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Title: The soul of the moving picture
Author: Walter S. Bloem
Translator: Allen W. Porterfield
Release date: February 26, 2024 [eBook #73028]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1924
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE MOVING PICTURE ***
Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by
♦♠♥♣ symbols in the text and are shown immediately below the
paragraph in which they appear.
Details and other notes may be found at the end of this eBook.
THE SOUL OF THE MOVING PICTURE
[Illustration: Scene from _The Nibelungs_.]
[_See p. 93_]
THE SOUL OF THE MOVING PICTURE
BY
WALTER S. BLOEM
_AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN_
BY
ALLEN W. PORTERFIELD
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1924
By E. P. Dutton & Company
_All Rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Tools of the Trade 1
II. Texts 19
III. Tricks 32
IV. The Scene 40
V. The Setting 72
VI. The Poet 95
VII. The Compass of Poetry 110
VIII. Film Adaptation 144
IX. The Path to Art 153
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SCENE FROM
The Nibelungs _Frontispiece_
FIGURE FACING PAGE
1 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 6
2 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 14
3 The Stone Rider 20
4 The Stone Rider 28
5 The Nibelungs 34
6 Destiny 42
7 The Children of Darkness 48
8 Algol 60
9 Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown 64
10 Golem 70
11 Golem 78
12 Destiny 84
13 Sumurun 100
14 Madame Dubarry 108
15 Anne Boleyn 114
16 Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown 122
17 A Doll’s House 130
18 Vögelöd Castle 138
19 Destiny 146
20 The Nibelungs 152
21 The Nibelungs 160
INTRODUCTION
The influence of the moving picture on the souls of the various peoples
of the earth has become so great that an attitude of indifference
toward this marvelous invention is no longer permissible. We see
ourselves forced to take a definite stand for it or against it; we are
obliged to line up as friend or foe of the film. It is, however, no
longer sufficient to oppose the moving picture in a spirit of indulgent
contempt or fanatic hostility. All the world knows that there are more
bad moving pictures than good ones, and that the moral and aesthetic
tendency of a great many films is of a quite negligible nature. But if
the moving picture were in reality the offspring of the Devil, as many
theologians and academic demi-gods the world over contend, thinking
people would be at once confronted with this insoluble problem: How
does it come that thousands upon thousands of human beings scattered
over the earth are laboring, with intense resignation and passionate
zeal, to the end that the film may be made more perfect artistically
and cleaner from a purely moral point of view? The striving after
money has naturally something to do with their efforts. To offer this,
however, as a final explanation of this unusual situation would be an
idle method of reasoning. You cannot explain the joy these men are
taking in their creative efforts in this way, for their souls are in
their work.
To many thinking people, the real nature of the moving picture is
wrapped in mystery; it is a brilliant and enigmatic riddle to them.
They recognize, though they fail to comprehend, the fact that the
moving picture, despised without restraint and condemned on general
principles only the other day, has won an incomparable victory over the
hearts of men—a victory, too, that will be all the greater and more
beautiful once the psychic and moral perfection of the moving picture
has been accomplished.
The cultured man has an instinctive hatred of forces the significance
of which lie beyond his grasp; he makes every conceivable effort to
defend himself against them, to ward them off. But the people, the
masses, throw themselves into the arms of such forces blindly and
without question. The number of cultured men, however, who are going
over to the camp of the moving picture—without thereby becoming
disloyal to the other arts—is growing daily. Even those sworn and
confirmed skeptics who still look down upon the film from the
heights of their intellectual superiority with superciliousness
and contempt are bound to admit that there is something between
the pictures which has a magic power to draw, which exercises an
ineluctable influence in the gaining of recruits.
* * * * *
The moving picture is an art based on feeling, and not on thought. It
has to do with the emotions rather than with the intellect. The man
who goes to the moving picture wants to experience certain incidents,
not by thinking about them, but by feeling them. Just as music arouses
the feelings through tones, just so does the moving picture attempt
to solve, not the riddle of the human brain, but of the human soul. A
moving picture is a _feeling expressed through gestures_.
There is still much about this youthful art that is altogether
misunderstood. Its real sources, the fountains of its life, are
suspected, foreboded by only a few; nor are they recognized, when
seen, by all. Nearly every visit to a motion picture theatre is a
disappointment; the must of the grape is still carrying-on in a really
absurd fashion.
The motion picture, however, is marching straight ahead in a course
of unmistakable and wonderful development toward the heights of
victory. And this development, this evolution, has to do not merely
with the perfecting of the art itself, but with the enjoyment that is
derivable and derived from the art. Our eyes are becoming keener in
the detection of gestures and mimicry; our imaginations are growing
sharper, even clairvoyant; they are rapidly becoming able to read
the language of pictures and movement. When the motion picture was
still in its infancy, its actors assumed and employed the shrill and
tinny pathos of the pantomime. At that time, and it was not long ago,
the lovely and mutely passionate world of gesture was unknown to us.
We saw it, to be sure, in the dance, but we were still incapable
of interpreting it. To-day we feel, detect, see some sort of inner
vibration behind the slightest movement.
In the other arts, in the old and tried arts, those that have already
been developed to a high stage of perfection, if not actually
over-developed, progress, if made at all, must be made with the
expenditure of tremendous effort; it must be wrung from the depths,
as it were. In the moving picture, on the other hand, a thousand
possibilities still lie quite on the surface, ready, indeed longing,
for fulfilment. The great creator can think, feel, and dream new and
novel features without falling into despair at the thought of
what has already been done. Becoming mindful of the past is not a
painful occupation for him. Indeed, the motion picture may be compared
to a starry heaven that stretches out before our upturned eyes,
awaiting the creative ken of the celestial investigator.
* * * * *
Every attempt, however, of the exuberant creator, filled with the urge
for deeds, to perform aesthetic experiments on the motion picture
avenges itself; such experiments cannot be carried out with impunity.
For the applause of a small circle of the elect is not going to
prevent bankruptcy on the part of the film company that supports these
experiments. Film art without economic success is quite unthinkable.
Germany, the land of theory, experienced a short while ago a veritable
flood of aesthetic experiments in the domain of the moving picture. Of
these, there was but one, _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_, which provided
its creators with the satisfaction that comes from a pronounced success
in foreign countries. And even in this case the success was due to
the peculiarity of certain means that had heretofore never been seen
on the screen. The American has too much appreciation of this world,
and too little sense for the world beyond, to grow enthusiastic
about phantoms or nebulous adventures. Nor is he weighed down with the
traditions that reach back through centuries of time and constitute
so much impedimenta on the part of European artists. And the Swede
is too intimately associated with the mother-earth of his home ever
to undertake a flight to the clouds through the medium of the motion
picture. But the Swede and the German reached the point where they
saw that you have got to speak a language, in the film, which can be
understood by men wherever they chance to live.
A work, let it be ever so artistic and valuable in itself, which
brings economic distress to the film company that produces it, harms
indirectly the entire film business as an art. That film artist attains
to the complete realization of his desires whose creations put money
into the purse of the company; the one who does not do this fails in
the end. The task of the film artist is always and ever: To effect a
happy union between art and business. Moreover, this union must be
brought about in such a way that both—art and business—flourish. The
man who cannot do this merely drives the film companies on to the
production of cheap and cheapening pictures which draw the masses and
pay a reasonable dividend, but nothing more. For the film companies
of this earth are and remain, first of all, business concerns
that must pay. Film art is expensive, and no gratuitous distributor
of private funds is going to give one penny which will not bear him
interest. If there be anyone so blind as not to be able to grasp this
simple principle, he is unable to grasp the underlying principle of
the motion picture as an art. To fail to recognize commercial success
as the basic condition on which film art rests is to call down upon
one’s head the irritation that ensues from ineffectual grumbling.
Consequently, the much lauded redeemer of the film will be he, and he
only, who can create what is at once of enduring artistic value and
financial potentiality.
And every film will have this artistic and commercial success which
glows with real passion because it has been wrung from powerful
feeling. The art, the very soul of the motion picture, cherishes no
desire for subtle, intellectual form or forms. It longs, indeed, for a
soul form of elementary force.
* * * * *
This is true, for the unique though inexhaustible domain of the motion
picture is the eternal _feelings_ of man, the initial and primeval
feelings that rise from out of the _senses_ and mount to the _soul_.
Love or hate, and the joy, sorrow, grief, hope, lamentation and good
fortune that emanate from these two—it is with these that the
film has to do. It has to do with nothing that comes rigidly from the
intellect—or exclusively from the soul itself. In the moving picture
everything becomes pale and colorless which is not born of the sensual
emotions. Every art seeks its way to the soul. Sensuality[1] _and_
soul, that is the moving picture. There is only one eternal, immutable,
and never-failing material for the film: it is the passion of the soul.
[1] There is no word that occurs more frequently in this book than
_sinnlich_, or the noun derived from it, _Sinnlichkeit_. Throughout,
the former is rendered by “sensual,” the latter by “sensuality.”
Neither of these words has here the connotation that is ordinarily
attached to it: “Sensual” means nothing more than relating to the
senses; and “Sensuality” is the noun form and means nothing more
than the composite result of our being “sensual.” We have, as a
matter of fact, five “senses.” The German for “sense” is _Sinn_.
Consequently, _sinnlich_ has reference to our capacity for sensations,
our sensibility. The words might have been translated in a variety of
ways. I might have commandeered such terms as “sentient,” “sensory,”
“susceptible to sense experiences,” and so on. Such variety would have
been, probably, in the interest of seeming erudition, which leaves me
cold, or in the interest of pedagogy which, so long as I remain normal,
no man can ever persuade me to study. —Translator.
Thought and intellect are given an intelligent welcome by but very
few people. Were it not for the herd and hypocrisy, poetry would be
unread and the stage would be a temple of the lonely and isolated. Is
Shakespeare or Goethe really understood by the masses?
The senescent stage is the counterpart of the goal of our
civilization, which is the thought that can be felt, the idea that can
be filled with soul. It is for this reason that we have to-day, more
than ever, the _spiritual stage_.
Art based on emotions is art for the masses. The youthful motion
picture is the counterpart of the origin of our nature, which is the
sensuality that can be felt and filled with soul. It is for this reason
that we have to-day the sensual, the sensuous, moving picture.
There are limits to feelings. For we live in an age that demands
crystal clarity and coy niceness. The limp, flabby and effeminate
we dislike. No age was less naïve than ours, and yet none was less
sentimental.
The motion picture is art for the masses; it is mass art. Sectarianism,
chilly aestheticism, attempts at escape from inadequate culture—these
are not known to the motion picture. Art for the masses, art for the
money. That is the entire story. But does art for the masses mean
art such as the masses themselves would create? Rabble art? The film
in which the plebeian soul alone takes interest and from which it
derives pleasure is not a good film. Nor is that a good film which
is understood only by the aesthetic soul. To be good, satisfactory,
excellent, a film must carry along with it and enrapture all, those
whose hearts are simple and those whose hearts are intricate,
complex, full of intertwined sensations. To do this is hard. If and
when done, it is done through the medium of great art.
* * * * *
This book was written by a man who writes scenarios. It is not beyond
reason to believe that such a book could have been written only in
Germany, where one, in matters of art, not infrequently forgets the
action out of an all-absorbing interest in meditation. It arose from
an inner desire, from an inner exertion: I wished to become clear,
for the benefit of my own manuscripts and using them as a basis, as
to how a film should be constructed so that art and profit, which are
inseparable in this field, might get along with each other; might
endure mutual juxtaposition. And I wished to give other people the
benefit of my views.
I have devoted my attention mainly to those motion pictures that have
been most readily accessible to my fellow-countrymen and, to me. In
other words, I have discussed German films. The time at which my
wounded and bleeding country will again take its place among the happy
and prosperous nations of the earth is still remote. Moreover, it is
only in rare instances that the best films of foreign lands are shown
in our theaters. The taste, however, in the matter of the moving
picture is virtually the same among white people the world over, and we
are all striving, even competing, for the identical goal—to please.
I am quite mindful of the fact that a purely theoretical discussion
has its limitations in value. Every personal opinion is one-sided, and
no sooner has the connoisseur found his way than he throws the views
of others overboard and proceeds on his course just as if he had never
heard of them. Nevertheless, the motion film of all lands, whether it
be American or European, makes its appeal to human beings every one of
whom has two eyes in his head and a heart in his breast. Nor is this
all. Every individual man, wherever he may chance to live or whatever
his origin may be, has one fundamental ambition, one basic goal: joy,
beauty, adventure. Perhaps I have succeeded in saying a few things
regarding the general nature of the motion picture which may be helpful
by way of showing how a successful picture is built up and produced. If
I may be permitted to do so, I should like to express the hope that I
have made a few suggestions of enduring value, even and also to those
across the Atlantic. Nor is it judicious to overlook the fact that
an idea is by no means worthless when it incites to contradiction or
refutal.
The smallest creation is more valuable than the most beautiful
book of discussion. It is always permissible, however, to form certain
ideas regarding one’s own creations, and to discuss these ideas in a
theoretical way. The one point to be kept in mind in this connection
is, that we must never regard such discussion as the formulation of
definitive and irrefutable opinions; a treatise of this kind dare not
lay down an inelastic law for the film of the future. Limitations dare
not be placed on the free creative ability of the mind and the soul. A
real creator can break the chains of theory easily and without notice.
For him there is but one rule that always holds: Do your work well, and
then you need not pay the slightest attention to the law as this is
handed down.
W. S. B.
Burg Rienick.
_In the Summer of_ 1923.
THE SOUL OF THE MOVING PICTURE
CHAPTER I
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
The special characteristic of a fool is that he always tries to do
the thing for which he is not qualified. Art likewise commits a
grievous folly when it attempts something for which it is not fitted;
when it fails to undertake what it alone can accomplish. For this
specific accomplishment on its part is, as a matter of necessity,
expected of it. Whether this expectation be entertained consciously or
instinctively is beside the point.—Walter Harlan.
The moving picture is scarcely twenty-five years old. Born of a
matchless technical invention, it demands to-day, with the unrelieved
arrogance of the proverbial upstart, complete recognition in the
society of the arts There, in the company of the established arts,
it finds illustrious companions each of whom looks back upon a proud
tradition of hundreds and hundreds of years. The old arts, however,
are reluctant about admitting the moving picture to their family. And,
truth to tell, the film is bound to admit that its nursery was not as
it should have been; for filthy hands taught it to walk.
No man of intelligence refused to pay due honor, indeed to express
his vigorous admiration for, the invention of the moving picture and
the talking machine. The moment, however, that these two creations of
technical science asked to be regarded as means to a new and real art,
this honor and this admiration were at once driven from the field by a
frigid rejection. The masses, to be sure, sicklied over in no way with
a pale cast of thought, conducted themselves differently: they forsook
Olympus then and there and rushed with jubilant hearts into the temples
of the new “art.”
The film had arrived. The scholar refused to recognize it; he
closed his doors against it. It was impossible, however, for him to
prevent its spread over the entire earth. Owing to the very fact,
that intellect could at first not be persuaded to take a sympathetic
interest in the film, the film went on its way and became, quite
naturally, the tool of ignorance if not of imbecility. To its initial
champions any such concept as cultured civilization was unknown. Their
sole objective was to transform the novel device into jingling guineas,
and to do it as quickly as possible.
It was not long, however, until the public that frequented the
music halls and variety shows grew tired of the “cinematographic”
disrobings and their ♦attendant indecencies. What was to be done?
Writers immediately set about creating backstairs tales of the worst
conceivable type. There was but one slogan: Money! And the money was
forthcoming. Technical science, which has really never, of relatively
recent years, been without a keen nose for good business, came to the
aid of the scenario “authors.” As a result of this, the presentation
of the pictures soon acquired a stage of perfection which the most
enthusiastic dreamer had never once anticipated. But of art, of
culture, of an exquisitely visualized civilization—not a trace not
even a premonition.
♦ “attendent” replaced with “attendant”
Then came the moving picture actor, that living embodiment in one
person of idealism and materialism, in whose acting people began to
have a sort of pre-conception of an entirely new method of giving
visible and tangible expression to human feelings. The belief that a
new art was in the making was still vague; one’s idea of it was still
dim; but it was there. The “scholarly” world, whose unique privilege
it always has been, is, and will be to denounce, decry, and damn the
new so long as it has not been perfected and despite such evidences of
unquestioned greatness as it may reveal, at once shrieked as from a
single throat: “Surrogate!” It was in Italy that a certain poet with a
world-wide reputation permitted his work to be placed on the screen.
At this some began to be skittish, skeptical. And from afar off, as it
were, came the first trumpet tones announcing a new _art_.
And thus the moving picture, attacked by the entire “cultured” world,
went on its way, unimpeded by the objections that were raised against
it, to the heights on which it at present rests. The scholar proved
that there is one thing at least which he is not: a prophet, a seer,
a herald of the new. To be a pioneer does not mean that one must cast
slurs on that which has not yet found itself; it means much rather the
ability to catch, by fair means and fanciful, the first distinct notes
of remote clarity.
No one will be able to have great faith in the motion picture who is
not at the same time able to seal his heart against the veritable flood
of artistic disappointments—and who is not ready to pay his homage to
the few great scattered events and episodes that have gone toward the
effecting of the clarity of which we have spoken? If you say to me,
“Nine-tenths of all moving pictures are bad,” I shall reply by saying
that “One-tenth of all moving pictures is good.” If this repartee on
our part is possible from the point of view of hard fact, then it
certainly must be possible to squeeze out all the faulty fruit from
this budding garden of the screen. It is, in truth, ridiculous
to try to prove the worthlessness of the moving picture as a whole
by selecting, with much conscientious care, the worst pictures and
holding them up as typical—and abominable—“illustrations.” These “worst
pictures” merely make us realize the not exactly crushing truth that
the moving picture, like any other artistic tool or instrument, may be
misused. If we wish to prove the enduring value of poetry, we do not
cite Kotzebue or Conan Doyle. We can appreciate the value of the motion
picture only by studying its _best_ works.
It is easy to criticise; to nag is a sport in which all may indulge.
But mistakes are necessary: they return without ceasing and lay in our
lap first the foreboding, and then the real knowledge of those inner
laws that go to make up the truth. And they do this however deeply
buried the laws may be.
Technique stands at the service of civilization; it is the product of
cold, calculating, judicial intellect. Art serves culture; it is the
product of the warm, seeking soul. The moving picture wants to serve
culture; it wants to speak to the soul, sprung though it itself is from
cold technique.
When, at the close of the preceding century, its inventors projected
the first “living” pictures on the canvas, they did not even faintly
suspect the measure of development that was in store for the child
of their mind. The film was not created for the benefit of culture. If
in the meantime the visualization of human feelings has come to occupy
the lion’s share of attention, it is merely a proof of the fact that
the human soul has taken possession of the film in order, through it,
to acquire new forms of expression for its feelings.
Who would have the audacity to contend that the number of arts was
definitely decided upon centuries ago, and that new ones cannot be
added to the already existing list? Who will deny that every art has
sprung from some technical invention or other? Even music, the most
beautiful flower of human culture, was impossible and unthinkable
until men had invented sounding boards, vibrating strings, and similar
devices. Whether the technical apparatus associated with a species of
art, and making that art possible, be elaborate or simple, concerns art
itself in no way. For it is entirely and altogether a question as to
how large the space is which it offers the soul.
[Illustration: Fig. 1. Scene from _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_.
[_See p. 79_]
]
Long before the moving picture was a reality, there was an art of
dumb, mute, moving bodies which achieved its ends through crude and,
viewed from the present point of view, distinctly laughable method
of procedure. I have reference to the _pantomime_. We see that such
forms as the Pantomime has thus far employed, such devices as it has
thus far called to its aid, have by no means exhausted its artistic
possibilities. The mimic action, or incident, was laid at such a great
distance from the spectator that the finer values of the enterprise
failed of their real significance; they could not, in truth, be
applied. The pantomimic actor—even much more so than is the case with
the actor on the stage of the spoken drama when he is obliged to depend
upon gestures for his effects—saw himself forced into an excess of
pathos with which it was quite impossible for his soul to keep pace. We
felt such acting was affected; we dubbed it “hollow, theatrical pathos.”
In order to make its mimic expression more refined, which means more
artistic, pantomime called music to its aid, and music is an art of
feeling. It thereby ceased to be real pantomime (that is, a _pan_
or an “all” affair), especially in connection with the accompanying
song, the _canticum_. In other words, the hitherto existing forms of
pantomime have proved to be inadequate and unsatisfactory as agents
of transmission between the contents of the art they are supposed
to represent and the spectators who are supposed to enjoy the
representation.
Then came the film. Anything that had previously been lost in the
distance, anything in the way of tender emotions and delicate feelings
that the spacious room of the theatre had swallowed up, is now caught
up by the lens of the film. A symphony of humanity can be made to
vibrate in the play of a nervous hand, a chaos of opposing forces can
be visualized with an equally small display of effort. What art had
ever before been able to do justice to the animated and “living” hand?
What other phase of art had been able to catch, hold, and delineate the
twitching corners of the mouth?
It was not until the film had been brought to its present state of
perfection that there came forth from the pantomime this new and
exalted art, the art of expressing feelings through gesticulation. The
inexpressible, the unspeakable, that regarding which even poetry itself
can do no more than merely touch or indicate, has been taken up by the
film and made a reality in the sphere of art. Even years ago, the great
German actor Bassermann played, in the moving picture, a scene in which
the transition from unmarred joy to unrelieved grief was expressed in
his well-nigh immovable face. Where was such an accomplishment possible
before the invention of the film? On the legitimate stage? In the
pantomime?
The exploitation of the much-abused _Grossaufnahme_ (enlarged
photograph or close-up) is, of course, perfectly justified when it is
a question of portraying intensified feelings, provided the exposure
be taken with becoming caution. But it has meaning—that is, it is to
be applied then and only then when feelings are to be expressed which,
in actual life, are revealed gently. The close-up is out of place in
caricatures and facial distortions; it is intended solely for the
more tender emotions; gruff or even indifferent feelings cannot be
reproduced with its aid.
It is a matter of congratulation that the tendency in recent years, not
merely in Europe but also in America, has been away from the old method
of breaking up each individual scene into a half dozen close-ups. There
is, moreover, a certain definite standard with regard to this kind of
pictures beyond which it is impossible to go with impunity. When, for
example, a single head or face is detached from its pictural connection
and made to fill the entire surface of the canvas, the effect is
disagreeable, the impression unsympathetic.
Thus we see that the pantomimic possibilities are fulfilled, through
the aid of the motion picture, up to that very point beyond which
these possibilities no longer exist. The significance of this
is manifest: it is only with the aid of the motion picture that the
very possibilities in the way of the animated, or moving, body can
be visualized and exhausted. This in turn proves that the film was
necessary—that as a novel and perfect form of expression of the human
soul it is to be reckoned as an art of the arts, and among the other
arts, without hesitation or mental reservation. The gramophone is also
a technical invention; but we shall never be able to list it among
the arts because it was not necessary as an aid to music. All that it
does is to carry what it receives farther along and in an unchanged
condition, just like the waves of the radio station. The gramophone
does not bestow a deeper possibility of expression on the sound it
reproduces. The motion picture is a qualitative gain for art; the
gramophone is merely a quantitative gain.
