covering over two thou-
sand years, will be found, I hope, fully "up to date." I have adopted
the practice of italicising the name of each instrument when first
met with in the Historical Section, and the Index will be found
to include, in alphabetical order, not only names properly applied,
but also such mis-spelled variations as I may have met with, and
also many which have been erroneously used, they, like "the flow-
ers which bloom in the spring" having "nothing to do with the
case." The changes rung on Kine-, Cine-, and Vitaare so numerous
— one might say irritating — that I am led to hope that the math-
ematical laws of permutation may break down, and, in defiance of
arithmetical rules, thus create a necessity for radical changes in the
naming of later machines. The descriptions in the list of British
Patents must not be taken as full; I see no necessity to reprint
a mass of Government Blue-books which are available in full to
the public, but I believe that every specification pertinent to my
subject is at least mentioned, and I am convinced such a list is a
necessary complement to an historical review. Furthermore, these
patents will be found to include many ideas which may contain
some useful germs, and although many of these crude conceptions
have not been practically carried out, they at least afford food for
thought. An acquaintance with the minuteness of the steps in the
evolution of the Living Picture has caused me to attach value to even the slightest novelty, find it where I might. With regard to the Bibliography, I do not put it forward as exhaustive. Were it so, the valuable papers would be hidden among a number of reprints and comments. I merely append some of the more important references I have collected in the course of my reading, in order that others may pursue any point on which they desire further information than I have been able to supply in the space at my disposal. To this end the Index is especially directed; I believe its utility will justify the labour I have expended upon it. In conclusion, I would say that my aim has been to express each fact as clearly as possible in a popular way, and to present in a connected form as much information as I could collect, in order that my book might not only provide a few hours pleasant reading, but also serve as a standard of reference on its subject. Finally, I should esteem it a favour if any reader who discovers an error, either of commission or omission, in my work would acquaint me with the fact, for "to err is human"; and I should be pleased to find my critics approach the other extreme of the proverb cited.

***

**source**: Henry V. Hopwood, *Living pictures: their history, photo-production and practical working, with a digest of British patents and annotated bibliography*, London : Optician & Photographic Trades Review, 1899.
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

The psychology of theatre
audiences

The drama is the only art, excepting oratory and certain forms of music, that is designed to appeal to a crowd instead of to an individual. The lyric poet writes for himself, and for such selected persons here and there throughout the world as may be wisely sympathetic enough to understand his musings. The essayist and the novelist write for a reader sitting alone in his library : whether ten such readers or a hundred thousand ultimately read a book, the w riter speaks to each of them apart from all the others. It is the same with painting and with sculpture. Though a picture or a statue may be seen by a limitless succession of observers, its appeal is made always to the individual mind. But it is different with a play. Since a drama is, in essence, a story devised to be pre- sented by actors on a stage before an audience, it must necessarily be designed to appeal at once to a multitude of people. We have to be alone in order to appreciate the Venus of Melos or the Sistine Madonna or the Ode to a Nightingale or the Egoist or the Religio Medici ; but who could sit alone in a wide theatre and see Cyrano
de Bergerac performed? The sympathetic presence of a multitude of people would be as necessary to our appreciation of the play as solitude in all the other cases. And because the drama must be written for a crowd, it must be fashioned differently from the other, and less popular, forms of art.

No writer is really a dramatist unless he recognises this distinction of appeal; and if an author is not accustomed to writing for the crowd, he can hardly hope to make a satisfying play. Ténnyson, the perfect poet; Browning, the master of the human mind; Stevenson, the teller of enchanting tales; — each of them failed when he tried to make a drama, because the conditions of his proper art had schooled him long in writing for the individual instead of for the crowd. A literary artist who writes for the individual may produce a great work of literature that is cast in the dramatic form; but the work will not be, in the practical sense, a play. Samson Agonistes, Faust, Pippa Passes, Peer Gynt, and the early dream-dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, are something else than plays. They are not devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience. As a work of literature, A Blot in the ' Scutcheon is immeasurably greater than The Two Orphans; but as a play, it is immeasurably less. For even though, in this particular piece, Browning did try to write for the theatre (at the suggestion of Macready), he employed the same intricately intellectual method of character analysis that has made many of his poems the most solitude-compelling of modern literary works. Properly to appreciate his piece, you must be alone, just as you must be alone to read A Woman's Last Word. It is not written for a crowd; *The Two Orphans*, less weighty in wisdom, is. The second is a play.
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La reine de Chypre, les acteurs et les spectateurs : [estampe] / par Marcelin [BNF]

The mightiest masters of the drama — Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Molière — have recognised the popular character of its appeal and written frankly for the multitude. The crowd, therefore, has
exercised a potent influence upon the dramatist in every era of the
theatre. One person the lyric poet has to please, — himself; to a
single person only, or an unlimited succession of single persons,
does the novelist address himself, and he may choose the sort of
person he will write for; but the dramatist must always please the
many. His themes, his thoughts, his emotions, are circumscribed
by the limits of popular appreciation. He writes less freely than
any other author; for he cannot pick his auditors. Mr. Henry James
may, if he choose, write novels for the super-civilised; but a crowd
is never super-civilised, and therefore characters like those of Mr.
James could never be successfully presented in the theatre. Treasure
Island is a book for boys, both young and old; but a modern
theatre crowd is composed largely of women, and the theme of
such a story could scarcely be successful on the stage.

In order, therefore, to understand the limitations of the drama
as an art, and clearly to define its scope, it is necessary to inquire
into the psychology of theatre audiences. This subject presents two
phases to the student. First, a theatre audience exhibits certain
psychological traits that are common to all crowds, of whatever
kind,— a political convention, the spectators at a ball-game, or a
church congregation, for example. Second, it exhibits certain other
traits which distinguish it from other kinds of crowds. These, in
turn, will be considered in the present chapter. By the word crowd,
as it is used in this discussion, is meant a multitude of people
whose ideas and feelings have taken a set in a certain single di-
rection, and who, because of this, exhibit a tendency to lose their
individual self-consciousness in the general self-consciousness of
the multitude. Any gathering of people for a specific purpose —
whether of action or of worship or of amusement — tends to be-
come, because of this purpose, a crowd, in the scientific sense.
Now, a crowd has a mind of its own, apart from that of any of its
individual members. The psychology of the crowd was little understood until late in the nineteenth century, when a great deal of attention was turned to it by a group of French philosophers.

The subject has been most fully studied by M. Gustave Le Bon, who devoted some two hundred pages to his *Psychologie des Foules* [1895]. According to M. Le Bon, a man, by the mere fact that he forms a factor of a crowd, tends to lose consciousness of those mental qualities in which he differs from his fellows, and becomes more keenly conscious than before of those other mental qualities in which he is at one with them. The mental qualities in which men differ from one another are the acquired qualities of intellect and character; but the qualities in which they are at one are the innate basic passions of the race. A crowd, therefore, is less intellectual and more emotional than the individuals that compose it. It is less reasonable, less judicious, less disinterested, more credulous, more primitive, more partisan; and hence, as M. Le Bon cleverly puts it, a man, by the mere fact that he forms a part of an organised crowd, is likely to descend several rungs on the ladder of civilisation. Even the most cultured and intellectual of men, when he forms an atom of a crowd, tends to lose consciousness of his acquired mental qualities and to revert to his primal simplicity and sensitiveness of mind.

The dramatist, therefore, because he writes for a crowd, writes for a comparatively uncivilised and uncultivated mind, a mind richly human, vehement in approbation, emphatic in disapproval, easily credulous, eagerly enthusiastic, boyishly heroic, and somewhat carelessly unthinking. Now, it has been found in practice that the only thing that will keenly interest a crowd is a struggle of some sort or other. Speaking empirically, the late Ferdinand Brunetiere, in 1893, stated that the drama has dealt always with a struggle between human wills; and his statement, formulated
in the catchphrase, “No struggle, no drama”, has since become a commonplace of dramatic criticism. But, so far as I know, no one has yet realised the main reason for this, which is, simply, that characters are interesting to a crowd only in those crises of emotion that bring them to the grapple. A single individual, like the reader of an essay or a novel, may be interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneath which a character unfolds itself as mildly as a water-lily; but to what Thackeray called “that savage child, the crowd,” a character does not appeal except in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their plays ; a bear-baiting or a cockfight used to empty Shakespeare’s theatre on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet upon the field, while such a crowd could not be aggregated from New York alone to see the greatest play the world has yet produced. For the crowd demands a fight ; and where the actual exists, it will scarcely be contented with the semblance.

Hence the drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with *Macbeth*; or piteous, with *Lear*. The crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides. There is no fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins ; and there is very little fun in seeing a play unless the dramatist allows you to throw your sym-
pathies on one side or the other of the struggle. Hence, although
in actual life both parties to a conflict are often partly right and
partly wrong, and it is hard to choose between them, the dramatist
usually simplifies the struggle in his plays by throwing the balance
of right strongly on one side. Hence, from the ethical standpoint,
the simplicity of theatre characters.

Desdemona is all innocence, Iago all deviltry. Hence also the
conventional heroes and villains of melodrama, — these to be
hissed and those to be applauded. Since the crowd is comparatively
lacking in the judicial faculty and cannot look upon a play from a
detached and disinterested point of view, it is either all for or all
against a character; and in either case its judgment is frequently
in defiance of the rules of reason. It will hear no word against
Camille, though an individual would judge her to be wrong, and it
has no sympathy with Pere Duval. It idolizes Raffles, who is a liar
and a thief; it shuts its ears to Marion Allardyce, the defender of
virtue in Letty. It wants its sympathetic characters, to love; its an-
tipathetic characters, to hate; and it hates and loves them as un-
reasonably as a savage or a child. The trouble with Hedda Gabler
as a play is that it contains not a single personage that the audience
can love.
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Les Spectateurs applaudissant
BNF (Observations théâtrales, n° 8), 1831</figcaption></figure>

The crowd demands those so-called “sympathetic” parts that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent. And since the crowd is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win. Hence the convention of the “happy ending”, insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the public. The blind Louise, in *The Two Orphans*, will get her sight back, never fear. Even the wicked Oliver, in *As You Like It*, must turn over a new leaf and marry a pretty girl.

Next to this prime instinct of partisanship in watching a con-
tention, one of the most important traits in the psychology of
crowds is their extreme credulity. A crowd will nearly always be-
lieve anything that it sees and almost anything that it is told. An
audience composed entirely of individuals who have no belief in
ghosts will yet accept the *Ghost in Hamlet* as a fact. Bless you, they have seen him! The crowd accepts the disguise of Rosalind, and never wonders why Orlando does not recognise his love. To this extreme credulity of the crowd is due the long line of plays that are founded on mistaken identity, — farces like *The Comedy of Errors* and melodramas like *The Lyons Mail*, for example. The crowd, too, will accept without demur any condition precedent to the story of a play, however impossible it might seem to the mind of the individual. *Oedipus King* has been married to his mother many years before the play begins; but the Greek crowd forbore to ask why, in so long a period, the enormity had never been discovered. The central situation of *She Stoops to Conquer* seems impossible to the individual mind, but is eagerly accepted by the crowd. Individual critics find fault with Thomas Heywood's lovely old play, *A Woman Killed with Kindness*, on the ground that though Frankford's no-ble forgiveness of his erring wife is beautiful to contemplate, Mrs. Frankford's infidelity is not sufficiently motivated, and the whole story, therefore, is untrue. But Heywood, writing for the crowd, said frankly, "If you will grant that Mrs. Frankford was unfaithful, I can tell you a lovely story about her husband, who was a gentleman worth knowing; otherwise there can't be any story"; and the Elizabethan crowd, eager for the story, was willing to oblige the dramatist with the necessary credulity.

There is this to be said about the credulity of an audience, however, — that it will believe what it sees much more readily than what it hears. It might not believe in the ghost of Hamlet's father if the ghost were merely spoken of and did not walk upon the stage. If a dramatist would convince his audience of the generosity or the treachery of one character or another, he should not waste words either praising or blaming the character, but should present him to the eye in the performance of a generous or treacherous action.
The audience hears wise words from *Polonius* when he gives his parting admonition to his son ; but the same audience sees him made a fool of by *Prince Hamlet*, and will not think him wise. The fact that a crowd's eyes are more keenly receptive than its ears is the psychologic basis for the maxim that in the theatre action speaks louder than words. It also affords a reason why plays of which the audience does not understand a single word are frequently successful. Mme. Sarah Bernhardt's thrilling performance of *La Tosca* has always aroused enthusiasm in London and New-York, where the crowd, as a crowd, could not understand the language of the play.
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Les Spectateurs pleurant

*(Observations théatrales n°3) Oeuvre de Cl. Pruche, 1837 [BNF]*</figcaption></figure>

Another primal characteristic of the mind of the crowd is its susceptibility to emotional contagion. A cultivated individual reading *The School for Scandal* at home alone will be intelligently appreciative of its delicious humor; but it is difficult to imagine him laughing over it aloud. Yet the same individual, when submerged in a theatre crowd, will laugh heartily over this very play, largely because other people near him are laughing too. Laughter, tears, enthusiasm, all the basic human emotions, thrill and tremble through an audience, because each member of the crowd feels that
he is surrounded by other people who are experiencing the same
emotion as his own. In the sad part of a play it is hard to keep
from weeping if the woman next to you is wiping her eyes; and still
harder is it to keep from laughing, even at a sorry jest, if the man
on the other side is roaring in vociferous cachinnation. Success-
ful dramatists play upon the susceptibility of a crowd by serving
up raw morsels of crude humor and pathos for the unthinking to
wheeze and blubber over, knowing that these members of the audi-
ence will excite their more phlegmatic neighbors by contagion. The
practical dictum that every laugh in the first act is worth money
in the box-office is founded on this psychologic truth. Even puns
as bad as Mr. Zangwill's are of value early in a play to set on some
quantity of barren spectators and get the house accustomed to a
titter. Scenes like the football episodes in *The College Widow and
Strongheart*, or the battle in *The Round Up*, are nearly always sure to
raise the roof; for it is usually sufficient to set everybody on the
stage a-cheering in order to make the audience cheer too by sheer
contagion. Another and more classical example was the speech-
less triumph of Henry V's return victorious, in Richard Mansfield's
sumptuous production of the play. Here the audience felt that he
was every inch a king; for it had caught the fervor of the crowd
upon the stage.

This same emotional contagion is, of course, the psychologic
basis for the French system of the claque, or band of hired ap-
plauders seated in the centre of the house. The leader of the claque
knows his cues as if he were an actor in the piece, and at the psy-
chologic moment the claqueurs burst forth with their clatter and
start the house applauding. Applause begets applause in the the-
atre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget tears. But not only
is the crowd more emotional than the individual; it is also more
sensuous. It has the lust of the eye and of the ear, — the savage's
love of gaudy color, the child's love of soothing sound.

It is fond of flaring flags and blaring trumpets. Hence the rich-
costumed processions of the Elizabethan stage, many years before
the use of scenery; and hence, in our own day, the success of pieces
like *The Darling of the Gods* and *The Rose of the Rancho*. Color, light,
and music, artistically blended, will hold the crowd better than the
most absorbing story. This is the reason for the vogue of musical
comedy, with its pretty girls, and gaudy shifts of scenery and lights,
and tricksy, tripping melodies and dances.

