Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

And that distinction brings me to the producer. It was for him that I should have liked to have thought of it. For he fell to talking to me about his art, the art of production, and of cinematography in general, and I found myself forced to make some comparisons with what I had, up to that moment, always thought of as the “regular” stage. But evidently, as Jeffery said of Wordsworth’s poem, this would never do. The producer might have thought I was reflecting upon his art, about which he was so enthusiastic, as something “irregular.” At last, after deplorable hesitation, I found my phrase—the “other” stage. Dreadfully tame, I admit, but safe; it hurt nobody. Even now, however, I have an uneasy feeling that the producer was not quite satisfied with it. I ought perhaps to have accompanied it with a shrug, some sign of apology for so much as recognizing the existence of “other” stages of anything else, in short, than what was, at that moment and on that spot, the stage, the “silent” stage, the stage of moving pictures. It was like speaking of Frith’s “Derby Day” in the presence of a Cubist. Artistic enthusiasts must be allowed their little exclusions.

If the producer was an enthusiast, there was certainly a method in his enthusiasm. His table was covered with elaborate geometrical drawings, which, I was told, were first sketches for successive scenes. On pegs hung little schedules of the artists required for each scene, and of the scenes wherein each of the principals was concerned. Innumerable photographs, of course—photographs of scenes actually represented on the “film,” and of others not represented, experiments for the actual, final thing. For it is to be remembered that the producer of a “film” is relatively more important than the producer of a “spoken drama.” He is always part, and sometimes whole, author of the play. He has to conceive the successive phases of the action in detail, and to conceive them in terms of photography. Even with some one else’s play as a datum he has, I take it, to invent a good deal. For while the “spoken drama” can only show selected, critical moments of life, the “silent stage” aims at continuity and gives you the intervening moments. On the one stage, when a lady makes an afternoon call, you see her hostess’s drawing-room, and she walks in; on the other stage you see her starting from home, jumping into her Rolls-Royce, dashing through the crowded streets, knocking at the front door, being relieved of her cloak by the flunkey, mounting the stairs to the drawing-room, etc., etc. Indeed, this mania for continuity is a besetting sin of the “silent stage”; it leads to sheer irrelevance and the ruin of all proportion. My enthusiastic producer, it is only fair to say, was far too good an artist to approve it.

“At the first whistle, get ready,” shouted the producer, “at the second, slow waltz, please.” And then the baronial hall was filled by the crowd of exemplary patience and they danced with unaffected enjoyment, these gay people, just as though no camera were directed on them. The heroine appeared (she was the daughter of the house, and this was her first ball—indicated by a stray curl down her back), and her ravishing pink gown, evidently a choice product of the West-end, looked strange in a disused East-end factory. Of course she had adopted the inexorable “cinema” convention of a “Cupid’s bow” mouth. Here is the youngest of the arts already fast breeding its own conventions. Surely the variety of female lips might be recognized! Women’s own mouths are generally prettier, and certainly more suitable to their faces, than some rigidly fixed type. It would be ungallant to say that the leading lady’s “Cupid’s bow” did not become her, but the shape of her own mouth, I venture to suggest, would have been better still. And where was my friend the notable comedian all this time? Rigging himself out in evening clerical dress for the ball (he was the vicar of the parish), and evidently regarding his momentary deviation into “film” work (for the benefit of a theatrical charity) as great fun. Will the heroes of the “silent stage,” I wonder, ever deviate into “spoken drama”? It would be startling to hear Charlie Chaplin speak.

THE MOVIES

All is dark and an excellent orchestra is playing a Beethoven symphony. The attendant flashes you to your seat with her torch, you tumble over a subaltern, and murmur to yourself, with Musset’s Fantasio, “Quelles solitudes que tous ces corps humains!” For that is the first odd thing that strikes you about the movies; the psychology of the audience is not collective, but individual. You are not aware of your neighbour, who is shrouded from your gaze, and you take your pleasure alone. Thus you are rid of the “contagion of the crowd,” the claims of human sympathy, the imitative impulse, and thrown in upon yourself, a hermit at the mercy of the hallucinations that beset the solitary. You never applaud, for that is a collective action. What with the soothing flow of the music, the darkness, and the fact that your eye is fixed on one bright spot, you are in the ideal condition for hypnotism. But the suspected presence of others, vague shadows hovering near you, give your mood the last touch of the uncanny. You are a prisoner in Plato’s cave or in some crepuscular solitude of Maeterlinck. Anything might happen.

