THE CINEMA.
SCREEN COMEDY.—II.
The Beloved Vagabond, which is showing now at the Palace Theatre, is in all essentials a typical screen drama, except in duration. It is based on a popular novel ; it makes a muddled and disorganized attempt to follow out that novel's continuity ; it is overloaded with sub-titles, with ill-timed close-ups and flash-backs and other jolts to the action ; and the members of the cast seem to be making up their mind— and changing it—during the course of the film, whether the tmphasis of their acting is to be placed on stage voice, film gesture or statuesque pose. It is absurd that, at this period of advance, such an uncertainty about the capacity and the exactions of screen art should prevail among those to whom the knowledge is of vital importance ; yet one always does come away from an average continuous show in London with the memory of hundreds of feet of useless celluloid lip-work, of ezpres.sions " registered " with agonising efficiency, of sub- titles following instead of immediately preceding the incidents they describe, of plot detail tremendously massed in one, and abstractly neglected in another portion of the scenario : one comes away with the feeling, indeed, that both producer and actors have muddled their job in the most unintelligent manner.
This impression is not, I think, quite just, because screen light is such a glaring, such a searching critique of the efforts of all who have to do with the making of a film that minor faults are apt to appear unduly pronounced, the casual failure an integral blemish ; the camera lens swells and clarifies c very molehill into a mountain, however excellent the pro- ducer's intentions may be, however clever the actole evasions. But in the realistic drama which is at present the Cinema's most usual and frequent product, one unalterable law at least may be discovered for producers, and one for actors : the screen calls for its own plot continuity ; its selection, massing, pruning and suggestive use of incident is of an altogether different kind from that customary in the page or applicable on the boards ; and, in the technique of screen acting, gesture and highly harmonized movement must be substituted for the stage effects of voice-tone and intensive movement. In the theatre gestures serve mainly to reveal, in ways that even words cannot, the emotions of the partici- pants; the gestures of each character are as individual and independent as the lines he has to speak, and more quickly Provocative than words of those dramatic clashes of plot- induced temperament which are the essence of a "well acting" stage play. The two factors of the Cinema which make it a contrast to the Theatre in this respect are voice- lessness and a sliding background. It is this dynamic silence which lends to the former something of the range, especially in expressions, of group feeling—something of the aspiring, keen, sidereal atmosphere of the Ballet, though the concen- trated particularity of the camera's eye prohibits the Cinema from attempting any manifestation of pure emotion divorced from personality, and therefore excludes it from that illusion of timelessness which is the most entrancing implication of group dancing. The Cinema, even during its present comae of naturalistic drama, shows best and most originally when it follows those two lines of progress which started from its specialized mechanism and are now waiting to be joined up to the trails of universal Art. Mr. D. W. Griffiths and, in lesser ways, almost every other resourceful producer, must have worked under a half-realization of this truth when they planned those barbarically beautiful " spectacles " by which they first astonished the world, and alienated the coteries from the Cinema. Yet even in Intolerance, the finest of all naturalistic screen dramas, though the Cinema's boundless control over movement is triumphantly realized by a use of four stories of similar tone, carried forward in alternate scenes and resulting in a simultaneous climax, there is something lacking, something distasteful in the aggregate impression ; and the explanation is that mass effects, the more naturalistic they are in their handling, are the more moral and confined in their appeal. I call the acting in Intolerance naturalistic, its movement intensive rather than harmonious, because, though the natural sliding background of the Cinema was used with admirable energy and deliberation in the construction of the plot, the participants behaved without reference to it, without displaying any consciousness that, contrary to the rules of the theatre, this background would probably make a greater impression on the imagination, as apart from the mere atten- tion, of the spectators than the tiny spot-lit personal drama in the foreground.
For this quality and for general intelligence, the most accom- plished film I have ever seen is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, of which there was a Press show at the Alhambra last week. It is a German production, distributed in this country by the Phillips Film Co., Wardour Street, and it will be released very shortly. It is not a new film—barely post-War, I believe— and the general lighting is far from comfortable ; but the dimmest-eyed critic should be able to see sufficient of it to be persuaded that it is the most important thing that has come to the Cinema for years. It is a very subtle, a most imaginatively portrayed drama of hallucination, a consistent. study of the human mind in madness. And the two most notable points about it are the scenic background, which is completely futurist, and the technique by which the characters, their costumes, their gestures and bearing, every display of their personalities is harmonized with it : the actors and their environment work evenly, side by side, like Nature and Man in Arcadia. But I shall have to leave discussion of this film to my next notes, as well as my proper approach to the twice postponed subject of the series.
BERTRADI HIGGINS.
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