ARTS

The

THE literature of the month has much to say of the motion picture. Evidently the picture play as an art, or to be more pungent a near-art, is attracting the serious attention it undoubtedly deserves. The business of making and distributing films is advancing with seven-league boots. An industry or a near-art which provides the majority of human beings with their only glimpse into life imaginatively conceived cannot afford to be neglected. writer recalls a lovely country village, a village of green fields, immemorial elms, and old colonial houses, whose one weekly titbit of the world was afforded by an outof-date 'serial,'- a thing of 'episodes,' violent, hideous, perverted and base, full of vitriol throwings, moonlight stabbings, heroines tied to stair posts in burning houses, ancient automobiles bouncing off cliffs all a perfectly appalling business. By the vibrating light of the picture beam, the spectator watched the children of the fields staring entranced, some of them on the very edges of their chairs, and when the hooded demon was about to throw his lovely victim into the sausage machine, the air was certain to be stirred with gasps, ‘oh my's,' and little inarticulate, grammarschool snuffles. Finally, a Grange committee, prodded on by the writer and a handful of friends, succeeded in having the particular 'serial' stopped and better films brought to town.

There has been very little criticism in America of the 'movies' as creations of the imagination. Sickened by the violence, the vulgarity, the glucose sentimentality, the trained critic has fled the 'movies' like a pestilence, leaving the field of criticism to professional penny-a-liners prepared to write the kind of nonsense which is the journalistic order of the day. And thus America, the land of the film, is left with little genuine criticism SO much needed.

In these circumstances, it is interesting to turn to European criticism of the film. The attempts of the British film companies to get on their feet and meet American competition are widely discussed in the British press. Thus in a recent number of the London Telegraph, Mr. Alder Anderson remarks:

It is only during the past twelve months really that it has been generally recognized that without a good story the labor of film making is in vain. There are quite a number of men still, however, prominent men, too, who never refer to films in the plural. They will speak to you about good or bad quality 'fillum,' exactly as if they were discussing silk or guano, or any other marketable commodity. This is a state of affairs which the nascent but already promising British picture making industry should know how to turn to advantage. Unfortunately, it displays extraordinary apathy in some directions. In selecting subjects to turn into picture plays it all too often falls into the error of assuming that merely ephemeral insular notoriety is synonymous with world fame. Occasionally, though rarely, the two are identical.

England possesses more than her share of universally acknowledged men of literary genius, yet the sum total in two centuries can almost be reckoned on the fingers of two hands. One hears far too much of British film producers to-day contracting to take stories 'in bulk' of certain authors instead of hunting until they find something really original and worth while. 'Broken Blossoms,' made by David Wark Griffith, from a short sketch by Mr. Thomas Burke, included in his book Limehouse Nights, is still continuing its triumphal career throughout the United States, yet during all these months no producer in this country apparently has had the idea that the author might be able to give them other subjects equally good. Now Mr. Burke

tells me he has arranged with Griffith to go to America, in order to evolve, if possible, several more screen subjects.

In all fairness, however, it must be confessed that it required the genius of a Griffith to discern all the screen possibilities in the story, and when we possess a Griffith in this country there will no longer be any fear that the British-made film will have to take secondary place. It will be very interesting to see what Mr. Griffith makes out of Romance with Doris Keane. Hitherto almost all the players he has had have been without any previous experience of acting, either on the stage or for the screen. Miss Keane is the first notable exception to the rule.

