The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

With a certainty that is growing from year to year, the film writers of to-day choose their material from such domains of feeling as have a universal and altogether human appeal. They depict the impulses of the soul, but only up to that point where the healthy feelings terminate. It is one of the wonders of peace that these impulses are common to all the peoples of the earth. The intriguing writ of the Asiatic soul becomes, in this case, clear and simple. Even the barbarian nations, the Negro, the Eskimo, the Moroccan, rejoice at the sight of our films with the joy that spells appreciation.

It seems, however, that a great motion picture cannot be built up around peoples who are impulsive and that only. The characters of Hintertreppe were impulsive; those of Scherben were lethargic and animalistic. We were moved but not convulsed. The impulse in itself, and in its isolation, is uninteresting, for it is un-psychic. We sympathize with and feel the feelings after those who display them only when the impulse is raised to a passion. If we are to be captivated, carried off our feet as it were, the action has got to be strong; it must set forth not mere wish but will, too. Those elementary passions that spring forth from sensuality—that is, from the ensemble functioning of all our senses, constitute the field of mimic portrayal. The motion picture has as its goal the great and captive passions. And characters that are bound to earth, full of soul but in the plight of the unhappy Prometheus, make up the strongest expression of the art of the motion picture.

The bow of the passions is a mighty one, great in compass and more frequently taut than not. It rises from out of the primeval abysses of nature and takes in the tenderest tremblings of the soul. Anyone who has ever seen that wonderful Goldwyn film entitled Honor Thy Mother knows that by passions I mean, not merely what is ordinarily connoted by the term, but also that calm, melancholy faith of the heart which characterizes all reverential and respectful people. Every impulse that arises in a perfectly natural way, and which cannot be separated from the heart by any power on earth, is a passion.

Everything that is an initial, original, and uninfluenced impulse is stuff for the motion picture. But just as all art moves about a certain pole, about that basic impulse which flouts reason in the exercise of the drawing force that one man has for another, and that pulls them both along toward the inescapable judgment handed down by the senses, just so does the motion picture itself obey the urge, and that with unconscious docility, to move on to the fate that finds its basis in human love, and in so doing it moves on to the highest, unexhausted, and inexhaustible goal—its eventual formation and conformation.

To such love the coldly and exclusively intellectual is alien. There is no place for the blue-stocking Helena. A lover in a motion picture who would show himself superior to the simple, unaffected ways of love would cut a ridiculous figure. The love of the moving picture strikes but few strings, and these strings are gentle. This art is not wreathed about with the roseate play of lovely thoughts. Those poets whose hearts do not overflow with an abundance of visions paint, in the motion picture, nothing more than the tiring and monotonous picture of a colorless and brutal giving and taking. But just as the great Garrick could move his audience to tears through the mere recital of the alphabet, just so can a fiery soul fill the violin of the motion picture with more nearly inner and more truly intimate notes than a soul that is halt and blind can fill the entire orchestra of the stage.

Passion is pure; it is clean. Wherever the soul is moved, and whenever it moves with the action, there is purification. But just as the legitimate stage may lose itself in the frigid chill of unanimated intellectuality, so does the motion picture run at all times the danger—if its poet is a bellowing and garrulous individual—of sinking into the fiery swamp of unanimated sensuality. When this is the case, the unwholesome passion of mere sexual perversities becomes a play of social life that is poles removed from real art. In the foul seething and turgid vapor of such degeneracy, culture is stifled, purity is unable to raise its lovely head, and what might be the hills and high places of art are converted into waste places. This disgusting drama that poisons the people is the everlasting nuisance and eternal bugbear of those who have faith enough in them to feel that the time should come when the motion picture is a proud and pure art.

We all know how matters stand: each individual has the dignity of mankind at his disposal, after all. It can never be the duty of the motion picture to use the magic song of love, such as all true poets have sung to their peoples, in order that it may drown out the vulgar street ditty with its lines of illicit passion and its refrain of indecency.

The real motion picture poet, however, the one in whose heart there vibrates and pulsates a culture that is natural to him and given him of the gods, will always be able to fill his figures with a noble and royal sensuality that shines out in bright effulgence over and beyond the flat, greedy, paralytic doings of the love that knows not inspiration and to which the staleness of everyday carrying-on is first and second nature. His soul, recruiting in the interests of human kind, will move like a storm across the hills; there will be love in its flight, and then it will settle down into calm serenity like the subdued tones of so many silvery bells.

The motion picture can delineate aristocratic characters; it can represent men and women of aristocratic souls. But when this is to be done, more must be done than to have the leading man and the leading woman don evening dress.

Those who accomplish this—the delineation of fine and fair souls—have to be great artists. Rubbish and art, discord and harmony, the inflated and the sterling, though their spheres are relatively near each other, are nevertheless separated by the wide, wide gulf that separates the dilettant from the genius. Those who are petty in the business can offer us only the empty, the hollow, the fatuous. Abundance they know not; harmony is not a part of them; they deal in deadening boredom.