THE COMPASS OF POETRY
The word is the world of the legitimate stage. It rings out clear from
the actor’s lips, forces its way through the spacious auditorium, and
reaches the ear of the most remote spectator. The gesture is drowned
out in this same space; it is the handmaid of the spoken word, to which
it lends corroboration and the expression of will power.
The word is an enigmatic symbol of thought. What our ear receives is a
fleeting fugitive sound, almost an indifferent sequence of sounds. What
our mind receives is the meaning liberated from the sound. “Death!” The
meaning is clear. Remove the meaning, the sense that lies hidden in
this word, and there remains nothing but a null and void sound picture:
D-e-a-t-h. Make a single, insignificant change in the sound, substitute
“br” for “d,” and the meaning, the sense of it, is completely changed.
The word is the instrument of the mind.
As Heinrich Laube has well said, we termed the stage, while it was
still in its “first, naïve period,” a _Schauspiel_. The ♦word means a
“play that is seen.” But the stage is neither a _Schauspiel_ nor a
_Hörspiel_ (“a play that is heard”), as in the case of music. It is a
_Gedankenspiel_, or “thought play.”
♦ “words” replaced with “word”
Those values of the stage action which we perceive through the aid of
our various senses are merely symbols and forms of expression for the
intellectual or spiritual values. The word itself, as a matter of fact,
loses its significance as a sensual sequence of sounds, as an acoustic
phenomenon completely except for a slight fragment of beauty that lies
in the word as such. The distinctive earmark of the stage action is the
spiritual style. And since every art fashions the soul, stage art is
the spiritual soul; it depicts feelings through thoughts.
Unintellectual, obtuse, dull people do not thrill us on the stage.
Dramas whose characters are peasants and the lower classes of workmen
have to be embellished and doctored-up with a goodly measure of strong
theatrical devices in order to be really effective. We have but to
think of the efforts that have been made to arouse interest in such
plays as Schönherr’s _Faith and Fireside_ and Hauptmann’s _Teamster
Henschel_ and _The Weavers_.
Consequently, it is never the dark, flat levels of purely impulsive
life that are sought after by the great dramatists—whoever they
may be and in whatever age they may live. The great “stage people”
are characterized by an abundance of spiritual wealth. Heinrich Laube
was right when he said, “Mind and thought are the drama’s weapons of
attack.” They are also the weapons of attack of the grand characters
that stalk across the stage. Wallenstein, Faust, Macbeth, Lear,
Hamlet—these are the characters that are sought after by the actor, for
they all enjoy the very highest of spiritual wealth.
The stage, the most perfect counterpart or reflection of mankind,
embraces the three realms of life—Sensuality, Soul, Intellect. All
those glorious figures are choked and convulsed by sensuality. Their
paths lead away from sensuality and back, if possible, to pure
intellectuality. That course goes so far that one of the very wildest
of them remarks at the close of his career:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is not mere chance, nor is it a histrionic whim on the part of the
poet, that Faust abandons Gretchen and seeks and finds Helena. On this
account the sensual impulses of the stage characters are the paths of
error which lead up to the intellect. The great stage personages
are never men of mere impulse. Thoas is not a barbarian of the senses;
Tell is not a rude, crude fellow just as nature made him; Romeo is not
a mere sensual seducer but a psychic visionary.
The legitimate stage strives after great, free thoughts; and characters
such as Faust represent the very strongest expression of its arts.
In this excess of excelsior, however, in this defection from the wishes
of this earth, lies a real danger to which not merely the poetising
dilettant is apt to succumb; indeed the very greatest of German poets
have at times failed to escape its intriguing peculiarity. It is
the danger of the too-high, of arctic clarity, of the exclusively
intellectual. The soul glows through real art like a vestal fire, pure,
mild, serene. Let the flight be too hardy and too upward, and the fire
goes out, art ceases, and shrewd, shivering theatrical dialectics set
in.
In the case of the motion picture, the opposite takes place. The word
withdraws, becomes unessential, often directly adverse to art and the
canons of art. Then it is that mimicry steps out and up and becomes the
bearer of the action.
If humanity had been born deaf and dumb, it would long since have
perfected its mimic apparatus so completely that it would be the tool
and symbol of thought. What can the gesture mean to us? Feeling
that is so familiar to us that it awakens sympathy on the slightest
provocation. Only that which is from the very beginning impulse within
us is sensuality. Mimicry is the symbol of sensual values. The sign,
the prognostic, the distinctive mark of mimic action is the sensual
style. And since this art signifies the expression of the soul, the
motion picture is the sensual soul. It is feeling expressed through
gesture.
