continuation of the chapter on Fairy Splendor. In this field we find one
of the worst failures of the commercial films, and their utterly
unimaginative corporation promoters. Again I must refer them to such
fairy books as those of Padraic Colum, where neither sword nor wing nor
boat is found to move, except for a fairy reason.
I have just returned this very afternoon from a special showing of the
famous imported film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Some of the earnest
spirits of the Denver Art Association, finding it was in storage in the
town, had it privately brought forth to study it with reference to its
bearing on their new policies. What influence it will have in that most
vital group, time will show.
Meanwhile it is a marvellous illustration of the meaning of this chapter
and the chapter on Fairy Splendor, though it is a diabolical not a
beneficent vitality that is given to inanimate things. The furniture,
trappings, and inventions are in motion to express the haunted mind, as
in Griffith's Avenging Conscience, described pages 121 through 132. The
two should be shown together in the same afternoon, in the Art Museum
study rooms. Caligari is undoubtedly the most important imported film
since that work of D'Annunzio, Cabiria, described pages 55 through 57.
But it is the opposite type of film. Cabiria is all out-doors and
splendor on the Mediterranean scale. In general, imported films do not
concern Americans, for we have now a vast range of technique. All we lack
is the sense to use it.
The cabinet of Caligari is indeed a cabinet, and the feeling of being in
a cell, and smothered by all the oppressions of a weary mind, does not
desert the spectator for a minute.
The play is more important, technically, than in its subject-matter and
mood. It proves in a hundred new ways the resources of the film in making
all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act at all,
the leading actors in the films. But they need not necessarily act to a
diabolical end. An angel could have as well been brought from the cabinet
as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have been a work
of beneficence and health and healing. I could not help but think that
the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could have been
acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case and great
sarcophagus. The wings of Isis and Nephthys could have been spread over
the sky instead of the oppressive walls of the crooked city. Lights
instead of shadows could have been made actors and real hieroglyphic
inscriptions instead of scrawls.
As it was, the alleged insane man was more sensible than most motion
picture directors, for his scenery acted with him, and not according to
accident or silly formula. I make these points as an antidote to the
general description of this production by those who praise it.
They speak of the scenery as grotesque, strained, and experimental, and
the plot as sinister. But this does not get to the root of the matter.
There is rather the implication in most of the criticisms and praises
that the scenery is abstract. Quite the contrary is the case. Indoors
looks like indoors. Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs.
The actors do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to
believe. The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for
the most part expressed in the acting and plot. The fair looks like a
fair and the library looks like a library. There is nothing experimental
about any of the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or
over-considered. It seems experimental because it is thrown into contrast
with extreme commercial formulas in the regular line of the "movie
trade." But compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or
Du Lac or Dürer, or Rembrandt's etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more
realistic. And Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions
of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter. Hundreds of indoor stories
will be along such lines, once the merely commercial motive is
eliminated, and the artist is set free. This film is an extraordinary
variation of the intimate, as expounded in chapter three. It is
drawing-in-motion, instead of painting-in-motion. Because it was drawing
instead of painting, literary-minded people stepped to the hasty
conclusion it was experimental. Half-tone effects are, for the most part,
eliminated. Line is dominant everywhere. It is the opposite of vast
conceptions like Theodora--which are architecture-in-motion. All the
architecture of the Caligari film seems pasteboard. The whole thing
happens in a cabinet.
It is the most overwhelming contrast to Griffith's Intolerance that could
be in any way imagined. It contains, one may say, all the effects left
out of Intolerance. The word cabinet is a quadruple pun. Not only does it
mean a mystery box and a box holding a somnambulist, but a kind of
treasury of tiny twisted thoughts. There is not one line or conception in
it on the grand scale, or even the grandiose. It is a devil's toy-house.
One feels like a mouse in a mouse-trap so small one cannot turn around.
In Intolerance, Griffith hurls nation at nation, race at race, century
against century, and his camera is not only a telescope across the plains
of Babylon, but across the ages. Griffith is, in Intolerance, the
ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron,
and since he is the first of his kind I, for one, am willing to name him
with Marlowe.
But for technical study for Art Schools, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is
more profitable. It shows how masterpieces can be made, with the
second-hand furniture of any attic. But I hope fairy-tales, not
diabolical stories, will come from these attics. Fairy-tales are
inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times
hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not
willing to stop to tell them. Lillian Gish could be given wings and a
wand if she only had directors and scenario writers who believed in
fairies. And the same can most heartily be said of Mae Marsh.