THE SCENE
Let thought impart fixed content to the forms
That move across the stage in restless search.
—Gœthe.
All that has been said thus far is supposed to serve as an Ariadne
thread through the labyrinth of the moving picture. All individual
forms should be bound together and be reminded in this way of their
common purpose and objective. For it is impossible, if art is to
flourish, to permit each individual section of this manifold complex to
scream aloud, and that with all its might, in an endeavor to drown out
other sections by coercing them into a parrot’s cage, where the most
they can do is to observe an obligatory subserviency.
There is no art in which the star system, the mere existence and
independent, inconsiderate activity on the part of a few gifted
persons, is so nefarious as in the motion picture. This is an art in
which there must be an unreserved ensemble of effort, a friendship
of minds, a perfect harmony of creative souls. In the orchestra of
productive spirits that plays in the motion picture, no man dare be
master, no man dare be assistant. The manager himself must be
_primus inter pares_. And neither the author nor the manager is the
chief creator of a work: it is created in truth with the idea of
equal honor and responsibility for author, manager, actor, operator,
and architect. Let each man in this circle of personalities be a
professional in his field—and an intelligent person with regard to the
fields of each of his colleagues. If anyone fails to perform his full
duty, or if anyone pushes his own personality too ♦obtrusively into
the foreground, the inherent value of the film is weakened while its
eventual success is jeopardized. This is true, for art is weak and
but little capable of defending itself against the fatuous doings and
dealings of all that is merely dazzling, just as truth is but little
minded to take up effective warfare against the hollow phrase.
♦ “obtrustively” replaced with “obtrusively”
The values that have been found in this way solved the problem of the
material. An artist soul that is certain of itself will never find any
great difficulty in seizing upon the right tools to accomplish its
ends; and it will rely upon its feelings in determining what these
tools shall be. And yet the labyrinth in which the film artist is
supposed to find himself is so ramified and many-sided that even the
greatest connoisseurs not infrequently lose their way in the winding
maze of paths that lie open and seem to bid for popular usage.
The main wheel in the machinery of film art has been found; the
technical bases which decide the limits to which the accomplishments
and achievements of the motion pictures may hope to go, these are
known. Just as brush and colors, or hammer and chisel, each inartistic
means in themselves, circumscribe the arts which they aid in creating,
and set up a vigorous resistance to an alien or irrelevant aid, just so
does the moving picture mechanism become indignant at the intrusion of
any and every foreign contrivance or figuration the essential being of
which is beyond its natural control.
These technical means, by which the manifolding of scenes is made
possible and their reproduction stimulating, aid in preserving the
naturally perishable art work of the scene or act. The actor-scene
becomes the pivot of all art consideration. It is from it that all
recruiting and recreation radiate; and the fame and glory that attach
to the enterprise fall upon those people who delineate the play of the
human heart in the visible presence of the spectator.
[Illustration: Fig. 6. Scene from _Destiny_.
[_See p. 83_]
]
* * * * *
The actor on the legitimate stage is a person—that is, a _per-sona_
(a “sounding-through”); he is the speaking tube of the poet.
His conception of the rôle he acts is limited, determined, and
circumscribed, at least by the words of the poet, and these are,
so to speak, anchored in the harbor of his activity. If the art of the
actor means “art seen through a temperament,” there still remains the
marginal latitude of the temperament, of the personality. Despite this
latitude, however, it is unlikely that an actor will be minded to, or
be able to, make such self-imposed use of his personality as would be
subversive of the ends the poet himself had in mind. The contest, the
dispute, the disagreement about the interpretation of a given rôle—we
have but to think of the riddle of Hamlet or Mephistopheles—invariably
revolves about the question of what the poet himself meant by it when
he created it. The stage actor becomes the interpreter of the poetic
purpose.
The most important means at the disposal of the stage actor is the
words, the lines he has to learn. The world in which he acts is
relatively the same as the everyday world in which he lives when off
the stage and going about his usual business. The northern actor makes
but little use of gestures; they mean but little to him. Such concepts
as he wishes to transmit to the spectator he feels should and must be
transmitted through the aid of speech. Naturally, the stage actor does
not speak in the restless, uncertain, and indistinct manner in which
he speaks when off the stage. His language—with the exception of
that employed in the hyper-naturalistic drama—is filed and planed,
whether it be prose or verse. But he makes himself understood by his
dramaturgic colleagues, principally through the same means that he
employs when he wishes to convey an idea to them in daily life.