Consequently, an impulse that is not in everybody is not felt by
everybody. This explains the failure of quite a few works. The
homosexual film, for example, _Anders als die Andern_ (“Different From
Other People”) was a source of disordered loathing to those “other
people.” How can we expect a healthy individual to feel the excitement
of an insane person, as in _Dr. Caligari_, or of a pathological
vampire, as in _The Vampyre_? And how can we expect a human being
with a strong constitution to sympathize with the demented antics
of a nervous wreck and feel his feelings after him, as in _Nerven_
(“Nerves”)?
[Illustration: Fig. 15. Scene from _Anne Boleyn_.
[_See p. 88_]
]
With a certainty that is growing from year to year, the film writers
of to-day choose their material from such domains of feeling as have
a universal and altogether human appeal. They depict the impulses of
the soul, but only up to that point where the healthy feelings
terminate. It is one of the wonders of peace that these impulses
are common to all the peoples of the earth. The intriguing writ of
the Asiatic soul becomes, in this case, clear and simple. Even the
barbarian nations, the Negro, the Eskimo, the Moroccan, rejoice at the
sight of our films with the joy that spells appreciation.
It seems, however, that a great motion picture cannot be built up
around peoples who are impulsive and that only. The characters of
_Hintertreppe_ were impulsive; those of _Scherben_ were lethargic
and animalistic. We were moved but not convulsed. The impulse in
itself, and in its isolation, is uninteresting, for it is un-psychic.
We sympathize with and feel the feelings after those who display
them only when the impulse is raised to a passion. If we are to be
captivated, carried off our feet as it were, the action has got to be
strong; it must set forth not mere wish but will, too. Those elementary
passions that spring forth from sensuality—that is, from the ensemble
functioning of all our senses, constitute the field of mimic portrayal.
The motion picture has as its goal the great and captive passions. And
characters that are bound to earth, full of soul but in the plight of
the unhappy Prometheus, make up the strongest expression of the art of
the motion picture.
The bow of the passions is a mighty one, great in compass and more
frequently taut than not. It rises from out of the primeval abysses of
nature and takes in the tenderest tremblings of the soul. Anyone who
has ever seen that wonderful Goldwyn film entitled _Honor Thy Mother_
knows that by passions I mean, not merely what is ordinarily connoted
by the term, but also that calm, melancholy faith of the heart which
characterizes all reverential and respectful people. Every impulse that
arises in a perfectly natural way, and which cannot be separated from
the heart by any power on earth, is a _passion_.
Everything that is an initial, original, and uninfluenced impulse is
stuff for the motion picture. But just as all art moves about a certain
pole, about that basic impulse which flouts reason in the exercise of
the drawing force that one man has for another, and that pulls them
both along toward the inescapable judgment handed down by the senses,
just so does the motion picture itself obey the urge, and that with
unconscious docility, to move on to the fate that finds its basis in
human love, and in so doing it moves on to the highest, unexhausted,
and inexhaustible goal—its eventual formation and conformation.
To such love the coldly and exclusively intellectual is alien. There
is no place for the blue-stocking Helena. A lover in a motion
picture who would show himself superior to the simple, unaffected ways
of love would cut a ridiculous figure. The love of the moving picture
strikes but few strings, and these strings are gentle. This art is not
wreathed about with the roseate play of lovely thoughts. Those poets
whose hearts do not overflow with an abundance of visions paint, in the
motion picture, nothing more than the tiring and monotonous picture
of a colorless and brutal giving and taking. But just as the great
Garrick could move his audience to tears through the mere recital of
the alphabet, just so can a fiery soul fill the violin of the motion
picture with more nearly inner and more truly intimate notes than a
soul that is halt and blind can fill the entire orchestra of the stage.
Passion is pure; it is clean. Wherever the soul is moved, and whenever
it moves with the action, there is purification. But just as the
legitimate stage may lose itself in the frigid chill of unanimated
intellectuality, so does the motion picture run at all times the
danger—if its poet is a bellowing and garrulous individual—of sinking
into the fiery swamp of unanimated sensuality. When this is the
case, the unwholesome passion of mere sexual perversities becomes a
play of social life that is poles removed from real art. In the foul
seething and turgid vapor of such degeneracy, culture is stifled,
purity is unable to raise its lovely head, and what might be the hills
and high places of art are converted into waste places. This disgusting
drama that poisons the people is the everlasting nuisance and eternal
bugbear of those who have faith enough in them to feel that the time
should come when the motion picture is a proud and pure art.
