The business of depicting feelings must be left to the actor. Any feature of the action that cannot be controlled in an unconstrained way by the art of mimicry must be cared for by the text. Under this heading would fall the announcement of decisions reached or resolutions made by the participating personages. But when the text essays to chew, swallow, and regurgitate what our imagination can dispose of by virtue of its own power much better than words can tell, failure raises its austere visage; for imagination, if not left alone, slinks into the corner in disgruntled mood and proclaims from its safe but sinister seat that the entire performance is a fraud, that what seems like splendor is nothing but cheap paint.
It is not the mute but the monosyllabic character that the motion picture develops. We are becoming aware of the fact that there is a pronounced tendency in this modern age toward greater brevity; we are turning away from the prolix and diffuse; we are endeavoring more and more to say a great deal in a few words, and to use expressions that carry comprehensive meaning. The man of the motion picture is related by affinity and by his very being to the man of the first quarter of the century.
In the hands of a disciplined and experienced film writer the text, as a tool of the trade, disports itself benevolently, and is a handmaiden of the arts. In the hands of an inferior writer, it murders art and slays the canons of art; for the text becomes an end in itself, and its æsthetic lassitude as well as its gradual effacement, or rather extinction, robs in time the legitimate gestures of their specific meaning and their general significance.
It is remarkable, however, that these facts, these bits of knowledge regarding the film, do not apply to the comic motion picture. Even the ingenious Chaplin, who makes more out of gestures than any of his colleagues, has never been known to object to a right good, or juicy, text. There are, in truth, quite a number of film comedies in which the foils and florets of wit are swung about with marked liberality and hilarity.
But whatever may be said, whatever theories may be proposed, it remains a sober truth that the real freedom of the film artist is preserved, for his own enjoyment and that of his spectators, when he is allowed to make his picture effective as he sees it, and through such gestures as he personally sees fit to employ to this end. That is the thought the Swedes kept in mind in the making of their astonishing film entitled Erotikon, in which they played fast and loose with all academic deductions touching on the muteness of the film. And if asked, “When is text permissible?” we would be obliged to reply that it is permissible only when it is necessary.
CHAPTER III
TRICKS
On what planet was the man of the moving picture born? Did he, and does he, first see the light of day on some magic star where the established laws of nature fail to function? Where time stands still, or runs backward? Where spread tables emerge from the earth? Where the wish suffices to enable a man to fly through the air, or to disappear without a trace into the ground beneath him?
Long before the World War, when the real power of the motion picture to represent feelings was as yet unknown, and when serious literature, on this subject or on that, was as yet unable to rise above the low level of the cheap pamphlet, one of the most valiant of German literati—Julius Bab—referred to the trick film, the fairy film, as the exclusive species of creation with which the so-called moving picture could legitimately lay claim to success, achieved or potential. The pedagogues rushed to his support; they showered him with applause; they demanded the fairy film; they hated and even damned the serious motion picture.
But never mind! Let us grant that the film Bab and his supporters had in mind enjoys substantial possibilities in the way of setting forth certain types of pictures. Their contention merely increased the scope of the moving picture. But did the picture they had in mind add to the artistic scope of the business at hand? Bab wrote at that time these words: “For the motion picture, and in the motion picture, it is easy to have water run uphill, to have a venerable costermonger of the gentler sex soar through the empyrean heights, to have a snail overtake an express train.”
Now, there is at least one irrefutable proof that a given thing is not art: unlimited possibilities. These make up the stock-in-trade of the trick film. In such a production there is no development; there is nothing in which the artist soul triumphs over the soul of the merest mechanic. There is none of the torture or anguish that goes with the act of real creation. There is nothing more than a trick played on the object in question. The trick film is the work of a cold hand. The inventive mind is constantly bringing out new and quite ingenious tricks—magic tricks. Having become experienced in this, “it has the Devil kidnap a railway train and make off with it through the air.” But this is not art; it belongs to the variety shows; it is in place where all that is asked for and paid for is physical cleverness, legerdemain, art without soul.