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Looking Backward and Forward

For twenty years some speaker at every motion picture oratorical occasion has unfailingly referred to our art as "the infant industry." Twenty years hence they will be doing the same thing, and it will be just as true then as it is now. Both as an art and as an industry, motion pictures are in their infancy. Therein lies the only excuse for their shortcomings of the past and the best promise for the future.

Looking back almost a quarter of a century as I can do in this art, one fails to see any art in it, even through the lens of a microscope soft-focused by time.

Figures do not lie, but they frequently bore, so I shall avoid all statistics and merely touch on the aspects of the art's development by which its progress may be judged. From the angles of acting, stories, direction, settings, lighting and photography, the present day motion picture is as superior to our early efforts as the radio is to the tom-tom signals of the Congo savages.

What does the future hold for us of the motion picture industry? Colored films, stereoscopic pictures and synchronized music are now only "stunts"; a gesture of versatility, as it were. There is no doubt that they can be achieved. But when we have them, will the essentials of the picture art be improved or broadened? I doubt it. Perhaps our grandchildren may see "radio-movies"; who knows? So much has happened in twenty years in this business which no man then could have foretold that he is a fool who tries to set limits to its future possibilities.

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