According to the programme what happens is called The Prodigal Wife. Her husband is a doctor and she pines for gaiety while he is busy at the hospital. It is her birthday and he has forgotten to bring her her favourite roses, which are in fact offered to her by another gentleman with more leisure and a better memory. Our own grievance against the husband, perhaps capricious, is his appalling straw hat—but then we equally dislike the lovers tail-coat, so matters are even, and the lady’s preference of No. 2 to No. 1 seems merely arbitrary. Anyhow, she goes off with No. 2 in a motor-car, “all out,” leaving the usual explanatory letter behind her, which is thrown on the screen for all of us to gloat over.

Here let me say that this profuse exhibition on the screen of all the correspondence in the case, letters, telegrams, copies of verses, last wills and testaments, the whole dossier, strikes me as a mistake. It under-values the intelligence of the audience, which is quite capable of guessing what people are likely to write in the given circumstances without being put to the indelicacy of reading it. As it is, you no sooner see some one handling a scrap of paper than you know you are going to have the wretched scrawl thrust under your nose. As if we didn’t know all about these things! As if it wouldn’t be pleasanter to leave the actual text to conjecture! I remember in Rebellious Susan there is a packet of compromising letters shown to interested parties, whose vague comments, “Well, after that,” etc., sufficiently enlighten us without anything further. But now, when Lady Macbeth reads her lord’s letter, up it goes on the screen, blots and all. This is an abuse of the film, which finds it easier to exhibit a letter than to explain why it came to be written. As things are, the lady seems to have eloped in a hurry without sufficient grounds. No. 2 presents his roses, and, hey presto! the car is round the corner. No. 1 takes it very nobly, hugs his abandoned babe to his bosom, and pulls long faces (obligingly brought nearer the camera to show the furrows). The mother’s sin shall ever be hidden from the innocent child, and to see the innocent child innocently asking, “Where’s muvver?” and being answered with sad headshakes from the bereaved parent (now bang against the camera) is to bathe in sentimental photography up to the neck.

Thereafter the innocent child grows like (and actually inside) a rosebud till, as the petals fall off, she is revealed as a buxom young woman—the familiar photographic trick of showing one thing through another being here turned to something like poetic advantage. But then the film again bolts with the theme. There is running water and a boat, things which no film can resist. Away go the girl and her sweetheart on a river excursion, loosening the painter, jumping in, shoving off, performing, in short, every antic which in photography can be compassed with a stream and a boat. We have forgotten all about the prodigal wife. But here she is again, her hair in grey bandeaux and her lips, as the relentless camera shows you at short range, rouged with a hard outline. She has returned to her old home as the family nurse. For there is now another innocent babe, the doctor’s grandchild, to wax and wane with the advancing and receding camera, and to have its little “nightie” blown realistically by the usual wind as it stands on the stair-head. The doctor himself is as busy as ever, making wonderful pharmacological discoveries (newspaper extracts exhibited on the screen) in a laboratory blouse and dictating the results (notes shown on the screen) to an enterprising reporter.

And here there is another “rushed” elopement. “The art of drama,” said Dumas, “is the art of preparations.” But nothing has prepared us (save, perhaps, heredity) for the sudden freak of the prodigal wife’s daughter in running away with a lover so vague that you see only his hat (another hideous straw—il ne manquait que ca!) and the glow of his cigarette-end. Family nurse to the rescue! Tender expostulations, reminders about the innocent babe, and nick-of-time salvation of the “intending” runaway. Ultimate meeting of nurse and doctor; he is all forgiveness, but prodigal wives are not to be forgiven like that. No, she must go out into the snow, and you see her walking down the long path, dwindling, dwindling, from a full-sized nurse into a Euclidean point.