But, the people say, the film has its weak points: It is colorless; it
shows a flat surface and not a well-rounded fullness; it is mute. I
detect at once two disadvantages and one advantage.
I am aware of the weakness that arises from the fact that the film
reproduces flat surfaces. Life itself is rich and round, bodies move
about in pliable fullness, there are such things as propinquity and
remoteness; some things are near, others afar off. The film brings out
all of this only in an imperfect way; indeed to a certain degree
these concepts and realities are distorted by the film. There was a
desire to transform this defect into an advantage, and the shadow
picture, as well as the etched and colored film, was the result. Each
was rather attractive, neat, even winsome; but in the framework of our
art they were altogether without real significance. For the strongest
impression of the motion picture is and remains the play of real human
beings; and we cannot expand or contract our moving picture people just
before they begin to play, and just so that they may have the right
“size.” Let us rather be content with longing for the inventor who will
present us with the plastic film.
I appreciate the weakness that arises from the colorlessness of the
film. Life itself is rich and variegated; it shines forth in colors of
a thousand hues. The flowers are beautiful; the blush on the cheek of
a lovely young woman is filled with magic charm. We can indeed at this
stage only seriously regret that this diverting play of colors has thus
far not been a gift out after which the film may reach. The film as we
know it is without color.
But Heaven forbid that we should become unmindful of the austere fact
that all arts have their weak points alongside of their strong ones.
How we should like to hear the angels on the Altar of Ghent sing!
How we should like to see the aurora of Michael Angelo broaden out the
glorious body! The truth is, however, that the motion picture, even in
its present imperfect state, gives us an abundance, indeed enough, of
pleasurable sensations. For does it not depict the play of beautiful
bodies, the wonders of the storm-tossed sea, of the wind-swept plain?
Does it not show us the flying clouds and foaming waves? It does; and
we can consequently endure, for the time being, its colorlessness and
its imperfections with regard to space, especially since there is
well-founded reason to believe that sooner or later the inventor will
come forth and eliminate both of these defects.
I am aware of one advantage. The film is mute where life itself is rich
and resounding. One would fancy then at first blush that this were a
disgraceful weakness on the part of the film, one that must be removed
at once if the film is to survive. We, however, detect a distinct
advantage in the muteness of the film. Every art must have a basic
and fundamental soil, so to speak, in which its particular species
of flowers flourish. Poetry has the spoken word, painting has color,
music has sounds, the plastic arts the rigid body. It is in these that
each seeks and enjoys its originality—and originality is the sole
ground on which art of any sort justifies its continued existence.
Therefore, grant to the motion picture its mute play of moving bodies,
for if you are unwilling to do this, you will doom the film to become
merely a hackneyed, parrot-like imitation of the regular stage. But
man is so constituted that he makes those inventions which he can make
and not others, regardless always as to whether these inventions are
beneficial to human kind or not; regardless as to whether they are of a
beneficent or a malevolent nature. This proposition must be accepted,
or it is impossible to account for the invention of the cannon. And
so, in all probability quite soon, the speaking and resounding film
will challenge the mute film to the arena. The outcome of the ensuing
struggle is hard to predict. It is altogether probable that the film
public will suddenly be brought to realize that the silent, speechless
motion picture gives it more stimulation and more pleasure than the
speaking film, for the latter will have nothing original about it. And
it remains a solemn fact that the public always wants to see something
original; it wants to be conducted straight to the visionary land of a
colorful fancy where such adventures as men have never seen literally
grow on the trees before them.
Let us wait then and see how the world receives the speaking film.
If it accepts it, one of the most beautiful, and one of the most
recent, messengers of peace known to the human family will have been
lost. For the film speaks to-day the silent language of the emotions,
that language which is understood by all peoples and races wherever
they may live; it speaks the reconciliatory language of the human
heart. We have all seen and felt Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Jews,
Chinese, and even Negroes play in the motion picture. They all spoke
with the voice of brotherhood, and no one hated them.
[Illustration: Fig. 2. Scene from _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_.
[_See p. 77_]
]
The speechless silence of the film, however, is not altogether
tolerable. The most taciturn of men speak a word at times, and the film
dare not create the impression of total unnaturalness. The film is not
pure pantomime. Misguided and obsessed theorists try every now and then
to project a pantomime film on the screen, and every now and then these
creations enjoy a measure of approbation on the part of the critical
public. The characters of these scenarios are doomed men and women
whose lips have been sealed. Their playing is often ungraceful and
tortured, for there are not a few instances in human fate, as this is
delineated on the screen, in which something must be said which cannot
be said through the exclusive means of gestures. The subject matter of
these pantomimic films has, without exception, been exceedingly
primitive thus far. A marked case of such a film was the German picture
entitled _Scherben_ which, nota-bene, has also been shown in America.
There is nothing left for the spectator to do other than to long in
vain for at least a scrap of text which may serve to transform the
unnaturalness of it all into a true picture.
It has been felt, indeed, everywhere that the film dare not be wholly
speechless. Words there must be. There dare not, at the same time, be
anything even approaching a perfect lack of consideration for the art
that is being indulged in: we dare not forget that the prime feature of
the film is its silence. We are willing to put up with colorlessness
and an altogether inadequate depiction of space and perspective,
but we become indignant when living and life-sized human beings
converse with each other for a long while and in absolute silence.
Again and again, and even in the best of motion pictures, we see the
“soundless conversation.” It is a mad conception that was unknown
until the moving picture was invented. People speak with each other,
often in regular word duels, and we have only the vaguest idea as to
what they are saying. To be a spectator at such a performance is to
receive instruction that leads on to the hazy suspension of reason
and to the merciless softening of the mind. With art, or with the
“participation of the creative fancy of the spectator” it has nothing
whatever to do. No text, and be it endless, can remove the impression
that such a procedure is an anomaly.
It is still more dangerous to have people sing in the film. To see such
a sweet flower of the human family as Mary Pickford, dressed in white
and sitting at a concert piano, is to be sure a rare pleasure; at the
sight of her, the eye gladly forgets the impatience of the ear. But
there are films in which a tenor sings a wordy song that, in itself, is
“linked sweetness long drawn out.” His breast heaves, his mouth opens
like a barn door, all in the silence of the tomb! In such instances
many a tried and valiant actor has played an involuntary Chapliniad.
Strangely enough, instrumental music often has a quite pleasing effect
in the motion picture. The reason for this is not far to seek: the
accompanying music and the picture are blended into a unity; between
them there is perfect harmony. That this harmony exists, however, is a
matter of pure accident. Fearful, on the other hand, is the result when
a living singer takes his place in the orchestra and accompanies the
picture with a song. When the hero up in the film opens his mouth, the
artist down among the musicians opens his too, and song comes forth.
All of these are trifles which a skilful producer can easily avoid.
Between silence and loquaciousness lies a spacious domain which offers
the capable film artist abundant room for an easy and agreeable
portrayal of his subject matter. This having been accomplished, no one
feels that there is anything anomalous about the picture, or the art
that makes its production possible. No one will feel a desire for a
speaking film, for the silence that is in the main obligatory has been
interrupted and toned down by the interjection of occasional lines of
text. All in all, the film as it has been developed thus far, is a new
revelation of the artistic world-soul: it delineates feelings through
gestures; emotions are set forth with the aid of gesticulation. For
this reason alone, the film in its present form is a new art.
Is the photograph which makes the film possible also an art? No, it is
not; and will not be an art. But the operator is an artist. His tool
is the lifeless material, just as marble is the tool of the sculptor.
And he animates his picture, he gives it life, by means of the most
delicate lights and shades, through the introduction and application of
the tenderest of moods.
Let us rejoice that the human mind has been enabled, thanks to
the motion picture, to hew out a way for itself into lands that have
hitherto been unknown—a way that leads us off the beaten track on which
the glare and hardness of everyday life become at times unendurable, a
way that leads us into the dreamy twilight of poetry, into the realm
of romance. How necessary the film, as an art, has become if we are to
escape with judicious frequency the drab dullness of the workaday world
is known to everyone who is sufficiently familiar with it to feel that
its loss would be lamentable.
CHAPTER II
TEXTS
Man as a mute? In the old pantomime, man was deaf and dumb. His acting
consisted of a ridiculous, bombastic, and excited whipping about with
all manner of gestures, a convulsive attempt to make clear, through
the exclusive agency of gesticulation, a number of things, indeed
everything, that cannot be said through gestures alone. Pantomime is
tin-horn and big-drum solo.
This is not the way of the moving picture. For it followed as a matter
of self-evident fact that the inaudible words could be inserted in
writing between the pictures. Many people, however, have succumbed to
the delusion that the moving picture actor has regained his speech, and
that without limit. There is no phase of the film in which it is still
groping about more in the dark, none in which its essential conditions
have been so little fulfilled as in the matter of interpolated texts.
One begins to have a feeling that the shorter the speech the better.
But even a battle of words consisting of short, even abbreviated,
lines can have an undesirable effect so far as the artistic
impression is concerned.
Laws are always first felt and then recognized in error. It is even
so with the texts that accompany the pictures of the film: they are
conditioned by a state of concealed necessity which the artist is in
duty bound to recognize if he would impart to his text the psychic
impressiveness without which it is a failure, and the artistic
importance without which it cannot survive.
[Illustration: Fig. 3. Scene from _The Stone Rider_.
[_See p. 81_]
]
The contrasts between the picture and the text exist; they even stand
out. But they have never prevented plastic art from attaching written
explanations to the works that sail under its banner—that is to say,
the creations of the artist are named. If such a designation, or
naming, were not employed, it is within reason to believe that many a
work of art would never enjoy a correct or adequate interpretation. It
will probably always be a mystery as to precisely what Titian meant
by his so-called, his inadequately designated, “Celestial and Earthly
Love.” These terms or names are superfluous, if not annoying, only when
they convey an idea which is perfectly patent in the very nature of the
work itself. Why ascribe set titles to such works as “Träumerei,” or
“The Water Carrier,” or “A Happy Home”? Truth to tell, the interweaving
of picture and text had been elevated to the rank of a unique
art form by a great artist long before the moving picture began its
ascendent course. I mean, Wilhelm Busch, with his pictures and verses.
In our soul, Busch’s contrasts are dissolved and intertwined; they
constitute an organic unity; they are a spiritual entity.
Æsthetic categorizing has consequently been secured, in turn, and that
to the salvation of art. The discovery of the practical, artistic
relations that picture and text should bear to each other have,
unfortunately, not been made essentially easier thereby.
There can be no doubt but that different peoples feel quite differently
on this point. The Italian—Gabriel d’Annunzio, for example, in his
_Cabiria_—inserts sentences of a length, effusiveness, and fustian
which are just as intolerable to the art-sense of a German as are the
swollen and pathetic stage notes of his regular dramas. Are we to
conclude from this that we Germans are cooler, calmer, soberer, and
less buoyant than the children of sunny Italy? Or are we to conclude
that our feelings are safer guides in matters of art than those of the
Italians because we believe that the true significance of the moving
picture is to be sought in the picture and not in the text? For it
seems to us like an artistic contradiction, like utter nonsense,
when the film, intended to create its effects through moving bodies,
supererogates unto itself art forms for which better means have been
provided, more appropriate ways found. The book was made for poetry,
and if it is to be spoken, its place is manifestly on the stage.
The task of the motion picture, let us repeat, is to express feelings
by gestures. In this proposition there lies hidden a great deal of
knowledge. Feeling does not belong to the text; the written text is
not its sphere; it is not to be spoken; it is to be given form and
substance through the art of mimicry. But there are motion pictures
staged by men who at the very thought of an _I love you_ (the warmest
and tenderest possibility of this art) cannot resist the temptation to
have these three words roared forth through so much accompanying text.
But never mind! _I love you_—that would be an almost classically sober
wording. The actors could play this concept so perfectly that such a
sentence, however superfluous it might be, would scarcely be noticed.
The more, however, the text endeavors to create atmosphere through
itself alone, the more the film departs from real art. In a certain
gloriously ♦dilettantish screen creation one reads: “Vera, you are
so lovely and good to everybody, couldn’t you be lovely and good
to me too?” Even a sentence such as “You are beautiful” brought
a discordant note into the general situation. We should be able to
detect, in each of our five senses, the way in which the beauty of a
woman gains utter control over a man. If we are so bereft of feeling
and fancy that we cannot see this and feel it, a whole volume of
emotional text would not be able to drum it into our heads and hearts.
♦ “dilettanteish” replaced with “dilettantish”
One notices that the film authors frequently try to bring a bit of
poetry into their texts: “It is not wise to show me how much I lost
when I erased the memory of the woman from my mind,” said the Tiger of
Eschnapur in the _Indisches Grabmal_ (“Indian Monument”). In a case of
this kind, words take to their heels, so to speak, wander out into the
realm of undisciplined poetry, and lose all feeling for and connection
with mimic action. But in the motion picture the word is not free; it
is bound with secret chains to the mimic action. If these are broken,
the ensuing contradiction jars on our senses in that two art forms are
welded together which in reality have nothing to do with each other.
The striving after lyric tenderness and beauty is noticeable in a
great many German and American films. In this regard, the Swede is
wiser, his feelings more commendable. His texts are more objective
and material; and the effects they produce are more wholesome and
artistic. For wherever and whenever the text displays an excess of fire
and fancy, the spectator remains as cold as ice. His feelings can be
aroused only by the gestures, by the movements of the bodies of the
actors. In _Dr. Mabuse_ we were regaled with this bit of declamation:
“He—who is he? No one knows him. He stands over the city. He is as tall
as a tower. He is damnation, he is salvation—and he loved me.” The
public was not moved one iota—but it laughed tears. Instead of being
exalted, it was disenchanted; it was sobered down. For the very simple
reason that the laws of the motion picture text are different from and
narrower than those that have to do with poetry.
The film texts that are written in verse prove to be pretty thin and
anemic in their effect, even when a serious and gentle poet writes
them. We have but to think of _Der müde Tod_ (“Weary Death”). They
are however altogether unbearable when they come trotting across the
screen in the cumbersome armor of the iambic pentameter—as the Italians
so frequently employ them. That kind of inflated film text has been
rejected by the entire world. The film text cannot endure a revel
in words; it must fit the action as tightly and as neatly as a
smooth, stiff fleshing fits an actor of the spoken stage. Dress it up
with the festival garments of formal poetry and these garments flop
about its limbs while æsthetics go begging.
Here is a thought to be kept on our memorandum: _All that is said
in the way of feelings in the text is not felt in the play_. Our
instinctive presentiment, at this stage of film development, is so deep
that we are not going to admit through the threefold door of the heart
any text that attempts to bend and mold this presentiment to suit its
own purposes.
The ease with which the spectator may be inundated with a flood of
textual words cajoles some into smuggling the talmy-gold of speech
into the moving picture: “I forbid you to leave this house; and if you
dare to act contrary to my wish in this matter, you will not receive
a single penny from me!” This text occurs in the _Indisches Grabmal_.
Fewer words would be more, that is, more effective. A clear, soulful
portrayal as well as a fixed, secure, and successful mounting is made
altogether impossible by such an unchastened and miserably affected
text as this. The very dignity of the film, in this case, has been
abandoned to the caprice of the man who wrote the lines. The author
is in a position to do one of two things: he may either cleanse
the film to the point of high art by grasping the true significance of
such text as is needed, or he may demote the same film with all its
art potentialities, to the grade of a mere hawked pamphlet by filling
his text with the heavy, plebeian splashings of everyday and everyman
conversation.
But never mind! Such texts may be regarded as a failure, but they
are by no means equivalent to the transferral of the material to the
purely _spiritual_ world (which is closed to the sensuous moving
picture because it cannot be disclosed through gestures alone). But
wherever we sense an attempt on the part of the text to make even a
remote effort at touching on the problems of the intellect or spirit,
we notice at once the patchouly stench of botched and bungled art. All
those expressions of a well-meant and, in poetry, quite permissible
brooding and grieving over the sinister incidents of life, as well as
such threadbare philosophizing as goes with this species of mental
indulgence—all of these utterances taste like thin lemonade, sweet,
flat, and insipid. In them there is not a grain of real film feeling;
the art of the great picture they know not. Exalted spirit, how near
I feel myself to thee—such is the boast of the moving picture in this
instance—that is, when it makes short shift with its fundamental right
and privilege, if indeed it does not dispense with it entirely.
The spirit of the film author is not shown by allowing his Pegasus to
roam uncurbed over boundless territories, emitting wise sayings as
he stamps the ground of his seemingly privileged course. His spirit,
the intellect that he may have, is revealed in its true light when he
exercises an iron will in his search after the right expression, and
makes this expression just as short and just as rare as the exigencies
of the occasion permit. As Alfred Kerr has laconically put it: “The
goal of your expression? The briefer.” And when this law is laid down
and adhered to, the really marvelous begins to take place: these
condensed, sober, frigid words actually begin to ring and glow. The
best text that has ever been given any motion picture, and the one that
lent the scene to which it belonged the most veritable magic, was found
in _Caligari_. At the head of these dark and somber horrors stood the
one word, “Night.” This lone monosyllable, which in the rise and swell
of poetry might be passed over quite unnoticed, cast a spell over us in
the film like the glowing of greenish eyes from the dark.
Such brevity is, of course, not always necessary, nor is it at all
times possible, for it would frequently be impossible for the general
public to understand it. But a clear, clean primness, one that
is just as alien to any imitation of everyday speech as it is to the
striving after original, poetic effect, should characterize the style
of the text that accompanies the picture.
How could we best define a really adequate motion picture text? By
saying that it is a lump of ice in which there is a glowing coal.
“Night—” This is obviously the artistic sense of the style we are
considering: we are endeavoring to make it possible for the actor to
indulge in an unhampered and unhindered mimicry that is poles removed
from the gymnastics of the pantomime. Carl Hauptmann said once upon a
time: “That will always be a poor motion picture in which a violent
effort is made through the overworking of gestures to express an idea
which in reality can be expressed only through the medium of words.
That, too, will always be regarded as a benevolent inter-pictorial
text which holds up to the mind of the spectator, suddenly and without
warning, certain necessary words the mission of which will be to impart
roundness, fullness, and ultimate clarity to the mental content of the
pictures that have been passing before our vision.”
[Illustration: Fig. 4. Scene from _The Stone Rider_.
[_See p. 82_]
]
The compass of the motion picture were far too limited to merit serious
and universal study if the materials that are used by it were confined
to such as can be fully and adequately interpreted through gestures
alone, and without the use of even the briefest of explanatory text.
The American, who troubles himself but little about theoretical
considerations, frequently mounts, in less important films, individual
scenes with six or more bits of text arranged in remark and reply.
There has been a tendency of late, however, to exercise greater
moderation in this, respect. The whole matter can be summed up by
saying that with regard to the number of interspersed words, and the
length of the explanatory sentences that are used, one’s feelings
are the only safe criterion to follow; and they set down this as
an infallible guide: A text is good if it is effective. It can be
effective only when it harmonizes with the pictures. And if it is to
be effective—that is, if it is to find its way to the heart, the very
narrowest of limitations are imposed upon it.
The business of depicting feelings must be left to the actor. Any
feature of the action that cannot be controlled in an unconstrained
way by the art of mimicry must be cared for by the text. Under this
heading would fall the announcement of decisions reached or resolutions
made by the participating personages. But when the text essays to chew,
swallow, and regurgitate what our imagination can dispose of by
virtue of its own power much better than words can tell, failure raises
its austere visage; for imagination, if not left alone, slinks into the
corner in disgruntled mood and proclaims from its safe but sinister
seat that the entire performance is a fraud, that what seems like
splendor is nothing but cheap paint.
It is not the mute but the monosyllabic character that the motion
picture develops. We are becoming aware of the fact that there is a
pronounced tendency in this modern age toward greater brevity; we are
turning away from the prolix and diffuse; we are endeavoring more and
more to say a great deal in a few words, and to use expressions that
carry comprehensive meaning. The man of the motion picture is related
by affinity and by his very being to the man of the first quarter of
the century.
In the hands of a disciplined and experienced film writer the text, as
a tool of the trade, disports itself benevolently, and is a handmaiden
of the arts. In the hands of an inferior writer, it murders art and
slays the canons of art; for the text becomes an end in itself, and
its æsthetic lassitude as well as its gradual effacement, or rather
extinction, robs in time the legitimate gestures of their specific
meaning and their general significance.
It is remarkable, however, that these facts, these bits of
knowledge regarding the film, do not apply to the comic motion picture.
Even the ingenious Chaplin, who makes more out of gestures than any
of his colleagues, has never been known to object to a right good,
or juicy, text. There are, in truth, quite a number of film comedies
in which the foils and florets of wit are swung about with marked
liberality and hilarity.
But whatever may be said, whatever theories may be proposed, it remains
a sober truth that the real freedom of the film artist is preserved,
for his own enjoyment and that of his spectators, when he is allowed to
make his picture effective as he sees it, and through such gestures as
he personally sees fit to employ to this end. That is the thought the
Swedes kept in mind in the making of their astonishing film entitled
_Erotikon_, in which they played fast and loose with all academic
deductions touching on the muteness of the film. And if asked, “When is
text permissible?” we would be obliged to reply that it is permissible
only when it is necessary.
CHAPTER III
TRICKS
On what planet was the man of the moving picture born? Did he, and
does he, first see the light of day on some magic star where the
established laws of nature fail to function? Where time stands still,
or runs backward? Where spread tables emerge from the earth? Where the
wish suffices to enable a man to fly through the air, or to disappear
without a trace into the ground beneath him?
Long before the World War, when the real power of the motion picture
to represent feelings was as yet unknown, and when serious literature,
on this subject or on that, was as yet unable to rise above the
low level of the cheap pamphlet, one of the most valiant of German
literati—Julius Bab—referred to the trick film, the fairy film, as the
exclusive species of creation with which the so-called moving picture
could legitimately lay claim to success, achieved or potential. The
pedagogues rushed to his support; they showered him with applause;
they demanded the fairy film; they hated and even damned the serious
motion picture.
But never mind! Let us grant that the film Bab and his supporters had
in mind enjoys substantial possibilities in the way of setting forth
certain types of pictures. Their contention merely increased the scope
of the moving picture. But did the picture they had in mind add to the
artistic scope of the business at hand? Bab wrote at that time these
words: “For the motion picture, and in the motion picture, it is easy
to have water run uphill, to have a venerable costermonger of the
gentler sex soar through the empyrean heights, to have a snail overtake
an express train.”
Now, there is at least one irrefutable proof that a given thing is not
art: unlimited possibilities. These make up the stock-in-trade of the
trick film. In such a production there is no development; there is
nothing in which the artist soul triumphs over the soul of the merest
mechanic. There is none of the torture or anguish that goes with the
act of real creation. There is nothing more than a trick played on
the object in question. The trick film is the work of a cold hand.