We all know how matters stand: each individual has the dignity of
mankind at his disposal, after all. It can never be the duty of the
motion picture to use the magic song of love, such as all true poets
have sung to their peoples, in order that it may drown out the vulgar
street ditty with its lines of illicit passion and its refrain of
indecency.
The real motion picture poet, however, the one in whose heart there
vibrates and pulsates a culture that is natural to him and given him
of the gods, will always be able to fill his figures with a noble
and royal sensuality that shines out in bright effulgence over and
beyond the flat, greedy, paralytic doings of the love that knows not
inspiration and to which the staleness of everyday carrying-on is first
and second nature. His soul, recruiting in the interests of human kind,
will move like a storm across the hills; there will be love in its
flight, and then it will settle down into calm serenity like the
subdued tones of so many silvery bells.
The motion picture can delineate ♦aristocratic characters; it can
represent men and women of aristocratic souls. But when this is to be
done, more must be done than to have the leading man and the leading
woman don evening dress.
♦ “aristrocratic” replaced with “aristocratic”
Those who accomplish this—the delineation of fine and fair souls—have
to be great artists. Rubbish and art, discord and harmony, the inflated
and the sterling, though their spheres are relatively near each other,
are nevertheless separated by the wide, wide gulf that separates the
dilettant from the genius. Those who are petty in the business can
offer us only the empty, the hollow, the fatuous. Abundance they know
not; harmony is not a part of them; they deal in deadening boredom.
Around about the love of the motion picture is stretched the
bright-colored frame of the surrounding world. Its milieu is of
diversified hues. It is not possible for even the legitimate stage to
renounce entirely the world in which its action takes place—though
_Romeo and Juliet_ might be played to an audience recruited wholly
from the slums and not lose either its fragrance or its charm. In the
motion picture, the nature and the wish of the milieu signify the
constant variation of the impure motive.
Let no man fancy that it would be possible to construct a great motion
picture from an environment. There is, for example, the case of the
French film entitled _Columbus_—the most abominable piece of work,
incidentally, that has ever been done on the screen. The life of the
great discoverer was mashed and squeezed into a mess of incoherent
scenes. The one great, heart-shaking act, or action—the real experience
of Columbus’s soul—was missing. In like manner, the film entitled
_August der Starke_ (“August the Strong”) went up in smoke between
the baroque castles of Saxony around which the gala coaches moved in
unending procession while the uniforms shone forth in all their kind of
glory. In between all this revived and represented ostentation were six
love scenes—a new one for each act—each of loathsome brutality—and in
each of them the poet was the match-maker!
The surrounding world, the milieu, becomes the exclusive servant of
the feelings. A historical film is a love action of times long since
past, and never a treatise on the cultural history of that time.
Schiller compressed the whole history of the Thirty Years’ War into
his _Wallenstein_. In it Max and Thekla drift along as if on a small
floating piece of ice. The legitimate stage can do that sort
of thing, provided the individual that does it is a genius and has
genius. But the most ingenious motion picture actor is the one whose
hand forges the historical motives into a splendid yet ♦unobtrusive
frame, and places this frame about the action of the soul. He cannot
count upon fidelity to history; he is lost if he endeavors to reproduce
historical events. Whenever the great men of history appear in the
motion picture, they have to feel great; they must display great
emotions. The muse of the motion picture is anacreontic.
♦ “unobstrusive” replaced with “unobtrusive”
There is the case of _Madame Recamier_ which was brilliantly staged
by Delmont. In it Napoleon, Talma, Josephine Beauharnais, Juliette
Recamier, and the people associated with them were bound together
into a fate that was pure, shot through though it was with smoldering
passions. We had a foreboding of the flaming forth of a dark and
princely soul. Closely interwoven with the action, though detached from
it for a few minutes, was a picture of Napoleon standing off on a flat
elevation surrounded by a few officers. It could be seen only in the
distance. A rider comes up, and then another, and then another. Each is
in haste. In the valley below we catch sight of a fire; there is smoke.
A certain fate that was an entity in itself, a strange and urgent
fate, prevented the various pictures from becoming separated or allowed
to stand out in isolated importance. The picture as a whole, the whole
of the picture, cast its shadows over this scene. Napoleon, already
long since made a part of the action, stood there as if to say: “Here I
am. I am coming!”
