But let us consider the details of the matter. The stage has its exits
and entrances at the side and back. The standard photoplays have their
exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the
most stirring mob and battle scenes. In Judith of Bethulia, though the
people seem to be coming from everywhere and going everywhere, when we
watch close, we see that the individuals enter at the near right-hand
corner and exit at the near left-hand corner, or enter at the near
left-hand corner and exit at the near right-hand corner.
Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he
goes out at the side and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides.
With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out
that way. In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain
in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a
human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads,
disappearing when largest. There is an explosive power about the mildest
motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse. The people left
in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing cyclops.
Likewise, when the actor enters again, his mechanical importance is
overwhelming. Therefore, for his first entrance the motion picture star
does not require the preparations that are made on the stage. The
support does not need to warm the spectators to the problem, then talk
them into surrender.
When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries
to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one
follows. He does not realize that his camera-born opportunity to magnify
persons and things instantly, to interweave them as actors on one level,
to alternate scenes at the slightest whim, are the big substitutes for
dialogue. By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: cottage,
field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation
between three places rather than three persons. By alternating the
picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When
two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects
rather than their voices. The collector presents a bill: the adventurer
shows him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it. Moving
objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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