Both in its sentiments and in its opinions, the crowd is com-
fortably commonplace. It is, as a crowd, incapable of original
thought and of any but inherited emotion. It has no speculation
in its eyes. What it feels was felt before the flood; and what it
thinks, its fathers thought before it. The most effective moments
in the theatre are those that appeal to basic and commonplace
emotions, — love of woman, love of home, love of country, love
of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery. So
great for centuries has been the inherited influence of the Chris-
tian religion that any adequate play whose motive is self-sacrifice
is almost certain to succeed. Even when the self-sacrifice is unwise
and ignoble, as in the first act of *Frou-Frou*, the crowd will give
it vehement approval. Countless plays have been made upon the
man who unselfisnly assumes responsibility for another's guilt. The
great tragedies have familiar themes, — ambition in *Macbeth*, jeal-
ousy in *Othello*, filial ingratitude in *Lear*; there is nothing in these
motives that the most unthinking audience could fail to under-
stand. No crowd can resist the fervor of a patriot who goes down
scornful before many spears. Show the audience a flag to die for,
or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to maintain
against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as an-
cient as the human race. Few are the plays that can succeed without
the moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions. These
themes do not require that the audience shall think.

But for the speculative, the original, the new, the crowd evinces
little favor. If the dramatist holds ideas of religion, or of politics,
or of social law, that are in advance of his time, he must keep them
to himself or else his plays will fail. Nimble wits, like Mr. Shaw,
who scorn tradition, can attain a popular success only through the
crowd's inherent love of fads; they cannot long succeed when they
run counter to inherited ideas. The great successful dramatists, like
Moliere and Shakespeare, have always thought with the crowd on
all essential questions. Their views of religion, of morality, of pol-
itics, of law, have been the views of the populace, nothing more.
They never raise questions that cannot quickly be answered by the
crowd, through the instinct of inherited experience. No mind was
ever, in the philosophic sense, more commonplace than that of
Shakespeare. He had no new ideas. He was never radical, and sel-
dom even progressive. He was a careful money-making business
man, fond of food and drink and out-of-doors and laughter, a pa-
triot, a lover, and a gentleman. Greatly did he know things about
people; greatly, also, could he write. But he accepted the religion,
the politics, and the social ethics of his time, without ever bother-
ing to wonder if these things might be improved.

The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn
tradition and discover new ideas, have had minds far different
from this. They have not written plays. It is to these men, — the
philosopher, the essayist, the novelist, the lyric poet, — that each
of us turns for what is new in thought. But from the dramatist the
crowd desires only the old, old thought. It has no patience for con-
sideration; it will listen only to what it knows already. If, there-
fore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound, let him set it
forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat it with a
story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the in-
dividual mind. Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become
generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre.

This point is admirably illustrated by two of the best and most
successful plays of recent seasons. The Witching Hour, by Mr. Augustus Thomas, and The Servant in the House, by Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, were both praised by many critics for their " novelty "; but to me one of the most significant and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real respect, novel in the least. Consider for a moment the deliberate and careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr. Thomas so skilfully set forth. What Mr. Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering about and thinking during the last few years. The timeliness of the play lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations of the same materials. Mr. Thomas has himself explained, in certain semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this play — on which his mind had been set for many years — until the general public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to set forth. Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would undoubtedly have failed. When it was produced, it was not novel, but resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded. For one of the surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning any subject of importance. The dramatist should be the catholic collector and wise interpreter of
those ideas which the crowd, in its conservatism, feels already to
be safely true.

And if *The Servant in the House* will — as I believe — outlive *The Witching Hour*, it will be mainly because, in the author's theme and his ideas, it is older by many, many centuries. The theme of Mr. Thomas's play — namely, that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some extent the power of action — is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is at least recent in the history of thinking. It is a theme which dates itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose interest for the next. But Mr. Kennedy's theme — namely, that when discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them — is at least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs to future generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr. Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason why *The Servant in the House* struck so many critics as being strange and new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable. I know that the best European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of the theatre. They are striving to say in the drama what might be said better in the essay or the novel. As the exposition of a theory, Mr. Shaw's Man and Superman is not nearly so effective as the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas. The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured individual and
not by the uncultured crowd. That is why the breadth of his appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art. Only his more commonplace plays — A Doll's House, for example — have attained a wide success. And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than material reasons. Surely it is a good thing for the public that Hamlet never fails.

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Orange, Théâtre Antique, la scène et les spectateurs : représentation par la Comédie Française "Les Funérailles d'Homère" [BNF, Département des Arts du Spectacle, Fonds Rondel] 1906.

The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser men who invent new tricks of technique and startle
the public with innovations. Molière merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly in *Love's Labour's Lost*, Greene in *As You Like It*, Marlowe in *Richard III*, Kyd in *Hamlet*, and Fletcher in *The Tempest*. He did the old thing better than the other men had done it, — that is all.

Yet this is greatly to Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed in the greatest drama. In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his sanity. He is so greatly usual that he can understand all men and sympathise with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom from the general mind of man. And it is largely because of this that he represents ever the ideal of the dramatist. He who would write for the theatre must not despise the crowd.

All of the above-mentioned characteristics of theatre audiences, their instinct for contention and for partisanship, their credulity, their sensuousness, their susceptibility to emotional contagion, their incapacity for original thought, their conservatism, and their love of the commonplace, appear in every sort of crowd, as M. Le Bon has proved with ample illustration. It remains for us to notice certain traits in which theatre audiences differ from other kinds of crowds.

In the first place, a theatre audience is composed of individuals more heterogeneous than those that make up a political, or social, or sporting, or religious convocation. The crowd at a foot-ball game, at a church, at a social or political convention, is by its very purpose selective of its elements: it is made up entirely of college-
folk, or Presbyterians, or Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play, therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine his message to any single caste of society. In the same single work of art he must incorporate elements that will interest all classes of humankind.

Those promising dramatic movements that have confined their appeal to a certain single stratum of society have failed ever, because of this, to achieve the highest excellence. The trouble with Roman comedy is that it was written for an audience composed chiefly of freedmen and slaves. The patrician caste of Rome walked wide of the theatres. Only the dregs of society gathered to applaud the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Hence the oversimplicity of their prologues, and their tedious repetition of the obvious. Hence, also, their vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity. Here was fine dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste of society, — the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its over-niceness, and

its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. Each of them, therefore, shot wide of the mark; while Moliere, who wrote at once for patrician and lebeian, scored a hit.

The really great dramatic movements of the world — that of Spain in the age of Calderon and Lope, that of England in the spacious times of great Elizabeth, that of France from 1830 to the present hour — have broadened their appeal to every class. The queen
and the orange-girl joyed together in the healthiness of Rosalind; the king and the gamin laughed together at the rogueries of Scapin. The breadth of Shakespeare's appeal remains one of the most significant facts in the history of the drama. Tell a filthy-faced urchin of the gutter that you know about a play that shows a ghost that stalks and talks at midnight underneath a castle-tower, and a man that makes believe he is out of his head so that he can get the

better of a wicked king, and a girl that goes mad and drowns herself, and a play within the play, and a funeral in a churchyard, and a duel with poisoned swords, and a great scene at the end in which nearly every one gets killed: tell him this, and watch his eyes gi'ow wide! I have been to a thirty-cent performance of *Othello* in a middlewestern town, and have felt the audience thrill with the headlong hurry of the action. Yet these are the plays that cloistered students study for their wisdom and their style! And let us not forget, in this connection, that a similar breadth of appeal is neither necessary nor greatly to be desired in those forms of literature that, unlike the drama, are not written for the crowd. The greatest non-dramatic poet and the greatest novelist in English are appreciated only by the few; but this is not in the least to the discredit of Milton and of Meredith. One indication of the greatness of Mr. Kipling's story, They, is that very few have learned to read it.

Victor Hugo, in his preface to *Ruy Bias*, has discussed this entire principle from a slightly different point of view. He divides the theatre audience into three classes — the thinkers, who demand characterisation; the women, who demand passion; and the mob, who demand action and insists that every great play must appeal to all three classes at once. Certainly Ruy Bias itself fulfils this desideratum, and is great in the breadth of its appeal. Yet although all three of the necessary elements appear in the play, it has more action than passion and more passion than characterisa-
tion. And this fact leads us to the theory, omitted by Victor Hugo from his preface, that the mob is more important than the women and the women more important than the thinkers, in the average theatre audience. Indeed, a deeper consideration of the subject almost leads us to discard the thinkers as a psychologic force and to obliterate the distinction between the women and the mob. It is to an unthinking and feminine-minded mob that the dramatist must first of all appeal; and this leads us to believe that action with passion for its motive is the prime essential for a play.
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Fichot, Charles (1817-1904), L'incendie de l'Opéra-Comique. La panique. Sortie des spectateurs affolés. 1887.</figcaption></figure>

Bibliothèque-musée de l'Opéra.
[BNF, Département des Arts du Spectacle]

For, nowadays at least, it is most essential that the drama
should appeal to a crowd of women. Practically speaking, our
matinee audiences are composed entirely of women, and our
evening audiences are composed chiefly of women and the men
that they have brought with them. Very few men go to the theatre
unattached; and these few are not important enough, from the
theoretic standpoint, to alter the psychologic aspect of the audi-
ence. And it is this that constitutes one of the most important dif-
ferences between a modem theatre audience and other kinds of
crowds.
The influence of this fact upon the dramatist is very potent. First of all, as I have said, it forces him to deal chiefly in action with passion for its motive. And this necessity accounts for the preponderance of female characters over male in the large majority of the greatest modern plays. Notice Nora Helmer, Mrs. Alving, Hedda Gabler; notice Magda and Camille; notice Mrs. Tanqueray, Mrs. Ebbsmith, Iris, and Letty, — to cite only a few examples. Furthermore, since women are by nature comparatively inattentive, the femininity of the modern theatre audience forces the dramatist to employ the elementary technical tricks of repetition and parallelism, in order to keep his play clear, though much of it be unattended to. Eugene Scribe, who knew the theatre, used to say that every important statement in the exposition of a play must be made at least three times. This, of course, is seldom necessary in a novel, where things may be said once for all.

The prevailing inattentiveness of a theatre audience at the present day is due also to the fact that it is peculiarly conscious of itself, apart from the play that it has come to see. Many people "go to the theatre," as the phrase is, without caring much whether they see one play or another; what they want chiefly is to immerse themselves in a theatre audience. This is especially true, in New York, of the large percentage of people from out of town who "go to the theatre" merely as one phase of their metropolitan experience. It is true, also, of the many women in the boxes and the orchestra who go less to see than to be seen. It is one of the great difficulties of the dramatist that he must capture and enchain the attention of an audience thus composed. A man does not pick up a novel unless he cares to read it; but many people go to the theatre chiefly for the sense of being there. Certainly, therefore, the problem of the dramatist is, in this respect, more difficult than that of
the novelist, for he must make his audience lose consciousness of
itself in the consciousness of his play.

One of the most essential differences between a theatre audience and other kinds of crowds lies in the purpose for which it is convened. This purpose is always recreation. A theatre audience is therefore less serious than a church congregation or a political or social convention. It does not come to be edified or educated; it has no desire to be taught: what it wants is to have its emotions played upon. It seeks amusement — in the widest sense of the word — amusement through laughter, sympathy, terror, and tears. And it is amusement of this sort that the great dramatists have ever given it.

The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical solemnity. They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre audience ought to w'ant to be edified. As a matter of fact, no audience ever does. Moliere and Shakespeare, who knew the limits of their art, never said a word about uplifting the stage. They wrote plays to please the crowd ; and if, through their inherent greatness, they became teachers as well as entertainers, they did so without any tall talk about the solemnity of their mission. Their audiences learned largely, but they did so unawares, — God being with them when they knew it not. The demand for an endowed theatre in America comes chiefly from those who believe that a great play cannot earn its own living. Yet Hamlet has made more money than any other play in English; *The School for Scandal* never fails to draw ; and in our own day we have seen *Cyrano de Bergerac* coining money all around the world.

There were not any endowed theatres in Elizabethan London.
Give the crowd the sort of plays it wants, and you will not have to
seek beneficence to keep your theatre floating. But, on the other
hand, no endowed theatre will ever lure the crowd to listen to the sort of plays it does not want. There is a wise maxim appended to one of Mr. George Ade's Fables in Slang: "In uplifting, get underneath". If the theatre in America is weak, what it needs is not endowment: it needs great and popular plays. Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the crowd come to see *The Master Builder*, or *A Blot in the 'Scutcheon'* , or *The Hour Glass*, or *Pelleas and Melisande*?

It is willing enough to come without urging to see Othello and *The Second Mrs. Tanqueray*. Give us one great dramatist who understands the crowd, and we shall not have to form societies to propagate his art. Let us cease our prattle of the theatre for the few. Any play that is really great as drama will interest the many.

One point remains to be considered. In any theatre audience there are certain individuals who do not belong to the crowd. They are in it, but not of it; for they fail to merge their individual self-consciousness in the general self-consciousness of the multitude. Such are the professional critics, and other confirmed frequenters of the theatre. It is not for them primarily that plays are written; and any one who has grown individualised through the theatre-going habit cannot help looking back regretfully upon those fresher days when he belonged, unthinking, to the crowd. A first-night audience is anomalous, in that it is composed largely of individuals opposed to self-surrender; and for this reason, a first-night judgment of the merits of a play is rarely final. The dramatist has written for a crowd, and he is judged by individuals. Most dramatic critics will tell you that they long to lose themselves in the crowd, and regret the aloofness from the play that comes of their profession. It is because of this aloofness of the critic that most dramatic criticism fails.
Throughout the present discussion, I have insisted on the point
that the great dramatists have always written primarily for the
many. Yet now I must add that when once they have fulfilled this
prime necessity, they may also write secondarily for the few. And
the very greatest have always done so. In so far as he was a drama-
tist, Shakespeare wrote for the crowd ; in so far as he was a lyric
poet, he wrote for himself ; and in so far as he was a sage and a styl-
ist, he wrote for the individual. In making sure of his appeal to the
many, he earned the right to appeal to the few. At the thirty-cent
performance of Othello that I spoke of, I was probably the only
person present who failed to submerge his individuality beneath
the common consciousness of the audience. Shakespeare made a
play that could appeal to the rabble of that middle-western town ;
but he wrote it in a verse that none of them could hear :

— Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow'dst yesterday.

The greatest dramatist of all, in writing for the crowd, did not
neglect the individual.

***

Source : "The Psychology of Theatre audicences", in *The theory of the theatre, and other principles of dramatic criticism* (1910) by Clayton Meeker Hamilton (1881-1946), New York, H. Holt and company, 1910, pp. 30-58. Public Domain.
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# Movies as an educational force

## MOTION-PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN EDUCATIONAL FORCE

There remains no doubt whatever that the cinematograph has completely won over the great public — the many millions who are constantly seeking fresh fields of amusement and diversion. Of all the classes that patronise the moving-picture entertainment, the children form the one most open to its influence and most responsive to what it offers them; and it is this well-known impressionability of the young mind that has set people thinking of the educational responsibility of the moving-picture show. From this it is but a step to the question, May not the cinematograph be brought into the school room?
The subject has several aspects that are worth treating some-
what at length. The firm of Pathé Frères has here, as in so many
other directions, been first in the field. Let us examine some of its
educational films.

The peculiar properties possessed by the magnet are profoundly
mysterious to the child. Textbooks may be written in the simplest
language and freely illustrated with diagrams, but the points still
remain somewhat obscure. This French manufacturing company
has prepared a film, "The Magnet," in which the well-known sub-
ject-matter of the school book is illustrated, and the phenomena
described therein are demonstrated in a simple manner by visual
records of the peculiar properties possessed by the magnet.

The familiar experiments with the magnet and iron filings are
treated simply and with endless variety. If the pupils see the
teacher perform the manipulations with filings and magnet in the
usual way, the experiment conveys no tangible idea, and interest is
not greatly aroused. But when the same magnet is thrown upon the
screen in movement, and is ten feet or so in height, while the iron
filings are so magnified that they resemble not dust, but thorns or
long pins, a more convincing and indelible impression is conveyed.

