Edgar Lee Masters looked about him and discovered the village graveyard,
and made it as wonderful as Noah's Ark, or Adam naming the animals, by
supplying honest inscriptions to the headstones. Such stories can be told
by the Chinese theatrical system as well. As many different films could
be included under the general title: "Seven Old Families, and Why they
Went to Smash." Or a less ominous series would be "Seven Victorious
Souls." For there are triumphs every day under the drab monotony of an
apparently defeated town: conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners.
Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral for this chapter because
there was conscience behind it. First: the rectitude of the Chinese
actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic tradition alive, a
tradition that was bequeathed from the ancient generations. Then the
artistic integrity of the men who readapted the tradition for western
consumption, and their religious attitude that kept the high teaching and
devout feeling for human life intact in the play. Then the zeal of the
Drama League that indorsed it for the country. Then the earnest work of
the Coburn Players who embodied it devoutly, so that the whole company
became dear friends forever.
By some such ladder of conscience as this can the local scenario be
endowed, written, acted, filmed, and made a real part of the community
life. The Yellow Jacket was a drama, not a photoplay. This chapter does
not urge that it be readapted for a photoplay in San Francisco or
anywhere else. But a kindred painting-in-motion, something as beautiful
and worthy and intimate, in strictly photoplay terms, might well be the
flower of the work of the local groups of film actors.
Harriet Monroe's magazine, "Poetry" (Chicago), has given us a new sect,
the Imagists:--Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, Amy
Lowell, F.S. Flint, D.H. Lawrence, and others. They are gathering
followers and imitators. To these followers I would say: the Imagist
impulse need not be confined to verse. Why would you be imitators of
these leaders when you might be creators in a new medium? There is a
clear parallelism between their point of view in verse and the
Intimate-and-friendly Photoplay, especially when it is developed from the
standpoint of the last part of chapter nine, _space measured without
sound plus time measured without sound_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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