TEXTS
Man as a mute? In the old pantomime, man was deaf and dumb. His acting
consisted of a ridiculous, bombastic, and excited whipping about with
all manner of gestures, a convulsive attempt to make clear, through
the exclusive agency of gesticulation, a number of things, indeed
everything, that cannot be said through gestures alone. Pantomime is
tin-horn and big-drum solo.
This is not the way of the moving picture. For it followed as a matter
of self-evident fact that the inaudible words could be inserted in
writing between the pictures. Many people, however, have succumbed to
the delusion that the moving picture actor has regained his speech, and
that without limit. There is no phase of the film in which it is still
groping about more in the dark, none in which its essential conditions
have been so little fulfilled as in the matter of interpolated texts.
One begins to have a feeling that the shorter the speech the better.
But even a battle of words consisting of short, even abbreviated,
lines can have an undesirable effect so far as the artistic
impression is concerned.
Laws are always first felt and then recognized in error. It is even
so with the texts that accompany the pictures of the film: they are
conditioned by a state of concealed necessity which the artist is in
duty bound to recognize if he would impart to his text the psychic
impressiveness without which it is a failure, and the artistic
importance without which it cannot survive.
[Illustration: Fig. 3. Scene from _The Stone Rider_.
[_See p. 81_]
]
The contrasts between the picture and the text exist; they even stand
out. But they have never prevented plastic art from attaching written
explanations to the works that sail under its banner—that is to say,
the creations of the artist are named. If such a designation, or
naming, were not employed, it is within reason to believe that many a
work of art would never enjoy a correct or adequate interpretation. It
will probably always be a mystery as to precisely what Titian meant
by his so-called, his inadequately designated, “Celestial and Earthly
Love.” These terms or names are superfluous, if not annoying, only when
they convey an idea which is perfectly patent in the very nature of the
work itself. Why ascribe set titles to such works as “Träumerei,” or
“The Water Carrier,” or “A Happy Home”? Truth to tell, the interweaving
of picture and text had been elevated to the rank of a unique
art form by a great artist long before the moving picture began its
ascendent course. I mean, Wilhelm Busch, with his pictures and verses.
In our soul, Busch’s contrasts are dissolved and intertwined; they
constitute an organic unity; they are a spiritual entity.
Æsthetic categorizing has consequently been secured, in turn, and that
to the salvation of art. The discovery of the practical, artistic
relations that picture and text should bear to each other have,
unfortunately, not been made essentially easier thereby.
There can be no doubt but that different peoples feel quite differently
on this point. The Italian—Gabriel d’Annunzio, for example, in his
_Cabiria_—inserts sentences of a length, effusiveness, and fustian
which are just as intolerable to the art-sense of a German as are the
swollen and pathetic stage notes of his regular dramas. Are we to
conclude from this that we Germans are cooler, calmer, soberer, and
less buoyant than the children of sunny Italy? Or are we to conclude
that our feelings are safer guides in matters of art than those of the
Italians because we believe that the true significance of the moving
picture is to be sought in the picture and not in the text? For it
seems to us like an artistic contradiction, like utter nonsense,
when the film, intended to create its effects through moving bodies,
supererogates unto itself art forms for which better means have been
provided, more appropriate ways found. The book was made for poetry,
and if it is to be spoken, its place is manifestly on the stage.
The task of the motion picture, let us repeat, is to express feelings
by gestures. In this proposition there lies hidden a great deal of
knowledge. Feeling does not belong to the text; the written text is
not its sphere; it is not to be spoken; it is to be given form and
substance through the art of mimicry. But there are motion pictures
staged by men who at the very thought of an _I love you_ (the warmest
and tenderest possibility of this art) cannot resist the temptation to
have these three words roared forth through so much accompanying text.
But never mind! _I love you_—that would be an almost classically sober
wording. The actors could play this concept so perfectly that such a
sentence, however superfluous it might be, would scarcely be noticed.
The more, however, the text endeavors to create atmosphere through
itself alone, the more the film departs from real art. In a certain
gloriously ♦dilettantish screen creation one reads: “Vera, you are
so lovely and good to everybody, couldn’t you be lovely and good
to me too?” Even a sentence such as “You are beautiful” brought
a discordant note into the general situation. We should be able to
detect, in each of our five senses, the way in which the beauty of a
woman gains utter control over a man. If we are so bereft of feeling
and fancy that we cannot see this and feel it, a whole volume of
emotional text would not be able to drum it into our heads and hearts.