In the frame of the scenic apparatus, the actor plays in the course of
a few moments, and in _one_ progressive and uninterrupted action, his
rôle from beginning to end. In this case there is no such thing as
the splitting up of the action that is to be gone through with into a
hundred or more different scenes. It is only rare, to be sure, that the
artist observes the whole of his playing from the wings, but in the
scenes he has to play the ♦character of his rôle is developed in logical
sequence, and he has become familiar with the entire play through
rehearsals or through previous performances.
♦ “charcater” replaced with “character”
He is his own auditor. The lines of the poet are transformed also
for him into intoxicating music to which he resigns, by which he is
inspired, and on the wings of which he is carried along.
In addition to all of this, there comes that rare and invaluable
reciprocal action and reaction between him and his spectator, the
force of which lends an inextinguishable and inescapable force to his
receptive soul.
There is only one thing that tortures him, and from which there is
no possible escape: he sees himself obliged to crawl into a new and
strange rôle to-morrow, and into still another new and strange rôle
day after to-morrow, and so on throughout his entire career as long
as this is in the ascendancy. This being the case, even the greatest
creation of the greatest poet is apt, if the danger is not incessantly
guarded against, to rattle around in his soul with the emptiness of a
hand-organ. But it is right there that we note the real task of the
stage actor: he is not supposed to bellow forth scene after scene in
uncontrolled eruptions of feelings. On the contrary, he is supposed to
study each work of art, rehearse it, say it over, look into it, until
he _knows_ it from every angle and in its every aspect. There is only
one state of mind that can be sure of success when it is a question
of performing a written play on the legitimate stage: the calm, easy,
superior assurance that comes from infinite study and practice. “I
seize the passions as the pianist seizes the octaves—without seeing
what I am doing!” This confession was made by Salvini.
* * * * *
Compared with his colleagues on the legitimate stage, the film
actor has in many ways a much more difficult task. The Italian and
the Frenchman, both highly gifted in the art of mimicry, are
much better adapted to the art of gesticulation than is the stiff
northerner, or the snobbish cosmopolite whom the moving picture of
all peoples takes such great delight in portraying. But the feverish
gestures of the Romance people is beginning to screech and scream, in
the moving picture, with the result, rather astonishing in itself, that
the undemonstrative northerner is becoming the most gifted film actor.
Now, why have the film actors of the Romance peoples been a failure? It
is easy to answer the question: Because the film shows _life_, while
the Romance film, and particularly that of the Italians, has shown
_theater_, and not always good theater at that.
The film actor is split with doubt; he labors under a dual desire: he
is supposed to avail himself of all the means of mimic expression which
he consciously neglects and oppresses in daily life—and he is supposed
consciously to neglect and suppress the linguistic means of expression
which he employs in everyday life. The defective mimic ability of the
northerner is revealed in the majority of German, Scandinavian, and
American films. So soon as the actor becomes aware that his gestures
are not putting the picture across, he begins to speak his soundless
language.
His gesture is supposed to embrace the content, in the way of
feeling, of the entire scene. In this striving, the actor is supported
by the peculiarity of the film mechanism, which catches up even the
gentlest and most subdued mimicry and holds it up before the spectator.
It would be impossible, especially for a northerner, to play an entire
mimic action, in all its shades and nuances, at one time or in one
concerted effort. This explains why the pantomime could never rise
above the level of a rather crude art form. But the film dissects the
action, winnows its parts, and allocates them to various places or
dramaturgic localities. Everything that happens in the same place is
assembled, while the picture is being taken, and made into a united and
single play. This is done, of course, for practical reasons associated
with costumes, decorations, and travels. This being the case, the
actor does, and has to, concentrate his entire attention, for a very
short time, a time that is generally measured in seconds, on the mimic
material and means that are naturally placed at his disposal.