The sensual motion picture knows no god. The poet of the spoken drama
can convert a hut into a house, a cabin into a castle. The motion
picture man builds up his houses and castles until they reach the
very skies, but they remain formations of this earth. They are grand,
perhaps they are beautiful; but they are never holy; they are never
exalted. The divine services and mysteries of the motion picture are
mere parades of brainlessness. That which is supposed to be holy leaves
an unholy impression. Religiousness is dissipated into the merest
emptiness. The boastful seeker after God remains a man in prayer; he
gesticulates with his hands, and his hands are empty.
[Illustration: Fig. 16. Scene from _Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown_.
[_See p. 90_]
]
Priscilla Dean, whom we love very much in Germany, played in her film,
_The Beggar Woman of Stamboul_, a charming scene of prayer. A lovely
little girl knelt down and folded her hands. There was piety in the
scene. But her action was a sweet, imitated, childlike gesture, while
in her little head there was no room for the superhuman picture of
the creator.
“But why nothing but sensuality?” you ask me. The answer is easy: it
is utterly impossible to photograph an idea. One should never try to
project the invisible land of dream or wish on the screen, for such
a land is the creation of the brain. Experiments of this kind have
been made often enough—naturally in Germany. But every single one
was a failure, for the idea thus treated becomes even more cold and
bloodless than on the legitimate stage. One cannot catch up an idea
through the medium of faint and feeble symbols. Moreover, the road
that affects to point to the place where ideas are translated to the
hearts of men leads in reality to an infinity of texts, to a surrogate
of the intellect. Let us be modest, for the domain of the film is
rich enough as it is, and the man who creates exclusively from the
abundance of things seen, from visions as it were, will never exhaust
the fountainhead.
But there is a gap in this sphere of sensuality; there is an empty
place in the field in question. Those silent heroes who have turned
away from the world, and behind whom and back of whom there lie
struggle and passion, step out from the world of sensuality, in which
they have become and remained mute, into the realm of spirituality.
This land is open to them to the uttermost end of its compass,
indeed down to and up to the point where they see God; where they
have forebodings and premonitions of God that are the equivalents of
acquirement. No thought that is felt is foreign to them. But they do
not speak of the visions they have had; every word from their lips
would be profane; it would be a matter of desecration. The great,
strange, lonely figures of the motion picture, back of whose brain the
thought shines forth, are not to be understood through thought. They
are to be felt, not thought. They are not to be conceived of as wise
men and prophets; they are brooders and sufferers.
One would have to, and one might, write a _Christus_ film that is
apathetic and undramatic: _Christus_ the man, making a pilgrimage over
the Earth, a stranger, unapproachable, silent, immediate, unknown, not
understood. Such a film could be made a vast deal more effective than a
_Christus_ drama on the spoken stage. For on the stage the _Christus_
dare not remain silent. He would have to appear as a speaker. The
humble carpenter’s son would have to pass before us, and on by the
mute greatness of His own soul, engaged in an endless flow of words of
wisdom and thoughts that lie too deep for men.
It was such a _Christus_ nature as this, invisibly crucified, that
our wonderful Bernhard Goetzke played in his _Indisches Grabmal_. Even
under the slag of this adventuresome action there shone forth the pure
glow of a passionately suffering heart. When Ramigani raised his hands
we understood that before this gentle, imperative gesture the tigers of
the fields slunk away in silence while lifeless things fell to pieces.
It was the power of the superman that was revealed to us: a power
that had been generated in the man himself, not given of God. When he
prayed, it was a coming unto and into himself, not a disappearance in
or a coming unto God. Buddha vanished in the background, a cold, chilly
picture.
♦ “adventursome” replaced with “adventuresome”
Such greatness is rare in a film. There is only one other film
character whom I can recall having seen who bore the very stamp
of immortal greatness on his brow—the Frenchman, G. Melchior, in
_Atlantide_. His eyes had the effect of invisible arms which brushed
the seductive passion of the woman in the case clean from his heart.
His glance glided over men and things as if he were in an atmosphere
of his own creation, far removed from what constitute the spoils of
mortal man. But art of this sort stands in the background of the motion
picture; it is suspected by but few. And in the foreground stands
mottled, gaudy sensuality. It cannot be otherwise. For the motion
picture is an art that is of the earth earthy; it revels and rolls
in human feelings.
This defection on its part from intellect is necessary; it is not thus
because its creators wish it so. Just as is the case with music, the
motion picture will never be called upon to solve the problems of the
human intellect or of man’s morality. The motion picture pedagogue
works ahead in an ineffectual effort to put brains into the screen;
he cannot do it. He fills the text with sententious remarks and moral
observations. He clutters the whole business up with a mess of mushy
wisdom that bears not the slightest relation to the sensory content of
the action, which is mimic first, last and always.