One may have seen many diagrams showing the lines of force,
as they are called. But no diagram can produce the unforgettable
impression gained by the sight of the phenomenon itself occurring
before the eyes. The iron filings may be seen resolving themselves
into the two distinct groups about the poles, as if imbued with life,
and the process may be followed from beginning to end with per-
fect ease, owing to the size to which the filings are magnified in
projection.

The operation of natural laws is indelibly impressed upon the
schoolboy when he is shown some novel experiment in physics car-
ried out upon the screen. Physiology and anatomy can be taught
by producing pictures taken by X-ray photography.

History ought surely to be a successful field for the educational
cinematograph. The portrayal by Pathé Frères of episodes during
the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic era ; the representation
of the Normans landing in England, the discovery of America by
Columbus — these and similar pictures have already shown the
wide possibilities of the historical film. Of course, great care must
be taken to adhere to strict historical truth in fact and setting;
when they will greatly serve to fix in the pupil's mind events, and
historical atmosphere, and aid him in distinguishing various peri-
ods.

The fact that this film is produced in natural colours enhances
its effect; a schoolboy would be hard indeed to impress if he failed
to appreciate the wonderful significance of this evolution of the
hyacinth from the bulb to the flowering stage. Again, he is enabled
to witness upon the screen the birth of the common housefly, and
its entire span of existence. He can see how ants work and live, and
how the bee manufactures its honey. As a corollary to the matter-
of-fact and uninteresting textbook the cinematograph film can-
not be excelled. It presents in actual movement what mere words,
which have to be" committed to memory, seek to convey without
any durable result. Indeed, there is not the slightest doubt that a
thousand pictures will impress themselves upon the school boy's
mind, and impart to him more definite knowledge of their sub-
ject in one minute than hours of hammering with the aid of text-
book and blackboard. Even actual ocular demonstration fails to be
so convincing as a projection upon a whitened sheet, where every-
thing immediately concerned is magnified to an extreme degree.

The inventor of the Kinetoscope, Mr. Thomas Edison, is of
opinion that the cinematograph will displace all other methods in
the schoolroom for the teaching of geography. Both teachers and pupils will be inclined to agree with this dictum. A teacher may talk for hours about the tremendous height of the peaks in the Andes, the racial characteristics of the natives of Abyssinia, or the manner in which rivers are born on the flanks of mighty glaciers. But words sometimes convey very little to the immature mind. Throw upon the screen a series of pictures of an actual journey, and the youngster gleans the facts without the slightest effort. He sees the towering, snowcapped rocks with their precipitous flanks; the melting snow and ice flowing down from the mighty glacier and forming a tempestuous, rushing river; he sees in their natural surroundings the folk of a hundred strange and distant tribes. Perhaps he is transported for the time to the deck of a steamer driving its way up through the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Books and pictures have given him but a faint idea of these noble waters; but when he sees their beauty, and witnesses the enormous traffic carried upon their broad bosoms, figures and facts take on new significance, and are never forgotten.

Whatever scene he sees, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Antarctic circle, that scene becomes henceforth not a mere spot on the map, but a living reality.

One of the most remarkable series of pictures worthy of inclusion in this category is that obtained of Mount Etna in eruption. The cinematograph operator displayed wonderful daring in venturing to the verge, of the crater of this vent to internal fires. The reward for his intrepidity certainly conveys a more realistic and vivid impression of a belching volcano than the most imaginative flights of description in textbooks.

The success of the educational campaign of the cinematograph depends upon the suitability of the film. The cinematographer has roved through all the fields of science securing interesting pictures
in metallurgy, natural history, manufacturing industries, electricity, agriculture, horticulture, and so forth. The educational value of the films now produced is beyond dispute; but it may be that they are somewhat too old for children. The film manufacturers have, up to the present, chiefly consulted the tastes of adults; and the films of a distinctly educational character which they produce appeal to the mature rather than to the child mind. On the other hand, it should not be at all difficult to produce films which, like the one already described, representing experiments with the magnet, would give regular instead of incidental instruction upon subjects actually treated in schools — animated textbooks, in short. But as yet the picture producer has not received sufficient encouragement from the educational authorities to warrant him in preparing such films.

Unfortunately, the feeling against the moving picture has not been entirely eliminated, despite its tremendous popularity. Once an energetic Board of Education realises the possibilities of cinematography as a supplement to the information conveyed by textbooks and manuals, the film manufacturers will hasten to supply the demand thus created. The last obstacle will have been removed; for the field presents no special mechanical difficulties, the only serious one having been removed by the discovery of the non-inflammable film. The perfecting of this film has obviated the necessity of confining the installation within an iron box — a requirement which militated very appreciably against the introduction of the cinematograph into schools.

A striking illustration of the educational value of moving pictures is revealed in the beautiful series of “Empire” pictures which are being secured by Messrs. William Butcher and Sons. They are completing what may be described best as a cinematographic encyclopsedia of Greater Britain — its peoples, resources, industries,
sports, and scenic beauties. Every corner of the Empire is being searched for entrancing pictorial contributions to this project.

As might have been expected, others beside educational institutions have seen in the moving-picture show a powerful instrument of propaganda. Political, charitable, municipal, and numerous other organisations have pressed the celluloid ribbon into service to aid them in their crusades. It has been of far-reaching utility in preaching the gospel of sanitation and prosecuting the war against disease, for the films convey their lessons in a terribly realistic manner. The Americans have produced a striking film for the dissemination of information as to how to combat advantageously the ravages of the great "White Plague" of consumption. The various American hygiene associations also have pressed home their campaign against the common housefly with commendable vigour by means of the cinematograph. Other photographs of a similar character have been produced in various places for the purpose of initiating the public into the causes of certain diseases and maladies, and the best means of prevention or treatment.

Medical science has profitted materially from the perfection of the art and its application to surgery. It is not always possible for students to be present at a peculiarly delicate and abnormal operation. Although the subject may be described at length in the technical papers, words fail to be so emphatic as a pictorial reproduction of the feat. Not only can the operation be followed closely when reproduced upon the screen, but, if desired, any particular phase in the achievement can be selected, and by enlargement upon photographic paper it can be subjected to closer and more minute investigation at leisure.

Even the Government has not failed to recognise the power of the cinematograph. Some years ago Mr. Robert Paul applied to the War Office for permission to film scenes in a soldier's
life. The facilities were granted, and some first-class pictures were obtained. They proved immensely popular with the public, and were far more potent as a means of inducing enlistment with the colours than the most glowing word-pictures painted by glib, persuasive recruiting sergeants. This idea has been copied by other nations, and today the cinematograph is regarded as an indispensable weapon for attracting recruits to the land and sea services.

Religious institutions have not been backward in realising the value of animated pictures in preaching the gospel of faith. The producer, by means of the stage and actors, can present any episode from the Creation to the Resurrection. The world before the Deluge, the toil of the Israelites in the land of the Pharaohs, the Sacrifice of Abraham, the Passage of the Red Sea, with the destruction of the Egyptian hosts, the story of Samson and Delilah, the Fall of Babylon, scenes from the Life of Christ all these and many others help to familiarise both old and young with the Bible stories, and add wonderfully to their convincingness, as the following episode shows :' — A teacher was describing the Passage of the Red Sea. The children followed his words intently ; and his peroration was accompanied by a piping voice exclaiming :

" Yes, teacher, I know that is right "

" Why ? " asked the somewhat startled teacher.

" Because I saw it I "

The teacher was perhaps prepared to chide at this flight of imagination ; but the child soon explained that the previous evening she had been to a picture theatre and had seen the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

Among the American preachers the significance of the cinematograph is beginning to be recognised. Ministers see in the projector a valuable adjunct to their teaching, and are disposed to introduce it into their churches. I am at liberty to quote in this
connection a letter from one of the leading luminaries in Ameri-
can church circles, which was received by Mr. Richard G. Holla-
man. The divine wrote : "My opinion is that the moving picture is
the coming great educator. This I believe to be true, not only in the
education of the youth, but in the church. I believe in a very few
years every well-equipped church will have a moving-picture appa-
ratus, so that the minister will appeal to the eye more than to the
ear."

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Poster from 1896 advertising the Cinématographe Lumière,
with the heterogeneous audience watching *L'Arroseur Arrosé*
[public domain]</figcaption></figure>

***
*source*: Frederick A Talbot, *Moving pictures: how they are made and worked*. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1912.
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>

# Writing the Photoplay

## 4. Where to Look for Titles

Good titles are everywhere—if you know how to find them. The Bible, Shakespeare, all the poets, books and plays that you read, newspapers, even advertisements on billboards and in street cars, all contain either suggestions for titles or complete titles, waiting only to be picked out and used. But be sure that someone else has not forestalled you!

Sayings, proverbs, and well-known quotations are a fruitful source of titles, as we have already intimated. But sometimes the real significance and value of such a title are not apparent to a great many of the spec[Pg 81]tators until they have witnessed the climax of the picture. This arises from their ignorance of literature and is, of course, their loss. Many good and extremely appropriate titles of this character are taken from the Psalms, from Shakespeare, and other poets. Frequently these quotations, used as titles, are so well known, and their meanings so apparent, that al-
most every one of the spectators will at once understand them, and catch at least the theme or general drift of the story from the title. Sometimes, again, the real significance of a title is best brought out by repeating it, or even the complete quotation from which it is taken, in the form of a leader at the point in the action where its significance cannot fail to be impressed upon the spectators. For example, a certain Selig release was entitled "Through Another Man's Eyes." Before the next to the last scene, which showed the ne'er-do-well lover peering in at the window, while his former friend bends over to kiss his wife—who might have been the wife of the wayward young man, had he been made of different stuff—the leader was introduced:

"How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes!"

## 2. Elements of Plot

If it is important that, in every case, the spectators must be "shown" what happens in the working out of a plot, it is equally important that they be shown *why* it happens. This also has to do with sound and comprehensible motivation. "It is not so much a case of 'show me,' with the average American, as a common recognition that there must be a reason for the existence of everything created. He is inclined to give every play a fair show, will sit patiently through a lot of straining for effect, if there is a *raison d'être* in the summing up, but his mode of thought, and it belongs to the constitution of the race, is that of getting at some truth by venturesome experiment or logical demonstration."

## 7. Naming the Characters
One thing to be remembered, however, is that the picture spectators of today have been gradually educated up to expecting and approving many things which the spectators of a few years ago would have looked upon as too “highbrow.” This is due in no small degree to the many screen adaptations of literary classics and fictional successes generally which have been made, as well as to the large number of stage plays that have been transferred to the screen, for, of course, the authors, publishers and dramatic producers have always stipulated that the casts be kept as they originally were made out—except that occasionally certain characters who in the stage-production of a certain play were merely spoken about and described have been, in the photoplay form, actually introduced, and thus added to the cast. But the point is that there is no longer the frantic striving to keep everything as “short and simple as possible” that once existed, and this applies to everything in the nature of inserts quite as much as to the names used for characters in the picture. Little by little “art” in motion picture production is becoming a reality instead of being merely a high-sounding word used occasionally by the press-agents.

## 13. Visions, Memories, Dreams, and Other Devices

Everyone who has attended the motion picture theatres has seen dozens of examples of “visions,” produced in one or another manner, and it should be easy to distinguish between “visions” and “thoughts” or “memories.” The latter may be introduced as part of another scene just as the vision (using the word in the sense of “apparition” or “supernatural visitant”) is introduced; but it must be borne in mind that the photoplay spectators have in the past few years been gradually educated up to a rather perfect comprehension of what results different technical devices produce—even
if they do not quite understand the technical why and wherefore;
and for this reason it is best when writing action in which the
characters are supposed to show what they are thinking about or
describing to use the fade-out and fade-in device, as the mean-
ing of this is now very clearly understood. The spectators are quite
used to seeing the picture fade out, or "go black" at the end of cer-
tain scenes, just as they are familiar with the use of it at the actual
end of the photoplay. Apart from these two uses, they have come
to associate the fade-out with the thought[Pg 179] of the immedi-
ate introduction of a "memory," either related to others or silently
indulged in, or a mere thought, or, if the character is seen going to
sleep, of a "dream."

17. Serials

The future holds out immense possibilities for producers and
writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past
many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on
account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and
weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spec-
tators, now with the improvement in the *stories* of serial pictures
has come an increase in the spectators who follow them up, and a
consequent introduction of serials into theatres where at one time
nothing of the kind would have been tolerated.

In conclusion, it may be said that for purposes of plot-study the
photoplay serial can hardly be sur passed. Good, bad or indifferent,
every photoplay serial reveals a sheer ingenuity of plotting that is
a genuine inspiration to the writer of often better material. And
a careful following-up and study of a good serial is a liberal photo-
play-writing education in itself.
### 3. *The Danger of Over-Compression*

let us quote Mr. Frank E. Woods, who, besides being well known as a critic, photoplaywright, director and supervisor of productions under Mr. David W. Griffith, is an acknowledged expert in editing motion pictures.

"Many a picture," says Mr. Woods, "has been ruined by inadequate sub-titles. The makers of the picture have assumed that because *they* understood the meaning of every action, the spectators should also understand, forgetting that the spectators will view the picture for the first time. The moment a spectator becomes confused and loses the sense of what he is seeing on the screen, his interest is gone. While he is wondering 'What are they talking about now?' or 'Who is the chap in the long coat?' or 'How did he get from the house in the woods?' the film is being reeled off merrily and the spectator has lost the thread of the story. Going to the other extreme and inserting sub-titles where the meaning is perfectly obvious, or telling in sub-titles that which is to be pictured immediately after, should also be avoided, although pictures are sometimes criticized for having too many titles when in fact the keen-eyed critic is the only one who finds them too many. The average spectator is none too alert.... The sub-title should be in complete harmony with the story and should never divert interest from the story. It should never be obtrusive. It should be there only because it belongs there. Therefore all sub-titles should be couched in language that harmonizes with the story. Every word should be weighed. Nothing should ever shock the spectator out of his interest in the picture by its incongruity, extravagance or inanity. Too much in a sub-title is as bad as too little—like seasoning in a pudding. The function of the sub-title is to supplement and correct the action of the picture, to cover lapses in the continuity, and to sup-
ply the finer shades of meaning which the actor has been unable to express in pantomime."

In passing, let us note one point of considerable moment. Notwithstanding the fact that many pictures are shown in which a leader immediately follows the title, it is much better not to arrange it so. Let your title be followed by a scene—by action—even though the scene be a short one. Then, if necessary, intro[Pg 228]duce your first leader. If when the photoplay opens the title is flashed upon the screen, and immediately a leader is shown, there is a chance that, having taken in the title almost at a glance, the spectator may momentarily divert his gaze and so miss your first leader, only turning his eyes toward the screen again when he notices that a scene is being shown. Again, even though he may be watching closely, the spectator is seldom quite so attentive to an explanatory insert which is shown before the opening scene as he is to one introduced later, when he has already become interested.

Most critics are also agreed that the use of leaders introducing the principal characters (usually accompanied by a few feet of film in which the character named is also pictured, perhaps in the act of bowing to the audience, or in some pose characteristic of the part he plays) is a mistake, when such "introducing" is done before the first scene of the story has been shown. Undoubtedly *anything* coming before the first scene is really out of place—so far as its being part of the story is concerned. Again Mr. Sargent stated a fact when he said that "What goes before the first real scene of a story is no more a part of that story than the design-head is a part of the fiction story. No magazine editor expects the author to be his own artist and supply an illustrated title. Start your story with the first scene of action, and let the director supply the preliminary scenes [close-ups of the principals] and leaders to suit himself."
As a matter of fact, though, the very best reason for not introducing from three to six or eight characters before the opening scene is that by the time the story has advanced a little many of the spectators have forgotten “who is who,” whereas they have a much better opportunity to fix a character’s name and occupation—so to speak—in their minds if that character is briefly but properly introduced at the point of his first entrance into the action of the play. Only the fact that we were already familiar with the faces of the contemporary historical characters shown in such features as Ambassador Gerard’s “My Four Years in Germany” made it possible for us to keep track, during the first few scenes in which each one appeared, of the persons shown. No one could possibly have memorized the “panoramic” leader giving the cast, with its thirty or more names of characters and players.