This human weakness—which makes a relatively long and at the same time
inspired action impossible—has been made the basis of photographic
technique by the American. His reasoning and his technique must
be commended. Where his European colleagues generally let the
apparatus stand during the entire scene and then play a few close-ups
later on, the American takes a picture of every individual scene,
and from all conceivable angles. His scenario is arranged from the
beginning with this end in view. The result is that each scene is
wrapped in a spirited, glimmering, glittering unrest which lifts even
the most indifferent episode quite up above the shadow of tedium. I am
of the opinion that the American film owes a good share of its charm to
this distinctly advantageous and manifold dissection of the pictures,
just as I believe that the failure of so many German and Swedish films
is due to the slowness and tediousness that are familiarly associated
with their photographic technique.
[Illustration: Fig. 7. Scene from _The Children of Darkness_.
[_See p. 83_]
]
This splitting up of the film action, however, into individual scenes,
which are not photographed in their logical sequence, brings into the
artistry of the film actor that profound psychic cleft, even physical
disruption, which fundamentally differentiates his creative activity
from that of the actor on the legitimate stage. The action does not
carry him into his playing, or into the inner nature of his rôle, in
calm, gradual development. On the contrary, the flood-tide of feeling
springs up obviously without the proper motivation, and ends with a
suddenness that suggests that someone cut it off before it had been
fully lived out. There is no such thing as a gliding and swelling of
mood such as is necessary, it would seem, to effect a mild and logical
transition from scene to scene.
This causes the actor and the manager all manner of difficulty; neither
is able to gain a complete survey of the work to be done. Where the
regular stage actor brings his mind into the proper equilibrium, we
might say equanimity, slowly, step by step, and with a careful studying
of the objective that is to be taken, so that the climax of his effort
will stand out from the subsidiary efforts that have led up to it, the
film actor scatters his entire energy over all the scenes, and some of
them are not merely preparatory to the climax, they are in themselves
of a distinctly subordinate nature. When a case really arises in which
there is perfect artistic gradation, each scene receiving the emphasis
it deserves and the climax rising up above all that has gone before, we
may be certain that this is due to the solemn fact that both the acting
and the management have been in possession of unqualified artistic
appreciation, that each has worked in harmony with the other, and that
the eventual and final success of the achievement has been due to
unusual excellence in the way of creating and producing a picture. When
this happens, however, the layman remains altogether unaware of it.
He takes it for granted. But even he appreciates the astonishing effect
of it all; he somehow knows that the performance was perfect. He feels
the perfection though he is unable to explain it.
Take the case of Lubitsch’s _Sumurun_. The histrionic brilliancy of
it was due to the fact that it consisted of an unbroken and dazzling
chain of episodes and pictures. The truth is, this disadvantage that
is inherent in the technique of the film can be removed only by the
author. He must see to it that there is a rhythm about his scenes;
these must rise and fall naturally and smoothly.
An excess of magnificence is easier to endure than a total lack of
ebullient ingenuity. The average film is a tedious, wooden affair that
moves along with the slowness of all that is mediocre and commonplace.
For in the very inherent inability to get a complete survey of what
is taking place lies a hazard which only the best of film actors, and
these only when urged on and inspired by the best of producers, can
take with ease or success: the hazard lies in the fact that the entire
character of a figure is tuned either to a sharp or a flat note, in a
major or a minor key, and once set going it works like an unwelcome
narcotic. The actor plays on a certain day just one individual scene,
now from the first and then from the last and still again from some
intervening act. Then on still another day he takes up another scene
from another act, and so on until the mosaic of all the scenes has
been, not composed or arranged in becoming sequence, but heaped up in a
veritable pile.
It is perfectly easy to see how that fine feeling that is associated
with real art, and which even the least gifted actor in the spoken
drama has at his immediate disposal, escapes the less gifted film
actor, when this method of playing is in vogue, and especially so if he
is not carried along by a colorful bit of poetry. He is simply not in a
position to bring new colors, new tones, new passions into his acting,
and therefore into his act. The result of all this is that entire film
actions are played by one or several actors on a single string. The
women of the film fraternity are frequently characterized by this very
type of playing; indeed, it is rare that any one of them can boast of
the innate possession of that choice ability which enables them to
vary the chords that are struck in their souls by the actions they are
supposed to depict.