The task of the motion picture is quite similar to the task of music:
to serve a generation that has strong feelings. Where music, however,
excites and incites a general and indefinite feeling (whose compass
reaches from the tortures of the ego to the all-embracing feeling of
the godhead itself) through tones, the motion picture assembles its
fullness on the earthly world of emotions.
The motion picture actor fails to reach his objective, he fails to
fulfill his true mission, if he depends for success upon mere sexual
♦titillation. He is lost to himself and the cause he serves if he works
for the excitation of undisciplined and easily aroused pruriency.
There is, indeed, no art that admits of such abysms of failure and
misconduct as the motion picture. There lurks in every step the motion
picture actor takes and makes the grave danger of sinking into the
slime of unleashed sexuality. There is no well-constructed, marked, and
planned road here that leads straight out, away, and over earthly love.
And we do not wish to get sucked down into the mire. Sensuality _and_
soul—that is the slogan.
♦ “titulation” replaced with “titillation”
A new world has been discovered for which there has been up to the
present no adequate expression. We film voyagers hoist the sails and
embark on a voyage of conquest and circumnavigation. But behold! it is
a strange and yet a familiar route we have to pursue. It is not like
the realm of tones, etherial and intangible. It is our lives that we
have discovered, and which we are looking upon with our own eyes.
A mighty flood of pictures rushes by us. Which shall we choose?
Shall we choose the spooks, the spooky visions, the dancing
will-o’-the-wisps, the nocturnal spirits? We let them go on their way.
They are not for us. For the film has at last taught us what everyday
life had caused us to forget—or almost to forget. I mean by “us” the
Europeans who have become filled with hate and poisoned with pugnacity.
We had about forgotten that the world is beautiful.
Every nation has its own soul. But where the spirits of the
various peoples stand in the presence of each other, and opposite each
other, alien if not directly hostile, separated as it were from each
other by “foreign” languages, the real souls of all the peoples have
grown up from the brotherly roots of humanity.
Despite this brotherhood, however, no one should attempt to sink his
own folk-soul into the soul of another people. That cannot be done. Let
the German turn out the historical film, in which he sinks his soul
into the world of feelings of the ancient Egyptians, or the English, or
the Romance peoples just as much as he pleases. It is his business, and
no one can stop him. But the fact remains that the historical film is
always a somehow colorless creation in the popular sense. It is always
somewhat affected if not a bit fraudulent, and in the case of any
nation it is always touched up and retouched with the same artificial
masks. The historical film is here and here to stay, however. There is
a good reason: in those ages of violence and lawlessness film themes
grew on the trees. There was a dazzling world full of adventure such as
the film will never completely turn its back on.
I am of the distinct conviction, at the same time, that it is the
modern film which most effectively discloses the real nature and
aim of the film. It is the most popular; it alone is true. In it there
are no masks; and there are very few big wigs and pasted mustachios.
The people do not have to sink themselves into unknown deeds and
inexperienced acts of gruesomeness. They stand before the camera of the
world in which they live; it is their own feelings that the lens takes
up into itself.
♦ “gruesomness” replaced with “gruesomeness”
In the modern film each people goes its own way; it has its own
feelings, its own heart projected on the screen. It obeys the
inescapable and inevitable commands of its own public life. Every man
does what he can; he acts on what he himself knows. And as Goethe once
wisely remarked, “Life is interesting, it makes no difference where you
take hold of it.”
The differences in peoples are wonderful—as the modern film shows. The
American rejects any and every film that does not stand with both feet
on the ground of actual life. The American takes his film themes from
his own activity, and it is a gigantic one. He binds his people close
to the world. He has them engage in the calling that is theirs. He is
as little inclined to scorn the orphanage or the tent of the cowboy as
he is to close his eyes to the elegant urban salon. Wherever he goes,
he notes what he has seen with the hard pencil of the professional
reporter. He eavesdrops, he listens-in on life in every form. With the
“essential” he is but little concerned; he is out for the picture of
his milieu, of his environment, of the world about him, and this world
of his is bubbling over with life. He is objective, and his objectivity
has not been distorted by any theory of art that confuses the issue
when conditions change. He seizes the world wherever he finds it most
interesting. He does not hesitate, once he has seized it, to place his
people in this surrounding; and he endows his people, as it were, with
the fates and the fancies of their new setting. The American film is
always most effective when it takes its material from the checkered and
chic fullness of the very present; when it depends for its inspiration
upon reality. It aims at genuineness; it tries to be true. It seems, at
least, that it never tries to depict a milieu which it does not know.
