The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

But the motion picture poet himself? Who knows anything about Carl Mayer, the author of Dr. Caligari and the Hintertreppe? Who ever heard of Hans Gaus, the man who wrote Madame Recamier? Who is in any way familiar with the name of Hans Kräly, who, in collaboration with Lubitsch, wrote Die Puppe, Kohlhiesels Töchter, and a number of our other most brilliant scenarios? Truth to tell, if Lubitsch had been only a writer of scenarios and not at the same time one of our very greatest managers and producers, it would be impossible to make a circus dog bark at the mention of his name.

This is all due in part to the inherent nature of the case. The motion picture is art for the masses. And the masses are naturally accustomed to admire that artist who submits his creations to them in tangible, palpable, and finished form. The man who chopped the crude picture from the marble block was called an apprentice, a laborer, a pupil. But in contradistinction to the poet of the motion picture, the apprentice did not create the completed and complex picture.

To be a poet is to be a brooder. In order to acquire the title of poet, one must be able to conjure a coveted picture from the refractory clay.

The poets of German Romanticism did their creative work in rain-soaked, wind-rattled attic rooms far from every vestige of external culture. They suffered the inconvenient pangs of hunger while so engaged. But no one has ever become fat from their creations at the same time that the thanks they have received have come from the heart, and have been repaid a thousandfold.

To be a motion picture poet means that you have got to keep your feet on the ground. In this art—which is hopelessly bound up with the bank account and the pocketbook—there is no place for the idealist of romanticism. Such an individual can only stand alone in the corner, embittered and sterile.

The film writer is still held in rather low esteem in Germany. It is impossible to get along without him, for without new ideas and actions the entire apparatus of the film corporation stands idle. As things are at present, however, the method of procedure is incorrect: his material is taken from him, he is kept at what seems a safe distance from the ateliers, and the duty of building his material up into an actable and effective motion picture is left to the producer and manager. The author is poorly paid; consequently he finds it materially and spiritually unwise to torture himself for any great length of time with any one work. Quantity, not quality, has to be his shibboleth if he is to meet his very ordinary financial obligations.

The mistake that is being made is naturally a two-sided one. The film author’s place is in the studio; he should be the silent witness of every scene; he should be thoroughly conversant with such technical progress as has been made and is being made in the way of illumination and psychic photography. But he dare never forget that a film work is not the work of an individual.

An author has to have, if success is to crown his efforts, a great store of general information, a store such as reaches far out beyond the studio. He should have a general but clear idea as to what it costs to mount a film. He should be familiar with what other film companies have accepted and produced; he should study the film output of foreign film peoples—if he does not, collisions are apt to occur and these have been known to result in lawsuits based on the charge of plagiarism. He should be skilled in the distribution and placing of such decorations as are to be used with his scenario, and thus be able to avoid the embarrassment that arises when a colossal scenery has been bought and paid for, though the scene that it is supposed to decorate is of Lilliputian dimensions. He should know what people are talking about, how they are most easily entertained, most intelligently amused. If he fails in this regard, he is apt to expend his creative energy in the lining out of a film that is in its place in an established institution for the blind.

There is a tremendous amount of work attached to the domain which the film author feels is his; there is so much technique, so much specializing in the modern motion picture, that the author is unquestionably an indispensable member of the court that creates the film; he does not make it alone, but it cannot be made without him. His opinions must be respected, otherwise he avenges himself by an action which bears on its very brow the stamp of mere affectation and technique; you can see that it has been invented; that it is not of sterling inspiration. And so far as the recognition of the film author is concerned, I am bound to say that things are still in a serious plight in my native land.