The Photoplay Part 4

It is not different with the author who writes a historical novel or drama. Every man's life is crowded with the trivialities of the day. The scholarly historian may have to look into them; the artist selects those events in his hero's life which truly express his personality and which are fit to sustain the significant plot. The more he brings those few elements out of the many into sharp relief, the more he stimulates our interest and makes us really feel with the persons of his novel or drama. The sculptor even selects one single position. He cannot, like the painter, give us any background, he cannot make his hero move as on the theater stage. The marble statue makes the one position of the hero everlasting, but this is so selected that all the chance aspects and fleeting gestures of the real man appear insignificant compared with the one most expressive and most characteristic position which is chosen.

However far this selection of the essential traits removes the artistic creation from the mere imitative reproduction of the world, a much greater distance from reality results from a second need if the work is to fulfill the purposes of art. We saw that we have art only when the work is isolated, that is, when it fulfills every demand in itself and does not point beyond itself. This can be done only if it is sharply set off from the sphere of our practical interests. Whatever enters into our practical sphere links itself with our impulses to real action and the action would involve a change, an intrusion, an influence from without.

As long as we have the desire to change anything, the work is not complete in itself. The relation of the work to us as persons must not enter into our awareness of it at all. As soon as it does, that complete restfulness of the esthetic enjoyment is lost. Then the object becomes simply a part of our practical surroundings. The fundamental condition of art, therefore, is that we shall be distinctly conscious of the unreality of the artistic production, and that means that it must be absolutely separated from the real things and men, that it must be isolated and kept in its own sphere. As soon as a work of art tempts us to take it as a piece of reality, it has been dragged into the sphere of our practical action, which means our desire to put ourselves into connection with it. Its completeness in itself is lost and its value for our esthetic enjoyment has faded away.

Now we understand why it is necessary that each art should have its particular method for fundamentally changing reality. Now we recognize that it is by no means a weakness of sculpture that the marble statue has not the colors of life but a whiteness unlike any human being. Nor does it appear a deficiency in the painting or the drawing that it can offer two dimensions only and has no means to show us the depth of real nature. Now we grasp why the poet expresses his feelings and thoughts in the entirely unnatural language of rhythms and rhymes. Now we see why every work of art has its frame or its base or its stage. Everything serves that central purpose, the separation of the offered experience from the background of our real life. When we have a painted garden before us, we do not want to pick the flowers from the beds and break the fruit from the branches. The flatness of the picture tells us that this is no reality, in spite of the fact that the size of the painting may not be different from that of the windowpane through which we see a real garden. We have no thought of bringing a chair or a warm coat for the woman in marble. The work which the sculptor created stands before us in a s.p.a.ce into which we cannot enter, and because it is entirely removed from the reality toward which our actions are directed we become esthetic spectators only. The smile of the marble girl wins us as if it came from a living one, but we do not respond to her welcome. Just as she appears in her marble form she is complete in herself without any relation to us or to anyone else. The very difference from reality has given her that self-sustained perfect life.

If we read in a police report about burglaries, we may lock our house more securely; if we read about a flood, we may send our mite; if we read about an elopement, we may try to find out what happened later. But if we read about all these in a short story, we have esthetic enjoyment only if the author somehow makes it perfectly clear to us by the form of the description that this burglary and flood and elopement do not belong to our real surroundings and exist only in the world of imagination. The extreme case comes to us in the theater performance. We see there real human beings a few feet from us; we see in the melodrama how the villain approaches his victim from behind with a dagger; we feel indignation and anger: and yet we have not the slightest desire to jump up on the stage and stay his arm. The artificial setting of the stage, the lighted proscenium before the dark house, have removed the whole action from the world which is connected with our own deeds. The consciousness of unreality, which the theater has forced on us, is the condition for our dramatic interest in the events presented. If we were really deceived and only for a moment took the stage quarrel and stage crime to be real, we would at once be removed from the height of esthetic joy to the level of common experience.

We must take one step more. We need not only the complete separation from reality by the changed forms of experience, but we must demand also that this unreal thing or event shall be complete in itself. The artist, therefore, must do whatever is needed to satisfy the demands which any part awakens. If one line in the painting suggests a certain mood and movement, the other lines must take it up and the colors must sympathize with it and they all must agree with the pictured content. The tension which one scene in the drama awakens must be relieved by another.