The great city is the mother-earth of the American film. The minute it
abandons the city and goes forth on voyages of discovery in nature it
loses its vivacity, its effectiveness, its sense of reality, and goes
over into watered makeshifts or highway romanticism.
[Illustration: Fig. 17. _Scene from A Doll’s House_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
The American despises all heavy, tiresome, serious art; he depicts a
highly-colored life, bubbles over with mad, or at least unexpected,
ideas and notions, and has his spectator laugh and weep—an
omniscient Lord knows that he never lets him do anything but laugh, or
anything but weep. The more extravagant the thing is, on the heights
and in the depths, the better. After all, life is beautiful. One laughs
ten times as willingly as one weeps. And no sane man wishes to see this
belief in the joy of life, and the eventual victory of happiness and
strength, taken from us.
The American has not a shimmer of a conception of _Dramatischer
Aufbau_; of dramatic composition he is innocent. The most he does is
to indulge in a brief exposition, which he expresses in a few and none
too labored words, in which he has something to say about the general
significance of the people in whom he is momentarily interested—and
then the thing starts. The American film is effective; and its
effectiveness is to be explained on the ground of the American people
themselves; they know precisely what they are after, and they proceed
without delay; they are not hampered by inertia; they are intelligent;
they are diligent.
The American’s creative action is sure and simple; it is not
reflective, nor congested with too much brooding; and it certainly
is not based on systematic philosophizing. His film is just as
unsentimental as his life. The majority of his scenes are noted
for an atmosphere of sobriety. This and that takes place, but if a
catastrophe does not follow there is no use to get excited. In the
few scenes in which the fate of one man rebounds against the fate
of another, the will of one man stands face to face with the will
of another. The American film is, so to speak, dramatic only in a
secondary or subsidiary sense.
The hero of the American film is the man of deeds. In the first act his
goal is set; in the last act he reaches it. Everything that intervenes
between these two acts is a test of strength. The strongest wins, every
time. The whole action revolves about this hero, and the “good ending”
is more a matter of logic than of anything else; it is the judgment
handed down as to who was the most powerful. There is no such thing
as a weakling among American film heroes. “It is not interesting; it
is not effective; therefore we don’t want it.” That is the history of
American film making in so many words.
The basic principle of the American film is expediency. It is
expediency, suitability, availability, that makes the American exercise
great care in choosing the title of his film, in having the action grow
in interest, and in using decoration that fits the case and represents,
on the whole, a genuine and solid picturesqueness. It is expediency
that prompts the American to avoid those diseased and unwholesome
themes which would be understood only by the spectator who is likewise
diseased and unwholesome. It is expediency that moves him to avoid
purely and rigidly intellectual themes, such as are appropriate for
private audiences only. It is expediency that suggests to him cheerful,
vigorous, bright, and fanciful themes in which the world is made to
shine and flash. It is expediency that causes him to fill even the
gloomiest theme with a good measure of happiness. There are, indeed,
many roads that lead to idealism.
The American does not seem to be at all familiar with the word “Art”
when he takes and makes a motion picture. He uses, instead of art,
the word “effect.” This may seem a bit primitive, even uninspired,
but it gets desirable results. That is good which is effective; the
ineffective is bad; whatever pleases is allowed. These seem to be his
shibboleths. He has, for this very reason, been spared the humiliation
attendant upon the film that would-be art, and which has brought
bankruptcy to its champions and producers.
For the American the soul is merely a means toward an effect. He never
overworks the soul; he does not splash it all over the individual
scene. He uses it just in so far as it is necessary to make his
hero a sympathetic creature and creation. In the middle, and the middle
point, of his film activity stands, not the soul, but the joy in
telling a story. For there is only one thing the American aims at:
he wants to have a chat; he wants to indulge in a _causerie_. For
him there is no artistic “problem to be solved.” He neither writes
theoretical treatises on the film, nor does he read them.
In this somewhat rigid domain which the life and _Weltanschauung_ of
the American people themselves have staked off for the American film,
there live, move, and have their being a great number of happily
endowed and cautious talents. They avoid clever and ingenious dodges;
they are not easily derailed. They try incessantly to raise the value
of the work they are engaged in and on to an ever-increasing height of
excellence.
The American film reflects the inmost nature of a people that is happy;
of a people that has been accustomed to create without being loaded
down with theory or chained to tradition. It is the film of a people
that has preserved unto itself the riches of the centuries.
