The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

[See p. [81]]

The contrasts between the picture and the text exist; they even stand out. But they have never prevented plastic art from attaching written explanations to the works that sail under its banner—that is to say, the creations of the artist are named. If such a designation, or naming, were not employed, it is within reason to believe that many a work of art would never enjoy a correct or adequate interpretation. It will probably always be a mystery as to precisely what Titian meant by his so-called, his inadequately designated, “Celestial and Earthly Love.” These terms or names are superfluous, if not annoying, only when they convey an idea which is perfectly patent in the very nature of the work itself. Why ascribe set titles to such works as “Träumerei,” or “The Water Carrier,” or “A Happy Home”? Truth to tell, the interweaving of picture and text had been elevated to the rank of a unique art form by a great artist long before the moving picture began its ascendent course. I mean, Wilhelm Busch, with his pictures and verses. In our soul, Busch’s contrasts are dissolved and intertwined; they constitute an organic unity; they are a spiritual entity.

Æsthetic categorizing has consequently been secured, in turn, and that to the salvation of art. The discovery of the practical, artistic relations that picture and text should bear to each other have, unfortunately, not been made essentially easier thereby.

There can be no doubt but that different peoples feel quite differently on this point. The Italian—Gabriel d’Annunzio, for example, in his Cabiria—inserts sentences of a length, effusiveness, and fustian which are just as intolerable to the art-sense of a German as are the swollen and pathetic stage notes of his regular dramas. Are we to conclude from this that we Germans are cooler, calmer, soberer, and less buoyant than the children of sunny Italy? Or are we to conclude that our feelings are safer guides in matters of art than those of the Italians because we believe that the true significance of the moving picture is to be sought in the picture and not in the text? For it seems to us like an artistic contradiction, like utter nonsense, when the film, intended to create its effects through moving bodies, supererogates unto itself art forms for which better means have been provided, more appropriate ways found. The book was made for poetry, and if it is to be spoken, its place is manifestly on the stage.

The task of the motion picture, let us repeat, is to express feelings by gestures. In this proposition there lies hidden a great deal of knowledge. Feeling does not belong to the text; the written text is not its sphere; it is not to be spoken; it is to be given form and substance through the art of mimicry. But there are motion pictures staged by men who at the very thought of an I love you (the warmest and tenderest possibility of this art) cannot resist the temptation to have these three words roared forth through so much accompanying text.

But never mind! I love you—that would be an almost classically sober wording. The actors could play this concept so perfectly that such a sentence, however superfluous it might be, would scarcely be noticed. The more, however, the text endeavors to create atmosphere through itself alone, the more the film departs from real art. In a certain gloriously dilettantish screen creation one reads: “Vera, you are so lovely and good to everybody, couldn’t you be lovely and good to me too?” Even a sentence such as “You are beautiful” brought a discordant note into the general situation. We should be able to detect, in each of our five senses, the way in which the beauty of a woman gains utter control over a man. If we are so bereft of feeling and fancy that we cannot see this and feel it, a whole volume of emotional text would not be able to drum it into our heads and hearts.

One notices that the film authors frequently try to bring a bit of poetry into their texts: “It is not wise to show me how much I lost when I erased the memory of the woman from my mind,” said the Tiger of Eschnapur in the Indisches Grabmal (“Indian Monument”). In a case of this kind, words take to their heels, so to speak, wander out into the realm of undisciplined poetry, and lose all feeling for and connection with mimic action. But in the motion picture the word is not free; it is bound with secret chains to the mimic action. If these are broken, the ensuing contradiction jars on our senses in that two art forms are welded together which in reality have nothing to do with each other.

The striving after lyric tenderness and beauty is noticeable in a great many German and American films. In this regard, the Swede is wiser, his feelings more commendable. His texts are more objective and material; and the effects they produce are more wholesome and artistic. For wherever and whenever the text displays an excess of fire and fancy, the spectator remains as cold as ice. His feelings can be aroused only by the gestures, by the movements of the bodies of the actors. In Dr. Mabuse we were regaled with this bit of declamation: “He—who is he? No one knows him. He stands over the city. He is as tall as a tower. He is damnation, he is salvation—and he loved me.” The public was not moved one iota—but it laughed tears. Instead of being exalted, it was disenchanted; it was sobered down. For the very simple reason that the laws of the motion picture text are different from and narrower than those that have to do with poetry.

The film texts that are written in verse prove to be pretty thin and anemic in their effect, even when a serious and gentle poet writes them. We have but to think of Der müde Tod (“Weary Death”). They are however altogether unbearable when they come trotting across the screen in the cumbersome armor of the iambic pentameter—as the Italians so frequently employ them. That kind of inflated film text has been rejected by the entire world. The film text cannot endure a revel in words; it must fit the action as tightly and as neatly as a smooth, stiff fleshing fits an actor of the spoken stage. Dress it up with the festival garments of formal poetry and these garments flop about its limbs while æsthetics go begging.

Here is a thought to be kept on our memorandum: All that is said in the way of feelings in the text is not felt in the play. Our instinctive presentiment, at this stage of film development, is so deep that we are not going to admit through the threefold door of the heart any text that attempts to bend and mold this presentiment to suit its own purposes.