The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

The values that have been found in this way solved the problem of the material. An artist soul that is certain of itself will never find any great difficulty in seizing upon the right tools to accomplish its ends; and it will rely upon its feelings in determining what these tools shall be. And yet the labyrinth in which the film artist is supposed to find himself is so ramified and many-sided that even the greatest connoisseurs not infrequently lose their way in the winding maze of paths that lie open and seem to bid for popular usage.

The main wheel in the machinery of film art has been found; the technical bases which decide the limits to which the accomplishments and achievements of the motion pictures may hope to go, these are known. Just as brush and colors, or hammer and chisel, each inartistic means in themselves, circumscribe the arts which they aid in creating, and set up a vigorous resistance to an alien or irrelevant aid, just so does the moving picture mechanism become indignant at the intrusion of any and every foreign contrivance or figuration the essential being of which is beyond its natural control.

These technical means, by which the manifolding of scenes is made possible and their reproduction stimulating, aid in preserving the naturally perishable art work of the scene or act. The actor-scene becomes the pivot of all art consideration. It is from it that all recruiting and recreation radiate; and the fame and glory that attach to the enterprise fall upon those people who delineate the play of the human heart in the visible presence of the spectator.

Fig. 6. Scene from Destiny.

[See p. [83]]

The actor on the legitimate stage is a person—that is, a per-sona (a “sounding-through”); he is the speaking tube of the poet. His conception of the rôle he acts is limited, determined, and circumscribed, at least by the words of the poet, and these are, so to speak, anchored in the harbor of his activity. If the art of the actor means “art seen through a temperament,” there still remains the marginal latitude of the temperament, of the personality. Despite this latitude, however, it is unlikely that an actor will be minded to, or be able to, make such self-imposed use of his personality as would be subversive of the ends the poet himself had in mind. The contest, the dispute, the disagreement about the interpretation of a given rôle—we have but to think of the riddle of Hamlet or Mephistopheles—invariably revolves about the question of what the poet himself meant by it when he created it. The stage actor becomes the interpreter of the poetic purpose.

The most important means at the disposal of the stage actor is the words, the lines he has to learn. The world in which he acts is relatively the same as the everyday world in which he lives when off the stage and going about his usual business. The northern actor makes but little use of gestures; they mean but little to him. Such concepts as he wishes to transmit to the spectator he feels should and must be transmitted through the aid of speech. Naturally, the stage actor does not speak in the restless, uncertain, and indistinct manner in which he speaks when off the stage. His language—with the exception of that employed in the hyper-naturalistic drama—is filed and planed, whether it be prose or verse. But he makes himself understood by his dramaturgic colleagues, principally through the same means that he employs when he wishes to convey an idea to them in daily life.

In the frame of the scenic apparatus, the actor plays in the course of a few moments, and in one progressive and uninterrupted action, his rôle from beginning to end. In this case there is no such thing as the splitting up of the action that is to be gone through with into a hundred or more different scenes. It is only rare, to be sure, that the artist observes the whole of his playing from the wings, but in the scenes he has to play the character of his rôle is developed in logical sequence, and he has become familiar with the entire play through rehearsals or through previous performances.

He is his own auditor. The lines of the poet are transformed also for him into intoxicating music to which he resigns, by which he is inspired, and on the wings of which he is carried along.