otive is
eliminated, and the artist is set free. This film is an extraordinary
variation of the intimate, as expounded in chapter three. It is
drawing-in-motion, instead of painting-in-motion. Because it was drawing
instead of painting, literary-minded people stepped to the hasty
conclusion it was experimental. Half-tone effects are, for the most part,
eliminated. Line is dominant everywhere. It is the opposite of vast
conceptions like Theodora--which are architecture-in-motion. All the
architecture of the Caligari film seems pasteboard. The whole thing
happens in a cabinet.

It is the most overwhelming contrast to Griffith's Intolerance that could
be in any way imagined. It contains, one may say, all the effects left
out of Intolerance. The word cabinet is a quadruple pun. Not only does it
mean a mystery box and a box holding a somnambulist, but a kind of
treasury of tiny twisted thoughts. There is not one line or conception in
it on the grand scale, or even the grandiose. It is a devil's toy-house.
One feels like a mouse in a mouse-trap so small one cannot turn around.
In Intolerance, Griffith hurls nation at nation, race at race, century
against century, and his camera is not only a telescope across the plains
of Babylon, but across the ages. Griffith is, in Intolerance, the
ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron,
and since he is the first of his kind I, for one, am willing to name him
with Marlowe.

But for technical study for Art Schools, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is
more profitable. It shows how masterpieces can be made, with the
second-hand furniture of any attic. But I hope fairy-tales, not
diabolical stories, will come from these attics. Fairy-tales are
inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times
hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not
willing to stop to tell them. Lillian Gish could be given wings and a
wand if she only had directors and scenario writers who believed in
fairies. And the same can most heartily be said of Mae Marsh.

Chapter XI--Architecture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument
about the Splendor Pictures, in chapters five, six, and seven. This is an
element constantly re-illustrated in a magnificent but fragmentary way by
the News Films. Any picture of a seagull flying so close to the camera
that it becomes as large as a flying machine, or any flying machine made
by man and photographed in