778 T13T?
Talbot
Film: an antholopv
778 TIJT*
Talbot $7.50
Film: an anthology
59-15669
59-15669
-P.VBLIC LIBRARY""
BATE DUE
Film:
An Anthology
compiled and
edited by
Daniel Jalbot
SIMON AND SCHUSTER / NEW YORK / 1959
ALL RIGHTS RKSRRVKD
INCLUDING TI1K RIG! IT OF REPRODUCTION
IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
CJOPYKIGHT 1959 BY DAN1KLTALBOT
JH'HUSIUW BY SIMON AN!) SCHU8TKK, INC.
R(K:KKFELLKRCENTKR I 630 FIFTH AVENUE
NFAV YORK 2O, N. Y.
KIRST PRINTING
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMIWK: 5C)-I
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Acknowledgments
The editor wishes to acknowledge the following
twes $nd publishers for their courtesy In gnmttng penttission to
reprint the selections included in this anthology:
James Agec Trust for "Comedy's Greatest Kra" by James A gee,
1949 by the James Agee Trust
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd* for 'The Mechanised Muse" by Mar-
garet Kennedy, 1942 by George Allen 8c Unwin, Ltd.
Bruce Humphries, Inc., for selections from The Art of
by filie Faure, 1923 by The Four Seas Company,
ACKNOWLETCMENTS v
University of California Press for selections from Film as Art by
Rudolf Arnheim, 1957 by The Regents of the University of
California.
Thomas Y. Crowell Company for "Film Reality: The Cinema and
The Theatre" from Film and Theatre by Aliardyce Nicoll, 1936
by Aliardyce Nicoll.
Estate of Robert Warshow for "The Westerner" by Robert War-
show, 1954 by the Estate of Robert Warshow.
Manny Farber for "Underground Films," published in the Novem-
ber 1957 issue of Commentary, 1957 by The American Jewish
Committee.
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc., for "Hollywood's Surrealist Eye"
from The Hollywood Hallucination by Parker Tyler, (c) 104.4 bv
in i TI i J J ~ N "^ 7 T*T /
Parker Tyler.
The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, for selections from Movies: A
Psychological Study by Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Lekes,
1950 by The Free Press.
Librairie Gallimard for "How Films Are Made" from Reflections
on the Cinema by Ren6 Glair, 1951 by Librairie Gallimard.
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., for "The Cinematographic
Principle and the Ideogram" from Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein,
translated and edited by Jay Leyda, 1949 by Harcourt, Brace and
Company, Inc.; for "The Movie Colon)" from Hollywood by Leo
C. Rostcn, 1941 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; for "D.
W. Griffith" from The Rise of the American Film by Lewis Jacobs,
1939 by Lewis Jacobs; and for "Directors of the Thirties" from
Grienon on Documentary, compiled and edited by Forsyth Hardy,
1947 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., used by courtesy
of Forsyth Hardy.
The Johns Hopkins Press for "The Informer" from Novels into
Films by George Bluestone, 1957 by George Bluestone.
Miss Pauline Kael for "Movies, the Desperate Art" from The Berk-
ley Book of Modern Writing No, 3, 1956 by The Berkley Publish-
ing Corporation,
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for "The Film Age" from The Social His-
tory of Art by Arnold Hauser, published in 1951 by Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc.
VI ACKNOWLfilXSNfENTS
The Macmillan Company for "The Bankruptcy of Cinema as Art 11
by Seymour Stern, from Movies on Trial, edited by William J,
Perlnum, 1936 by William J. Perhmn.
New Directions for "The Golden Age" from The
Eye by I lenry Miller, (a) 1939 by New Directions; reprinted by per-
mission of Netc Directions.
W. W. Norton & (X, Inc., for u MelieT from The History of Mo-
tion Pictures by Maurice Bardeehe and Robert Brasilhich, trans-
lated and edited by Iris Barry, 1938 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Rnvin Panofsky for "Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,"
originally published in the Rullethi of the Department of Art and
Archaeology^ Princeton University, 1934-
Robert Payne for "Charlie Chaplin: Portrait of the Moralist" from
The Grctft (tod Pan, published in 1951 by ! lennitage J louse, (r) *95*
by Robert Payne,
Princeton University Press for "Caligari" from From Hitler to Call-
gari by Siegfried Kracauer, 1947 by the Princeton University
Press, *
Random House, Inc, for Chapter 3 from The (heat (ioldwyn by
Alva Johnston, 1937 by Random House, Inc,
Rinchart & Company, Inc., for ^Everything Han Just Gone Xoom"
from Picture by Lillian Ross, 1952 by Lillian Ro&s The contents
of the book were originally published in The New Yorker,
Paul Rotha for selections from Docwwfflt&ry Fihn by Paul Rotho, in
conjunction with Sinclair Roacl and Richard Griffith* 1952 by
Paul Rotha. Permission granted on author's behalf by John Farcjithar-
son, Ltd., London.
Roy Publishers for selections from Theory of the Film by
Baldzs, 1952 by Roy Publishers; and for selections from
on the Film by Jean Cocteau^ 1954 by Roy Publishers.
Georges Sadoul for a selection from French Film by Georges
Sadoul, 1953 by Georges Sadoul.
Charles Scribner's Sons for **A Note on the Film" from Fettling md
Form by Susanne Langer, 1953 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Simon and Schuster, Inc., for "First Night on Broadway" from A
Million md One Nights by Terry Ramsaye, 1926 by Simon and
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vll
Schuster, Inc., renewed 1954 by Terry Ramsaye; and for "Enter, the
Movies" from A Child of the Century by Ben Hccht, 1954 by
Ben Hccht.
