[See p. [85]]
In the good film manuscript, the feelings are not poured in a lavish way over every single scene. Over the majority of scenes there should rest a splendid freshness, a sunny everyday life filled with a wholesome humor the chief inspiration of which is the very joy of living and the atmosphere of activity. The isolated scenes of real feeling should be played all the more quietly and calmly if the natural instinct of the actor prompts him to display unusually strong feelings. In other words, the more excited the actor the less excited his acting should be. I personally place the wreath of honor on the head of that actor who creates the coveted effects with the least expenditure of visible energy. In every gesture, in every flash or darkening of the eye, there should be concealed a deep truth which is illumined and illuminated, secretly, by the warmth of the feelings that the artist in reality experiences.
CHAPTER V
THE SETTING
The director of the legitimate stage is supposed to create an art form which rests essentially upon the spoken word, with its artistic possibilities and potentialities. His entire setting, from curtain decorations to background and supernumerary costumes, is supposed to intimate and indicate in a symbolic way (though it must be conceded that the Meininger Stage strives after ideals of its own in this regard). The word rings out in front of the pictures and traverses a jagged line of the background up to the mountain.
Mimic art calls for a sharp milieu, a pronounced environment. Since the descriptive power of the gesture does not extend beyond the hidden contents of the human soul, the figures of an unenvironed motion picture would float about in empty space.
The world of the spoken drama is limited to the cubic feet of space within the theater; the motion picture, on the contrary, has the world for its field; it moves in perfect freedom. The camera follows the actor wherever he may go. If he betake himself to the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there too. So far, then, as decorative setting in the motion picture is concerned, there is no such thing, from an artistic point of view, as limitation or consideration.
The very freedom, however, which the motion picture enjoys in the way of scenic alternation and variety necessitates constant indulgence in this freedom: a mimic action dare not drag its weary course for hours at a time over the same setting. There must be frequent change of scene. Its psychic powers of expression are too soon exhausted for it to tarry with impunity, or satisfaction, for any considerable length of time on the same scene.
In Germany we have made some experiments with films in which there was no decoration. One of these, the Rex film entitled Scherben, is said to have met with success on the other side of the Atlantic. I feel, for my own part, that the unvaried and undecorated scene of this paltry milieu was pretty tiresome. A good film should show an abundance of pictures; it should have three or four milieus follow close after each other, rebound against each other. We might as well make up our minds to it that the need for entertainment on the part of the public is so great that nothing short of gay, if not gaudy, variety will suffice.
For this reason, decorations are made each one of which has a definite stamp or character. Rooms in which human beings live and work must show traces of human habitation. With the stage this may not be necessary, for the illuminating, enlivening power of the poet’s words lifts the mind above the external picture. The stage of Shakespeare transformed the really immutable and altogether unpretentious setting once in Macbeth’s banquet hall, another time in the gray field of the witches—and it did this through the animating phantasy of Shakespeare’s lines. The stage is style art. Indeed, the intellectual would have it this entirely. But the realism of the last century, which brought into being the so-called stage of illusion and fostered this creation until it went to the very last conceivable length in the matter of imitation, is a source of real danger to the essential nature of the spoken word, and to the wings of such fancy as the word may have. The great mass of spectators the world over demand from the stage, and also from the film, that it hold up before them a picture of reality. But in contrast to the film, the spoken stage cannot be regarded as the spiritual property of these masses.
Regarding film setting, the first question that arises, and it is a very fundamental one, is this: Which shall it be—Style or Reality? Shall we prepare scenery that is related to the style of the legitimate stage, or shall we copy life as it is?