The Times prints another note on the popular 'Broken Blossoms,' and remarks that a time will come, and that very soon, when tragedy and comedy alike will have to be specially constructed to suit the special needs of the screen.' The final paragraph questions Mr. Griffith's presentation of Limehouse, remarking that, 'This is à limehouse which neither Mr. Burke nor any other man who knows his East End of London will be able to recognize. It may be a very good impression of an American producer's idea of Limehouse but it is nothing more.' With this notion the writer of these lines completely disagrees. The Limehouse of the film is, to be sure, not the real Limehouse, but it is to a dot the Limehouse of Mr. Burke's imagination, the imagination of an intensely literary mind distilling hideous tales, tales in which there is much dwelling on cruelty, tales whose action and psychology have the false ring of a cracked bowl. One calls to mind the comment of that sane critic, Mr. Holbrook Jackson: 'One of the dangers of modern life is a growing habit of living by proxy or taking life at second hand; and the same applies to much of the writing of the present day: too many modern writers write from second-hand experience.' The vogue of Burke is a sign of a tired and neurotic world.

IN Germany the cinema trade is greatly perturbed by a project which has been seriously put forward by the Minister for the Interior to municipalize all the cinema

theatres throughout the country. The people interested in the business are preparing to oppose the project tooth and nail. One of the principal reasons urged against it is that if such a formidable weapon were to be controlled, as it probably would, by one political party, the death-knell of all artistic advance would be sounded, and a form of intellectual tyranny imposed which would be almost more intolerable than Kaiserism.

In weaning the German workman from the drinking shop, the cinema theatre, its advocates say, has proved a veritable godsend to the nation. It is also alleged that so far from hurting the expansion of the legitimate theatre, the moving pictures have proved a vast recruiting ground for the audiences of the regular theatres. Until the cinema came, we are assured, the German working classes generally absolutely ignored the artistic side of life. Not one workingman in ten ever dreamed of entering a theatre, which, for him, dealt in some recondite form of so-called entertainment utterly beyond his comprehension. The picture plays are initiating him into the mysteries of a whole new universe.

THE following recently appeared in the London Chronicle under the caption 'A Birmingham Vicar's Experiment.'

The Birmingham Licensing Justices have granted an application made by the vicar of St. Bartholomew's for a license for a cinema in his church. The proposal was agreed to on the understanding that the exhibition was not to be run as a commercial proposition, and would take place only on Sunday nights.

The vicar, who said he had the Bishop's sanction for the experiment, explained that the pictures shown would be in part religious and wholly decent. The object was to bring under wholesome influences people parading the central streets on Sunday evenings. No charge would be made for admission.

IN a review of two other British films, Back Stage and His Naughty Wife are to be found these illuminating remarks on film motor cars and film policemen:

The great majority of film comedies are

modeled upon an extremely rigid pattern. There seems to be an unwritten set of rules, beside which the laws of the Medes and Persians were very flimsy affairs. To put the matter upon a mathematical basis, there are some quite arbitrary axioms and a number of postulates, and upon these a body of theorems and a larger body of problems have been constructed. The outstanding axiom apparently is that no cinematograph comedy shall possess a plot with any claim to coherence whatever. Once this is assumed the ground is cleared to a very great extent. The postulates fall into several general divisions, and these may be very briefly pointed out.

One of the great divisions is concerned with all forms of locomotion. If a motor car is introduced into the story it must never behave in a normal manner. It may go backward or overturn; fly through the air or blow up. Otherwise its movements are rather circumscribed. As regards human locomotion, a character is very seldom allowed to walk. He may run or jump, and there is one rule he must not break. He must not retain his balance, if it is humanly possible for him to fall down. In His Naughty Wife quite a dozen characters slip on banana skins, and thereby illustrate the truth of Professor Bergson's contentions as to the causes of laughter. Another division deals with hydraulics, and especially with the habits of water-taps and baths. Taps must always be left turned on until a flood results, and baths are always full and must always be fallen into by at least one person in the course of the action.

Around public servants a very large body of lore has grown up. Policemen always dress like scarecrows, and invariably perform their public duties in a body. If they are called upon to pursue a criminal they crowd themselves into a small but swift motor car, and fall out on to the road at regular intervals. When they pick themselves up they jump into the air once or twice (they are allowed a certain amount of latitude in this particular case), and run after the car with appropriate gesticulations.