The inventive mind is constantly bringing out new and quite ingenious
tricks—magic tricks. Having become experienced in this, “it has the
Devil kidnap a railway train and make off with it through the air.”
But this is not art; it belongs to the variety shows; it is in place
where all that is asked for and paid for is physical cleverness,
legerdemain, art without soul.
There comes a time where we really feel sorry for the motion picture
artist—when he finds tricks indispensable if he is to give an adequate
idea of the miraculous magic in which he is interested. We will
concede that in the trick film, and particularly in the fairy film, a
certain measure of inner and intimate development is possible, and is
at times evident. This “art,” however, always has a flaw in it that
defies mending. Any art that forms an alliance with pure mechanisms in
order to be effective, or to bring out the intended effects, is to be
distrusted from the very beginning. For art ceases when mechanismus
begins to play a rôle that can in any way be considered creative or
important. The purpose of art is clear: it is to serve in the colorful
reproduction of a scene.
[Illustration: Fig. 5. Scene from _The Nibelungs_.
[_See p. 82_]
]
This fact should be recognized, and in the films that set forth
that reality which makes the warping and twisting of natural
laws impossible, there should be just as little use made of tricks
as the situation allows; and when employed, they should be employed
with extreme caution. For the spectator, enlightened as he may become
through the papers and magazines, is all too apt to catch on to
these tricks. And it is never wise to grant the man whose art-sense is
undeveloped, and whose æsthetic understanding is anything but mellow, a
peep behind the scenes. The sole place that the artistically immature
can occupy with impunity is in front of the stage.
Many film tricks are, indeed, distinctly deceptive—or fraudulent. If
the incomparable detective is to land in an automobile that is whirring
by at a fearful rate of speed, he goes about his undertaking in a quite
calm way: four pictures a second, and the car making sixty miles an
hour. What really happens? Twenty or thirty-second pictures, mad speed,
foolhardy defiance of every known danger, and so on and so on. But woe
to the final effect if the average spectator sees through the thing!
Even when there is no great or real mystery about the applied tricks,
the artistic effect of them is rather weak. The spectator looks at it
all, and so many technical questions arise in his mind as to how the
feat is accomplished that his attention is drawn away from the picture
itself. “How do they do that?” is one question that distracts him.
Another is: “Is it real?” Indeed, the legitimate stage not infrequently
finds it hard to resist the temptation to amaze and bewilder the
spectator through the use of technical appliances.
Simple tricks, such as the sudden appearance of a dream figure, the
unforeseen vanishing of magic people right in the middle of the picture
may, in urgent cases, be employed. They rarely radiate anything that
even distantly approaches what might be called psychic power, as did,
for example, the unpretentious and altogether laudable tricks employed
in the _Indisches Grabmal_. The truth is, we are reluctant about
submitting to these mechanical devices; we refuse to be duped. Be the
management and mounting ever so clever, we feel too keenly the presence
of the cold mechanism.
More complicated and more difficult tricks, which really deceive no
one, are the appearance of the same person twice in the same picture.
When such takes place, two thoughts, or feelings, fight rather
vigorously for dominance: we don’t like to refuse homage to the at
times marvelous art of the actor (as in the case of Henny Porten in
_Kohlhiesels Töchter_, or Ossy Oswalda in _Puppe_); and the situation
can be so captivating that it is out of the question for us to witness
it and remain cold. But the point is eventually reached where we feel
the impossibility, indeed the very absurdity of it all: “Just hand the
old quockerwodger over to me! I’ll cut him in half and each part will
dance on the rope just as comically as you please!” This is all
very well, but you cannot expect a man to be an earth-worm, for which
dual dancing of this type would be a mere trifle. Any pleasure that we
might otherwise be enabled to draw from such a performance is vitiated
by the ineluctable consciousness that we are witnessing a trick of a
distinctly technical virtuosity.
But it is still more impossible to feel that we are in the presence
of an artistic performance when—and it is common enough—the scene
demanding that a man be pushed off some dangerous ledge or routed from
some death-giving height, a big stuffed doll is substituted for the
mortal thus to be visualized. In _Golem_, for example, we know full
well that it is not the actor, Lothar Müthel, who is swept from the
tower by the raging ghost. And we merely smile when the Golem drags
a stuffed doll around by the hair. The presence of Mirjam’s clothing
helps neither one way nor the other. Or take another type of situation:
Where would it be possible to find an actor who was willing to have
himself hurled high into the air on the occasion of one of the numerous
and popular automobile collisions? In such a scene, where the living
actor, of course, does not take part, the most that even the naïvest
of spectator experiences is a quasi-thrill just as the “hero” receives
his bump. After that there is nothing left but the disagreeable
feeling on the part of the spectator that the staging of the piece was
inadequate.
The man of the moving picture is born upon the same earth upon which
all the rest of us live, move, and have our being. The established
laws of nature apply to him just as they apply to us. Flying through
the air, disappearing into the earth—these are the inartistic little
simpletons that belong to the “movie” in its most desperate and
degraded age. It is not the degree to which we can imitate that makes
art: art is determined by the degree in which figures are fashioned
that have souls in them.
The fairy-tale imitation on the part of the motion picture is fearful,
at least in those instances in which, in order to carry out the trick,
the lion’s share is allotted to the text. The fairy film is a bit of
merry nonsense, a charming piece of roguery and skylarking, which takes
place here on this earth, and which is not supposed to reflect the
profound seriousness of the really poetic world of fairies or other
supernatural creatures.
But we are at a loss to know what to do with the fairy film, for the
fairy world—in this hard, sober, material, and at times, brutal world
of ours—has become about extinct, depopulated, dead. For this
reason alone, the fairy film cannot hope to succeed as a business
proposition.
Within the last year, the magic tricks that were once so common have
almost completely disappeared from the screen. The Swedes—the most
artistic of all film peoples—have never found the trick necessary, not
even in their fairy films, though the Swedes belong to a race that
loves reverie, likes to dream, and enjoys visions.
CHAPTER IV
THE SCENE
Let thought impart fixed content to the forms
That move across the stage in restless search.
—Gœthe.
All that has been said thus far is supposed to serve as an Ariadne
thread through the labyrinth of the moving picture. All individual
forms should be bound together and be reminded in this way of their
common purpose and objective. For it is impossible, if art is to
flourish, to permit each individual section of this manifold complex to
scream aloud, and that with all its might, in an endeavor to drown out
other sections by coercing them into a parrot’s cage, where the most
they can do is to observe an obligatory subserviency.
There is no art in which the star system, the mere existence and
independent, inconsiderate activity on the part of a few gifted
persons, is so nefarious as in the motion picture. This is an art in
which there must be an unreserved ensemble of effort, a friendship
of minds, a perfect harmony of creative souls. In the orchestra of
productive spirits that plays in the motion picture, no man dare be
master, no man dare be assistant. The manager himself must be
_primus inter pares_. And neither the author nor the manager is the
chief creator of a work: it is created in truth with the idea of
equal honor and responsibility for author, manager, actor, operator,
and architect. Let each man in this circle of personalities be a
professional in his field—and an intelligent person with regard to the
fields of each of his colleagues. If anyone fails to perform his full
duty, or if anyone pushes his own personality too ♦obtrusively into
the foreground, the inherent value of the film is weakened while its
eventual success is jeopardized. This is true, for art is weak and
but little capable of defending itself against the fatuous doings and
dealings of all that is merely dazzling, just as truth is but little
minded to take up effective warfare against the hollow phrase.
♦ “obtrustively” replaced with “obtrusively”
The values that have been found in this way solved the problem of the
material. An artist soul that is certain of itself will never find any
great difficulty in seizing upon the right tools to accomplish its
ends; and it will rely upon its feelings in determining what these
tools shall be. And yet the labyrinth in which the film artist is
supposed to find himself is so ramified and many-sided that even the
greatest connoisseurs not infrequently lose their way in the winding
maze of paths that lie open and seem to bid for popular usage.
The main wheel in the machinery of film art has been found; the
technical bases which decide the limits to which the accomplishments
and achievements of the motion pictures may hope to go, these are
known. Just as brush and colors, or hammer and chisel, each inartistic
means in themselves, circumscribe the arts which they aid in creating,
and set up a vigorous resistance to an alien or irrelevant aid, just so
does the moving picture mechanism become indignant at the intrusion of
any and every foreign contrivance or figuration the essential being of
which is beyond its natural control.
These technical means, by which the manifolding of scenes is made
possible and their reproduction stimulating, aid in preserving the
naturally perishable art work of the scene or act. The actor-scene
becomes the pivot of all art consideration. It is from it that all
recruiting and recreation radiate; and the fame and glory that attach
to the enterprise fall upon those people who delineate the play of the
human heart in the visible presence of the spectator.
[Illustration: Fig. 6. Scene from _Destiny_.
[_See p. 83_]
]
* * * * *
The actor on the legitimate stage is a person—that is, a _per-sona_
(a “sounding-through”); he is the speaking tube of the poet.
His conception of the rôle he acts is limited, determined, and
circumscribed, at least by the words of the poet, and these are,
so to speak, anchored in the harbor of his activity. If the art of the
actor means “art seen through a temperament,” there still remains the
marginal latitude of the temperament, of the personality. Despite this
latitude, however, it is unlikely that an actor will be minded to, or
be able to, make such self-imposed use of his personality as would be
subversive of the ends the poet himself had in mind. The contest, the
dispute, the disagreement about the interpretation of a given rôle—we
have but to think of the riddle of Hamlet or Mephistopheles—invariably
revolves about the question of what the poet himself meant by it when
he created it. The stage actor becomes the interpreter of the poetic
purpose.
The most important means at the disposal of the stage actor is the
words, the lines he has to learn. The world in which he acts is
relatively the same as the everyday world in which he lives when off
the stage and going about his usual business. The northern actor makes
but little use of gestures; they mean but little to him. Such concepts
as he wishes to transmit to the spectator he feels should and must be
transmitted through the aid of speech. Naturally, the stage actor does
not speak in the restless, uncertain, and indistinct manner in which
he speaks when off the stage. His language—with the exception of
that employed in the hyper-naturalistic drama—is filed and planed,
whether it be prose or verse. But he makes himself understood by his
dramaturgic colleagues, principally through the same means that he
employs when he wishes to convey an idea to them in daily life.
In the frame of the scenic apparatus, the actor plays in the course of
a few moments, and in _one_ progressive and uninterrupted action, his
rôle from beginning to end. In this case there is no such thing as
the splitting up of the action that is to be gone through with into a
hundred or more different scenes. It is only rare, to be sure, that the
artist observes the whole of his playing from the wings, but in the
scenes he has to play the ♦character of his rôle is developed in logical
sequence, and he has become familiar with the entire play through
rehearsals or through previous performances.
♦ “charcater” replaced with “character”
He is his own auditor. The lines of the poet are transformed also
for him into intoxicating music to which he resigns, by which he is
inspired, and on the wings of which he is carried along.
In addition to all of this, there comes that rare and invaluable
reciprocal action and reaction between him and his spectator, the
force of which lends an inextinguishable and inescapable force to his
receptive soul.
There is only one thing that tortures him, and from which there is
no possible escape: he sees himself obliged to crawl into a new and
strange rôle to-morrow, and into still another new and strange rôle
day after to-morrow, and so on throughout his entire career as long
as this is in the ascendancy. This being the case, even the greatest
creation of the greatest poet is apt, if the danger is not incessantly
guarded against, to rattle around in his soul with the emptiness of a
hand-organ. But it is right there that we note the real task of the
stage actor: he is not supposed to bellow forth scene after scene in
uncontrolled eruptions of feelings. On the contrary, he is supposed to
study each work of art, rehearse it, say it over, look into it, until
he _knows_ it from every angle and in its every aspect. There is only
one state of mind that can be sure of success when it is a question
of performing a written play on the legitimate stage: the calm, easy,
superior assurance that comes from infinite study and practice. “I
seize the passions as the pianist seizes the octaves—without seeing
what I am doing!” This confession was made by Salvini.
* * * * *
Compared with his colleagues on the legitimate stage, the film
actor has in many ways a much more difficult task. The Italian and
the Frenchman, both highly gifted in the art of mimicry, are
much better adapted to the art of gesticulation than is the stiff
northerner, or the snobbish cosmopolite whom the moving picture of
all peoples takes such great delight in portraying. But the feverish
gestures of the Romance people is beginning to screech and scream, in
the moving picture, with the result, rather astonishing in itself, that
the undemonstrative northerner is becoming the most gifted film actor.
Now, why have the film actors of the Romance peoples been a failure? It
is easy to answer the question: Because the film shows _life_, while
the Romance film, and particularly that of the Italians, has shown
_theater_, and not always good theater at that.
The film actor is split with doubt; he labors under a dual desire: he
is supposed to avail himself of all the means of mimic expression which
he consciously neglects and oppresses in daily life—and he is supposed
consciously to neglect and suppress the linguistic means of expression
which he employs in everyday life. The defective mimic ability of the
northerner is revealed in the majority of German, Scandinavian, and
American films. So soon as the actor becomes aware that his gestures
are not putting the picture across, he begins to speak his soundless
language.
His gesture is supposed to embrace the content, in the way of
feeling, of the entire scene. In this striving, the actor is supported
by the peculiarity of the film mechanism, which catches up even the
gentlest and most subdued mimicry and holds it up before the spectator.
It would be impossible, especially for a northerner, to play an entire
mimic action, in all its shades and nuances, at one time or in one
concerted effort. This explains why the pantomime could never rise
above the level of a rather crude art form. But the film dissects the
action, winnows its parts, and allocates them to various places or
dramaturgic localities. Everything that happens in the same place is
assembled, while the picture is being taken, and made into a united and
single play. This is done, of course, for practical reasons associated
with costumes, decorations, and travels. This being the case, the
actor does, and has to, concentrate his entire attention, for a very
short time, a time that is generally measured in seconds, on the mimic
material and means that are naturally placed at his disposal.
This human weakness—which makes a relatively long and at the same time
inspired action impossible—has been made the basis of photographic
technique by the American. His reasoning and his technique must
be commended. Where his European colleagues generally let the
apparatus stand during the entire scene and then play a few close-ups
later on, the American takes a picture of every individual scene,
and from all conceivable angles. His scenario is arranged from the
beginning with this end in view. The result is that each scene is
wrapped in a spirited, glimmering, glittering unrest which lifts even
the most indifferent episode quite up above the shadow of tedium. I am
of the opinion that the American film owes a good share of its charm to
this distinctly advantageous and manifold dissection of the pictures,
just as I believe that the failure of so many German and Swedish films
is due to the slowness and tediousness that are familiarly associated
with their photographic technique.
[Illustration: Fig. 7. Scene from _The Children of Darkness_.
[_See p. 83_]
]
This splitting up of the film action, however, into individual scenes,
which are not photographed in their logical sequence, brings into the
artistry of the film actor that profound psychic cleft, even physical
disruption, which fundamentally differentiates his creative activity
from that of the actor on the legitimate stage. The action does not
carry him into his playing, or into the inner nature of his rôle, in
calm, gradual development. On the contrary, the flood-tide of feeling
springs up obviously without the proper motivation, and ends with a
suddenness that suggests that someone cut it off before it had been
fully lived out. There is no such thing as a gliding and swelling of
mood such as is necessary, it would seem, to effect a mild and logical
transition from scene to scene.
This causes the actor and the manager all manner of difficulty; neither
is able to gain a complete survey of the work to be done. Where the
regular stage actor brings his mind into the proper equilibrium, we
might say equanimity, slowly, step by step, and with a careful studying
of the objective that is to be taken, so that the climax of his effort
will stand out from the subsidiary efforts that have led up to it, the
film actor scatters his entire energy over all the scenes, and some of
them are not merely preparatory to the climax, they are in themselves
of a distinctly subordinate nature. When a case really arises in which
there is perfect artistic gradation, each scene receiving the emphasis
it deserves and the climax rising up above all that has gone before, we
may be certain that this is due to the solemn fact that both the acting
and the management have been in possession of unqualified artistic
appreciation, that each has worked in harmony with the other, and that
the eventual and final success of the achievement has been due to
unusual excellence in the way of creating and producing a picture. When
this happens, however, the layman remains altogether unaware of it.
He takes it for granted. But even he appreciates the astonishing effect
of it all; he somehow knows that the performance was perfect. He feels
the perfection though he is unable to explain it.
Take the case of Lubitsch’s _Sumurun_. The histrionic brilliancy of
it was due to the fact that it consisted of an unbroken and dazzling
chain of episodes and pictures. The truth is, this disadvantage that
is inherent in the technique of the film can be removed only by the
author. He must see to it that there is a rhythm about his scenes;
these must rise and fall naturally and smoothly.
An excess of magnificence is easier to endure than a total lack of
ebullient ingenuity. The average film is a tedious, wooden affair that
moves along with the slowness of all that is mediocre and commonplace.
For in the very inherent inability to get a complete survey of what
is taking place lies a hazard which only the best of film actors, and
these only when urged on and inspired by the best of producers, can
take with ease or success: the hazard lies in the fact that the entire
character of a figure is tuned either to a sharp or a flat note, in a
major or a minor key, and once set going it works like an unwelcome
narcotic. The actor plays on a certain day just one individual scene,
now from the first and then from the last and still again from some
intervening act. Then on still another day he takes up another scene
from another act, and so on until the mosaic of all the scenes has
been, not composed or arranged in becoming sequence, but heaped up in a
veritable pile.
It is perfectly easy to see how that fine feeling that is associated
with real art, and which even the least gifted actor in the spoken
drama has at his immediate disposal, escapes the less gifted film
actor, when this method of playing is in vogue, and especially so if he
is not carried along by a colorful bit of poetry. He is simply not in a
position to bring new colors, new tones, new passions into his acting,
and therefore into his act. The result of all this is that entire film
actions are played by one or several actors on a single string. The
women of the film fraternity are frequently characterized by this very
type of playing; indeed, it is rare that any one of them can boast of
the innate possession of that choice ability which enables them to
vary the chords that are struck in their souls by the actions they are
supposed to depict.
There are a few, however, who have the psychic power which spells
variety in the creation of character. In Germany there is first of all
Mady Christians; and then there is Lil Dagover. France has only one
such film actress, and she is but little known: Marie-Louise Tribe. In
Sweden, Karin Molander and Tora Teje are noted for their genius in this
direction. In America, colorful film actresses are as numerous as the
sands of the sea. But in all film countries the average film actress is
a tired, tedious, washed-out, and worn-out character.
Such lifeless moving pictures present us consequently with the
soporific drama of a single sorrow or grief or pain, of a conventional
melancholy, sadness, or lament. And these emotions are reiterated time
out of mind, and through the abnormal exploitation of sentimentality
they become swollen and mendacious. Indeed, even buoyancy and mirth can
sound hard and tinny if they are made to trip along without variation
or interruption.
It is the task of the author and the producer to work hand and hand
with the actor to the end that he may be enabled to put life into
his acting. To do this, flashes of light must be shed, in the real
and artistic sense, on the action of the play; the individual scene
must be made to appear in its true light with regard to the play as a
whole—that is to say, this must be done if the complete and completed
play is to give the effect of unified art, art as an entity, art in its
totality.
The dissection of the action into countless inorganic parts
naturally has its effect on the artistic form of the film actor, and
gives to his efforts a tone and quality that is altogether different
from what we are accustomed to in the case of the actor in the spoken
drama.
This is seen first of all in the rehearsal. Such a thing as the
learning of a rôle by heart, or the practicing of gestures before
the mirror, is unknown to the film actor. With him the rehearsal is
rather an experimenting. In America, where the use of the negative
plays no rôle, the individual parts of the scenes are turned again and
again, until it is possible to establish a “model copy” from which the
best parts are chosen. But such a “waste,” which seems to be quite
profitable in the end, is unknown in Europe, which, following the lead
of its lack of reason, feels that it is too impoverished to indulge in
such lavishness. In Europe the apparatus, literally speaking, is turned
but once, or, in case the result is wholly unacceptable, it is turned
twice, but with a sigh.
The stage actor is a “soul stormer.” But, as contrasted with the film
actor, the stage actor can work himself into his rôle gradually and by
all manner of psychic cajolery. The film actor is not presented with
an entire work of art, but with the merest particle of such a work,
and then he is told to put life into it. “Inspire it!” That is the
command to which he must be obedient. “That is the trial by fire of
the film actor,” says the doughty Danish director, Urban Gad, “when he
can poetize himself, so to speak, into the rôle that he is supposed to
create, when he can feel the situation in its entirety. Then he is the
born film actor. Otherwise he is merely a more or less well trained
circus horse.”
The creative work of the film actor is, consequently, not a matter of
slow and possibly even tiresome learning in solo and ensemble; it is
a matter of ingenious and spontaneous improvisation. The man who has
to stand up before a mirror and see whether this gesture is fitting
and another permissible is no film actor. And it is from his ability
to rise from nothing to an exalted and passionate art-feeling that
the pride and joy of the film player owe their origin; and having
originated, they cast a beneficent atmosphere over the art that is
called into being.
It is not enough to delude oneself regarding an essentially cold heart
by the abundant use of gestures that would seem to indicate that the
heart is warm. There are actors on the legitimate stage who, by the
traditional use of the merest and veriest routine, can carry their
publics along with them and raise them to pinnacles of enthusiasm;
make them rage with indignation; or petrify them into horror over
the deeds done before them. No film actor has ever yet succeeded in
doing that. The lines are creations of the mind; they are spoken with
shrewd calculation as to the effects they can evoke; they are declaimed
with real consideration. The gestures, on the other hand, are truer
than the lines; they come direct from the soul. Moreover, the lens
of the familiar apparatus is sharper and less indulgent than the
human eye. The lens catches everything; nothing escapes it. It makes
a living picture of every attempt to deceive and visualizes all that
comes before it. No film actor who is not passionately concerned with
and about the incident he is to portray will ever bring other people
to the point of passion. The inert playing of comedy which infests
the legitimate stage with false and idle pathos, with the spirit of
repulsive paint and powder, is utterly out of place, and out of the
question, in the moving picture. The film actor has got to be what he
plays.
Every actor, however, has his own personality; his own world. There
is an atmosphere about him that is his. He cannot escape it; it makes
itself felt; and it causes him to have a definite, even unique,
disposition, temperament, character. Now if the circumference of
his soul is very large, the compass of his soul will be equally
large—and he will provide us with a wonderful drama—the drama of a man
who can create one character to-day, another to-morrow, and in so doing
renew himself as a molder of personalities.
The moving picture, with its spontaneous creation, is a high grade and
first-class measurer of temperament. The world has a plentiful supply
of actors and actresses who can depict robbers and prostitutes of the
lowest as well as of the highest classes of society. But the world has
only a few, a very few artists, in whom a royal and proud, a fine and
demure, a rich and colorful soul plays its part.
