Over twenty years ago, Mr. Edison stated in his patent specification in referring to his ability to take forty-six photographs per second, “I have also been able to hold the tape at rest for nine tenths of the time.” It was probably not intended to convey the impression that he could take anything approaching ten times the number of pictures, as it is of course necessary to provide for rest periods; but it is significant that very recently a machine has been perfected for portraying such rapid motion as projectiles in flight, etc., which takes the almost inconceivable number of two hundred and fifty pictures per second. Indeed, experiments are in progress which promise even four hundred per second.
Films are also being utilized to show the news of the day. A member of THE CENTURY staff was in Rome last year when the king was fired upon. Two days later, in Perugia, he saw a moving-picture of the king appearing on the balcony of the palace before an enormous crowd assembled to congratulate him on his escape. More recently a London theater which shows the news of the day in motion-pictures is regularly opened and important events are shown on the screen two hours after their occurrence, a promptness approaching that of the press “extra.”
TRICK FILMS
THE old saying is that figures do not lie; but a modern one is that they can be made to. Just so the trick film places before one’s very eyes what to one’s inner consciousness is impossible. Two favorite devices of the trickster are brought into play in a recent film which shows a cleverly produced romance woven about such an absurdity as the painting of a landscape by the switching of a cow’s tail. The film tells the story of a ne’er-do-well, in love, pretending to study art. The father frowns on the match, but promises his favor if the son will produce an example of his skill. In desperation the brush and palette are taken to a field, and while the lovers are despairing, a friendly cow approaches the easel. The switching begins at once, and a change in the canvas is seen with every movement until a creditable painting appears. What has appeared astonishing would have attracted less attention had the audience seen that the pictures showing the restless cow were taken at intervals, between which, while the camera was stopped, a real artist worked on the picture, and stepped to one side when the camera was put into action.
The work of the trickster is shown to advantage in reversing a film depicting a building operation. When run backward, a brand-new structure is seen to be pulled to pieces, and its various members hauled away in wagons running backward.
One operator, who had shown boys diving from a high spring-board, has related how, by reversing the film, he let his audience see the boys come out of the water feet foremost, rise through the air the same way, and by a graceful turn land on their feet on the spring-board. Another has told how, by the same reverse motion, firemen, who a moment before had rescued occupants from a burning building, were seen to carry their victims back into the flames. We may perhaps look for some of these enterprising tricksters to illustrate the possibility of that expression of impossibility, “the unscrambling of eggs,” or for one of them, with rare presence of mind, to catch on his lens an accident shattering a number of valuable cut-glass pieces, and then to convert a loss into profit by exhibiting the film reversed, and showing with wonderful effectiveness a mass of broken glass ascend through space and form itself on the table into the perfect originals.
THE PHOTO-PLAY
THE moving-picture has developed an important branch in the field of literature. Several periodicals are devoted entirely to the subject, and in many of the standard magazines can be found regular advertisements for short “photo-plays.” The scenario-writers engaged in the work do not seem to be able to keep up with the increasing demand. Standard plays are pressed into service, and the leading managers and actors of the world are found among those producing the 5000 plays which moving-picture audiences require every year.
The drama on the white sheet dates back to the autumn of 1894, when Alexander Black of New York brought out the first “picture-play” before a distinguished literary audience. This first picture-play, called “Miss Jerry,” like later white-sheet plays by the same author and artist, was accompanied by a spoken monologue giving all the speeches and covering all the transitions of the action. The pictures, the making of which was begun before the appearance of the motion-picture device, were produced in series, indoors and out, from a living cast, as in the present plays, and were put on the screen with registered backgrounds by the aid of a double stereopticon at the rate of from three to five per minute, thus presenting stages of action—a prophecy of the continuous action perfected in the plays of to-day.
When Mr. Black gave “Miss Jerry” for the first time in Boston, Edward Everett Hale, greeting the author after the performance, exclaimed, “Black, it’s so inevitable that I’m chagrined to think that I didn’t invent it myself.” It seemed inevitable, also, that the motion-picture machine would take up the play idea; yet for a considerable time motion exploitation was confined to short, episodic films. Indeed, the early motion films were far less smooth in effect than the modern product, and at the beginning a prolonged run appeared like a hazardous undertaking for the eyes. Within the present season certain films have been run in almost unbroken continuity (as in Bernhardt’s “Queen Elizabeth”) for an hour and a half, which is to say that the motion-pictures are now giving the full dramatic progression suggested by the original lantern-play as seen by Dr. Hale.