e: the gesture of the
conventional policeman in contrast with the mannerism of the stereotyped
preacher. The Intimate Film gives us more elusive personal gestures: the
difference between the table manners of two preachers in the same
restaurant, or two policemen. A mark of the Fairy Play is the gesture of
incantation, the sweep of the arm whereby Mab would transform a prince
into a hawk. The other Splendor Films deal with the total gestures of
crowds: the pantomime of a torch-waving mass of men, the drill of an army
on the march, or the bending of the heads of a congregation receiving the
benediction.

Another way to demonstrate the thesis is to use the old classification of
poetry: dramatic, lyric, epic. The Action Play is a narrow form of the
dramatic. The Intimate Motion Picture is an equivalent of the lyric. In
the seventeenth chapter it is shown that one type of the Intimate might
be classed as imagist. And obviously the Splendor Pictures are the
equivalent of the epic.

But perhaps the most adequate way of showing the meaning of this outline
is to say that the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate
Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the Fairy Pageant, along with the
rest of the Splendor Pictures, may be described as architecture-in-motion.
This chapter will discuss the bearing of the phrase sculpture-in-motion.
It will relate directly to chapter two.

First, gentle and kindly reader, let us discuss sculpture in its most
literal sense: after that, less realistically, but perhaps more
adequately. Let us begin with Annette Kellerman in Neptune's Daughter.
This film has a crude plot constructed to show off Annette's various
athletic resources. It is good photography, and a big idea so far as the
swimming episodes are concerned. An artist haunted by picture-conceptions
equivalent to the musical thoughts back of Wagner's Rhine-maidens could
have made of Annette, in her mermaid's dress, a notable figure. Or a
story akin to the mermaid tale of Hans Christian Andersen, or Matthew
Arnold's poem of the forsaken merman, could have made this picturesque
witch of the salt water truly significant, and still retained the most
beautiful parts of the photoplay as it was exhibited. It is an
exceedingly irrelevant imagination that shows her in other scenes as a
duellist, for instance, because forsooth she can fence. As a child of the
ocean, half fish, half woman, she is indeed convincing. Such mermaids as
this have hau