It is rare that the manager of a Swedish picture strives for such brilliant effects, or for such a wealth of ideas, as characterizes the American and German film manager. Swedish film technique stands nearly still; if it moves at all, it is a cautious move. This is true, indeed, of Swedish film art as a whole—that art which came as a direct revelation to, though it left its imprint upon, the film art of other peoples, and especially upon that of the Germans. Swedish photography is not infrequently dull; it seems to have been lighted up from underneath; it makes no attempt to compete with the chiaroscuro for which American and German operators are noted.
The Swede creates for himself. He loves the figures of his native land; in them and through them he improvises; he rings changes on the same motives. Does he really wish to create art? Will the seed he has been sowing grow?
While the Swede was quietly engaged in his dreamy plays, the American and German—stimulated by him to a rather high degree—were chiseling from the stone blocks of their own folk souls stronger and more delusive pictures which, in their innermost nature, were no less true than the film of the Swede. Since the Swede makes no attempt to speak to the world, but only to a limited circle of intellectually inclined people, he is always threatened with an imminent exhaustion of means. Even to-day, on this account it seems, he is trying to effect a compromise between himself and the world, though it cannot be said that he is going into convulsions over his effort. He is not in a hurry. He is trying his skill at historical films which hardly become him either as a creative genius or a trained spectator. He is snatching his figures out of the earth and giving them, at the expense of verisimilitude, and following the bad example of the German social film, the rather rootless and precarious existence that attaches itself at all times to mondaine as distinguished from mundane life. It is a case of change from I to We which connotes a changed attitude toward the world in general; and it is a change which the film of Sweden has not entirely escaped. But it was to be expected: the Swede and his film are both much too strong and healthy either to avoid or neglect this transition.
The Swedish film is the reflection of a people that depends upon itself, that rests within itself, on whose shores the tempestuous waves of other nations break but gently: they have already been broken before reaching that point.
Fig. 18. Scene from Vögelöd Castle.
[See p. [91]]
The German is the great experimenter. Fate has struck Germany many a telling blow in the last decade; much has been destroyed forever. But amid the débris there has remained a spirit of daring, a courage that makes an essay at the bold enticing. We experiment in the motion picture, though not so much from a mere love of the novel as from a settled conviction that in this field we still have a great deal to learn; we are still undecided about a great number of things.
There is hardly a theme on earth or in the moon with which we have not concerned ourselves; we have conjured the things of the earth and the stars up before the film camera and had them remain there until their pictures were at our disposal. We have descended into the dusty tombs of prehistoric times; we have adapted the stories of foreign countries to the screen. Fairy tales—those of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow—have been tried. And when, at the close of the War, a sudden flood of ideas, notions, conceits, and utopias swept over our heads, we even tried to philosophize on the screen.
In all of this busy activity, in this feverish and unceasing search after new themes and new values, there has been one thing that we completely forgot; and this one thing has been passing by us in a thousand pictures: it was our own people. Of German films that introduce us to the whirling life of our country, particularly from the rural point of view, we have hardly an indication. A real beginning in this direction certainly has not been made. It is there, however, and there only where uniqueness of real character is conspicuous that one finds the type of originality that pleases in itself and defies competition of any kind. At present, forces are beginning to work, action has been begun which, if carried on and out, will project on the screen the land of Germany with all the beauty of its streams and forests, and which will show the German soul with all its dreams and wishes. This is the way the film entitled Explosion, which tells of miners and their lives, came into existence. This was the initial inspiration of Fritz Lang’s Nibelungs, that grandiose epic of the remote Germanic past. These are to be sure beginnings; but so long as they remain the sole examples, so long as the status quo in this matter is preserved, we Germans simply do not exist in the film; we have not yet arrived. And be it said once for all that the popular film is the one in which a film people can best show its real character.