He started to depict emotion of the slow and intense kind, just as a storm gathers, just as there are shimmerings of light and distant grumbling of thunder, before there is an outburst, he taught his interpreters to exhibit feeling. He dared try to show the subtle shades of thought, the deep-running undercurrents of passion, all the fascinating phases of human existence as we encounter them in real life. A commercial proposition that depends for its very existence upon creative talent, whose structure is the work of selective taste, plastic imagination and power to formulate self-expression, ceases to be a good one from the moment it shrivels to a pulseless skeleton. All the traps to snare the unwary purchaser, all business schemes to market the mediocre, are short-lived. His best interpreters give us the essence of this or that emotion instead of moving around like a lot of lay figures worked by invisible strings.
Motion often wearies the eye and confuses the understanding.
He will fasten attention with immobility and suddenly transform silent mystery into tremendous revelation. In a period of dull preparation before the main action is under way he will spread out before our eyes some beautiful or comprehensive tableau as compensation. Even when character and purpose begin to emerge from his visions of loveliness, when the architecture of the drama begins to assume importance, he plants a flower here or there, occasional tender notes in the large composition, like the man of dreams that he is. He is starting anew, and I hope his fondest dreams will be realized. I hope for the sake of the New Art that he has befriended that his finest conceptions will be materialized in grandeur or beauty on the screen.