The suddenness with which these feelings must be conjured up demands
rapidity of inspiration, an ever-ready excitability (the managers are
well aware of this!), a pliability of mood, an unrestrained capacity to
enter into the spirit of complete renunciation, compared with which the
ability on the part of the regular stage actor to feel himself into his
rôle is a calm and subdued sauntering about, a mere strolling through
the mazes of the human heart. The film actor is not fired on to intense
passion by the words of the poet; he has to kindle the potential flame
within his heart by the fire that he himself strikes, and with the
aid of such fuel as he himself can assemble for the purpose. But
in doing all this, his faithful colleague, the manager, stands by
his side, and his dare not be an unvibrant soul. The manager is duty
bound to find words that will inspire even the most lethargic of film
actors. The will power, one might say the will violence, of the best
of managers is so strong that, guided by them, the actor plays as in a
hypnotic state.
Without inspired and intelligent direction, the actual necessity
of ensemble playing, and the necessities imposed by the desire for
such playing are easily forgotten, with the result that lack of
discipline dissipates the general effect, and such art as might have
been revealed goes the way of all weakness. The reason for this safe
assertion is patent: in the motion picture, the feelings burst forth
from momentarily calm hearts. Unusual diligence must, consequently, be
exercised in the working-up of emotions, in the emphasis that is to be
laid on significant scenes and on climaxes.
For these nervous and sensitive people, the restraint of feelings is
a distinct torture. The endless waiting in the hot and noisy glass
house, the disturbing feature of the apparatus while the picture is
being taken, the garish light which hurts the eye, the lamp which not
infrequently explodes with the subsequent danger to such combustible
paraphernalia as ball dress and wig, and the director, this
disagreeable person who is always around, watching what is going on,
interrupting here with a word of constructive criticism and there with
a sentence of plain abuse—these are a few of the things that make the
film actor’s life a hard one. And added to them must be the solemn
fact that there is no public there to give wings to the actor’s soul.
This being the case, an actually mad desire to create a character
has got to come over and settle down upon the actor if he is to come
into the right frame of mind. That he has got to be a man of perfect
self-forgetfulness while surrounded by this hubbub of haste and
confusion need not be stated.
* * * * *
The means at the disposal of the film actor is his body, which admits
of unmeasured and unaccounted possibilities in the way of expressing
emotions. It was only a few years ago that we learned that there is no
condition of the soul for which the body does not have its appropriate
and interpretative movement; and to-day we hardly have an inkling
of the profound depths of the soul for which bodily agitations or
affections may be found, and will be found, once the generations that
are to come shall have learned the true significance of mimicry. In the
future, mimicry must develop into an intimate and familiar language. In
the dances of antiquity and in the pantomime of past centuries, the
soul wrestled with the body, for it had already sensed its ability to
speak through the body. But the spectators sat too far away, the ring
of the gesture was drowned out by space, and the bodies had to shriek,
as it were, in order to be understood. But a tender feeling can do
nothing more than whisper, for it is averse to all that is loud. The
soul gave up the struggle as hopeless; pantomime became petrified, or
stereotyped, into the conventional ballet which has dragged its weary
course through the centuries.
It was not until our own day—the ancient arts of which are tired to
death and foul to the very marrow of their bones—a day in which it
seemed that art could take no hope, that technique stepped in and
made inventions as a result of which the gesture took on fullness and
acquired sound. Modern technique has invented the film, and the film is
the violin of the human body.
Before one recognized the nuances of which the film was potentially
capable, it had to wander along through the crude errors of pantomime.
That the imperfect films of the first decades offered only imperfect,
at times even repellent, pictures, is altogether natural. The
intellectuals of all nations, and those who had schooled their eye and
their heart on the perfection and beauty of the old and established
arts, were terrified, if not horrified, at and by the unlicked antics
of this new contraption. They saw in the motion picture nothing more
than a machine to entertain, chiefly to amuse, the populace. They
damned it outright; they found it a perverter of youth, just as they
had and have found those cheap, vulgar and badly printed paper volumes
which are to be had for a few pennies, and which poison the youthful
mind so that the expenditure of millions in charity and philanthropy
cannot reclaim them.
There were as yet no artists who could play on this new and novel
fairy violin. The evolution of the film is quite logical: it began
with devices and agencies which were inadequate, both artistically and
technically.
[Illustration: Fig. 8. Scene from _Algol_.
[_See p. 84_]
]
It is our duty and our pleasure to do homage at this point to an artist
who took up with the film, and resigned herself to it, at a time
when artists in general poured contempt without measure and derision
without thought on it. This artist was the Dane—Asta Nielsen. She
has been dethroned, unquestionably a prima donna of the old school
by whose playing we can now do no more than evaluate the tremendous
progress that has been made by her pupils and successors. But in
Europe she was the queen, the standard-bearer of the film. Her large,
dark eyes, and the symmetrical play of her limbs, captivated and
converted many of different faith to the cause. Her gestures were
taken from the pantomime: she moved across the canvas in slow, long,
ostentatious tread. There was, indeed, something about her movements
that might be described as obtrusive, importunate. But Asta Nielsen
was—let us repeat, in Europe—the first of that great herd of jobless
_artistes_ and beggarly paid servants who took up her position before
the revolving camera in a really and truly artistic way. She was filled
with a passion, and endowed with a faith in art that was unknown to and
unappreciated by the great majority, as she played the lachrymose and
vapid tales that were then being turned out for visualization on the
screen.
She was originally an actress; she abandoned the legitimate stage and
went over to the motion picture. Now, the actor on the regular stage
is one kind of individual; the actor for the motion picture is quite
another. The stage has a limited and well-defined category of beings
and shadows, of vessels, so to speak, for the fancy of the poet in
words. There is the youthful lover, the sentimental dame of uncertain
years, the first hero, the first heroine, the doughty old father, the
droll old lady, and so on. The list need not be filled out; it is a
familiar one.
Anything that fits into one of these classifications is played,
_summa summarum_, by the actor engaged to take the part. The actor
of the spoken stage has a clear and definite being; his character,
his make-up, is known. He is a comedian, a boneless man who can slip
into this rôle to-day and into another to-morrow. In his position,
whatever it may be at any given time, he engages in a really fraudulent
and affected game. That is the comedy which devours in time the very
character of that actor whose gifts are naturally none too great. He
becomes a player of all parts; he creates all rôles; he grows into
a poseur without truth of soul. Only the tremendous characters of
the rarely gifted, of a Garrick or a Kainz, win the victory over the
insidious phrase, assimilate any rôle they essay to interpret, and
transform it into a part of their own being.
I do not know whether Asta Nielsen was a great artist on the legitimate
stage or not; I hardly believe that she was. For there is the
atmosphere of “comedy” about her rôles, an eternal conflict between
truth and phraseology. No one had even a remote conception of the
unsparing nature of the film lens in the early days of her histrionic
glory. One schematized a rôle in accordance with the traditions of
the legitimate stage. Nor was this all; the first great film artist
had to do everything. She was worth her weight in gold; and she was
exploited. This week she would take the part of a demoniac prostitute
in silk and satin; next week she would play the part of a young girl
whose youthfulness was not surpassed by her chastity, and whose beauty
was the cynosure of vigilant eyes.
Two things, consequently, were to be recognized, and to be overcome:
the phraseology of the pantomime gesture, and the insincerity of the
rôle. The legitimate stage portrays and represents shadows—speaking
tubes of the poet; the film uses real human beings.
The development of the film has been different in different countries.
In one country its growth has been noticeably slow; in another it
has been remarkably rapid. Film actors put in their appearance,
were carried along for a while on the wave of popularity, and then
vanished—or they still fight on—Asta Nielsen is a case in point—in
a mad and ineffectual attempt to regain or retain their thrones.
This development of the film has been recognized nowhere. It has not
come to light. It has been brought about in perfect accord with that
instinctive necessity with which the healthy never fails to blaze its
trail and find its way.
Man versus rôle, individual versus a stage phantom—that is the
situation. In America, where cumbersome traditions are rare, in the
realm of art, the goal was reached more quickly than elsewhere. It was
in America that we witnessed the complete defection from the stage
actor and a consequential preference for the type. There is to be no
mimicking; there is to be no playing of theater; each man has his own
character, and this character he projects on the screen, again and
again, now in this disguise, now in another, but it is always the same
character. He projects his own ego; and for this reason he never fails,
for a man can find his own mouth with the spoon, it makes no difference
how dark the dining-room may be.
[Illustration: Fig. 9. Scene from _Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown_.
[_See p. 84_]
]
There is another country which, by virtue of its well-nigh complete
isolation from the hardened traditions of the Mediterranean nations,
found the truth and genuineness of the film with marked rapidity:
Sweden. The Swedish player is very rarely a great “actor.” His
face, with its broad Finnish cheek bones, is rather immovable. His
eyes dream, but inwardly. They turn at times with an expression of
unqualified skepticism toward the things of the outer world only
to return to the same soul from which they derived their initial
characteristics and inspiration. The figures are not yet entirely
awakened; they stretch themselves after the fashion of young trees.
But in these Swedish men lies deep breath: it is the dreamy melancholy
of their native land. Every one of them has the warm blood of life
coursing through his veins, and the atmosphere of truth is about them
all, even when we feel that they are all a bit alike in the matter
of elegiac temperament. When steel and stone are rubbed together,
sparks fly; the Swedes are all constituted, more or less, of the same
resilient wood.
The film theater of the Romance peoples was simply fearful. The
ostentatious gesticulation, the long-drawn-out echo of feelings,
the false pomp of their operatic style have been the cause of many
a bankruptcy among film companies and producers in sunny Italy. The
Italian film industry represents, in truth, in the year 1923, nothing
but a heap of ruins from which here and there, but only rarely, a patch
of green prosperity raises its intimidated tuft. A great many Italians
are coming up to Germany to-day, the film gestures of which appeal to
them as being relatively tolerable. The sober, phraseless vibration of
American acting gets on the hot-blooded nerves of these sons of the
South.
We Germans, however, are fully convinced that the way we had been
following, in the matter of gestures, up to 1923 was a false one. Our
producers rarely have the courage to go fishing for film actors,
for new and youthful faces, in the great stream of humanity that flows
by them without ceasing. Until only one year ago, we fancied that no
one was fitted for the screen unless he had proved his ability on the
stage. That was a grievous error.
We have, to be sure, some clever character players whose psychic
powers were not corrupted by the pathos of the stage. I mention, among
others, the famous Jennings, Wegener, and Schünzel. They are great on
the stage for the very evident and simple reason that they dominate
any part they play and make it yield to the dictates of their own
personalities. But we have no youthful favorite among the ladies; we
do not have the smiling hero, who lustily packs up life and carries it
off on one shoulder. But our greatest lack is in another direction: we
have no young woman; we have no radiant girl. She is lacking, but only
in our moving pictures; in life she is present. And if we wish to bring
these charming and lovely young girls into the moving picture world and
project them on the screen, we have got to make up our minds that there
is but one place where they can be found: in life itself. We have got
to recruit them from the flowing naturalness of their laughter.
We begin with a decided aversion to the star system. And it must be
said that all of those presumptive and presumptuous film princesses,
whose abilities would be remarkable indeed if they bore the slightest
relation to their caprices, have disappeared from the studios. These
stars made, until quite recently, the production of a picture in
Germany an excessively expensive undertaking because of their lack of
willingness to work, and their eternal talking. This explains why Fritz
Lang, of the Decla-Bioscop, showed so many new and strange faces in his
marvelous picture based on the Nibelungen saga.
It is rare, in the case of the legitimate stage, that a part is written
for a special actor. Whoever fits the part is assigned to it, and he
creates the character. No other course of procedure is thinkable, for
a drama is written for a thousand stages. There is something solitary
about the film; we regard it as something that “takes place” but
once. It is difficult to write good film characters if the writer is
unfamiliar with the players that create the characters. Hampered by
this lack of personal acquaintance, the most that can be accomplished
by the author is an acceptable sketch. One has to associate with the
prospective film actors, and study their personalities without letting
them become aware of the end in view and the caution that is being
exercised in attaining it. One has to study the player’s unconscious
movements; the mirthful action of his hand; the sensuous expression
of his eye; his gait; his manner of sitting down. The whole man is
sometimes revealed by the way in which he smokes a cigarette. One must
make the actor angry and nervous. Each expression of impatience, of
joy, of tedium that is characteristic of a given man must be noted down
in the film book. One has got to make a portrait of the man who is
going to play the part the author has in mind.
He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just
as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward
the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got
to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him
on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired
information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift
a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and
transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. There it finds itself
again, safe and carefully guarded: it smiles, and develops its flowers.
It is only in this way that the characters grow from their own power.
Made to grow in this fashion, they reveal in their every movement,
as in every deed they do, the saving sign of inner truth. They
convulse the spectator through the unadulterated naturalness of their
art; and by virtue of their own ability, they can make an improbable
situation seem natural, for their own life is natural, just as it is
peculiar to them alone, and virile.
It is impossible to be a great film actor if one is small and unworthy.
The person who is cold by nature, and who carries an unsympathetic
heart in his breast, will never be able to do more than simulate real
feelings. I do not believe that a prostitute would ever be able to
play the rôle of an angelic creature in a film. Behind and back of the
keyboard on which the film writer improvises there must be a set of
beautifully tuned strings. Otherwise nothing comes of the effort but
the banal clanging of the hand-organ.
The film actor must be first of all a human being, a real man, a
clear and unequivocal character of life and from life. The picture of
his soul is found only in everyday life, never on the stage. And his
adaptability to the moving picture is determined by the manner in which
he conducts himself in the life he leads from day to day with other
men. If he is beautiful, if his body is erect and pliable, so much the
better. But he must be a man of character.
Character and temperament—two things that cannot be learned. One can
learn, however, the business of playing while facing the camera; one
can learn, in this position, to control one’s gestures, and to give a
cautious expression of the feelings.
On the legitimate stage it is quite permissible, it is indeed
necessary, for the actor to express his emotions through a certain
exaggeration, with the most beautiful pathos known to gesticulation.
The opposite is true of the film: in it, suppression of emotions,
muffling of feelings, is necessary. Why? Because in actual life
feelings are after all expressed in a subdued way, behind the veil, so
to speak, of that on which the interested party is to eavesdrop. Every
time we notice any such emotion as ecstasy on the screen we remain
cold; we become in truth disenchanted because of what we have sensed.
Experience has already taught us that exaggeration has no place in the
moving picture; it is ineffective. This lesson we have learned from
the Italians. All good film actors are noted for a certain measure of
immovability; they are cautious with and sparing of their gestures.
[Illustration: Fig. 10. Scene from _Golem_.
[_See p. 85_]
]
In the good film manuscript, the feelings are not poured in a lavish
way over every single scene. Over the majority of scenes there should
rest a splendid freshness, a sunny everyday life filled with a
wholesome humor the chief inspiration of which is the very joy of
living and the atmosphere of activity. The isolated scenes of real
feeling should be played all the more quietly and calmly if the natural
instinct of the actor prompts him to display unusually strong feelings.
In other words, the more excited the actor the less excited his acting
should be. I personally place the wreath of honor on the head of that
actor who creates the coveted effects with the least expenditure of
visible energy. In every gesture, in every flash or darkening of the
eye, there should be concealed a deep truth which is illumined and
illuminated, secretly, by the warmth of the feelings that the artist in
reality experiences.
CHAPTER V
THE SETTING
The director of the legitimate stage is supposed to create an art
form which rests essentially upon the spoken word, with its artistic
possibilities and potentialities. His entire setting, from curtain
decorations to background and supernumerary costumes, is supposed to
intimate and indicate in a symbolic way (though it must be conceded
that the Meininger Stage strives after ideals of its own in this
regard). The word rings out in front of the pictures and traverses a
jagged line of the background up to the mountain.
Mimic art calls for a sharp milieu, a pronounced environment. Since
the descriptive power of the gesture does not extend beyond the hidden
contents of the human soul, the figures of an unenvironed motion
picture would float about in empty space.
The world of the spoken drama is limited to the cubic feet of space
within the theater; the motion picture, on the contrary, has the world
for its field; it moves in perfect freedom. The camera follows the
actor wherever he may go. If he betake himself to the uttermost
parts of the earth, it is there too. So far, then, as decorative
setting in the motion picture is concerned, there is no such thing,
from an artistic point of view, as limitation or consideration.
The very freedom, however, which the motion picture enjoys in the way
of scenic alternation and variety necessitates constant indulgence in
this freedom: a mimic action dare not drag its weary course for hours
at a time over the same setting. There must be frequent change of
scene. Its psychic powers of expression are too soon exhausted for it
to tarry with impunity, or satisfaction, for any considerable length of
time on the same scene.
In Germany we have made some experiments with films in which there was
no decoration. One of these, the Rex film entitled _Scherben_, is said
to have met with success on the other side of the Atlantic. I feel, for
my own part, that the unvaried and undecorated scene of this paltry
milieu was pretty tiresome. A good film should show an abundance of
pictures; it should have three ♦or four milieus follow close after each
other, rebound against each other. We might as well make up our minds
to it that the need for entertainment on the part of the public is so
great that nothing short of gay, if not gaudy, variety will suffice.
♦ “of” replaced with “or”
For this reason, ♦decorations are made each one of which has a definite
stamp or character. Rooms in which human beings live and work must
show traces of human habitation. With the stage this may not be
necessary, for the illuminating, enlivening power of the poet’s words
lifts the mind above the external picture. The stage of Shakespeare
transformed the really immutable and altogether unpretentious setting
once in Macbeth’s banquet hall, another time in the gray field of the
witches—and it did this through the animating phantasy of Shakespeare’s
lines. The stage is style art. Indeed, the intellectual would have it
this entirely. But the realism of the last century, which brought into
being the so-called stage of illusion and fostered this creation until
it went to the very last conceivable length in the matter of imitation,
is a source of real danger to the essential nature of the spoken word,
and to the wings of such fancy as the word may have. The great mass
of spectators the world over demand from the stage, and also from the
film, that it hold up before them a picture of reality. But in contrast
to the film, the spoken stage cannot be regarded as the spiritual
property of these masses.
♦ “docorations” replaced with “decorations”
Regarding film setting, the first question that arises, and it is a
very fundamental one, is this: Which shall it be—Style or Reality?
Shall we prepare scenery that is related to the style of the
legitimate stage, or shall we copy life as it is?
The realism of the spoken stage is cumbersome and inadequate. You have
got to let the public sit and wait a full half hour to change a single
setting of elaborate decoration. And after all, do what we may, it is
only a defective and sometimes even miserable transcript of nature that
is conjured on to the stage, despite the ingenuity of the machinist
and many other near-colleagues. The Berlin performance of _Andalosia_
represented, a few years ago, the forest act as follows: the stage was
arranged in hills, covered with tin tubs in which there was a profusion
of real fir trees and genuine heather. Diagonally across the stage ran
a real brook. Behind an invisible wire cage squirrels hopped about and
frightened birds flew from corner to corner.
Such a pompous stage setting as this is absurdly complicated. The stage
that goes in exclusively for style will produce the same psychic effect
with the most simple and elementary means.
If style decoration is so made as to meet the exact needs of the stage,
if it suits the stage in every way, well and good; but this is not
in itself irrefutable proof that we should follow the same rules in
preparing decoration for the film. The ways and means of the two arts
are fundamentally different; and the public that each attracts, and
from whose patronage each must survive or perish, is in neither case
the same. Moreover, it is the duty of each art to do what it can. It is
only a fool who attempts the very thing for which he is not naturally
fitted.
The lens of the moving picture camera sucks up the world about it with
unlimited greediness; but it rebels at the mere intimation of perverse
or distorted art forms. The materials with which the film deals, which
it handles, are far too simple, natural, and human to endure any sort
of studied or affected decoration. The spectators in the motion picture
want to see an interesting action on the part of human beings; they
demand beautiful and picturesque decorations; they wince at, if they do
not reject out and out, such pictures as owe their origin to, and would
please the art critics.
The urgent need for good and original settings is ubiquitous; every
film nation feels it. But strangely enough, it has been given the
consideration it calls for neither by the Americans nor by the Swedes.
Both peoples, if we may be permitted to say so, are perfectly contented
with pretty pictures. But real decoration is a vast deal more than a
mere frame enclosing, in rather indifferent fashion, the human heart.
Within the compass of the play, the psychic or psychological effect
and impressiveness have their quite real meaning; they are important.
This fact has been recognized, let us state it candidly, by the
Germans. The German film may be a very imperfect creation, but you have
got to admit that in the way of inventiveness, wealth of ingenuity, and
such atmosphere as can be created by decoration, it has accomplished a
great deal; indeed, in some instances, it has gone too far.
An instance of excess in the field of decoration was that clever and
ingenious film entitled _Dr. Caligari_. It may be referred to as the
masterpiece of doubtful decorative art. (Illustrations No. 1 and 2.)
This was the meaning of these decorations: they were intended to
surround or accompany the action as a sort of powerful tone; they were
so many notes. The action itself was hostile to life, misanthropic,
dour. It painted the gruesome phantasies of a mind diseased. It was
an unintended, but not on that account ineffective, bit of irony that
this picture of a deranged world was enveloped in hyper-impressionistic
decoration. The action was that of a madman; the scenery was as it
was. One saw oblique and twisted houses painted with all manner of mad
flourishes; rooms no wall of which was rectangular or perpendicular
or level; passageways of the same description and streets that
cannot be described; rhombic windows and doors; bent, warped, and
splintered trees which reminded of the monumental drawings that are
associated with Chinese painting.
In these pictures (the composition of them was an inimitable success)
there was a perfect reflection, in error and knowledge, of the
inevitable characteristics of decoration.
[Illustration: Fig. 11. Scene from _Golem_.
[_See p. 86_]
]
We had to do, first of all, with the oft-repeated objection to this
much-praised and much-calumniated film, that in that insanely distorted
milieu the actors moved about in their own human, unfractured, and
undeformed bodies. Werner Krauss alone, who played the title rôle,
was so unqualifiedly successful in making his being fit in and seem
at home with the spooky element of this heap of distortions that the
environment apparently enveloped this magician with a singularly
magical veil. The unnaturalness of his predicament was made to appear
natural. With the others it was altogether different. The magic circle
in which they moved left the impression that it was merely a ghostly
and ghastly mantle that flopped about their figures. It simply is
not possible to squeeze such inherently contradictory material and
motivation into a single frame. The decoration, always easily
changed and varied, must adapt itself to the form and figure of the
actor, which is unvariable and cannot be changed. This being the case,
the following basic law compels formulation and observance: Setting
dare not distort reality.
This law has a meaning of its own: it applies to the whole business of
art as this is exploited in the interests of caricatured and twisted
expressionism. That expressionism has about fought its last fight and
displayed its ultimate lunacy, is a safe and reasoned assumption. The
“deformation” of nature as an aid to the inadequate ability of the
artist is a hopelessly unsatisfactory emergency aid invoked on behalf
of a foul and decayed naturalism in its desperate attempt to conjure up
a new style—_un coin de la nature, vu à travers d’un tempérament_.
