The influence of the moving picture on the souls of the various peoples of the earth has become so great that an attitude of indifference toward this marvelous invention is no longer permissible. We see ourselves forced to take a definite stand for it or against it; we are obliged to line up as friend or foe of the film. It is, however, no longer sufficient to oppose the moving picture in a spirit of indulgent contempt or fanatic hostility. All the world knows that there are more bad moving pictures than good ones, and that the moral and aesthetic tendency of a great many films is of a quite negligible nature. But if the moving picture were in reality the offspring of the Devil, as many theologians and academic demi-gods the world over contend, thinking people would be at once confronted with this insoluble problem: How does it come that thousands upon thousands of human beings scattered over the earth are laboring, with intense resignation and passionate zeal, to the end that the film may be made more perfect artistically and cleaner from a purely moral point of view? The striving after money has naturally something to do with their efforts. To offer this, however, as a final explanation of this unusual situation would be an idle method of reasoning. You cannot explain the joy these men are taking in their creative efforts in this way, for their souls are in their work.
To many thinking people, the real nature of the moving picture is wrapped in mystery; it is a brilliant and enigmatic riddle to them. They recognize, though they fail to comprehend, the fact that the moving picture, despised without restraint and condemned on general principles only the other day, has won an incomparable victory over the hearts of men—a victory, too, that will be all the greater and more beautiful once the psychic and moral perfection of the moving picture has been accomplished.
The cultured man has an instinctive hatred of forces the significance of which lie beyond his grasp; he makes every conceivable effort to defend himself against them, to ward them off. But the people, the masses, throw themselves into the arms of such forces blindly and without question. The number of cultured men, however, who are going over to the camp of the moving picture—without thereby becoming disloyal to the other arts—is growing daily. Even those sworn and confirmed skeptics who still look down upon the film from the heights of their intellectual superiority with superciliousness and contempt are bound to admit that there is something between the pictures which has a magic power to draw, which exercises an ineluctable influence in the gaining of recruits.
The moving picture is an art based on feeling, and not on thought. It has to do with the emotions rather than with the intellect. The man who goes to the moving picture wants to experience certain incidents, not by thinking about them, but by feeling them. Just as music arouses the feelings through tones, just so does the moving picture attempt to solve, not the riddle of the human brain, but of the human soul. A moving picture is a feeling expressed through gestures.
There is still much about this youthful art that is altogether misunderstood. Its real sources, the fountains of its life, are suspected, foreboded by only a few; nor are they recognized, when seen, by all. Nearly every visit to a motion picture theatre is a disappointment; the must of the grape is still carrying-on in a really absurd fashion.
The motion picture, however, is marching straight ahead in a course of unmistakable and wonderful development toward the heights of victory. And this development, this evolution, has to do not merely with the perfecting of the art itself, but with the enjoyment that is derivable and derived from the art. Our eyes are becoming keener in the detection of gestures and mimicry; our imaginations are growing sharper, even clairvoyant; they are rapidly becoming able to read the language of pictures and movement. When the motion picture was still in its infancy, its actors assumed and employed the shrill and tinny pathos of the pantomime. At that time, and it was not long ago, the lovely and mutely passionate world of gesture was unknown to us. We saw it, to be sure, in the dance, but we were still incapable of interpreting it. To-day we feel, detect, see some sort of inner vibration behind the slightest movement.
In the other arts, in the old and tried arts, those that have already been developed to a high stage of perfection, if not actually over-developed, progress, if made at all, must be made with the expenditure of tremendous effort; it must be wrung from the depths, as it were. In the moving picture, on the other hand, a thousand possibilities still lie quite on the surface, ready, indeed longing, for fulfilment. The great creator can think, feel, and dream new and novel features without falling into despair at the thought of what has already been done. Becoming mindful of the past is not a painful occupation for him. Indeed, the motion picture may be compared to a starry heaven that stretches out before our upturned eyes, awaiting the creative ken of the celestial investigator.
Every attempt, however, of the exuberant creator, filled with the urge for deeds, to perform aesthetic experiments on the motion picture avenges itself; such experiments cannot be carried out with impunity. For the applause of a small circle of the elect is not going to prevent bankruptcy on the part of the film company that supports these experiments. Film art without economic success is quite unthinkable.
Germany, the land of theory, experienced a short while ago a veritable flood of aesthetic experiments in the domain of the moving picture. Of these, there was but one, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which provided its creators with the satisfaction that comes from a pronounced success in foreign countries. And even in this case the success was due to the peculiarity of certain means that had heretofore never been seen on the screen. The American has too much appreciation of this world, and too little sense for the world beyond, to grow enthusiastic about phantoms or nebulous adventures. Nor is he weighed down with the traditions that reach back through centuries of time and constitute so much impedimenta on the part of European artists. And the Swede is too intimately associated with the mother-earth of his home ever to undertake a flight to the clouds through the medium of the motion picture. But the Swede and the German reached the point where they saw that you have got to speak a language, in the film, which can be understood by men wherever they chance to live.
A work, let it be ever so artistic and valuable in itself, which brings economic distress to the film company that produces it, harms indirectly the entire film business as an art. That film artist attains to the complete realization of his desires whose creations put money into the purse of the company; the one who does not do this fails in the end. The task of the film artist is always and ever: To effect a happy union between art and business. Moreover, this union must be brought about in such a way that both—art and business—flourish. The man who cannot do this merely drives the film companies on to the production of cheap and cheapening pictures which draw the masses and pay a reasonable dividend, but nothing more. For the film companies of this earth are and remain, first of all, business concerns that must pay. Film art is expensive, and no gratuitous distributor of private funds is going to give one penny which will not bear him interest. If there be anyone so blind as not to be able to grasp this simple principle, he is unable to grasp the underlying principle of the motion picture as an art. To fail to recognize commercial success as the basic condition on which film art rests is to call down upon one’s head the irritation that ensues from ineffectual grumbling. Consequently, the much lauded redeemer of the film will be he, and he only, who can create what is at once of enduring artistic value and financial potentiality.