Nothing must remain unexplained and nothing unfinished. We do not want to know what is going on behind the hills of the landscape painting or what the couple in the comedy will do after the engagement in the last act. On the other hand, if the artist adds elements which are in harmony with the demands of the other parts, they are esthetically valuable, however much they may differ from the actual happenings in the outer world. In the painting the mermaid may have her tail and the sculptured child may have his angel wings and fairies may appear on the stage. In short, every demand which is made by the purpose of true art removes us from reality and is contrary to the superficial claim that art ought to rest on skillful imitation. The true victory of art lies in the overcoming of the real appearance and every art is genuine which fulfills this esthetic desire for history or for nature, in its own way.

The number of ways cannot be determined beforehand. By the study of painting and etching and drawing merely, we could not foresee that there is also possible an art like sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric poetry we could not construct beforehand the forms of the drama. The genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely changed that they are separated from all possible reality, isolated from all connections and made complete in themselves. We have not yet spoken about the one art which gives us this perfect satisfaction in the isolated material, satisfies every demand which it awakens, and yet which is further removed from the reality we know than any other artistic creation, music. Those tones with which the composer builds up his melodies and harmonies are not parts of the world in which we live at all. None of our actions in practical life is related to tones from musical instruments, and yet the tones of a symphony may arouse in us the deepest emotions, the most solemn feelings and the most joyful ones.

They are symbols of our world which bring with them its sadness and its happiness. We feel the rhythm of the tones, fugitive, light and joyful, or quiet, heavy and sustained, and they impress us as energies which awaken our own impulses, our own tensions and relaxations.

We enter into the play of those tones which with their intervals and their instrumental tone color appear like a wonderful mosaic of agreements and disagreements. Yet each disagreement resolves itself into a new agreement. Those tones seek one another. They have a life of their own, complete in itself. We do not want to change it. Our mind simply echoes their desires and their satisfaction. We feel with them and are happy in their ultimate agreement without which no musical melody would be beautiful. Bound by the inner law which is proclaimed by the first tones every coming tone is prepared. The whole tone movement points toward the next one. It is a world of inner self-agreement like that of the colors in a painting, of the curves in a work of sculpture, like the rhythms and rhymes in a stanza. But beyond the mere self-agreement of the tones and rhythms as such, the musical piece as a whole unveils to us a world of emotion. Music does not depict the physical nature which fine arts bring to us, nor the social world which literature embraces, but the inner world with its abundance of feelings and excitements. It isolates our inner experience and within its limits brings it to that perfect self-agreement which is the characteristic of every art.

We might easily trace further the various means by which each particular art overcomes the chaos of the world and renders a part of it in a perfectly isolated form in which all elements are in mutual agreement.

We might develop out of this fundamental demand of art all the special forms which are characteristic in its various fields. We might also turn to the applied arts, to architecture, to arts and crafts, and so on and see how new rules must arise from the combination of purely artistic demands and those of practical utility. But this would lead us too far into esthetic theory, while our aim is to push forward toward the problem of the photoplay. Of painting, of drama, and of music we had to speak because with them the photoplay does share certain important conditions and accordingly certain essential forms of rendering the world. Each element of the photoplay is a picture, flat like that which the painter creates, and the pictorial character is fundamental for the art of the film. But surely the photoplay shares many conditions with the drama on the stage. The presentation of conflicting action among men in dramatic scenes is the content, on the stage as on the screen. Our chief claim, however, was that we falsify the meaning of the photoplay if we simply subordinate it to the esthetic conditions of the drama. It is different from mere pictures and it is different from the drama, too, however much relation it has to both. But we come nearer to the understanding of its true position in the esthetic world, if we think at the same time of that other art upon which we touched, the art of the musical tones. They have overcome the outer world and the social world entirely, they unfold our inner life, our mental play, with its feelings and emotions, its memories and fancies, in a material which seems exempt from the laws of the world of substance and material, tones which are fluttering and fleeting like our own mental states. Of course, a photoplay is not a piece of music. Its material is not sound but light.

But the photoplay is not music in the same sense in which it is not drama and not pictures. It shares something with all of them. It stands somewhere among and apart from them and just for this reason it is an art of a particular type which must be understood through its own conditions and for which its own esthetic rules must be traced instead of drawing them simply from the rules of the theater.

