THE POET
I will praise the sons of Atreus,
Of Cadmus will I sing—
But my harp will be in tune with
A theme that makes love ring.
—Anacreon.
We have progressed with our subject up to a certain point, proceeding
at all times from the external to the internal; from that which is
without to that which is within. As we have done this, the parts have
been placed in our hands: the mechanism and the scenic picture. The
individual who unites these two parts into a coherent whole, and who
breathes the breath of a full and pulsating world into these united
parts, is the poet. The means are in his hand, just as hammer and
chisel; the picture stands before his soul.
The longing of every artist is to fashion and give shape to a heaven
and an earth; he longs to compress the whole of bubbling life into his
picture. But the marble block gapes at him and says: “Of sound in me
there is not a note. I am immovable. Colors do not radiate from me.
Fashion me into a living picture! Give me form and life!”
It is even so with the moving picture. It has its own world, a
narrow, hard, unwieldy world that is not unlike the heartless chunk of
marble. Locked up in this world of the moving picture are the fates and
visions which dream of the amiable artist who will some day chance to
take them unto himself, and give them the life they feel is theirs by
every right.
The poet of the motion picture! From his soul come forth the
pictures—those that have never been seen, that are never to be seen.
The divine grace of completing a work of his own is not given to
him; he is given the torture associated with excavating confused and
heterogenous visions from the mountain of desire. This is his part.
Though the better, he does not choose it; it is assigned to him by
virtue of the things that have been given him, and have not been given
to other men.
The dramatist, the poet of the legitimate stage, has a final form at
his immediate disposal—the word. This word rings out from the stage in
unamended and unadulterated form, and is caught up, with gratitude, by
the sympathetic friends in the pit, stalls, and boxes. He is rewarded
with thanks—even though the thanks he receives come merely from hearts
momentarily exuberant.
Those who make their living from the creative activity of the
motion picture poet are famous people. They live in the very atmosphere
of renown. Their names are household words. Their pictures are
displayed in the plateglass show-windows of the cities.
But the motion picture poet himself? Who knows anything about Carl
Mayer, the author of _Dr. Caligari_ and the _Hintertreppe_? Who ever
heard of Hans Gaus, the man who wrote _Madame Recamier_? Who is in
any way familiar with the name of Hans Kräly, who, in collaboration
with Lubitsch, wrote _Die Puppe_, _Kohlhiesels Töchter_, and a number
of our other most brilliant scenarios? Truth to tell, if Lubitsch had
been only a writer of scenarios and not at the same time one of our
very greatest managers and producers, it would be impossible to make a
circus dog bark at the mention of his name.
This is all due in part to the inherent nature of the case. The motion
picture is art for the masses. And the masses are naturally accustomed
to admire that artist who submits his creations to them in tangible,
palpable, and finished form. The man who chopped the crude picture from
the marble block was called an apprentice, a laborer, a pupil. But in
contradistinction to the poet of the motion picture, the apprentice did
not create the completed and complex picture.
To be a poet is to be a brooder. In order to acquire the title of
poet, one must be able to conjure a coveted picture from the refractory
clay.
The poets of German Romanticism did their creative work in rain-soaked,
wind-rattled attic rooms far from every vestige of external culture.
They suffered the inconvenient pangs of hunger while so engaged. But
no one has ever become fat from their creations at the same time that
the thanks they have received have come from the heart, and have been
repaid a thousandfold.
To be a motion picture poet means that you have got to keep your feet
on the ground. In this art—which is hopelessly bound up with the bank
account and the pocketbook—there is no place for the idealist of
romanticism. Such an individual can only stand alone in the corner,
embittered and sterile.
The film writer is still held in rather low esteem in Germany. It is
impossible to get along without him, for without new ideas and actions
the entire apparatus of the film corporation stands idle. As things are
at present, however, the method of procedure is incorrect: his material
is taken from him, he is kept at what seems a safe distance from the
ateliers, and the duty of building his material up into an actable
and effective motion picture is left to the producer and manager.
The author is poorly paid; consequently he finds it materially and
spiritually unwise to torture himself for any great length of time with
any one work. Quantity, not quality, has to be his shibboleth if he is
to meet his very ordinary financial obligations.
The mistake that is being made is naturally a two-sided one. The film
author’s place is in the studio; he should be the silent witness of
every scene; he should be thoroughly conversant with such technical
progress as has been made and is being made in the way of illumination
and psychic photography. But he dare never forget that a film work is
not the work of an individual.
An author has to have, if success is to crown his efforts, a great
store of general information, a store such as reaches far out beyond
the studio. He should have a general but clear idea as to what it costs
to mount a film. He should be familiar with what other film companies
have accepted and produced; he should study the film output of foreign
film peoples—if he does not, collisions are apt to occur and these have
been known to result in lawsuits based on the charge of plagiarism. He
should be skilled in the distribution and placing of such decorations
as are to be used with his scenario, and thus be able to avoid the
embarrassment that arises when a colossal scenery has been bought
and paid for, though the scene that it is supposed to decorate is of
Liliputian dimensions. He should know what people are talking about,
how they are most easily entertained, most intelligently amused. If he
fails in this regard, he is apt to expend his creative energy in the
lining out of a film that is in its place in an established institution
for the blind.
