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 coöperation 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 rôle 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 nobody 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.
Nobody 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 rôle of words. The drama and novel live by words. How much of
this noblest 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 emancipation
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 title. 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 title 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 title 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 title 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 attitude. 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.
It is quite different with accompanying music. Even if the music in the
overwhelming majority of cases were not so pitifully bad as it is in
most of the picture theaters of today, no one would consider it an
organic part of the photoplay itself, like the singing in the opera. Yet
the need of such a more or less melodious and even more or less
harmonious accompaniment has always been felt, and even the poorest
substitute for decent music has been tolerated, as seeing long reels in
a darkened house without any tonal accompaniment fatigues and ultimately
irritates an average audience. The music relieves the tension and keeps
the attention awake. It must be entirely subordinated and it is a fact
that most people are hardly aware of the special pieces which are
played, while they would feel uncomfortable without them. But it is not
at all necessary for the music to be limited to such harmonious
smoothing of the mind by rhythmical tones. The music can and ought to be
adjusted to the play on the screen. The more ambitious picture
corporations have clearly recognized this demand and show their new
plays with exact suggestions for the choice of musical pieces to be
played as accompaniment. The music does not tell a part of the plot and
does not replace the picture as words would do, but simply reënforces
the emotional setting. It is quite probable, when the photoplay art has
found its esthetic recognition, that composers will begin to write the
musical score for a beautiful photoplay with the same enthusiasm with
which they write in other musical forms.
Just between the intolerable accompaniment by printed or spoken words on
the one side and the perfectly welcome rendering of emotionally fitting
music on the other, we find the noises with which the photoplay managers
like to accompany their performances. When the horses gallop, we must
hear the hoofbeats, if rain or hail is falling, if the lightning
flashes, we hear the splashing or the thunderstorm. We hear the firing
of a gun, the whistling of a locomotive, ships' bells, or the ambulance
gong, or the barking dog, or the noise when Charlie Chaplin falls
downstairs. They even have a complicated machine, the "allefex," which
can produce over fifty distinctive noises, fit for any photoplay
emergency. It will probably take longer to rid the photoplay of these
appeals to the imagination than the explanations of the leaders, but
ultimately they will have to disappear too. They have no right to
existence in a work of art which is composed of pictures. In so far as
they are simply heightening the emotional tension, they may enter into
the music itself, but in so far as they tell a part of the story, they
ought to be ruled out as intrusions from another sphere. We might just
as well improve the painting of a rose garden by bathing it in rose
perfume in order that the spectators might get the odor of the roses
together with the sight of them. The limitations of an art are in
reality its strength and to overstep its boundaries means to weaken it.
It may be more open to discussion whether this same negative attitude
ought to be taken toward color in the photoplay. It is well-known what
wonderful technical progress has been secured by those who wanted to
catch the color hues and tints of nature in their moving pictures. To be
sure, many of the prettiest effects in color are even today produced by
artificial stencil methods. Photographs are simply printed in three
colors like any ordinary color print. The task of cutting those many
stencils for the thousands of pictures on a reel is tremendous, and yet
these difficulties have been overcome. Any desired color effect can be
obtained by this method and the beauty of the best specimens is
unsurpassed. But the difficulty is so great that it can hardly become a
popular method. The direct photographing of the colors themselves will
be much simpler as soon as the method is completely perfected. It can
hardly be said that this ideal has been reached today. The successive
photographing through three red, green, and violet screens and the later
projection of the pictures through screens of these colors seemed
scientifically the best approach. Yet it needed a multiplication of
pictures per second which offered extreme difficulty, besides an
extraordinary increase of expense. The practical advance seems more
secure along the line of the so-called "kinemacolor." Its effects are
secured by the use of two screens only, not quite satisfactory, as true
blue impressions have to suffer and the reddish and greenish ones are
emphasized. Moreover the eye is sometimes disturbed by big flashes of
red or green light. Yet the beginnings are so excellent that the perfect
solution of the technical problem may be expected in the near future.
Would it be at the same time a solution of the esthetic problem?
It has been claimed by friends of color photography that at the present
stage of development natural color photography is unsatisfactory for a
rendering of outer events because any scientific or historical happening
which is reproduced demands exactly the same colors which reality shows.
But on the other hand the process seems perfectly sufficient for the
photoplay because there no objective colors are expected and it makes no
difference whether the gowns of the women or the rugs on the floor show
the red and green too vividly and the blue too faintly. From an esthetic
point of view we ought to come to exactly the opposite verdict. For the
historical events even the present technical methods are on the whole
satisfactory. The famous British coronation pictures were superb and
they gained immensely by the rich color effects. They gave much more
than a mere photograph in black and white, and the splendor and glory of
those radiant colors suffered little from the suppression of the bluish
tones. They were not shown in order to match the colors in a ribbon
store. For the news pictures of the day the "kinemacolor" and similar
schemes are excellent. But when we come to photoplays the question is no
longer one of technique; first of all we stand before the problem: how
far does the coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the photoplay? No
doubt the effect of the individual picture would be heightened by the
beauty of the colors. But would it heighten the beauty of the photoplay?