## 8. Write Mainly of Characters That Arouse the Spectator’s Sympathy

Each hero must have his opposite, as each great cause must have its protagonist and antagonist. Indeed, as we have seen, it is this warfare that makes all drama possible. But it will not do to glorify the doer of evil deeds and thus corrupt the sympathies of the spectators. The hero and not the “villain” must swing the sympathies of those who see. Be certain, therefore, that pity for, and even sympathy with, a wrong-doer is not magnified, through the action of your play, into admiration by the onlookers, for in the photoplay as in the legitimate drama the leading character may be a great of-fender. This way danger lies, however, and you must walk with extreme caution, or the censors “will catch you—if you don’t watch out!”—to say nothing of the lashings of your own conscience.

Without repeating what was said in Chapter XVI regarding the introduction of crime into film stories, we would impress upon the
photoplaywright the necessity for always having a fully sufficient, though not necessarily a morally justifiable, motive for any crime that is introduced in a story; besides, the introduction of a crime must be necessary to the action and not a mere spectacular scene. But remember that it is not sufficient to avoid “crime without motive;” the motive must be one which will, after the crime has been committed, leave no doubt in the mind of the spectator that the crime was virtually inevitable, if not absolutely unavoidable. If it is the hero of the story who commits the crime, the very greatest care must be taken to show that he had a really powerful motive for his act, if he is to have the sympathy—though not the approval—of the audience after yielding to temptation. This, of course, does not refer to deeds of violence which are really not only excusable but actually right, in the circumstances—like the killing of an attacking desperado in self-defense.

As an example of the point we are trying to emphasize, take a story like “The Bells,” the play in which Sir Henry Irving appeared so often. Mathias the innkeeper, who later became the Burgomaster, was a character, who, by reason of Irving’s superb art, won and held the sympathies of the audience from the start. Yet after Mathias had murdered the Polish Jew and robbed him of his belt of gold, even the art of Irving could not have made us sympathize with the character had we not been shown that Mathias was urged on to his crime—a crime for which he was constantly tortured ever afterward, and which occasioned his tragic death—by two very compelling motives. His primary motive was the urgent need of money. But he had a two-fold need of money: he had been notified by the landlord that he must pay his over-due rent or be turned out of his home; and he had been told by the doctor that unless he could immediately remove his sick wife to a milder climate she would certainly die. Thus, impelled by the thought that only by the speedy
acquisition of sufficient money could he hope to save the life of
his wife, he commits the deed which he would never have commit-
ted had his only motive been the necessity for raising money to
pay the rent. Mathias was esteemed by his neighbors as an honest
man; he was a man whose conscience smote him terribly when he
was contemplating the murder of the Jew; and after the crime had
been committed—fifteen years later, in fact—that same guilty con-
science, wracking his very soul, drove him on to his death.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a character with whom we are forced
to sympathize measurably, because we know that he is not natu-
rally a criminal. Yet, after all, Macbeth is a man who—as Professor
Pierce has pointed out—"has been restrained in the straight path
of an upright life [only] by his respect for conventions." Mathias,
on the other hand, is not held in check by conventions; he is es-
sentially an honest man. He commits a crime, but what stronger
motive could a man have than the one that drove him on to its
commission? And yet—and this is the mistake that we wish to
point out to the young writer—seven years ago a certain company
released "The Bells" as a two-part subject, in which, according to
the synopsis published in the trade journals, Mathias's only motive
for committing the most detestable of all crimes was that he was
behind in his rent! Even the magazine that gave in fiction form
the story of the picture failed to mention what is brought out so
strongly in the play—the innkeeper's distress at the thought that
his wife's life depended upon his being able to raise the money to
send her to the south of France without delay. The author men-
tioned that Mathias had a sick wife, but that was all. The whole
treatment of the story in fiction form, moreover, was farcical, such
names as "Mr. Parker" being intermingled with those of the well-
known characters, "Mathias," "Christian," and "Annette," while
the wealthy, dignified Polish Jew was turned into a typical East-
side clothing merchant. The real fault lay with the producer who, ignoring the great and pressing necessity that prompted Mathias's crime, garbled the original plot to the extent of allowing the innkeeper to murder the Jew because (according to the fiction-version in the magazine) he needed one hundred and seventy-five dollars to pay the rent! First, last, and all the time you must remember that your story is not a good story if the leading character is not, at all times, deserving of the spectator's sympathy, even when his action is not worthy of approval.

It is a matter for real regret to have to be compelled to state that, in spite of the many artistic advances made in motion-picture production during the past six or seven years, this most important point was deliberately overlooked when the Pathé Company made its very fine feature-production of “The Bells” in the Fall of 1918. We say “deliberately overlooked” because the writer who prepared the scenario for this modern five-reel version had the same opportunity as had the scenarioist who made the other adaptation, years ago, to read the original stage-play and to introduce this most compelling motive for Mathias’s crime. If anything, the fault is more glaring in the Pathé production than in the older picture, for the wife is shown as a woman in apparently perfect health, although naturally worried by the fact that her husband’s inability to raise the required amount of money may result in their losing both their home and their means of livelihood. All the fine acting of Mr. Frank Keenan as Mathias, and all the wonderful scenic and lighting effects, were not sufficient to make us lose sight of the fact that the ones responsible for the picture’s production had not given proper thought to the necessity for showing that the innkeeper had an unusually compelling motive for taking the life of and then robbing his guest. And, make no mistake, no matter how fine the produc-
tion may be in other respects, this sort of thing is not overlooked
by the intelligent, right-minded spectator of the photoplay.

***

_source_ : J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds, *Writing the photo-play*. Éditeur: Springfield, 1919.
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Technique of the Photoplay

It does not matter how well you may write. The public does not want and will not have a succession of stories in which the heroine is drowned in the last fifty feet or where the hero commits suicide in the last ten. You will doubtless see many stories with unhappy and doleful endings on the screen. Some of them will be unusually good, but a majority will show on study that a half-baked author sought to be strong merely by being perverse and running contrary to the desire of his spectators.

To sell a story you must have either a new plot or a new use of an old idea. Since the new idea scarcely seems to exist, you must learn to make old ideas look so new that spectators are convinced that they are new.
Page -155-

The more compact your cast; the more closely your action is
centered upon a few persons, the greater opportunity do you have
for winning favor or disfavor for them. Employ this opportunity to
the full. Center all the interest on the handful of major people you
employ and do not confuse your story and the spectator by bring-
ing in people who appear only on one action or sequence of scenes
and are not heard of again. If you do this you will leave your spec-
tators wondering what happened to this person or that.

Page -157-

And lastly, remember in writing action that if your action is
important and it is necessary that it be clearly conveyed to the au-
dience, it is necessary to play that action on the photographic stage
where it may be seen to the best advantage. This must be done
without seeming to make an effort to bring the players down front.
If for any reason you must play an action well up stage and can-
not bring the players down front, create a new stage wherever they
may happen to be by writing a close-up of that part of the scene.
If the action is a big one, depending upon the action of players
in the mass, it does not have to be played upon the photographic
stage; but where the expression of the individual player is largely
instrumental in conveying the meaning of the action to the specta-
tor this expression must be registered by the camera that the spec-
tator may understand what it is about. If you can bring them down
front do so. If you cannot, resort to a close-up. It is better to make
a little trouble for the company than a great deal for the spectators
the world over.

Page -275-
Next to the danger of selecting a theme dangerous in that it will antagonize the members of a sect or religious belief, the thing most to be feared is making the personages in j'our play of secondary importance to the problem it presents. This is a very common but none the less a grave error. A problem can possess only an academic interest. It must be made human by the personages whose adventures present the problem. In the presentation of your play you must first write your drama and then through our interest in these personages of the drama interest your spectators in the problem that their adventures present, but hold always to the problem.

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Louis Lumière et son appareil : les spectateurs munis de lunettes spéciales [photographie de presse] / Agence Meurisse [BNF. MEU 105550 A-5080 bis B] 26 février 1935.</figcaption></figure>
***

*source*: Epes Winthrop Sargent, *The technique of the photoplay*. New York City: The Moving picture world, 1913.
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Practical Cinematography

Profit and pleasure combine to win recruits for the art of animated photography. As an entertainment offered to the public, the moving-pictures have had no rival. Their popularity has been remarkable and universal. It increases daily, and, since we are only now beginning to see the magnitude of what the cinematograph can effect, it is not likely to diminish. This development has stirred the ambition of the amateur or independent photographer because the field is so vast, fertile, and promising. Remunerative reward is obtainable practically in every phase of endeavour so long as the elements of novelty or originality are manifest. The result is that it is attracting one and all. Animated photography can convey so fascinating and convincing a record of scenes and events that many persons—sportsmen, explorers, and travellers—make use of it.
ATTRACTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF THE ART

From the commercial point of view the issue is one of magnetic
importance. In all quarters there is an increasing demand for films
of prominent topical interest, either of general or local signifi-
cance.

The proprietors of picture palaces have discovered that no films
draw better audiences than these. If they deal with a prominent
incident ike a visit of royalty to the neighbourhood, an important
sporting event, a public ceremony, or even, such is human nature,
with some disaster to life or property, they will make a stronger ap-
peal for a few days than the general film fare offered at the theatre,
because the episode which is uppermost in the mind of the public
is what draws and compels public attention. Even, it would seem,
when the reality itself has just been witnessed by the audience, its
photographic reproduction proves more attractive than all else.

The picture palace, indeed, is assuming the functions of the il-
lustrated newspaper, and is governed by like laws. The more per-
sonal and immediate the news, the more pleased are the beholders.
So there is an increasing effort to supply upon the screen in life
and motion what the papers are recording in print and illustration.
One can almost hear the phrase that will soon become general,
"Animated news of the moment." Already the French are show-
ing us the way. In Paris one is able to visit a picture palace for 25
centimes at any time between noon and midnight and see, upon
the screen, the events of the hour in photographic action. As fresh
items of news, or, rather, fresh sections of film, are received, they
are thrown upon the screen in the pictorial equivalent of the para-
graphs in the stop press column of the newspapers, earlier items of
less interest being condensed or expunged in the true journalistic
manner to allow the latest photographic intelligence to be given in
a length consistent with its importance.

It is obvious that this branch of the business must fall largely
into the hands of the unattached or independent worker, who
bears the same relation to the picture palace as the outside corre-
spondent to the newspaper. A firm engaged in supplying topical
films cannot hope to succeed without amateur assistance. No mat-
ter how carefully and widely it distributes its salaried photog-
raphers, numberless events of interest are constantly
happening—shipwrecks, accidents, fires, sensational discoveries,
movements of prominent persons, and the like, at places beyond
the reach of the retained cinematographer. For film intelligence of
these incidents the firm must rely upon the independent worker.

Curiously enough, in many cases, the amateur not only executes
his work better than his salaried rival, but often outclasses him
in the very important respect that he is more enterprising. Acting
on his own responsibility, he knows that by smartness alone can
he make wayagainst professionals. Only by being the first to seize
a chance can he find a market for his wares. Thus when Blériot
crossed the English Channel in his aeroplane it was the camera
of an amateur that caught the record of his flight for the picture
palaces, although a corps of professionals was on the spot for the
purpose. True, the successful film showed many defects. But de-
fects matter little compared with the importance of getting the
picture first or exclusively. Similar cases exist in plenty. The am-
ateur has an excellent chance against the professional. His remu-
neration, too, is on a generous scale. The market is so wide and
the competition is so keen, especially in London, which is the
world's centre of the cinematograph industry, that the possessor of
a unique film can dictate his own terms and secure returns often
twenty times as great as the prime cost of the film he has used.
The conveyance of players to a suitable natural setting is ex-
pensive, but it represents all the difference between success and
failure. Of course, there are occasions when a natural setting de-
mands a certain amount of artificial embellishment. This was the
case in the filming of Hamlet, as presented by Sir Forbes Robert-
son and his company. A sea background and a battlemented castle
were required. The former was quite easy to find, but the combi-
nation of the two was more difficult. The problem was solved by
the choice of Lulworth Cove as the scene and by erecting a solid
set to represent the castle. In this case the preparation of the ex-
temporised castle was so thorough and careful that it looks like a
weather-beaten stone building.

The photo-play stage will be forced to emulate the current
practice of the theatre. It must bring the artist to bear upon the
work. At the moment it is merely a combination of the photogra-
pher and the stage-manager or producer. The latter is not always
an artist, though he is clever at making existing facilities suit his
purpose. The theatre is holding its own principally because it re-
spects the artistic side of the issue. Individuality is encouraged. The
photo-play stage will have to follow the same line of action. Di-
rectly this is done the picture palace will become a spirited rival of
the theatre.

For this reason the efforts of Sir Hubert von Herkomer, the em-
inent British artist, are being followed with interest. He was at-
tracted to the photo-play producing business owing to the artistic
atrocities perpetrated by the professional producer of film plays.
He is not attempting to achieve any revolution, except in the
mounting and acting of plays for the camera, but in this sphere he
hopes to bring about a recognition of the part that the artist must
play.
There is a complete absence of sensationalism about the artist-producer's work, and in this respect he goes against the conventions. He is deliberately flouting many of the accepted tenets of the photo-play production, and his attitude is certain to meet with some hostile criticism. But from the realist point of view he is correct. His matter-of-fact productions give verisimilitude to the scene and story, and brings them within the range of probability. There is no straining after effect. No detail is introduced unless it has a distinct bearing on the subject. The costumes are faithful to the last button. If a sixteenth century farmhouse is wanted, it is built, and built so well that in the picture it has every appearance of having been built of stone.

A feature which will be appreciated in the Herkomer productions is the suppression of the harsh and distressing blacks, greys and whites, which under brilliant illumination often convey the impression of snow. Nor do the players seem to be suffering from anæmia. These appear to be trivial matters in themselves, but they greatly affect the ultimate

whole. The robust aspect of the peasant who lives out of doors is faithfully conveyed, and he is thrown up in sharp contrast to the white-faced townsman. In the conventional picture-play, on the other hand, there is no individuality of facial expression, because one and all are made up in the same way.

Sir Hubert von Herkomer has commenced his work in a logical way. He confesses that until he began it he knew nothing about it. He was not harassed by a partial knowledge of how things are done. He is essentially a pioneer, content to work out his own ideas, and possessed of views upon stage-craft which are not to be despised. They had a good
effect upon the theatre twenty or thirty years ago, and have lately been revived by another enthusiast. So Sir Hubert von Herkomer is not likely to be the slave of tradition.

He maintains that in the average photo-play everything is sacri-ficed to rapid action. This is true, and it is done purposely to dis-tract attention from the weakness of the rest. The spectator must fix his attention upon the characters or he loses the thread of the story. No time is given him to see the deficiency of atmosphere or environment. The result is that everything is rushed through as if the villain and hero were racing the clock. To realise this it is only necessary to follow the film-play of a well-known historical story. Familiarity with the incident here gives the spectator a chance of taking in the setting and the mounting. If there are mistakes, inter-est gives way to mirth and all concentration is lost. The picture is followed with no more enthusiasm than a pantomime. This is the main reason why producers are chary of portraying well-known historical episodes upon the screen.

