Supposing it is a fisher-maiden's romance. In the background the waves toss in one tempo. Owing to the sail, the boat rocks in another. In the foreground the tree alternately bends and recovers itself in the breeze, making more opposition than the sail. In still another time-unit the smoke rolls from the chimney, making no resistance to the wind. In another unit, the lovers pace the sand. Yet there is one least common multiple in which all move. This the producing genius should sense and make part of the dramatic structure, and it would have its bearing on the periodic appearance of the minor and major crises. Films like this, you say, would be hard to make. Yes. Here is the place to affirm that the one-reel Intimate Photoplay will no doubt be the form in which this type of time-and-space music is developed. The music of silent motion is the most abstract of moving picture attributes and will probably remain the least comprehended. Like the quality of Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, or that of Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, it will not satisfy the sudden and the brash. * * * * * The reader will find in his round of the picture theatres many single scenes and parts of plays that elucidate the title of this chapter. Often the first two-thirds of the story will fit it well. Then the producers, finding that, for reasons they do not understand, with the best and most earnest actors they cannot work the three reels into an emotional climax, introduce some stupid disaster and rescue utterly irrelevant to the character-parts and the paintings that have preceded. Whether the alleged thesis be love, hate, or ambition, cottage charm, daisy dell sweetness, or the ivy beauty of an ancient estate, the resource for the final punch seems to be something like a train-wreck. But the transfiguration of the actors, not their destruction or rescue, is the goal. The last moment of the play is great, not when it is a grandiose salvation from a burning house, that knocks every delicate preceding idea in the head, but a tableau that is as logical as the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty after the hero has explored all the charmed castle. CHAPTER X FURNITURE, TRAPPINGS, AND INVENTIONS IN MOTION The Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Pictures, paintings-in-motion, the Splendor Pictures, many and diverse. It seems far-fetched, perhaps, to complete the analogy and say they are architecture-in-motion; yet, patient reader, unless I am mistaken, that assumption can be given a value in time without straining your imagination.