The writer has seen hundreds of productions since this one.  He has described it from memory.  It came out in a time when the American people paid no attention to the producer or the cast.  It may have many technical crudities by present-day standards.  But the root of the matter is there.  And Springfield knew it.  It was brought back to our town many times.  It was popular in both the fashionable picture show houses and the cheapest, dirtiest hole in the town.  It will soon be reissued by the Vitagraph Company.  Every student of American Art should see this film.

The same exultation that went into it, the faculty for commanding the great spirits of history and making visible the unseen powers of the air, should be applied to Crowd Pictures which interpret the non-sectarian prayers of the broad human race.

The pageant of Religious Splendor is the final photoplay form in the classification which this work seeks to establish.  Much of what follows will be to reenforce the heads of these first discourses.  Further comment on the Religious Photoplay may be found in the eleventh chapter, entitled “Architecture-in-Motion.”

CHAPTER VIII

SCULPTURE-IN-MOTION

The outline is complete.  Now to reenforce it.  Pictures of Action Intimacy and Splendor are the foundation colors in the photoplay, as red, blue, and yellow are the basis of the rainbow.  Action Films might be called the red section; Intimate Motion Pictures, being colder and quieter, might be called blue; and Splendor Photoplays called yellow, since that is the hue of pageants and sunshine.

Another way of showing the distinction is to review the types of gesture.  The Action Photoplay deals with generalized pantomime:  the gesture of the conventional policeman in contrast with the mannerism of the stereotyped preacher.  The Intimate Film gives us more elusive personal gestures:  the difference between the table manners of two preachers in the same restaurant, or two policemen.  A mark of the Fairy Play is the gesture of incantation, the sweep of the arm whereby Mab would transform a prince into a hawk.  The other Splendor Films deal with the total gestures of crowds:  the pantomime of a torch-waving mass of men, the drill of an army on the march, or the bending of the heads of a congregation receiving the benediction.

Another way to demonstrate the thesis is to use the old classification of poetry:  dramatic, lyric, epic.  The Action Play is a narrow form of the dramatic.  The Intimate Motion Picture is an equivalent of the lyric.  In the seventeenth chapter it is shown that one type of the Intimate might be classed as imagist.  And obviously the Splendor Pictures are the equivalent of the epic.

But perhaps the most adequate way of showing the meaning of this outline is to say that the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the Fairy Pageant, along with the rest of the Splendor Pictures, may be described as architecture-in-motion.  This chapter will discuss the bearing of the phrase sculpture-in-motion.  It will relate directly to chapter two.