***

*source:* Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot, *Practical cinematography and its applications*. Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott ; London : William Heinemann, 1913
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The Photoplay
(Master's thesis, 1914)

Avoid the commonplace; we are all familiar with the conventional. An erroneous idea entertained by many writers is that crime is the basis of all dramatic action. Too much stress can not be placed upon the desirability of avoiding crime, domestic infidelity, and related subjects as bases for scenarios. These subjects are distasteful to an audience, and should be shunned for the further reason that a severe censorship is placed upon the moving picture, and the portrayal of incidents repulsive to our sense of morals will eliminate an otherwise meritorious scenario. [...] Here the fact of the robbery is effectually conveyed to the audience without the action of the robbery being thrown upon the screen. It requires skillful handling of the plot to even suggest crime, and it is best omitted.

Your leading characters should appear early in the action of the play, and the audience immediately acquainted with their posi-
tions and connections with the plot. Their identity should be made
apparent from the first; if the action of the play is incapable of
such construction that this end is readily accomplished, resort to
captions, as, for example, “Ethel’s Brother Returns From College.”
Under no circumstances permit a character to leave the scene be-
fore his connection with the plot has been definitely impressed
upon the audience.

Page -18-

The settings must be in harmony with the action of your play.
Do not engage your characters in pursuits inconsistent with their
station in life. A supposedly low-salaried character shown as a
member of an exclusive club elicits criticism and weakens your
plot. Nor would the matriculation of a day-laborer's daughter in
a fashionable boarding school escape comment from what often
proves to be a hypercritical audience. Remember that the evolu-
tion of the photoplay and the present demand for closer attention
to details has sharpened the critical vision of even the casual wit-
ness of the “movies.”

***

source: James A Taylor, "The Photoplay", Master's thesis (1914)
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# The Art of the Moving Picture

Written in 1915, *The Art of the Moving Picture* by poet Vachel Lindsay is one of the first books to treat movies as art. Lindsay writes a brilliant analysis of the early silent films (including several now lost films). He is extraordinarily prescient about the future of moviemaking particularly about the business, the prominence of technology, and the emergence of the director as the author of the film.

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## THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION

Let us assume, friendly reader, that it is eight o'clock in the evening when you make yourself comfortable in your den, to peruse this chapter. I want to tell you about the Action Film, the simplest, the type most often seen. In the mind of the habitué of
the cheaper theatre it is the only sort in existence. It dominates the slums, is announced there by red and green posters of the melodrama sort, and retains its original elements, more deftly handled, in places more expensive. The story goes at the highest possible speed to be still credible. When it is a poor thing, which is the case too often, the St. Vitus dance destroys the pleasure-value. The rhythmic quality of the picture-motions is twitched to death. In the bad photoplay even the picture of an express train more than exaggerates itself. Yet when the photoplay chooses to behave it can reproduce a race far more joyously than the stage. On that fact is based the opportunity of this form. Many Action Pictures are indoors, but the abstract theory of the Action Film is based on the out-of-door chase. You remember the first one you saw where the policeman pursues the comical tramp over hill and dale and across the town lots. You remember that other where the cowboy follows the horse thief across the desert, spies him at last and chases him faster, faster, faster, and faster, and finally catches him. If the film was made in the days before the National Board of Censorship, it ends with the cowboy cheerfully hanging the villain; all details given to the last kick of the deceased.

One of the best Action Pictures is an old Griffith Biograph, recently reissued, the story entitled "Man's Genesis." In the time when cave-men-gorillas had no weapons, Weak-Hands (impersonated by Robert Harron) invents the stone club. He vanquishes his gorilla-like rival, Brute-Force (impersonated by Wilfred Lucas). Strange but credible manners and customs of the cave-men are detailed. They live in picturesque caves. Their half-monkey gestures are wonderful to see. But these things are beheld on the fly. It is the chronicle of a race between the brain of Weak-Hands and the body of the other, symbolized by the chasing of poor Weak-Hands in and out among the rocks until the climax. Brain desper-
ately triumphs. Weak-Hands slays Brute-Force with the startling invention. He wins back his stolen bride, Lily-White (impersonated by Mae Marsh). It is a Griffith masterpiece, and every actor does sound work. The audience, mechanical Americans, fond of crawling on their stomachs to tinker their automobiles, are eager over the evolution of the first weapon from a stick to a hammer. They are as full of curiosity as they could well be over the history of Langley or the Wright brothers.

The dire perils of the motion pictures provoke the ingenuity of the audience, not their passionate sympathy. When, in the minds of the deluded producers, the beholders should be weeping or sighing with desire, they are prophesying the next step to one another in worldly George Ade slang. This is illustrated in another good Action Photoplay: the dramatization of The Spoilers. The original novel was written by Rex Beach. The gallant William Farnum as Glenister dominates the play. He has excellent support. Their team-work makes them worthy of chronicle: Thomas Santschi as McNamara, Kathryn Williams as Cherry Malotte, Bessie Eyton as Helen Chester, Frank Clark as Dextry, Wheeler Oakman as Bronco Kid, and Jack McDonald as Slapjack.

There are, in The Spoilers, inspiriting ocean scenes and mountain views. There are interesting sketches of mining-camp manners and customs. There is a well-acted love-interest in it, and the element of the comradeship of loyal pals. But the chase rushes past these things to the climax, as in a policeman picture it whirls past blossoming gardens and front lawns till the tramp is arrested. The difficulties are commented on by the people in the audience as rahrah boys on the side lines comment on hurdles cleared or knocked over by the men running in college field-day. The sudden cut-backs into side branches of the story are but hurdles also, not plot complications in the stage sense. This is as it should be. The pursuit
progresses without St. Vitus dance or hysteria to the end of the film. There the spoilers are discomfited, the gold mine is recap- tured, the incidental girls are won, in a flash, by the rightful own- ers.

These shows work like the express elevators in the Metropolitan Tower. The ideal is the maximum of speed in descending or as- cending, not to be jolted into insensibility. There are two girl parts as beautifully thought out as the parts of ladies in love can be ex- pected to be in Action Films. But in the end the love is not much more romantic in the eye of the spectator than it would be to be- hold a man on a motorcycle with the girl of his choice riding on the same machine behind him. And the highest type of Action Picture romance is not attained by having Juliet triumph over the motorcycle handicap. It is not achieved by weaving in a Sherlock Holmes plot. Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each one of these swift glimpses: when it is a race, but with a proper and golden-linked grace from action to action, and the goal is the most beautiful glimpse in the whole reel.

In the Action Picture there is no adequate means for the de- velopment of any full grown personal passion. The distinguished character-study that makes genuine the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance. People are but types, swiftly moved chessmen. More elaborate discourse on this subject may be found in chapter twelve on the differences between the films and the stage. But here, briefly: the Action Pictures are falsely adver- tised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy. But though the actors glower and wrestle and even if they are the most skilful lambasters in the profession, the audience gossips and chews gum.

Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply
because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.

To make the elevator go faster than the one in the Metropolitan Tower is to destroy even this emotion. To elaborate unduly any of the agonies or seductions in the hope of arousing lust, love, hate, or hunger, is to produce on the screen a series of misplaced figures of the order Frankenstein.

How often we have been horrified by these galvanized and ogling corpses. These are the things that cause the outcry for more censors. It is not that our moral codes are insulted, but what is far worse, our nervous systems are temporarily racked to pieces. These wriggling half-dead men, these over-bloody burglars, are public nuisances, no worse and no better than dead cats being hurled about by street urchins.

The cry for more censors is but the cry for the man with the broom. Sometimes it is a matter as simple as when a child is scratching with a pin on a slate. While one would not have the child locked up by the chief of police, after five minutes of it almost every one wants to smack him till his little jaws ache. It is the very cold-bloodedness of the proceeding that ruins our kindness of heart. And the best Action Film is impersonal and unsympathetic even if it has no scratching pins. Because it is cold-blooded it must take extra pains to be tactful. Cold-blooded means that the hero as we see him on the screen is a variety of amiable or violent ghost. Nothing makes his lack of human charm plainer than when we as audience enter the theatre at the middle of what purports to be the most passionate of scenes when the goal of the chase is unknown to us and the alleged "situation" appeals on its magnetic merits. Here is neither the psychic telepathy of Forbes Robertson's Cæsar, nor the fire-breath of E.H. Sutherland's Don Quixote. The audience is not worked up into the deadly still mob-unity of the speaking theatre.
We late comers wait for the whole reel to start over and the goal to be indicated in the preliminary, before we can get the least bit wrought up. The prize may be a lady's heart, the restoration of a lost reputation, or the ownership of the patent for a churn. In the more effective Action Plays it is often what would be secondary on the stage, the recovery of a certain glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. And to begin, we are shown a clean-cut picture of said glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. Then when these disappear from ownership or sight, the suspense continues till they are again visible on the screen in the hands of the rightful owner.

In brief, the actors hurry through what would be tremendous passions on the stage to recover something that can be really photographed. For instance, there came to our town long ago a film of a fight between Federals and Confederates, with the loss of many lives, all for the recapture of a steam-engine that took on more personality in the end than private or general on either side, alive or dead. It was based on the history of the very engine photographed, or else that engine was given in replica. The old locomotive was full of character and humor amidst the tragedy, leaking steam at every orifice. The original is in one of the Southern Civil War museums. This engine in its capacity as a principal actor is going to be referred to more than several times in this work.

The highest type of Action Picture gives us neither the quality of Macbeth or Henry Fifth, the Comedy of Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew. It gives us rather that fine and special quality that was in the ink-bottle of Robert Louis Stevenson, that brought about the limitations and the nobility of the stories of Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and the New Arabian Nights.

This discussion will be resumed on another plane in the eighth chapter: Sculpture-in-Motion.
Having read thus far, why not close the book and go round the corner to a photoplay theatre? Give the preference to the cheapest one. *The Action Picture will be inevitable. Since this chapter was written, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks have given complete department store examples of the method, especially Chaplin in the brilliantly constructed Shoulder Arms, and Fairbanks in his one great piece of acting, in The Three Musketeers.*

***

*Source:* Vachel Lindsay, *The art of the moving picture*. New York: Macmillan, 1915
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Psychology of the Screen

If you get out Volume P.o of that new *Encyclopedia Brittanica*, that you're buying at a dollar down and a dollar ever afterwards, you'll find that the subject of this article isn't so hard as it looks. Reduced to brass tacks, it simply means the way the brain works — my brain, your brain, and the brain of your next-door neighbor (provided he has one). And so the psychology of the screen means the way the Motion Picture actors and actresses express the emotions that are supposed to be going on in their minds — love, maybe ; and how some of those bayoutiful heroes and heroines do express that — wheel — or hate, or jealousy, or despair because the cook is leaving — and the way they make these emotions reach out across the orchestra and set the fat drummer in the third row blubbering, or the highschool girl and her beau to holding hands.

In the spoken drama, the audience is continually being coached and directed how to feel. The characters of the play explain and argue and scatter words right and left in the most spendthrift fashion. When the playwright is afraid his audience wont understand the heroine's state of mind, he simply sets the butler and the maid
to tidying up the drawing-room to the accompaniment of a conversation something like this:

The Butler (shaking head mournfully) — It fair breaks me heart to see how unhappy the mistress is these days!

The Maid (dusting a papier-mache bust of Lincoln)

— Yes, it's because she's too stout to wear this season's styles. She's afraid she'll have to give up icecream sundaes to keep master's love. What brutes you men are!

—an so on, until every one knows the whole situation. Now, on the screen it is difficult for an actress to behave like a woman who has had to give up ice-cream sundaes, or yet as somebody or other has suggested to enter the room with the air of just having had a cup of tea.

Subtleties like these are too fine for the screen. If the movie audiences are to understand what is going on, only the most elementary and recognizable emotions can be chosen for photoplay use. We've all of us presumably experienced love, remorse, jealousy and sorrow at some time in our lives, and it's dollars to doughnuts we'll know them when we see them. When the handsome hero with the square jaw kisses the lovely heroine with the expensive hair, Friend Wife leans against our shoulder and murmurs, tenderly, "He doesn't do it half so well as you did, Jim; and I don't see — do you ? — why they call her so goodlooking!" And when the villain repents, and dies to slow music, we remember the time we gave a lead nickel to the conductor, and feel for our handkerchiefs in real sympathy.

A few years ago, photoplays were mostly pictures of action, cowboys and Indians on horseback, guns going off, trains being wrecked, autos speeding after fugitives, and "something doing" generally. But people got sick and tired of Chief Rain-in-the-Face and his band of Irish-American Indians, and gun-fights — with the
pianist bearing hard on the bass — ceased to thrill. So the word went forth to the scenario writers to work a little plot and heart-interest into their scripts. The “picture-play” became the “silent drama,” and the movie actors found that it was distinctly up to them to register a large number of emotions, so that they would “get over” to their audiences.

Lacking words, the picture people adopted a sort of shorthand code of gesture to represent different emotions, and the faithful fans have learnt this code by heart. When the persecuted heroine clutches her chest and rolls her eyes, they know she is not having an attack of acute indigestion, but a pang of unrequited affection. When the hero beats his brow and clenches his fist, they know it is not the bill for his wife's new hat that troubles him, but the fact that he has just dropped a couple of millions in Wall Street. Jealousy has its bitten lip; revenge, its flashing eye and set jaw.

When Theda Bara lets down her back hair and runs her hands thru it, in a sort of vampirish shampoo, it is a sign that she is being very naughty.

I dont quite know why back hair is as naughty as it is, but when a movie actress lets hers down, it's one of the surest things you know that trouble is brewing. Likewise when she smooths it straight back, a la Yaleska Suratt, or parts it and rolls it very low, so that it hides her ears.

When Edith Storey's sensitive nostrils quiver and her eyes dilate, the fan recognizes her portrayal as that of dread. And when Charlie Chaplin stumbles onto the screen, with his million-dollar mustache, he gets a laugh before he earns it, because, in the code of moviedom, a stumble and tumble and ten-cent-store scrap of whisker is mighty humorous.

To be sure, some people do not recognize this code at once. When you take dear old Aunt Matilda from back home to the Mo-
tion Pictures, and she sees Charlie Chaplin playfully kick a lady in the stomach, it is just possible that she may nudge you and inquire, anxiously:

"What are all the folks laughing at, anyhow, Lizzie? Why, ef that young feller should cut-up round Green Corners scand'lous as that, the seelect men would put him in the jail."

Come to think of it, I'm blest if I know why a short man in baggy trousers, kicking out with a shoe two sizes too large, is so uproariously funny; but it must be, for Charlie gets seven times as much money as the President of the United States every year for doing it. You point out this fact to Aunt Matilda, and when a little later Charlie upsets a perambulator with the crook of his cane, the good old soul is quite convulsed with merriment.

Memory is perhaps the most important function the brain of man performs. Our emotions are nearly all of them dependent on the process of remembering — of tying the present to the past. We cannot hate very cordially without memory; we cannot love successfully, nor hope, nor grieve. A baby's worn shoe is not a pathetic or tender object unless it makes us remember some child we have loved or lost; a rose is significant to a lover because of its connection with past love-episodes; the knife is terrible to a criminal because of the association it has with his crime.

In the representation of this most universal process of psychology, the photoplay has the advantage of the spoken drama. It can picture to the spectator the actual scene that is being recalled to the hero or heroine's mind. In Vitagraph's "The Man Who Couldn't Beat God," the man's conscience-tortured brain is bared to the gaze of the audience. He has thought about his old crime so much that sick memory twists ordinary, everyday happenings into visions of his victim. Finally, sitting in a box at a performance of "Oliver Twist," he sees Bill Sykes murdering his light-o'-love, Nancy, and
rises up with an irresistible cry of warning and confession. No
mere pantomime could portray this man's emotions without the
aid of camera trickery. But the "doubleexposure," with its possi-
bilities of representing dreams, hallucinations and memories, has
done much to change mere Motion Pictures into emotion pictures
with dramatic possibilities of spiritual and mental conflict.