There are a few, however, who have the psychic power which spells
variety in the creation of character. In Germany there is first of all
Mady Christians; and then there is Lil Dagover. France has only one
such film actress, and she is but little known: Marie-Louise Tribe. In
Sweden, Karin Molander and Tora Teje are noted for their genius in this
direction. In America, colorful film actresses are as numerous as the
sands of the sea. But in all film countries the average film actress is
a tired, tedious, washed-out, and worn-out character.
Such lifeless moving pictures present us consequently with the
soporific drama of a single sorrow or grief or pain, of a conventional
melancholy, sadness, or lament. And these emotions are reiterated time
out of mind, and through the abnormal exploitation of sentimentality
they become swollen and mendacious. Indeed, even buoyancy and mirth can
sound hard and tinny if they are made to trip along without variation
or interruption.
It is the task of the author and the producer to work hand and hand
with the actor to the end that he may be enabled to put life into
his acting. To do this, flashes of light must be shed, in the real
and artistic sense, on the action of the play; the individual scene
must be made to appear in its true light with regard to the play as a
whole—that is to say, this must be done if the complete and completed
play is to give the effect of unified art, art as an entity, art in its
totality.
The dissection of the action into countless inorganic parts
naturally has its effect on the artistic form of the film actor, and
gives to his efforts a tone and quality that is altogether different
from what we are accustomed to in the case of the actor in the spoken
drama.
This is seen first of all in the rehearsal. Such a thing as the
learning of a rôle by heart, or the practicing of gestures before
the mirror, is unknown to the film actor. With him the rehearsal is
rather an experimenting. In America, where the use of the negative
plays no rôle, the individual parts of the scenes are turned again and
again, until it is possible to establish a “model copy” from which the
best parts are chosen. But such a “waste,” which seems to be quite
profitable in the end, is unknown in Europe, which, following the lead
of its lack of reason, feels that it is too impoverished to indulge in
such lavishness. In Europe the apparatus, literally speaking, is turned
but once, or, in case the result is wholly unacceptable, it is turned
twice, but with a sigh.
The stage actor is a “soul stormer.” But, as contrasted with the film
actor, the stage actor can work himself into his rôle gradually and by
all manner of psychic cajolery. The film actor is not presented with
an entire work of art, but with the merest particle of such a work,
and then he is told to put life into it. “Inspire it!” That is the
command to which he must be obedient. “That is the trial by fire of
the film actor,” says the doughty Danish director, Urban Gad, “when he
can poetize himself, so to speak, into the rôle that he is supposed to
create, when he can feel the situation in its entirety. Then he is the
born film actor. Otherwise he is merely a more or less well trained
circus horse.”
The creative work of the film actor is, consequently, not a matter of
slow and possibly even tiresome learning in solo and ensemble; it is
a matter of ingenious and spontaneous improvisation. The man who has
to stand up before a mirror and see whether this gesture is fitting
and another permissible is no film actor. And it is from his ability
to rise from nothing to an exalted and passionate art-feeling that
the pride and joy of the film player owe their origin; and having
originated, they cast a beneficent atmosphere over the art that is
called into being.
It is not enough to delude oneself regarding an essentially cold heart
by the abundant use of gestures that would seem to indicate that the
heart is warm. There are actors on the legitimate stage who, by the
traditional use of the merest and veriest routine, can carry their
publics along with them and raise them to pinnacles of enthusiasm;
make them rage with indignation; or petrify them into horror over
the deeds done before them. No film actor has ever yet succeeded in
doing that. The lines are creations of the mind; they are spoken with
shrewd calculation as to the effects they can evoke; they are declaimed
with real consideration. The gestures, on the other hand, are truer
than the lines; they come direct from the soul. Moreover, the lens
of the familiar apparatus is sharper and less indulgent than the
human eye. The lens catches everything; nothing escapes it. It makes
a living picture of every attempt to deceive and visualizes all that
comes before it. No film actor who is not passionately concerned with
and about the incident he is to portray will ever bring other people
to the point of passion. The inert playing of comedy which infests
the legitimate stage with false and idle pathos, with the spirit of
repulsive paint and powder, is utterly out of place, and out of the
question, in the moving picture. The film actor has got to be what he
plays.