The American is genuine; the Swede is true. Other peoples fill their
motion pictures with foaming and sometimes frantic melodies. The
Swedish film is not rich; it is unostentatious, sometimes to the
very point of scantiness. Its tone is that of the folk-song with its
tones taken from and based on pictures. Its characters are close to
the earth; they are rarely impulsive, and if so, the impulsiveness is
of a gentle nature; they seem quite free from self-consciousness. They
move their limbs after the fashion of dreamy giants. They play with
their hearts somewhat as the children of Asa were wont to play with
the golden discs. Their feelings have not been artificially translated
into a milieu; they have not been composed into a new home. They
grow quite naturally from the soil that begot them. In the case of the
American, or the German, film, we have the conflict first; the milieu
proceeds then from this conflict. The canon of the Swede reads: In the
beginning was the earth.
On this soil, excessively aromatic or iridescent fruit does not thrive.
The passions of the Swede are subdued; they whisper like waving grain
swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze. Because of their lack of display
they seem, to the eye and ear of the person accustomed to the bluster
of an industrial life, a bit primitive and monotonous. The Swedish
film is an æolian harp which is moved unconsciously; the few wonderful
tones that lie as potential factors in its strings are melodies only.
The reflective element of this film is remarkably impulsive in
character. It sinks itself with burning fervor into the depths of the
heart, never rises to the chilly clarity of abstract thought, and
rarely loses itself in moral fustian.
The Swedish film retains its perfect naturalness even when it concerns
itself with urban personages and chooses, perforce, its decoration and
setting from the fashionable drawing-rooms. When it does this it is a
matter of secret mask. These men in evening dress, these décolletée
ladies, remain after all peasant children who wear their foreign garb
with naïve gaiety. At times the Swede grafts an alien twig on the young
wild tree of his motion picture art. When he does, it is German if
subtle, French if erotic.
The Swede paints his picture with a fine brush, embellishes each
on rather broad lines, and coats every picture with a shimmer of
hearty intimacy which to a film connoisseur of another country seems
altogether unobtrusive. The film action, the ebb and flow of pictures,
seems to him a matter of indifference. He avoids excitement; he shuns
the raging of man against man. Invented, and therefore affected,
action, be it never so refined, leaves him cold. He loves to see things
grow; the secrets of the inner life are precious to him. His heroes
encircle the coveted goal without bodily moving out of their tracks.
All of this is at once an advantage and a disadvantage.
It is rare that the manager of a Swedish picture strives for such
brilliant effects, or for such a wealth of ideas, as characterizes
the American and German film manager. Swedish film technique stands
nearly still; if it moves at all, it is a cautious move. This is true,
indeed, of Swedish film art as a whole—that art which came as a direct
revelation to, though it left its imprint upon, the film art of other
peoples, and especially upon that of the Germans. Swedish photography
is not infrequently dull; it seems to have been lighted up from
underneath; it makes no attempt to compete with the chiaroscuro for
which American and German operators are noted.
The Swede creates for himself. He loves the figures of his native land;
in them and through them he improvises; he rings changes on the same
motives. Does he really wish to create art? Will the seed he has been
sowing grow?
While the Swede was quietly engaged in his dreamy plays, the American
and German—stimulated by him to a rather high degree—were chiseling
from the stone blocks of their own folk souls stronger and more
delusive pictures which, in their innermost nature, were no less true
than the film of the Swede. Since the Swede makes no attempt to speak
to the world, but only to a limited circle of intellectually inclined
people, he is always threatened with an imminent exhaustion
of means. Even to-day, on this account it seems, he is trying to
effect a compromise between himself and the world, though it cannot
be said that he is going into convulsions over his effort. He is not
in a hurry. He is trying his skill at historical films which hardly
become him either as a creative genius or a trained spectator. He is
snatching his figures out of the earth and giving them, at the expense
of verisimilitude, and following the bad example of the German social
film, the rather rootless and precarious existence that attaches itself
at all times to _mondaine_ as distinguished from mundane life. It is
a case of change from _I_ to _We_ which connotes a changed attitude
toward the world in general; and it is a change which the film of
Sweden has not entirely escaped. But it was to be expected: the Swede
and his film are both much too strong and healthy either to avoid or
neglect this transition.
The Swedish film is the reflection of a people that depends upon
itself, that rests within itself, on whose shores the tempestuous waves
of other nations break but gently: they have already been broken before
reaching that point.
[Illustration: Fig. 18. Scene from _Vögelöd Castle_.
[_See p. 91_]
]
The German is the great experimenter. Fate has struck Germany many
a telling blow in the last decade; much has been destroyed forever.