Partly on account of this trick work, the camera is more suc-
cessful in portraying abnormal phases of the mind than normal
ones, the heightened emotions than the simpler and commoner
feelings. Thus love makes a better picture-theme than affection or
friendship, sorrow than grief, and jealousy than doubt. Of course
leaders are often used to explain emotions that cannot very well
be visualized, but leaders at their best are boesian affairs, and
at their worst they are impertinent interruptions. Two longsepa-
rated lovers at last reach each other's arms, but before their lips
can meet, the inconsiderate director cuts them off with a remark
something on this order :

The Misunderstanding Between Grace and Tom Is Finally Re-
moved.

A bank clerk, worried by the odd millions he had abstracted
from the petty-cash drawer, is about to end his troubles with a pis-
tol, and again that busybody of a director interrupts at the crucial
point with a leader anent the wage's of sin. No, no ; as few lead-
ers as possible, if you please, Mr. Photoplaywright, and, if they are
necessary, make them at least truer to life than they are now.

A little care taken to make not only the leaders but the letters
or newspaper notices shown in the plays more convincing would
help a great deal toward improving the psychology of the screen.
As it is now, the characters commit the most dangerous secrets to
paper, and conveniently lose the paper for some other character
to find. Crooks communicate freely by letter, prattling artlessly of
murder and robbery; young ladies leave their love-notes about, to
be found by irate parents or husbands, and a man informs his wife
of his plans as follows (in backhand grammar-school script) :

*Dear Wife: Am leaving on business for China at two o'clock. Will be back a year from next January.*

Your affectionate husband,

Bob.

The psychology of the screen is at present a rather elementary
psychology, but one in a wonderful process of development. Its
success depends upon the collaboration of the spectator with the
playwright in supplying, imagining and interpreting what he can-
not say. For this reason it is a valuable aid to concentration and
alertness of understanding. In a way, when you and I go to a pho-
toplay, we are author and actor and audience, too, like that famous
individual of the Bab Ballads, who was "cap'n and cook and bo'sun,
too and crew of the Nancy's brig!

***

source : Anonymous, "Psychology of the Screen". *Motion Picture Classic* (1916)
MOTION PICTURE
CLASSIC

DECEMBER

25¢

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Marian Nixon

Don
Reed

Are American Movies Corrupting Japan?

GRAFTING FROM THE STARS
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Movie Advertising viewed
by a Fan

MOVIE ADVERTISING FROM THE VIEW POINT OF A
FAN

You may hardly credit it when I say that motion-picture audi-
ences are the most critical in the world. They do not outwardly
show their disapproval of things, but after they resolved that the
photoplay was here to stay, anything as a motion picture would no
longer satisfy them. So the film producers had to humor the folks
who had made their wealth, and today, the fans have been edu-
cated up to such a pitch that nothing but the best will satisfy them.
Here, then, is the class of readers represented by moving-picture
publicity.

The obvious conclusion is that advertisers will have to follow
the path of the ordinary producer in order to obtain the greatest
value out of this new advertising medium.
A talk with an intelligent motion-picture fan, as I found, is very interesting.

"I would like your views on ad. films," I asked.

"With pleasure/ she replied, and forthwith got down to business.

"I must say that they are considerably more interesting than the advertisements that meet your eye in the newspapers. How nice it is to watch an industry on the screen and be taken through a big manufacturing plant. It is an education in itself, and it never strikes you as though it was intended as a boost, although the particular thing the point the advertiser wishes to bring home, I believe you call it leaves an indelible impression on you".

"I also enjoy the films in which there is a story. One such film, I remember, told of a poor family who took in washing. Disease abounded, and the folks who had their laundry done learned their lesson. Then the sanitary methods of the steam laundry were contrasted. It impressed me very much.

"The comic films are frequently laughable, but I remember being offended once at seeing a man like somebody's beer so much that he drank it until he was dead drunk. I noticed that I was not the only spectator to leave the hall. I like, at all times, my photo-play fare to be in good taste.

"At some of the movie theaters I at tend they make a practice of running a number of slides after the reels. They relate to neighbor-
ing stores, but are so dry and shown for so many weeks with out
being changed that I always skip them."

"Would you prefer," I chimed in, "that the advertising film por-
tion be abolished?"

"I would not so long as the ordinary pictures did not suffer in
quality and quantity. A show I regularly visit out in New Jersey al-
ways runs the ad. films after the program has finished. As the pic-
tures are invariably good ones, I always stay to see them through,
and most others in the audience seem to do like wise. And another
thing, the subjects are frequently changed, for naturally one grows
tired of seeing the same things over and over again."

"Have you," I broached, "any suggestions for improvements?"

"Sure; I would like to see some of my favorite photoplayers take
the leading parts in the ad. stories. It would be just crazy to watch
Mary Fuller and Francis X. Bushman as a pair of newly weds who
try to overcome housekeeping difficulties with various modern ar-
ticles to be bought at stores.

"I also think that there is considerable room for improving the
film plots. They should be as good as the ordinary photoplays.
What they seem to lack is strength. There is seldom any of the
strong, exciting situations which I am accustomed to see, and the
punch is often conspicuous by its absence at the end."
APPROACHING THE WORKING CLASSES WITH A MOTION-PICTURE PLAY

It was the Bard of Stratford who said that “the play was the thing”. Although it then referred to the legitimate stage, as it does now, it can to-day apply aptly to the motion-picture theater. A good story is, also, the ideal vehicle for film advertising. The twenty million movie fans in this country frequent their favorite form of amusement to be entertained, and some greatly resent the pure advertising or semi-educationalists which they often have to sit out. It must be borne in mind that it is the one kind of relaxation by which the working classes are able to get away from the monotony and hardness of their everyday existence. They, therefore, want their fare served up in an appetizing manner. Anything else is apt to prove a bore, and you can thus see what kind of a receptive mood by which you have to approach the average motionpicture audience. That is why it is advisable to have your advertising points ingeniously incorporated in either a comedy or drama, the former preferably. The most common type of ad. film is the industrialog, portray-ing the processes by which certain goods are manufactured. Sev-eral of these subjects I have seen at the picture shows lately were so unnecessarily padded that they were enough to send spectators to sleep. No wise advertiser would attempt to cram in all the matter he could into the smallest pos-sible space in his press announce-ments, neither should he try it on the film.

Industrialogs undoubtedly appeal more to a better-class audi-
ence, but it must be remembered that a good pro portion of the
movie theaters are still nickel shows, which attract the working
classes. These folks see enough of factory and business life in the
daytime, so they do not want to be inflicted with it when endeav-
oring to get away from the atmosphere. Here you have a large au-
dience which is extremely difficult to address via the press, for the
majority go in for hardly any reading at all. May be they haven't
got the inclination or money to do it. Their custom is certainly
worth while cultivating, and no doubt they can understand pic-
tures better than books, as, when the world was young, pictures
were drawn on slabs of stone to indicate what otherwise could not
be explained. Compelled to go out to work at an early age is re-
sponsible for a good proportion of the masses being poor readers
and writers. By the motion pictures, however, you can approach
public previously beyond your reach.

I recently was commissioned to write a short comedy scenario
for a well-known tobacco manufacturer, and here follows the syn-
opsis of the plot:

Bill, a workingman, is enjoying his pipe of Tobacco in the par-
lor of his home, when a passerby notices smoke issuing from the
window. Thinking the house on fire, he brings the fire department
on the scene. They turn the hose on the house, and, after a severe
drenching, Bill escapes. He is indignant at being duped by the
passerby, and the firemen also resent being made fools of. They
then turn the hose on the culprit, who pleads for mercy. Bill offers
to release him if he buys four packages of Tobacco all round. The
passerby agrees, and hurries off to the shop to buy the same, paci-
fying his victims, who are left enjoying the tobacco.

For some things drama is better for hammering points home,
but stick to comedy as much as you can it is more popular with
movie audiences.

The French branch of the Remington Typewriter Company re-
cently had a photoplay story produced which concerned a working
girl, who, on her father's death, was the only support of the fam-
ily. Through the firm cutting down expenses, she is dismissed and
vainly endeavors to obtain another position as a stenographer. At
the end of her resources, she obtains a Remington typewriter on
the installment plan and obtains sufficient clients to provide her
with work.

It is seldom advisable to go beyond a reel, which occupies about
eighteen minutes on the screen, for that is the ideal length. Au-
diences will stand this with out a murmur of protest, since they
appreciate one good extra reel on the pro gram. It matters little
whether they realize that it is advertising disguised. Quick action
is one of the things that have been responsible for the great pre-
sent vogue of the motion picture, so have your producer compress
all he can into every foot of film. It should then bring you more
than the desired results.

***

*Source:* Ernest A. Dench: *Advertising by Motion Pictures*. Standard Publishing Co.: Cincinnati, Ohio, 1916

see also:

* Dench, Ernest A. : *Making the Movies*. Macmillan Co., New York, 1915 Dench, Ernest A.: *Motion Picture Education*. Standard Publishing Co.: Cincinnati, Ohio, 1917

* Dench, Ernest A.: *Putting your Library in the Movies*. In: The Library Journal. Vol. 43 – February 1918 (January-December, 1918). Publication Office: New York, 1919. – P. 71-73.
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New Fox policy for 1918-19
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Psychology of the movies

After spending five years with the intricacies of orange ranching, which intricacies included the big freeze, three floods, and a famine from scale, I returned to civilization, which is Los Angeles, to find the moving picture to be second only to the automobile in wonderful advancement during that five years. I immediately became a movie fan. My reasons for so doing were various. I had lost all sense of anticipation while ranching, because it is beyond human endeavor to anticipate what California will dish up in the shape of weather to an inoffensive orange grower. I had lost all hope because after having one flood wash me off the earth, I had had two more wash me practically out of existence, so I was hopeless, and I did not have an illusion left to my name. Therefore I turned to the picture plays which are all illusion, to regain a normal state of mind. They proved to be worth while. — the moving pictures. They restored in a measure much I had lost in battling with the stern realities of ranching, and I became a regular patron to them for some time before I began to notice the audiences. Recently they have proved more interesting than the pictures.
What psychological effect will the movies have upon the pre-
sent generation was naturally a question which arose in my mind
as soon as I had grown rested and observant. I had come to them
without much of anything left in my mind, except harassment. Be-
ing deprived of hope and anticipation and illusion one finds one-
self bereft of about all that makes life worth while. I knew from
hard experience that things do not come out right, regardless of
how much one tries, so that at first the fact that every picture
showed success for the ending, rather grated upon me, yet in
course of time, I had that much of my illusions of life restored
to me through the photo drama. I did not bring to the theater
the absolute sophistication that seemed to mark the youngsters
about me. They all knew exactly how every illusion in the picture
is done. They know all the scenes shown. "That's the post-office at
Topanga," "There is the road in Laurel Canyon," "I saw them tak-
ing that scene on Spring street," and "Say, he's no good, I know
the feller that sells him his cigars," were comments freely made
by members of the audience. Evidently, familiarity with the mov-
ing picture people and the California scenery has bred a certain
amount of contempt in the youthful movie fan. Nothing of plea-
sure would seem to be left to them, because they know exactly
what a villain does a certain thing for, and exactly what he will
do next, and just how the heroine is going to escape. Why then
do they attend? They can get no anticipation and no illusion from
what they regard so cynically. If the youth of seventeen of to-
day can be neither amused nor interested in what they see, what
shall we expect of them at forty? Will they be the better off for
having no illusions, no anticipations and no hopes when they are
young, to be crushed by the stern realities, the hard failures, and
the doubtful successes of life? This is a psychological development
which it will be interesting to watch.
This youthful cynicism seems to be more prevalent in the higher-priced houses on Broadway than in the five-cent houses on the same thoroughfare. I have wondered about that. We go to see a star, and whatever he or she does, we accept as being the proper thing in photo-drama. Some of the things the stars are doing are really too absurd for words, so absurd that they are both clever and amusing, but not the slightest true to nature, nor to life. Then in some of the five cent houses they show just as absurd stuff, which is not greeted with laughter, but with guffaws at its absurdities, yet it is no more absurd than the stuff the stars are doing. But the class of people attending the five-cent shows is different from that which attends the ten, twenty, and thirty houses. It is not such a blase, sophisticated crowd.

It takes its shows more literally. It does not care how the picture is made. It is not looking at a picture. It is looking at life, and it wants its life pictures, true to life. It guffaws if it sees an absurdity upon life. It does not care who is doing the acting because what it is looking at is not acting but reality and it has kept its illusions, and anticipations, and its hopes and brings them to the show keyed up to the highest pitch. The audience in a five-cent show is the most interesting in the city. As a rule the houses are small, though showing fine pictures, and the voices of excited gazers can be heard throughout the place, and the comments made by them are funnier than a show, and the rabid desire of the young girls and women for murder, and revenge, and bloodletting is simply astounding! The young thing in front of me looks as though she would not hurt a fly, as though she would squeal at a mouse, and yet she sits watching two men knifing each other to death, drawing in her breath between her teeth, and shaking all over with excitement, and when the villain has been done to death by the trusty knife of the hero (I shudder to think what would happen to such
an audience if by mistake the director had the hero done to death by the villain accidentally) she lets go of her breath, and says audibly to her escort, “My God, I’m glad he got him!”

And beside me sit two young things, a girl of seventeen and her sister of ten, and they watch the picture with much comment.

“Of course he loves her, and will get her. You watch him. Ain’t he fine,” the big sister admonishes. But obstacles to be overcome before he gets her are tremendous, and include a wonderful hairbreatdh escape from a pit of death, with the heroine tackled firmly to the hero’s waist by rope while he digs his way up the crumbling sands. Every step of this perilous ascent is commented upon vividly by the two beside me, and when the hero slips with exhaustion and almost falls back into the abyss but is deftly caught by the heroine, (the sophisticated youth at the higher priced places would calmly tell vou how this was done, and would thereby miss the thrill of his life,) the older girl screams out, “I pray to God he saves her.” Her prayer is answered, for of what use would a director be, if not to save the situation, but the girls beside me are not thinking of directors, nor of the story which must come out right. They are witnessing life, as real and absolute as though they were living it. Yet one wonders what such girls would actually do, if such calamities should touch them in real life. Perhaps they will wring life dry of all its emotions by photodrama, instead of reality. If so, they will have been spared much misery and afforded great pleasure.

The newcomers behind me are a fond husband, an excitable wife, and a child. ‘Now don’t get excited,” cautions husband as wifey’s breath goes with a sob. “Oh, why don’t they go one,” she pleads, as the picture flashes off at its most terrifying point, to show the caption, which she reads in a rush, and then must wait an interminable time until the rest of the audience has had time to read through. “I can’t live if they don’t go on,” she wails. “Now don’t get
excited, darling,” cautions the hubby again. ‘Tt will all come back in a minute.” “But I can’t wait,” shrills the woman, and the child asks anxiously, “Will he kill him, father; do you think he will kill him?” “Yes, yes, petty, y-e-s-s,” replied the busy father. Comes back the picture, and a long drawn breath from the wife results. Then she begins to really get excited. Her voice rises. “Oh, why don’t he strike? Oh, the big boob, can’t he see the other feller is going to kill him? Oh, why don’t he strike?” And of course he does strike, at the exact moment when he should, knowing all the time that the vil-lain was behind him, and the woman cries out in delight, “Goody, goody, goody.”

Now what do you think of that? What will the psychological effect be upon us as a race of people during the next ten or fifteen years? We have got to be thrilled. In the higher priced houses, it must be absurdity that thrills us, stars shooting over office buildings, and jumping moving trains, taking flying leaps from automobiles over cliff’s, anything so that it is of tremendous risks, and even then the sophisticated onlooker remarks that the trick was done so and so, yet he must have it even if tricks do it. In the cheaper houses, the thrills produced must be murder, and fights, and wife beating, and abuse of crippled children. It is the shilling shocker, the dime novel over again only a million times more intense. The youngsters so small they can not read the captions, go to see the pictures, and beg their elders to read ‘what it says,’ and they are as excited and as thrilled as the older ones.

