Around about the love of the motion picture is stretched the bright-colored frame of the surrounding world. Its milieu is of diversified hues. It is not possible for even the legitimate stage to renounce entirely the world in which its action takes place—though Romeo and Juliet might be played to an audience recruited wholly from the slums and not lose either its fragrance or its charm. In the motion picture, the nature and the wish of the milieu signify the constant variation of the impure motive.
Let no man fancy that it would be possible to construct a great motion picture from an environment. There is, for example, the case of the French film entitled Columbus—the most abominable piece of work, incidentally, that has ever been done on the screen. The life of the great discoverer was mashed and squeezed into a mess of incoherent scenes. The one great, heart-shaking act, or action—the real experience of Columbus’s soul—was missing. In like manner, the film entitled August der Starke (“August the Strong”) went up in smoke between the baroque castles of Saxony around which the gala coaches moved in unending procession while the uniforms shone forth in all their kind of glory. In between all this revived and represented ostentation were six love scenes—a new one for each act—each of loathsome brutality—and in each of them the poet was the match-maker!
The surrounding world, the milieu, becomes the exclusive servant of the feelings. A historical film is a love action of times long since past, and never a treatise on the cultural history of that time. Schiller compressed the whole history of the Thirty Years’ War into his Wallenstein. In it Max and Thekla drift along as if on a small floating piece of ice. The legitimate stage can do that sort of thing, provided the individual that does it is a genius and has genius. But the most ingenious motion picture actor is the one whose hand forges the historical motives into a splendid yet unobtrusive frame, and places this frame about the action of the soul. He cannot count upon fidelity to history; he is lost if he endeavors to reproduce historical events. Whenever the great men of history appear in the motion picture, they have to feel great; they must display great emotions. The muse of the motion picture is anacreontic.
There is the case of Madame Recamier which was brilliantly staged by Delmont. In it Napoleon, Talma, Josephine Beauharnais, Juliette Recamier, and the people associated with them were bound together into a fate that was pure, shot through though it was with smoldering passions. We had a foreboding of the flaming forth of a dark and princely soul. Closely interwoven with the action, though detached from it for a few minutes, was a picture of Napoleon standing off on a flat elevation surrounded by a few officers. It could be seen only in the distance. A rider comes up, and then another, and then another. Each is in haste. In the valley below we catch sight of a fire; there is smoke. A certain fate that was an entity in itself, a strange and urgent fate, prevented the various pictures from becoming separated or allowed to stand out in isolated importance. The picture as a whole, the whole of the picture, cast its shadows over this scene. Napoleon, already long since made a part of the action, stood there as if to say: “Here I am. I am coming!”
The sensual motion picture knows no god. The poet of the spoken drama can convert a hut into a house, a cabin into a castle. The motion picture man builds up his houses and castles until they reach the very skies, but they remain formations of this earth. They are grand, perhaps they are beautiful; but they are never holy; they are never exalted. The divine services and mysteries of the motion picture are mere parades of brainlessness. That which is supposed to be holy leaves an unholy impression. Religiousness is dissipated into the merest emptiness. The boastful seeker after God remains a man in prayer; he gesticulates with his hands, and his hands are empty.
Fig. 16. Scene from Dr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown.
[See p. [90]]
Priscilla Dean, whom we love very much in Germany, played in her film, The Beggar Woman of Stamboul, a charming scene of prayer. A lovely little girl knelt down and folded her hands. There was piety in the scene. But her action was a sweet, imitated, childlike gesture, while in her little head there was no room for the superhuman picture of the creator.
“But why nothing but sensuality?” you ask me. The answer is easy: it is utterly impossible to photograph an idea. One should never try to project the invisible land of dream or wish on the screen, for such a land is the creation of the brain. Experiments of this kind have been made often enough—naturally in Germany. But every single one was a failure, for the idea thus treated becomes even more cold and bloodless than on the legitimate stage. One cannot catch up an idea through the medium of faint and feeble symbols. Moreover, the road that affects to point to the place where ideas are translated to the hearts of men leads in reality to an infinity of texts, to a surrogate of the intellect. Let us be modest, for the domain of the film is rich enough as it is, and the man who creates exclusively from the abundance of things seen, from visions as it were, will never exhaust the fountainhead.