One saw an irrationally perverse and eccentric, painted and plotted
picture of a city (the surface in the background of illustration No.
1). Two insane people stood before it, one of whom pointed at the
singular picture and said: “My native city!” Of the feeling of art
there was not a trace. The spectator, going at the thing in a purely
rational way, figured it out as follows: the lunatic was born in
a little hilly city. The magic of the words “native city” was not
even hinted at, to say nothing of being exhausted. In a mimic
and sensuous moving picture it does not suffice to portray a painted
surface as a picture. Such scenery will do on the legitimate stage,
but, in the motion picture, the symbolism of it fails to reach the
heart. The decoration of the film must be plastic.
Such a film can have only one meaning; it can be important in only one
way: it is an experiment, and experiments are rarely useless. They may
even be quite valuable; for to start out on a wrong road is not useless
in itself, since we thereby learn that it is the wrong road. We learn
that we are in a blind alley, that there is no use to try to go any
farther, that any attempt at a new creation is beaten at the beginning,
and can hope to end only in the most wretched of conditions—such
as those find themselves committed to who have arrived late. Any
achievement in the way of film scenery can have and be of enduring
value then and only then when it serves as a stimulus to colleagues in
other branches of the same art; it must leave some room for many minds.
A film such as that of _Dr. Caligari_, which begins with irony and ends
with resignation, can never be regarded as more than a curiosity. The
Decla Company made another expressionistic film entitled _Genuine, die
Geschichte einer Blutsäuferin_ (“The Tale of a Vampyre”). It revealed
the same artistic principles as those of _Dr. Caligari_, but with
this difference: they had now become petrified after the fashion of
a regular mask. I am of the opinion that for an achievement in this
field to be of real value, in technique as well as in art, it has got
to be taken from life and follow lifelike lines. For this reason, the
possibility of a fruitful development in this direction seems remote
indeed.
This gigantic spring-tide which surged forth with unqualified
suddenness from the chaos of film evolution has about ebbed away and
been absorbed by a few remarkable decorations. Its effects are still
noticeable here and there on the upper surface; this much must be
conceded. But the great storm that reached down to the depths and
brought about a complete revolution and reformation in the domain of
film scenery, has never taken place, though it was prophesied and
promised by its leading adherents at the time. Wherever we can still
recognize a faint echo of it, it has quieted down into a milder, calmer
form which first coquettes with nature and flirts with life, only to
become gradually but completely reconciled to them in the end.
The tendency to invention of phantastic settings was immensely aroused
by _Dr. Caligari_. Illustration No. 3. for example, shows what may be
done in the way of an art form that is supposed to follow nature,
though it is conceived in error, and though it is a specimen of such
nature as we get when it is constructed rather than allowed to grow,
and constructed with the inescapable contortions that characterize this
type of thing. The unreasoned and unbalanced twisting and the laborious
padding of these mountain lines are without a trace of either warmth or
truth; they lack inner genuineness. The sunflowers in the foreground at
the left are simply idiotic. Illustration No. 4 is a trifle better in
the calm flow of its lines. It is astonishingly true to life, though
the thought of a castle that has been chiseled from the solid rock does
not exactly remind one of home, or if so, it merely emphasizes the
saying that there is no place like home.
Illustration No. 5 is thoroughly saturated with the romantic clarity of
feeling for nature. The reconciliation of the inventive artist with the
forms of nature has been perfected; it is complete. There is, moreover,
a remarkable freedom of invention coupled with astonishing fidelity to
nature.
In all of these pictures we recognize an ever-increasing moderation,
an intimate and sympathetic pressing forward to the forms of reality
that are not slavishly copied; they are felt, and that in a vigorous
and natural way. Before we enter upon the open road of scenery that
is faithful to reality, however, we must follow for a season romantic
setting by way of familiarizing ourselves with a number of its amiable
ramifications.
The playing or sportive mind of the artist in pictures roams about and
remains resting, in time, toying like a butterfly, on the bizarre forms
of the phantastic world. Illustration No. 6, for example, shows us a
magic garden in Asia. There is an easy and refreshing humor about it;
it is charming as a picture. It has only one fault: it is inappropriate
as a bit of decoration for a film. For the film picture passes by in
a few seconds, and it is not the business of the decoration to draw
attention away from the action. Such complicated pictures, with all
their captivating by-products, can be studied in detail and with much
thought and consideration, but not in the film—there is no time for
them there.
All decorative scenery has to be well arranged; it must be lucid,
clear, and easy of survey. Illustration No. 7 is confused and hard
to read. Moreover, this scenery has nothing to do with the action.
No one would ever suspect that this room was occupied by an American
millionairess. Let the decoration be as grand and glorious as the
human mind can make it, if it is not a frame, or a framework,
for the things that go on in the human heart, its effect is swollen,
disingenuous, and undesirable from every point of view.
The odd and fanciful device fails if it is not truly and inwardly
affiliated with human fate. This is proved by Illustration No. 8, the
cramped and even convulsive style of which, with its black and white
norm, does not convince. The plastic effect is altogether inadequate
and defective. This picture is shown here because it is a brilliant
refutal of the oft-repeated assertion that the film, as an art-form,
has to do with and rests upon the art of black and white. There is
neither artistic nor objective value in the picture; it is merely a
curio, a bit of nourishment for under-bred curiosity, and was born of a
deformed notion.
[Illustration: Fig. 12. Scene from _Destiny_.
[_See p. 87_]
]
The curiosity, however, of phantastic forms is not to be ruthlessly
denounced and rejected if back of it lies a graceful notion, a happy
idea. Illustration No. 9 shows such an original scene of vibrant
freshness. The dancing girl is pictured as an undisciplined, capricious
little creature, and one is bound to admit that a setting of this sort
throws a captivating and intriguing frame about the radiant soul of
man. This picture has nothing in the world to do with naturalism. It
is of merely momentary significance and, like Illustration No. 8, has
but little bearing on, and consequently but little significance
for, the real value of decoration. But in contrast to that pale black
and white drawing, this dance scenery gives evidence of a brilliant
artistic brain from which ingenuity radiates and in which confidence
may be placed when it is a question of brightening up a film. One sees
that it comes from a brain which creates pictures in an easy even if
extravagant mood, pictures which fire the imagination somewhat after
the fashion of a cool flask of seasoned and sparkling champagne.
We had a wonderful fulfillment of the phantastic decoration in
Wegener’s _Golem_, that fairy tale which told of the breathing of life
into a figure of clay through the magic power of a Jewish Rabbi, who
made the monster his servant—until it, having reached the point where
it had real feelings, turned against its lord and master. Poelzig
had created the milieu for the romantic action, Illustration No. 10.
A fairy play of spooky streets and ghost-like alleys, the old, old
house of which bent and crouched under the vault of heaven. There was
the doomed and damned world of the Ghetto, isolated from all things
agreeably human and threatened by gigantic walls.
The sober fact of the business is that when genius takes a hand in the
matter of scenery, and visualizes its ingenuity, doubts disappear and
faith rules supreme. We give in; we resign. Was this world a copy
of reality? Was it the sole product of the artist’s wish? The whole
thing was a play, a marvelous mask, the expression of an animated and
enlivened will.
There was much more style to the interior of the rooms. And for this
very reason they were less natural; they were more alien to free and
easy conception. But the room of the Rabbi, with its low, crooked,
burdened walls, the stairway of which the least that can be said was
that it was heavily constructed (Illustration No. 11) was entirely in
keeping with the city sighing as it was under its mighty load.
But _Golem_ lay apart; it was a unique picture. The swirling,
over-decorated flourishes of this world which had become so
introspective, which had retired unto itself, and which retires unto
itself again and again and at every opportunity, did not somehow make
the right replies to the questions of our soul. The final echo, the
longed-for repercussion of those wishes that creep into the hearts of
the children of men, are always and invariably lacking in phantastic
art. Such art may cause curiosity to grow; on such curiosity may
batten; but it is never the creation that at once constitutes the
longing and stills the longing that has been aroused.
The film is not the art in which a visionary fancy may rage until
its rage is over. On the contrary, the film represents the most perfect
union of active and modern life with the symphony of feelings. And it
is not until we reach the point where the film dips down into hard
reality—whether it be the reality of the present or of bygone ages is
of but little consequence—that its art of decoration is confronted with
those problems and tasks at the sight of which the human eye begins to
glisten with ardent enthusiasm—is confronted with those works of the
film in which every picture, every feeling, and every gesture preaches
its _Tua res agitur_.
Settings befitting reality do not necessarily have to be smooth,
unconditional, and unconditioned copies of reality. The chief
desideratum is to have life and atmosphere in them; they must be filled
with tender emotion, gentle animation. The following pictures belong
to this category. Illustration No. 12 reveals in a kindly, loving way
the milieu of a South German village. It is full of fancy, yet it is
faithful to reality. The sole point in connection with this picture
lies in this question: A German film company made this picture; very
few people took part in it. Would it then not have been better and, in
the end, less expensive, if the company had actually gone to one of
the countless South German villages and taken the photographs on the
spot?
Illustration No. 13 is a trick setting from Lubitsch’s _Sumurun_. It is
only a few yards in height, and the effect produced is so natural that
one fancies one is really surrounded by colossal buildings that stand
out all alone.
Illustrations No. 14 and 15 offer an interesting study in comparisons.
In No. 14, the grandiose scene from _Madame Dubarry_ (smaller
minds have all too often been influenced by this scene, to their
own detriment), we have a chaotic fullness from the masses, and an
architectural ensemble in the buildings included that is rather hard
to study in the right perspective. It seems on the whole somewhat
disconnected. But in this very lack of composition the picture reveals
a fabulous fidelity to life; this is just such a scene as real life
throws on the canvas. In contrast to this we have the bold composition
of the pictures from _Anne Boleyn_. It is in beautiful style, in the
manner of the Meininger Stage. There is fullness and there is order; it
shows genuineness instead of truth.
A continuation in the development of this imitation, which in this
case is ramified and multiplied down to the last and minutest bit of
gim-crack on the houses, is no longer possible. Such additions as may
be made will have to consist, not in making the decoration more
intensive, but in making it more extensive; it must have to do with
surface and not with depth (as in the buildings of the _Indisches
Grabmal_), for the limit in intensity and depth has been reached. This
being the case, the only thing that can be expected in the future is
a sort of wild goose-chase after every conceivable species of scenic
extravaganza. One architect tries to outdo the other in building high
buildings and big buildings and complex buildings, with the result that
the firm that has the greatest resources, or the best credit, will, in
the end, carry off the prize. The man who really tries to further art
will be forced into the background; the material, the mass makes itself
felt.
Scenic views have, in truth, already been constructed every detail of
which, and there are many, rather militates against real effect so far
as the film is concerned. This is proof that the way of film setting
is unique unto itself; there are such things as faithful imitations of
indispensable film style, but to follow them is to be led out on to
distant paths that are alien to the essential objective; for lavishness
is never a sign of control.
The prime prerequisite of a good film picture is that one glance
is sufficient to take it in; from this truth there is no escape.
And despite this, the film picture dare not lack atmosphere. The
imitation of reality is all right in itself and quite beautiful.
But so soon as the reality that is imitated becomes excessive in detail
so that easy survey of it is impossible, we have to depart from it with
an indulgent farewell, otherwise it will become distorted, caricatured,
and naturally annoying where it is meant to be illuminating.
Film decoration calls for an elaborate and calm flow of lines, lines
which surround the action like a mighty and manifold frame, but which
do not wean our attention away from the film itself; on it our eye at
least must be kept riveted. Those details, which are as expensive as
they are useless, are to be avoided, while emphasis is to be placed on
the essentials in the scenery.
Illustration No. 16 is on the border line between a faithful copy
and a clever diversity or manifolding. The scene is extravagant only
in composition; the details have been worked out with just enough
completeness to give the impression of absolute reality.
The settings of the following pictures are of a remarkably impressive
and artistic power. They give visual evidence of an elaborate style,
the chief concern of which is suitability. It is a style which, thanks
to the sketchy means of the wings, reproduces the decisive line
without becoming lost in ornamental set-off and too much ramification.
Illustration No. 17, a quite unostentatious setting, shows, with
unreserved fidelity to life, a house wing of plain compactness, and of
an unusually modest atmosphere, which encompasses the action and aids
in its effective visualization.
The scenery in Illustration No. 18—the picture is from _Vögelöd_—is
inimitable. The loneliness and desertion of the two people is seemingly
in the act of beginning to strike up a deep note, just as if one were
to draw the bow across the bass string of a violin.
This is the kind of reserved and unobtrusive clarity of lines that
has got to be practiced if we are to solve the problem of film
decoration in a successful way. Such practice absorbs and assimilates
the fundamental elements of all styles and tones them down into one
grandiose picture—such as Illustration No. 19. It leads one out
beyond the narrow confines of the atelier and on to piles of human
occupancy in the open air, creations of the architect’s mind which
make no attempt at a microcosmic delineation of details; it has the
whole, the entity, rather tower up before us, in microcosmic fashion,
and uses to this end, not the pebbles of excessive embellishment, but
the huge square stones of all great buildings. Instances of such are
Illustrations Nos. 20 and 21.
It must be conceded that settings, if strenuously composed, as
we have indicated, call for a certain simplicity in the matter of
photography, a simplicity the strict observance of which necessitates
the taking of the photographs at a considerable distance and from
obvious points of vantage. For it is clear that it is impossible to
get a picture of such objects at any or every angle. Such strong
compositions are practicable only in the films that have to do
with heroic subjects. We may lay it down as a general rule that a
heavy composition, because of its heavy arches, can easily become
disadvantageous to the lines. The quiet, peaceful day of rest in
Illustration No. 21 is beautiful.
But it is not merely setting that must be made with due regard for the
effectiveness of the film for which it is intended; the costume that
the actor wears must also be given discriminating attention. We want a
replica of reality; this goes without saying. But wherever the reality
is unattractive, or characterized, to be specific, by a bewildering
fullness of lines, then it is that we need probability—or better still,
verisimilitude. To play some great episode in the same costume in
which it originally took place is in itself a noble idea. But it means
nothing to the film to place the costumes of that time, glittering
with color and bedizened with all manner of spangles and buckles,
before the, after all, color-blind eye of the camera. The big,
balloon-like costumes of the Renaissance, the Italian as well as the
German, make a rather poor picture of unknown colors and indifferent
lines. To take a picture of this kind and do it effectively requires
an artist who is cautious in his exploitation of all things stylistic,
modest in his desire to display his inventive power, and trained in
the art school of experience. We may say, in general, that there is no
single costume of any age or all ages that is entirely effective on the
screen. It is a serious fact that cannot be lost sight of that, in this
domain of the moving picture, the effects we so ardently strive after
depend not so much on genuineness as on the appearance of genuineness.
Take the frontispiece. What a splendid clarity and lucidity of line!
But the costumes of those times were like the ones that constitute the
glory of this picture only in general proportions and outlines.
And thus it comes about—just as in the most exalted works of art of all
ages—that each individual part serves the whole, and there is none of
that greediness for isolated triumph that results, if unleashed, in a
dazzling and distracting display of the arts of the virtuoso.
Our film world is a business affair, but every sane man is willing and
eager to let the grand ideas of real art have the fullest possible
play—provided these ideas are effective and imbued with sufficient life
to work in harmony with our business interests.
The motion picture is art for the masses; there is not a shred of use
to try to deny this, or to evade the conditions that this unpliable
fact necessitates. Such decoration as it calls to its aid must,
consequently, be of such simple, even primitive, impressiveness
that its place in the motion picture becomes at once clear even to
the untrained and obtuse eye. It is injudicious to launch out on
any artistic enterprise which cannot be felt and appreciated by the
masses. Such æsthetic hardiness as characterized _Dr. Caligari_, with
its voguish art forms, can never be regarded as more than an unusual
attempt which took the masses by surprise. Let that kind of moving
picture become the rule rather than the exception, and the people who
have hitherto flocked to the motion picture will fail to re-enter it
and, bent on entertainment of some kind, they will betake themselves
to the kino—to those narrow, moldy pits in which the canvases that are
displayed consist of a spiced and peppery potpourri that is especially
concocted to seduce the eye—canvases that are born of low but intense
avidity, and which are given to such children of men as are most easily
moved by the same impulse.
CHAPTER VI
THE POET
I will praise the sons of Atreus,
Of Cadmus will I sing—
But my harp will be in tune with
A theme that makes love ring.
—Anacreon.
We have progressed with our subject up to a certain point, proceeding
at all times from the external to the internal; from that which is
without to that which is within. As we have done this, the parts have
been placed in our hands: the mechanism and the scenic picture. The
individual who unites these two parts into a coherent whole, and who
breathes the breath of a full and pulsating world into these united
parts, is the poet. The means are in his hand, just as hammer and
chisel; the picture stands before his soul.
The longing of every artist is to fashion and give shape to a heaven
and an earth; he longs to compress the whole of bubbling life into his
picture. But the marble block gapes at him and says: “Of sound in me
there is not a note. I am immovable. Colors do not radiate from me.
Fashion me into a living picture! Give me form and life!”
It is even so with the moving picture. It has its own world, a
narrow, hard, unwieldy world that is not unlike the heartless chunk of
marble. Locked up in this world of the moving picture are the fates and
visions which dream of the amiable artist who will some day chance to
take them unto himself, and give them the life they feel is theirs by
every right.
The poet of the motion picture! From his soul come forth the
pictures—those that have never been seen, that are never to be seen.
The divine grace of completing a work of his own is not given to
him; he is given the torture associated with excavating confused and
heterogenous visions from the mountain of desire. This is his part.
Though the better, he does not choose it; it is assigned to him by
virtue of the things that have been given him, and have not been given
to other men.
The dramatist, the poet of the legitimate stage, has a final form at
his immediate disposal—the word. This word rings out from the stage in
unamended and unadulterated form, and is caught up, with gratitude, by
the sympathetic friends in the pit, stalls, and boxes. He is rewarded
with thanks—even though the thanks he receives come merely from hearts
momentarily exuberant.
Those who make their living from the creative activity of the
motion picture poet are famous people. They live in the very atmosphere
of renown. Their names are household words. Their pictures are
displayed in the plateglass show-windows of the cities.
But the motion picture poet himself? Who knows anything about Carl
Mayer, the author of _Dr. Caligari_ and the _Hintertreppe_? Who ever
heard of Hans Gaus, the man who wrote _Madame Recamier_? Who is in
any way familiar with the name of Hans Kräly, who, in collaboration
with Lubitsch, wrote _Die Puppe_, _Kohlhiesels Töchter_, and a number
of our other most brilliant scenarios? Truth to tell, if Lubitsch had
been only a writer of scenarios and not at the same time one of our
very greatest managers and producers, it would be impossible to make a
circus dog bark at the mention of his name.
This is all due in part to the inherent nature of the case. The motion
picture is art for the masses. And the masses are naturally accustomed
to admire that artist who submits his creations to them in tangible,
palpable, and finished form. The man who chopped the crude picture from
the marble block was called an apprentice, a laborer, a pupil. But in
contradistinction to the poet of the motion picture, the apprentice did
not create the completed and complex picture.
To be a poet is to be a brooder. In order to acquire the title of
poet, one must be able to conjure a coveted picture from the refractory
clay.
The poets of German Romanticism did their creative work in rain-soaked,
wind-rattled attic rooms far from every vestige of external culture.
They suffered the inconvenient pangs of hunger while so engaged. But
no one has ever become fat from their creations at the same time that
the thanks they have received have come from the heart, and have been
repaid a thousandfold.
To be a motion picture poet means that you have got to keep your feet
on the ground. In this art—which is hopelessly bound up with the bank
account and the pocketbook—there is no place for the idealist of
romanticism. Such an individual can only stand alone in the corner,
embittered and sterile.
The film writer is still held in rather low esteem in Germany. It is
impossible to get along without him, for without new ideas and actions
the entire apparatus of the film corporation stands idle. As things are
at present, however, the method of procedure is incorrect: his material
is taken from him, he is kept at what seems a safe distance from the
ateliers, and the duty of building his material up into an actable
and effective motion picture is left to the producer and manager.
The author is poorly paid; consequently he finds it materially and
spiritually unwise to torture himself for any great length of time with
any one work. Quantity, not quality, has to be his shibboleth if he is
to meet his very ordinary financial obligations.
The mistake that is being made is naturally a two-sided one. The film
author’s place is in the studio; he should be the silent witness of
every scene; he should be thoroughly conversant with such technical
progress as has been made and is being made in the way of illumination
and psychic photography. But he dare never forget that a film work is
not the work of an individual.
An author has to have, if success is to crown his efforts, a great
store of general information, a store such as reaches far out beyond
the studio. He should have a general but clear idea as to what it costs
to mount a film. He should be familiar with what other film companies
have accepted and produced; he should study the film output of foreign
film peoples—if he does not, collisions are apt to occur and these have
been known to result in lawsuits based on the charge of plagiarism. He
should be skilled in the distribution and placing of such decorations
as are to be used with his scenario, and thus be able to avoid the
embarrassment that arises when a colossal scenery has been bought
and paid for, though the scene that it is supposed to decorate is of
Liliputian dimensions. He should know what people are talking about,
how they are most easily entertained, most intelligently amused. If he
fails in this regard, he is apt to expend his creative energy in the
lining out of a film that is in its place in an established institution
for the blind.
♦ “Liliputian” replaced with “Lilliputian”
There is a tremendous amount of work attached to the domain which
the film author feels is his; there is so much technique, so much
specializing in the modern motion picture, that the author is
unquestionably an indispensable member of the court that creates the
film; he does not make it alone, but it cannot be made without him.
His opinions must be respected, otherwise he avenges himself by an
action which bears on its very brow the stamp of mere affectation and
technique; you can see that it has been invented; that it is not of
sterling inspiration. And so far as the recognition of the film author
is concerned, I am bound to say that things are still in a serious
plight in my native land.
[Illustration: Fig. 13. Scene from _Sumurun_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
If the moving picture writer is paid precisely the same money for
a subtle, well-studied, artistic, and purified bit of poet action
that he would be paid, or is paid, for a bit of cheap, meretricious,
and insidious cajolery, there is no hope. Then good-bye soul,
and welcome to the martyrdom that ensues when other people wax fat
on the creation that has made the author lean! He says to himself,
and he cannot be expected to say anything else, “To the Devil with
idealism!” This explains why Hans Gaus is not writing another _Madame
Recamier_, why he is not writing any more passionate, brilliant,
disciplined film poetry. And it explains, too, alack and alas, why he
is turning out cleverly devised, invented, and not felt, film pieces
that keep the pot boiling. This explains, of course it does, why the
battalions of rather talented motion picture writers are fabricating
whole libraries of scenarios that reveal nothing more than the cold
hand of invention.
