The Art of the Moving Picture

MP3 Audio CD. The Art of the Moving Picture

BOOK I--THE GENERAL PHOTOPLAY SITUATION IN AMERICA, JANUARY 1, 1922

Especially as Viewed from the Heights of the Civic Centre at Denver,
Colorado, and the Denver Art Museum, Which Is to Be a Leading Feature of
This Civic Centre


In the second chapter of book two, on page 8, the theoretical outline
begins, with a discussion of the Photoplay of Action. I put there on
record the first crude commercial films that in any way establish the
principle. There can never be but one first of anything, and if the
negatives of these films survive the shrinking and the warping that comes
with time, they will still be, in a certain sense, classic, and ten years
hence or two years hence will still be better remembered than any films
of the current releases, which come on like newspapers, and as George Ade
says:--"Nothing is so dead as yesterday's newspaper." But the first
newspapers, and the first imprints of Addison's Spectator, and the first
Almanacs of Benjamin Franklin, and the first broadside ballads and the
like, are ever collected and remembered. And the lists of films given in
books two and three of this work are the only critical and carefully
sorted lists of the early motion pictures that I happen to know anything
about. I hope to be corrected if I am too boastful, but I boast that my
lists must be referred to by all those who desire to study these
experiments in their beginnings. So I let them remain, as still vivid in
the memory of all true lovers of the photoplay who have watched its
growth, fascinated from the first. But I would add to the list of Action
Films of chapter two the recent popular example, Douglas Fairbanks in The
Three Musketeers. That is perhaps the most literal "Chase-Picture" that
was ever really successful in the comm