Vachel LINDSAY vs. Hugo MÜNSTERBERG: on their ideas on theater and the movies

Differences between the stage theater and the movies – for Vachel LINDSAY:

* THE AUDIENCE: * In the real theater, the audience is more ‘respectful’, it is quiet and totally concentrated on what is happening on stage. Contrarily to the movies where “the audience is not worked up into the deadly still mob-unity of the speaking theater.” * In the stage theater, the audience forms a group, a unit, whereas, in the movies, the audience is composed of individuals. Moreover, stage drama audiences are larger (three hundred or a thousand) than in the movies (around two hundred). * To sum it up, Vachel LINDSAY gives the example of what happens with late-comers in both cases. In the case of the real theater: “if he appears later, he is glared at. In the motion picture art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of vision. The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling without breaking the spell. There is no spell, in the stage sense, to break. People can climb over each other’s knees to get in or out. If the picture is political, they murmur war-cries to one another. If the film suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each other with the richest sewing society report.” * Moreover, LINDSAY tackles the different ways audiences show that they appreciated the movie or the stage drama. “I have never heard an audience in a photoplay theater clap its hands even when the house was bursting with people. Yet they often see the film through twice. When they have had enough, they stroll home. They manifest their favorable verdict by sending some other member of the family to ‘see the picture’.”

* THE MOVIES vs. IBSEN’s THEATER:
Vachel LINDSAY opposes the movies to IBSEN’s stage drama. Saying that in some ways, the art of the Norwegian dramaturge