CHAPTER IX

THE MEANS OF THE PHOTOPLAY

We have now reached the point at which we can knot together all our threads, the psychological and the esthetic ones. If we do so, we come to the true thesis of this whole book. Our esthetic discussion showed us that it is the aim of art to isolate a significant part of our experience in such a way that it is separate from our practical life and is in complete agreement within itself. Our esthetic satisfaction results from this inner agreement and harmony, but in order that we may feel such agreement of the parts we must enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and color and form, every word and tone and note. Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooperation of the parts. The means of the various arts, we saw, are the forms and methods by which this aim is fulfilled. They must be different for every material. Moreover the same material may allow very different methods of isolation and elimination of the insignificant and reenforcement of that which contributes to the harmony. If we ask now what are the characteristic means by which the photoplay succeeds in overcoming reality, in isolating a significant dramatic story and in presenting it so that we enter into it and yet keep it away from our practical life and enjoy the harmony of the parts, we must remember all the results to which our psychological discussion in the first part of the book has led us.

We recognized there that the photoplay, incomparable in this respect with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind. To be sure, the events in the photoplay happen in the real s.p.a.ce with its depth. But the spectator feels that they are not presented in the three dimensions of the outer world, that they are flat pictures which only the mind molds into plastic things. Again the events are seen in continuous movement; and yet the pictures break up the movement into a rapid succession of instantaneous impressions. We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind which binds the pictures together. But much stronger differences came to light when we turned to the processes of attention, of memory, of imagination, of suggestion, of division of interest and of emotion. The attention turns to detailed points in the outer world and ignores everything else: the photoplay is doing exactly this when in the close-up a detail is enlarged and everything else disappears. Memory breaks into present events by bringing up pictures of the past: the photoplay is doing this by its frequent cut-backs, when pictures of events long past flit between those of the present. The imagination antic.i.p.ates the future or overcomes reality by fancies and dreams; the photoplay is doing all this more richly than any chance imagination would succeed in doing. But chiefly, through our division of interest our mind is drawn hither and thither. We think of events which run parallel in different places. The photoplay can show in intertwined scenes everything which our mind embraces. Events in three or four or five regions of the world can be woven together into one complex action.

Finally, we saw that every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectator's mind can mold the scenes in the photoplay until they appear the embodiment of our feelings. In every one of these aspects the photoplay succeeds in doing what the drama of the theater does not attempt.

If this is the outcome of esthetic a.n.a.lysis on the one side, of psychological research on the other, we need only combine the results of both into a unified principle: _the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, s.p.a.ce, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion._

We shall gain our orientation most directly if once more, under this point of view, we compare the photoplay with the performance on the theater stage. We shall not enter into a discussion of the character of the regular theater and its drama. We take this for granted. Everybody knows that highest art form which the Greeks created and which from Greece has spread over Asia, Europe, and America. In tragedy and in comedy from ancient times to Ibsen, Rostand, Hauptmann, and Shaw we recognize one common purpose and one common form for which no further commentary is needed. How does the photoplay differ from a theater performance? We insisted that every work of art must be somehow separated from our sphere of practical interests. The theater is no exception. The structure of the theater itself, the framelike form of the stage, the difference of light between stage and house, the stage setting and costuming, all inhibit in the audience the possibility of taking the action on the stage to be real life. Stage managers have sometimes tried the experiment of reducing those differences, for instance, keeping the audience also in a fully lighted hall, and they always had to discover how much the dramatic effect was reduced because the feeling of distance from reality was weakened. The photoplay and the theater in this respect are evidently alike. The screen too suggests from the very start the complete unreality of the events.

But each further step leads us to remarkable differences between the stage play and the film play. In every respect the film play is further away from the physical reality than the drama and in every respect this greater distance from the physical world brings it nearer to the mental world. The stage shows us living men. It is not the real Romeo and not the real Juliet; and yet the actor and the actress have the ringing voices of true people, breathe like them, have living colors like them, and fill physical s.p.a.ce like them. What is left in the photoplay? The voice has been stilled: the photoplay is a dumb show. Yet we must not forget that this alone is a step away from reality which has often been taken in the midst of the dramatic world. Whoever knows the history of the theater is aware of the tremendous role which the pantomime has played in the development of mankind. From the old half-religious pantomimic and suggestive dances out of which the beginnings of the real drama grew to the fully religious pantomimes of medieval ages and, further on, to many silent mimic elements in modern performances, we find a continuity of conventions which make the pantomime almost the real background of all dramatic development. We know how popular the pantomimes were among the Greeks, and how they stood in the foreground in the imperial period of Rome. Old Rome cherished the mimic clowns, but still more the tragic pantomimics. "Their very nod speaks, their hands talk and their fingers have a voice." After the fall of the Roman empire the church used the pantomime for the portrayal of sacred history, and later centuries enjoyed very unsacred histories in the pantomimes of their ballets. Even complex artistic tragedies without words have triumphed on our present-day stage. "L'Enfant Prodigue" which came from Paris, "Sumurun" which came from Berlin, "Petroushka" which came from Petrograd, conquered the American stage; and surely the loss of speech, while it increased the remoteness from reality, by no means destroyed the continuous consciousness of the bodily existence of the actors.