Every actor, however, has his own personality; his own world. There
is an atmosphere about him that is his. He cannot escape it; it makes
itself felt; and it causes him to have a definite, even unique,
disposition, temperament, character. Now if the circumference of
his soul is very large, the compass of his soul will be equally
large—and he will provide us with a wonderful drama—the drama of a man
who can create one character to-day, another to-morrow, and in so doing
renew himself as a molder of personalities.
The moving picture, with its spontaneous creation, is a high grade and
first-class measurer of temperament. The world has a plentiful supply
of actors and actresses who can depict robbers and prostitutes of the
lowest as well as of the highest classes of society. But the world has
only a few, a very few artists, in whom a royal and proud, a fine and
demure, a rich and colorful soul plays its part.
The suddenness with which these feelings must be conjured up demands
rapidity of inspiration, an ever-ready excitability (the managers are
well aware of this!), a pliability of mood, an unrestrained capacity to
enter into the spirit of complete renunciation, compared with which the
ability on the part of the regular stage actor to feel himself into his
rôle is a calm and subdued sauntering about, a mere strolling through
the mazes of the human heart. The film actor is not fired on to intense
passion by the words of the poet; he has to kindle the potential flame
within his heart by the fire that he himself strikes, and with the
aid of such fuel as he himself can assemble for the purpose. But
in doing all this, his faithful colleague, the manager, stands by
his side, and his dare not be an unvibrant soul. The manager is duty
bound to find words that will inspire even the most lethargic of film
actors. The will power, one might say the will violence, of the best
of managers is so strong that, guided by them, the actor plays as in a
hypnotic state.
Without inspired and intelligent direction, the actual necessity
of ensemble playing, and the necessities imposed by the desire for
such playing are easily forgotten, with the result that lack of
discipline dissipates the general effect, and such art as might have
been revealed goes the way of all weakness. The reason for this safe
assertion is patent: in the motion picture, the feelings burst forth
from momentarily calm hearts. Unusual diligence must, consequently, be
exercised in the working-up of emotions, in the emphasis that is to be
laid on significant scenes and on climaxes.
For these nervous and sensitive people, the restraint of feelings is
a distinct torture. The endless waiting in the hot and noisy glass
house, the disturbing feature of the apparatus while the picture is
being taken, the garish light which hurts the eye, the lamp which not
infrequently explodes with the subsequent danger to such combustible
paraphernalia as ball dress and wig, and the director, this
disagreeable person who is always around, watching what is going on,
interrupting here with a word of constructive criticism and there with
a sentence of plain abuse—these are a few of the things that make the
film actor’s life a hard one. And added to them must be the solemn
fact that there is no public there to give wings to the actor’s soul.
This being the case, an actually mad desire to create a character
has got to come over and settle down upon the actor if he is to come
into the right frame of mind. That he has got to be a man of perfect
self-forgetfulness while surrounded by this hubbub of haste and
confusion need not be stated.
* * * * *
The means at the disposal of the film actor is his body, which admits
of unmeasured and unaccounted possibilities in the way of expressing
emotions. It was only a few years ago that we learned that there is no
condition of the soul for which the body does not have its appropriate
and interpretative movement; and to-day we hardly have an inkling
of the profound depths of the soul for which bodily agitations or
affections may be found, and will be found, once the generations that
are to come shall have learned the true significance of mimicry. In the
future, mimicry must develop into an intimate and familiar language. In
the dances of antiquity and in the pantomime of past centuries, the
soul wrestled with the body, for it had already sensed its ability to
speak through the body. But the spectators sat too far away, the ring
of the gesture was drowned out by space, and the bodies had to shriek,
as it were, in order to be understood. But a tender feeling can do
nothing more than whisper, for it is averse to all that is loud. The
soul gave up the struggle as hopeless; pantomime became petrified, or
stereotyped, into the conventional ballet which has dragged its weary
course through the centuries.
It was not until our own day—the ancient arts of which are tired to
death and foul to the very marrow of their bones—a day in which it
seemed that art could take no hope, that technique stepped in and
made inventions as a result of which the gesture took on fullness and
acquired sound. Modern technique has invented the film, and the film is
the violin of the human body.
