TRICKS
On what planet was the man of the moving picture born? Did he, and
does he, first see the light of day on some magic star where the
established laws of nature fail to function? Where time stands still,
or runs backward? Where spread tables emerge from the earth? Where the
wish suffices to enable a man to fly through the air, or to disappear
without a trace into the ground beneath him?
Long before the World War, when the real power of the motion picture
to represent feelings was as yet unknown, and when serious literature,
on this subject or on that, was as yet unable to rise above the
low level of the cheap pamphlet, one of the most valiant of German
literati—Julius Bab—referred to the trick film, the fairy film, as the
exclusive species of creation with which the so-called moving picture
could legitimately lay claim to success, achieved or potential. The
pedagogues rushed to his support; they showered him with applause;
they demanded the fairy film; they hated and even damned the serious
motion picture.
But never mind! Let us grant that the film Bab and his supporters had
in mind enjoys substantial possibilities in the way of setting forth
certain types of pictures. Their contention merely increased the scope
of the moving picture. But did the picture they had in mind add to the
artistic scope of the business at hand? Bab wrote at that time these
words: “For the motion picture, and in the motion picture, it is easy
to have water run uphill, to have a venerable costermonger of the
gentler sex soar through the empyrean heights, to have a snail overtake
an express train.”
Now, there is at least one irrefutable proof that a given thing is not
art: unlimited possibilities. These make up the stock-in-trade of the
trick film. In such a production there is no development; there is
nothing in which the artist soul triumphs over the soul of the merest
mechanic. There is none of the torture or anguish that goes with the
act of real creation. There is nothing more than a trick played on
the object in question. The trick film is the work of a cold hand.
The inventive mind is constantly bringing out new and quite ingenious
tricks—magic tricks. Having become experienced in this, “it has the
Devil kidnap a railway train and make off with it through the air.”
But this is not art; it belongs to the variety shows; it is in place
where all that is asked for and paid for is physical cleverness,
legerdemain, art without soul.
There comes a time where we really feel sorry for the motion picture
artist—when he finds tricks indispensable if he is to give an adequate
idea of the miraculous magic in which he is interested. We will
concede that in the trick film, and particularly in the fairy film, a
certain measure of inner and intimate development is possible, and is
at times evident. This “art,” however, always has a flaw in it that
defies mending. Any art that forms an alliance with pure mechanisms in
order to be effective, or to bring out the intended effects, is to be
distrusted from the very beginning. For art ceases when mechanismus
begins to play a rôle that can in any way be considered creative or
important. The purpose of art is clear: it is to serve in the colorful
reproduction of a scene.
[Illustration: Fig. 5. Scene from _The Nibelungs_.
[_See p. 82_]
]
This fact should be recognized, and in the films that set forth
that reality which makes the warping and twisting of natural
laws impossible, there should be just as little use made of tricks
as the situation allows; and when employed, they should be employed
with extreme caution. For the spectator, enlightened as he may become
through the papers and magazines, is all too apt to catch on to
these tricks. And it is never wise to grant the man whose art-sense is
undeveloped, and whose æsthetic understanding is anything but mellow, a
peep behind the scenes. The sole place that the artistically immature
can occupy with impunity is in front of the stage.
Many film tricks are, indeed, distinctly deceptive—or fraudulent. If
the incomparable detective is to land in an automobile that is whirring
by at a fearful rate of speed, he goes about his undertaking in a quite
calm way: four pictures a second, and the car making sixty miles an
hour. What really happens? Twenty or thirty-second pictures, mad speed,
foolhardy defiance of every known danger, and so on and so on. But woe
to the final effect if the average spectator sees through the thing!
Even when there is no great or real mystery about the applied tricks,
the artistic effect of them is rather weak. The spectator looks at it
all, and so many technical questions arise in his mind as to how the
feat is accomplished that his attention is drawn away from the picture
itself. “How do they do that?” is one question that distracts him.
Another is: “Is it real?” Indeed, the legitimate stage not infrequently
finds it hard to resist the temptation to amaze and bewilder the
spectator through the use of technical appliances.
Simple tricks, such as the sudden appearance of a dream figure, the
unforeseen vanishing of magic people right in the middle of the picture
may, in urgent cases, be employed. They rarely radiate anything that
even distantly approaches what might be called psychic power, as did,
for example, the unpretentious and altogether laudable tricks employed
in the _Indisches Grabmal_. The truth is, we are reluctant about
submitting to these mechanical devices; we refuse to be duped. Be the
management and mounting ever so clever, we feel too keenly the presence
of the cold mechanism.
More complicated and more difficult tricks, which really deceive no
one, are the appearance of the same person twice in the same picture.
When such takes place, two thoughts, or feelings, fight rather
vigorously for dominance: we don’t like to refuse homage to the at
times marvelous art of the actor (as in the case of Henny Porten in
_Kohlhiesels Töchter_, or Ossy Oswalda in _Puppe_); and the situation
can be so captivating that it is out of the question for us to witness
it and remain cold. But the point is eventually reached where we feel
the impossibility, indeed the very absurdity of it all: “Just hand the
old quockerwodger over to me! I’ll cut him in half and each part will
dance on the rope just as comically as you please!” This is all
very well, but you cannot expect a man to be an earth-worm, for which
dual dancing of this type would be a mere trifle. Any pleasure that we
might otherwise be enabled to draw from such a performance is vitiated
by the ineluctable consciousness that we are witnessing a trick of a
distinctly technical virtuosity.
But it is still more impossible to feel that we are in the presence
of an artistic performance when—and it is common enough—the scene
demanding that a man be pushed off some dangerous ledge or routed from
some death-giving height, a big stuffed doll is substituted for the
mortal thus to be visualized. In _Golem_, for example, we know full
well that it is not the actor, Lothar Müthel, who is swept from the
tower by the raging ghost. And we merely smile when the Golem drags
a stuffed doll around by the hair. The presence of Mirjam’s clothing
helps neither one way nor the other. Or take another type of situation:
Where would it be possible to find an actor who was willing to have
himself hurled high into the air on the occasion of one of the numerous
and popular automobile collisions? In such a scene, where the living
actor, of course, does not take part, the most that even the naïvest
of spectator experiences is a quasi-thrill just as the “hero” receives
his bump. After that there is nothing left but the disagreeable
feeling on the part of the spectator that the staging of the piece was
inadequate.
The man of the moving picture is born upon the same earth upon which
all the rest of us live, move, and have our being. The established
laws of nature apply to him just as they apply to us. Flying through
the air, disappearing into the earth—these are the inartistic little
simpletons that belong to the “movie” in its most desperate and
degraded age. It is not the degree to which we can imitate that makes
art: art is determined by the degree in which figures are fashioned
that have souls in them.
The fairy-tale imitation on the part of the motion picture is fearful,
at least in those instances in which, in order to carry out the trick,
the lion’s share is allotted to the text. The fairy film is a bit of
merry nonsense, a charming piece of roguery and skylarking, which takes
place here on this earth, and which is not supposed to reflect the
profound seriousness of the really poetic world of fairies or other
supernatural creatures.
But we are at a loss to know what to do with the fairy film, for the
fairy world—in this hard, sober, material, and at times, brutal world
of ours—has become about extinct, depopulated, dead. For this
reason alone, the fairy film cannot hope to succeed as a business
proposition.
Within the last year, the magic tricks that were once so common have
almost completely disappeared from the screen. The Swedes—the most
artistic of all film peoples—have never found the trick necessary, not
even in their fairy films, though the Swedes belong to a race that
loves reverie, likes to dream, and enjoys visions.