Two things, consequently, were to be recognized, and to be overcome: the phraseology of the pantomime gesture, and the insincerity of the rôle. The legitimate stage portrays and represents shadows—speaking tubes of the poet; the film uses real human beings.
The development of the film has been different in different countries. In one country its growth has been noticeably slow; in another it has been remarkably rapid. Film actors put in their appearance, were carried along for a while on the wave of popularity, and then vanished—or they still fight on—Asta Nielsen is a case in point—in a mad and ineffectual attempt to regain or retain their thrones. This development of the film has been recognized nowhere. It has not come to light. It has been brought about in perfect accord with that instinctive necessity with which the healthy never fails to blaze its trail and find its way.
Man versus rôle, individual versus a stage phantom—that is the situation. In America, where cumbersome traditions are rare, in the realm of art, the goal was reached more quickly than elsewhere. It was in America that we witnessed the complete defection from the stage actor and a consequential preference for the type. There is to be no mimicking; there is to be no playing of theater; each man has his own character, and this character he projects on the screen, again and again, now in this disguise, now in another, but it is always the same character. He projects his own ego; and for this reason he never fails, for a man can find his own mouth with the spoon, it makes no difference how dark the dining-room may be.
Fig. 9. Scene from Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown.
[See p. [84]]
There is another country which, by virtue of its well-nigh complete isolation from the hardened traditions of the Mediterranean nations, found the truth and genuineness of the film with marked rapidity: Sweden. The Swedish player is very rarely a great “actor.” His face, with its broad Finnish cheek bones, is rather immovable. His eyes dream, but inwardly. They turn at times with an expression of unqualified skepticism toward the things of the outer world only to return to the same soul from which they derived their initial characteristics and inspiration. The figures are not yet entirely awakened; they stretch themselves after the fashion of young trees. But in these Swedish men lies deep breath: it is the dreamy melancholy of their native land. Every one of them has the warm blood of life coursing through his veins, and the atmosphere of truth is about them all, even when we feel that they are all a bit alike in the matter of elegiac temperament. When steel and stone are rubbed together, sparks fly; the Swedes are all constituted, more or less, of the same resilient wood.
The film theater of the Romance peoples was simply fearful. The ostentatious gesticulation, the long-drawn-out echo of feelings, the false pomp of their operatic style have been the cause of many a bankruptcy among film companies and producers in sunny Italy. The Italian film industry represents, in truth, in the year 1923, nothing but a heap of ruins from which here and there, but only rarely, a patch of green prosperity raises its intimidated tuft. A great many Italians are coming up to Germany to-day, the film gestures of which appeal to them as being relatively tolerable. The sober, phraseless vibration of American acting gets on the hot-blooded nerves of these sons of the South.
We Germans, however, are fully convinced that the way we had been following, in the matter of gestures, up to 1923 was a false one. Our producers rarely have the courage to go fishing for film actors, for new and youthful faces, in the great stream of humanity that flows by them without ceasing. Until only one year ago, we fancied that no one was fitted for the screen unless he had proved his ability on the stage. That was a grievous error.
We have, to be sure, some clever character players whose psychic powers were not corrupted by the pathos of the stage. I mention, among others, the famous Jennings, Wegener, and Schünzel. They are great on the stage for the very evident and simple reason that they dominate any part they play and make it yield to the dictates of their own personalities. But we have no youthful favorite among the ladies; we do not have the smiling hero, who lustily packs up life and carries it off on one shoulder. But our greatest lack is in another direction: we have no young woman; we have no radiant girl. She is lacking, but only in our moving pictures; in life she is present. And if we wish to bring these charming and lovely young girls into the moving picture world and project them on the screen, we have got to make up our minds that there is but one place where they can be found: in life itself. We have got to recruit them from the flowing naturalness of their laughter.