When men work for the high degrees in the universities, they labor on a
piece of literary conspiracy called a thesis which no one outside the
university hears of again. The gist of this research work that is dead to
the democracy, through the university merits of thoroughness, moderation
of statement, and final touch of discovery, would have a chance to live
and grip the people in a motion picture transcript, if not a photoplay.
It would be University Extension. The relentless fire of criticism which
the heads of the departments would pour on the production before they
allowed it to pass would result in a standardization of the sense of
scientific fact over the land. Suppose the film has the coat of arms of
the University of Chicago along with the name of the young graduate whose
thesis it is. He would have a chance to reflect credit on the university
even as much as a foot-ball player.
Large undertakings might be under way, like those described in the
chapter on Architecture-in-Motion. But these would require much more than
the ordinary outlay for thesis work, less, perhaps, than is taken for
Athletics. Lyman Howe and several other world-explorers have already set
the pace in the more human side of the educative film. The list of Mr.
Howe's offerings from the first would reveal many a one that would have
run the gantlet of a university department. He points out a new direction
for old energies, whereby professors may become citizens.
Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, be allowed to ponder over
scientific truth. He is at present the victim of the alleged truth of the
specious and sentimental variety of photograph. It gives the precise
edges of the coat or collar of the smirking masher and the exact fibre in
the dress of the jumping-jack. The eye grows weary of sharp points and
hard edges that mean nothing. All this idiotic precision is going to
waste. It should be enlisted in the cause of science and abated
everywhere else. The edges in art are as mysterious as in science they
are exact.
Some of the higher forms of the Intimate Moving Picture play should be
endowed by local coteries representing their particular region. Every
community of fifty thousand has its group of the cultured who have
heretofore studied and imitated things done in the big cities. Some of
these coteries will in exceptional cases become creative and begin to
express their habitation and name. The Intimate Photoplay is capable of
that delicacy and that informality which should characterize neighborhood
enterprises.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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