Would not this color be again an addition which oversteps the essential
limits of this particular art? We do not want to paint the cheeks of the
Venus of Milo: neither do we want to see the coloring of Mary Pickford
or Anita Stewart. We became aware that the unique task of the photoplay
art can be fulfilled only by a far-reaching disregard of reality. The
real human persons and the real landscapes must be left behind and, as
we saw, must be transformed into pictorial suggestions only. We must be
strongly conscious of their pictorial unreality in order that that
wonderful play of our inner experiences may be realized on the screen.
This consciousness of unreality must seriously suffer from the addition
of color. We are once more brought too near to the world which really
surrounds us with the richness of its colors, and the more we approach
it the less we gain that inner freedom, that victory of the mind over
nature, which remains the ideal of the photoplay. The colors are almost
as detrimental as the voices.
On the other hand the producer must be careful to keep sufficiently in
contact with reality, as otherwise the emotional interests upon which
the whole play depends would be destroyed. We must not take the people
to be real, but we must link with them all the feelings and associations
which we would connect with real men. This is possible only if in their
flat, colorless, pictorial setting they share the real features of men.
For this reason it is important to suggest to the spectator the
impression of natural size. The demand of the imagination for the normal
size of the persons and things in the picture is so strong that it
easily and constantly overcomes great enlargements or reductions. We see
at first a man in his normal size and then by a close-up an excessive
enlargement of his head. Yet we do not feel it as if the person himself
were enlarged. By a characteristic psychical substitution we feel rather
that we have come nearer to him and that the size of the visual image
was increased by the decreasing of the distance. If the whole picture is
so much enlarged that the persons are continually given much above
normal size, by a psychical inhibition we deceive ourselves about the
distance and believe that we are much nearer to the screen than we
actually are. Thus we instinctively remain under the impression of
normal appearances. But this spell can easily be broken and the esthetic
effect is then greatly diminished. In the large picture houses in which
the projecting camera is often very far from the screen, the dimensions
of the persons in the pictures may be three or four times larger than
human beings. The illusion is nevertheless perfect, because the
spectator misjudges the distances as long as he does not see anything in
the neighborhood of the screen. But if the eye falls upon a woman
playing the piano directly below the picture, the illusion is destroyed.
He sees on the screen enormous giants whose hands are as large as half
the piano player, and the normal reactions which are the spring for the
enjoyment of the play are suppressed.
The further we go into details, the more we might add such special
psychological demands which result from the fundamental principles of
the new art. But it would be misleading if we were also to raise demands
concerning a point which has often played the chief rôle in the
discussion, namely, the selection of suitable topics. Writers who have
the unlimited possibilities of trick pictures and film illusions in mind
have proclaimed that the fairy tale with its magic wonders ought to be
its chief domain, as no theater stage could enter into rivalry. How many
have enjoyed "Neptune's Daughter"--the mermaids in the surf and the
sudden change of the witch into the octopus on the shore and the joyful
play of the watersprites! How many have been bewitched by Princess
Nicotina when she trips from the little cigar box along the table! No
theater could dare to imitate such raptures of imagination. Other
writers have insisted on the superb chances for gorgeous processions and
the surging splendor of multitudes. We see thousands in Sherman's march
to the sea. How hopeless would be any attempt to imitate it on the
stage! When the toreador fights the bull and the crowds in the Spanish
arena enter into enthusiastic frenzy, who would compare it with those
painted people in the arena when the opera "Carmen" is sung. Again
others emphasize the opportunity for historical plays or especially for
plays with unusual scenic setting where the beauties of the tropics or
of the mountains, of the ocean or of the jungle, are brought into living
contact with the spectator. Biblical dramas with pictures of real
Palestine, classical plots with real Greece or Rome as a background,
have stirred millions all over the globe. Yet the majority of authors
claim that the true field for the photoplay is the practical life which
surrounds us, as no artistic means of literature or drama can render the
details of life with such convincing sincerity and with such realistic
power. These are the slums, not seen through the spectacles of a
littérateur or the fancy of an outsider but in their whole abhorrent
nakedness. These are the dark corners of the metropolis where crime is
hidden and where vice is growing rankly.
They all are right; and at the same time they all are wrong when they
praise one at the expense of another. Realistic and idealistic,
practical and romantic, historical and modern topics are fit material
for the art of the photoplay. Its world is as unlimited as that of
literature, and the same is true of the style of treatment. The
humorous, if it is true humor, the tragic, if it is true tragedy, the
gay and the solemn, the merry and the pathetic, the half-reel and the
five-reel play, all can fulfill the demands of the new art.