THE FUNCTION OF THE PHOTOPLAY
Enthusiasts claim that in the United States ten million people daily are
attending picture houses. Sceptics believe that "only" two or three
millions form the daily attendance. But in any case "the movies" have
become the most popular entertainment of the country, nay, of the world,
and their influence is one of the strongest social energies of our time.
Signs indicate that this popularity and this influence are increasing
from day to day. What are the causes, and what are the effects of this
movement which was undreamed of only a short time ago?
The economists are certainly right when they see the chief reason for
this crowding of picture houses in the low price of admission. For five
or ten cents long hours of thrilling entertainment in the best seats of
the house: this is the magnet which must be more powerful than any
theater or concert. Yet the rush to the moving pictures is steadily
increasing, while the prices climb up. The dime became a quarter, and in
the last two seasons ambitious plays were given before audiences who
paid the full theater rates. The character of the audiences, too,
suggests that inexpensiveness alone cannot be decisive. Six years ago a
keen sociological observer characterized the patrons of the picture
palaces as "the lower middle class and the massive public, youths and
shopgirls between adolescence and maturity, small dealers, pedlars,
laborers, charwomen, besides the small quota of children." This would be
hardly a correct description today. This "lower middle class" has long
been joined by the upper middle class. To be sure, our observer of that
long forgotten past added meekly: "Then there emerges a superior person
or two like yourself attracted by mere curiosity and kept in his seat by
interest until the very end of the performance; this type sneers aloud
to proclaim its superiority and preserve its self-respect, but it never
leaves the theater until it must." Today you and I are seen there quite
often, and we find that our friends have been there, that they have
given up the sneering pose and talk about the new photoplay as a matter
of course.
Above all, even those who are drawn by the cheapness of the performance
would hardly push their dimes under the little window so often if they
did not really enjoy the plays and were not stirred by a pleasure which
holds them for hours. After all, it must be the content of the
performances which is decisive of the incomparable triumph. We have no
right to conclude from this that only the merits and excellences are the
true causes of their success. A caustic critic would probably suggest
that just the opposite traits are responsible. He would say that the
average American is a mixture of business, ragtime, and sentimentality.
He satisfies his business instinct by getting so much for his nickel, he
enjoys his ragtime in the slapstick humor, and gratifies his
sentimentality with the preposterous melodramas which fill the program.
This is quite true, and yet it is not true at all. Success has crowned
every effort to improve the photostage; the better the plays are the
more the audience approves them. The most ambitious companies are the
most flourishing ones. There must be inner values which make the
photoplay so extremely attractive and even fascinating.
To a certain degree the mere technical cleverness of the pictures even
today holds the interest spellbound as in those early days when nothing
but this technical skill could claim the attention. We are still
startled by every original effect, even if the mere showing of movement
has today lost its impressiveness. Moreover we are captivated by the
undeniable beauty of many settings. The melodrama may be cheap; yet it
does not disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a similar tragic
vulgarity would on the real stage, because it may have the snowfields of
Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant background. An
intellectual interest, too, finds its satisfaction. We get an insight
into spheres which were strange to us. Where outlying regions of human
interest are shown on the theater stage, we must usually be satisfied
with some standardized suggestion. Here in the moving pictures the play
may really bring us to mills and factories, to farms and mines, to
courtrooms and hospitals, to castles and palaces in any land on earth.
Yet a stronger power of the photoplay probably lies in its own dramatic
qualities. The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity. As
the words are absent which, in the drama as in life, fill the gaps
between the actions, the gestures and deeds themselves can follow one
another much more quickly. Happenings which would fill an hour on the
stage can hardly fill more than twenty minutes on the screen. This
heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator. He feels as if he
were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal
energies. The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect
inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain
simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the
motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly
be transformed into photoplays. Where words are missing the characters
tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their
complexity. The plot of the photoplay is usually based on the
fundamental emotions which are common to all and which are understood
by everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and
jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions
have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios. The more
mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this
primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to
simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all
necessary. In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly
to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of life and to stir the
depths of the human mind.
