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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.
Fig. 8. Scene from Algol.
[See p. 84]
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.
CHAPTER V
THE SETTING
The director of the legitimate stage is supposed to create an art
form which rests essentially upon the spoken word, with its artistic
possibilities and potentialities. His entire setting, from curtain
decorations to background and supernumerary costumes, is
supposed to intimate and indicate in a symbolic way (though it must
be conceded that the Meininger Stage strives after ideals of its own
in this regard). The word rings out in front of the pictures and
traverses a jagged line of the background up to the mountain.
Mimic art calls for a sharp milieu, a pronounced environment.
Since the descriptive power of the gesture does not extend beyond
the hidden contents of the human soul, the figures of an unenvironed
motion picture would float about in empty space.
The world of the spoken drama is limited to the cubic feet of
space within the theater; the motion picture, on the contrary, has the
world for its field; it moves in perfect freedom. The camera follows
the actor wherever he may go. If he betake himself to the uttermost
parts of the earth, it is there too. So far, then, as decorative setting in
the motion picture is concerned, there is no such thing, from an
artistic point of view, as limitation or consideration.
The very freedom, however, which the motion picture enjoys in
the way of scenic alternation and variety necessitates constant
indulgence in this freedom: a mimic action dare not drag its weary
course for hours at a time over the same setting. There must be
frequent change of scene. Its psychic powers of expression are too
soon exhausted for it to tarry with impunity, or satisfaction, for any
considerable length of time on the same scene.
In Germany we have made some experiments with films in which
there was no decoration. One of these, the Rex film entitled
Scherben, is said to have met with success on the other side of the
Atlantic. I feel, for my own part, that the unvaried and undecorated
scene of this paltry milieu was pretty tiresome. A good film should
show an abundance of pictures; it should have three or four milieus
follow close after each other, rebound against each other. We might
as well make up our minds to it that the need for entertainment on
the part of the public is so great that nothing short of gay, if not
gaudy, variety will suffice.
For this reason, decorations are made each one of which has a
definite stamp or character. Rooms in which human beings live and
work must show traces of human habitation. With the stage this may
not be necessary, for the illuminating, enlivening power of the poet’s
words lifts the mind above the external picture. The stage of
Shakespeare transformed the really immutable and altogether
unpretentious setting once in Macbeth’s banquet hall, another time in
the gray field of the witches—and it did this through the animating
phantasy of Shakespeare’s lines. The stage is style art. Indeed, the
intellectual would have it this entirely. But the realism of the last
century, which brought into being the so-called stage of illusion and
fostered this creation until it went to the very last conceivable length
in the matter of imitation, is a source of real danger to the essential
nature of the spoken word, and to the wings of such fancy as the
word may have. The great mass of spectators the world over
demand from the stage, and also from the film, that it hold up before
them a picture of reality. But in contrast to the film, the spoken stage
cannot be regarded as the spiritual property of these masses.
Regarding film setting, the first question that arises, and it is a
very fundamental one, is this: Which shall it be—Style or Reality?
Shall we prepare scenery that is related to the style of the legitimate
stage, or shall we copy life as it is?
The realism of the spoken stage is cumbersome and inadequate.
You have got to let the public sit and wait a full half hour to change a
single setting of elaborate decoration. And after all, do what we may,
it is only a defective and sometimes even miserable transcript of
nature that is conjured on to the stage, despite the ingenuity of the
machinist and many other near-colleagues. The Berlin performance
of Andalosia represented, a few years ago, the forest act as follows:
the stage was arranged in hills, covered with tin tubs in which there
was a profusion of real fir trees and genuine heather. Diagonally
across the stage ran a real brook. Behind an invisible wire cage
squirrels hopped about and frightened birds flew from corner to
corner.
Such a pompous stage setting as this is absurdly complicated.
The stage that goes in exclusively for style will produce the same
psychic effect with the most simple and elementary means.
If style decoration is so made as to meet the exact needs of the
stage, if it suits the stage in every way, well and good; but this is not
in itself irrefutable proof that we should follow the same rules in
preparing decoration for the film. The ways and means of the two
arts are fundamentally different; and the public that each attracts,
and from whose patronage each must survive or perish, is in neither
case the same. Moreover, it is the duty of each art to do what it can.
It is only a fool who attempts the very thing for which he is not
naturally fitted.
The lens of the moving picture camera sucks up the world about it
with unlimited greediness; but it rebels at the mere intimation of
perverse or distorted art forms. The materials with which the film
deals, which it handles, are far too simple, natural, and human to
endure any sort of studied or affected decoration. The spectators in
the motion picture want to see an interesting action on the part of
human beings; they demand beautiful and picturesque decorations;
they wince at, if they do not reject out and out, such pictures as owe
their origin to, and would please the art critics.
The urgent need for good and original settings is ubiquitous;
every film nation feels it. But strangely enough, it has been given the
consideration it calls for neither by the Americans nor by the
Swedes. Both peoples, if we may be permitted to say so, are
perfectly contented with pretty pictures. But real decoration is a vast
deal more than a mere frame enclosing, in rather indifferent fashion,
the human heart. Within the compass of the play, the psychic or
psychological effect and impressiveness have their quite real
meaning; they are important. This fact has been recognized, let us
state it candidly, by the Germans. The German film may be a very
imperfect creation, but you have got to admit that in the way of
inventiveness, wealth of ingenuity, and such atmosphere as can be
created by decoration, it has accomplished a great deal; indeed, in
some instances, it has gone too far.
An instance of excess in the field of decoration was that clever
and ingenious film entitled Dr. Caligari. It may be referred to as the
masterpiece of doubtful decorative art. (Illustrations No. 1 and 2.)
This was the meaning of these decorations: they were intended to
surround or accompany the action as a sort of powerful tone; they
were so many notes. The action itself was hostile to life,
misanthropic, dour. It painted the gruesome phantasies of a mind
diseased. It was an unintended, but not on that account ineffective,
bit of irony that this picture of a deranged world was enveloped in
hyper-impressionistic decoration. The action was that of a madman;
the scenery was as it was. One saw oblique and twisted houses
painted with all manner of mad flourishes; rooms no wall of which
was rectangular or perpendicular or level; passageways of the same
description and streets that cannot be described; rhombic windows
and doors; bent, warped, and splintered trees which reminded of the
monumental drawings that are associated with Chinese painting.
In these pictures (the composition of them was an inimitable
success) there was a perfect reflection, in error and knowledge, of
the inevitable characteristics of decoration.
Fig. 11. Scene from Golem.
[See p. 86]