Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is indicated by _underscores_;
boldface text is indicated by =equals signs=.
[Illustration:
The 7 Lively
Arts
_by_
Gilbert Seldes
]
[Illustration: THE CUSTODIANS OF THE KEYSTONE. By Ralph Barton]
THE SEVEN
LIVELY ARTS
By
_Gilbert Seldes_
“... _But, beside those great men, there is a certain number
of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we
cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in
general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who
have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just
because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority._”
--WALTER PATER
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXIV
THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS
Copyright, 1924
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
_First Edition_
B-Y
TO MY FATHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
_The Keystone the Builders Rejected_ 3
_An Imaginary Conversation_ 27
_“I Am Here To-Day”: Charlie Chaplin_ 41
_Say It with Music_ 57
_Tearing a Passion to Ragtime_ 69
_Toujours Jazz_ 83
_Mr Dooley, Meet Mr Lardner_ 111
_A Tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld_ 129
_The Darktown Strutters on Broadway_ 149
_Plan for a Lyric Theatre in America_ 161
_The One-Man Show_ 177
_The Dæmonic in the American Theatre_ 191
_These, Too_ 203
_The “Vulgar” Comic Strip_ 213
_The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself_ 231
_The Damned Effrontery of the Two-a-Day_ 249
_They Call It Dancing_ 267
_St Simeon Stylites_ 277
_Burlesque, Circus, Clowns, and Acrobats_ 291
_The True and Inimitable Kings of Laughter_ 297
_The Great God Bogus_ 309
_An Open Letter to the Movie Magnates_ 323
_Before a Picture by Picasso_ 345
APPENDICES
_Appendix to “I Am Here To-Day”_ 361
_“Bananas” and Other Songs_ 367
_Appendix to “These, Too_...” 374
_The Krazy Kat Ballet_ 377
_Further Note on the Fratellini_ 380
_The Cinema Novel_ 383
_Acknowledgments_ 391
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Custodians of the Keystone. _By Ralph Barton_ _Frontispiece_
_Page_
Charlie Chaplin. _By E. E. Cummings_ 42
Irving Berlin (_Photo. Maurice Goldberg_) 74
George Gershwin (_Photo. Carl Klein_) 92
The Sun’s Dwelling. _By Joseph Urban_ 132
(_From the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915. Photo. M. N. Lawrence_)
George M. Cohan. _By Alfred Frueh_ 138
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Willie Collier. By Alfred Frueh 142
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Eddie Cantor. _By Roland Young_ 179
Frank Tinney. _By Roland Young_ 181
Ed Wynn. _By Roland Young_ 183
Fanny Brice (_Photo. Steichen_) 192
Al Jolson (_Photo. Muray_) 198
Leon Errol. _By Alfred Frueh_ 204
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Bert Savoy (_Photo. Abbe_) 208
Mike and Mike. _By T. E. Powers_ 218
(_Copyright by the Star Company. By permission of the
publishers of the_ New York Journal)
A Cartoon. _By R. L. Goldberg_ 228
(_Courtesy of_ Life--_from the Burlesque Sunday Supplement
Number_)
Fragment from the Krazy Kat of the Door. _By George Herriman_ 240
(_Copyright by the Star Company_)
Krazy Kat. _By George Herriman_ 244
(_Courtesy of the artist and the_ New York American)
Vaudeville. _By Charles Demuth_ 254
Joe Cook (_Photo. Morton Harvey_) 260
Irene Castle (_Photo. Muray_) 268
Cirque Medrano. _By Henri Toulouse-Lautrec_ 292
(_By permission of Paul Rosenberg & Co., Inc._)
National Winter Garden Burlesque. _By E. E. Cummings_
(_Courtesy of_ The Dial) 294
Paolo 298
Francesco 298
Alberto 299
The Fratellini. _By Fernand Leger_ 300
A Painting. _By Pablo Picasso_ 346
(_By permission of Paul Rosenberg & Co., Inc._)
NOTE
This book was written while on holiday some three thousand miles away
from data, documents, and means of verification. It is written from
memory and, although I have had time and have tried to check up, I feel
sure that the safest thing is to let it go as cautious merchants do
when they send out statements--with the _caveat_: E. and O. E.--errors
and omissions excepted. I haven’t tried to write a history of any of
the lively arts, nor intended to mention all of those who practice
them. I should, however, feel sorry if I have omitted anyone who has
given me intense pleasure, even though the omission has not, in any
way, the countenance of a slur.
Everything else that properly belongs in a preface has found its way
into the two chapters: _The Great God Bogus_ and _Before a Picture by
Picasso_--and the acknowledgments are numerous and serious enough to
need a place for themselves in the appendix.
