For the real fun of rapid motion, appropriately used, give me _Mutt and Jeff_. Mutt, buried in the sand, with a head like an egg, prompts an ostrich to lay another egg, from which emerges a brood of little ostriches. Jeff goes out to shoot them, but his shots glance off in harmless wreaths of smoke. When Mutt and Jeff exchange ideas you see them actually travelling like an electric spark along the wire, from brain to brain. The ostrich hoists Mutt out of the sand by the breeches. Collapse of Jeff. It suggests a drawing by Caran d’Ache in epileptic jerks. The natural history pictures, too, the deer and the birds, strike one as admirable examples of what animated photography can do for us in the way of instruction as well as amusement.... And the orchestra has been playing all this time, Beethoven and Mozart, a “separate ecstasy.” And again I stumble over the subaltern, and wonder to find people moving so slowly in Piccadilly Circus. TIME AND THE FILM There was a gentleman in Molière, frequently mentioned since and now for my need to be unblushingly mentioned again, who said to another gentleman, about never mind what, that _le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire_. But Molière belonged to that effete art the “spoken drama,” which we learn, from America, has sunk to be used mainly as an advertisement of the play which is subsequently to be filmed out of it. He wrote in the dark or pre-film ages, and could not know what an all-important part _le temps_ was to play in _l’affaire_ of the film. Among its innumerable and magnificent activities the film is an instructor of youth, and it seems, from a letter which the Rev. Dr. Lyttelton has written to _The Times_, it instructs at a pace which is a little too quick for the soaring human boy. “Elephants,” the reverend Doctor pathetically complains, “are shown scuttling about like antelopes,” and so the poor boy mixes up antelopes and elephants and gets his zoology all wrong. I should myself have innocently supposed that this magical acceleration of pace is one of the great charms of the film for the boy. It not only provides him with half-a-dozen pictures in the time it would have taken him to read one of them in print (to say nothing of his being saved the trouble of reading, learning the alphabet, and other pedagogic nuisances altogether), but it offers him something much more exciting and romantic than his ordinary experience. He knows that at the Zoo elephants move slowly, but here on the film they are taught, in the American phrase, to “step lively,” and are shown scuttling about like antelopes. A world wherein the ponderous and slow elephant is suddenly endowed by the magician’s wand with the lightness and rapidity of the antelope—what enhancement for boys, aye, and for grown-ups too!