The motion picture itself suffers most from this unenviable state of
affairs. But this, in itself, is a rather impersonal theme for lament,
for it is the film corporations that must bear the major part of this
misfortune. And why? Because a good scenario, one that glows with the
heat of informed inspiration, forces its way into the soul of the
spectator, invites him to come back, and even goes so far as to have
the hope well forth in his bosom that, having now seen twenty moving
pictures in which the swollen effusions of uninspired tricks have left
him cold and disappointed, he will go the twenty-first time with enough
faith in human nature to fancy that he may at last be rewarded for
his persistence. A motion picture is successful only when an unusually
good and ♦extraordinarily inspired scenario chances to lift it up above
the colorless odds in numerical superiority and enables it, for this
reason and for other reasons, to shine forth like a lighthouse on a sea
of near-darkness.
♦ “extaordinarily” replaced with “extraordinarily”
It is sometimes amazing to see what enormous sums of money may be
expended, and what an abundance of ability may be lavished on utterly
inadequate and ineffective poetry. Such a film can never hope for wide
or world-success. Everything that is deserving of attentive interest is
in the picture itself. Once it has been played there is no more to it;
that is the end of it. There may be architects of real imagination and
education, managers who are inherently clever and not at all afraid of
work, a select company of actors and actresses—all of which is fine.
But in this circle of people there is one who is missing: the author.
He should be there, for it is he who is to reflect on the ways of the
world and project a new world on the screen. It is he in whom and
through whom the work of the others is to acquire the breath of real
life.
But, though it is a hard statement, it is true: In _this_ art not a
finger is being moved in the exclusive interests of the idea of
æsthetic progress. And yet, and yet—for the film companies to further
the cause of the poet is to put money into their own pockets. The best
field the film companies can possibly develop is the mind, heart, and
soul of the naturally gifted film author. The film companies will
never have splendid and effective scenarios to work on until they have
made up their minds to reward, in a practical way, the film author,
splendidly and effectively, for his labors, to recognize him, in a
practical way, just as they at present “recognize” the leading manager
and actor.
I am ready to contend that the best film actions are written in
Germany—but that the very worst manuscripts and clue-books are also
written in Germany. This is true of the average. Those companies in
which the film author enjoys the same rights and privileges that the
manager enjoys, and in which the two work hand in hand, are having one
success after another. I need but mention the Decla-Bioscop, a company
that is altogether unique in that its records show that one of the most
brilliant film authoresses Germany has thus far produced, Thea von
Harbou, is married to Fritz Lang, one of our very best managers.
It is a remarkable fact that no one can write a film alone—and that it
should not on this account be attempted. A good film, other things
being equal, is created when two adequately endowed writers, one of
whom can depict action, the other of whom can arrange the scenes, rub
elbows in a common and mutual effort. When it is done in this fashion,
the film glows with the fire of creative genius and is altogether
vivacious.
From an artistic point of view, there is but one way to solve the
problem of the film writer, and that is to have the author—as Griffith,
Lubitsch, and a number of others are doing—stage and produce their own
works. The idea of the action has been crystallized in their souls in a
thousand pictures. No other person, however gifted he may be and be his
intentions the very best, can appreciate the picture even approximately
as well as the author himself who dreamed it into existence.
But if the film author has no ability as a director, the only course
left open to him is to submit his scenario to a second party, or at
least the germ, the central idea of it. The only thing this second
party can then do is to raise a strange flower from the seed the author
sowed. A sympathetic understanding of the two artists, in this case,
is a wish that has not yet been fulfilled. For the two artists to work
at random, to say nothing of working against each other, is to create
confusion worse confounded, and such is not art. In the end the
will of the one or of the other will have made itself felt. And we can
hardly demand of the poet that he accede to revisions and emendations
of his poetry without cavil, inquiry, or interest.
It frequently happens, however, that a talented poet is wholly
unfamiliar with the nature and technique of the motion picture. In such
a case, the artistic and financial success of the picture depends upon
a complete revision of the scenario as originally submitted, and this
revision is undertaken either by the stage manager, who must have a
fair measure of the poet in him even if he has not written, or by that
creature known as the dramaturge: he is part stage critic, part stage
manager.
The old-fashioned dramaturge is, as should be known, the man who has
no idea of his own but who is an ingenious thief. He still vegetates
in all countries, sad specimen though he is. No man is a good
dramaturge who is not also a poet. He should be the second poet who
collaborates with the author. The author is not infrequently maladroit,
dream-burdened, and obsessed with unfilm-like notions. The dramaturge
has to be a malleable connoisseur, one who can scent out of the wealth
of good passages the weak spots of a film manuscript, and then
lift them out before it is too late. To work with such a dramaturge is
a pleasure. The author stands ashamed and humiliated in the presence
of pictures the existence of which the dramaturge first challenges and
then kills. One affable moment follows another of the same enviable
description. A creative fever comes over both of them; they are
convulsed when the heroes suffer; they revel in satisfaction when jolly
situations rebound against each other.
This is however an idealized situation. Generally speaking, the
dramaturge is an ambitious, avaricious, sterile wiseacre who spills his
caustic criticism all over the author’s creation and leaves it a thing
of shreds and patches. With heedless, listless scorn, he derides and
lampoons any idea that did not originate in his anointed head. He robs
in time the author of every vestige of desire to create so that he (the
author) avoids future encounters with him (the dramaturge) as he would
avoid a plague. From that time on, the author writes his manuscripts
alone and sends them in to the dread dramaturge, who is at liberty to
do with them as his conscience dictates. Good, delicate, and amiable
film manuscripts do not arise in this way.
There are poets and managers who do not know what the essential
prerequisites of a good motion picture are. Here is where the
dramaturge comes in. It is his lofty task to effect a reconciliation
between idealism and materialism. That he judge the work solely on
its artistic merits and from the artistic point of view is out of
the question. The first film that arose under such conditions would
be a commercial failure; the second would spell the bankruptcy of
the company that produced it. It is, at the same time, lamentable,
pitiable, when the dramaturge judges a submitted manuscript solely
from the point of view of its potential commercial success. Let this
type of dramaturge have his way, and the film will suffer complete
deterioration, decay, and death. Moreover, such film works have not the
slightest chance of success in foreign countries. To concoct a good
and “safe” thing that will take on the local corner—any man can do
that. But the film must be so great and grandiose that nobody else can
do it. Detective, revolver, and sensation films find devotees in the
movie halls of the entire world who can do this trick just as well as
anybody else; and they know it. Such films have from the very beginning
powerful competition. Why has Charlie Chaplin been such a ubiquitous
success? Because he is unique; his achievements are his own; his
accomplishments are inimitable. A film manuscript is good then and then
only when it promises an artistic and an economic success. Art and
business—let us repeat—must be united in this case.
To judge a film manuscript on this dual basis is, however, not so
difficult. The motion picture is art for the masses. This truth
eliminates of itself all cold-blooded and un-felt texts. A warm,
vivacious, animated, artistically valuable motion picture book has
got to please—that is, it has got to lead up to a commercial success.
The dramaturge who takes this view of his business is an exceedingly
important personage among his company’s acquaintances. He is its
artistic conscience; he is its reliable guarantee against failure.
The basic condition of what he does is perfect knowledge and ability in
the field in which he works. He has to _know_ the nature of the motion
picture; he has to be able to see in advance its possibilities of
success. And this knowing, this seeing, must be second-nature to him;
he must be saturated with them. This alone will give him the ability to
select, from the mass of manuscripts that are submitted to him, those
that are in every way available. He must be the good physician, the
unbribable custodian of those imperfect and yet redeemable papers that
lie on his desk for investigation. Nor is this all. In case the manager
does not elect to stage the film work himself, the dramaturge must be
able to get everything that is in every scene out of it.
[Illustration: Fig. 14. Scene from _Madame Dubarry_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
The basic condition of his very being is the perfect, the
universal recognition of his position, a position that he has to fight
for just as strenuously as the dramaturge of the legitimate stage has
to fight for his. The film dramaturge is by no means the fifth wheel on
the wagon. Indeed, every art, including the art of the theater, moves
along on many wheels every one of which must be in working order if
the wagon in question is to enjoy easy and unimpeded motion, and is
eventually to reach the point where those who are driving it, in this
way and in that, would have it go.
CHAPTER VII
THE COMPASS OF POETRY
The word is the world of the legitimate stage. It rings out clear from
the actor’s lips, forces its way through the spacious auditorium, and
reaches the ear of the most remote spectator. The gesture is drowned
out in this same space; it is the handmaid of the spoken word, to which
it lends corroboration and the expression of will power.
The word is an enigmatic symbol of thought. What our ear receives is a
fleeting fugitive sound, almost an indifferent sequence of sounds. What
our mind receives is the meaning liberated from the sound. “Death!” The
meaning is clear. Remove the meaning, the sense that lies hidden in
this word, and there remains nothing but a null and void sound picture:
D-e-a-t-h. Make a single, insignificant change in the sound, substitute
“br” for “d,” and the meaning, the sense of it, is completely changed.
The word is the instrument of the mind.
As Heinrich Laube has well said, we termed the stage, while it was
still in its “first, naïve period,” a _Schauspiel_. The ♦word means a
“play that is seen.” But the stage is neither a _Schauspiel_ nor a
_Hörspiel_ (“a play that is heard”), as in the case of music. It is a
_Gedankenspiel_, or “thought play.”
♦ “words” replaced with “word”
Those values of the stage action which we perceive through the aid of
our various senses are merely symbols and forms of expression for the
intellectual or spiritual values. The word itself, as a matter of fact,
loses its significance as a sensual sequence of sounds, as an acoustic
phenomenon completely except for a slight fragment of beauty that lies
in the word as such. The distinctive earmark of the stage action is the
spiritual style. And since every art fashions the soul, stage art is
the spiritual soul; it depicts feelings through thoughts.
Unintellectual, obtuse, dull people do not thrill us on the stage.
Dramas whose characters are peasants and the lower classes of workmen
have to be embellished and doctored-up with a goodly measure of strong
theatrical devices in order to be really effective. We have but to
think of the efforts that have been made to arouse interest in such
plays as Schönherr’s _Faith and Fireside_ and Hauptmann’s _Teamster
Henschel_ and _The Weavers_.
Consequently, it is never the dark, flat levels of purely impulsive
life that are sought after by the great dramatists—whoever they
may be and in whatever age they may live. The great “stage people”
are characterized by an abundance of spiritual wealth. Heinrich Laube
was right when he said, “Mind and thought are the drama’s weapons of
attack.” They are also the weapons of attack of the grand characters
that stalk across the stage. Wallenstein, Faust, Macbeth, Lear,
Hamlet—these are the characters that are sought after by the actor, for
they all enjoy the very highest of spiritual wealth.
The stage, the most perfect counterpart or reflection of mankind,
embraces the three realms of life—Sensuality, Soul, Intellect. All
those glorious figures are choked and convulsed by sensuality. Their
paths lead away from sensuality and back, if possible, to pure
intellectuality. That course goes so far that one of the very wildest
of them remarks at the close of his career:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is not mere chance, nor is it a histrionic whim on the part of the
poet, that Faust abandons Gretchen and seeks and finds Helena. On this
account the sensual impulses of the stage characters are the paths of
error which lead up to the intellect. The great stage personages
are never men of mere impulse. Thoas is not a barbarian of the senses;
Tell is not a rude, crude fellow just as nature made him; Romeo is not
a mere sensual seducer but a psychic visionary.
The legitimate stage strives after great, free thoughts; and characters
such as Faust represent the very strongest expression of its arts.
In this excess of excelsior, however, in this defection from the wishes
of this earth, lies a real danger to which not merely the poetising
dilettant is apt to succumb; indeed the very greatest of German poets
have at times failed to escape its intriguing peculiarity. It is
the danger of the too-high, of arctic clarity, of the exclusively
intellectual. The soul glows through real art like a vestal fire, pure,
mild, serene. Let the flight be too hardy and too upward, and the fire
goes out, art ceases, and shrewd, shivering theatrical dialectics set
in.
In the case of the motion picture, the opposite takes place. The word
withdraws, becomes unessential, often directly adverse to art and the
canons of art. Then it is that mimicry steps out and up and becomes the
bearer of the action.
If humanity had been born deaf and dumb, it would long since have
perfected its mimic apparatus so completely that it would be the tool
and symbol of thought. What can the gesture mean to us? Feeling
that is so familiar to us that it awakens sympathy on the slightest
provocation. Only that which is from the very beginning impulse within
us is sensuality. Mimicry is the symbol of sensual values. The sign,
the prognostic, the distinctive mark of mimic action is the sensual
style. And since this art signifies the expression of the soul, the
motion picture is the sensual soul. It is feeling expressed through
gesture.
Consequently, an impulse that is not in everybody is not felt by
everybody. This explains the failure of quite a few works. The
homosexual film, for example, _Anders als die Andern_ (“Different From
Other People”) was a source of disordered loathing to those “other
people.” How can we expect a healthy individual to feel the excitement
of an insane person, as in _Dr. Caligari_, or of a pathological
vampire, as in _The Vampyre_? And how can we expect a human being
with a strong constitution to sympathize with the demented antics
of a nervous wreck and feel his feelings after him, as in _Nerven_
(“Nerves”)?
[Illustration: Fig. 15. Scene from _Anne Boleyn_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
With a certainty that is growing from year to year, the film writers
of to-day choose their material from such domains of feeling as have
a universal and altogether human appeal. They depict the impulses of
the soul, but only up to that point where the healthy feelings
terminate. It is one of the wonders of peace that these impulses
are common to all the peoples of the earth. The intriguing writ of
the Asiatic soul becomes, in this case, clear and simple. Even the
barbarian nations, the Negro, the Eskimo, the Moroccan, rejoice at the
sight of our films with the joy that spells appreciation.
It seems, however, that a great motion picture cannot be built up
around peoples who are impulsive and that only. The characters of
_Hintertreppe_ were impulsive; those of _Scherben_ were lethargic
and animalistic. We were moved but not convulsed. The impulse in
itself, and in its isolation, is uninteresting, for it is un-psychic.
We sympathize with and feel the feelings after those who display
them only when the impulse is raised to a passion. If we are to be
captivated, carried off our feet as it were, the action has got to be
strong; it must set forth not mere wish but will, too. Those elementary
passions that spring forth from sensuality—that is, from the ensemble
functioning of all our senses, constitute the field of mimic portrayal.
The motion picture has as its goal the great and captive passions. And
characters that are bound to earth, full of soul but in the plight of
the unhappy Prometheus, make up the strongest expression of the art of
the motion picture.
The bow of the passions is a mighty one, great in compass and more
frequently taut than not. It rises from out of the primeval abysses of
nature and takes in the tenderest tremblings of the soul. Anyone who
has ever seen that wonderful Goldwyn film entitled _Honor Thy Mother_
knows that by passions I mean, not merely what is ordinarily connoted
by the term, but also that calm, melancholy faith of the heart which
characterizes all reverential and respectful people. Every impulse that
arises in a perfectly natural way, and which cannot be separated from
the heart by any power on earth, is a _passion_.
Everything that is an initial, original, and uninfluenced impulse is
stuff for the motion picture. But just as all art moves about a certain
pole, about that basic impulse which flouts reason in the exercise of
the drawing force that one man has for another, and that pulls them
both along toward the inescapable judgment handed down by the senses,
just so does the motion picture itself obey the urge, and that with
unconscious docility, to move on to the fate that finds its basis in
human love, and in so doing it moves on to the highest, unexhausted,
and inexhaustible goal—its eventual formation and conformation.
To such love the coldly and exclusively intellectual is alien. There
is no place for the blue-stocking Helena. A lover in a motion
picture who would show himself superior to the simple, unaffected ways
of love would cut a ridiculous figure. The love of the moving picture
strikes but few strings, and these strings are gentle. This art is not
wreathed about with the roseate play of lovely thoughts. Those poets
whose hearts do not overflow with an abundance of visions paint, in the
motion picture, nothing more than the tiring and monotonous picture
of a colorless and brutal giving and taking. But just as the great
Garrick could move his audience to tears through the mere recital of
the alphabet, just so can a fiery soul fill the violin of the motion
picture with more nearly inner and more truly intimate notes than a
soul that is halt and blind can fill the entire orchestra of the stage.
Passion is pure; it is clean. Wherever the soul is moved, and whenever
it moves with the action, there is purification. But just as the
legitimate stage may lose itself in the frigid chill of unanimated
intellectuality, so does the motion picture run at all times the
danger—if its poet is a bellowing and garrulous individual—of sinking
into the fiery swamp of unanimated sensuality. When this is the
case, the unwholesome passion of mere sexual perversities becomes a
play of social life that is poles removed from real art. In the foul
seething and turgid vapor of such degeneracy, culture is stifled,
purity is unable to raise its lovely head, and what might be the hills
and high places of art are converted into waste places. This disgusting
drama that poisons the people is the everlasting nuisance and eternal
bugbear of those who have faith enough in them to feel that the time
should come when the motion picture is a proud and pure art.
We all know how matters stand: each individual has the dignity of
mankind at his disposal, after all. It can never be the duty of the
motion picture to use the magic song of love, such as all true poets
have sung to their peoples, in order that it may drown out the vulgar
street ditty with its lines of illicit passion and its refrain of
indecency.
The real motion picture poet, however, the one in whose heart there
vibrates and pulsates a culture that is natural to him and given him
of the gods, will always be able to fill his figures with a noble
and royal sensuality that shines out in bright effulgence over and
beyond the flat, greedy, paralytic doings of the love that knows not
inspiration and to which the staleness of everyday carrying-on is first
and second nature. His soul, recruiting in the interests of human kind,
will move like a storm across the hills; there will be love in its
flight, and then it will settle down into calm serenity like the
subdued tones of so many silvery bells.
The motion picture can delineate ♦aristocratic characters; it can
represent men and women of aristocratic souls. But when this is to be
done, more must be done than to have the leading man and the leading
woman don evening dress.
♦ “aristrocratic” replaced with “aristocratic”
Those who accomplish this—the delineation of fine and fair souls—have
to be great artists. Rubbish and art, discord and harmony, the inflated
and the sterling, though their spheres are relatively near each other,
are nevertheless separated by the wide, wide gulf that separates the
dilettant from the genius. Those who are petty in the business can
offer us only the empty, the hollow, the fatuous. Abundance they know
not; harmony is not a part of them; they deal in deadening boredom.
Around about the love of the motion picture is stretched the
bright-colored frame of the surrounding world. Its milieu is of
diversified hues. It is not possible for even the legitimate stage to
renounce entirely the world in which its action takes place—though
_Romeo and Juliet_ might be played to an audience recruited wholly
from the slums and not lose either its fragrance or its charm. In the
motion picture, the nature and the wish of the milieu signify the
constant variation of the impure motive.
Let no man fancy that it would be possible to construct a great motion
picture from an environment. There is, for example, the case of the
French film entitled _Columbus_—the most abominable piece of work,
incidentally, that has ever been done on the screen. The life of the
great discoverer was mashed and squeezed into a mess of incoherent
scenes. The one great, heart-shaking act, or action—the real experience
of Columbus’s soul—was missing. In like manner, the film entitled
_August der Starke_ (“August the Strong”) went up in smoke between
the baroque castles of Saxony around which the gala coaches moved in
unending procession while the uniforms shone forth in all their kind of
glory. In between all this revived and represented ostentation were six
love scenes—a new one for each act—each of loathsome brutality—and in
each of them the poet was the match-maker!
The surrounding world, the milieu, becomes the exclusive servant of
the feelings. A historical film is a love action of times long since
past, and never a treatise on the cultural history of that time.
Schiller compressed the whole history of the Thirty Years’ War into
his _Wallenstein_. In it Max and Thekla drift along as if on a small
floating piece of ice. The legitimate stage can do that sort
of thing, provided the individual that does it is a genius and has
genius. But the most ingenious motion picture actor is the one whose
hand forges the historical motives into a splendid yet ♦unobtrusive
frame, and places this frame about the action of the soul. He cannot
count upon fidelity to history; he is lost if he endeavors to reproduce
historical events. Whenever the great men of history appear in the
motion picture, they have to feel great; they must display great
emotions. The muse of the motion picture is anacreontic.
♦ “unobstrusive” replaced with “unobtrusive”
There is the case of _Madame Recamier_ which was brilliantly staged
by Delmont. In it Napoleon, Talma, Josephine Beauharnais, Juliette
Recamier, and the people associated with them were bound together
into a fate that was pure, shot through though it was with smoldering
passions. We had a foreboding of the flaming forth of a dark and
princely soul. Closely interwoven with the action, though detached from
it for a few minutes, was a picture of Napoleon standing off on a flat
elevation surrounded by a few officers. It could be seen only in the
distance. A rider comes up, and then another, and then another. Each is
in haste. In the valley below we catch sight of a fire; there is smoke.
A certain fate that was an entity in itself, a strange and urgent
fate, prevented the various pictures from becoming separated or allowed
to stand out in isolated importance. The picture as a whole, the whole
of the picture, cast its shadows over this scene. Napoleon, already
long since made a part of the action, stood there as if to say: “Here I
am. I am coming!”
The sensual motion picture knows no god. The poet of the spoken drama
can convert a hut into a house, a cabin into a castle. The motion
picture man builds up his houses and castles until they reach the
very skies, but they remain formations of this earth. They are grand,
perhaps they are beautiful; but they are never holy; they are never
exalted. The divine services and mysteries of the motion picture are
mere parades of brainlessness. That which is supposed to be holy leaves
an unholy impression. Religiousness is dissipated into the merest
emptiness. The boastful seeker after God remains a man in prayer; he
gesticulates with his hands, and his hands are empty.
[Illustration: Fig. 16. Scene from _Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown_.
[_See p. 90_]
]
Priscilla Dean, whom we love very much in Germany, played in her film,
_The Beggar Woman of Stamboul_, a charming scene of prayer. A lovely
little girl knelt down and folded her hands. There was piety in the
scene. But her action was a sweet, imitated, childlike gesture, while
in her little head there was no room for the superhuman picture of
the creator.
“But why nothing but sensuality?” you ask me. The answer is easy: it
is utterly impossible to photograph an idea. One should never try to
project the invisible land of dream or wish on the screen, for such
a land is the creation of the brain. Experiments of this kind have
been made often enough—naturally in Germany. But every single one
was a failure, for the idea thus treated becomes even more cold and
bloodless than on the legitimate stage. One cannot catch up an idea
through the medium of faint and feeble symbols. Moreover, the road
that affects to point to the place where ideas are translated to the
hearts of men leads in reality to an infinity of texts, to a surrogate
of the intellect. Let us be modest, for the domain of the film is
rich enough as it is, and the man who creates exclusively from the
abundance of things seen, from visions as it were, will never exhaust
the fountainhead.
But there is a gap in this sphere of sensuality; there is an empty
place in the field in question. Those silent heroes who have turned
away from the world, and behind whom and back of whom there lie
struggle and passion, step out from the world of sensuality, in which
they have become and remained mute, into the realm of spirituality.
This land is open to them to the uttermost end of its compass,
indeed down to and up to the point where they see God; where they
have forebodings and premonitions of God that are the equivalents of
acquirement. No thought that is felt is foreign to them. But they do
not speak of the visions they have had; every word from their lips
would be profane; it would be a matter of desecration. The great,
strange, lonely figures of the motion picture, back of whose brain the
thought shines forth, are not to be understood through thought. They
are to be felt, not thought. They are not to be conceived of as wise
men and prophets; they are brooders and sufferers.