Moreover the student of a modern pantomime cannot overlook a characteristic difference between the speechless performance on the stage and that of the actors of a photoplay. The expression of the inner states, the whole system of gestures, is decidedly different: and here we might say that the photoplay stands nearer to life than the pantomime. Of course, the photoplayer must somewhat exaggerate the natural expression. The whole rhythm and intensity of his gestures must be more marked than it would be with actors who accompany their movements by spoken words and who express the meaning of their thoughts and feelings by the content of what they say. Nevertheless the photoplayer uses the regular channels of mental discharge. He acts simply as a very emotional person might act. But the actor who plays in a pantomime cannot be satisfied with that. He is expected to add something which is entirely unnatural, namely a kind of artificial demonstration of his emotions. He must not only behave like an angry man, but he must behave like a man who is consciously interested in his anger and wants to demonstrate it to others. He exhibits his emotions for the spectators. He really acts theatrically for the benefit of the bystanders. If he did not try to do so, his means of conveying a rich story and a real conflict of human pa.s.sions would be too meager. The photoplayer, with the rapid changes of scenes, has other possibilities of conveying his intentions. He must not yield to the temptation to play a pantomime on the screen, or he will seriously injure the artistic quality of the reel.

The really decisive distance from bodily reality, however, is created by the subst.i.tution of the actor's picture for the actor himself. Lights and shades replace the manifoldness of color effects and mere perspective must furnish the suggestion of depth. We traced it when we discussed the psychology of kinematoscopic perception. But we must not put the emphasis on the wrong point. The natural tendency might be to lay the chief stress on the fact that those people in the photoplay do not stand before us in flesh and blood. The essential point is rather that we are conscious of the flatness of the picture. If we were to see the actors of the stage in a mirror, it would also be a reflected image which we perceive. We should not really have the actors themselves in our straight line of vision; and yet this image would appear to us equivalent to the actors themselves, because it would contain all the depth of the real stage. The film picture is such a reflected rendering of the actors. The process which leads from the living men to the screen is more complex than a mere reflection in a mirror, but in spite of the complexity in the transmission we do, after all, see the real actor in the picture. The photograph is absolutely different from those pictures which a clever draughtsman has sketched. In the photoplay we see the actors themselves and the decisive factor which makes the impression different from seeing real men is not that we see the living persons through the medium of photographic reproduction but that this reproduction shows them in a flat form. The bodily s.p.a.ce has been eliminated. We said once before that stereoscopic arrangements could reproduce somewhat this plastic form also. Yet this would seriously interfere with the character of the photoplay. We need there this overcoming of the depth, we want to have it as a picture only and yet as a picture which strongly suggests to us the actual depth of the real world. We want to keep the interest in the plastic world and want to be aware of the depth in which the persons move, but our direct object of perception must be without the depth. That idea of s.p.a.ce which forces on us most strongly the idea of heaviness, solidity and substantiality must be replaced by the light flitting immateriality.

But the photoplay sacrifices not only the s.p.a.ce values of the real theater; it disregards no less its order of time. The theater presents its plot in the time order of reality. It may interrupt the continuous flow of time without neglecting the conditions of the dramatic art.

There may be twenty years between the third and the fourth act, inasmuch as the dramatic writer must select those elements spread over s.p.a.ce and time which are significant for the development of his story. But he is bound by the fundamental principle of real time, that it can move only forward and not backward. Whatever the theater shows us now must come later in the story than that which it showed us in any previous moment.

The strict cla.s.sical demand for complete unity of time does not fit every drama, but a drama would give up its mission if it told us in the third act something which happened before the second act. Of course, there may be a play within a play, and the players on the stage which is set on the stage may play events of old Roman history before the king of France. But this is an enclosure of the past in the present, which corresponds exactly to the actual order of events. The photoplay, on the other hand, does not and must not respect this temporal structure of the physical universe. At any point the photoplay interrupts the series and brings us back to the past. We studied this unique feature of the film art when we spoke of the psychology of memory and imagination. With the full freedom of our fancy, with the whole mobility of our a.s.sociation of ideas, pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present. Time is left behind. Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with the day before yesterday. The freedom of the mind has triumphed over the unalterable law of the outer world.