G. S.
_Ile St Louis--New York City
March 1923--February 1924_
_The Keystone
the Builders Rejected_
THE KEYSTONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED
_For fifteen years there has existed in the United States, and
in the United States alone, a form of entertainment which,
seemingly without sources in the past, restored to us a kind
of laughter almost unheard in modern times. It came into being
by accident; it had no pretensions to art. For ten years or
more it added an element of cheerful madness to the lives of
millions and was despised and rejected by people of culture
and intelligence. Suddenly--suddenly as it appeared to them--a
great genius arose and the people of culture conceded that in
his case, but in his case alone, art existed in slap-stick
comedy; they did not remove their non expedit from the form
itself._
_Perhaps only those of us who care for the rest know how
good Charlie is. Perhaps only the inexpressive multitudes
who have laughed and not wondered why they laughed can know
how fine slap-stick is. For myself, I have had no greater
entertainment than these dear and preposterous comedies, and
all I can do is remember. The long, dark, narrow passage set
out with uncomfortable chairs; the sharp almond odours, the
sense of uncertainty, and the questionable piano; and then upon
the screen, in a drab grey and white, jiggling insecurely,
something strange and wonderful occurred. It was mingled with
dull and stupid things; but it had a fire, a driving energy
of its own--and it was funny! Against all our inhibitions
and habits it played games with men and women; it made them
ridiculous and mad; it seemed to have no connexion with the
logic of human events, trusting to an undecipherable logic of
its own. A few scholars found the commedia dell’arte living
again; a few artists saw that the galvanic gestures and
movements were creating fresh lines and interesting angles.
And a nation cared for them intensely until the remorseless
hostility of the genteel began to corrupt the purity of
slap-stick. That is where we are now: too early to write an
epitaph--late enough to pay a tribute._
Lest the year 1914 should be not otherwise distinguished in history,
it may be recorded that it was then, or a year earlier, or possibly a
year later, that the turning point came in the history of the American
moving picture. The first of the great mergers arrived--an event not
unforeseen in itself, a “logical development” the press agents called
it--seeming to establish the picture as a definitely accepted form of
entertainment. It was a moment when a good critic might have foretold
the course of the moving picture during the next decade, for at that
time the Triangle of Fine Arts (D. W. Griffith), Kay-Bee (Thomas H.
Ince), and Keystone (Mack Sennett) was formed. Two of these names were
already known, and of the two one was to become, for a time, the
most notable name in the profession; the third was hidden behind the
obscure symbol of the Keystone; it represented one who had acted in,
and was now directing, the most despised, and by all odds the most
interesting, films produced in America. Mr Griffith was already entered
on that road which has since ruined him as a director; he was producing
_Intolerance_, and, if I may borrow a phrase from the Shuberts, his
personal supervision was not always given to the Triangle-Fine Arts
releases; Mr Ince was presently to meditate upon the possibility of
joining the word “super” to the word “spectacle,” thus creating the
word “superspectacle”; and Mr Sennett--by a process of exclusion one
always arrives at Mr Sennett. He is the Keystone the builders rejected.
I know nothing more doleful as a subject of conversation than the
social-economics of the moving picture; what was remarkable about the
Triangle was not its new method of distribution, its new hold on the
timid exhibitor, or its capacity for making or losing fortunes. The
thing to note is that the two “serious” producers, and the hard-headed
business men who invested money in their efforts, thought it well
to associate with themselves the best producer of vulgar slap-stick
comedy. More than that, they combined in a peculiar ratio for the
scheme provided that there was to be released each week either a Fine
Arts or an Ince picture; and that with each of these was to be shown
a Keystone comedy. So that those who were perpetually being caught in
the rain, or missing the eleven-o’clock from Philadelphia to New York,
saw twice as many Keystone comedies as (a) Fine Arts or (b) Kay-Bee
releases. The recent all-hailing of Mr Chaplin as an artist because of
his work in _The Kid_, the bright young reputations of Harold Lloyd
and Buster Keaton, indicate that most critics of the moving picture
caught the train and missed the shower. They certainly missed the
comedies; for the Fine Arts and Ince pictures were in their time the
best pictures produced; and the Keystone comedies were consistently and
almost without exception better.
This is not the place to discuss the shortcomings of the feature film;
for the moment, let the dreadful opulent gentility of a Cecil De Mille
production serve only to sharpen the saucy gaiety of the comic, the
dulness of a Universal set off the revelry of slap-stick. There is one
serious point which a good critic (Aristotle, for example) would have
discovered when he regarded the screen as long ago as 1914 and became
aware of the superiority of the comic films. He would have seen at once
that while Mr Griffith and Mr Ince were both developing the technique
of the moving picture, they were exploiting their discoveries with
materials equally or better suited to another medium: the stage or the
dime novel or whatever. Whereas Mr Sennett was already so enamoured of
his craft that he was doing with the instruments of the moving picture
precisely those things which were best suited to it--those things which
could not be done with any instrument but the camera, and could appear
nowhere if not on the screen.
This does not mean that nothing but slap-stick comedy is proper
to the cinema; it means only that everything in slap-stick _is_
cinematographic; and since perceiving a delicate adjustment of means
to end, or a proper relation between method and material, is a source
of pleasure, Mr Sennett’s developments were more capable of pleasing
the judicious than those of either of his two fellow-workers. The
highly logical humanist critic of the films could have foreseen in
1914--without the decade of trial and error which has intervened--what
we see now: that the one field in which the picture would most notably
declare itself a failure would be that of the drama (Elinor Glyn-Cecil
De Mille-Gilbert Parker, in short). Without a moment’s hesitation he
would have put his finger on those two elements in the cinema which,
being theoretically sound, had a chance of practical success: the
spectacle (including the spectacular melodrama) and the grotesque
comedy. Several years later he would have added one word more, that
grotesque tragedy might conceivably succeed. For it is not only the
fun in the Keystones which makes them successful: it is the method of
presentation.