One would have to, and one might, write a _Christus_ film that is
apathetic and undramatic: _Christus_ the man, making a pilgrimage over
the Earth, a stranger, unapproachable, silent, immediate, unknown, not
understood. Such a film could be made a vast deal more effective than a
_Christus_ drama on the spoken stage. For on the stage the _Christus_
dare not remain silent. He would have to appear as a speaker. The
humble carpenter’s son would have to pass before us, and on by the
mute greatness of His own soul, engaged in an endless flow of words of
wisdom and thoughts that lie too deep for men.
It was such a _Christus_ nature as this, invisibly crucified, that
our wonderful Bernhard Goetzke played in his _Indisches Grabmal_. Even
under the slag of this adventuresome action there shone forth the pure
glow of a passionately suffering heart. When Ramigani raised his hands
we understood that before this gentle, imperative gesture the tigers of
the fields slunk away in silence while lifeless things fell to pieces.
It was the power of the superman that was revealed to us: a power
that had been generated in the man himself, not given of God. When he
prayed, it was a coming unto and into himself, not a disappearance in
or a coming unto God. Buddha vanished in the background, a cold, chilly
picture.
♦ “adventursome” replaced with “adventuresome”
Such greatness is rare in a film. There is only one other film
character whom I can recall having seen who bore the very stamp
of immortal greatness on his brow—the Frenchman, G. Melchior, in
_Atlantide_. His eyes had the effect of invisible arms which brushed
the seductive passion of the woman in the case clean from his heart.
His glance glided over men and things as if he were in an atmosphere
of his own creation, far removed from what constitute the spoils of
mortal man. But art of this sort stands in the background of the motion
picture; it is suspected by but few. And in the foreground stands
mottled, gaudy sensuality. It cannot be otherwise. For the motion
picture is an art that is of the earth earthy; it revels and rolls
in human feelings.
This defection on its part from intellect is necessary; it is not thus
because its creators wish it so. Just as is the case with music, the
motion picture will never be called upon to solve the problems of the
human intellect or of man’s morality. The motion picture pedagogue
works ahead in an ineffectual effort to put brains into the screen;
he cannot do it. He fills the text with sententious remarks and moral
observations. He clutters the whole business up with a mess of mushy
wisdom that bears not the slightest relation to the sensory content of
the action, which is mimic first, last and always.
The task of the motion picture is quite similar to the task of music:
to serve a generation that has strong feelings. Where music, however,
excites and incites a general and indefinite feeling (whose compass
reaches from the tortures of the ego to the all-embracing feeling of
the godhead itself) through tones, the motion picture assembles its
fullness on the earthly world of emotions.
The motion picture actor fails to reach his objective, he fails to
fulfill his true mission, if he depends for success upon mere sexual
♦titillation. He is lost to himself and the cause he serves if he works
for the excitation of undisciplined and easily aroused pruriency.
There is, indeed, no art that admits of such abysms of failure and
misconduct as the motion picture. There lurks in every step the motion
picture actor takes and makes the grave danger of sinking into the
slime of unleashed sexuality. There is no well-constructed, marked, and
planned road here that leads straight out, away, and over earthly love.
And we do not wish to get sucked down into the mire. Sensuality _and_
soul—that is the slogan.
♦ “titulation” replaced with “titillation”
A new world has been discovered for which there has been up to the
present no adequate expression. We film voyagers hoist the sails and
embark on a voyage of conquest and circumnavigation. But behold! it is
a strange and yet a familiar route we have to pursue. It is not like
the realm of tones, etherial and intangible. It is our lives that we
have discovered, and which we are looking upon with our own eyes.
A mighty flood of pictures rushes by us. Which shall we choose?
Shall we choose the spooks, the spooky visions, the dancing
will-o’-the-wisps, the nocturnal spirits? We let them go on their way.
They are not for us. For the film has at last taught us what everyday
life had caused us to forget—or almost to forget. I mean by “us” the
Europeans who have become filled with hate and poisoned with pugnacity.
We had about forgotten that the world is beautiful.
Every nation has its own soul. But where the spirits of the
various peoples stand in the presence of each other, and opposite each
other, alien if not directly hostile, separated as it were from each
other by “foreign” languages, the real souls of all the peoples have
grown up from the brotherly roots of humanity.
Despite this brotherhood, however, no one should attempt to sink his
own folk-soul into the soul of another people. That cannot be done. Let
the German turn out the historical film, in which he sinks his soul
into the world of feelings of the ancient Egyptians, or the English, or
the Romance peoples just as much as he pleases. It is his business, and
no one can stop him. But the fact remains that the historical film is
always a somehow colorless creation in the popular sense. It is always
somewhat affected if not a bit fraudulent, and in the case of any
nation it is always touched up and retouched with the same artificial
masks. The historical film is here and here to stay, however. There is
a good reason: in those ages of violence and lawlessness film themes
grew on the trees. There was a dazzling world full of adventure such as
the film will never completely turn its back on.
I am of the distinct conviction, at the same time, that it is the
modern film which most effectively discloses the real nature and
aim of the film. It is the most popular; it alone is true. In it there
are no masks; and there are very few big wigs and pasted mustachios.
The people do not have to sink themselves into unknown deeds and
inexperienced acts of gruesomeness. They stand before the camera of the
world in which they live; it is their own feelings that the lens takes
up into itself.
♦ “gruesomness” replaced with “gruesomeness”
In the modern film each people goes its own way; it has its own
feelings, its own heart projected on the screen. It obeys the
inescapable and inevitable commands of its own public life. Every man
does what he can; he acts on what he himself knows. And as Goethe once
wisely remarked, “Life is interesting, it makes no difference where you
take hold of it.”
The differences in peoples are wonderful—as the modern film shows. The
American rejects any and every film that does not stand with both feet
on the ground of actual life. The American takes his film themes from
his own activity, and it is a gigantic one. He binds his people close
to the world. He has them engage in the calling that is theirs. He is
as little inclined to scorn the orphanage or the tent of the cowboy as
he is to close his eyes to the elegant urban salon. Wherever he goes,
he notes what he has seen with the hard pencil of the professional
reporter. He eavesdrops, he listens-in on life in every form. With the
“essential” he is but little concerned; he is out for the picture of
his milieu, of his environment, of the world about him, and this world
of his is bubbling over with life. He is objective, and his objectivity
has not been distorted by any theory of art that confuses the issue
when conditions change. He seizes the world wherever he finds it most
interesting. He does not hesitate, once he has seized it, to place his
people in this surrounding; and he endows his people, as it were, with
the fates and the fancies of their new setting. The American film is
always most effective when it takes its material from the checkered and
chic fullness of the very present; when it depends for its inspiration
upon reality. It aims at genuineness; it tries to be true. It seems, at
least, that it never tries to depict a milieu which it does not know.
The great city is the mother-earth of the American film. The minute it
abandons the city and goes forth on voyages of discovery in nature it
loses its vivacity, its effectiveness, its sense of reality, and goes
over into watered makeshifts or highway romanticism.
[Illustration: Fig. 17. _Scene from A Doll’s House_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
The American despises all heavy, tiresome, serious art; he depicts a
highly-colored life, bubbles over with mad, or at least unexpected,
ideas and notions, and has his spectator laugh and weep—an
omniscient Lord knows that he never lets him do anything but laugh, or
anything but weep. The more extravagant the thing is, on the heights
and in the depths, the better. After all, life is beautiful. One laughs
ten times as willingly as one weeps. And no sane man wishes to see this
belief in the joy of life, and the eventual victory of happiness and
strength, taken from us.
The American has not a shimmer of a conception of _Dramatischer
Aufbau_; of dramatic composition he is innocent. The most he does is
to indulge in a brief exposition, which he expresses in a few and none
too labored words, in which he has something to say about the general
significance of the people in whom he is momentarily interested—and
then the thing starts. The American film is effective; and its
effectiveness is to be explained on the ground of the American people
themselves; they know precisely what they are after, and they proceed
without delay; they are not hampered by inertia; they are intelligent;
they are diligent.
The American’s creative action is sure and simple; it is not
reflective, nor congested with too much brooding; and it certainly
is not based on systematic philosophizing. His film is just as
unsentimental as his life. The majority of his scenes are noted
for an atmosphere of sobriety. This and that takes place, but if a
catastrophe does not follow there is no use to get excited. In the
few scenes in which the fate of one man rebounds against the fate
of another, the will of one man stands face to face with the will
of another. The American film is, so to speak, dramatic only in a
secondary or subsidiary sense.
The hero of the American film is the man of deeds. In the first act his
goal is set; in the last act he reaches it. Everything that intervenes
between these two acts is a test of strength. The strongest wins, every
time. The whole action revolves about this hero, and the “good ending”
is more a matter of logic than of anything else; it is the judgment
handed down as to who was the most powerful. There is no such thing
as a weakling among American film heroes. “It is not interesting; it
is not effective; therefore we don’t want it.” That is the history of
American film making in so many words.
The basic principle of the American film is expediency. It is
expediency, suitability, availability, that makes the American exercise
great care in choosing the title of his film, in having the action grow
in interest, and in using decoration that fits the case and represents,
on the whole, a genuine and solid picturesqueness. It is expediency
that prompts the American to avoid those diseased and unwholesome
themes which would be understood only by the spectator who is likewise
diseased and unwholesome. It is expediency that moves him to avoid
purely and rigidly intellectual themes, such as are appropriate for
private audiences only. It is expediency that suggests to him cheerful,
vigorous, bright, and fanciful themes in which the world is made to
shine and flash. It is expediency that causes him to fill even the
gloomiest theme with a good measure of happiness. There are, indeed,
many roads that lead to idealism.
The American does not seem to be at all familiar with the word “Art”
when he takes and makes a motion picture. He uses, instead of art,
the word “effect.” This may seem a bit primitive, even uninspired,
but it gets desirable results. That is good which is effective; the
ineffective is bad; whatever pleases is allowed. These seem to be his
shibboleths. He has, for this very reason, been spared the humiliation
attendant upon the film that would-be art, and which has brought
bankruptcy to its champions and producers.
For the American the soul is merely a means toward an effect. He never
overworks the soul; he does not splash it all over the individual
scene. He uses it just in so far as it is necessary to make his
hero a sympathetic creature and creation. In the middle, and the middle
point, of his film activity stands, not the soul, but the joy in
telling a story. For there is only one thing the American aims at:
he wants to have a chat; he wants to indulge in a _causerie_. For
him there is no artistic “problem to be solved.” He neither writes
theoretical treatises on the film, nor does he read them.
In this somewhat rigid domain which the life and _Weltanschauung_ of
the American people themselves have staked off for the American film,
there live, move, and have their being a great number of happily
endowed and cautious talents. They avoid clever and ingenious dodges;
they are not easily derailed. They try incessantly to raise the value
of the work they are engaged in and on to an ever-increasing height of
excellence.
The American film reflects the inmost nature of a people that is happy;
of a people that has been accustomed to create without being loaded
down with theory or chained to tradition. It is the film of a people
that has preserved unto itself the riches of the centuries.
The American is genuine; the Swede is true. Other peoples fill their
motion pictures with foaming and sometimes frantic melodies. The
Swedish film is not rich; it is unostentatious, sometimes to the
very point of scantiness. Its tone is that of the folk-song with its
tones taken from and based on pictures. Its characters are close to
the earth; they are rarely impulsive, and if so, the impulsiveness is
of a gentle nature; they seem quite free from self-consciousness. They
move their limbs after the fashion of dreamy giants. They play with
their hearts somewhat as the children of Asa were wont to play with
the golden discs. Their feelings have not been artificially translated
into a milieu; they have not been composed into a new home. They
grow quite naturally from the soil that begot them. In the case of the
American, or the German, film, we have the conflict first; the milieu
proceeds then from this conflict. The canon of the Swede reads: In the
beginning was the earth.
On this soil, excessively aromatic or iridescent fruit does not thrive.
The passions of the Swede are subdued; they whisper like waving grain
swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze. Because of their lack of display
they seem, to the eye and ear of the person accustomed to the bluster
of an industrial life, a bit primitive and monotonous. The Swedish
film is an æolian harp which is moved unconsciously; the few wonderful
tones that lie as potential factors in its strings are melodies only.
The reflective element of this film is remarkably impulsive in
character. It sinks itself with burning fervor into the depths of the
heart, never rises to the chilly clarity of abstract thought, and
rarely loses itself in moral fustian.
The Swedish film retains its perfect naturalness even when it concerns
itself with urban personages and chooses, perforce, its decoration and
setting from the fashionable drawing-rooms. When it does this it is a
matter of secret mask. These men in evening dress, these décolletée
ladies, remain after all peasant children who wear their foreign garb
with naïve gaiety. At times the Swede grafts an alien twig on the young
wild tree of his motion picture art. When he does, it is German if
subtle, French if erotic.
The Swede paints his picture with a fine brush, embellishes each
on rather broad lines, and coats every picture with a shimmer of
hearty intimacy which to a film connoisseur of another country seems
altogether unobtrusive. The film action, the ebb and flow of pictures,
seems to him a matter of indifference. He avoids excitement; he shuns
the raging of man against man. Invented, and therefore affected,
action, be it never so refined, leaves him cold. He loves to see things
grow; the secrets of the inner life are precious to him. His heroes
encircle the coveted goal without bodily moving out of their tracks.
All of this is at once an advantage and a disadvantage.
It is rare that the manager of a Swedish picture strives for such
brilliant effects, or for such a wealth of ideas, as characterizes
the American and German film manager. Swedish film technique stands
nearly still; if it moves at all, it is a cautious move. This is true,
indeed, of Swedish film art as a whole—that art which came as a direct
revelation to, though it left its imprint upon, the film art of other
peoples, and especially upon that of the Germans. Swedish photography
is not infrequently dull; it seems to have been lighted up from
underneath; it makes no attempt to compete with the chiaroscuro for
which American and German operators are noted.
The Swede creates for himself. He loves the figures of his native land;
in them and through them he improvises; he rings changes on the same
motives. Does he really wish to create art? Will the seed he has been
sowing grow?
While the Swede was quietly engaged in his dreamy plays, the American
and German—stimulated by him to a rather high degree—were chiseling
from the stone blocks of their own folk souls stronger and more
delusive pictures which, in their innermost nature, were no less true
than the film of the Swede. Since the Swede makes no attempt to speak
to the world, but only to a limited circle of intellectually inclined
people, he is always threatened with an imminent exhaustion
of means. Even to-day, on this account it seems, he is trying to
effect a compromise between himself and the world, though it cannot
be said that he is going into convulsions over his effort. He is not
in a hurry. He is trying his skill at historical films which hardly
become him either as a creative genius or a trained spectator. He is
snatching his figures out of the earth and giving them, at the expense
of verisimilitude, and following the bad example of the German social
film, the rather rootless and precarious existence that attaches itself
at all times to _mondaine_ as distinguished from mundane life. It is
a case of change from _I_ to _We_ which connotes a changed attitude
toward the world in general; and it is a change which the film of
Sweden has not entirely escaped. But it was to be expected: the Swede
and his film are both much too strong and healthy either to avoid or
neglect this transition.
The Swedish film is the reflection of a people that depends upon
itself, that rests within itself, on whose shores the tempestuous waves
of other nations break but gently: they have already been broken before
reaching that point.
[Illustration: Fig. 18. Scene from _Vögelöd Castle_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
The German is the great experimenter. Fate has struck Germany many
a telling blow in the last decade; much has been destroyed forever.
But amid the débris there has remained a spirit of daring, a
courage that makes an essay at the bold enticing. We experiment in the
motion picture, though not so much from a mere love of the novel as
from a settled conviction that in this field we still have a great deal
to learn; we are still undecided about a great number of things.
There is hardly a theme on earth or in the moon with which we have
not concerned ourselves; we have conjured the things of the earth and
the stars up before the film camera and had them remain there until
their pictures were at our disposal. We have descended into the dusty
tombs of prehistoric times; we have adapted the stories of foreign
countries to the screen. Fairy tales—those of yesterday, to-day, and
to-morrow—have been tried. And when, at the close of the War, a sudden
flood of ideas, notions, conceits, and utopias swept over our heads, we
even tried to philosophize on the screen.
In all of this busy activity, in this feverish and unceasing search
after new themes and new values, there has been one thing that we
completely forgot; and this one thing has been passing by us in
a thousand pictures: it was our own people. Of German films that
introduce us to the whirling life of our country, particularly from
the rural point of view, we have hardly an indication. A real
beginning in this direction certainly has not been made. It is
there, however, and there only where uniqueness of real character is
conspicuous that one finds the type of originality that pleases in
itself and defies competition of any kind. At present, forces are
beginning to work, action has been begun which, if carried on and out,
will project on the screen the land of Germany with all the beauty of
its streams and forests, and which will show the German soul with all
its dreams and wishes. This is the way the film entitled _Explosion_,
which tells of miners and their lives, came into existence. This was
the initial inspiration of Fritz Lang’s _Nibelungs_, that grandiose
epic of the remote Germanic past. These are to be sure beginnings; but
so long as they remain the sole examples, so long as the _status quo_
in this matter is preserved, we Germans simply do not exist in the
film; we have not yet arrived. And be it said once for all that the
popular film is the one in which a film people can best show its real
character.
Instead of studying this theme—our own people—and exploiting it day
in and day out, the German has scoured the whole world for themes.
His historical films have been prepared with marvelous accuracy; not
a detail has been neglected which might add in even the slightest way
to historical reality: loyalty to history has been preserved
and observed with touching constancy. I have my very serious doubt,
however, whether this has been wholly necessary, for such films are not
shown exclusively to historical seminars in the universities.
The German is almost universally successful in digging up a theme of
crushing weight and power. He is never at a loss to create an action of
either gruesome or exalted greatness. We have but to think of _Golem_,
_Madame Dubarry_, _Dr. Mabuse_, and _Dr. Caligari_. These are most
powerful films. Another is the _Nibelungs_. So far so good. But it is
rare indeed that the German succeeds in endowing such films as these
with the light and easy, the inspiring and inspiriting wings of humor.
For a time, indeed, there was only one type of film that was regarded
as a success: the film with the tragic ending. The German so frequently
forgets, or he at least overlooks, the fact that it is not the business
of the motion picture to play into the hands of hard, rigid, classical
art, and to follow the canons of such art in so doing. It is the
business, rather, of the motion picture to amuse people, to cheer them
up, and to stimulate them.
Latterly, the German has shown a marked tendency to turn away
from the film based on the masses. He has not done this however
voluntarily; the extreme cost of producing such films has made
them prohibitive. Nor is this all: the German has not looked with favor
recently on the film that has to do with huge crowds of human beings
for spiritual reasons. At present there is decided preference for
the film that depicts a strong fervor of some sort; for a film that
is impressive from the point of view of individuals; for a film that
delineates a logical development of the adventures of the soul. And
it must be conceded that the best artists are gradually finding a way
by which they can unite delicacy of soul with grace of experience and
thereby create what all the world must regard as beauty.
For a long while, the German, like the Swede, neglected the real art of
decoration and photography. Within recent years, however, our better
ateliers have made remarkable progress in this direction. Some of our
films that have been created since the making of this progress, such as
_Suvarin_ or _The Stone Rider_ need not hesitate to stand comparison
with the best of any country. The small film companies have been
obliged to close owing to the unprecedented depreciation in German
currency. This, however, is not a matter for profound regret, for their
quality could never be said to be the outstanding feature of their
creations. Nothing but quality can ever make the trouble that has
to be taken a matter of eventual gain. In the art of motion picture,
genius is its own reward, but pains are well paid.
The German film will come once the chaos that reigns supreme at present
has been eradicated, and the situation becomes brighter all around and
everywhere. To-day, Bolshevism raises its ugly head in the East; in the
West, heavy artillery is in position while fleets of bombing planes
whirr through the air. The atmosphere is thick; so thick, indeed, that
it casts a heavy shadow over the country.
CHAPTER VIII
FILM ADAPTATION
The mad search of the motion picture for appropriate material created
a unique caricature: second-hand art. In general, it is regarded as
a sign of unoriginality, if not of actual sterility, when a work,
which speaks a different language in the domain of art, is translated
into the language of the motion picture. It is not dissimilar to
the situation that obtains when a given individual, unable to write
anything on his own account, translates from the writings of others.
But the languages of words, words that act as the hand-maidens of
thought, are all members of the same great family of the human mind.
When languages of this kind are translated, the only change that is
made is a change in sound. The meaning remains the same. The essential
traits, the underlying faculties of a poet remain quite intact if
translated cleverly, knowingly, and modestly.
It is the spiritual soul that shines forth in poetry. The motion
picture “is not of this confectionery,” the Swiss Carl Spitteler would
say. All that can come to light in the film, and particularly in
film adaptations, is the sensual soul of an action. From this it is
evident that when a bit of literature is adapted to the screen, the
adapter is obliged to set up a quite different objective from that
which the original poet had in mind.
Attempts have been made to refute the necessity of this change of
purpose. The desire so to adapt a great piece of literature to the
screen that it will be in every way worthy of the original poet in
that it is a faithful reflection of his aims, is in itself altogether
praiseworthy. But no poet has thus far ever had his renown increased
by such an effort. All that was the most tender of beauty in the poem
as it originally stood became a soft sweet pap and nothing more when
transferred to the literal words of the film text. Attempts of this
kind have not only been unsuccessful with regard to the poet that was
to be honored; the truth is, no good motion picture has ever been made
in such a way and with such an aim in view. The result has invariably
been a surrogate that afforded nothing more than a glassy tedium.
The problem of film adaptation cannot be solved by reverence alone.
For the spiritual soul mocks the coercive oppression that goes with
gestures and refuses to be confined within the narrow circle of
such art as the motion picture has at its command. Gold becomes a mere
quasi-precious metal, beauty degenerates into paint and powder, truth
is routed by phraseology.
No one who is at all judicious will ever attempt to adapt to the
screen a bit of poetry whose entire art consists in a complete
absorption by and amalgamation with the world of pure thought. Goethe’s
transcendental works run but little risk. Those works, however, in
which there is a union of the spiritual soul with a sensual soul
stand in ever-present danger. Shakespeare’s works, for example, are
remarkably divided in this regard; they are full of fissures: he hid
his pure intellectuality in an action that is glaring, medieval, and
vigorous.
[Illustration: Fig. 19. Scene from _Destiny_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
What do we mean by film adaptation? We mean the separation of the
sensual action from all the rest. The feelings, transfigured through
pure intellect in the original poetry, are lifted from their initial
surroundings. Adapt a poem of the spiritual soul in this way and a
journalese tract is the result. Take the case of _Hamlet_: death
through poison, the son as the detective, the queen mother suffering
from aberrations, a duel with poisoned blades, and a conclusion of
fourfold death by poison. In such a bungled compilation there
would not be a single trace of Shakespearian spirit. In such a thing
the riddle of Hamlet would not be solved but cracked.
