There comes a time where we really feel sorry for the motion picture artist—when he finds tricks indispensable if he is to give an adequate idea of the miraculous magic in which he is interested. We will concede that in the trick film, and particularly in the fairy film, a certain measure of inner and intimate development is possible, and is at times evident. This “art,” however, always has a flaw in it that defies mending. Any art that forms an alliance with pure mechanisms in order to be effective, or to bring out the intended effects, is to be distrusted from the very beginning. For art ceases when mechanismus begins to play a rôle that can in any way be considered creative or important. The purpose of art is clear: it is to serve in the colorful reproduction of a scene.
Fig. 5. Scene from The Nibelungs.
[See p. [82]]
This fact should be recognized, and in the films that set forth that reality which makes the warping and twisting of natural laws impossible, there should be just as little use made of tricks as the situation allows; and when employed, they should be employed with extreme caution. For the spectator, enlightened as he may become through the papers and magazines, is all too apt to catch on to these tricks. And it is never wise to grant the man whose art-sense is undeveloped, and whose æsthetic understanding is anything but mellow, a peep behind the scenes. The sole place that the artistically immature can occupy with impunity is in front of the stage.
Many film tricks are, indeed, distinctly deceptive—or fraudulent. If the incomparable detective is to land in an automobile that is whirring by at a fearful rate of speed, he goes about his undertaking in a quite calm way: four pictures a second, and the car making sixty miles an hour. What really happens? Twenty or thirty-second pictures, mad speed, foolhardy defiance of every known danger, and so on and so on. But woe to the final effect if the average spectator sees through the thing!
Even when there is no great or real mystery about the applied tricks, the artistic effect of them is rather weak. The spectator looks at it all, and so many technical questions arise in his mind as to how the feat is accomplished that his attention is drawn away from the picture itself. “How do they do that?” is one question that distracts him. Another is: “Is it real?” Indeed, the legitimate stage not infrequently finds it hard to resist the temptation to amaze and bewilder the spectator through the use of technical appliances.
Simple tricks, such as the sudden appearance of a dream figure, the unforeseen vanishing of magic people right in the middle of the picture may, in urgent cases, be employed. They rarely radiate anything that even distantly approaches what might be called psychic power, as did, for example, the unpretentious and altogether laudable tricks employed in the Indisches Grabmal. The truth is, we are reluctant about submitting to these mechanical devices; we refuse to be duped. Be the management and mounting ever so clever, we feel too keenly the presence of the cold mechanism.
More complicated and more difficult tricks, which really deceive no one, are the appearance of the same person twice in the same picture. When such takes place, two thoughts, or feelings, fight rather vigorously for dominance: we don’t like to refuse homage to the at times marvelous art of the actor (as in the case of Henny Porten in Kohlhiesels Töchter, or Ossy Oswalda in Puppe); and the situation can be so captivating that it is out of the question for us to witness it and remain cold. But the point is eventually reached where we feel the impossibility, indeed the very absurdity of it all: “Just hand the old quockerwodger over to me! I’ll cut him in half and each part will dance on the rope just as comically as you please!” This is all very well, but you cannot expect a man to be an earth-worm, for which dual dancing of this type would be a mere trifle. Any pleasure that we might otherwise be enabled to draw from such a performance is vitiated by the ineluctable consciousness that we are witnessing a trick of a distinctly technical virtuosity.
But it is still more impossible to feel that we are in the presence of an artistic performance when—and it is common enough—the scene demanding that a man be pushed off some dangerous ledge or routed from some death-giving height, a big stuffed doll is substituted for the mortal thus to be visualized. In Golem, for example, we know full well that it is not the actor, Lothar Müthel, who is swept from the tower by the raging ghost. And we merely smile when the Golem drags a stuffed doll around by the hair. The presence of Mirjam’s clothing helps neither one way nor the other. Or take another type of situation: Where would it be possible to find an actor who was willing to have himself hurled high into the air on the occasion of one of the numerous and popular automobile collisions? In such a scene, where the living actor, of course, does not take part, the most that even the naïvest of spectator experiences is a quasi-thrill just as the “hero” receives his bump. After that there is nothing left but the disagreeable feeling on the part of the spectator that the staging of the piece was inadequate.