The soul of the moving picture

by Walter Julius Bloem

A purely lyrical stage drama such as Anton Wildgans’s Armut (“Poverty”) fails to produce the really deep echo: our sympathy, rattling around itself as the sole pivot it can commandeer soon runs out. The stage, which finds in the play of thoughts a rich variety, needs nevertheless a will-power that guides and gives direction to the stream that flows by. The motion picture, which is much less gifted with wealth of color, labors under the coercion of a strong action somewhat as violin playing labors under the coercion of melody. There is no such thing as a lyric motion picture.

Now, this is of course old, gray theory which applies to the average film, but which never applies to the exceptional creation of the god-endowed genius. Such an exception, and one of marvelously subdued and magic beauty, was Honour thy Mother! This film had not one loud tone apart from a single cry of wild anguish. Its action was the divine mercy of a human heart.

This is all very well; one man could do it once. The Swedes, on the other hand, have suffered pitiable bankruptcy with their lyrical films, though some of them were of exceptional beauty. Success has a better chance of realization when the action is a little robust, strong-fisted. That excesses in this direction are fatal is shown by the idiotic action of the Eddie-Polo films. In the film whose action is benevolently vigorous the lyric element loses its independence. It is dissolved in the action, comes to the fore every now and then in individual places with renewed force, and has a subduing effect on the flow of action. In this way, the moving picture becomes a cheerfully moved and never breathless art. But if the poet throws discipline to the winds and pours out his lyric gentleness over every single scene, his action soon and inevitably sinks into an inert and dripping morass.

There is also no such thing as an epic motion picture; just as there is no such thing as an epic stage play. The epic has an action—that is, a general trend and direction of events, but it has no distinct goal. Episode is concatenated with episode like pearls on a string. In the last analysis, however, there is no such thing as pure epic. When Ulysses the great sufferer is driven from shore to shore, there is something more to his case than the mere driving. Back of his fate stands a dramatic question: Will he return to Ithaca? Will Penelope have remained true to him? Will he be able to overcome her wooers? This being the case, the episodes of his unenviable existence are not concatenated without plan; there is no aimlessness about his affair. The incidents of his life are joined together into a complete circle; they end with dramatic necessity, not with epic arbitrariness. The epic of the Nibelungs is dramatic to the core.

The Italian motion picture dangles about in epic robes, attaching, or affixing, scene to scene with proverbial epic breadth. The real action is included in just a few isolated scenes. The picture exists for its own sake, and it is surrounded with perfectly colossal decoration. We have but to think of the Dante film, or of Cabiria, and to a degree of Quo Vadis.

The rest of the world does not feel in this way; and it does not feel this way about the motion picture. The tense and rigid condensation of the action, and its logical progress from scene to scene—this is the desideratum of the German film. The fates we see all about us, and of which we ourselves are so many living proofs, are not to glide by each other and dissipate in the winds: they are to rebound against each other, and end when their struggle is over. Moreover, such fate as remains when the end has been reached is somehow to be transformed, and bear the stamp of this struggle.

There was the case of Golem. It had in it the possibilities of some tremendous dramatic action. But in the final scenes this potential action was dissipated into an unintended and undesired epic flow: the de-souled monster had again become a lump of clay and lay before us in all its obvious impotency. Everything will turn out all right: the houses that have been burned down will be rebuilt. And the Jews take Golem on their shoulders and carry him off to the synagogue: “Hail to thee, Rabbi Loew! He has saved the city for the third time!” Life will now go on its usual course just as if nothing had happened. And with this the whole affair is over; it is forgotten; and it has been erased from the heart of the spectator. The play seemed to have to do, not with the age of terror of Golem, but with the age of peace. We had expected a tragedy—and we were given an episode.

Another altogether undramatic film was Dr. Caligari. It consisted of a series of gruesome things which, to make matters worse, proved in the end to be the fancies of a madman. The play had action; but it had no goal, no dramatic tension or suspense. The spectator was left in a cloud of uncertainty and doubt. “What is this all about?” he asked himself.

Dramatic suspense is the anticipation of events from which there can be no reasonable escape. Anything that is tossed into our laps, as it were, suddenly and without due motivation appeals to us as irrational, senseless and unnecessary. We know that it all might have been so different.

The film, having, as it certainly does, fewer means of expression at its immediate command than the legitimate stage, and depending for its appeal upon an audience that is, as a rule, less cultured, dare not overlook, slight, or neglect a single means that might help it in its effort to bring out strong effects. Is dramatic suspense or tension inartistic? Quite the contrary; it is the best proof we have of artistic ability, for we may search the art canons of the civilized world and we will never find a rule to the effect that art must be tiring and tiresome. Suspense is artistic, and the greater the effect of it upon the spectator the more artistic it is. One must not fancy, however, that the suspense of Eddie-Polo, or of the sensations of Luciano Albertini are really and finally effective. In the movie of the Apaches, to which the visitor is admitted for the smallest coin known to the mint, this suspense is quite popular, because the nerves of these people have become so blunted and so crude that they have quite lost all appreciation of finer effects. Fortunately, however, the general film public, the one that patronizes the average and paying motion picture, is essentially more refined than the Apache. The more refined spectator cannot be captivated so easily and persistently by the sensational tension that lasts for a moment as he can by the pleasure derivable and derived from lengthier and more enduring amusement. He is more interested in the suspense that is spread out over an entire action, the tension that gives greater evidence of human shrewdness, and is consequently more agreeable to men of like characteristics and qualifications.