The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

It was not until our own day—the ancient arts of which are tired to death and foul to the very marrow of their bones—a day in which it seemed that art could take no hope, that technique stepped in and made inventions as a result of which the gesture took on fullness and acquired sound. Modern technique has invented the film, and the film is the violin of the human body.

Before one recognized the nuances of which the film was potentially capable, it had to wander along through the crude errors of pantomime. That the imperfect films of the first decades offered only imperfect, at times even repellent, pictures, is altogether natural. The intellectuals of all nations, and those who had schooled their eye and their heart on the perfection and beauty of the old and established arts, were terrified, if not horrified, at and by the unlicked antics of this new contraption. They saw in the motion picture nothing more than a machine to entertain, chiefly to amuse, the populace. They damned it outright; they found it a perverter of youth, just as they had and have found those cheap, vulgar and badly printed paper volumes which are to be had for a few pennies, and which poison the youthful mind so that the expenditure of millions in charity and philanthropy cannot reclaim them.

There were as yet no artists who could play on this new and novel fairy violin. The evolution of the film is quite logical: it began with devices and agencies which were inadequate, both artistically and technically.

Fig. 8. Scene from Algol.

[See p. [84]]

It is our duty and our pleasure to do homage at this point to an artist who took up with the film, and resigned herself to it, at a time when artists in general poured contempt without measure and derision without thought on it. This artist was the Dane—Asta Nielsen. She has been dethroned, unquestionably a prima donna of the old school by whose playing we can now do no more than evaluate the tremendous progress that has been made by her pupils and successors. But in Europe she was the queen, the standard-bearer of the film. Her large, dark eyes, and the symmetrical play of her limbs, captivated and converted many of different faith to the cause. Her gestures were taken from the pantomime: she moved across the canvas in slow, long, ostentatious tread. There was, indeed, something about her movements that might be described as obtrusive, importunate. But Asta Nielsen was—let us repeat, in Europe—the first of that great herd of jobless artistes and beggarly paid servants who took up her position before the revolving camera in a really and truly artistic way. She was filled with a passion, and endowed with a faith in art that was unknown to and unappreciated by the great majority, as she played the lachrymose and vapid tales that were then being turned out for visualization on the screen.

She was originally an actress; she abandoned the legitimate stage and went over to the motion picture. Now, the actor on the regular stage is one kind of individual; the actor for the motion picture is quite another. The stage has a limited and well-defined category of beings and shadows, of vessels, so to speak, for the fancy of the poet in words. There is the youthful lover, the sentimental dame of uncertain years, the first hero, the first heroine, the doughty old father, the droll old lady, and so on. The list need not be filled out; it is a familiar one.

Anything that fits into one of these classifications is played, summa summarum, by the actor engaged to take the part. The actor of the spoken stage has a clear and definite being; his character, his make-up, is known. He is a comedian, a boneless man who can slip into this rôle to-day and into another to-morrow. In his position, whatever it may be at any given time, he engages in a really fraudulent and affected game. That is the comedy which devours in time the very character of that actor whose gifts are naturally none too great. He becomes a player of all parts; he creates all rôles; he grows into a poseur without truth of soul. Only the tremendous characters of the rarely gifted, of a Garrick or a Kainz, win the victory over the insidious phrase, assimilate any rôle they essay to interpret, and transform it into a part of their own being.

I do not know whether Asta Nielsen was a great artist on the legitimate stage or not; I hardly believe that she was. For there is the atmosphere of “comedy” about her rôles, an eternal conflict between truth and phraseology. No one had even a remote conception of the unsparing nature of the film lens in the early days of her histrionic glory. One schematized a rôle in accordance with the traditions of the legitimate stage. Nor was this all; the first great film artist had to do everything. She was worth her weight in gold; and she was exploited. This week she would take the part of a demoniac prostitute in silk and satin; next week she would play the part of a young girl whose youthfulness was not surpassed by her chastity, and whose beauty was the cynosure of vigilant eyes.