The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

But there is a gap in this sphere of sensuality; there is an empty place in the field in question. Those silent heroes who have turned away from the world, and behind whom and back of whom there lie struggle and passion, step out from the world of sensuality, in which they have become and remained mute, into the realm of spirituality. This land is open to them to the uttermost end of its compass, indeed down to and up to the point where they see God; where they have forebodings and premonitions of God that are the equivalents of acquirement. No thought that is felt is foreign to them. But they do not speak of the visions they have had; every word from their lips would be profane; it would be a matter of desecration. The great, strange, lonely figures of the motion picture, back of whose brain the thought shines forth, are not to be understood through thought. They are to be felt, not thought. They are not to be conceived of as wise men and prophets; they are brooders and sufferers.

One would have to, and one might, write a Christus film that is apathetic and undramatic: Christus the man, making a pilgrimage over the Earth, a stranger, unapproachable, silent, immediate, unknown, not understood. Such a film could be made a vast deal more effective than a Christus drama on the spoken stage. For on the stage the Christus dare not remain silent. He would have to appear as a speaker. The humble carpenter’s son would have to pass before us, and on by the mute greatness of His own soul, engaged in an endless flow of words of wisdom and thoughts that lie too deep for men.

It was such a Christus nature as this, invisibly crucified, that our wonderful Bernhard Goetzke played in his Indisches Grabmal. Even under the slag of this adventuresome action there shone forth the pure glow of a passionately suffering heart. When Ramigani raised his hands we understood that before this gentle, imperative gesture the tigers of the fields slunk away in silence while lifeless things fell to pieces. It was the power of the superman that was revealed to us: a power that had been generated in the man himself, not given of God. When he prayed, it was a coming unto and into himself, not a disappearance in or a coming unto God. Buddha vanished in the background, a cold, chilly picture.

Such greatness is rare in a film. There is only one other film character whom I can recall having seen who bore the very stamp of immortal greatness on his brow—the Frenchman, G. Melchior, in Atlantide. His eyes had the effect of invisible arms which brushed the seductive passion of the woman in the case clean from his heart. His glance glided over men and things as if he were in an atmosphere of his own creation, far removed from what constitute the spoils of mortal man. But art of this sort stands in the background of the motion picture; it is suspected by but few. And in the foreground stands mottled, gaudy sensuality. It cannot be otherwise. For the motion picture is an art that is of the earth earthy; it revels and rolls in human feelings.

This defection on its part from intellect is necessary; it is not thus because its creators wish it so. Just as is the case with music, the motion picture will never be called upon to solve the problems of the human intellect or of man’s morality. The motion picture pedagogue works ahead in an ineffectual effort to put brains into the screen; he cannot do it. He fills the text with sententious remarks and moral observations. He clutters the whole business up with a mess of mushy wisdom that bears not the slightest relation to the sensory content of the action, which is mimic first, last and always.

The task of the motion picture is quite similar to the task of music: to serve a generation that has strong feelings. Where music, however, excites and incites a general and indefinite feeling (whose compass reaches from the tortures of the ego to the all-embracing feeling of the godhead itself) through tones, the motion picture assembles its fullness on the earthly world of emotions.

The motion picture actor fails to reach his objective, he fails to fulfill his true mission, if he depends for success upon mere sexual titillation. He is lost to himself and the cause he serves if he works for the excitation of undisciplined and easily aroused pruriency. There is, indeed, no art that admits of such abysms of failure and misconduct as the motion picture. There lurks in every step the motion picture actor takes and makes the grave danger of sinking into the slime of unleashed sexuality. There is no well-constructed, marked, and planned road here that leads straight out, away, and over earthly love. And we do not wish to get sucked down into the mire. Sensuality and soul—that is the slogan.

A new world has been discovered for which there has been up to the present no adequate expression. We film voyagers hoist the sails and embark on a voyage of conquest and circumnavigation. But behold! it is a strange and yet a familiar route we have to pursue. It is not like the realm of tones, etherial and intangible. It is our lives that we have discovered, and which we are looking upon with our own eyes.

A mighty flood of pictures rushes by us. Which shall we choose? Shall we choose the spooks, the spooky visions, the dancing will-o’-the-wisps, the nocturnal spirits? We let them go on their way. They are not for us. For the film has at last taught us what everyday life had caused us to forget—or almost to forget. I mean by “us” the Europeans who have become filled with hate and poisoned with pugnacity. We had about forgotten that the world is beautiful.

Every nation has its own soul. But where the spirits of the various peoples stand in the presence of each other, and opposite each other, alien if not directly hostile, separated as it were from each other by “foreign” languages, the real souls of all the peoples have grown up from the brotherly roots of humanity.