It is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays try to steal the thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time reversals on the legitimate stage. We are esthetically on the borderland when a grandfather tells his grandchild the story of his own youth as a warning, and instead of the spoken words the events of his early years come before our eyes. This is, after all, quite similar to a play within a play. A very different experiment is tried in "Under Cover."

The third act, which plays on the second floor of the house, ends with an explosion. The fourth act, which plays downstairs, begins a quarter of an hour before the explosion. Here we have a real denial of a fundamental condition of the theater. Or if we stick to recent products of the American stage, we may think of "On Trial," a play which perhaps comes nearest to a dramatic usurpation of the rights of the photoplay.

We see the court scene and as one witness after another begins to give his testimony the courtroom is replaced by the scenes of the actions about which the witness is to report. Another clever play, "Between the Lines," ends the first act with a postman bringing three letters from the three children of the house. The second, third, and fourth acts lead us to the three different homes from which the letters came and the action in the three places not only precedes the writing of the letters; but goes on at the same time. The last act, finally, begins with the arrival of the letters which tell the ending of those events in the three homes. Such experiments are very suggestive but they are not any longer pure dramatic art. It is always possible to mix arts. An Italian painter produces very striking effects by putting pieces of gla.s.s and stone and rope into his paintings, but they are no longer pure paintings. The drama in which the later event comes before the earlier is an esthetic barbarism which is entertaining as a clever trick in a graceful superficial play, but intolerable in ambitious dramatic art. It is not only tolerable but perfectly natural in any photoplay. The pictorial reflection of the world is not bound by the rigid mechanism of time. Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then to the past: the photoplay can equal it in its freedom from the bondage of the material world.

But the theater is bound not only by s.p.a.ce and time. Whatever it shows is controlled by the same laws of causality which govern nature. This involves a complete continuity of the physical events: no cause without following effect, no effect without preceding cause. This whole natural course is left behind in the play on the screen. The deviation from reality begins with that resolution of the continuous movement which we studied in our psychological discussions. We saw that the impression of movement results from an activity of the mind which binds the separate pictures together. What we actually see is a composite; it is like the movement of a fountain in which every jet is resolved into numberless drops. We feel the play of those drops in their sparkling haste as one continuous stream of water, and yet are conscious of the myriads of drops, each one separate from the others. This fountainlike spray of pictures has completely overcome the causal world.

In an entirely different form this triumph over causality appears in the interruption of the events by pictures which belong to another series.

We find this whenever the scene suddenly changes. The processes are not carried to their natural consequences. A movement is started, but before the cause brings its results another scene has taken its place. What this new scene brings may be an effect for which we saw no causes. But not only the processes are interrupted. The intertwining of the scenes which we have traced in detail is itself such a contrast to causality.

It is as if different objects could fill the same s.p.a.ce at the same time. It is as if the resistance of the material world had disappeared and the substances could penetrate one another. In the interlacing of our ideas we experience this superiority to all physical laws. The theater would not have even the technical means to give us such impressions, but if it had, it would have no right to make use of them, as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built. We have only another case of the same type in those series of pictures which aim to force a suggestion on our mind. We have spoken of them. A certain effect is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to appear the film is cut off. We have the causes without the effect. The villain thrusts with his dagger--but a miracle has s.n.a.t.c.hed away his victim.

_While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of s.p.a.ce and time and causality and are freed from its bounds, they are certainly not without law._ We said before that the freedom with which the pictures replace one another is to a large degree comparable to the sparkling and streaming of the musical tones. The yielding to the play of the mental energies, to the attention and emotion, which is felt in the film pictures, is still more complete in the musical melodies and harmonies in which the tones themselves are merely the expressions of the ideas and feelings and will impulses of the mind. Their harmonies and disharmonies, their fusing and blending, is not controlled by any outer necessity, but by the inner agreement and disagreement of our free impulses. And yet in this world of musical freedom, everything is completely controlled by esthetic necessities. No sphere of practical life stands under such rigid rules as the realm of the composer. However bold the musical genius may be he cannot emanc.i.p.ate himself from the iron rule that his work must show complete unity in itself. All the separate prescriptions which the musical student has to learn are ultimately only the consequences of this central demand which music, the freest of the arts, shares with all the others. In the case of the film, too, the freedom from the physical forms of s.p.a.ce, time, and causality does not mean any liberation from this esthetic bondage either. On the contrary, just as music is surrounded by more technical rules than literature, the photoplay must be held together by the esthetic demands still more firmly than is the drama. The arts which are subordinated to the conditions of s.p.a.ce, time, and causality find a certain firmness of structure in these material forms which contain an element of outer connectedness. But where these forms are given up and where the freedom of mental play replaces their outer necessity, everything would fall asunder if the esthetic unity were disregarded.

