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 coöperation 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 reënforcement 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 space 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 anticipates 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 analysis 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, space, 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 space 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 rôle 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 passions 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 substitution 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 space 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 space 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 space 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 space 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 classical 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 association 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 glass 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 space 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 space 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 snatched away his
victim.
_While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of space 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 emancipate 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 space, 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 space, 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 advertisement for the
newest fashions.
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 space, 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._