♦ “dilettanteish” replaced with “dilettantish”
One notices that the film authors frequently try to bring a bit of
poetry into their texts: “It is not wise to show me how much I lost
when I erased the memory of the woman from my mind,” said the Tiger of
Eschnapur in the _Indisches Grabmal_ (“Indian Monument”). In a case of
this kind, words take to their heels, so to speak, wander out into the
realm of undisciplined poetry, and lose all feeling for and connection
with mimic action. But in the motion picture the word is not free; it
is bound with secret chains to the mimic action. If these are broken,
the ensuing contradiction jars on our senses in that two art forms are
welded together which in reality have nothing to do with each other.
The striving after lyric tenderness and beauty is noticeable in a
great many German and American films. In this regard, the Swede is
wiser, his feelings more commendable. His texts are more objective
and material; and the effects they produce are more wholesome and
artistic. For wherever and whenever the text displays an excess of fire
and fancy, the spectator remains as cold as ice. His feelings can be
aroused only by the gestures, by the movements of the bodies of the
actors. In _Dr. Mabuse_ we were regaled with this bit of declamation:
“He—who is he? No one knows him. He stands over the city. He is as tall
as a tower. He is damnation, he is salvation—and he loved me.” The
public was not moved one iota—but it laughed tears. Instead of being
exalted, it was disenchanted; it was sobered down. For the very simple
reason that the laws of the motion picture text are different from and
narrower than those that have to do with poetry.
The film texts that are written in verse prove to be pretty thin and
anemic in their effect, even when a serious and gentle poet writes
them. We have but to think of _Der müde Tod_ (“Weary Death”). They
are however altogether unbearable when they come trotting across the
screen in the cumbersome armor of the iambic pentameter—as the Italians
so frequently employ them. That kind of inflated film text has been
rejected by the entire world. The film text cannot endure a revel
in words; it must fit the action as tightly and as neatly as a
smooth, stiff fleshing fits an actor of the spoken stage. Dress it up
with the festival garments of formal poetry and these garments flop
about its limbs while æsthetics go begging.
Here is a thought to be kept on our memorandum: _All that is said
in the way of feelings in the text is not felt in the play_. Our
instinctive presentiment, at this stage of film development, is so deep
that we are not going to admit through the threefold door of the heart
any text that attempts to bend and mold this presentiment to suit its
own purposes.
The ease with which the spectator may be inundated with a flood of
textual words cajoles some into smuggling the talmy-gold of speech
into the moving picture: “I forbid you to leave this house; and if you
dare to act contrary to my wish in this matter, you will not receive
a single penny from me!” This text occurs in the _Indisches Grabmal_.
Fewer words would be more, that is, more effective. A clear, soulful
portrayal as well as a fixed, secure, and successful mounting is made
altogether impossible by such an unchastened and miserably affected
text as this. The very dignity of the film, in this case, has been
abandoned to the caprice of the man who wrote the lines. The author
is in a position to do one of two things: he may either cleanse
the film to the point of high art by grasping the true significance of
such text as is needed, or he may demote the same film with all its
art potentialities, to the grade of a mere hawked pamphlet by filling
his text with the heavy, plebeian splashings of everyday and everyman
conversation.
But never mind! Such texts may be regarded as a failure, but they
are by no means equivalent to the transferral of the material to the
purely _spiritual_ world (which is closed to the sensuous moving
picture because it cannot be disclosed through gestures alone). But
wherever we sense an attempt on the part of the text to make even a
remote effort at touching on the problems of the intellect or spirit,
we notice at once the patchouly stench of botched and bungled art. All
those expressions of a well-meant and, in poetry, quite permissible
brooding and grieving over the sinister incidents of life, as well as
such threadbare philosophizing as goes with this species of mental
indulgence—all of these utterances taste like thin lemonade, sweet,
flat, and insipid. In them there is not a grain of real film feeling;
the art of the great picture they know not. Exalted spirit, how near
I feel myself to thee—such is the boast of the moving picture in this
instance—that is, when it makes short shift with its fundamental right
and privilege, if indeed it does not dispense with it entirely.
The spirit of the film author is not shown by allowing his Pegasus to
roam uncurbed over boundless territories, emitting wise sayings as
he stamps the ground of his seemingly privileged course. His spirit,
the intellect that he may have, is revealed in its true light when he
exercises an iron will in his search after the right expression, and
makes this expression just as short and just as rare as the exigencies
of the occasion permit. As Alfred Kerr has laconically put it: “The
goal of your expression? The briefer.” And when this law is laid down
and adhered to, the really marvelous begins to take place: these
condensed, sober, frigid words actually begin to ring and glow. The
best text that has ever been given any motion picture, and the one that
lent the scene to which it belonged the most veritable magic, was found
in _Caligari_. At the head of these dark and somber horrors stood the
one word, “Night.” This lone monosyllable, which in the rise and swell
of poetry might be passed over quite unnoticed, cast a spell over us in
the film like the glowing of greenish eyes from the dark.
