The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

The hero of the American film is the man of deeds. In the first act his goal is set; in the last act he reaches it. Everything that intervenes between these two acts is a test of strength. The strongest wins, every time. The whole action revolves about this hero, and the “good ending” is more a matter of logic than of anything else; it is the judgment handed down as to who was the most powerful. There is no such thing as a weakling among American film heroes. “It is not interesting; it is not effective; therefore we don’t want it.” That is the history of American film making in so many words.

The basic principle of the American film is expediency. It is expediency, suitability, availability, that makes the American exercise great care in choosing the title of his film, in having the action grow in interest, and in using decoration that fits the case and represents, on the whole, a genuine and solid picturesqueness. It is expediency that prompts the American to avoid those diseased and unwholesome themes which would be understood only by the spectator who is likewise diseased and unwholesome. It is expediency that moves him to avoid purely and rigidly intellectual themes, such as are appropriate for private audiences only. It is expediency that suggests to him cheerful, vigorous, bright, and fanciful themes in which the world is made to shine and flash. It is expediency that causes him to fill even the gloomiest theme with a good measure of happiness. There are, indeed, many roads that lead to idealism.

The American does not seem to be at all familiar with the word “Art” when he takes and makes a motion picture. He uses, instead of art, the word “effect.” This may seem a bit primitive, even uninspired, but it gets desirable results. That is good which is effective; the ineffective is bad; whatever pleases is allowed. These seem to be his shibboleths. He has, for this very reason, been spared the humiliation attendant upon the film that would-be art, and which has brought bankruptcy to its champions and producers.

For the American the soul is merely a means toward an effect. He never overworks the soul; he does not splash it all over the individual scene. He uses it just in so far as it is necessary to make his hero a sympathetic creature and creation. In the middle, and the middle point, of his film activity stands, not the soul, but the joy in telling a story. For there is only one thing the American aims at: he wants to have a chat; he wants to indulge in a causerie. For him there is no artistic “problem to be solved.” He neither writes theoretical treatises on the film, nor does he read them.

In this somewhat rigid domain which the life and Weltanschauung of the American people themselves have staked off for the American film, there live, move, and have their being a great number of happily endowed and cautious talents. They avoid clever and ingenious dodges; they are not easily derailed. They try incessantly to raise the value of the work they are engaged in and on to an ever-increasing height of excellence.

The American film reflects the inmost nature of a people that is happy; of a people that has been accustomed to create without being loaded down with theory or chained to tradition. It is the film of a people that has preserved unto itself the riches of the centuries.

The American is genuine; the Swede is true. Other peoples fill their motion pictures with foaming and sometimes frantic melodies. The Swedish film is not rich; it is unostentatious, sometimes to the very point of scantiness. Its tone is that of the folk-song with its tones taken from and based on pictures. Its characters are close to the earth; they are rarely impulsive, and if so, the impulsiveness is of a gentle nature; they seem quite free from self-consciousness. They move their limbs after the fashion of dreamy giants. They play with their hearts somewhat as the children of Asa were wont to play with the golden discs. Their feelings have not been artificially translated into a milieu; they have not been composed into a new home. They grow quite naturally from the soil that begot them. In the case of the American, or the German, film, we have the conflict first; the milieu proceeds then from this conflict. The canon of the Swede reads: In the beginning was the earth.

On this soil, excessively aromatic or iridescent fruit does not thrive. The passions of the Swede are subdued; they whisper like waving grain swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze. Because of their lack of display they seem, to the eye and ear of the person accustomed to the bluster of an industrial life, a bit primitive and monotonous. The Swedish film is an æolian harp which is moved unconsciously; the few wonderful tones that lie as potential factors in its strings are melodies only. The reflective element of this film is remarkably impulsive in character. It sinks itself with burning fervor into the depths of the heart, never rises to the chilly clarity of abstract thought, and rarely loses itself in moral fustian.

The Swedish film retains its perfect naturalness even when it concerns itself with urban personages and chooses, perforce, its decoration and setting from the fashionable drawing-rooms. When it does this it is a matter of secret mask. These men in evening dress, these décolletée ladies, remain after all peasant children who wear their foreign garb with naïve gaiety. At times the Swede grafts an alien twig on the young wild tree of his motion picture art. When he does, it is German if subtle, French if erotic.

The Swede paints his picture with a fine brush, embellishes each on rather broad lines, and coats every picture with a shimmer of hearty intimacy which to a film connoisseur of another country seems altogether unobtrusive. The film action, the ebb and flow of pictures, seems to him a matter of indifference. He avoids excitement; he shuns the raging of man against man. Invented, and therefore affected, action, be it never so refined, leaves him cold. He loves to see things grow; the secrets of the inner life are precious to him. His heroes encircle the coveted goal without bodily moving out of their tracks. All of this is at once an advantage and a disadvantage.