Before one recognized the nuances of which the film was potentially
capable, it had to wander along through the crude errors of pantomime.
That the imperfect films of the first decades offered only imperfect,
at times even repellent, pictures, is altogether natural. The
intellectuals of all nations, and those who had schooled their eye and
their heart on the perfection and beauty of the old and established
arts, were terrified, if not horrified, at and by the unlicked antics
of this new contraption. They saw in the motion picture nothing more
than a machine to entertain, chiefly to amuse, the populace. They
damned it outright; they found it a perverter of youth, just as they
had and have found those cheap, vulgar and badly printed paper volumes
which are to be had for a few pennies, and which poison the youthful
mind so that the expenditure of millions in charity and philanthropy
cannot reclaim them.
There were as yet no artists who could play on this new and novel
fairy violin. The evolution of the film is quite logical: it began
with devices and agencies which were inadequate, both artistically and
technically.
[Illustration: Fig. 8. Scene from _Algol_.
[_See p. 84_]
]
It is our duty and our pleasure to do homage at this point to an artist
who took up with the film, and resigned herself to it, at a time
when artists in general poured contempt without measure and derision
without thought on it. This artist was the Dane—Asta Nielsen. She
has been dethroned, unquestionably a prima donna of the old school
by whose playing we can now do no more than evaluate the tremendous
progress that has been made by her pupils and successors. But in
Europe she was the queen, the standard-bearer of the film. Her large,
dark eyes, and the symmetrical play of her limbs, captivated and
converted many of different faith to the cause. Her gestures were
taken from the pantomime: she moved across the canvas in slow, long,
ostentatious tread. There was, indeed, something about her movements
that might be described as obtrusive, importunate. But Asta Nielsen
was—let us repeat, in Europe—the first of that great herd of jobless
_artistes_ and beggarly paid servants who took up her position before
the revolving camera in a really and truly artistic way. She was filled
with a passion, and endowed with a faith in art that was unknown to and
unappreciated by the great majority, as she played the lachrymose and
vapid tales that were then being turned out for visualization on the
screen.
She was originally an actress; she abandoned the legitimate stage and
went over to the motion picture. Now, the actor on the regular stage
is one kind of individual; the actor for the motion picture is quite
another. The stage has a limited and well-defined category of beings
and shadows, of vessels, so to speak, for the fancy of the poet in
words. There is the youthful lover, the sentimental dame of uncertain
years, the first hero, the first heroine, the doughty old father, the
droll old lady, and so on. The list need not be filled out; it is a
familiar one.
Anything that fits into one of these classifications is played,
_summa summarum_, by the actor engaged to take the part. The actor
of the spoken stage has a clear and definite being; his character,
his make-up, is known. He is a comedian, a boneless man who can slip
into this rôle to-day and into another to-morrow. In his position,
whatever it may be at any given time, he engages in a really fraudulent
and affected game. That is the comedy which devours in time the very
character of that actor whose gifts are naturally none too great. He
becomes a player of all parts; he creates all rôles; he grows into
a poseur without truth of soul. Only the tremendous characters of
the rarely gifted, of a Garrick or a Kainz, win the victory over the
insidious phrase, assimilate any rôle they essay to interpret, and
transform it into a part of their own being.
I do not know whether Asta Nielsen was a great artist on the legitimate
stage or not; I hardly believe that she was. For there is the
atmosphere of “comedy” about her rôles, an eternal conflict between
truth and phraseology. No one had even a remote conception of the
unsparing nature of the film lens in the early days of her histrionic
glory. One schematized a rôle in accordance with the traditions of
the legitimate stage. Nor was this all; the first great film artist
had to do everything. She was worth her weight in gold; and she was
exploited. This week she would take the part of a demoniac prostitute
in silk and satin; next week she would play the part of a young girl
whose youthfulness was not surpassed by her chastity, and whose beauty
was the cynosure of vigilant eyes.
Two things, consequently, were to be recognized, and to be overcome:
the phraseology of the pantomime gesture, and the insincerity of the
rôle. The legitimate stage portrays and represents shadows—speaking
tubes of the poet; the film uses real human beings.
