La Musique is all a matter of construction and is a wonderful example of the use of material. For at bottom it consists of the efforts of two men to play a serenade and the continual intrusion of a third. Francesco and Paolo arrive, each carrying a guitar or a mandoline, and place two chairs close together exactly in the centre of the ring. They step on the chairs and prepare to sit on the backs, but even this simple process is difficult for them, as neither is willing to sit down before the other, nor to remain seated while the other is still erect, and they must be continually rising and apologizing until one flings the other down and keeps him there until he himself is seated. Ready then, they blow out the electric lights and strike the first notes; but the spotlight deserts them; they are left in the dark and puzzled; they regard one another with dismay and suspicion. Suddenly they see it across the ring and, descending with great gravity, carry their chairs across. Again they start, and again the spotlight goes; their irritation mounts, but their dignity remains and they follow it. It flits back to where they had come from. There is a consultation and the two chairs are returned to their original place in the centre of the ring. Then the two musicians take off their coats, prowl around the ring stalking the light, and fall upon it; then slowly and with much labour they lift the light by its edges and carefully carry it back to their chairs. And as they begin to play the grotesque marches in behind them, unconscious of them, intent only upon his vast horn and the enormous musical score he carries. Unseeing and unseen, he prepares himself, and at about the tenth bar the great bray of his horn shatters the melody of the strings. The two musicians are dismayed, but as they cannot see the source of the disturbance, they try again; again the horn intrudes. This time there is expostulation and argument with the grotesque, but, as he reasonably points out, music was desired and he is doing his share. There is only one issue for such a scene, and it takes place, in a riot.
The Fratellini. By Fernand Leger
The preparation of these riots is a work of real delicacy, for the Fratellini know that two things are equally true: violence is funny and violence ceases to be funny. Like Chaplin, they infuse into their violence the sense of reason—they are violent only when no other means will suffice. In the photographer scene they call into action the “august” a stock character of the European circus, played at the Medrano with exceptional skill by M Lucien Godart. The august is a man of great dignity whose office it is to parley with clowns, be the butt of their jokes, and in M Godart’s version, set off their grotesque appearance by an excellent figure and the most correct of evening clothes. (He is in addition a rather good tumbler, and it is part of the Medrano tradition for the audience to hiss him until he grows seemingly furious and turns twenty difficult somersaults around the ring.) The Fratellini, armed with a huge black box and a cloth, ask him to sit for his photograph. Francesco takes it upon himself to explain the apparatus, Paolo standing close by with the three fence posts which represent the tripod, and Alberto, the grotesque waiting near by. Suddenly the tripod falls on Alberto’s feet and he howls with pain; Paolo picks the posts up again, and again they fall, and again he howls. It is unbelievable that this should be funny, yet it is funny beyond any capacity to describe it for one reason which the spectator senses long before he sees it. That is that the tripod is not intentionally thrown on the feet of the grotesque. The fault is Francesco’s, for he is explaining the machine and making serious errors, and every time he makes a mistake Paolo gets excited and forgets that he has the tripod in his hand, and simply lets it drop. One senses his acute regret, and at the next moment one realizes that his scientific zeal, his respect for his profession of photographer, simply does not permit him to let a misstatement pass; his gesture as he turns to set the matter right is so eager, so agonized, that one doesn’t see what has happened to the tripod until it has fallen. And to point the moral of the matter, when the grotesque Alberto after the fifth time picks the tripod up and attempts to slay Paolo, Paolo is again turning toward the others and the blow goes wide.
What the Fratellini are doing here is, to be sure, what every great actor does—they are presenting their effects indirectly. The difficulty for them is that in the end they must give their effects with the maximum of directness—they have to strike a man in the face and make the sound tell. In the scene of the photograph the august is “he who gets slapped” (the phrase is a common one) and the scene is carefully built up through his reluctance and stupidity in posing. At first it is only an exaggeration of the customary difficulties between a photographer and a little child; but as the august becomes more and more suspicious of the intentions of the photographer, the clowns become more and more insistent that he, and nobody but he, shall have his picture taken. Gradually an atmosphere of hostility is built up; the august tries to escape from the ring and is hauled back; then dragged, then forced to sit; the opposing wills grow more and more violent; the audience senses the good will of the clowns, the obstinacy of the august; not a push or shove is given without reason and meaning. And when they see that there is nothing else for it, the three hurl themselves upon the clown in a frenzy of destructiveness and he is rent limb from limb. (In actual fact only his exquisite evening clothes were rent, but the effect is the same.)
In these scenes and almost all their others, the Fratellini escape the reproach of being nothing but violent, while they hold every good element which violence in action can give them. To them are comparable the best (and only the best) of Eddie Cantor’s scenes—when he applied for the job of policeman and when he was examined for the army—where there is a play of motive and a hidden logic. In their world everything must be sensible, and the most sensible thing in the world is to hit out. Behind them is a dual tradition—centuries of laughter and centuries of refining the instruments by which simple laughter can be produced. For it is opposed to their sense of fitness (as it is to ours) that the clown should create an effect of subtlety.[26] The kind of laughter they produce must involve the whole body, but not the mind. They have to be active all the time, so that you are dazzled and cannot think; and they must shake the solid ground under your feet, so that you may shake with laughter. What the critical observer discovers as method must reach the actual average spectator only as effect. All of this the Fratellini have accomplished—“these three brothers who constitute one artist” are the complete and perfect exemplars of their art. Seeing them sometimes twice a week, and nearly two dozen times, I find their qualities inexhaustible. Even in the descriptions of acts noted above it can be seen that they have a definite sense of pace; their changes from fast to slow in the middle of an act, their variations from violence to trickery, their complete mastery of climax, their fertility of invention, are all elements of superiority. But they are only elements in a composition based on something fundamentally right—the knowledge that we have almost forgotten how to laugh in the actual world, and that to make us laugh again they must create a world of their own.