This unity is, first of all, the unity of action. The demand for it is the same which we know from the drama. The temptation to neglect it is nowhere greater than in the photoplay where outside matter can so easily be introduced or independent interests developed. It is certainly true for the photoplay, as for every work of art, that nothing has the right to existence in its midst which is not internally needed for the unfolding of the unified action. Wherever two plots are given to us, we receive less by far than if we had only one plot. We leave the sphere of valuable art entirely when a unified action is ruined by mixing it with declamation, and propaganda which is not organically interwoven with the action itself. It may be still fresh in memory what an esthetically intolerable helter-skelter performance was offered to the public in "The Battlecry of Peace." Nothing can be more injurious to the esthetic cultivation of the people than such performances which hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail and yet destroy their esthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the fundamental principle of art, the demand for unity. But we recognized also that this unity involves complete isolation. We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested bystander. The scenic background of the play is not presented in order that we decide whether we want to spend our next vacation there. The interior decoration of the rooms is not exhibited as a display for a department store. The men and women who carry out the action of the plot must not be people whom we may meet tomorrow on the street. All the threads of the play must be knotted together in the play itself and none should be connected with our outside interests. A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody. It is not an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the newest fas.h.i.+ons.

This unity of action involves unity of characters. It has too often been maintained by those who theorize on the photoplay that the development of character is the special task of the drama, while the photoplay, which lacks words, must be satisfied with types. Probably this is only a reflection of the crude state which most photoplays of today have not outgrown. Internally, there is no reason why the means of the photoplay should not allow a rather subtle depicting of complex character. But the chief demand is that the characters remain consistent, that the action be developed according to inner necessity and that the characters themselves be in harmony with the central idea of the plot. However, as soon as we insist on unity we have no right to think only of the action which gives the content of the play. We cannot make light of the form.

As in music the melody and rhythms belong together, as in painting not every color combination suits every subject, and as in poetry not every stanza would agree with every idea, so the photoplay must bring action and pictorial expression into perfect harmony. But this demand repeats itself in every single picture. We take it for granted that the painter balances perfectly the forms in his painting, groups them so that an internal symmetry can be felt and that the lines and curves and colors blend into a unity. Every single picture of the sixteen thousand which are shown to us in one reel ought to be treated with this respect of the pictorial artist for the unity of the forms.

_The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of s.p.a.ce, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance._

CHAPTER X

THE DEMANDS OF THE PHOTOPLAY

We have found the general formula for the new art of the photoplay. We may turn our attention to some consequences which are involved in this general principle and to some esthetic demands which result from it.

Naturally the greatest of all of them is the one for which no specific prescription can be given, namely the imaginative talent of the scenario writer and the producer. The new art is in that respect not different from all the old arts. A Beethoven writes immortal symphonies; a thousand conductors are writing symphonies after the same pattern and after the same technical rules and yet not one survives the next day.

What the great painter or sculptor, composer or poet, novelist or dramatist, gives from the depth of his artistic personality is interesting and significant; and the unity of form and content is natural and perfect. What untalented amateurs produce is trivial and flat; the relation of form and content is forced; the unity of the whole is incomplete. Between these two extremes any possible degree of approach to the ideal is shown in the history of human arts. It cannot be otherwise with the art of the film. Even the clearest recognition of the specific demands of the photoplay cannot be sufficient to replace original talent or genius. The most slavish obedience to esthetic demands cannot make a tiresome plot interesting and a trivial action significant.

If there is anything which introduces a characteristic element into the creation of the photoplay as against all other arts, it may be found in the undeniable fact that the photoplay always demands the cooperation of two inventive personalities, the scenario writer and the producer. Some collaboration exists in other arts too. The opera demands the poet and the composer; and yet the text of the opera is a work of literature independent and complete in itself, and the music of the opera has its own life. Again, every musical work demands the performer. The orchestra must play the symphonies, the pianist or the singer must make the melodies living, the actors must play the drama. But the music is a perfect work of art even before it is sung or played on an instrument, just as a drama is complete as a work of literature even if it never reaches the stage. Moreover it is evident that the realization by actors is needed for the photoplay too. But we may disregard that. What we have in mind is that the work which the scenario writer creates is in itself still entirely imperfect and becomes a complete work of art only through the action of the producer. He plays a role entirely different from that of the mere stage manager in the drama. The stage manager carries out what the writer of the drama prescribes, however much his own skill and visual imagination and insight into the demands of the characters may add to the embodiment of the dramatic action. But the producer of the photoplay really must show himself a creative artist, inasmuch as he is the one who actually transforms the plays into pictures. The emphasis in the drama lies on the spoken word, to which the stage manager does not add anything. It is all contained in the lines. In the photoplay the whole emphasis lies on the picture and its composition is left entirely to the producing artist.

