On the other hand perhaps the scene of suffering that our director will be called upon to reproduce on the screen is one less important or vivid than his own. It might be a scene of a little boy stammering out his first lesson in school. Suffering, to be sure, but not of such great magnitude. In this case the line A is merely extended downward until the little boy's emotional arc is reached.
To reduce such a process of the intellect is indeed dangerous. An individual's emotional experience is no matter of diagrammatical science. However this science is purely imaginary. The whole process is carried out in the director's brain. It is only the fact that it is here reduced to cold type that makes it seem rather brutal.
Perhaps certain directors will scoff at the idea but to those it may be replied that they use such a process of reasoning whether they know it or not. The whole working out of the scheme is mechanical and subconscious to a certain extent.
Perhaps, too, there are those among the directors who believe that their moments of supreme suffering, park bench or otherwise, were far greater than Napoleon's sufferings. Nevertheless their own arcs of emotional experience still serve their good steads. Such a director merely reverses the process and goes down the line A until he reaches what he believes the arc of Napoleon, instead of going up the line. Such conceit on the part of the director does not, however, lead to the best results.
By the same process the director is able to live in his mind the greatest case of self-sacrifice that the world has ever known, provided that at one time in his career he has made a self-sacrifice that loomed of tremendous proportions at the time. His line of sacrifice, B, is followed to the point where it cuts the arc containing the greatest sacrificial act of the world. And of course on the line, B, as on all the other lines from all the other points innumerable other arcs cut across representing cases of emotion between the greatest and the humblest.
And so by his own experience, no matter how small or how large it is in comparison to the experience he is to picturize, the director is able to give a realistic and sensitive representation of it on the motion picture screen.
The case holds the same with all the other emotions of life. Perhaps with the case of love it is a bit different. For in the matter of other emotions the director may grant that someone else has experienced them in greater degree than he. But with the matter of his own romance or romances—no! All directors have no hesitancy in claiming, only to themselves of course, that theirs is the greatest in the world. Consequently there is no line C, but just the point. It is stationary. The director follows it neither up nor down to reach out for some similar point on another arc. Thus it is that romantic scenes are quite the most frequently done realistically and properly of all the emotional scenes contrived for the screen. This time the director's conceit does not stand in his way.
For the rest the great director's arc of emotional experience contains every emotion, every cross and mixture of emotions, that he has lived through during his life. His arc contains hundreds of lines, each one distinguished from the other by less than a hair's breadth. And yet, when he comes to employ the arc in his work, the exact line he desires immediately stands out in bold relief from the others and the director sets to work upon it.
Thus the greatest directors of today are the men who have run the greatest gamut of emotional experience. To converse with D. W. Griffith is to instantly realize that here is a man who has suffered, sacrificed, lost, loved, triumphed. His brain is a storehouse of emotional experience, his own particular arc contains so many points upon it that a dozen times a dozen alphabets would not suffice to represent them all.
Thomas H. Ince has confessed to tramping Broadway searching for work. Chance led him to the old Biograph studio. Today he is among the greatest producers in the art. And it is a safe wager that his beginnings and struggles have not been obliterated from his mind by his success—rather they have been responsible for it.