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is
probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and
which we have understood from its psychological conditions. _The massive
outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and
causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own
consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll
on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no
other art can furnish us._ No wonder that temples for the new goddess
are built in every little hamlet.
The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience cannot
remain without strong social effects. It has even been reported that
sensory hallucinations and illusions have crept in; neurasthenic persons
are especially inclined to experience touch or temperature or smell or
sound impressions from what they see on the screen. The associations
become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up
to the moving pictures. The applause into which the audiences,
especially of rural communities, break out at a happy turn of the
melodramatic pictures is another symptom of the strange fascination. But
it is evident that such a penetrating influence must be fraught with
dangers. The more vividly the impressions force themselves on the mind,
the more easily must they become starting points for imitation and other
motor responses. The sight of crime and of vice may force itself on the
consciousness with disastrous results. The normal resistance breaks down
and the moral balance, which would have been kept under the habitual
stimuli of the narrow routine life, may be lost under the pressure of
the realistic suggestions. At the same time the subtle sensitiveness of
the young mind may suffer from the rude contrasts between the farces and
the passionate romances which follow with benumbing speed in the
darkened house. The possibilities of psychical infection and destruction
cannot be overlooked.
Those may have been exceptional cases only when grave crimes have been
traced directly back to the impulses from unwholesome photoplays, but no
psychologist can determine exactly how much the general spirit of
righteousness, of honesty, of sexual cleanliness and modesty, may be
weakened by the unbridled influence of plays of low moral standard. All
countries seem to have been awakened to this social danger. The time
when unsavory French comedies poisoned youth lies behind us. A strong
reaction has set in and the leading companies among the photoplay
producers fight everywhere in the first rank for suppression of the
unclean. Some companies even welcome censorship provided that it is
high-minded and liberal and does not confuse artistic freedom with moral
licentiousness. Most, to be sure, seem doubtful whether the new
movement toward Federal censorship is in harmony with American ideas on
the freedom of public expression.
But while the sources of danger cannot be overlooked, the social
reformer ought to focus his interest still more on the tremendous
influences for good which may be exerted by the moving pictures. The
fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on the
screen is established. The high degree of their suggestibility during
those hours in the dark house may be taken for granted. Hence any
wholesome influence emanating from the photoplay must have an
incomparable power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national
soul. From this point of view the boundary lines between the photoplay
and the merely instructive moving pictures with the news of the day or
the magazine articles on the screen become effaced. The intellectual,
the moral, the social, and the esthetic culture of the community may be
served by all of them. Leading educators have joined in endorsing the
foundation of a Universal Culture Lyceum. The plan is to make and
circulate moving pictures for the education of the youth of the land,
picture studies in science, history, religion, literature, geography,
biography, art, architecture, social science, economics and industry.
From this Lyceum "schools, churches and colleges will be furnished with
motion pictures giving the latest results and activities in every sphere
capable of being pictured."
But, however much may be achieved by such conscious efforts toward
education, the far larger contribution must be made by the regular
picture houses which the public seeks without being conscious of the
educational significance. The teaching of the moving pictures must not
be forced on a more or less indifferent audience, but ought to be
absorbed by those who seek entertainment and enjoyment from the films
and are ready to make their little economic sacrifice.
The purely intellectual part of this uplift is the easiest. Not only the
news pictures and the scientific demonstrations but also the photoplays
can lead young and old to ever new regions of knowledge. The curiosity
and the imagination of the spectators will follow gladly. Yet even in
the intellectual sphere the dangers must not be overlooked. They are not
positive. It is not as in the moral sphere where the healthy moral
impulse is checked by the sight of crimes which stir up antisocial
desires. The danger is not that the pictures open insight into facts
which ought not to be known. It is not the dangerous knowledge which
must be avoided, but it is the trivializing influence of a steady
contact with things which are not worth knowing. The larger part of the
film literature of today is certainly harmful in this sense. The
intellectual background of most photoplays is insipid. By telling the
plot without the subtle motivation which the spoken word of the drama
may bring, not only do the characters lose color but all the scenes and
situations are simplified to a degree which adjusts them to a
thoughtless public and soon becomes intolerable to an intellectually
trained spectator.