The development of the film has been different in different countries.
In one country its growth has been noticeably slow; in another it
has been remarkably rapid. Film actors put in their appearance,
were carried along for a while on the wave of popularity, and then
vanished—or they still fight on—Asta Nielsen is a case in point—in
a mad and ineffectual attempt to regain or retain their thrones.
This development of the film has been recognized nowhere. It has not
come to light. It has been brought about in perfect accord with that
instinctive necessity with which the healthy never fails to blaze its
trail and find its way.
Man versus rôle, individual versus a stage phantom—that is the
situation. In America, where cumbersome traditions are rare, in the
realm of art, the goal was reached more quickly than elsewhere. It was
in America that we witnessed the complete defection from the stage
actor and a consequential preference for the type. There is to be no
mimicking; there is to be no playing of theater; each man has his own
character, and this character he projects on the screen, again and
again, now in this disguise, now in another, but it is always the same
character. He projects his own ego; and for this reason he never fails,
for a man can find his own mouth with the spoon, it makes no difference
how dark the dining-room may be.
[Illustration: Fig. 9. Scene from _Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown_.
[_See p. 84_]
]
There is another country which, by virtue of its well-nigh complete
isolation from the hardened traditions of the Mediterranean nations,
found the truth and genuineness of the film with marked rapidity:
Sweden. The Swedish player is very rarely a great “actor.” His
face, with its broad Finnish cheek bones, is rather immovable. His
eyes dream, but inwardly. They turn at times with an expression of
unqualified skepticism toward the things of the outer world only
to return to the same soul from which they derived their initial
characteristics and inspiration. The figures are not yet entirely
awakened; they stretch themselves after the fashion of young trees.
But in these Swedish men lies deep breath: it is the dreamy melancholy
of their native land. Every one of them has the warm blood of life
coursing through his veins, and the atmosphere of truth is about them
all, even when we feel that they are all a bit alike in the matter
of elegiac temperament. When steel and stone are rubbed together,
sparks fly; the Swedes are all constituted, more or less, of the same
resilient wood.
The film theater of the Romance peoples was simply fearful. The
ostentatious gesticulation, the long-drawn-out echo of feelings,
the false pomp of their operatic style have been the cause of many
a bankruptcy among film companies and producers in sunny Italy. The
Italian film industry represents, in truth, in the year 1923, nothing
but a heap of ruins from which here and there, but only rarely, a patch
of green prosperity raises its intimidated tuft. A great many Italians
are coming up to Germany to-day, the film gestures of which appeal to
them as being relatively tolerable. The sober, phraseless vibration of
American acting gets on the hot-blooded nerves of these sons of the
South.
We Germans, however, are fully convinced that the way we had been
following, in the matter of gestures, up to 1923 was a false one. Our
producers rarely have the courage to go fishing for film actors,
for new and youthful faces, in the great stream of humanity that flows
by them without ceasing. Until only one year ago, we fancied that no
one was fitted for the screen unless he had proved his ability on the
stage. That was a grievous error.
We have, to be sure, some clever character players whose psychic
powers were not corrupted by the pathos of the stage. I mention, among
others, the famous Jennings, Wegener, and Schünzel. They are great on
the stage for the very evident and simple reason that they dominate
any part they play and make it yield to the dictates of their own
personalities. But we have no youthful favorite among the ladies; we
do not have the smiling hero, who lustily packs up life and carries it
off on one shoulder. But our greatest lack is in another direction: we
have no young woman; we have no radiant girl. She is lacking, but only
in our moving pictures; in life she is present. And if we wish to bring
these charming and lovely young girls into the moving picture world and
project them on the screen, we have got to make up our minds that there
is but one place where they can be found: in life itself. We have got
to recruit them from the flowing naturalness of their laughter.
We begin with a decided aversion to the star system. And it must be
said that all of those presumptive and presumptuous film princesses,
whose abilities would be remarkable indeed if they bore the slightest
relation to their caprices, have disappeared from the studios. These
stars made, until quite recently, the production of a picture in
Germany an excessively expensive undertaking because of their lack of
willingness to work, and their eternal talking. This explains why Fritz
Lang, of the Decla-Bioscop, showed so many new and strange faces in his
marvelous picture based on the Nibelungen saga.
