Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

[Other notes] may be found at the end of this eBook.

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Lilliputian 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.

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.

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.

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.