The rightness of the spectacle film is implicit in its name: the
screen is a place on which things can be _seen_, and so long as a film
depends upon the eye it is right for the screen--and whether it is
right in any other regard depends upon taste and judgment and skill.
Omit as irrelevant the news reels, animated cartoons, educational and
travel films--all of them good; omit equally those printed jokes and
clippings from the _Literary Digest_ which are at once the greatest
trial _and_ error of the screen. What remains? The feature film and
_The Cabinet of Dr Caligari_. This--the only film of high fantasy I
have ever seen--is the seeming exception which proves the rule, since
it owes its success to the skilfully concealed exploitation of the
materials and technique of the spectacle and of the comic film, and not
to the dramatic quality of its story. The studio settings in distortion
represent the spectacle; they are variations of scenery or “location”;
the chase over the roofs is a psychological parallel to the Keystone
cops; and the weak moment of this superb picture is that in which the
moving picture always fails, in the double revelation at the end, like
that of _Seven Keys to Baldpate_, representing “drama.”
No. The drama film is almost always wrong, the slap-stick almost
always right; and it is divinely just that the one great figure of
the screen should have risen out of the Keystone studios. He came
too early; Chaplin spoiled nearly everything else for us, and he is
always used by those who dislike slap-stick to prove their case.
Their case, regrettably, is in a fair way to be proved, for slap-stick
is in danger. The hypothetical critic mentioned above has not yet
occurred; Mr Bushnell Dimond, the best actual critic of the movies,
is without sympathy for Mack Sennett and calls him a Bourbon, in the
sense of one who forgets nothing and learns less. What Mr Sennett has
needed long since is encouragement and criticism; and stupid newspaper
critics (who write half-columns about a new Gloria Swanson picture
and add “the comedy which ends the bill is _Down in the Sewer_”) have
left slap-stick wholly without direction.[1] At the same time the
tradition of gentility, the hope of being “refined,” has touched the
grotesque comedy; its directors have heard abuse and sly remarks about
custard pies so long that they have begun to believe in them, and the
madness which is a monstrous sanity in the movie comedy is likely to
die out. The moving picture is being prettified; the manufacturers
and exhibitors are growing more and more pretentious, and the riot
of slap-stick seems out of place in a “presentation” which begins
with the overture to _Tannhäuser_, and includes a baritone from the
imperial opera house in Warsaw singing _Indian Love Lyrics_ in front
of an art curtain. In Paris there are one or two Chaplin films visible
nearly every day; in New York the Rialto Theatre alone seems to make
a habit of Chaplin revivals and of putting its comic feature in the
electric sign. The Capitol, the largest, and rapidly becoming the most
genteel, of moving picture palaces (but who ever heard of an opera
palace?) frequently announces a programme of seven or eight items
without a comedy among them; and you have to go to squalid streets and
disreputable neighborhoods if you want to see Chaplin regularly. He
could ask for no finer tribute, to be sure; but it is not much to our
credit that the greatest mimic of our time has no theatre named after
him, that it was in Berlin, not in Chicago or New York, that the first
Chaplin festival took place, and that _Tillie’s Punctured Romance_,
a film intensely important in his development, was last billed in
a converted auction room on the lower East Side of New York, where
Broadway would find it vulgar.
There were always elements in the Keystone which jeopardized its
future--it lacked variety, it was often dull, its lapses of taste were
serious. (I transfer the name of Keystone to the _genre_ of which
it was the most notable example; it was for long, and may still be,
superior to most of the others.) But, while there is still time, its
miraculously good qualities can be caught and possibly preserved. The
ideal comedy of Mack Sennett is a fairly standardized article; too
much so, perhaps, but the elements are sound. They include a simple,
usually preposterous plot, frequently a burlesque of a serious play;
more important are the characters, grotesque in bulk, form, or make-up;
and, finally, the events which have as little connexion with the plot
as, say, a clog dance in a musical comedy. In the early days of the
Keystone, it is said, the plot was almost nonexistent in advance, and
developed out of the set and the props. The one which was called, in
revival, _The Pile Driver_, must have been such a film, for its plot
is that two men meet a pretty girl near a river and they find a huge
mallet. It is a film full of impromptus--not very brilliant ones,
as a matter of fact--in which Sennett and Chaplin and Mabel Normand
each occasionally give flashes of their qualities. A few years later
you see the same thing when the trick of working up a film from the
material in hand has become second nature. _His Night Out_ presents Ben
Turpin and Charlie Chaplin as equal comedians: two men on a drinking
party, stumbling into a luxurious hotel, reverting automatically to
the saloon from which they have been thrown, mutually assisting and
hindering each other in a serious effort to do something they cannot
define, but which they feel to be of cosmic importance. Later, one
finds a more sophisticated kind of comic. _Bright Eyes_ has to do
with a gawky young man, reputed rich, received into a wealthy family,
engaged to the daughter, denounced as an impostor, reduced to the
kitchen, flirting there with the maid, restored to favour, and, nobly
refusing the daughter’s hand, marrying the maid. Here Ben Turpin had
good moments, but much of the gaiety of the film depended upon Chester
Conklin (or one who much resembles him) as another servant in the
house, bundling himself up in furs like Peary in the Arctic, bidding
farewell at an imaginary outpost of civilization, and striding into--a
huge refrigerator, to bring back a ham before the adoring eyes of the
cook.