But amid the débris there has remained a spirit of daring, a
courage that makes an essay at the bold enticing. We experiment in the
motion picture, though not so much from a mere love of the novel as
from a settled conviction that in this field we still have a great deal
to learn; we are still undecided about a great number of things.
There is hardly a theme on earth or in the moon with which we have
not concerned ourselves; we have conjured the things of the earth and
the stars up before the film camera and had them remain there until
their pictures were at our disposal. We have descended into the dusty
tombs of prehistoric times; we have adapted the stories of foreign
countries to the screen. Fairy tales—those of yesterday, to-day, and
to-morrow—have been tried. And when, at the close of the War, a sudden
flood of ideas, notions, conceits, and utopias swept over our heads, we
even tried to philosophize on the screen.
In all of this busy activity, in this feverish and unceasing search
after new themes and new values, there has been one thing that we
completely forgot; and this one thing has been passing by us in
a thousand pictures: it was our own people. Of German films that
introduce us to the whirling life of our country, particularly from
the rural point of view, we have hardly an indication. A real
beginning in this direction certainly has not been made. It is
there, however, and there only where uniqueness of real character is
conspicuous that one finds the type of originality that pleases in
itself and defies competition of any kind. At present, forces are
beginning to work, action has been begun which, if carried on and out,
will project on the screen the land of Germany with all the beauty of
its streams and forests, and which will show the German soul with all
its dreams and wishes. This is the way the film entitled _Explosion_,
which tells of miners and their lives, came into existence. This was
the initial inspiration of Fritz Lang’s _Nibelungs_, that grandiose
epic of the remote Germanic past. These are to be sure beginnings; but
so long as they remain the sole examples, so long as the _status quo_
in this matter is preserved, we Germans simply do not exist in the
film; we have not yet arrived. And be it said once for all that the
popular film is the one in which a film people can best show its real
character.
Instead of studying this theme—our own people—and exploiting it day
in and day out, the German has scoured the whole world for themes.
His historical films have been prepared with marvelous accuracy; not
a detail has been neglected which might add in even the slightest way
to historical reality: loyalty to history has been preserved
and observed with touching constancy. I have my very serious doubt,
however, whether this has been wholly necessary, for such films are not
shown exclusively to historical seminars in the universities.
The German is almost universally successful in digging up a theme of
crushing weight and power. He is never at a loss to create an action of
either gruesome or exalted greatness. We have but to think of _Golem_,
_Madame Dubarry_, _Dr. Mabuse_, and _Dr. Caligari_. These are most
powerful films. Another is the _Nibelungs_. So far so good. But it is
rare indeed that the German succeeds in endowing such films as these
with the light and easy, the inspiring and inspiriting wings of humor.
For a time, indeed, there was only one type of film that was regarded
as a success: the film with the tragic ending. The German so frequently
forgets, or he at least overlooks, the fact that it is not the business
of the motion picture to play into the hands of hard, rigid, classical
art, and to follow the canons of such art in so doing. It is the
business, rather, of the motion picture to amuse people, to cheer them
up, and to stimulate them.
Latterly, the German has shown a marked tendency to turn away
from the film based on the masses. He has not done this however
voluntarily; the extreme cost of producing such films has made
them prohibitive. Nor is this all: the German has not looked with favor
recently on the film that has to do with huge crowds of human beings
for spiritual reasons. At present there is decided preference for
the film that depicts a strong fervor of some sort; for a film that
is impressive from the point of view of individuals; for a film that
delineates a logical development of the adventures of the soul. And
it must be conceded that the best artists are gradually finding a way
by which they can unite delicacy of soul with grace of experience and
thereby create what all the world must regard as beauty.
For a long while, the German, like the Swede, neglected the real art of
decoration and photography. Within recent years, however, our better
ateliers have made remarkable progress in this direction. Some of our
films that have been created since the making of this progress, such as
_Suvarin_ or _The Stone Rider_ need not hesitate to stand comparison
with the best of any country. The small film companies have been
obliged to close owing to the unprecedented depreciation in German
currency. This, however, is not a matter for profound regret, for their
quality could never be said to be the outstanding feature of their
creations. Nothing but quality can ever make the trouble that has
to be taken a matter of eventual gain. In the art of motion picture,
genius is its own reward, but pains are well paid.
The German film will come once the chaos that reigns supreme at present
has been eradicated, and the situation becomes brighter all around and
everywhere. To-day, Bolshevism raises its ugly head in the East; in the
West, heavy artillery is in position while fleets of bombing planes
whirr through the air. The atmosphere is thick; so thick, indeed, that
it casts a heavy shadow over the country.