Certainly the history of these enterprises is full of adventures worthy
to rank with the most daring feats in the newspaper world. We hear that
when the investiture of the Prince of Wales was performed at Carnarvon
at four o'clock in the afternoon, the public of London at ten o'clock of
the same day saw the ceremony on the screen in a moving picture twelve
minutes in length. The distance between the two places is two hundred
miles. The film was seven hundred and fifty feet long. It had been
developed and printed in a special express train made up of long freight
cars transformed into dark rooms and fitted with tanks for the
developing and washing and with a machine for printing and drying. Yet
on the whole the current events were slowly losing ground even in
Europe, while America had never given such a large share of interest to
this rival of the newspaper. It is claimed that the producers in America
disliked these topical pictures because the accidental character of the
events makes the production irregular and interferes too much with the
steady preparation of the photoplays. Only when the war broke out, the
great wave of excitement swept away this apathy. The pictures from the
trenches, the marches of the troops, the life of the prisoners, the
movements of the leaders, the busy life behind the front, and the action
of the big guns absorbed the popular interest in every corner of the
world. While the picturesque old-time war reporter has almost
disappeared, the moving picture man has inherited all his courage,
patience, sensationalism, and spirit of adventure.
A greater photographic achievement, however, than the picturing of the
social and historic events was the marvelous success of the
kinematograph with the life of nature. No explorer in recent years has
crossed distant lands and seas without a kinematographic outfit. We
suddenly looked into the most intimate life of the African wilderness.
There the elephants and giraffes and monkeys passed to the waterhole,
not knowing that the moving picture man was turning his crank in the top
of a tree. We followed Scott and Shackleton into the regions of eternal
ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the height of the
aeroplane, and every child in Europe knows now the wonders of Niagara.
But the kinematographer has not sought nature only where it is gigantic
or strange; he follows its path with no less admirable effect when it is
idyllic. The brook in the woods, the birds in their nest, the flowers
trembling in the wind have brought their charm to the delighted eye more
and more with the progress of the new art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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