It is unfortunate that productive poets can be persuaded to subject their works to the adapter only with difficulty (as Carl Mayer in the superb film Schloss Vögelöd). This is true, though the thought that is required to adapt a work to the film is so great that the process in itself requires originality and reveals a spirit of the most real productivity. For it is after all easier to create a new work from the beginning than to take a finished work and transform it so completely that it meets the requirements of an entirely new and novel art.
For the author the adaptation is frequently a most unsatisfactory affair. The book often leads the adapter astray; follow it, and he loses himself in byways that are unknown to the ways of the film world. In such a case the entire production has to be re-created, which means that it has to be re-written. The result of this is that everybody is dissatisfied, and not a few are in a bad humor. On the other hand, the author may allow, or may have allowed, himself to be carried away by a veritable wealth of ideals: he changes everything; he adapts everything; he makes new characters; he develops new action; he cajoles a new fate into the composition as a whole; he invents new episodes; he even creates a new milieu and a new atmosphere. The result of all this may be, to be sure, a quite good film. But it may be so new that it is incorrect to speak of it as an adaptation. In such a case, the original author falls into ill humor, because he feels that violence has been done his creation which is equivalent, he feels, to having been neglected or slighted. The manager is also apt to have his face wreathed in frowns, for what has become of his funds? He has paid out a handsome royalty for what? For nothing, he feels. His case seems justified, for he paid for a given book, but there is not a trace of that book in the film which is to care for the needs of the box-office. And our old friend—the dramaturge—is in the worst frame of mind of all, for he feels that the author has gone about his business with excessive independence and with too little concern for his excellent criticism.
From all of this it should be manifest that it is rare that a good adaptation is the result of a single effort. Adaptation is a slow and complicated process. There must be untiring revision—with the disagreeable result that a manuscript promised for and by a certain date is not ready at the stipulated time. It is much better all around when the author lives himself, as it were, into the milieu he plans to film, becomes perfectly familiar with it, if he was not familiar with it when he began, creates characters with whom he is on speaking terms, and fashions a fate such as he himself has experienced.
It is dangerous to adapt a great work to the film. The adaptation of the Marriage of Figaro showed the baroque curlicues, the confusions, the harmless malevolences of Beaumarchais’s work (which in the opera are quite unessential and the transparency of which appeal to us to-day as altogether childish); we thought of Mozart and sighed. And Hamlet! With Asta Nielsen! Without Shakespeare! Adapted “after an old saga!” Why that was merely and after all a stolen creation.
The living poet may decide for himself whether treason has been committed by the adapter who visualized his creation on the screen, and did it artistically, but as an artistic motion picture. The dead poet is unable to come to his own defence. If his work cannot be adapted with piety, it is always the privilege of the would-be adapter to leave it alone—as an act of piety.
Fig. 20. Scene from The Nibelungs.
[See p. [91]]
CHAPTER IX
THE PATH TO ART
The lyric poem is poised on a shoreless sea; its prime feature is its indefiniteness; it leads on to the undetermined goal of mortal mood. But harmony—that resting which satisfies itself—soon exhausts itself. And, to repeat once more, undetermined mood may easily be converted into monotony, or it may change to a chaotic ebb and flow that connotes the surging of unanticipated floods rather than tidal regularity. No “progressive” work of art revels in planlessness. The sails in which the winds play, as an idle mood may dictate, do not indulge in their seeming gaiety with impunity. Punishment of one sort or another follows. The helm decides a certain course; in this course lie the fruits of strength. In poetry, mood is routed by action. The feelings remain the driving power. For when feeling and passion form an alliance, “action” ensues.