Think of the perverted emotions developed by the moving pictures, and then wonder what the effect at large will be. Yet the movie fan does not want a fine story, and fine acting, with fine ideals exploited. No, it wants its thrills and such thrills as they are likely never to experience in real life. For what one of us, looking at the pictures, expects to be held up and robbed, beaten by thugs,
knifed by a jealous rival, or thrown over a cliff from an automobile
as we go on our peaceful way homeward? The very premonition of
any such disaster overtaking us would frighten us into seventeen
different sorts of fits.

'Tis an odd phase of life we are living through. Has it anything
to do with the amazing record of young criminals?

'Tis a problem perplexing very
To the cannibal maid, and the missionarv.'
Indeed it is.

***

*Source: The New American Woman, Vol. III, 1, Feb. 1918, p. 19.*
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Developing Your Plot

Plot germs have taken up quite a bit of our time in this new series of thoughts on the writing of photoplays. And rightly so. For, unless you know where to look for plots, and how to recognize a possible plot in embryo, how are you going to construct them?

Let's proceed a step further along our path. Having discovered the germ of a plot, how are we going to develop it into a full-grown, vigorous structure? What is the prime necessity? What magic touch infuses life and strength into the bare idea we possess and makes of it something that will hold the interest of others, that will entertain them?

Speaking generally, and leaving to later discussion the narrower by-ways and paths of plot development, we may set down as the primary essential of a plot the basic element—*struggle*. Your plot germ, your original idea, is usually an out of the ordinary character or an incident that concerns ordinary characters in an unusual manner.

Into this source, you must inject—*struggle*. Some will call it conflict, others will tell you that *suspense* is the necessity. But suspense is the outgrowth of struggle or conflict.
There is struggle of varying sorts. Your struggle may be that be-
tween the different characters of your story, it may be the struggle
of one of your characters against conditions of life and the world,
it may be the struggle of your character with his own inner self.

But it is struggle of one sort or another that makes your story.
Barring the few exceptions whose existence we have noted, and
which we will describe and study later, it is the tale of struggles
that makes up the entertainment of the world.

The spectator who comes to see a motion picture, or the reader
who picks up a book, expects to be introduced to an interesting
character, one whom he will either like very much or dislike very
much. After hearing your premises they expect to witness a strug-
gle, the further progress in life of your character and necessarily
the sort of progress that brings struggle. Your character may be the
most interesting one in the world, but two hours talk about his
unusual points will not satisfy anyone. Those two hours must con-
cern things that are happening to your character or events that he
is causing to happen—that is, the element of struggle.

You will remember that last month, in discussing the possible
plots to be discovered in newspapers, we found a germ in the “Let-
ters From Readers” column. It was an epistle signed “Lonesome,”
and was from a young man who wanted to know why the big city
did not provide some sort of welfare club or association where a
stranger could meet and become acquainted with other persons?

That word “Lonesome” aroused our curiosity. It would likewise
interest an audience. Imagine Charles Ray in the character. We see
him fresh from the country, in his little hall-room, life, hustle and
bustle all around him. But to Charlie they mean nothing; he has
none in the length and breadth of the city to call “Friend.”

When you have introduced such a character you have the au-
dience with you. But you must go further. The audience wants to
see Charlie struggle against his environment, or, out of his despair they wish to see him perform some rash act that will force a struggle on him.

Comedy or drama can be developed from such a theme—by the injection of struggle. The chances are you will bring to light the most artistic and desirable of blends —comedy-drama. Suppose that our “Lonesome” youngster, suddenly grown rash, forms a decision. “I’m going to walk out that door,” he says, “and speak to the first person I meet. I don’t care whether it’s John D. Rockefeller or a street sweeper, I’m going to tell him I’m lonesome and want someone to talk to who will speak about something beside the weather.” There’s the start of your struggle. Why, it’s a funny struggle alone to see Charlie walking the room, trying to screw up his determination to go through with the rashly made resolution. Finally he strides forth bravely.

### Whom does he meet?

There’s where your genius as a story teller comes in. What sort of a character would O. Henry have him meet? Start a Harold McGrath story off with this theme. The story will be running away with you—if your imagination is in working order.

The simplest form of struggle is that of the eternal triangle—two men for a girl, or the conflict of two women for one man. The struggle that develops out of your “Lonesome” story may eventuate in that sort before it gets very far. But you can see that you have started on more original ground, that if you follow these paths you will not have simply an “eternal triangle” story.

That has been our reason for withholding mention of “struggle” to this point. There are those who would tell you of this basic essential before any other point had been discussed. The result is that so many amateurs set out to write stories by seeking for a struggle. They look over the list of various sorts of struggles, two men for a
girl, two girls for a man, man against poverty, man against temp-
tations, and so on. And when the alleged story is completed it is
merely a framework, without life or soul. Stilted characters strug-
gle through time-worn situations.

"Struggle" may be classified and indexed. But "plot germs" can-
not; the plot germs that you can discover are limited only by your
own experience, your own reading, your own imagination. And if
you set out to write your story by searching for the germ that is
unusual and interesting, the chances are in your favor in securing
originality—something different. Because your own life, your own
viewpoint is something different. It is yours as long as you keep it
yours, it is going to become trite only when you grow lazy and fol-
low the lines of pictures and stories you remember because that is
the easy way.

Starting with a germ that is *different*, the *"struggle"* you *provide* will *be different* because *it will* be the sort of struggle that could happen only to your *different* characters.

There's the basis of originality—your own life, your own heart,
your own mind.

***

source : Anonymous. Developing Your Plot. *Film Truth*, Vol. 1, No. 6, September 1920.
<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>The 1920s: The 4 Best Hollywood Movies Of The Decade</figcaption></figure>
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REGULATING
AUDIENCES
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# Motion picture education

## THE MOTION-PICTURE CRITIC

INCREDIBLE as it may seem, the motion-picture is still regarded as a scientific toy by the daily press. New York is supposed to set the pace for the entire country, yet what do we find? Of the regular dailies, but one is making an honest attempt to criticize current photodrama attractions. True enough, there appear columns of film notes, which are contributed by the publicity departments of the photoplay manufacturers, but anything resembling the regular dramatic department is practically unknown.

When a newspaper does review a photoplay it dispatches its regular dramatic critic. He may be a competent man in his own particular sphere, but when he tackles the motion picture he at once betrays his ignorance. He will say, for instance, that "The Love Chief" was "produced" at the Blank theater, whereas he should have written "presented." He is also fond of using the word "posed," when speaking of the actors. As any fan knows, once a
photoplayer commences to pose, he is artificial. "Appeared" is a better word.

Speaking at a dinner in March, 1915, Arthur Brisbane, editor of the New York Evening Journal, said: "The success of the motion picture is based upon the stupidity and lack of intellectual development of the human race. I am one of the few living men who have never seen Mary Pickford or Charles Chaplin or Theda Bara or Miss Clarke. All I have seen is the 'Durbar' and Scott's South Pole pictures and 'Carmen,' which I couldn't escape because it was given in Mr. Hearst's house and I happened to be a guest there." When a great editor, such as Mr. Brisbane, permits prejudice to outweigh all other considerations, we begin to understand the apathy displayed by many newspaper editors toward the photoplay.

About two years before this speech was made, a well-known Chicago dramatic critic boasted that he had never seen a photoplay and did not wish to. Another dramatic critic made a fool of himself at a trade dinner when he mentioned a perfect, one-reel photoplay which it had been his pleasure to see. Naturally, his listeners thought he alluded to the old Griffith-Biograph pictures. "Spartacus," he said, when asked the name. "A one-reeler?" queried his questioner. "You must have only seen the final reel!"

Why should not photoplays be criticized the same as stage productions? The popularity of the feature photoplay, and the resulting improvements effected in the producing end, entitle the silent drama to be judged on a plane by itself. Why should a review be hidden among the "legitimate" stuff and criticized from the angle of a speaking play? It is not fair to the public or the producer. The newspapers claim that the average photoplay is not worth criticizing the story is too improbable to begin with. Let us grant that they are correct in their assumption. What is the critic for? Is it not his duty to dissect the faults and show how they may be reme-
died? Very well. He should be pleased because there is some useful
work ahead of him. The producer has been accustomed to taking
things easy because his efforts are sent out into the world with-
out rebuffs. He may obtain a few "roasts" from the trade papers,
but these do not reach the public at large, so why should he worry?
Once a newspaper engages a motion-picture critic, he will put the
producers on their mettle.

The motion-picture critic has difficulties which he alone can
appreciate. There are something like one hundred productions, of
all lengths and descriptions, released weekly. To see the entire out-
put would keep the critic more than busy during each of the seven
days. Then, there are space considerations. Under such conditions
as exist in the big city it would not be advisable to just take the fea-
tures playing at the leading theaters in the business and shopping
sections, for the many ordinary shows situated in various other
parts of the town and suburbs would be missed entirely. The only
fair way is a middle course. It will be presumed that the critic
keeps in touch with the latest output, which knowledge should
greatly assist him to decide which are the best six or twelve pro-
ductions of the week, and these should be included on his viewing
schedule. This was the policy adopted by Wid Gunning, when mo-
tion-picture critic of the New York *Evening Mail* and proved satis-
factory in two ways. It prevented readers from seeing a lemon and
was an incentive for manufacturers to turn out better productions.

The duties of the small town motion-picture critic are consid-
erably restricted. There are probably but two or three theaters in
his territory, and all that is necessary is to review the star attrac-
tion of each house. If the theaters favor the daily change, as most
do, it is impossible to review the features in time to be of service
to the reader. For this reason I am inclined to the opinion that the
small-town newspaper is best served by a syndicate service.
Where will the successful motion-picture critics come from?
Many will be recruited from the photoplay-writing ranks because
the first-hand experience thus gained will have taught them the
qualities which go to the making of the perfect photoplay.

SHOWING OLD FILMS TO CHILDREN

The motion picture exhibitor is evidently under the impression
that solving the child problem is solved by setting aside special
matinees, but while this is a step in the right direction, it is far
from satisfactory.

On the seven evenings weekly that the exhibitor solicits the pa-
tronage of adults, he generally presents the best of the latest pro-
ductions. At the special children's performance, however, he seems
to take a pride in showing motion pictures anywhere from a year
old and up. This "junk," as it is termed in trade circles, is what is
standing in the way of an adequate supply of new juvenile subjects.
The exhibitor rents these films at the rate of one dollar per reel for
one day from the exchange. Each reel the exchange has purchased
from the producer for $100, so, in order to recover the initial out-
lay, two years must elapse before the exhibitor can obtain same at
his price.

The exhibitor avers that the children's performance is not a
paying proposition, but he is not going the right way to make it so
when he puts on a cheap program.

He also considers that anything will do for the kiddies. There
is a marked difference in the photoplays released several years ago
and the present-day output. Now, wholesome stories, good acting,
careful staging and attention to detail are the order of the day, and
to feed children on an antiquated motion-picture diet is a penny-
wise and pound-foolish policy.

Then, there are the educational subjects to be considered. Some
of these are of timely interest when first shown, yet, by the time
they are exhibited at the average children's performance, their in-
structive qualities are practically nil.

A child who has been taken to an ordinary performance will
find many desirable qualities lacking in the children's perfor-
mance, which will, in all probability, become a bore. He may then
attend the photoplay theater without the parents' consent when
undesirable (to him) pictures are on the program.

I realize that there is the exhibitor's case to be heard, but were
he to charge, say, five cents additional, I feel sure that parents
would not resent such an increase if it meant the newest juvenile
productions being shown.

It is useless to appeal to the producer, who is a business man
and must be guided by the needs of the exhibitor the retailer. The
exhibitor must, therefore, be approached before any response can
be made to the increased production of these pictures.

The problem, in my opinion, will only be solved when com-
panies that specialize in the production of child photoplays are
formed, and a chain of theaters opened all over the country cater-
ing to young folk only. But until this time comes it is up to the
mothers to leave no stone unturned to persuade exhibitors to for-
sake their present cheap policy.

***

*source:* Dench, Ernest Alfred, *Motion picture education*. Cincinnati: The Standard publishing company, c. 1917.
# Motion Picture
Education

By

ERNEST A. DENCH

Author of "Making the Movies," "Playerwriting
for the Cinema," "Advertising by
Motion Pictures"

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CINCINNATI
THE STANDARD PUBLISHING COMPANY
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The Cinema : Its Present
and Future

The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (1917) is a report and summary of evidence taken by the Cinema Commission instituted by the National Council of Public Morals in UK. The NCPM was "deeply concerned with the influence of the cinematograph, especially upon young people, with the possibilities of its development and with its adaptation to national educational purposes" and the report includes several passages taken from interviews with children where commission members asked them questions about their cinema-going habits. This document is a thorough investigation into the cinema in 1910's Britain and what its effects might be on the viewing public. The report was favourable towards the film industry, which was delighted to receive such vindication of its work, and recommended the implementation of a system of official censorship, superseding that of local authorities. This rare document is strongly recommend it to anyone interested in early British film or the social history of film.
#### IV.— THE VALUE OF THE PICTURE HOUSE

We are convinced that the picture house means so much happiness not only to children but even to adults living and working under adverse conditions, that any attempt at suppression would be a grievous social loss, and that, accordingly, every effort should be made to make all picture houses, as places of public amusement for old and young, clean and safe morally without sacrificing their interest and attraction. The testimony of one whose work for many years has been among the poor must be given. " In my judgment," says Mr. Massey, " it would be a great blow to my neighbourhood if the cinemas were suppressed or closed against the children. Just imagine what the cinemas mean to tens of thousands of poor kids herded together in one room — to families living in one house, six or eight families under the same roof. For a few hours at the picture house at the corner, they can find breathing space, warmth, music (the more the better) and the pictures, where they can have a real laugh, a cheer and sometimes a shout. Who can measure the effect on their spirits and body ? To be able to make the poor, pinched-faced, half-clad and half-nourished boys and girls in the crowded slums in cities forget their pain and misery and their sad lot is a great thing, and the pictures do it." There is also the relief to the mother. " My knowledge," says the Rev. T. Home, "is of tired-out mothers working hard during the greater part of the day. They are only too glad to know that their children are able to go to an interesting entertainment such as the cinema, and that they are enjoying themselves out of the dangers and risks of the street."

Another social worker, less favourable to the cinemas on the whole, recognises that it is better for the children in her district to be in the picture house than even in their homes or in the street. This is a form of amusement that reaches a poorer class than any other, and it is, therefore, incumbent on those more favourably
placed, while doing all possible to improve it, not to do anything that would rob shadowed lives of the little brightness that comes to them.

## MORAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS

### The Alternatives to the Picture House

We must recognise that the picture house fulfils a useful and needful function amid social conditions which press very hard not only on the very poor, but even on the bulk of the working classes. So unsatisfactory is housing both in town and country, that there are few homes in which the leisure hours can be spent in quiet comfort and enjoyment. Not only are the slums and mean streets physically injurious, but they are beset with moral perils; the sights seen and the sounds heard are potent factors in the deterioration of the morals and the manners of youth. For many months, owing to our climate, the parks and open spaces cannot supply a refuge from the house or the street.

Apart from the picture house the only resort that is offered to the teeming masses above the prohibited ages is the public house, with its constant temptation of strong drink and its no less poluted moral atmosphere.