♦ “Liliputian” replaced with “Lilliputian”
There is a tremendous amount of work attached to the domain which
the film author feels is his; there is so much technique, so much
specializing in the modern motion picture, that the author is
unquestionably an indispensable member of the court that creates the
film; he does not make it alone, but it cannot be made without him.
His opinions must be respected, otherwise he avenges himself by an
action which bears on its very brow the stamp of mere affectation and
technique; you can see that it has been invented; that it is not of
sterling inspiration. And so far as the recognition of the film author
is concerned, I am bound to say that things are still in a serious
plight in my native land.
[Illustration: Fig. 13. Scene from _Sumurun_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
If the moving picture writer is paid precisely the same money for
a subtle, well-studied, artistic, and purified bit of poet action
that he would be paid, or is paid, for a bit of cheap, meretricious,
and insidious cajolery, there is no hope. Then good-bye soul,
and welcome to the martyrdom that ensues when other people wax fat
on the creation that has made the author lean! He says to himself,
and he cannot be expected to say anything else, “To the Devil with
idealism!” This explains why Hans Gaus is not writing another _Madame
Recamier_, why he is not writing any more passionate, brilliant,
disciplined film poetry. And it explains, too, alack and alas, why he
is turning out cleverly devised, invented, and not felt, film pieces
that keep the pot boiling. This explains, of course it does, why the
battalions of rather talented motion picture writers are fabricating
whole libraries of scenarios that reveal nothing more than the cold
hand of invention.
The motion picture itself suffers most from this unenviable state of
affairs. But this, in itself, is a rather impersonal theme for lament,
for it is the film corporations that must bear the major part of this
misfortune. And why? Because a good scenario, one that glows with the
heat of informed inspiration, forces its way into the soul of the
spectator, invites him to come back, and even goes so far as to have
the hope well forth in his bosom that, having now seen twenty moving
pictures in which the swollen effusions of uninspired tricks have left
him cold and disappointed, he will go the twenty-first time with enough
faith in human nature to fancy that he may at last be rewarded for
his persistence. A motion picture is successful only when an unusually
good and ♦extraordinarily inspired scenario chances to lift it up above
the colorless odds in numerical superiority and enables it, for this
reason and for other reasons, to shine forth like a lighthouse on a sea
of near-darkness.
♦ “extaordinarily” replaced with “extraordinarily”
It is sometimes amazing to see what enormous sums of money may be
expended, and what an abundance of ability may be lavished on utterly
inadequate and ineffective poetry. Such a film can never hope for wide
or world-success. Everything that is deserving of attentive interest is
in the picture itself. Once it has been played there is no more to it;
that is the end of it. There may be architects of real imagination and
education, managers who are inherently clever and not at all afraid of
work, a select company of actors and actresses—all of which is fine.
But in this circle of people there is one who is missing: the author.
He should be there, for it is he who is to reflect on the ways of the
world and project a new world on the screen. It is he in whom and
through whom the work of the others is to acquire the breath of real
life.
But, though it is a hard statement, it is true: In _this_ art not a
finger is being moved in the exclusive interests of the idea of
æsthetic progress. And yet, and yet—for the film companies to further
the cause of the poet is to put money into their own pockets. The best
field the film companies can possibly develop is the mind, heart, and
soul of the naturally gifted film author. The film companies will
never have splendid and effective scenarios to work on until they have
made up their minds to reward, in a practical way, the film author,
splendidly and effectively, for his labors, to recognize him, in a
practical way, just as they at present “recognize” the leading manager
and actor.
I am ready to contend that the best film actions are written in
Germany—but that the very worst manuscripts and clue-books are also
written in Germany. This is true of the average. Those companies in
which the film author enjoys the same rights and privileges that the
manager enjoys, and in which the two work hand in hand, are having one
success after another. I need but mention the Decla-Bioscop, a company
that is altogether unique in that its records show that one of the most
brilliant film authoresses Germany has thus far produced, Thea von
Harbou, is married to Fritz Lang, one of our very best managers.
It is a remarkable fact that no one can write a film alone—and that it
should not on this account be attempted. A good film, other things
being equal, is created when two adequately endowed writers, one of
whom can depict action, the other of whom can arrange the scenes, rub
elbows in a common and mutual effort. When it is done in this fashion,
the film glows with the fire of creative genius and is altogether
vivacious.
From an artistic point of view, there is but one way to solve the
problem of the film writer, and that is to have the author—as Griffith,
Lubitsch, and a number of others are doing—stage and produce their own
works. The idea of the action has been crystallized in their souls in a
thousand pictures. No other person, however gifted he may be and be his
intentions the very best, can appreciate the picture even approximately
as well as the author himself who dreamed it into existence.