But the scenario writer must not only have talent for dramatic invention and construction; he must be wide awake to the uniqueness of his task, that is, he must feel at every moment that he is writing for the screen and not for the stage or for a book. And this brings us back to our central argument. He must understand that the photoplay is not a photographed drama, but that it is controlled by psychological conditions of its own. As soon as it is grasped that the film play is not simply a mechanical reproduction of another art but is an art of a special kind, it follows that talents of a special kind must be devoted to it and that n.o.body ought to feel it beneath his artistic dignity to write scenarios in the service of this new art. No doubt the moving picture performances today still stand on a low artistic level. Nine tenths of the plays are cheap melodramas or vulgar farces. The question is not how much larger a percentage of really valuable dramas can be found in our theaters. Many of their plays are just as much an appeal to the lowest instincts. But at least the theater is not forced to be satisfied with such degrading comedies and pseudotragedies. The world literature of the stage contains an abundance of works of eternal value.

It is a purely social and not an esthetic question, why the theaters around the "White Way" yield to the vulgar taste instead of using the truly beautiful drama for the raising of the public mind. The moving picture theaters face an entirely different situation. Their managers may have the best intentions to give better plays; and yet they are unable to do so because the scenario literature has so far nothing which can be compared with the master works of the drama; and nothing of this higher type can be expected or hoped for until the creation of photoplays is recognized as worthy of the highest ideal endeavor.

n.o.body denies that the photoplay shares the characteristic features of the drama. Both depend upon the conflict of interests and of acts. These conflicts, tragic or comic, demand a similar development and solution on the stage and on the screen. A mere showing of human activity without will conflict might give very pleasant moving pictures of idyllic or romantic character or perhaps of practical interest. The result would be a kind of lyric or epic poem on the screen, or a travelogue or what not, but it would never shape itself into a photoplay as long as that conflict of human interests which the drama demands was lacking. Yet, as this conflict of will is expressed in the one case by living speaking men, in the other by moving pictures, the difference in the artistic conception must surely be as great as the similarity. Hence one of the supreme demands must be for an original literature of real power and significance, in which every thought is generated by the idea of the screen. As long as the photoplays are fed by the literature of the stage, the new art can never come to its own and can never reach its real goal. It is surely no fault of Shakespeare that Hamlet and King Lear are very poor photoplays. If ever a Shakespeare arises for the screen, his work would be equally unsatisfactory if it were dragged to the stage. Peer Gynt is no longer Ibsen's if the actors are dumb.

The novel, in certain respects, fares still worse, but in other respects some degrees better. It is true that in the superficial literature written for the hour the demarcation line between dramatic and narrative works is often ignored. The best sellers of the novel counter are often warmed over into successful theater plays, and no society play with a long run on Broadway escapes its transformation into a serial novel for the newspapers. But where literature is at its height, the deep difference can be felt distinctly. The epic art, including the novel, traces the experiences and the development of a character, while the drama is dependent upon the conflict of character. Mere adventures of a personality are never sufficient for a good drama and are not less unsatisfactory for the plot of a photoplay. In the novel the opposing characters are only a part of the social background which is needed to show the life story of the hero or heroine. They have not the independent significance which is essential for the dramatic conflict.

The novel on the screen, if it is a true novel and not the novelistic rendering of what is really a dramatic plot, must be lifeless and uninspiring. But on the other hand the photoplay much more than the drama emphasizes the background of human action, and it shares this trait with the novel. Both the social and the natural backgrounds are the real setting for the development of the chief character in the story. These features can easily be transferred to the photoplay and for this reason some picturized novels have had the advantage over the photoplay cut from the drama. The only true conclusion must remain, however, that neither drama nor novel is sufficient for the film scenarios. The photopoet must turn to life itself and must remodel life in the artistic forms which are characteristic of his particular art. If he has truly grasped the fundamental meaning of the screen world, his imagination will guide him more safely than his reminiscences of dramas which he has seen on the stage and of novels which he has read.

