Despite this brotherhood, however, no one should attempt to sink his own folk-soul into the soul of another people. That cannot be done. Let the German turn out the historical film, in which he sinks his soul into the world of feelings of the ancient Egyptians, or the English, or the Romance peoples just as much as he pleases. It is his business, and no one can stop him. But the fact remains that the historical film is always a somehow colorless creation in the popular sense. It is always somewhat affected if not a bit fraudulent, and in the case of any nation it is always touched up and retouched with the same artificial masks. The historical film is here and here to stay, however. There is a good reason: in those ages of violence and lawlessness film themes grew on the trees. There was a dazzling world full of adventure such as the film will never completely turn its back on.
I am of the distinct conviction, at the same time, that it is the modern film which most effectively discloses the real nature and aim of the film. It is the most popular; it alone is true. In it there are no masks; and there are very few big wigs and pasted mustachios. The people do not have to sink themselves into unknown deeds and inexperienced acts of gruesomeness. They stand before the camera of the world in which they live; it is their own feelings that the lens takes up into itself.
In the modern film each people goes its own way; it has its own feelings, its own heart projected on the screen. It obeys the inescapable and inevitable commands of its own public life. Every man does what he can; he acts on what he himself knows. And as Goethe once wisely remarked, “Life is interesting, it makes no difference where you take hold of it.”
The differences in peoples are wonderful—as the modern film shows. The American rejects any and every film that does not stand with both feet on the ground of actual life. The American takes his film themes from his own activity, and it is a gigantic one. He binds his people close to the world. He has them engage in the calling that is theirs. He is as little inclined to scorn the orphanage or the tent of the cowboy as he is to close his eyes to the elegant urban salon. Wherever he goes, he notes what he has seen with the hard pencil of the professional reporter. He eavesdrops, he listens-in on life in every form. With the “essential” he is but little concerned; he is out for the picture of his milieu, of his environment, of the world about him, and this world of his is bubbling over with life. He is objective, and his objectivity has not been distorted by any theory of art that confuses the issue when conditions change. He seizes the world wherever he finds it most interesting. He does not hesitate, once he has seized it, to place his people in this surrounding; and he endows his people, as it were, with the fates and the fancies of their new setting. The American film is always most effective when it takes its material from the checkered and chic fullness of the very present; when it depends for its inspiration upon reality. It aims at genuineness; it tries to be true. It seems, at least, that it never tries to depict a milieu which it does not know. The great city is the mother-earth of the American film. The minute it abandons the city and goes forth on voyages of discovery in nature it loses its vivacity, its effectiveness, its sense of reality, and goes over into watered makeshifts or highway romanticism.
Fig. 17. Scene from Scene from A Doll’s House.
[See p. [91]]
The American despises all heavy, tiresome, serious art; he depicts a highly-colored life, bubbles over with mad, or at least unexpected, ideas and notions, and has his spectator laugh and weep—an omniscient Lord knows that he never lets him do anything but laugh, or anything but weep. The more extravagant the thing is, on the heights and in the depths, the better. After all, life is beautiful. One laughs ten times as willingly as one weeps. And no sane man wishes to see this belief in the joy of life, and the eventual victory of happiness and strength, taken from us.
The American has not a shimmer of a conception of Dramatischer Aufbau; of dramatic composition he is innocent. The most he does is to indulge in a brief exposition, which he expresses in a few and none too labored words, in which he has something to say about the general significance of the people in whom he is momentarily interested—and then the thing starts. The American film is effective; and its effectiveness is to be explained on the ground of the American people themselves; they know precisely what they are after, and they proceed without delay; they are not hampered by inertia; they are intelligent; they are diligent.
The American’s creative action is sure and simple; it is not reflective, nor congested with too much brooding; and it certainly is not based on systematic philosophizing. His film is just as unsentimental as his life. The majority of his scenes are noted for an atmosphere of sobriety. This and that takes place, but if a catastrophe does not follow there is no use to get excited. In the few scenes in which the fate of one man rebounds against the fate of another, the will of one man stands face to face with the will of another. The American film is, so to speak, dramatic only in a secondary or subsidiary sense.