They force on the cultivated mind that feeling which musical persons
experience in the musical comedies of the day. We hear the melodies
constantly with the feeling of having heard them ever so often before.
This lack of originality and inspiration is not necessary; it does not
lie in the art form. Offenbach and Strauss and others have written
musical comedies which are classical. Neither does it lie in the form
of the photoplay that the story must be told in that insipid, flat,
uninspired fashion. Nor is it necessary in order to reach the millions.
To appeal to the intelligence does not mean to presuppose college
education. Moreover the differentiation has already begun. Just as the
plays of Shaw or Ibsen address a different audience from that reached by
the "Old Homestead" or "Ben Hur," we have already photoplays adapted to
different types, and there is not the slightest reason to connect with
the art of the screen an intellectual flabbiness. It would be no gain
for intellectual culture if all the reasoning were confined to the
so-called instructive pictures and the photoplays were served without
any intellectual salt. On the contrary, the appeal of those strictly
educational lessons may be less deep than the producers hope, because
the untrained minds, especially of youth and of the uneducated
audiences, have considerable difficulty in following the rapid flight of
events when they occur in unfamiliar surroundings. The child grasps very
little in seeing the happenings in a factory. The psychological and
economic lesson may be rather wasted because the power of observation
is not sufficiently developed and the assimilation proceeds too slowly.
But it is quite different when a human interest stands behind it and
connects the events in the photoplay.
The difficulties in the way of the right moral influence are still
greater than in the intellectual field. Certainly it is not enough to
have the villain punished in the last few pictures of the reel. If
scenes of vice or crime are shown with all their lure and glamour the
moral devastation of such a suggestive show is not undone by the
appended social reaction. The misguided boys or girls feel sure that
they would be successful enough not to be trapped. The mind through a
mechanism which has been understood better and better by the
psychologists in recent years suppresses the ideas which are contrary to
the secret wishes and makes those ideas flourish by which those
"subconscious" impulses are fulfilled. It is probably a strong
exaggeration when a prominent criminologist recently claimed that
"eighty-five per cent. of the juvenile crime which has been investigated
has been found traceable either directly or indirectly to motion
pictures which have shown on the screen how crimes could be committed."
But certainly, as far as these demonstrations have worked havoc, their
influence would not have been annihilated by a picturesque court scene
in which the burglar is unsuccessful in misleading the jury. The true
moral influence must come from the positive spirit of the play itself.
Even the photodramatic lessons in temperance and piety will not rebuild
a frivolous or corrupt or perverse community. The truly upbuilding play
is not a dramatized sermon on morality and religion. There must be a
moral wholesomeness in the whole setting, a moral atmosphere which is
taken as a matter of course like fresh air and sunlight. An enthusiasm
for the noble and uplifting, a belief in duty and discipline of the
mind, a faith in ideals and eternal values must permeate the world of
the screen. If it does, there is no crime and no heinous deed which the
photoplay may not tell with frankness and sincerity. It is not necessary
to deny evil and sin in order to strengthen the consciousness of eternal
justice.
But the greatest mission which the photoplay may have in our community
is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience
daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame
of mind. On the other hand no training demands a more persistent and
planful arousing of the mind than the esthetic training, and never is
progress more difficult than when the teacher adjusts himself to the
mere liking of the pupils. The country today would still be without any
symphony concerts and operas if it had only received what the audiences
believed at the moment that they liked best. The esthetically
commonplace will always triumph over the significant unless systematic
efforts are made to reënforce the work of true beauty. Communities at
first always prefer Sousa to Beethoven. The moving picture audience
could only by slow steps be brought from the tasteless and vulgar
eccentricities of the first period to the best plays of today, and the
best plays of today can be nothing but the beginning of the great upward
movement which we hope for in the photoplay. Hardly any teaching can
mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches
the masses. The moral impulse and the desire for knowledge are, after
all, deeply implanted in the American crowd, but the longing for beauty
is rudimentary; and yet it means harmony, unity, true satisfaction, and
happiness in life. The people still has to learn the great difference
between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and
the mere tickling of the senses.