### The Influence of the Picture House in decreasing Hooliganism

Evidence has been submitted to us that the picture house has had some influence in reducing hooliganism, and in withdrawing custom from public-houses. " In my opinion," says Mr. Barnett, " the closing of the picture houses, or their prohibition to children, would have most unbeneficial results. In many cases the cinemas are the only form of healthy recreation available, and this is particularly the case during the long winter months. The children in question have neither the taste nor the facilities for indulging in any sport, and if the cinemas were closed to them, so far from the condition of the streets being improved, I am convinced there
would be an immediate and immense increase in hooliganism, shoplifting and similar street misdemeanours. Fifteen years ago street hooligan gangs were a real menace and problem. Now such gangs are quite unknown in my district.

This opinion is confirmed by other evidence submitted to us.

**The Cinema as a Counter-attraction to the Public-House**

The same witness declares: “I think it is obvious that the cinemas are a strong counter-attraction to the public-house.” All the witnesses questioned agreed with this opinion.

“The public-house proprietors”, says Mr. Massey, “have made a complaint that the picture palaces have interfered with the takings, and one man told me that he lost from £15 to £20 a week.” It must be observed that no picture house has a licence to sell intoxicating drinks, and no pass-out checks are given as in the theatre. It reveals a deplorable condition in many districts that in the opinion of some social workers even the least desirable picture house is a better place for the children than their homes or the streets, and that no thoroughly wholesome entertainment is being provided for them, especially in winter. While we have had sufficient evidence to show that there is need of much improvement as regards many picture houses, yet it is cheering to find that in the judgment of some of our witnesses there has been a marked improvement. The Rev. T. Home, who has known the industry from its very commencement, is confident that there has been a great improvement, and that there will be a still greater. He, in answer to a question, also expressed his conviction that the organised trades of the cinema industry. I will in reasonable time deal with anything that is undesirable. This view is confirmed by the Rev. A. Tildsley, who has watched the growth of the industry from its beginning, and rejoices in the improvement that has been made.

**FINDINGS**
1. While we recognise that there are difficulties in securing the necessary improvement, we do not admit that these are insuperable. Improvement is imperative.

2. While the charges of indecency have been greatly exaggerated and the evil is not nearly as widespread as is often assumed, yet that it does exist must be admitted, but not to any greater extent than in any other places of popular resort; and the regulations in force in London to suppress it should be made of general application.

3. Not only should the local authority enforce existing regulations, and regulations which after due inquiry and conference may be added, but the public should assist the local authority by calling attention to any disregard of them, or any acts of indecency.

4. A much stricter censorship than at one period prevailed is necessary. Steps have now been taken to effect this improvement. The censorship should include not only films, but also the posters advertising the films.

5. Owing to the large number of children visiting the picture houses, special care is necessary to protect them from what would be morally, as well as mentally or physically, injurious to them.

6. The charge that the children are induced to steal in order to pay for admission cannot be regarded as a condemnation of the picture house itself, for (a) the same objection might be, and as been, offered to any object of desire or form of pleasure that powerfully affected the child; (b) even if the money stolen is spent in the picture house, it must not be concluded that the money was stolen for that purpose, and it is found that such money is used for other enjoyments; (c) it must also be recognised that the picture house is often used as an excuse, when it is not the reason for the theft.

7. Regarding the connection of the cinema with imitative juvenile crime, there was presented to us conflicting evidence — some
asserting as emphatically as others denied any general connection.
Our conclusion is that such a connection does exist, though to a
limited extent. It is not, however, a necessary connection, and not
exclusive of many other factors too often ignored, because less ob-
vious to the untrained observer of social phenomena.

8. Apart from “sex” and “crime” films, an injurious effect is pro-
duced on young minds by the excessive sensationalism and fright-
fulness of some of the films shown, and the wrong ideas of life and
conduct often suggested.

9. It is evident that additional provision should be made for the
young, both as regards arranging special exhibitions for them and
securing suitable films to be there exhibited.

10. Despite the practical difficulties in making such provision,
we urge that educational authorities and societies interested in the
welfare of youth should co-operate in the endeavor to meet the
need.

11. Compelled as we were in our inquiry to give special atten-
tion to the alleged defects in the picture house, we have been con-
vinced by the amount of testimony offered in its favour of its value
as a cheap amusement for the masses, for parents as well as chil-
dren, especially as regards its influence in decreasing hooliganism
and as a counter-attraction to the public-house.

12. The abolition of the picture house, as advocated by some, is
impossible, even if it were desirable, as in our judgment it is not.
On the other hand, we are strongly of opinion that not only is im-
provement practicable, but also of great national importance.

***

source: National Council of Public Morals. Cinema Commis-
sion of Inquiry. "The cinema: its resent position and future possi-
bilities: being the report of and chief evidence taken by the cinema
Commission of Inquiry instituted by the National Council of Public Morals." London: Williams and Norgate, 1917.

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Entertaining Hospital
Patients by Film

It must be a trying ordeal for active folks to be bedridden, and consequently shut off from the outside world. No patient feels in a fit condition to undertake the necessary mental work involved in reading; he wants this done for him, and the motion picture ably performs this service. By the photoplay he can be taken through the realms of romance and forget his pains and troubles for the time being.

The Ohio State Hospital at Massillon runs photoplay entertainments in the sick rooms for the patients, and other hospitals are gradually falling into line. These hints may prove of value to the hospital about to inaugurate such plays. The first item of importance is the projection machine, the cost of which ranges from $250 to $300. The authorities in various parts of the country insist upon the projection machine being enclosed in a fireproof booth, for if there is an outbreak of fire it cannot possibly spread further. Here an expense of $65 is involved. This booth, made of galvanized iron,
gives the operator plenty of room in which to work, and being
shipped in parts, the whole is easily set up with nuts and bolts.

Carbons are necessary to run the projector. These cost from $17 to $44, although prices vary according to market conditions. The next important link is the screen. Formerly a tablecloth or bed sheet was used, but science has now brought out many different screens, the best costing about one dollar and a half a foot.

Without music, motion pictures are divested of much of their charm, and while an orchestra of several pieces is best, one can get along satisfactorily with a piano.

If there is a man on the staff of employees who is well versed in electricity, he could easily become an expert operator. If he is the right sort of man he will not object to doing two or three hours overtime of an evening, or perhaps his hours at regular work can be curtailed.

There remains one last item, the light by which to throw the pictures on the screen. If the hospital has a power plant, the current from that can be used. Have the operator focus the projection machine exactly in the middle of the screen, not an inch to the right or left, or an inch above or below. If this is not attended to, no matter in what advantageous position a spectator sits, he will either have to hold his head up high or the players in the picture appear unnaturally long and slim. The rays of light take a straight path, and if they are compelled to turn aside, a peculiar, annoying effect is produced.
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In selecting a suitable lens, the size of the room, the make of the projection machine, the length and height of the screen and the distance from the operating booth to the screen must be taken into consideration. It is false economy to purchase a cheap lens.

The standard speed at which pictures are projected is sixteen “frames” to the second. There are sixteen of these “frames,” otherwise tiny pictures, to each foot of film, and a reel takes about eighteen minutes to unspool. If the projection is faster, things in the film move at a rapid, mechanical pace, while explanatory matter is snatched off before it can be grasped.

The operator will have to be provided with a tool outfit, which should include cement for mending broken films, a file for sharpening carbons, lugs, reels and machine oil.

The three chief distributing organizations, General, Mutual and Universal, operate a chain of exchanges throughout the country and between them release about one hundred productions weekly.
The producers marketing their wares under these factions receive ten cents per foot for each print they supply, consequently every reel costs the exchange $100. It would be out of the question to show a film a single day on these terms, so it is hired out to the theaters booking them. The man who secures first-run service pays the highest price, but even then it only amounts to a part of the original price. As the age of a film increases, the rental decreases, until it can be hired for as low as one dollar per day. Even at this stage it is generally in good condition. The service has to be contracted for in advance, the films being shipped as required and re-shipped to the next theatre on the list at the expiration of the hiring term. It has been proven by experience that hospital patients appreciate comedy more than drama.

***

*Source:* Dench, Ernest A., "Entertaining Hospital Patients by Motion Pictures", *The American Journal of Nursing*, Volume 18, March 1918.
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Regulating Film as an
Entertainment

MOTION PICTURES AS A PHASE OF COMMERCIALIZED AMUSEMENT IN TOLEDO, OHIO (1919)

Reverend John J. Phelan's 1919 work, "Motion Pictures as a Phase of Commercialized Amusement in Toledo, Ohio," exemplifies a social survey driven more by moral concerns than social scientific inquiry. The book's title conveys a clear skepticism, which is reflected in the introduction's assertion that "there is a broad consensus among social science scholars on the need for community regulation of public commercialized entertainments." However, the study goes beyond mere critical suspicion of the public's movie preferences. Initially, Phelan acknowledges the positive aspects, outlining the significant benefits that motion pictures provide to society.
1. *The providing of a reasonable-priced and highly entertaining form of amusement.*

2. *Convenience both as to accessibility and continuous play hours.*

3. *The promotion of family unity – as seen in attendance of the entire family.*

4. *The counteraction against the influence of the brothel, saloon, public dance hall and other questionable forms of amusement.*

5. *A provision for amusement and relaxation.*

6. *The supplying of information in regard to travel, history and world events.*

7. *The treatise of high moral and educational themes.*

8. *The movies as an “art.”*

While Phelan acknowledges that movies may attract those who are drawn to the abnormal, distorted, and often vicious aspects of life, he also believes in their potential for moral and educational value. What lends credibility to his study is his reliance on empirical data to support his views on motion pictures. Focusing on Toledo, Phelan details the number, types, sizes, locations, ownership, and functions of the town's cinemas in 1919, totaling six. He describes their proximity to other commercial amusements such as saloons and dance halls. He provides information on their value, rental fees, and the costs associated with machinery, fabric, employees, musicians, advertising, lighting, and heating. He presents data on audience
demographics, ticket prices, and the structure of cinema pro-
grams. He also outlines the investment costs, operating ex-
penses, and revenues of the cinema industry, offering valuable
insights. Phelan includes evidence from studies conducted in
schools, listing educational films that highlight the burgeoning
sector of the film industry. He discusses moral concerns, cen-
sorship, and the struggle of "non-commercialized" amusements
against the allure of cinema. Notably, Phelan concludes each
book section with questions for "social studies" students, guid-
ing them on what to inquire about in their own regions if they
wish to conduct similar research on film audiences. The book
ends with extensive appendices, featuring a useful bibliography,
examples of pertinent legislation, a directory of Ohio cinemas
with details on ownership, management, seating, location, and
staff; sample questionnaires; excerpts of juvenile court testi-
monies; and more. Beyond the moralizing, the appendices pro-
vide a thorough overview of the cinema landscape.
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Positive paper print from lantern slide used in motion picture theaters as announcement.
1912. [Library of Congress]

## FOREWORD

The writer is not opposed to Motion Pictures as a form of amusement. Pictures are possessed of infinite social and economic power and are capable of unlimited moral and educational worth. Hundreds of thousands each day secure their chief impressions of life, ethics, religion and morality thru the "movies."

Whether these impressions are beneficial — it is the special privilege of the mature and discriminating to judge. We surely
cherish no desire to create standards of amusement for those best able to judge for themselves.

There is a large class, however, who do not exercise this nicely “discriminating” preference. In the cases when they would — they are handicapped by what is offered them. Statistics reveal that there are many who feed their nature upon the abnormal, distorted, suggestive and far too often, vicious things of life.

Students of social science are in quite general agreement as to the necessity of community control of public commercialized amusements. It lias been deemed necessary to place the motion picture industry under limited control in several States, and there is considerable agitation as to the necessity of a Federal Board of Censors for a more complete National control.

The social mind also is beginning to take notice of the great number of Juvenile Court cases: the newspaper reports concerning police arrests and the testimony of educators who deal with the young — as regards the increase of Juvenile delinquency. A prolific cause is the excessive and nondiscriminating patronage of picture houses.

It is poor policy, both moral and economic, for a community to allow its children to be filled with suggestions of filth and evil and then pay for it. Parents particularly must know that to tolerate or allow agencies to emphasize the dramatic value of the passions is a serious proposition. The “stress and strain” period of the adolescent child is most acute. Are we making the transition constructive or destructive?

The bedroom and lingerie style of drama are not constructive. Moving pictures with plots and themes fit only for a clinic cannot be tolerated in a democracy where children have a chance for growth and nurture. Our courts are practically crowded with a host of prematurely old — yet young persons in years. The placing
of premiums on domestic infelicity denouments do not minimize
the number of divorce cases, nor keep down the expense of operat-
ing police courts, infirmaries, hospitals and sanitariums.

We may excuse our responsibility toward the weaker members
of society by graciously placing them in corrective and charitable
institutions after they have “gone wrong,” and cease all further care
and thought of them, or, we may attempt by community measures
and the exercise of a Christiansocial consciousness to check this
increase of juvenile and adult delinquency at its source.

AN EXERCISE FOR ADVANCED SOCIAL STUDENTS.

A Questionnaire on Juvenile Standard for Motion Pictures.

Kindly give your careful consideration to each of the questions
and prepare a written intelligent answer. They will form a basis for
the selection of picture for children under 17.

It is understood that the emphasis in the selection of pictures
for children, both those under 12 and those between 12 and 17 shall
be placed on those themes and situations which are positive, help-
ful, constructive and inspiring. There is little need of statements
of fundamental positions upon scenic, biographical, scientific, na-
ture and industrial films. In the selection of amusing, dramatic and
thrilling pictures, it is necessary that welldefined, sympathetic and
comprehensive statements shall be formulated.

It is to be recognized that judgments will vary on individual
pictures. This is inevitable because, for instance, of the swiftness
of punishment, the repulsive nature of certain characters, the con-
trast presented, the lessons taught or the historic character of the
acts, or persons involved.
It is important to distinguish, carefully, between pictures shown to children under 12 and boys and girls between 12 and 17. The mental outlook changes decidedly during the adolescent period.

None of these questions can be answered without consideration of possible exceptions. They have many individual qualifications which may modify decisions.

1. Are young people from 12 to 17 accustomed to repicture in their minds details secondary to the main story presented in the film?

2. Is it necessary that the moral be pointed, that evil be punished and good rewarded in dramatic pictures?

3. Please express your judgment of the value of pictures showing children doing wrong and subsequently being punished as a means of impressing a lesson. Do they learn the lesson or just remember the exciting adventures?

4. What position should be taken about the manifestations of love and lovemaking in its various forms before and after marriage?

5. Are there times when the causes and effects of unwise, in-discreet and overtrustful lovemaking should be shown?

6. Are you committed to the policy of judging pictures for young people and children as a whole or in detail?

7. Can any rule be laid down refusing approval of pictures which play upon the weakness of any class or race?

8. Shall triangular and intricate problems of married life be shown under any conditions?
9. Shall crime and sex scenes which arouse unwholesome cu-
riosity and stir the imagination be shown, be entirely elimi-
nated or cut at the beginning of the questionable action?

10. Should Juvenile actors be encouraged to take adult parts?

11. Shall pictures be shown which make light of family ties, be-
littling the sanctity of marriage, presenting the humorous or
serious deceptions of husband and wife?

12. What do you think of the use of action in motion pictures
to arouse unthinking fear as a motive to check evil?

13. What is your opinion about scenes and pictures dealing with the underworld, its inhabitants, resorts and life?

14. Are you satisfied that clean pictures depicting action such as adventure, excitement, thrill, the work of detectives, cowboys, Indians, etc., should be shown ?

15. Have you any opinion about the portrayal of insane and fee-
bleminded persons?

16. What is your feeling about the presentation of scenes in which persons appear partially clothed, in tights, bathing suits, etc.?

17. Is it possible to lay down any absolute rules about the use of weapons by the individual for defense or offence? Please try to formulate a statement.

***

Source :

- John Joseph Phelan, *Motion pictures as a phase of commercialized amusement in Toledo, Ohio*. Toledo : Little book press, 1919.

- Lessons from Toledo “The Bioscope”, 2008 [with permission]