FILM PLAYS.

Hokitika Guardian, 4 May 1918, Page 4

FILM PLAYS.

CAN THE BEST AUTHORS” WRITE THEM ?

(By r W. L. George.)

A little while ago Dr Marie Slopes delivered the following pronouncement: “The best living authors must be encouraged to write film stories.” Now we cannot refuse our attention to the views of a member of the Kinematograph Commission of Inquiry', but I venture to suggest that it is hardly, useful tq encourage the “ best ” authors to write for the film, this because they cannot do it. Nobody to-day' is going to deny the value, of the kinema as a means oft, education; the times when it devoted itself to grclss farce and to cowboy drama are passing away, and it is fast becoming part of the educational machine. Indeed, I should like much of our school history to be taught by the kinema. for many of us find history dull because it is just print; if Charles I and Cromwell were flesh and blood, history would come alive Thus I hope we may yet see Mr Thomas Hardy'.’s play', “The Dynasts.” on the' film ; its main scenes, the death of Nelson, Waterloo, and the deep roll of its spoken lines “the past into the present bring.” The kinema can teach us history ; it can teach us much that the botanist and zoologist, hide in dull books (I have a vivid memory of a Cxerman film of wild beasts in the jungle) ; it has shown during the present war, by r the Somme film and especially the magnificeut Italian mountain film, by War Savings and Food Economy films, that millions of imaginations can be stirred which the printed word has left cold, but to say that the best authors can be fitted into the kinema plans, the best books and plays filmed, is quite auother story. I confidently assert that once filmed the best books are likely to become the worst.

* _ *■ * * * Here the kinema enthusiast will break in and say: “Wait! You don’t know what the film can do ; look at what it has already done.’’ Well, we all know it has done wonders, but wonders cease, and not even a war prophet would say that the time will come when we sell ale by the yard. Certainly tbe march of the kinema has been triumphant. When I saw my first film, in Brussels in 1905, I was seized wifh enthusiasm. It happened to he the first attempt to sho,w the making of a newspaper, and then I saw no limits to the powers of the kinema; later years have done much to strengthen that old irnpres siou, and even to-day it seems that the kinema may beat its records. In some ways it has asserted a definite superiority over the tlieati-e, notably as regards boldness of conception and execution. The film makes nothing of reproducing a ba f He or a tmrrie me, and no doubt it. will soon be able to afford the cost of a specially arranged naval action. There it has the theatre beaten. Films such as “ The Birth of a Nation” or “ Intolerance ” oonld not be equalled by a ten times enlarged Drury Lane ; no theatre could find room for the bombardment of Atlanta or for the amazing revelry in Babylon. For the theatre is hopelessly handicapped by its canvas scenery and can never set its scenes in impenetrable forests and eternal hills; nor can it hope to use real crowds, crowds of a thousand people in revolt or merriment, And, again, the machinery of

the theatre is clumsy ; it is tied down by' expense to two or three settings, one for each act, and so long must elapse while scenes are shifted that the interest of the audience must wander. But the theatro has other fields.'

The play' and the novel hold the field of subtle emotions into which the kinema can only stagger. This because good kinema acting is gross acting. On the film the raising of an eyebrow isrlinvisible. and, as'you know, most crises in life are decided by' a movement as small; so the film actor must have features like indiarubber and produce with that fatal eyebrow a contortion that, will stir his hair. The producer sees to it that the actor forces expression when tire heroine enters he must cry to the hero, “ Register joy ! ” Anc the poor wretch “registers ” joy in •< way that would frighten off the nor mal beloved.

* * * # * I do not say that the kinema has not produced remarkable players: Charlie Chaplin (a natural droll, a peer of Dan Leno), Mary Pick ford, Norah Talmadge, are masters of their craft, but masters only of a very' rough craft. They' are excessive in activity*, exaggerated in movement, caricatural in face.

With this goes the public demand lor continual changes of scenes. Every film is a, series of jerks, and if it were not it is possible that the audience would tire. Evidently it does not tire of the film as shown today', though I, for one find it in •-- deuing to fix my eyes for- lor-.scene is on a rural scene and then to see, it hurled into the past by a, scene at a, smart hotel. Life does not procee d like that; it is more leisurely, If, therefore, the film cannot adjust itself to our slower pace it cannot t -an-late hie, cannot embody a work of art, and is not worth a literary, man’s while. /r rhe lack of the spoken word must also hold it down, for pantomime c.-n no more express a romnlicated e stale of mind than a ballet dancer’s twirl can convey information. As the i-u-d film is the one where not a s-.0-mo word is flashed upon the screen. «i is obvious that only simple shnies rai:

be told ;jas the stories of life are o. t simple, -xhen the kinema ear not f-ft 1 the best. It tries; it has r ried “Justice,” “Julius Caesar-,” “ Hamlet;” without mucli success, tor tu such plays the word is greater thatthe fact. Yet it might encounter oh. vs and books that would foil it more-: 1 doubt if it. could reproduce the laugh, ing tears of “ Peter Pau ” unless Peter himself could speak them; lam quite sure that it coiild not “register ” the epigram- of Mr Bernhard Shaw, white no Mr Britling could ever “see it through” if his complicated changes of mind were magnified by the film into mental convulsions

It seems to me that in the future the kinema must seek its own field in the elementary etnotpns ; it can approach art by developing moderation, by avoiding vulgar repetition of detail, such as the cradle scene in “ Intolerance,” but to expect of it that it shall . express the delicate relationships of men is as unfair Jo the film as to the intelligence of the spectator.