Such brevity is, of course, not always necessary, nor is it at all
times possible, for it would frequently be impossible for the general
public to understand it. But a clear, clean primness, one that
is just as alien to any imitation of everyday speech as it is to the
striving after original, poetic effect, should characterize the style
of the text that accompanies the picture.
How could we best define a really adequate motion picture text? By
saying that it is a lump of ice in which there is a glowing coal.
“Night—” This is obviously the artistic sense of the style we are
considering: we are endeavoring to make it possible for the actor to
indulge in an unhampered and unhindered mimicry that is poles removed
from the gymnastics of the pantomime. Carl Hauptmann said once upon a
time: “That will always be a poor motion picture in which a violent
effort is made through the overworking of gestures to express an idea
which in reality can be expressed only through the medium of words.
That, too, will always be regarded as a benevolent inter-pictorial
text which holds up to the mind of the spectator, suddenly and without
warning, certain necessary words the mission of which will be to impart
roundness, fullness, and ultimate clarity to the mental content of the
pictures that have been passing before our vision.”
[Illustration: Fig. 4. Scene from _The Stone Rider_.
[_See p. 82_]
]
The compass of the motion picture were far too limited to merit serious
and universal study if the materials that are used by it were confined
to such as can be fully and adequately interpreted through gestures
alone, and without the use of even the briefest of explanatory text.
The American, who troubles himself but little about theoretical
considerations, frequently mounts, in less important films, individual
scenes with six or more bits of text arranged in remark and reply.
There has been a tendency of late, however, to exercise greater
moderation in this, respect. The whole matter can be summed up by
saying that with regard to the number of interspersed words, and the
length of the explanatory sentences that are used, one’s feelings
are the only safe criterion to follow; and they set down this as
an infallible guide: A text is good if it is effective. It can be
effective only when it harmonizes with the pictures. And if it is to
be effective—that is, if it is to find its way to the heart, the very
narrowest of limitations are imposed upon it.
The business of depicting feelings must be left to the actor. Any
feature of the action that cannot be controlled in an unconstrained
way by the art of mimicry must be cared for by the text. Under this
heading would fall the announcement of decisions reached or resolutions
made by the participating personages. But when the text essays to chew,
swallow, and regurgitate what our imagination can dispose of by
virtue of its own power much better than words can tell, failure raises
its austere visage; for imagination, if not left alone, slinks into the
corner in disgruntled mood and proclaims from its safe but sinister
seat that the entire performance is a fraud, that what seems like
splendor is nothing but cheap paint.
It is not the mute but the monosyllabic character that the motion
picture develops. We are becoming aware of the fact that there is a
pronounced tendency in this modern age toward greater brevity; we are
turning away from the prolix and diffuse; we are endeavoring more and
more to say a great deal in a few words, and to use expressions that
carry comprehensive meaning. The man of the motion picture is related
by affinity and by his very being to the man of the first quarter of
the century.
In the hands of a disciplined and experienced film writer the text, as
a tool of the trade, disports itself benevolently, and is a handmaiden
of the arts. In the hands of an inferior writer, it murders art and
slays the canons of art; for the text becomes an end in itself, and
its æsthetic lassitude as well as its gradual effacement, or rather
extinction, robs in time the legitimate gestures of their specific
meaning and their general significance.
It is remarkable, however, that these facts, these bits of
knowledge regarding the film, do not apply to the comic motion picture.
Even the ingenious Chaplin, who makes more out of gestures than any
of his colleagues, has never been known to object to a right good,
or juicy, text. There are, in truth, quite a number of film comedies
in which the foils and florets of wit are swung about with marked
liberality and hilarity.
But whatever may be said, whatever theories may be proposed, it remains
a sober truth that the real freedom of the film artist is preserved,
for his own enjoyment and that of his spectators, when he is allowed to
make his picture effective as he sees it, and through such gestures as
he personally sees fit to employ to this end. That is the thought the
Swedes kept in mind in the making of their astonishing film entitled
_Erotikon_, in which they played fast and loose with all academic
deductions touching on the muteness of the film. And if asked, “When is
text permissible?” we would be obliged to reply that it is permissible
only when it is necessary.