The comic film is by nature adventurous and romantic, and I think
what endears it to us is that the adventure is picaresque and the
romance wholly unsentimental--that is, both are pushed to the edge of
burlesque. For the romance you have a love affair, frequently running
parallel to a parody of itself. The hero is marked by peculiarities
of his own: the Chaplin feet, the Hank Mann bang and sombre eyes,
the Turpin squint, the Arbuckle bulk; against these oddities and
absurdities plays the serene, idle beauty of a simple girl (Edna
Purviance or Mabel Normand in her lovely early days), and only on
occasions a comic in her own right like Louise Fazenda or Polly Moran.
In some five hundred slap-stick comedies I do not remember one single
moment of sentimentality; and it seems to me that every look and
gesture of false chivalry and exaggerated devotion has been parodied
there. The characteristic moment, after all, is when the comedy is
ended, and just as the hero is about to kiss the heroine he winks
broadly and ironically at the spectators. Our whole tradition of love
is destroyed and outraged in these careless comedies; so also our
tradition of heroism. And since the moving picture, quite naturally,
began by importing the whole baggage of the romantic and sentimental
novel and theatre, the moving-picture comedy has at last arrived at
burlesquing its silly-serious half-sister. Two years before _Merton
of the Movies_ appeared, Mack Sennett, with the help of Ben Turpin’s
divinely crossed eyes, had consummated a burlesque of Messrs Griffith,
Ince, and Lubitsch, in _A Small Town Idol_, far more destructively,
be it said, than Chaplin in his _Carmen_, and with a vaster fun than
_Merton_.
Everything incongruous and inconsequent has its place in the unrolling
of the comic film: love and masquerade and treachery; coincidence and
disguise; heroism and knavishness; all are distorted, burlesqued,
exaggerated. And--here the camera enters--all are presented at an
impossible rate; the culmination is in the inevitable struggle and
the conventional pursuit, where trick photography enters and you see
the immortal Keystone cops in their flivver, mowing down hundreds of
telegraph poles without abating their speed, dashing through houses or
losing their wheels and continuing, blown to bits and reassembled in
midair; locomotives running wild, yet never destroying the cars they so
miraculously send spinning before them; airplanes and submarines in and
out of their elements--everything capable of motion set into motion;
and at the height of the revel, the true catastrophe, the solution of
the preposterous and forgotten drama, with the lovers united under the
canopy of smashed motor cars, or the gay feet of Mr Chaplin gently
twinkling down the irised street.
And all of this is done _with the camera, through action_ presented to
the eye. The secret of distortion is in the camera, and the secret of
pace in the projector. Regard them for a moment, regard the slap-stick
as every moment explains itself, and then go to the picture palace and
spend one-third of your time reading the flamboyancies of C. Gardner
Sullivan and another third watching the contortions of a famous actress
as she “registers” an emotion which action and photography should
present directly, and you will see why the comic film is superior.
There is virtually no registering in the comedy, there is no senseless
pantomime, and the titles are succinct and few. In _Bright Eyes_, as
the marriage of convenience is about to take place, the mother sweeps
in with these words, “Faint quick--he’s dead broke.” An absurd letter
or telegram is introduced to set the play going; the rest is literally
silence.
What I have said about Chaplin regards him as a typical slap-stick
comedian.[2] The form would have succeeded without him and he has
passed beyond the form entirely. The other practitioners of the art
come out of his shadow, and some of them are excellent. What makes
Chaplin great is that he has irony and pity, he knows that you must
not have the one without the other; he has both piety and wit. Next
to him, for his work in _His Bread and Butter_ and a few other films,
stands Hank Mann, who translates the childlike gravity of Chaplin into
a frightened innocence, a serious endeavour to understand the world
which seems always hostile to him. He was trained, I have been told,
as a tragic actor on the East Side of New York, and he seems always
stricken with the cruelty and madness of an existence in which he alone
is logical and sane. If he, walking backward to get a last glimpse of
his beloved (after “A Waiter’s Farewell,” as the caption has it), steps
on the running board of a motor instead of a street car, he is willing
to pay the usual fare and let bygones be bygones. His black bang almost
meets his eyes, and his eyes are mournful and piteous; his gesture
is slow and rounded; a few of the ends of the world have come upon
his head and the eyelids are a little weary. He is the Wandering Jew
misdirected into comic life by an unscrupulous fate.
His most notable opposite is Harold Lloyd, a man of no tenderness,
of no philosophy, the embodiment of American cheek and indefatigable
energy. His movements are all direct, straight; the shortest distance
between two points he will traverse impudently and persistently, even
if he is knocked down at the end of each trip; there is no poetry in
him, his whole utterance being epigrammatic, without overtone or image.
Yet once, at least, he too stepped into that lunatic Arcadia to which
his spirit is alien; not in _Grandma’s Boy_, which might just as well
have been done by Charles Ray, but in _A Sailor-made Man_. Here the
old frenzy fell upon him, the weakling won by guile, and instead of
fighting one man he laid out a mob from behind; something excessive,
topsy-turvy, riotous at last occurred in his ordered existence. He
is funny; but he has no vulgarity; he is smart. He amuses me without
making me laugh, and I figure him as a step toward gentility.
