t a defect, of the photoplays that
while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the
other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human.
By an extension of this principle, non-human tones, textures, lines, and
spaces take on a vitality almost like that of flesh and blood. It is
partly for this reason that some energy is hereby given to the matter of
reenforcing the idea that the people with the proper training to take the
higher photoplays in hand are not veteran managers of vaudeville
circuits, but rather painters, sculptors, and architects, preferably
those who are in the flush of their first reputation in these crafts. Let
us imagine the centres of the experimental drama, such as the Drama
League, the Universities, and the stage societies, calling in people of
these professions and starting photoplay competitions and enterprises.
Let the thesis be here emphasized that the architects, above all, are the
men to advance the work in the ultra-creative photoplay. "But few
architects," you say, "are creative, even in their own profession."

Let us begin with the point of view of the highly trained pedantic young
builder, the type that, in the past few years, has honored our landscape
with those paradoxical memorials of Abraham Lincoln the railsplitter,
memorials whose Ionic columns are straight from Paris. Pericles is the
real hero of such a man, not Lincoln. So let him for the time surrender
completely to that great Greek. He is worthy of a monument nobler than
any America has set up to any one. The final pictures may be taken in
front of buildings with which the architect or his favorite master has
already edified this republic, or if the war is over, before some
surviving old-world models. But whatever the method, let him study to
express at last the thing that moves within him as a creeping fire, which
Americans do not yet understand and the loss of which makes the classic
in our architecture a mere piling of elegant stones upon one another. In
the arrangement of crowds and flow of costuming and study of tableau
climaxes, let the architect bring an illusion of that delicate flowering,
that brilliant instant of time before the Peloponnesian war. It does not
seem impossible when one remembers the achievements of the author of
Cabiria in approximating Rome and Carthage.

Let the principal figure of the pageant be the virgin Athena, walking as
a presence visible only to us, yet