It is rare, in the case of the legitimate stage, that a part is written
for a special actor. Whoever fits the part is assigned to it, and he
creates the character. No other course of procedure is thinkable, for
a drama is written for a thousand stages. There is something solitary
about the film; we regard it as something that “takes place” but
once. It is difficult to write good film characters if the writer is
unfamiliar with the players that create the characters. Hampered by
this lack of personal acquaintance, the most that can be accomplished
by the author is an acceptable sketch. One has to associate with the
prospective film actors, and study their personalities without letting
them become aware of the end in view and the caution that is being
exercised in attaining it. One has to study the player’s unconscious
movements; the mirthful action of his hand; the sensuous expression
of his eye; his gait; his manner of sitting down. The whole man is
sometimes revealed by the way in which he smokes a cigarette. One must
make the actor angry and nervous. Each expression of impatience, of
joy, of tedium that is characteristic of a given man must be noted down
in the film book. One has got to make a portrait of the man who is
going to play the part the author has in mind.
He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just
as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward
the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got
to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him
on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired
information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift
a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and
transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. There it finds itself
again, safe and carefully guarded: it smiles, and develops its flowers.
It is only in this way that the characters grow from their own power.
Made to grow in this fashion, they reveal in their every movement,
as in every deed they do, the saving sign of inner truth. They
convulse the spectator through the unadulterated naturalness of their
art; and by virtue of their own ability, they can make an improbable
situation seem natural, for their own life is natural, just as it is
peculiar to them alone, and virile.
It is impossible to be a great film actor if one is small and unworthy.
The person who is cold by nature, and who carries an unsympathetic
heart in his breast, will never be able to do more than simulate real
feelings. I do not believe that a prostitute would ever be able to
play the rôle of an angelic creature in a film. Behind and back of the
keyboard on which the film writer improvises there must be a set of
beautifully tuned strings. Otherwise nothing comes of the effort but
the banal clanging of the hand-organ.
The film actor must be first of all a human being, a real man, a
clear and unequivocal character of life and from life. The picture of
his soul is found only in everyday life, never on the stage. And his
adaptability to the moving picture is determined by the manner in which
he conducts himself in the life he leads from day to day with other
men. If he is beautiful, if his body is erect and pliable, so much the
better. But he must be a man of character.
Character and temperament—two things that cannot be learned. One can
learn, however, the business of playing while facing the camera; one
can learn, in this position, to control one’s gestures, and to give a
cautious expression of the feelings.
On the legitimate stage it is quite permissible, it is indeed
necessary, for the actor to express his emotions through a certain
exaggeration, with the most beautiful pathos known to gesticulation.
The opposite is true of the film: in it, suppression of emotions,
muffling of feelings, is necessary. Why? Because in actual life
feelings are after all expressed in a subdued way, behind the veil, so
to speak, of that on which the interested party is to eavesdrop. Every
time we notice any such emotion as ecstasy on the screen we remain
cold; we become in truth disenchanted because of what we have sensed.
Experience has already taught us that exaggeration has no place in the
moving picture; it is ineffective. This lesson we have learned from
the Italians. All good film actors are noted for a certain measure of
immovability; they are cautious with and sparing of their gestures.
[Illustration: Fig. 10. Scene from _Golem_.
[_See p. 85_]
]
In the good film manuscript, the feelings are not poured in a lavish
way over every single scene. Over the majority of scenes there should
rest a splendid freshness, a sunny everyday life filled with a
wholesome humor the chief inspiration of which is the very joy of
living and the atmosphere of activity. The isolated scenes of real
feeling should be played all the more quietly and calmly if the natural
instinct of the actor prompts him to display unusually strong feelings.
In other words, the more excited the actor the less excited his acting
should be. I personally place the wreath of honor on the head of that
actor who creates the coveted effects with the least expenditure of
visible energy. In every gesture, in every flash or darkening of the
eye, there should be concealed a deep truth which is illumined and
illuminated, secretly, by the warmth of the feelings that the artist in
reality experiences.