The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

The realism of the spoken stage is cumbersome and inadequate. You have got to let the public sit and wait a full half hour to change a single setting of elaborate decoration. And after all, do what we may, it is only a defective and sometimes even miserable transcript of nature that is conjured on to the stage, despite the ingenuity of the machinist and many other near-colleagues. The Berlin performance of Andalosia represented, a few years ago, the forest act as follows: the stage was arranged in hills, covered with tin tubs in which there was a profusion of real fir trees and genuine heather. Diagonally across the stage ran a real brook. Behind an invisible wire cage squirrels hopped about and frightened birds flew from corner to corner.

Such a pompous stage setting as this is absurdly complicated. The stage that goes in exclusively for style will produce the same psychic effect with the most simple and elementary means.

If style decoration is so made as to meet the exact needs of the stage, if it suits the stage in every way, well and good; but this is not in itself irrefutable proof that we should follow the same rules in preparing decoration for the film. The ways and means of the two arts are fundamentally different; and the public that each attracts, and from whose patronage each must survive or perish, is in neither case the same. Moreover, it is the duty of each art to do what it can. It is only a fool who attempts the very thing for which he is not naturally fitted.

The lens of the moving picture camera sucks up the world about it with unlimited greediness; but it rebels at the mere intimation of perverse or distorted art forms. The materials with which the film deals, which it handles, are far too simple, natural, and human to endure any sort of studied or affected decoration. The spectators in the motion picture want to see an interesting action on the part of human beings; they demand beautiful and picturesque decorations; they wince at, if they do not reject out and out, such pictures as owe their origin to, and would please the art critics.

The urgent need for good and original settings is ubiquitous; every film nation feels it. But strangely enough, it has been given the consideration it calls for neither by the Americans nor by the Swedes. Both peoples, if we may be permitted to say so, are perfectly contented with pretty pictures. But real decoration is a vast deal more than a mere frame enclosing, in rather indifferent fashion, the human heart. Within the compass of the play, the psychic or psychological effect and impressiveness have their quite real meaning; they are important. This fact has been recognized, let us state it candidly, by the Germans. The German film may be a very imperfect creation, but you have got to admit that in the way of inventiveness, wealth of ingenuity, and such atmosphere as can be created by decoration, it has accomplished a great deal; indeed, in some instances, it has gone too far.

An instance of excess in the field of decoration was that clever and ingenious film entitled Dr. Caligari. It may be referred to as the masterpiece of doubtful decorative art. (Illustrations No. 1 and 2.)

This was the meaning of these decorations: they were intended to surround or accompany the action as a sort of powerful tone; they were so many notes. The action itself was hostile to life, misanthropic, dour. It painted the gruesome phantasies of a mind diseased. It was an unintended, but not on that account ineffective, bit of irony that this picture of a deranged world was enveloped in hyper-impressionistic decoration. The action was that of a madman; the scenery was as it was. One saw oblique and twisted houses painted with all manner of mad flourishes; rooms no wall of which was rectangular or perpendicular or level; passageways of the same description and streets that cannot be described; rhombic windows and doors; bent, warped, and splintered trees which reminded of the monumental drawings that are associated with Chinese painting.

In these pictures (the composition of them was an inimitable success) there was a perfect reflection, in error and knowledge, of the inevitable characteristics of decoration.

Fig. 11. Scene from Golem.