The object of that technique is the indirect communication of emotion—indirect because that is the surest way, in all the arts, of multiplying the degree of intensity. The American spectacle film still communicates a thrill in the direct way of a highwayman with a blackjack. But the American serious film drama communicates not even this: it is at this moment entirely dead, or in other words, wholly bogus. I may be wrong in thinking that our present position develops out of the creation of Mary Pickford as a star. The result is the same.
For as soon as the movie became “the silent drama” it took upon itself responsibilities. It had to be dignified and artistic; it had to have literature and actors and ideals. The simple movie plots no longer sufficed, and stage and novel were called upon to contribute their small share to the success of an art which seriously believed itself to be the consummation of all the arts. The obligation remained to choose only those examples which were suitable to the screen. It was, however, not adaptability which guided the choice, but the great name. Eventually everything was filmed because what couldn’t be adapted could be spoiled. The degree of vandalism passes words; and what completed the ruin was that good novels were spoiled not to make good films, but to make bad ones. Victory was a vile film in addition to being a vulgar betrayal of Conrad; even the good Molnar with his exciting second-rate play, The Devil, found himself so foully, so disgustingly changed on the screen that the whole idea, not a great one, was lost and nothing remained but a sentimental vulgarity which had no meaning of its own, quite apart from any meaning of his. In each of these the elements are the same: a psychological development through an action. By corrupting the action the producers changed the idea; bad enough in itself, they failed to understand what they were doing and supplied nothing to take the place of what they had destroyed. The actual movies so produced refused to project any consecutive significant action whatsoever.
It would be futile to multiply examples—as futile as to note that there have been well-filmed novels and plays. The essential thing is that nearly every picture made recently has borrowed something, usually in the interest of dignity, gentility, refinement—and the picture side, the part depending upon action before the camera, has gone steadily down. Long subtitles explain everything except the lack of action. Carefully built scenes are settings in which nothing takes place. The climax arrives in the masterpieces of the de Mille school. They are “art.” They are genteel. They offend nothing—except the intelligence. High life in the de Mille manner is not recognizable as decent human society, but it is refined, and the picture with it is refined out of existence. Ten years earlier there was another type of drama: the vamp, in short, and Theda Bara was its divinity. I have little to say in its defense because it was unalterably stupid (I don’t say I didn’t like it). But it wasn’t half so pretentious as the de Mille social drama, and not half so vulgar. What it had to say, false or banal or ridiculous, it said entirely with the camera. It appealed to low passions and it truckled to imitative morality; there was in it a sort of corruption. Yet one could resist that frank ugliness as one can’t resist the polite falsehood of the new culture of the movies.
It would be easy to exaggerate your failures. Your greatest mistake was a natural one—in taking over the realistic theatre. You knew that a photograph can reproduce actuality without significantly transposing it, and you assumed that that was the duty of the film. But you forgot that the rhythm of the film was creating something, and that this creation adapted itself entirely to the projection of emotion by means not realistic; that in the end the camera was as legitimately an instrument of distortion as of reproduction. You gave us, in short, the pleasure of verification in every detail; the Germans who are largely in the same tradition—they should have known better because their theatre knew better—improved the method at times and counted on significant detail. But neither of you gave us the pleasure of recognition. Neither you nor they have taken the first step (except in Caligari) toward giving us the highest degree of pleasure, that of escaping actuality and entering into a created world, built on its own inherent logic, keeping time in its own rhythm—where we feel ourselves at once strangers and at home. That has been done elsewhere—not in the serious film.
I would be glad to temper all of this with praise: for Anita Loos’ captions and John Emerson’s occasionally excellent direction; for George Loane Tucker, for Monte Katterjohn’s flashes of insight into what makes a scenario. I have liked many more films than I have mentioned here. But you are familiar with praise and there remains to say what you have missed. The moving picture when it became pretentious, when it went upstage and said, “dear God, make me artistic” at the end of its prayers, killed its imagination and foreswore its popularity. At your present rate of progress you will in ten years—if you survive—be no more a popular art than grand opera is. You had in your hands an incalculable instrument to set free the imagination of mankind—and the atrophy of our imaginative lives has only been hastened by you. You had also an instrument of fantasy—and you gave us Marguerite Clark in films no better than the “whimsy-me” school of stage plays. Above all, you had something fresh and clean and new; it was a toy and should have remained a toy—something for our delight. You gave us problem plays. Beauty you neither understood nor cared for; and although you talked much about art you never for a moment tried to fathom the secret sources, nor to understand the secret obligations, of art.
Can you do anything now? I don’t know and I am indifferent to your future—because there is a future for the moving picture with which you will have nothing to do. I do not know if the movie of the future will be popular—and to me it is the essence of the movie that it should be popular. Perhaps there will be a period of semi-popularity—it will be at this time that you will desert—and then the new picture will arrive without your assistance. For when you and your capitalizations and your publicity go down together, the field will be left free for others. The first cheap film will startle you; but the film will grow less and less expensive. Presently it will be within the reach of artists. With players instead of actors and actresses, with fresh ideas (among which the idea of making a lot of money may be absent) these artists will give back to the screen the thing you have debauched—imagination. They will create with the camera, and not record, and will follow its pulsations instead of attempting to capture the rhythm of actuality. It isn’t impossible to recreate exactly the atmosphere of Anderson’s I’m a Fool; it isn’t impossible (although it may not be desirable) to do studies in psychology; it is possible and desirable to create great epics of American industry and let the machine operate as a character in the play—just as the land of the West itself, as the corn must play its part. The grandiose conceptions of Frank Norris are not beyond the reach of the camera. There are painters willing to work in the medium of the camera and architects and photographers. And novelists, too, I fancy, would find much of interest in the scenario as a new way of expression.[30] There is no end to what we can accomplish.
The vulgar prettiness, the absurdities, the ignorances of your films haven’t saved you. And although the first steps after you take away your guiding hand may be feeble, although bogus artists and culture-hounds may capture the movie for a time—in the end all will be well. For the movie is the imagination of mankind in action—and you haven’t destroyed it yet.