The raw phonograph is likewise unmagnetic. Would you set upon the
shoulders of the troupe of actors the additional responsibility of
putting an adequate substitute for human magnetism in the phonographic
disk? The voice that does not actually bleed, that contains no
heart-beats, fails to meet the emergency. Few people have wept over a
phonographic selection from Tristan and Isolde. They are moved at the
actual performance. Why? Look at the opera singer after the last act. His
eyes are burning. His face is flushed. His pulse is high. Reaching his
hotel room, he is far more weary than if he had sung the opera alone
there. He has given out of his brain-fire and blood-beat the same
magnetism that leads men in battle. To speak of it in the crassest terms,
this resource brings him a hundred times more salary than another man
with just as good a voice can command. The output that leaves him
drained at the end of the show cannot be stored in the phonograph
machine. That device is as good in the morning as at noon. It ticks like
a clock.
To perfect the talking moving picture, human magnetism must be put into
the mirror-screen and into the clock. Not only is this imperative, but
clock and mirror must be harmonized, one gently subordinated to the
other. Both cannot rule. In the present talking moving picture the more
highly developed photoplay is dragged by the hair in a dead faint, in the
wake of the screaming savage phonograph. No talking machine on the market
reproduces conversation clearly unless it be elaborately articulated in
unnatural tones with a stiff interval between each question and answer.
Real dialogue goes to ruin.
The talking moving picture came to our town. We were given for one show a
line of minstrels facing the audience, with the interlocutor repeating
his immemorial question, and the end-man giving the immemorial answer.
Then came a scene in a blacksmith shop where certain well-differentiated
rackets were carried over the footlights. No one heard the blacksmith,
unless he stopped to shout straight at us.
The _phonoplay_ can quite possibly reach some divine goal, but it will be
after the speaking powers of the phonograph excel the photographing
powers of the reel, and then the pictures will be brought in as comment
and ornament to the speech. The pictures will be held back by the
phonograph as long as it is more limited in its range. The pictures are
at present freer and more versatile without it. If the _phonoplay_ is
ever established, since it will double the machinery, it must needs
double its prices. It will be the illustrated phonograph, in a more
expensive theatre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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