preventive. Its great danger is that it may become rigid and arbitrary. Special reasons, however, were advanced why in the case of the moving-picture preventive action should be taken. One of these was that the cinema theatre makes an extraordinary appeal to children, who comprise a large percentage of the average neigh- bourhood audience. But it could be answered that if the cinema was ever to become a mature art, it could not forever be restricted by standards of what might and might not be good for children. The best solution here seemed to lie in providing special performances for children; no good reason appeared why children should be encouraged or even permitted indiscriminately to attend the cinema theatre. A better plea for censorship was that the industry, having arisen in less than a quarter of a century, was still in a formative condition, without adequate artistic and moral standards. It was urged, there- fore, that censorship was necessary not only to protect the public but to protect the producer against his inability to perceive his own best interests. Such an argument clearly anticipated a period when censorship would be unnecessary; unfortunately experience points to the difficulty of abolishing any kind of bureaucratic agency when once it has become established. The continued existence of the British dramatic censorship, despite very great efforts to modify its powers, affords an excellent illustration of the tenacity of Government bureaus. It should be noted also that in the United States the censorship laws seemed to be designed partly as revenue measures, which of course still further entrenched them against attack. For these reasons the voluntary censorship undertaken by the Board of Film Censors in England and the National Board of Review in the United States would on the whole seem preferable to other methods of preventive supervision. In this connexion the following excerpt from the official statement of the American Board is significant: " The National Board's standards are, of course, progressive and will change with the lapse of time . . . becoming more ideal as the motion-picture in America emerges from its present condition as a new art. Moreover, the increased experience of the producers, the development of motion-picture artists, the classification of the theatres, the influence of more cultivated audiences, and the popular adoption of motion-pictures into education, all of which is even now in progress, will in time bring about conditions so different from the present that regulation may perhaps not be necessary."
Artistic Value. The close of the decade was marked by various controversies as to whether the cinema could be classified as an art. That discussion was in itself a valuable indication of the improving status of the moving-picture; ten years earlier the cinema was either ridiculed or ignored. Later critics very naturally sought to establish their case against the cinema on the obvious fact that a majority of the films were crude and childish, mostly slapstick farce and sentimental melodrama; but an argument evolved in this fashion has little to commend it; doubtless in the England of the 15th century it seemed equally impossible that the crude mystery and morality plays of the day should ever give rise to distinguished art. Yet these crude efforts were the precursors of the drama of Marlowe, of Jonson and of Shakespeare. This is not to say that friends of the cinema are looking forward to a Shakespeare of the films; the artistic values that can be achieved in the motion-picture are not commensurable with those which pertain to the written drama. What is contended is that, considered solely as a method of telling a story, the motion-picture is capable of achieving highly artistic results. Even sentimental melodrama as produced in the cinema became a more artistic type of narrative than the old popular melodrama of the stage. But the best producers were not content to have made only this degree of progress, and their finest achievements at least foreshadowed the develop- ment of singularly beautiful and expressive art.
Action and setting constitute the chief means of this art, and in both elements it has advantages over the older forms of narrative. The cinema can present action more successfully than the novel and hardly less effectively than the drama. In the ease with which it can represent and control the element of setting it has an immense superiority 'over both the novel and drama, though its possibilities in this direction were only beginning to be appreciated. Some writers, notably Prof. Hugo Munsterberg in his interesting study, The Photoplay (1916), insist that the essence of the new art lies in its ability to triumph over the ordinary limitations of mundane existence. "The photoplay," says Munsterberg, "tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination and
emotion." The plasticity of the motion-picture medium, its freedom from merely conventional restrictions of time and space, undoubtedly give fresh scope to the imagination and the power to weave new patterns out of the materials of existence. Possessing these advantages, the cinema lacks the means to tell any appreciable part of its story in words. Failure to appreciate the artistic possibilities of the moving-picture often arose from a failure to perceive that it must be regarded as an art quite different in method, if not in purpose, from that of essentially literary forms, particularly the spoken drama. It is not a literary art. It cannot rely on literary methods. This explains the lack of success that attended the efforts of many literary men, novelists and dramatists, to use this new medium. Its central purpose, namely to arouse emotion, is identical with that of the spoken drama; it is perhaps more amenable to fundamental laws of dramatic composition than many pro- ducers and directors seemed to realize. But in most respects it differs more widely from the accepted dramatic form than Shakespeare differs from Sophocles or Ibsen from both. In virtually surrendering dialogue, the motion-picture surrenders a form of expression upon which the dramatist relies very largely for the presentation of character and the clash of char- acter; it follows that a scene representing mental conflict, for example, must either be inadequately represented in the mov- ing-picture or expressed in a different way.
For this reason, the production of a successful motion-picture play makes the very highest demand on the skill and imagination of the scenario writer, the director, and the actor. In the composition of the story every scene and every element of the scene must possess an expressiveness which is quite unnecessary where words can be used to cover defects of action or setting. The art of sugges- tion must be pushed far beyond the conventional limits of the legitimate stage; an attitude, a look, a gesture, a bit of pantomime must be made to tell as much as pages of dialogue. There is no reason to disparage such a method ; in ordinary life we discern the nuances of character quite as much from facial expression as from what we are told by the person himself; the light in the eye often illuminates the mind better than the spoken word. Setting, also, may be made to reflect character ; it may show the world as the protagonist of the drama himself sees it, sometimes twisted and distorted, sometimes fair and alluring. Here at least is an opportunity to do what the legitimate drama could never do. Setting likewise may advance the plot; as Otis Skinner points out, sometimes a glove, a pistol, an empty chair, will tell a better story than action. To a much greater extent than the drama, the successful motion-picture requires the coordination of the efforts of the author, the actor and the producer: a play may have an existence of its own without ever having been produced on the stage, but a moving -picture scenario is the barest of skeletons before it is acted in front of a camera. The photoplay is thus a composite art, almost equally dependent on its various ele- ments. Some advance had been made in the decade 1910-20 in achieving a successful coordination of these elements, but no com- pletely adequate method or procedure for securing this result had been evolved, so that good acting was frequently wasted on ridicu- lous scenarios, while good stories were made childish by incompetent direction.
Film Actors. In an art so new, it is not surprising that the greatest reputations were made by actors whose appeal to the public is less a matter of circumstance than that of the scenario writer or the director. By reason of the extensive popularity of the motion-picture the names of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fair- banks, and Charles Chaplin had a renown that was no less than world-wide. Miss Pickford (family name Smith) was born in Toronto, Can., April 8 1893, the daughter of a character actress. She made her debut on the stage at the age of five, but her first marked success was in motion-pictures, and she after- wards appeared as leading woman in many highly successful photoplays, among them Tess of the Storm Country, Cinderella, Fanchon the Cricket, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, etc. For many she typified the charm of innocent girlhood. On March 28 1920 she married Douglas Fairbanks. She was in 1920 head of the Mary Pickford Film Company. Fairbanks, who was born May 23 1883 in Denver, Col., attended for a time the Colorado School of Mines. He appeared in a minor r61e on the New York stage in 1901; later he was " starred " in several comedies and musical pieces, after which he left the stage for motion-pictures, where his engaging smile and athletic prowess stood him in