But since film adaptations are the order of the day, we might as well
pay them our respects, bow to them, and confess that they exist.
There is no use to deny the existence of that which already exists;
a fact is a fact. Moreover, film adaptation is not so contrary to
all the laws of nature and art as it would seem at first blush. For
there are many poetic creations of magnificent beauty of action whose
picturesque fullness poetry alone can do nothing more than merely touch
or indicate. There are other poems whose world of feeling is congealed
in cold abstract thought. In such cases the motion picture reclaims its
original due. There are also poetic works, such as Schiller’s _Fiesko_,
which are just as effective in the poetic form as they are in the form
they take on at the hands of the motion picture. A work, consequently,
the sensual action of which is so strong that a masterful, and
dignified, motion picture can be made from it, may be adapted to the
screen.
To transform a creation of the human mind and soul which constitutes,
judged from every conceivable point of view, a work of real and great
art from the sphere in which it originally stood, and in which it was
originally created, to another sphere, and into another species
of art, is always more or less sacrilegious. If done, it must be done
well, and done completely. There is no room here for piecemeal work.
The adaptation of a poem to the film calls for a re-creator who is a
stranger to mercy; he dare not shrink from tearing up the tenderest
flower by the roots and transplanting it to a new and strange garden.
Anything that does not fit in with his purpose must be ruthlessly cast
aside. Follow this recipe, and a work that is not appreciated by the
uncultured, great though it may be, may be metamorphosed into a work
that is appreciated, on the screen. Indeed, a new work of real art may
arise in this way. In a case of this kind, the original poet may after
all have his renown increased despite the fact that the film to which
his name is still attached corresponds in no way to what he originally
had in mind.
Nor should we ever fancy that work of this kind is unnecessary. The
Norse adaptation of Björnson’s _Synnöve Solbakken_, one of Björnson’s
short stories, written when he was still a young man, seemed, in its
finished form, as if Björnson had had the film camera in mind when
he created it. Picture after picture was shown, and that at great
length—and great breadth. Of Björnson’s unquestioned passionateness,
however, which resembles the roaring power of an ice-cold mountain
stream as it gushes down the hillside, there was not a trace.
To adapt is to use violence, to do violence. The adapter will never
succeed in finding and filming the original purpose of the poet. The
adaptation of _Fiesko_ was good; it was a success; but it was not
Schiller; it was not a child of his mind. And it would have been still
better had it resembled Schiller even less than it did. The action
should have been adapted much more to the needs of exclusive mimic
portrayal. To try to spare the poet, to hurt his feelings in no way, is
to render him a disservice.
It is unfortunate that productive poets can be persuaded to subject
their works to the adapter only with difficulty (as Carl Mayer in the
superb film _Schloss Vögelöd_). This is true, though the thought that
is required to adapt a work to the film is so great that the process
in itself requires originality and reveals a spirit of the most real
productivity. For it is after all easier to create a new work from the
beginning than to take a finished work and transform it so completely
that it meets the requirements of an entirely new and novel art.
For the author the adaptation is frequently a most unsatisfactory
affair. The book often leads the adapter astray; follow it, and
he loses himself in byways that are unknown to the ways of the film
world. In such a case the entire production has to be re-created,
which means that it has to be re-written. The result of this is that
everybody is dissatisfied, and not a few are in a bad humor. On the
other hand, the author may allow, or may have allowed, himself to be
carried away by a veritable wealth of ideals: he changes everything;
he adapts everything; he makes new characters; he develops new action;
he cajoles a new fate into the composition as a whole; he invents new
episodes; he even creates a new milieu and a new atmosphere. The result
of all this may be, to be sure, a quite good film. But it may be so
new that it is incorrect to speak of it as an adaptation. In such a
case, the original author falls into ill humor, because he feels that
violence has been done his creation which is equivalent, he feels, to
having been neglected or slighted. The manager is also apt to have his
face wreathed in frowns, for what has become of his funds? He has paid
out a handsome royalty for what? For nothing, he feels. His case seems
justified, for he paid for a given book, but there is not a trace of
that book in the film which is to care for the needs of the box-office.
And our old friend—the dramaturge—is in the worst frame of mind of
all, for he feels that the author has gone about his business with
excessive independence and with too little concern for his excellent
criticism.
From all of this it should be manifest that it is rare that a good
adaptation is the result of a single effort. Adaptation is a slow
and complicated process. There must be untiring revision—with the
disagreeable result that a manuscript promised for and by a certain
date is not ready at the stipulated time. It is much better all around
when the author lives himself, as it were, into the milieu he plans to
film, becomes perfectly familiar with it, if he was not familiar with
it when he began, creates characters with whom he is on speaking terms,
and fashions a fate such as he himself has experienced.
It is dangerous to adapt a great work to the film. The adaptation of
the _Marriage of Figaro_ showed the baroque curlicues, the confusions,
the harmless malevolences of Beaumarchais’s work (which in the opera
are quite unessential and the transparency of which appeal to us to-day
as altogether childish); we thought of Mozart and sighed. And _Hamlet!_
With Asta Nielsen! Without Shakespeare! Adapted “after an old saga!”
Why that was merely and after all a stolen creation.
The living poet may decide for himself whether treason has been
committed by the adapter who visualized his creation on the screen, and
did it artistically, but as an artistic motion picture. The dead poet
is unable to come to his own defence. If his work cannot be adapted
with piety, it is always the privilege of the would-be adapter to leave
it alone—as an act of piety.
[Illustration: Fig. 20. Scene from _The Nibelungs_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
CHAPTER IX
THE PATH TO ART
The lyric poem is poised on a shoreless sea; its prime feature is
its indefiniteness; it leads on to the undetermined goal of mortal
mood. But harmony—that resting which satisfies itself—soon exhausts
itself. And, to repeat once more, undetermined mood may easily be
converted into monotony, or it may change to a chaotic ebb and flow
that connotes the surging of unanticipated floods rather than tidal
regularity. No “progressive” work of art revels in planlessness. The
sails in which the winds play, as an idle mood may dictate, do not
indulge in their seeming gaiety with impunity. Punishment of one sort
or another follows. The helm decides a certain course; in this course
lie the fruits of strength. In poetry, mood is routed by action. The
feelings remain the driving power. For when feeling and passion form an
alliance, “action” ensues.
A purely lyrical stage drama such as Anton Wildgans’s _Armut_
(“Poverty”) fails to produce the really deep echo: our sympathy,
rattling around itself as the sole pivot it can commandeer soon
runs out. The stage, which finds in the play of thoughts a rich
variety, needs nevertheless a will-power that guides and gives
direction to the stream that flows by. The motion picture, which is
much less gifted with wealth of color, labors under the coercion of a
strong action somewhat as violin playing labors under the coercion of
melody. There is no such thing as a lyric motion picture.
Now, this is of course old, gray theory which applies to the average
film, but which never applies to the exceptional creation of the
god-endowed genius. Such an exception, and one of marvelously subdued
and magic beauty, was _Honour thy Mother!_ This film had not one loud
tone apart from a single cry of wild anguish. Its action was the divine
mercy of a human heart.
This is all very well; one man could do it once. The Swedes, on the
other hand, have suffered pitiable bankruptcy with their lyrical
films, though some of them were of exceptional beauty. Success has
a better chance of realization when the action is a little robust,
strong-fisted. That excesses in this direction are fatal is shown by
the idiotic action of the Eddie-Polo films. In the film whose action is
benevolently vigorous the lyric element loses its independence. It is
dissolved in the action, comes to the fore every now and then in
individual places with renewed force, and has a subduing effect on the
flow of action. In this way, the moving picture becomes a cheerfully
moved and never breathless art. But if the poet throws discipline to
the winds and pours out his lyric gentleness over every single scene,
his action soon and inevitably sinks into an inert and dripping morass.
There is also no such thing as an epic motion picture; just as there
is no such thing as an epic stage play. The epic has an action—that
is, a general trend and direction of events, but it has no distinct
goal. Episode is concatenated with episode like pearls on a string.
In the last analysis, however, there is no such thing as pure epic.
When Ulysses the great sufferer is driven from shore to shore, there
is something more to his case than the mere driving. Back of his fate
stands a dramatic question: Will he return to Ithaca? Will Penelope
have remained true to him? Will he be able to overcome her wooers?
This being the case, the episodes of his unenviable existence are not
concatenated without plan; there is no aimlessness about his affair.
The incidents of his life are joined together into a complete circle;
they end with dramatic necessity, not with epic arbitrariness. The epic
of the _Nibelungs_ is dramatic to the core.
The Italian motion picture dangles about in epic robes, attaching,
or affixing, scene to scene with proverbial epic breadth. The real
action is included in just a few isolated scenes. The picture exists
for its own sake, and it is surrounded with perfectly colossal
decoration. We have but to think of the Dante film, or of _Cabiria_,
and to a degree of _Quo Vadis_.
The rest of the world does not feel in this way; and it does not feel
this way about the motion picture. The tense and rigid condensation of
the action, and its logical progress from scene to scene—this is the
desideratum of the German film. The fates we see all about us, and of
which we ourselves are so many living proofs, are not to glide by each
other and dissipate in the winds: they are to rebound against each
other, and end when their struggle is over. Moreover, such fate as
remains when the end has been reached is somehow to be transformed, and
bear the stamp of this struggle.
There was the case of _Golem_. It had in it the possibilities of some
tremendous dramatic action. But in the final scenes this potential
action was dissipated into an unintended and undesired epic flow: the
de-souled monster had again become a lump of clay and lay before us in
all its obvious impotency. Everything will turn out all right: the
houses that have been burned down will be rebuilt. And the Jews take
Golem on their shoulders and carry him off to the synagogue: “Hail
to thee, Rabbi Loew! He has saved the city for the third time!” Life
will now go on its usual course just as if nothing had happened. And
with this the whole affair is over; it is forgotten; and it has been
erased from the heart of the spectator. The play seemed to have to do,
not with the age of terror of Golem, but with the age of peace. We had
expected a tragedy—and we were given an episode.
Another altogether undramatic film was _Dr. Caligari_. It consisted of
a series of gruesome things which, to make matters worse, proved in
the end to be the fancies of a madman. The play had action; but it had
no goal, no dramatic tension or suspense. The spectator was left in
a cloud of uncertainty and doubt. “What is this all about?” he asked
himself.
Dramatic suspense is the anticipation of events from which there can
be no reasonable escape. Anything that is tossed into our laps, as it
were, suddenly and without due motivation appeals to us as irrational,
senseless and unnecessary. We know that it all might have been so
different.
The film, having, as it certainly does, fewer means of expression at
its immediate command than the legitimate stage, and depending
for its appeal upon an audience that is, as a rule, less cultured,
dare not overlook, slight, or neglect a single means that might help
it in its effort to bring out strong effects. Is dramatic suspense or
tension inartistic? Quite the contrary; it is the best proof we have
of artistic ability, for we may search the art canons of the civilized
world and we will never find a rule to the effect that art must be
tiring and tiresome. Suspense is artistic, and the greater the effect
of it upon the spectator the more artistic it is. One must not fancy,
however, that the suspense of Eddie-Polo, or of the sensations of
Luciano Albertini are really and finally effective. In the movie of
the Apaches, to which the visitor is admitted for the smallest coin
known to the mint, this suspense is quite popular, because the nerves
of these people have become so blunted and so crude that they have
quite lost all appreciation of finer effects. Fortunately, however, the
general film public, the one that patronizes the average and paying
motion picture, is essentially more refined than the Apache. The more
refined spectator cannot be ♦captivated so easily and persistently
by the sensational tension that lasts for a moment as he can by the
pleasure derivable and derived from lengthier and more enduring
amusement. He is more interested in the suspense that is spread
out over an entire action, the tension that gives greater evidence of
human shrewdness, and is consequently more agreeable to men of like
characteristics and qualifications.
♦ “capitivated” replaced with “captivated”
Dramatic suspense is not a whip which the poet swings over the heads of
his characters. The fact is, one picture should not be made to tumble
over another, following the command of “On, on and more of the same
kind!” Being driven forward in this fashion can only result in what one
instinctively feels is a pursued and persecuted, art, an hysterical
art, and in externalities nothing can arise from it but the ♦pouncy
art of the criminal film. No, this is not suspense. Suspense is rather
the calm, serene hand of the poet that guides the work he is creating.
It is this that enables one to feel that the poet is leading his
creation along past all potential hindrances straight to a premeditated
goal. The man who is unable to cause to arise, through each picture
that he presents, the question, what is going to happen next? is
doomed to failure from the very outset. Provide him with the most
glorious decoration imaginable and all his work will be in vain, and
his decorations will vanish as thin air. In the _Indisches Grabmal_,
the Prince led his English guest around for a quarter of an hour on
the screen. The splendor of an Oriental temple, the half of a
whole army, was conjured up and visualized—but there was no suspense.
We smiled at the pomp of it, and remained perfectly cool and calm. If
the people _en masse_ cry for a gala scene in every other picture,
well and good. Give it to them! It is your duty and your task. But do
what lies in your power to animate even these scenes; try to make even
these fit into the action, just as a powerful crescendo movement of the
orchestra fits into the music that is being played. In the average film
every group scene—parades, carnivals, mysteries—is a stop-gap of the
action.
♦ “pouncey” replaced with “pouncy”
Suspense has nothing to do with decoration or scenery. The gigantic
raging of gigantic battle scenes is very rarely a source of dramatic
suspense. As a matter of fact, strategy is quite rarely effective in a
film. Suspense is almost always concentrated in or around just a few
individuals.
[Illustration: Fig. 21. Scene from _The Nibelungs_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
That suspense which is produced through external, unpsychic means is
generally pretty cheap. One runs for his life; ten are after him.
Will he escape? If he can run faster than the ten, yes. If he can
shoot into the whole group of his pursuers and locate his shots with
efficiency, yes. But when this sort of means is resorted to, the motion
picture degenerates into art, not for the masses, but for the
rabble, in whom the basest of instincts are satisfied in the basest way.
The suspense of the motion picture does not wait for words, but for
deeds. It depends upon changes that must come about and definitive
results that must be achieved. And when such deeds are conditions
upon the soul’s being shaken to its very depths, and when the outcome
and goal are fixed by the feelings, then such suspense as the motion
picture may properly indulge in has been achieved, and achieved in
accordance with the laws of motion picture art.
For that species of suspense which proceeds from soul to soul quite
without visible effect can hardly be attained by the motion picture.
And yet, the tonic power, the ability of the spectator to undergo
suspense, and to feel it, can hardly be overestimated. We have already
become quite familiar with the mimic situation; we are now able to
see and feel in the slightest movement the condition of the actor’s
wishes. He lifts an eye, and we know what he wants. In the _Bull of
Olivera_, Jannings played the rôle of a French general who deserts his
passionately loved Spanish friend. He stands by the door with his hand
already on the knob. His back is turned to the spectator; we can see
his body quiver: “Shall I remain? Shall I go?” It was brilliant.
And, truth to tell, that kind of brilliancy can be met with more
frequently in the motion picture than we would be at first inclined to
believe.
There was an altogether captivating moment of suspense in _Schloss
Vögelöd_. It was entitled in the text “A Confession.” We saw a great
spacious hall; it was deserted, except for two perfectly motionless
human beings who were separated from each other by the width of the
hall (Illustration No. 18). But such suspense, in which the most
sensitive æsthete might take extreme delight, is not for the masses.
For them it has to be laid on thick. The really clever motion picture
actor will always make it a point “to bring something to a great many,”
to use Goethe’s words. To the few he will offer a tension of refined
nature and subtle explanation; to the many he will offer a tension that
is sturdy, robust, plain as a pike-staff.
The poet handles his suspense in a calm way. With him, suspense is
clarity in spiritual intoxication; it is the sculptor’s chisel marks of
complete control. It is from it that force ensues and action acquires
its sense of goal. Where there is no suspense there is a chaotic
draining off of episodes that sink into the sand without leaving a
trace.
The motion picture actor, who thoroughly understands his business,
guarantees to his art the befitting title of “Dramatic.” It is a title
of honor, and will be bestowed when won. In the matter of technical
composition and artistic development, the stage and the screen follow
the identical course. But from the point of view of significance, they
are widely divergent arts. The value of each to, and the effect of each
on, striving humanity is poles removed, the one from the other.
Let us repeat—the film is not an art of the intellect but of the soul.
It does not serve ideas; it serves feelings. The greatness of the
stage actor lies in and is measured by the circle of his thoughts. The
greatness of the film actor lies in and is measured by the warmth and
depth of his heart, and by the gracious power through which he seizes
the spectator and convulses his soul.
The stage actor transforms the cool intellect into warmth. He who, in
his own world, is a superman of the spiritual soul carries us along
with him; we cannot resist him. The film actor transforms close and
sultry sensuality into warmth. He who, in his own world, is a superman
of the sensual soul finds his way to our hearts; we cannot resist him.
From such glowing action as is incorporated in _Madame Recamier_,
or _The Orphan_, or _Honour Thy Mother!_ or the _Nibelungs_, there is
but one moral to be drawn, and that is the moral of the feeling that
is as strong as the greatest organ of the greatest cathedral and as
impressive. From such motion pictures it is quite impossible to concoct
a purely intellectual extract. But it may be that the moral of the
great soul represents and signifies the highest morality of all art,
and that any other or further symbolism is nothing more than a mantle
that wraps itself about this kernel.
Many of our modern and contemporary art critics suffer from an
overestimation of the value and significance of thought _qua_ thought.
But the rigidly intellectual has just as little to do with real art as
has the purely sensual, and it is not until both have been baptised,
dipped deep indeed, into the warm depths of feeling ♦that arises
which we call art. And neither the intellectual nor the sensual can be
set up as a standard by which to weigh art and determine its ultimate
value. It is the psychic power of expression that passes enduring
judgment on the creations of the artist.
♦ “that that” replaced with “that”
Is there not something in music that concerns us all, that is a
symbolic incarnation of our life of feeling, but which no thought
of ours is strong enough to capture on the wing? All the riddles of
our soul—call them Happiness, Heart, Love, God, or what you will, are
solved in and through our feelings. It is our feelings that make us
familiar with them, and intimate part of ourselves. They mock at the
mind; they deride the intellect, which can do nothing more than brood
in hopelessness, whereas the soul blindly resigns and thus comes to
understand.
Thus it is that music is the eternal soul, the symbol of all souls—of
the unthinkable, the indescribable, the unspeakable. From the voices
of the violin, the bass viol and the flute there breathes but one
thing—the soul.
We do not feel entirely familiar with the figures of the motion
picture; the _Tua res agitur_ rings out, as yet, only faintly and
rarely reaches our ears. But this whole art is so elementary, and is
so capable of reflecting the unthinkable fineness of the feelings,
that one thing is certain: the time will come when we will be in
appreciative accord with the most perfect figures of the motion
picture. The union between them and us will be happy, and it will be
perfect.
The legitimate stage represents a defection from sensuality, and a
hopeless brooding over the eternal riddles of life. But viewed in the
proper light, a defection from sensuality may be a striving after
the wish-figures of the motion picture—a home-coming to the soul, a
deep baptism in the mysterious fullness of the human breast. Just how
high the motion picture will rise, the extent to which it may succeed
in going, no man knows. But it will reach the soul. Music originated
from sensuality—from a union of rhythm and euphony. Music, too, has a
sensual soul the very psychic power of which burns away all sensuality.
To place relative estimates on the value of each of the arts is an
irrational undertaking. On the flowery tree of humanity each art has
its mysterious meaning—over which we should not brood: cold intellect
cannot solve such problems as are associated with this indubitable fact.
I have examined the motion picture from its various angles. I have
shown what it is like, explained its fundamental nature, commented
on the forces that impel it, discussed the wishes at which it aims,
elucidated its origin, and set up its goal. My purpose has been to
detach the motion picture from technique, and to make it serviceable
to art and culture. I have endeavored to proclaim the mission of the
motion picture artist.
No one people, taken as a whole, has _Kultur_. It is only the
purest, the noblest, the best of a given people from whose splendor
there radiates a remote luster that finds its way to the active life of
the masses. If properly applied, and molded by the proper people, the
motion picture will be a potent factor in this act of purification. It
will deepen our world of feeling and make it more cordial, warmer. Do
you recall hearing that anyone ever blamed a given instrument because
so many bunglers play on it?
From the motion picture there will flow forth a fruitful stream. All
poetic creations of the sensual soul find now their original art.
Liberated from them, the poem in words will serve the intellectual soul
more joyfully than ever. The time will come, too, when it will be shown
that in the motion picture there is either no art at all, or only great
art. There are abysses all along the road; each step is threatened; but
ingenious security will find its way past all these dangers.
One thing is certain: the motion picture, in its inseparable union with
technique, is one step more away from _Kultur_ and toward civilization.
The inventions of civilization endure; they connote the inescapable way
of humanity. Just as cannon and railroads, electricity and air ships,
can no longer be struck from the book of life of coming generations by
the willed and willful act of individuals, parties, or the whole
human race for that matter, just so is it true that the technical
invention of the motion picture belongs forever to the conditions
upon which the future will be predicated. We can no longer turn this
stream aside; to swim against it would be an imbecilic undertaking. To
allow oneself to be driven along by it would be distinctly immoral.
Shrewdness and morality make it imperative that we constitute ourselves
the advance waves of this stream, so that it may be made to flow in the
right and proper channels to the end that its goal may be noble, its
course one of generous service to human kind.
For the task of the coming centuries will be the reconciliation of
_Kultur_ and civilization. The motion picture—never as a unit or a
totality, always as reflected in the possibilities suggested by its
rarest fruits—is a powerful sign that this reconciliation will be a
complete success.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Non-printable characteristics have been given the following
Italic text: --> _text_
* * * * * indicates a thought break (extra
blank vertical white space).
Illustrations are indicated by: [Illustration: caption or
descriptive text].
Missing full-stops and abbreviation stops silently added.
The paragraph ending on page 136 with “loses itself in moral
fustian” probably is missing the word “melodrama” at the end.
Misspelled words have been corrected. Obsolete and alternative
spellings are left unchanged (e.g. ascendent, dilettant, etherial,
heterogenous, Shakespearian). Spelling and hyphenation has not been
standardised.
Illustrations within paragraphs are placed either before or after
the paragraph.
Corrections (“Edit Distance” refers to the Levenshtein Distance.):
page Source Correction Edit
Distance
3 attendent attendant 1
22 dilettanteish dilettantish 1
41 obtrustively obtrusively 1
44 charcater character 2
74 docorations decorations 1
100 Liliputian Lilliputian 1
102 extaordinarily extraordinarily 1
110 words word 1
119 aristrocratic aristocratic 1
121 unobstrusive unobtrusive 1
125 adventursome adventuresome 1
126 titulation titillation 2
129 gruesomness gruesomeness 1
158 capitivated captivated 1
159 pouncey pouncy 1
164 that that that 5
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