“Nor can it be said of picture drama, as it was of tragedy, that the element of plot is more important than the element of character. For here neither element is important. The important element now is motion. Any plot will serve the picture poet’s purpose (indeed most of them take them ready-made from those prose epics known as ‘shockers’), and any characters likewise (it will suffice if these be simplified types or ‘masks’). The essence of the matter is that all should be kept moving. And as moving objects are best seen to be moving when they are moving quickly, the picture poet will contrive that his horses shall always, as Homer says, devour the ground and his motor cars be ‘all out.’... Unity of plot—when there is a plot—does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. It consists in the final dwelling together in unity of the hero and his bride. Final must be understood as posterior to the pursuit of the bride by other men, who may be either white or red. Red men are better, as more unbridled in their passions than white. As Æschylus first introduced a second actor in tragedy, so an American poet, whose name is too barbarous to be written in Greek, introduced the red man in picture drama.... “With regard to the hero and his bride, though their characters should, as in tragedy, be morally good (χρηστά), it is chiefly necessary that their persons should be kinematographically good or good on the film. For at every peripety of the action they must become suddenly enlarged by the device of the photographer, so that every furrow of the knitted brow and every twitch of the agitated mouth is shown as large as life, if not larger. It is, in fact, by this photographic enlargement that the critical turns of the action are marked and distinguished, in the absence of the tragic element of diction. Where the tragic actor talks big, the picture player looks big. Nevertheless, the element of diction is not entirely wanting. Sentences (which should comprise as many solecisms as possible) may be shown on the screen, descriptive of what the players are doing or saying. But the more skilful players habitually say something else than what is thus imputed to them, thereby giving the audience the additional interest of conjecturing what they actually do say in place of what they ought to have said.