If we turn to a few special demands which are contained in such a general postulate for a new artistic method, we naturally think at once of the role of words. The drama and novel live by words. How much of this n.o.blest vehicle of thought can the photoplay conserve in its domain? We all know what a large part of the photoplay today is told us by the medium of words and phrases. How little would we know what those people are talking about if we saw them only acting and had not beforehand the information which the "leader" supplies. The technique differs with different companies. Some experiment with projecting the spoken words into the picture itself, bringing the phrase in glaring white letters near the head of the person who is speaking, in a way similar to the methods of the newspaper cartoonists. But mostly the series of the pictures is interrupted and the decisive word taken directly from the lips of the hero, or an explanatory statement which gives meaning to the whole is thrown on the screen. Sometimes this may be a concession to the mentally less trained members of the audience, but usually these printed comments are indispensable for understanding the plot, and even the most intelligent spectator would feel helpless without these frequent guideposts. But this habit of the picture houses today is certainly not an esthetic argument. They are obliged to yield to the scheme simply because the scenario writers are still untrained and clumsy in using the technique of the new art.

Some religious painters of medieval times put in the picture itself phrases which the persons were supposed to speak, as if the words were leaving their mouths. But we could not imagine Raphael and Michelangelo making use of a method of communication which is so entirely foreign to the real spirit of painting. Every art grows slowly to the point where the artist relies on its characteristic and genuine forms of expression.

Elements which do not belong to it are at first mingled in it and must be slowly eliminated. The photoplay of the day after tomorrow will surely be freed from all elements which are not really pictures. The beginning of the photoplay as a mere imitation of the theater is nowhere so evident as in this inorganic combination with bits of dialogue or explanatory phrases. The art of words and the art of pictures are there forcibly yoked together. Whoever writes his scenarios so that the pictures cannot be understood without these linguistic crutches is an esthetic failure in the new art. The next step toward the emanc.i.p.ation of the photoplay decidedly must be the creation of plays which speak the language of pictures only.

Two apparent exceptions seem justified. It is not contrary to the internal demands of the film art if a complete scene has a t.i.tle. A leader like "The Next Morning" or "After Three Years" or "In South Africa" or "The First Step" or "The Awakening" or "Among Friends" has the same character as the t.i.tle of a painting in a picture gallery. If we read in our catalogue of paintings that a picture is called "Landscape" or "Portrait" we feel the words to be superfluous. If we read that its t.i.tle is "London Bridge in Mist" or "Portrait of the Pope"

we receive a valuable suggestion which is surely not without influence on our appreciation of the picture, and yet it is not an organic part of the painting itself. In this sense a leader as t.i.tle for a scene or still better for a whole reel may be applied without any esthetic objection. The other case which is not only possible but perfectly justified is the introduction of letters, telegrams, posters, newspaper clippings, and similar printed or written communications in a pictorial close-up the enlargement of which makes every word readable. This scheme is more and more introduced into the plays today and the movement is in a proper direction. The words of the telegram or of the signboard and even of the cutting from the newspaper are parts of the reality which the pictures are to show us and their meaning does not stand outside but within the pictorial story. The true artist will make sparing use of this method in order that the spectator may not change his att.i.tude. He must remain in an inner adjustment to pictorial forms and must not switch over into an adaptation to sentences. But if its use is not exaggerated, the method is legitimate, in striking contrast to the inartistic use of the same words as leaders between the pictures.

The condemnation of guiding words, in the interest of the purity of the picture play as such, also leads to earnest objection to phonographic accompaniments. Those who, like Edison, had a technical, scientific, and social interest but not a genuine esthetic point of view in the development of the moving pictures naturally asked themselves whether this optical imitation of the drama might not be improved by an acoustical imitation too. Then the idea would be to connect the kinematoscope with the phonograph and to synchronize them so completely that with every visible movement of the lips the audible sound of the words would leave the diaphragm of the apparatus. All who devoted themselves to this problem had considerable difficulties and when their ventures proved practical failures with the theater audiences, they were inclined to blame their inability to solve the technical problem perfectly. They were not aware that the real difficulty was an esthetic and internal one. Even if the voices were heard with ideal perfection and exactly in time with the movements on the screen, the effect on an esthetically conscientious audience would have been disappointing. A photoplay cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed.

If we see and hear at the same time, we do indeed come nearer to the real theater, but this is desirable only if it is our goal to imitate the stage. Yet if that were the goal, even the best imitation would remain far inferior to an actual theater performance. As soon as we have clearly understood that the photoplay is an art in itself, the conservation of the spoken word is as disturbing as color would be on the clothing of a marble statue.