This discussion will be resumed on another plane in the eighth chapter:
Sculpture-in-Motion.
Having read thus far, why not close the book and go round the corner to a
photoplay theatre? Give the preference to the cheapest one. _The Action
Picture will be inevitable. Since this chapter was written, Charlie
Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks have given complete department store
examples of the method, especially Chaplin in the brilliantly constructed
Shoulder Arms, and Fairbanks in his one great piece of acting, in The
Three Musketeers_.
CHAPTER III
THE INTIMATE PHOTOPLAY
Let us take for our platform this sentence: THE MOTION PICTURE ART IS A
GREAT HIGH ART, NOT A PROCESS OF COMMERCIAL MANUFACTURE. The people I
hope to convince of this are (1) The great art museums of America,
including the people who support them in any way, the people who give the
current exhibitions there or attend them, the art school students in the
corridors below coming on in the same field; (2) the departments of
English, of the history of the drama, of the practice of the drama, and
the history and practice of "art" in that amazingly long list of our
colleges and universities--to be found, for instance, in the World
Almanac; (3) the critical and literary world generally. Somewhere in this
enormous field, piled with endowments mountain high, it should be
possible to establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine
art. Readers who do not care for the history of any art, readers who
have neither curiosity nor aspiration in regard to any of the ten or
eleven muses who now dance around Apollo, such shabby readers had best
lay the book down now. Shabby readers do not like great issues. My poor
little sermon is concerned with a great issue, the clearing of the way
for a critical standard, whereby the ultimate photoplay may be judged. I
cannot teach office-boys ways to make "quick money" in the "movies." That
seems to be the delicately implied purpose of the mass of books on the
photoplay subject. They are, indeed, a sickening array. Freeburg's book
is one of the noble exceptions. And I have paid tribute elsewhere to John
Emerson and Anita Loos. They have written a crusading book, and many
crusading articles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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