Strangely enough, instrumental music often has a quite pleasing effect in the motion picture. The reason for this is not far to seek: the accompanying music and the picture are blended into a unity; between them there is perfect harmony. That this harmony exists, however, is a matter of pure accident. Fearful, on the other hand, is the result when a living singer takes his place in the orchestra and accompanies the picture with a song. When the hero up in the film opens his mouth, the artist down among the musicians opens his too, and song comes forth.
All of these are trifles which a skilful producer can easily avoid. Between silence and loquaciousness lies a spacious domain which offers the capable film artist abundant room for an easy and agreeable portrayal of his subject matter. This having been accomplished, no one feels that there is anything anomalous about the picture, or the art that makes its production possible. No one will feel a desire for a speaking film, for the silence that is in the main obligatory has been interrupted and toned down by the interjection of occasional lines of text. All in all, the film as it has been developed thus far, is a new revelation of the artistic world-soul: it delineates feelings through gestures; emotions are set forth with the aid of gesticulation. For this reason alone, the film in its present form is a new art.
Is the photograph which makes the film possible also an art? No, it is not; and will not be an art. But the operator is an artist. His tool is the lifeless material, just as marble is the tool of the sculptor. And he animates his picture, he gives it life, by means of the most delicate lights and shades, through the introduction and application of the tenderest of moods.
Let us rejoice that the human mind has been enabled, thanks to the motion picture, to hew out a way for itself into lands that have hitherto been unknown—a way that leads us off the beaten track on which the glare and hardness of everyday life become at times unendurable, a way that leads us into the dreamy twilight of poetry, into the realm of romance. How necessary the film, as an art, has become if we are to escape with judicious frequency the drab dullness of the workaday world is known to everyone who is sufficiently familiar with it to feel that its loss would be lamentable.
CHAPTER II
TEXTS
Man as a mute? In the old pantomime, man was deaf and dumb. His acting consisted of a ridiculous, bombastic, and excited whipping about with all manner of gestures, a convulsive attempt to make clear, through the exclusive agency of gesticulation, a number of things, indeed everything, that cannot be said through gestures alone. Pantomime is tin-horn and big-drum solo.
This is not the way of the moving picture. For it followed as a matter of self-evident fact that the inaudible words could be inserted in writing between the pictures. Many people, however, have succumbed to the delusion that the moving picture actor has regained his speech, and that without limit. There is no phase of the film in which it is still groping about more in the dark, none in which its essential conditions have been so little fulfilled as in the matter of interpolated texts. One begins to have a feeling that the shorter the speech the better. But even a battle of words consisting of short, even abbreviated, lines can have an undesirable effect so far as the artistic impression is concerned.
Laws are always first felt and then recognized in error. It is even so with the texts that accompany the pictures of the film: they are conditioned by a state of concealed necessity which the artist is in duty bound to recognize if he would impart to his text the psychic impressiveness without which it is a failure, and the artistic importance without which it cannot survive.
Fig. 3. Scene from The Stone Rider.