Of course, there are those, and they may be legion today, who would
deride every plan to make the moving pictures the vehicle of esthetic
education. How can we teach the spirit of true art by a medium which is
in itself the opposite of art? How can we implant the idea of harmony by
that which is in itself a parody on art? We hear the contempt for
"canned drama" and the machine-made theater. Nobody stops to think
whether other arts despise the help of technique. The printed book of
lyric poems is also machine-made; the marble bust has also "preserved"
for two thousand years the beauty of the living woman who was the model
for the Greek sculptor. They tell us that the actor on the stage gives
the human beings as they are in reality, but the moving pictures are
unreal and therefore of incomparably inferior value. They do not
consider that the roses of the summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of
the poet do not exist in reality in the forms of iambic verse and of
rhymes; they live in color and odor, but their color and odor fade away,
while the roses in the stanzas live on forever. They fancy that the
value of an art depends upon its nearness to the reality of physical
nature.
It has been the chief task of our whole discussion to prove the
shallowness of such arguments and objections. We recognized that art is
a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of
the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies
perfect unity and harmony. The different arts are different ways of
abstracting from reality; and when we began to analyze the psychology of
the moving pictures we soon became aware that the photoplay has a way to
perform this task of art with entire originality, independent of the art
of the theater, as much as poetry is independent of music or sculpture
of painting. It is an art in itself. Only the future can teach us
whether it will become a great art, whether a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a
Mozart, will ever be born for it. Nobody can foresee the directions
which the new art may take. Mere esthetic insight into the principles
can never foreshadow the development in the unfolding of civilization.
Who would have been bold enough four centuries ago to foresee the
musical means and effects of the modern orchestra? Just the history of
music shows how the inventive genius has always had to blaze the path in
which the routine work of the art followed. Tone combinations which
appeared intolerable dissonances to one generation were again and again
assimilated and welcomed and finally accepted as a matter of course by
later times. Nobody can foresee the ways which the new art of the
photoplay will open, but everybody ought to recognize even today that it
is worth while to help this advance and to make the art of the film a
medium for an original creative expression of our time and to mold by it
the esthetic instincts of the millions. Yes, it is a new art--and this
is why it has such fascination for the psychologist who in a world of
ready-made arts, each with a history of many centuries, suddenly finds a
new form still undeveloped and hardly understood. For the first time the
psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic
development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical
age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art
destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the
mind.
* * * * *
BOOKS BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
Psychology and Life
pp. 286, Boston, 1899
Grundzüge der Psychologie
pp. 565, Leipzig, 1900
American Traits
pp. 235, Boston, 1902
Die Amerikaner
pp. 502 and 349, Berlin, 1904 (Rev, 1912)
Principles of Art Education
pp. 118, New York, 1905
The Eternal Life
pp. 72, Boston, 1905
Science and Idealism
pp. 71, Boston, 1906
Philosophie der Werte
pp. 486, Leipzig, 1907
On the Witness Stand
pp. 269, New York, 1908
Aus Deutsch-Amerika
pp. 245, Berlin, 1909
The Eternal Values
pp. 436, Boston, 1909
Psychotherapy
pp. 401, New York, 1909
Psychology and the Teacher
pp. 330, New York, 1910
American Problems
pp. 222, New York, 1910
Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben
pp. 192, Leipzig, 1912
Vocation and Learning
pp. 289, St. Louis, 1912
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
pp. 321, Boston, 1913
American Patriotism
pp. 262, New York, 1913
Grundzüge der Psychotechnik
pp. 767, Leipzig, 1914
Psychology and Social Sanity
pp. 320, New York, 1914
Psychology, General and Applied
pp. 488, New York, 1914
The War and America
pp. 210, New York, 1914
The Peace and America
pp. 276, New York, 1915
The Photoplay
New York, 1916