This principle of Mr. Ingram's is the ideal one on which to work. It is the principle of other arts beside that of producing motion pictures. It is the principle of creating something by implication and suggestion rather than actual reproduction. This, however, detracts not one whit from the credit that is Mr. Ingram's for being the first director to apply it to picture production in a consistent and effective way.
Mr. Ingram continues: “Whether a scene is being made of a beach-comber's shanty, an underworld basement saloon, a pool-hall, a ship's cabin, a shoe factory or a smart restaurant, not only should the aim be to convince the audience, but enough study should be given the subject, in each case, to convince the habitues of any of these places that they are in familiar surroundings.
“One of the most interesting sets that I have ever handled from an atmospheric standpoint was the interior of a derelict ship, beached, and become the hang-out of beach-combers, in 'Under Crimson Skies,' a production some years old. Conrad, the master writer of the sea, never offered a more wonderful opportunity for color than did this episode in the story provided by J. G. Hawks, with its thrilling climax in the battle in the surf between the white man and the black giant.
“In 'The Four Horsemen,' the basement resort of the Buenos Aires bocca, or river front hang-out, furnished plenty of chances to make colorful pictures—yet had I been literal in the way I handled it the effect would not have been anything nearly as realistic. For I doubt if anything just like that dive ever existed in the Argentine or anywhere else for that matter.
“The set was a Spanish version of a bowery cellar saloon that I used in a picture which I made several years before and re-created to suit the episode suggested in the great Ibanez novel. The signs on the wall, the types of men, in fact all the bits of atmosphere in the place were the results of painstaking efforts to get “color” and local atmosphere into the set. In one corner a sign hung which was the advertisement of a notorious 'crimp,' a sailor's boarding-house keeper, whose establishment was on the bocca for years. An old sailor who was working in the scene and who had lived in Buenos Aires came to me and said: 'I've been shanghaied by that blood-sucker.'
“I have gone so far as to have my principals speak the language of the country in which the picture is laid. Few of them like to go to this trouble but it helps them materially in keeping in the required atmosphere. The results on the screen are so encouraging that after they see what it has done for them the players don't mind the extra study that this course entails.
“I know of no branch of a director's job that is more fascinating than getting color and atmosphere into the settings—thinking out bits of 'business,' little flashes of life which, though only on the screen for a few moments, can give an air of reality to an entire sequence of scenes, that would perhaps otherwise be lacking.
“In screening Balzac, as I did in making 'The Conquering Power,' fine atmosphere and characterization are of more vital importance than incident, for nine times out of ten it is the characters in a great novel that we remember—rather than the plot.”
Mr. Ingram is going on his way, creating distinctly unusual pictures and one of the chief reasons is this great attention that he pays to atmosphere by suggestion rather than actual reproduction. Novelists call atmosphere “background.” The terms are the same. The novelist creates his background, his atmosphere, by painting pictures with words, suggesting the locale and environment of history. Thus with Mr. Ingram. He suggests scenes in his pictures and refuses to label them. In this respect he is farther advanced than most any director in the art today.
This idea of suggestion can easily be carried too far, however. The German producer who turned out “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” carried it to the point of alleged futuristic “art.” He aimed to suggest but instead he puzzled completely. The producer of “The Golem,” another German picture, came nearer the point. But it appears that neither of them equalled or much less surpassed the work of Mr. Ingram in his two fine productions already mentioned.