Prospero And The Pictures

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

Fer. This is a most majesticke vision, and Harmonious charmingly: may I be bold To thinke these spirits?

Pro. Spirits, which by mine Art

I have from their confines call'd to enact My present fancies.

Fer. Let me live here ever,

So rare a wondred Father, and a wise

Makes this place Paradise.

SINCE the somewhat morganatic marriage of literature to the "movies" there have been but few "majesticke visions." Many experiments have been made in the adapting of novels and stories to the screen, and much time and money have been wasted. So has much sage advice. Nevertheless, we should like to venture a suggestion.

We feel that in their choice of literature the producers have overlooked one realm of fiction peculiarly adapted to transformation into moving pictures, by reason of the mechanical resources of the latter. 'We refer to what we may roughly term the "literature of fantasy"—a type of literature out of which the stage finds it mechanically impossible to make convincing plays, but out of which the devices of the movie camera could easily create not only ocular delights but magic illusions not to be bettered even by the most masterly writing. Yet the movies remain content with mere "trick films" and animated cartoons, and, when they turn to stories, plunge heavily on ultra-sensational and ultra-moral dramas of modern life, with plots the most puerile, sentimental, and obvious.

Yet we believe the producer of "pictures" might be a veritable Prospero at enchanting many Ferdinands, figured as his audience. Certainly there is an Ariel in his service at the wave of whose wand any optical illusion is possible, from the djinn of the Arabian Nights taking substance from the spiralling smoke of the fisherman's jar to the comic possibilities of such a masterpiece of short fiction as H. G. Wells's "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," where a greatly imaginative—and profoundly human—fantasy could be set forth with delightful actuality.

There is also a large, almost unexplored field in fairy tales both ancient and modern, in weird and fantastic poetry, in the prose of writers who let the lightning of truly creative imagination or the rainbows of quaint fancy play upon the borderland between the real and the unreal. As diverse writers as Poe, James Stephens, Wells (in his earlier work), Anstey, Coleridge, Barrie, and many others could be named. Yes, we are perfectly aware that Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton" has been produced—as "Male and Female."

For, if there is an Ariel in Prospero's service, there is also a Caliban.

Pro. (Aside.) I had forgot that foule conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederatest
Against my life : the minute of their plott
Is almost come.

The fact remains that the production of solid, stodgy, ranting, weepy, hectic travesties of real life founded on second-rate novels and magazine stories is, at this writing, the Caliban of the movies. In such productions half the reasons for the movies existing as an independent art are deliberately abjured. No use is made of their immense facilities for rendering difficult illusions convincing or great flights of the imagination poignantly real. There is only a crude representation, usually soggy with sentiment, of a theme that could be far more artistically handled either in the written world or on the stage. Its best moments are of overstressed ranting action, necessary to get the wordless effect "over"; its worst are those passages where the written or spoken word would be most significant, but where the mere dumb show is obvious and wearisome. We have witnessed any number of these "real life" dramas, and yawned our way out. From the deliberately "significant" movie good Lord deliver us! Whereas what "majesticke visions," "harmonious charmingly," if Prospero would only call on Ariel more often !

We must leave it there. Much of the world's greatest literature belongs in the magical, fantastic realm. And the movies could far more easily make us believe in the actuality of an Aladdin's lamp or Wells's men in the moon than in the stock characters, stock situations, stock plots, and stock tragedy and comedy of their translations from the literature of "real life." Let Prospero call on his spirits to "enact his present fancies." There have been so few experiments in the movies' own natural field. So far Caliban has threatened Prospero to some effect with "all the infection that the Sunne sucks up." Yet is Prospero, indeed, "so rare a wondred father" that we marvel he has heretofore so rarely and so feebly dared to wave his wand.