But if the film author has no ability as a director, the only course
left open to him is to submit his scenario to a second party, or at
least the germ, the central idea of it. The only thing this second
party can then do is to raise a strange flower from the seed the author
sowed. A sympathetic understanding of the two artists, in this case,
is a wish that has not yet been fulfilled. For the two artists to work
at random, to say nothing of working against each other, is to create
confusion worse confounded, and such is not art. In the end the
will of the one or of the other will have made itself felt. And we can
hardly demand of the poet that he accede to revisions and emendations
of his poetry without cavil, inquiry, or interest.
It frequently happens, however, that a talented poet is wholly
unfamiliar with the nature and technique of the motion picture. In such
a case, the artistic and financial success of the picture depends upon
a complete revision of the scenario as originally submitted, and this
revision is undertaken either by the stage manager, who must have a
fair measure of the poet in him even if he has not written, or by that
creature known as the dramaturge: he is part stage critic, part stage
manager.
The old-fashioned dramaturge is, as should be known, the man who has
no idea of his own but who is an ingenious thief. He still vegetates
in all countries, sad specimen though he is. No man is a good
dramaturge who is not also a poet. He should be the second poet who
collaborates with the author. The author is not infrequently maladroit,
dream-burdened, and obsessed with unfilm-like notions. The dramaturge
has to be a malleable connoisseur, one who can scent out of the wealth
of good passages the weak spots of a film manuscript, and then
lift them out before it is too late. To work with such a dramaturge is
a pleasure. The author stands ashamed and humiliated in the presence
of pictures the existence of which the dramaturge first challenges and
then kills. One affable moment follows another of the same enviable
description. A creative fever comes over both of them; they are
convulsed when the heroes suffer; they revel in satisfaction when jolly
situations rebound against each other.
This is however an idealized situation. Generally speaking, the
dramaturge is an ambitious, avaricious, sterile wiseacre who spills his
caustic criticism all over the author’s creation and leaves it a thing
of shreds and patches. With heedless, listless scorn, he derides and
lampoons any idea that did not originate in his anointed head. He robs
in time the author of every vestige of desire to create so that he (the
author) avoids future encounters with him (the dramaturge) as he would
avoid a plague. From that time on, the author writes his manuscripts
alone and sends them in to the dread dramaturge, who is at liberty to
do with them as his conscience dictates. Good, delicate, and amiable
film manuscripts do not arise in this way.
There are poets and managers who do not know what the essential
prerequisites of a good motion picture are. Here is where the
dramaturge comes in. It is his lofty task to effect a reconciliation
between idealism and materialism. That he judge the work solely on
its artistic merits and from the artistic point of view is out of
the question. The first film that arose under such conditions would
be a commercial failure; the second would spell the bankruptcy of
the company that produced it. It is, at the same time, lamentable,
pitiable, when the dramaturge judges a submitted manuscript solely
from the point of view of its potential commercial success. Let this
type of dramaturge have his way, and the film will suffer complete
deterioration, decay, and death. Moreover, such film works have not the
slightest chance of success in foreign countries. To concoct a good
and “safe” thing that will take on the local corner—any man can do
that. But the film must be so great and grandiose that nobody else can
do it. Detective, revolver, and sensation films find devotees in the
movie halls of the entire world who can do this trick just as well as
anybody else; and they know it. Such films have from the very beginning
powerful competition. Why has Charlie Chaplin been such a ubiquitous
success? Because he is unique; his achievements are his own; his
accomplishments are inimitable. A film manuscript is good then and then
only when it promises an artistic and an economic success. Art and
business—let us repeat—must be united in this case.
To judge a film manuscript on this dual basis is, however, not so
difficult. The motion picture is art for the masses. This truth
eliminates of itself all cold-blooded and un-felt texts. A warm,
vivacious, animated, artistically valuable motion picture book has
got to please—that is, it has got to lead up to a commercial success.
The dramaturge who takes this view of his business is an exceedingly
important personage among his company’s acquaintances. He is its
artistic conscience; he is its reliable guarantee against failure.
The basic condition of what he does is perfect knowledge and ability in
the field in which he works. He has to _know_ the nature of the motion
picture; he has to be able to see in advance its possibilities of
success. And this knowing, this seeing, must be second-nature to him;
he must be saturated with them. This alone will give him the ability to
select, from the mass of manuscripts that are submitted to him, those
that are in every way available. He must be the good physician, the
unbribable custodian of those imperfect and yet redeemable papers that
lie on his desk for investigation. Nor is this all. In case the manager
does not elect to stage the film work himself, the dramaturge must be
able to get everything that is in every scene out of it.
[Illustration: Fig. 14. Scene from _Madame Dubarry_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
The basic condition of his very being is the perfect, the
universal recognition of his position, a position that he has to fight
for just as strenuously as the dramaturge of the legitimate stage has
to fight for his. The film dramaturge is by no means the fifth wheel on
the wagon. Indeed, every art, including the art of the theater, moves
along on many wheels every one of which must be in working order if
the wagon in question is to enjoy easy and unimpeded motion, and is
eventually to reach the point where those who are driving it, in this
way and in that, would have it go.