The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

We begin with a decided aversion to the star system. And it must be said that all of those presumptive and presumptuous film princesses, whose abilities would be remarkable indeed if they bore the slightest relation to their caprices, have disappeared from the studios. These stars made, until quite recently, the production of a picture in Germany an excessively expensive undertaking because of their lack of willingness to work, and their eternal talking. This explains why Fritz Lang, of the Decla-Bioscop, showed so many new and strange faces in his marvelous picture based on the Nibelungen saga.

It is rare, in the case of the legitimate stage, that a part is written for a special actor. Whoever fits the part is assigned to it, and he creates the character. No other course of procedure is thinkable, for a drama is written for a thousand stages. There is something solitary about the film; we regard it as something that “takes place” but once. It is difficult to write good film characters if the writer is unfamiliar with the players that create the characters. Hampered by this lack of personal acquaintance, the most that can be accomplished by the author is an acceptable sketch. One has to associate with the prospective film actors, and study their personalities without letting them become aware of the end in view and the caution that is being exercised in attaining it. One has to study the player’s unconscious movements; the mirthful action of his hand; the sensuous expression of his eye; his gait; his manner of sitting down. The whole man is sometimes revealed by the way in which he smokes a cigarette. One must make the actor angry and nervous. Each expression of impatience, of joy, of tedium that is characteristic of a given man must be noted down in the film book. One has got to make a portrait of the man who is going to play the part the author has in mind.

He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. There it finds itself again, safe and carefully guarded: it smiles, and develops its flowers.

It is only in this way that the characters grow from their own power. Made to grow in this fashion, they reveal in their every movement, as in every deed they do, the saving sign of inner truth. They convulse the spectator through the unadulterated naturalness of their art; and by virtue of their own ability, they can make an improbable situation seem natural, for their own life is natural, just as it is peculiar to them alone, and virile.

It is impossible to be a great film actor if one is small and unworthy. The person who is cold by nature, and who carries an unsympathetic heart in his breast, will never be able to do more than simulate real feelings. I do not believe that a prostitute would ever be able to play the rôle of an angelic creature in a film. Behind and back of the keyboard on which the film writer improvises there must be a set of beautifully tuned strings. Otherwise nothing comes of the effort but the banal clanging of the hand-organ.

The film actor must be first of all a human being, a real man, a clear and unequivocal character of life and from life. The picture of his soul is found only in everyday life, never on the stage. And his adaptability to the moving picture is determined by the manner in which he conducts himself in the life he leads from day to day with other men. If he is beautiful, if his body is erect and pliable, so much the better. But he must be a man of character.

Character and temperament—two things that cannot be learned. One can learn, however, the business of playing while facing the camera; one can learn, in this position, to control one’s gestures, and to give a cautious expression of the feelings.

On the legitimate stage it is quite permissible, it is indeed necessary, for the actor to express his emotions through a certain exaggeration, with the most beautiful pathos known to gesticulation. The opposite is true of the film: in it, suppression of emotions, muffling of feelings, is necessary. Why? Because in actual life feelings are after all expressed in a subdued way, behind the veil, so to speak, of that on which the interested party is to eavesdrop. Every time we notice any such emotion as ecstasy on the screen we remain cold; we become in truth disenchanted because of what we have sensed. Experience has already taught us that exaggeration has no place in the moving picture; it is ineffective. This lesson we have learned from the Italians. All good film actors are noted for a certain measure of immovability; they are cautious with and sparing of their gestures.

Fig. 10. Scene from Golem.