Firemen follow the same rules as policemen. Humbler servants of the public, like waiters, are encircled with a rather Bolshevist aura. Their mission in life is destruction. They are rather reminiscent of those entertainers who aver that they break so many pounds' worth of crockery every night. Film waiters, however, have the more satisfactory lot, because it is a point of honor with them that a good proportion of their crockery must be broken by contact with a customer. There are also a few riders to these propositions. An example of these is the pessimistic assumption that all those who venture in a ship must immediately suffer visible physical inconvenience

These are only a very few of the rules of film comedies, but they are sufficient to indicate that the subject will be well worth the learned research of some future scholiast, who shall lay aside his inquiries into the digamma in order to study the earliest manifestations of humor upon the screen.

All in all, the film has not yet attained standing as an art, and because its field is limited to the depiction of action, it probably never will. But art or near-art, as the writer has suggested, it is a presentation of imaginative source which must be sympathetically watched. The finer mind ought not to neglect its monstrous possibilities for good or evil. It can destroy literature as well as the spoken stage. 'Have you read such and such a book?' one asks. 'No, I did n't have to, I saw it in the movies' is the answer. Perhaps the best thing for the film is not to be too ambitious and to refrain from trying to storm Parnassus. Let the producers keep their hands off the great things. A noble statue is not to be shaped in putty, but in Parian marble. A 'good' film is really not a pretentious and grandiose thing vainly striving to interpret the niceties of life and emotion, but a bouncing depiction of intelligible action

plausible heroines in plausible distress, super-villains, and finest rapping heroes who put their shoulders to doors and come crashing through just in time. Virtue ought to be rewarded and vice punished. Who will be the Stevenson of the cinema?

[The King's Highway]
DARTMOOR

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS

Low are your little hills; narrow your vales;

But silver threads the fairy streams that leap From their moss cradles to the wide, green dales:

Yet in your ambit of the waste and steep,

Orbicular and perfect and austere, You win fidelity, command and keep

Our trust. How many a rich and vanished year

[Country Life]

To glean the boon of wisdom and good cheer.

Beside a rillet on a day of grace
Full often have I sat and felt your heart
Beating beneath the granite, until space

Throbbed to the far horizons, where apart

Ranged your uplifted ramparts cloudily,

As though they waited but the wind to

EUROPEANS have always been contented with a rather offhand opinion of America, and in most respects our recent wholesale incursion into their continent has not materially changed this attitude. They were inclined to ignore our domestic politics altogether until they discovered — or imagined that the way we managed our public affairs had a direct bearing upon the price of butter and rolls along the boulevards. Thereupon the foreign estimate of our political life began to rise and fall inversely as the price of the latter delicacies.

Consequently, the good will or the ill will of Europeans toward us promises for a time, at least to depend upon their material well being, for which they now hold us responsible. This may make American politics a more popular study on the other side of the water. It certainly is doing so at the present moment. To a degree quite unprecedented-though not nearly to the extent its members may imagine our Senate is in the spotlight of the transatlantic press. Indeed, some of the articles that appear abroad upon the treaty debate equal in fervor our most heated campaign literature.

Foreigners are generally more in

more

terested in our public men than in our parties- an attitude that we reciprocate. The election of Mr. Wilson, in 1912, was welcomed by the Liberal press of Europe as the dawn of a new era. He was heralded as the first professional scholar to be elevated to the Presidency, and what was directly to the point — as a broadminded, scientific economist who would give European manufacturers most generous treatment in American markets. Wilson and prosperity were, therefore, associated ideas from the very beginning of the former's presidential career.

This impression continued through the war. It afforded a favorable background for the great confidence which was inspired by his peace programme. He was conceived as an economic as well as a political savior. Both hopes have been disappointed, because both were from the outset equally impossible to realize. But Europe still attributes its present distress to the struggle of two opposing forces in our politics-. self-centred Americanism represented by the Senate, which in its opinion is the traditional stronghold of trusts and tariffs; and altruistic, idealist America, which it fancied for a period had found a mouthpiece in the President.