Ben Turpin has progressed, fortunately without taking that step. In
_Bright Eyes_ he was mildly absurd; in _His Night Out_, with Chaplin,
he was tremendously funny; and what he learned there of the lesson of
the master he imported into his private masterpiece, _A Small Town
Idol_. Like Chaplin, he disarms you and endears himself; unlike him,
and often to Turpin’s advantage, he knows how to be ridiculous. One
always sees Chaplin’s impersonations as they see themselves. Is he a
count or a pretender, or an English gentleman, or a policeman, or a
tramp, the character is completely embodied; Chaplin never makes fun of
himself. The process of identification is complete and, apart from the
interest and the fun of the action, your chief pleasure is in awaiting
the inevitable denunciation. Ben Turpin, who has only a talent for
Chaplin’s genius, makes the most of it and lets you see through him.
His exaggerations do more than reveal--they betray, and above all
they betray the fact that Turpin is aware of the absurdities of his
characters; you see them objectively, and through him you see through
them.
When he returns home as the Wild West screen hero, and his own picture
is shown before those who so recently had despised him, his deprecating
gesture before the screen on which his exploits are being shown is so
broad, so simple-silly, that it is more than a description of himself
as he thinks it is, and lets us perceive his absurdity. He is exactly a
zany.
Three other buffoons of the old Keystone days retain their capacity
to be amusing: the galvanic, jack-in-the-box, Al St John; Mack Swain,
and Chester Conklin; they are exactly as they were ten years ago, and
one fancies they will never be great. The difficult person to be sure
about is Buster Keaton, who came to the pictures from vaudeville,
and has carried into his new medium his greatest asset, an enormous,
incorruptible gravity. He never smiles, they say, and I have sat
through some of his pictures--_The Boat_, for one--without seeing any
reason why he should. It was a long mechanical contrivance with hardly
any humour, and was considered a masterpiece; while _The Paleface_,
in which Keaton played an entomologist captured by Indians, passed
unnoticed. It had nearly everything a comic needs, and there were
certain movements _en masse_, certain crossings of the lines of action,
which were quite perfect. Keaton’s intense preoccupation and his
hard sense of personality are excellent. In _Cops_ he took a purely
Keystone subject and multiplied and magnified it to its last degree
of development: thousands of policemen rushed down one street; equal
thousands rushed up another; and before them fled this small, serious
figure, bent on self-justification, caught in a series of absurd
accidents, wholly law-abiding, a little distracted. I do not think one
will soon forget the exquisite close of that picture: the whole police
force forming a phalanx, hurled as one body into the courtyard of the
station--and then the little figure which, having been trapped within,
seems doomed to arrest, coming out, itself accoutred in uniform, and
quietly, quietly locking the huge doors behind it. It, yes; for by that
time Keaton has become wholly impersonal. So affecting Larry Semon has
never been; nor Clyde Cook; and behind them, but _longo intervallo_,
come the misguided creatures who make the kind of slap-stick which most
people think Sennett makes. I am sure there are other good comedians;
but I am not trying to make a catalogue. No one, in any case, has been
able to impose himself as these few have; and most of the others are so
near in method and manner to these that they require nothing fresh to
be said of them.
It seemed for a moment, in 1922, that if a confessed murderer were set
free by a jury, he or she went into the movies; but if a moving-picture
actor was declared innocent, he was barred from the screen. The justice
of this I cannot discuss; yet a protest can be made against the
æsthetically high-minded who said that the real reason for barring the
films of “Fatty” Arbuckle was their vulgarity and their dulness. For
“Fatty” had gone over to a comedy more refined than slap-stick long
before 1922; and in 1914 he was neither stupid nor dull. Once indeed,
in _Fatty and Mabel Adrift_ (Mabel being Miss Normand) he came near to
the best of slap-stick, and the same picture was as photography and
printing, for sepia seascapes and light and shade, a superior thing
entirely. The fatuous, ingratiating smile was innocent then, in all
conscience, and as for vulgarity--
Let us, before we go to the heart of that question, look for a
moment at the comedy which was always set against the slap-stick to
condemn the custard-pie school of fun--the comedy of which the best
practitioners were indisputably Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew. In them there
was nothing offensive, except an enervating dulness. They pretended
to be pleasant episodes in our common life, the life of courtship and
marriage; they accepted all our conventions; and they were one and all
exactly the sort of thing which the junior class at high school acted
when money was needed to buy a new set of erasers for Miss Struther’s
course in mechanical drawing. The husband stayed out late at night or
was seen kissing a stenographer; the wife had trouble with a maid or
was extravagant at the best shops; occasionally arrived an ingenuity,
such as the romantic attachment of the wife to anniversaries contrasted
with her husband’s negligence--I seem to recall that to cure her he
brought her a gift one day in memory of Washington’s birthday. These
things were little stories, not even smoking-room stories; they were
acted entirely in the technique of the amateur stage; they were
incredibly genteel, in the milieu where “When Baby Came” is genteel;
neither in matter nor in manner did they employ what the camera and
the projector had to give. And, apart from the agreeable manners of Mr
and Mrs Sidney Drew, nothing made them successful except the corrupt
desire, on the part of the spectators, to be refined.
Nothing of the sort operated in the far better (feature film) comedies
which Douglas Fairbanks made when he was with Fine Arts. To suit
his physique, they were almost all adventurous; they were always
entertaining. _Flirting With Fate_[3] presented a young man who had
decided to die and gave “Automatic Joe,” a gunman, his last fifty
dollars to “bump him off” unexpectedly. Once the agreement was made,
the tide of fortune turned for the young man, and, desiring earnestly
to live, he felt the paid hand of the assassin always upon his
shoulder. At the same time the gunman had reformed; his one object was
to return the unearned fifty dollars. And the cross-purposes, the chase
and flight, were within short distance of high farce. The comedies of
Charles Ray were also unpretentious, and also used the camera. These
and others were always perfectly decent; but none of them was refined.
And there, essentially, we are back at slap-stick; for the refined
comedy was pretentious, and what is pretentious is vulgar in any
definition of the word; while slap-stick never pretended to be anything
but itself and could be disgusting or tasteless or dull, but it could
not be vulgar. I consider vulgar the thing which offends against the
canons of taste accepted by honest people, not by imitative people,
not by snobs. It is equally bad taste, presumably, to throw custard
pies and to commit adultery; but it is not bad taste to speak of
these things. What is intolerable only is the pretense, and it was
against pretentiousness that the slap-stick comedy had its hardest
fight. It showed a man sitting down on a lighted gas stove, and it
did not hesitate to disclose the underwear charred at the buttocks
which were the logical consequence of the action. There was never the
slightest suggestion of sexual indecency, or of moral turpitude, in the
Keystones; there was a fuller and freer use of gesture--gesture with
all parts of the human frame--than we are accustomed to. The laughter
they evoked was broad and long; it was thoracic, abdominal; it shook us
because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet. The animal
frankness and health of these pictures constituted the ground of their
offense. And something more.
For the Keystone offended our sense of security in dull and
business-like lives. Few of us imagined ourselves in the frenzy of
action which they set before us; none of us remained unmoved at
the freedom of fancy, the wildness of imagination, the roaring,
destructive, careless energy which it set loose. It was an ecstasy
of comic life, and in our unecstatic lives we fled from it to
polite comedy, telling ourselves that what we had seen was ugly and
displeasing. Often it was. I am stating the case for slap-stick, but
I do not wish to make myself responsible for the millions of feet of
stupidity and ugliness which have been released as comic films. I have
seen Ham and Bud and the imitators of Charlie Chaplin; I have seen
an egg splattered over a man’s face with such a degree of nauseous
ugliness that it seemed I could never see a comic again. But as like
as not, on the same bill was the James Young screen version of _The
Devil_ with George Arliss, or Geraldine Farrar in _Carmen_, or the
“_‘Affairs of’ Anatol_.” And when people who have seen these “artistic”
films, or the barber-shop scene in a Hitchcock revue or Eddie Cantor in
a dentist’s chair, exclaim (falsely) that moving-picture comedians do
nothing but throw pies, I am moved to wonder what on earth they are
expected to throw. They are using the eternal materials of their art,
precisely as Aristophanes used them and Rabelais, with already far too
many concessions to a debased and cowardly and artificial taste. At the
two extremes simple and sophisticated people have looked directly at
the slap-stick screen and loved it for itself alone; in between are the
people who can see nothing without the lorgnettes of prejudice provided
by fashion and gentility. The simple ones discovered and prospered
the slap-stick screen long before the sophisticated were aware of its
existence; they took it for what it was and cared nothing for the fact
that it was made by inartistic people and shown in reeking rooms for a
nickel. For long the poison of culture was powerless to enter; but not
long enough.
I feel moderately certain that the slap-stick comedy is a good thing
for America to have; yet, being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a
reformer, I have to put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds.
It has given me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see
it saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its
unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to banish the
bleak refinement which is setting in upon it.
Seven years ago, in an imaginary conversation, I made Mr David Wark
Griffith announce that he would produce _Helen of Troy_, and I made
him defend the Keystone comedy. It seemed to me then as now that there
is nothing incongruous in these subjects; properly made, they would
be equally unrefined, but _Helen of Troy_, being in the grand manner,
would be called “artistic.” Mr Griffith has not made _Helen of Troy_,
and the pre-eminent right to make it has passed from his hands. The
Keystone, with its variations, needs still an authoritative defender
and an authoritative critic. It is one of the few places where the
genteel tradition does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where
imagination is still riotous and healthy. In its economy and precision
are two qualities of artistic presentation; it uses still everything
commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it
has refrained from using the broad farces of literature--Aristophanes
and Rabelais and Molière--as material; it could become happily
sophisticated, without being cultured. But there is no fault inherent
in its nature, and its virtues are exceptional. For us to appreciate
slap-stick may require a revolution in our way of looking at the arts;
having taken thought on how we now look at the arts, I suggest that the
revolution is not entirely undesirable.
_An Imaginary
Conversation_
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
_The theatre of Dionysos. A great crowd is just leaving the
amphitheatre and as the attendants roll back the heavy awnings
and unleash the tent-poles, the moon, which has been excluded
for the performance, begins to filter in, and presently the
stone begins to throw off faint shimmers, and dark shadows fall
across the stage. The builded temple, which has been screened,
is now revealed, and its colours glow again, albeit in shades
not known to the light of day. The porticos of temples look
down upon the theatre, and olive trees stand dark and beautiful
on the hills. From afar the bustle of the town dies away, and,
perhaps, in a moment of unutterable stillness, the murmur of
the many-sounding sea can be heard._
_The spectators of the strange entertainment have at last
departed, and the long e’s, ungrateful to the ear of the Attic
scholar, are heard no more. In the far centre of the theatre
a man is taking apart a mechanism--that from which the deus
sprang in this evening’s play. Two other men remain. One walks
musing and absorbed, looking toward that entrance whereby
Orestes was wont to make his way to the stage. The other walks
slowly round about the theatre, marking its aspects, and
thinking of practical things. Presently they meet at the spot
where once the choragus stood. They salute each other._
MR GRIFFITH
I am sorry that you should have been here to-night. To you, I suppose,
this has been only a sacrilege. I am sorry that you should feel that I
am gloating over my success. But perhaps I am mistaken. Are you, or are
you not, Walter Pritchard Eaton?
MR EATON
I am. And you are David Wark Griffith, are you not? [_D. G. nods._] We
are well met, then--if I may make use of a phrase which the drama, and
not your _métier_ has made famous. By the way, ought I to “register”
pleasure in any conventional way?
D. G.
Score one for you. I have sinned. But since you say we are well met,
can’t we chat for a moment about things? You see, I am not altogether
unaffected by this scene--the light, and the ancient theatre, and the
memories of it all.
W. P. E.
They would all do admirably for a picture--for one of those
extraordinary scenic effects which you create as no other man can
create them. But the memories--those at least are mine. Surely you are
not thinking of--
D. G.
No. Not just now. I am humble at times. But let us say that you are
the great antagonist of the movies, and I the protagonist. I want very
much to understand what you mean when you attack them. I remember you
said that my spectacle, _The Birth of a Nation_, was violently unfair
because it was wordless. Am I not right?
W. P. E.
I said some such thing.
D. G.
And you are a defender of the theatre. May I assume that _The
Clansman_, which was a spoken drama, was more fair than my spectacle?
W. P. E.
At least, in the play, there was a reply in kind to every attack. The
dumb-show for which you are responsible showed only one side.
D. G.
Then you are attacking the movie for being a propaganda, and are
displeased with the propaganda because it is one-sided. May I say that
possibly the movie was made as an artistic spectacle, and had no such
object? And do I not recall the surprise with which such a play as
_Strife_ was received because it did show two sides? After all, I did
not make it impossible for you to put on _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ as a reply
to me.
W. P. E.
It would be fruitless to continue the discussion on this point. I spoke
of your movie in passing, because I am always hearing about it. For the
most part let us admit that it was not cheap. Can you say as much for
the others?
D. G.
No. The movie is a vulgar art--it is _the_ vulgar art. And certainly
I do not purpose to rob that statement of its effectiveness by saying
that the word must be taken in its best, or even in its original,
meaning. It must be taken in its worst meaning. The movie is vulgar,
but it is art. The best of it is none too good--yet. But the worst of
it is not so bad as you think.
W. P. E.
I am willing to grant you that in the representation of spectacle, in
the realm of trick photography and in the preservation of the events
of the moment, the movie has its place. I question it only when it
invades the drama. There you must pardon me. I have the drama close to
my heart.
D. G.
You have been warming the viper quite a long time. It is about to
sting. I am willing to grant you that in musical comedy, in purely
intellectual engagements, and in the exploitation of sound, the drama
has its place. But I have noticed in your own complaints that in the
things that touch the heart, in the grand manner, in the projection of
high emotion, you find the drama of to-day a pretty sad affair.
W. P. E.
Who is to blame for it?
D. G.
Who killed Cock Robin? Not I. I had not heard that the
Comédie-Française was seriously affected by the activities of Pathé
Frères. I have yet to learn that music has been driven into hiding by
the movies, although I have heard that the ride of the Valkyries is
more familiarly known to-day as the “Klan-theme” from _The Birth_.
Didn’t your theatre die--if it has died--because it stifled itself?
Hadn’t you noticed the decline ten years ago?
W. P. E.
I am not blaming the movie. I am deploring it. I do not think that
it is good for people to be eternally fed on whatever is cheapest,
nearest, easiest of comprehension. I object to it all the more when
something high and fine is butchered to make a movie holiday.
D. G.
I deplore that as much as you. I do not think that _Cabiria_ was cheap,
or easy of comprehension. There was enough on the surface to make it
popular. But there was also enough in the depths to make it grand.
W. P. E.
The movie is still two-dimensional, Mr Griffith. Can we speak of depths?
D. G.
Ah, you say “still”! Then we have a future. In the theatre there was a
long succession of little known men, and then came the men whose plays
made these stones sacred to you. There were many Elizabethans before
Shakespeare. Will you call me the Marlowe of the movies? I believe in
them enough to hope for a Shakespeare. But don’t you see that we are
young; we are without conventions--
W. P. E.
Pardon me. You are with far too many. I remember that in the early
days, when you went about on tiptoe for fear of waking up the
revengeful Muses, you employed actors without any technique. There was
an uncouth, a delightful freshness, about your work. I had hopes then
that you would contribute to the stage. Instead you have taken from it.
You have borrowed all its worst conventions. And you have added some of
your own. There is the dreadful convention of registering.
D. G.
Isn’t that from the stage?
W. P. E.
Hardly.
D. G.
Your actors and actresses register.
W. P. E.
Not as yours do. The long training in the expression of emotions has
developed a suitable medium, the slightest variation on which becomes
inestimably precious. In the moving picture the variation is unknown.
And, although I am the last person to want to advantage the movie, let
me tell you why. I can hear the voice of the director, just as the
misguided husband leaves his wife--a favorite situation in the movies
and very novel--I can hear him crying out, “Register grief!” If he
does not cry out, the inner voice of the actress cries out. Not “feel,”
not “express the feeling,” but express the semblance of grief. It is
an art of superficies. Perhaps your actresses--and why, dear sir, do
you choose such impossibly blond, pretty and stupid actresses?--have
worked out a new expression, a new registration. At the terrible moment
they forget. They register as they, or another actress as well paid
and as hotly advertised, registered six months before. I am as tired
of heaving breasts and eyes turned to heaven as I am tired of Charlie
Chaplin’s walk when he does not walk it. Conventions? There is no end
to them. What your art, as you call it, lacks, is limitations.
D. G.
You mean there are no limits to it? That is a strange remark for you to
make.
W. P. E.
No. I do not mean that. I mean that every art, until recent times, has
proposed certain limitations, under which it had to work. Goethe--a
poet whom you have yet to introduce to your spectators--once wrote,
“_In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister!_” And these
limitations must be more than physical. There is no reason why a poem
should rhyme abbaabbacdcdcd, but the sonnet must rhyme in some such
manner, or it will not be perfect. There may be greater poems than
these sonnets--that is a matter of taste--but the art of the sonnet
has its own perfection because those limitations have been accepted
joyously by those who chose to write. You have proposed no limitations
to yourself. Your art is chaos.
D. G.
Didn’t I confess as much when I said it was vulgar? It must have its
appeal to the very lowest. But because our roots are in the dung and
the mire, do you think there shall be no lovely blossoms on the trees
in spring and no fruit? If I make a fortune in raw melodrama, shall I
not spend it on Helen of Troy?
W. P. E.
Helen of Troy?
D. G.
Why not? The moving picture is always elemental, but it can be grand.
What are the essentials of a story: love, beauty, pursuit, coincidence,
rescue--
W. P. E.
Tell me, Mr Griffith, is it true that you recite “The Relief at
Lucknow” each night before you go to bed?
D. G.
Not now. I am reciting the Iliad now. Can’t you see the battlements of
Troy with Helen looking down from her tower--the ruinous face--
W. P. E.
Registering?
D. G.
Again a hit! But I shall overcome it. I shall show you Scamander rising
from his bed, and the gods on high Olympus--
W. P. E.
With a close-up of the beard of Zeus?
D. G.
And Patroclus leaping on the Ilian shore, and Achilles sulking in his
tent. I shall make Homer live again.
W. P. E.
Dear me. Is he dead? Why wasn’t I informed?
D. G.
Love and battle, heroism and beauty, action and emotion, pity and
terror--what more can you ask? All the great sum of Hellenic life, its
morning glow and its great noon of enviable beauty, shall be in my
picture. It shall mingle humanity with the gods again.
W. P. E.
Through the exquisite agency of cutbacks?
D. G.
As surely as Marlowe’s topless towers--the captions are written for
me--rose in the backdrops of your theatres. I shall glorify the
mechanics of my art. I shall make them invisible and divine. I shall
speak in words of white fire--
W. P. E.
Perhaps. But you will never speak with the tongues of angels--and of
men. I will admit the dulness of the theatre if you will grant the
absurdity of the mechanics you employ. I will ask you only if the
moving picture will ever become human?
D. G.
I do not know. I am not sure that humanity is very translatable. But
we have ecstasy. In the projector lies all wonderful adventure, and I
go into a dingy, stuffy, moving-picture house with the foreknowledge
that something strange and wonderful, though it be at times cheap and
vulgar, will be shown me. In a drab world the movie is an instrument
of miracles. The gross caricatures are perhaps truer than the realism
of the theatre. I see a Rabelaisian madness in the millions of broken
plates. In a thousand flying custard pies I recognize an eternal
impulse of humankind. In the mad comings and goings of impossible
characters I still see some persuasion that life is “wanton and
wondrous and forever well.” Here, in this theatre, life was once
glorified. But the grandeur has died out and we must restore it as we
can.
W. P. E.
Not in my time, I fear. For me the past is not dead, so you cannot
restore it. And here, in the end, you have my last objection to the
moving picture. You are destroying the imagination of mankind. There
are no more mysteries since your work has come into being. Everything
is visible. Everything is explained.
D. G.
Except the soul, my dear sir.[4]
“_I am Here To-Day_”:
_Charlie Chaplin_
“I AM HERE TO-DAY”: CHARLIE CHAPLIN