The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

The playing or sportive mind of the artist in pictures roams about and remains resting, in time, toying like a butterfly, on the bizarre forms of the phantastic world. Illustration No. 6, for example, shows us a magic garden in Asia. There is an easy and refreshing humor about it; it is charming as a picture. It has only one fault: it is inappropriate as a bit of decoration for a film. For the film picture passes by in a few seconds, and it is not the business of the decoration to draw attention away from the action. Such complicated pictures, with all their captivating by-products, can be studied in detail and with much thought and consideration, but not in the film—there is no time for them there.

All decorative scenery has to be well arranged; it must be lucid, clear, and easy of survey. Illustration No. 7 is confused and hard to read. Moreover, this scenery has nothing to do with the action. No one would ever suspect that this room was occupied by an American millionairess. Let the decoration be as grand and glorious as the human mind can make it, if it is not a frame, or a framework, for the things that go on in the human heart, its effect is swollen, disingenuous, and undesirable from every point of view.

The odd and fanciful device fails if it is not truly and inwardly affiliated with human fate. This is proved by Illustration No. 8, the cramped and even convulsive style of which, with its black and white norm, does not convince. The plastic effect is altogether inadequate and defective. This picture is shown here because it is a brilliant refutal of the oft-repeated assertion that the film, as an art-form, has to do with and rests upon the art of black and white. There is neither artistic nor objective value in the picture; it is merely a curio, a bit of nourishment for under-bred curiosity, and was born of a deformed notion.

Fig. 12. Scene from Destiny.

[See p. [87]]

The curiosity, however, of phantastic forms is not to be ruthlessly denounced and rejected if back of it lies a graceful notion, a happy idea. Illustration No. 9 shows such an original scene of vibrant freshness. The dancing girl is pictured as an undisciplined, capricious little creature, and one is bound to admit that a setting of this sort throws a captivating and intriguing frame about the radiant soul of man. This picture has nothing in the world to do with naturalism. It is of merely momentary significance and, like Illustration No. 8, has but little bearing on, and consequently but little significance for, the real value of decoration. But in contrast to that pale black and white drawing, this dance scenery gives evidence of a brilliant artistic brain from which ingenuity radiates and in which confidence may be placed when it is a question of brightening up a film. One sees that it comes from a brain which creates pictures in an easy even if extravagant mood, pictures which fire the imagination somewhat after the fashion of a cool flask of seasoned and sparkling champagne.

We had a wonderful fulfillment of the phantastic decoration in Wegener’s Golem, that fairy tale which told of the breathing of life into a figure of clay through the magic power of a Jewish Rabbi, who made the monster his servant—until it, having reached the point where it had real feelings, turned against its lord and master. Poelzig had created the milieu for the romantic action, Illustration No. 10. A fairy play of spooky streets and ghost-like alleys, the old, old house of which bent and crouched under the vault of heaven. There was the doomed and damned world of the Ghetto, isolated from all things agreeably human and threatened by gigantic walls.

The sober fact of the business is that when genius takes a hand in the matter of scenery, and visualizes its ingenuity, doubts disappear and faith rules supreme. We give in; we resign. Was this world a copy of reality? Was it the sole product of the artist’s wish? The whole thing was a play, a marvelous mask, the expression of an animated and enlivened will.

There was much more style to the interior of the rooms. And for this very reason they were less natural; they were more alien to free and easy conception. But the room of the Rabbi, with its low, crooked, burdened walls, the stairway of which the least that can be said was that it was heavily constructed (Illustration No. 11) was entirely in keeping with the city sighing as it was under its mighty load.