Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

To sum up. The camera would do better if it would learn self-denial and observe the law of artistic economy, keep its people consistently in one plane and out of boats and motor cars, soigner its crises a little more, and avoid publishing correspondence. And it should slacken its pace a bit. You may take the Heraclitean philosophy—πάντα χωρεῖ—a little too literally. The movies would be all the more moving for moving slower.

For the real fun of rapid motion, appropriately used, give me Mutt and Jeff. Mutt, buried in the sand, with a head like an egg, prompts an ostrich to lay another egg, from which emerges a brood of little ostriches. Jeff goes out to shoot them, but his shots glance off in harmless wreaths of smoke. When Mutt and Jeff exchange ideas you see them actually travelling like an electric spark along the wire, from brain to brain. The ostrich hoists Mutt out of the sand by the breeches. Collapse of Jeff. It suggests a drawing by Caran d’Ache in epileptic jerks. The natural history pictures, too, the deer and the birds, strike one as admirable examples of what animated photography can do for us in the way of instruction as well as amusement.... And the orchestra has been playing all this time, Beethoven and Mozart, a “separate ecstasy.” And again I stumble over the subaltern, and wonder to find people moving so slowly in Piccadilly Circus.

TIME AND THE FILM

There was a gentleman in Molière, frequently mentioned since and now for my need to be unblushingly mentioned again, who said to another gentleman, about never mind what, that le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire. But Molière belonged to that effete art the “spoken drama,” which we learn, from America, has sunk to be used mainly as an advertisement of the play which is subsequently to be filmed out of it. He wrote in the dark or pre-film ages, and could not know what an all-important part le temps was to play in l’affaire of the film. Among its innumerable and magnificent activities the film is an instructor of youth, and it seems, from a letter which the Rev. Dr. Lyttelton has written to The Times, it instructs at a pace which is a little too quick for the soaring human boy. “Elephants,” the reverend Doctor pathetically complains, “are shown scuttling about like antelopes,” and so the poor boy mixes up antelopes and elephants and gets his zoology all wrong. I should myself have innocently supposed that this magical acceleration of pace is one of the great charms of the film for the boy. It not only provides him with half-a-dozen pictures in the time it would have taken him to read one of them in print (to say nothing of his being saved the trouble of reading, learning the alphabet, and other pedagogic nuisances altogether), but it offers him something much more exciting and romantic than his ordinary experience. He knows that at the Zoo elephants move slowly, but here on the film they are taught, in the American phrase, to “step lively,” and are shown scuttling about like antelopes. A world wherein the ponderous and slow elephant is suddenly endowed by the magician’s wand with the lightness and rapidity of the antelope—what enhancement for boys, aye, and for grown-ups too!

Indeed, it seems to me that the greatest achievement of the film is its triumph over time. Some amateurs may find its chief charm in the perfect “Cupid’s bow” of its heroines’ mouths; others in the remarkable English prose of its explanatory accompaniments; others, again, in its exquisite humour of protagonists smothered in flour or soap-lather or flattened under runaway motor-cars. I admit the irresistible fascination of these delights and can quite understand how they come to be preferred to the high-class opera company which has been introduced at the Capitol, New York, to entertain “between pictures.” But I still think the prime merit of the film—the real reason for which last year more than enough picture films to encircle the earth at the Equator left the United States of America for foreign countries—lies in its ability to play as it will with time. The mere acceleration of pace (which is the ordinary game it plays)—the fierce galloping of horses across prairies, the miraculous speed of motor-cars, elephants scuttling about like antelopes—gives a sharp sense of exhilaration, of victory over sluggish nature. And even here there is an educational result that ought to console Dr. Lyttelton. The rate of plant growth is multiplied thousands of times so that we are enabled actually to see the plants growing, expanding from bud to flower under our eyes. But there is also the retardation of pace, which is even more wonderful. A diver is shown plunging into the water and swimming at a rate which allows the minutest movement of the smallest muscle to be clearly seen. This is an entirely beautiful thing; but I should suppose that the film, by its power of exhibiting movements naturally too quick for the eye at whatever slower rate is desired, must have extraordinary use for scientific investigations. This, at any rate, is a better use for the film than that sometimes claimed for it in the field of morality. I look with suspicion on those films, as I do on those “spoken” plays, that propose to do us good by exhibiting the details of this or that “social evil.” Some philanthropic societies, I believe, have introduced such pictures in all good faith. But many of their producers are, like the others, merely out to make money, and in every case I imagine their patrons to be drawn to them not by any moral impulse, but by a prurient curiosity—the desire to have a peep into the forbidden.

But to return to the question of time. It has its importance, too, in the “spoken drama,” but it ceases to be a question of visible pace. You cannot make real men and women scuttle about like antelopes. You can only play tricks with the clock. The act-drop is invaluable for getting your imaginary time outstripping your real time:—

jumping o’er times,

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass.