_genre_ scenes of slum life while he thought of filming the tragic
history of the South after the war. Other directors sought other
fields--notably that of the serial adventure film. Since they made
money for all concerned, you will not be surprised to hear these
serials praised: _The Exploits of Elaine_, the whole Pearl White
adventure, the thirty minutes of action closing on an impossible and
unresolved climax were, of course, infinitely better pictures than your
version of Mr Joseph Conrad’s _Victory_, your _Humoreske_, your _Should
a Wife Forgive_?[28] They were extremely silly; they worked too
closely on a scheme: getting out of last week’s predicament and into
next week’s can hardly be called a “form.” But within their limitations
they used the camera for all it was worth. It didn’t matter a bit that
the perils were preposterous, that the flights and pursuits were all
fakes composed by the speed of the projector. You were back in the days
of Nick Carter and the Liberty Boys; you hadn’t heard of psychology,
and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. You bored us when
your effects didn’t come off and I’m afraid amused us a little even
when they did. But you were on the right road.
There was very little _acting_ in these films and in the Wild West
exhibitions. There was a great deal of _action_. I can’t recall Pearl
White _registering_ a single time; I recall only movement, which was
excellent. It was later that your acting developed; up to this time
you were working with people who hadn’t succeeded in or were wholly
ignorant of the technique of the stage; they moved before the camera
gropingly at first, but gradually developing a technique suited to
the camera and to nothing else. I am referring to days so far back
that the old Biograph films used to be branded with the mark AB in a
circle, and this mark occurred in the photographed sets to prevent
stealing. In those days your actors and actresses were exceptionally
naïve and creative. You were on the point of discovering mass and line
in the handling of crowds, in the defile of a troop, in the movement
of individuals. Mr Griffith had already discovered that four men
running in opposite directions along the design of a figure 8 gave
the effect of sixteen men--a discovery lightly comparable to that of
Velasquez in the crossed spears of the Surrender of Breda. You would
have done well to continue your experiments with nameless individuals
and chaotic masses; but you couldn’t. You developed what you called
personalities--and after that, actresses.
Before _The Birth of a Nation_ was begun Mary Pickford had already
left Griffith. I have heard that he vowed to make Mae Marsh a greater
actress--as if she weren’t one from the start, as if acting mattered,
as if Mary Pickford ever could or needed to act. Remember that in _The
Avenging Conscience_ at least four people: Spottiswood Aiken, Henry
Walthall, Blanche Sweet, and another I cannot identify--the second
villain--_played_ superbly without acting. Conceive your own stupidity
in not knowing what Vachel Lindsay discovered: that “our Mary” was
literally “the Queen of my People,” a radiant, lovely, childlike
girl, a beautiful figurehead, a symbol of all our sentimentality. Why
did you allow her to become an actress? Why is everything associated
with her later work so alien to beauty? You did not see her legend
forming; you began to advertise her salary; you have, I believe
unconsciously, tried to restore her now by giving her the palest rôle
in all literature, that of Marguerite in _Faust_. You are ten years too
late. In the same ten years Blanche Sweet has almost disappeared and
Mae Marsh has not arrived; Gishes and Talmadges and Swansons and other
fatalities have triumphed. You have taken over the stage and the opera;
you have filmed Caruso and Al Jolson, too, for all I know. You now have
acting and no playing.
This is a matter of capital importance and I am willing to come closer
to a definition. Acting is the way of impersonating, of rendering
character, of presenting action which is suitable to the stage; it has,
in the first place, a specific relation to the size of the stage and to
that of the auditorium; it has also a second important relation to the
lines spoken. Good actors--they are few--will always suit the gesture
to the utterance in the sense that their gesture will be on the beat
of the words; failure to know this ruined several of John Barrymore’s
soliloquies in _Hamlet_. Neither of these two primary and determinant
circumstances affect the moving picture. It should be obvious that
if good acting is adapted to the stage, nothing less than a miracle
could make it also suitable to the cinema. The same thing is true of
opera, which is in a desperate state because it failed to develop a
type of representation adapted to musical instead of spoken expression.
Opera and the pictures both needed “playing”--by which I cover _other
forms_ of representation, of impersonation, characterization, without
identifying them. It is unlikely that opera and pictures require the
same kind of playing; but neither of them can bear acting. Chaplin, by
the way, is a player, not an actor--although we all think of him as
an actor because the distinction is tardily made. I should say that
Mae Marsh, too, was a player in _The Birth_. So was H. B. Warner in a
war play called _Shell 49_ (I am not sure of the figure); and there
have been others. I have never seen Conrad Veidt or Werner Kraus on
the stage; in _Caligari_ they were players, not actors. Possibly since
Kraus is considered the greatest of German actors, he acted so well
that he seemed to be playing. But that requires genius and the Gishes
have no genius.
The emergence of Mary Pickford and the production of _The Birth of
a Nation_ make the years 1911–14 the critical time of the movies.
Nearly all your absurdities began about this time, including your
protest against the word movies as no longer suited to the dignity
of your art. From the success of _The Birth_ sprang the spectacle
film which was intrinsically all right and only corrupted Griffith
and the pictures because it was unintelligently handled thereafter.
From the success of Mary Pickford came the whole tradition of the
movie as a genteel intellectual entertainment. The better side is
the spectacle and the fact that in 1922 the whole mastery of the
spectacular film has passed out of your hands ought to be sufficient
proof that you bungled somewhere. Or, to drive it home, what can you
make of the circumstance that one of the very greatest successes, in
America and abroad, was _Nanook of the North_, a spectacle film to
which the producer and the artistic director contributed nothing--for
it was a picture of actualities, made, according to rumour, in the
interests of a fur-trading company? You will reply that my assertions
are pure theory. It is true that I have never filmed a scenario in my
life. But as a spectator I am the one who is hard headed and you the
theorists. What I and several million others know is that something
wrong crept into the spectacle film. We know absolutely that the
overblown idea of _Intolerance_ was foisted on the simple tale of _The
Mother and the Law_, and that while single episodes of this stupendous
picture were excellent, the whole failed of effect. In _The Birth_
Mr Griffith had two stories with no perceptible internal relation,
but with sufficient personal interest to carry; even here not one
person in ten thousand saw the significance of the highfalutin title.
But after the time of _Intolerance_ Mr Griffith receded swiftly, and
his latest pictures are merely lavish. It is of no significance that
Mr Griffith treats Thomas Burke as though the latter were a great
writer instead of a good scenario writer; the prettifying of _Broken
Blossoms_ was so consistent, and the fake acting such good fake, that
the picture almost succeeded. Everywhere Mr Griffith now gives us
excesses--everything is big: the crowds, the effects, the rainstorms,
the ice floes, and everything is informed with an overwhelming dignity.
He has long ago ceased to create beauty--only beautiful effects, like
set pieces in fireworks. And he was the man destined by his curiosity,
his honesty, his intelligence, to reach the heights of the moving
picture.
It is a hard thing to say, but it is literally true that something
in Mr Griffith has been corrupted and died--his imagination. _Broken
Blossoms_ was a last expiring flicker. Since then he has constructed
well; I understand that his success has been great; I am not denying
that Mr Griffith is the man to do _Ben-Hur_. But he has imagined
nothing on a grand scale, nor has he created anything delicate or fine.
People talk of _The Birth_ as if the battle scenes were important;
they were very good and a credit to Griffith, who directed, and to
George Bitzer, who photographed them; the direction of the ride of the
Klansmen was better, it had some imagination. And far better still was
a moment earlier in the piece, when Walthall returned to the shattered
Confederate home and Mae Marsh met him at the door, wearing raw cotton
smudged to resemble ermine--brother and sister both pretending that
they had forgotten their dead, that they didn’t care what happened.
And then--for the honours of the scene went to Griffith, not even to
the exquisite Mae Marsh--then there appeared from within the doorway
the arm of their mother and with a gesture of unutterable loveliness
it enlaced the boy’s shoulders and drew him tenderly into the house.
To have omitted the tears, to have shown nothing but the arm in that
single curve of beauty, required, in those days, high imagination. It
was the emotional climax of the film; one felt from that moment that
the rape and death of the little girl was already understood in the
vast suffering sympathy of the mother. So much Mr Griffith never again
accomplished; it was the one moment when he stood beside Chaplin as a
creative artist--and it was ten years ago.
Of course if Griffith hasn’t come through there is hardly anything
to hope for from the others. Mr Ince always beat him in advertized
expenditure; Fox was always cheaper and easier and had Annette
Kellerman and did _The Village Blacksmith_. The logical outcome of
Griffithism is in the pictures he didn’t make: in _When Knighthood
Was in Flower_ and in _Robin Hood_, neither of which I could sit
through. The lavishness of these films is appalling; the camera runs
mad in everything but action, which dies a hundred deaths in as many
minutes. Of what use are sets by Urban if the action which occurs in
them is invisible to the naked eye? The old trick of using a crowd
as a background and holding the interest in the individual has been
lost; the trick of using the crowd as an individual hasn’t been found
because we must have our love story. The spectacle film is slowly
settling down to the level of the stereopticon slide.
Comparison with German films is inevitable. They are as much on the
wrong track as we are; and the exception, _Caligari_, is defective
because in a proper attempt to relieve the camera from the burden of
recording actuality, the producers gave it the job of recording modern
paintings for background. The acting was, however, playing; and the
destruction of realism, even if it was accomplished by a questionable
expedient, will have much to do with the future of the film. Yet even
in the spectacle film the Germans managed to do something. _Passion_
and _Deception_ and the Pharaoh film and the film made out of _Sumurun_
were not lavish. And in the manipulation of material (not of the
instrument, where we know much more than they) there came occasionally
flashes of the real thing. In _Deception_ there was a scene where the
courtyard had to be cleared of an angry mob. Every American producer
has handled the parallel scene and every one in the same way, centring
in the mêlée between civilians and police. What Lubitsch did was
to form a single line of pike staffs and to show a solid mass of
crowd--the feeling of hostility was projected in the opposition of
line and mass. And slowly the _space behind_ the pike staffs opened.
The bright calm sunlight fell on a wider and widening strip of the
courtyard. One was hardly aware of struggle; all one saw was that
gradually broadening patch of open, uncontested _space in the light_.
And suddenly one knew that the courtyard was cleared, one seemed to
hear the faint murmur of the crowd outside, and then silence. I am
lost in admiration of this simplicity which involves _every correct
principle of the æsthetics of the moving picture_. The whole thing was
done with movement and light--the movement massed and the light on the
open space. That is the true, the imaginative camera technique, which
we failed to develop.[29]
The object of that technique is _the indirect communication of
emotion_--indirect because that is the surest way, in all the arts,
of multiplying the degree of intensity. The American spectacle film
still communicates a thrill in the direct way of a highwayman with a
blackjack. But the American serious film drama communicates not even
this: it is at this moment entirely dead, or in other words, wholly
bogus. I may be wrong in thinking that our present position develops
out of the creation of Mary Pickford as a star. The result is the same.
For as soon as the movie became “the silent drama” it took upon itself
responsibilities. It had to be dignified and artistic; it had to have
literature and actors and ideals. The simple movie plots no longer
sufficed, and stage and novel were called upon to contribute their
small share to the success of an art which seriously believed itself
to be the consummation of all the arts. The obligation remained to
choose only those examples which were suitable to the screen. It was,
however, not adaptability which guided the choice, but the great name.
Eventually everything was filmed because what couldn’t be adapted could
be spoiled. The degree of vandalism passes words; and what completed
the ruin was that good novels were spoiled not to make good films,
but to make bad ones. _Victory_ was a vile film in addition to being
a vulgar betrayal of Conrad; even the good Molnar with his exciting
second-rate play, _The Devil_, found himself so foully, so disgustingly
changed on the screen that the whole idea, not a great one, was lost
and nothing remained but a sentimental vulgarity which had no meaning
of its own, quite apart from any meaning of his. In each of these the
elements are the same: a psychological development through an action.
By corrupting the action the producers changed the idea; bad enough in
itself, they failed to understand what they were doing and supplied
nothing to take the place of what they had destroyed. The actual movies
so produced refused to project any consecutive significant action
whatsoever.
It would be futile to multiply examples--as futile as to note that
there have been well-filmed novels and plays. The essential thing
is that nearly every picture made recently has borrowed something,
usually in the interest of dignity, gentility, refinement--and the
picture side, the part depending upon action before the camera, has
gone steadily down. Long subtitles explain everything except the lack
of action. Carefully built scenes are settings in which nothing takes
place. The climax arrives in the masterpieces of the de Mille school.
They are “art.” They are genteel. They offend nothing--except the
intelligence. High life in the de Mille manner is not recognizable as
decent human society, but it is refined, and the picture with it is
refined out of existence. Ten years earlier there was another type of
drama: the vamp, in short, and Theda Bara was its divinity. I have
little to say in its defense because it was unalterably stupid (I don’t
say I didn’t like it). But it wasn’t half so pretentious as the de
Mille social drama, and not half so vulgar. What it had to say, false
or banal or ridiculous, it said entirely with the camera. It appealed
to low passions and it truckled to imitative morality; there was in it
a sort of corruption. Yet one could resist that frank ugliness as one
can’t resist the polite falsehood of the new culture of the movies.
It would be easy to exaggerate your failures. Your greatest mistake was
a natural one--in taking over the realistic theatre. You knew that a
photograph can reproduce actuality without significantly transposing
it, and you assumed that that was the duty of the film. But you forgot
that the rhythm of the film was creating something, and that this
creation adapted itself entirely to the projection of emotion by means
_not realistic_; that in the end the camera was as legitimately an
instrument of distortion as of reproduction. You gave us, in short,
the pleasure of _verification_ in every detail; the Germans who are
largely in the same tradition--they should have known better because
their theatre knew better--improved the method at times and counted
on significant detail. But neither of you gave us the pleasure of
_recognition_. Neither you nor they have taken the first step (except
in _Caligari_) toward giving us the highest degree of pleasure, that of
escaping actuality and entering into a created world, built on its own
inherent logic, keeping time in its own rhythm--where we feel ourselves
at once strangers and at home. That has been done elsewhere--not in the
serious film.
I would be glad to temper all of this with praise: for Anita Loos’
captions and John Emerson’s occasionally excellent direction; for
George Loane Tucker, for Monte Katterjohn’s flashes of insight into
what makes a scenario. I have liked many more films than I have
mentioned here. But you are familiar with praise and there remains
to say what you have missed. The moving picture when it became
pretentious, when it went upstage and said, “dear God, make me
artistic” at the end of its prayers, killed its imagination and
foreswore its popularity. At your present rate of progress you will in
ten years--if you survive--be no more a popular art than grand opera
is. You had in your hands an incalculable instrument to set free the
imagination of mankind--and the atrophy of our imaginative lives has
only been hastened by you. You had also an instrument of fantasy--and
you gave us Marguerite Clark in films no better than the “whimsy-me”
school of stage plays. Above all, you had something fresh and clean
and new; it was a toy and should have remained a toy--something for
our delight. You gave us problem plays. Beauty you neither understood
nor cared for; and although you talked much about art you never for a
moment tried to fathom the secret sources, nor to understand the secret
obligations, of art.
Can you do anything now? I don’t know and I am indifferent to your
future--because there is a future for the moving picture with which you
will have nothing to do. I do not know if the movie of the future will
be popular--and to me it is the essence of the movie that it should be
popular. Perhaps there will be a period of semi-popularity--it will be
at this time that you will desert--and then the new picture will arrive
without your assistance. For when you and your capitalizations and your
publicity go down together, the field will be left free for others.
The first cheap film will startle you; but the film will grow less
and less expensive. Presently it will be within the reach of artists.
With players instead of actors and actresses, with fresh ideas (among
which the idea of making a lot of money may be absent) these artists
will give back to the screen the thing you have debauched--imagination.
They will create with the camera, and not record, and will follow its
pulsations instead of attempting to capture the rhythm of actuality.
It isn’t impossible to recreate exactly the atmosphere of Anderson’s
_I’m a Fool_; it isn’t impossible (although it may not be desirable) to
do studies in psychology; it is possible and desirable to create great
epics of American industry and let the machine operate as a character
in the play--just as the land of the West itself, as the corn must play
its part. The grandiose conceptions of Frank Norris are not beyond the
reach of the camera. There are painters willing to work in the medium
of the camera and architects and photographers. And novelists, too,
I fancy, would find much of interest in the scenario as a new way of
expression.[30] There is no end to what we can accomplish.
The vulgar prettiness, the absurdities, the ignorances of your films
haven’t saved you. And although the first steps after you take
away your guiding hand may be feeble, although bogus artists and
culture-hounds may capture the movie for a time--in the end all will be
well. For the movie is the imagination of mankind in action--and you
haven’t destroyed it yet.
_Before a Picture by Picasso_
BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO
For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally call
“fine,” which seem to me fundamental for living.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
It was my great fortune just as I was finishing this book to be taken
by a friend to the studio of Pablo Picasso. We had been talking on our
way of the lively arts; my companion denied none of their qualities,
and agreed violently with my feeling about the bogus, what we called
_le côté Puccini_. But he held that nothing is more necessary at the
moment than the exercise of discrimination, that we must be on our
guard lest we forget the major arts, forget even how to appreciate
them, if we devote ourselves passionately, as I do, to the lively ones.
Had he planned it deliberately he could not have driven his point home
more deeply, for in Picasso’s studio we found ourselves, with no more
warning than our great admiration, in the presence of a masterpiece. We
were not prepared to have an unframed canvas suddenly turned from the
wall and to recognize immediately that one more had been added to the
small number of the world’s greatest works of art.
I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn’t even
important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and
overwhelming thing to me was that I held the work a masterpiece and
knew it to be contemporary. It is a pleasure to come upon an accredited
masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and
see the Winged Victory and _know_ that it is good. But to have the
same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous
in every aspect, yet associated with the great tradition of painting,
with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art
and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself--that is
a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect--after one
had gone away and begun to be aware of effects--was to make one wonder
whether it is worth thinking or writing or feeling about anything else.
Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day,
it isn’t sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of
the minor arts isn’t, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always
believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions
of the arts which are honest--that the real opposition is between them,
allied, and the polished fake. To that position I returned a few days
later: it was a fortunate week altogether, for I heard the _Sacre du
Printemps_ of Strawinsky the next day, and this tremendous shaking of
the forgotten roots of being gave me reassurance.
[Illustration:
A PAINTING. By Pablo Picasso
]
More than that, I am convinced that if one is going to live fully
and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence, one must
care for both. It is possible to do well enough with either, and much
depends on how one derives pleasure from them. For no one imagines
that a pedant or a half-wit, enjoying a classic or a piece of ragtime,
is actually getting all that the subject affords. For an intelligent
human being knows that one difference between himself and the animals
is that he can “live in the mind”; to him there need be present no
conflict between the great arts and the minor; he will see, in the end,
that they minister to each other.