The Viking Press for "S-E-X" from The Great Audience by Gil-
bert Seldes, 1950 by Gilbert Seldes; reprinted by permission of The
Viking Press, Inc.
Vision Press, Ltd., for selections from Film Technique and Film
Acting by V. I. Pudovkin, translated and edited by Ivor Montagu,
Memorial Edition, 1954.
Contents
Foreword xj
L Aesthetics, Social Commentary and Analysis
The Art of Cineplastics, by lle Faure 3
Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,
by Erwin Panof sky 1 5
Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theater,
by Allardyce Nicoll 33
A Note on the Film, by Susanne Langer 51
Hollywood's Surrealist Eye, by Parker Tyler 56
The Film Age, by Arnold Hauser 64
The Bankruptcy of Cinema as Art, by Seymour Stern 76
The Mechanized Muse, by Margaret Kennedy 94
Directors of the Thirties, by John Grierson 1 24
Comedy's Greatest Era, by James Agee 144
k
X CONTENTS
The Westerner, by Robert Warshow 162
Underground Films, by Manny Farber 177
Movies, the Desperate Art, by Pauline Kacl 189
S-e-x, by G ilbcrt Seldes 2 1 o
The Inf owner, by George Blucstonc 22 1
- Movies: A Psychological Study, by Martha
Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites 244
//. Theory ami Technique
Film Technique, by V. I. Pudovldn 267
Theory of the Film, by Rein Bal;V/,s 279
Film as Art, by Rudolph Arnhcim 294
The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,
by Sergei FJLscnsccin 324
How Films Are Made, by Rent* Clair 339
Cocteau on the Film, by Jean Cocteau 348
Some Principles of Documentary, by Paul Rotha 357
III, History and Personal
First Night on Broadway, by Terry Ramsay e 373
V.M6U&S, by Maurice Bard&chc and Robert Brasillaeh 381
V--D. W, Griffith, by Lewis Jacobs 392
Caligari, by Siegfried Kracauer 449
t-Charlie Chaplin; Portrait of the Moralist, by Robert Payne 465
The Renaissance of the French Cinema Feyder, Renoir*
Duvivier, Carn6, by Georges Sadoul 479
The Golden Age, by Henry Miller 498
The Great Goldwyn, by Alva Johnston 510
The Movie Colony, by Leo G Rostcn 522
Everything Has Just Gone Zoom, by Lillian Ross 545
Enter, the Movies, by Ben Heche 582
Notes on the Contributors 6 1 3
Bibliography 6 1 9
Index 625
Foreword
This book stems from several years of pleasurable reading in
libraries and mttsemm. Although I had always been an ardent
moviegoer, I bad preferred not to investigate the literature on the
film or read the serious critics* I knew what 1 liked in a movie, I had
my own ideas as to what constituted artistry in this
j and I had a strong suspicion that writing on the film would
tend toward press-gentry. But after watching in bug-eyed astonish-
ment the internal movements of a major picture company in opera*
tion (I still wonder how pictures get ?nade at all in these medieval,
monolithic establishments ) } curiosity interposed and before long I
begm rummaging through hundreds of books and articles. Subse-
quently it struck me that hen was a vital body of writing. Hence
this book,
xi
Xli FOREWORD
It makes no claim whatsoever to being definitive, but it does in-
chide much that is important in aesthetic and historical writing on
the film. In making the following selections I was guided by an
eclectic spirit. I was aware of the drawbacks of eclecticism, but I
felt that it was the only way of achieving variety and diversity. In
many instances there are pieces, almost side by side, which seem to
flout each other. The result, I hope, is salutary.
This book comes at a time when the movies are in a funk, partic-
ularly in the United States. The movie magnates are howling and
the film artists are not doing so 'well. (Old tunes, these, but -possibly
close to being over by now.) We may be witnessing the climax of
the American passion play of Business vs. Art. In no other country
do businessmen and artists hate each other so much as in America,
and nowhere is this conflict as violent as in film making. One wishes
that it were possible to trap all that energetic eidetic imagery flow-
ing between them and to put it to good purpose. But the play will
end and we know the punch lines all too well: "Businessmen are
swine and artists are bums.
However, without taking to euphoric optimism, I think we can
point to a 'few encouraging signs. Hollywood the Giant has been
virtually smashed. The splinters that have formed into independent
production units constitute a healthy movement, Their atmosphere
is partially comparable to that of the early days of film making
when everybody was independent. To be sure, this has not meant
nor will it necessarily mean that good pictures will result. The
best that can be said is that it is a far better situation than we have
had.
Another boost to the movies is the failure of television to keep
as many people glued to their sets as it once did. The novelty was
bound to wear off. Since it is doing little in the way of imaginative
programming to serve its audience honorably, television's loss should
become the movies' gain. Provided, of course, that the movies turn
out the kind of fare that once made them lord of all the visual arts.
Finally, we can still look to the staggering amount of talent and
enthusiasm for good film making in America at present, I had the
"opportunity , while working as the Eastern story editor for a major
motion-picture company ? to come upon immmerable gifted film
artists. It IMS painful to see how tightly shut the doors were for
them. The adage that all good art inevitably finds its audience is
just not true of the movies. Yet the talent is there; it persists to use
an Agee~ism-with "unkillable" force. Some of it trickles into the
FOREWORD xjjj
big studios, but most of it winds up in the garage > even in our day
m expedient which still produces impressive results.
We all know what a powerful artistic and social medium the film
is. It has become as meaningful an educational force in our century
as the written and spoken 'word has been throughout the ages. In
the days of my youth mmy of us spent entire weekends in the
local movie house. 1 can remember my mother packing huge brown
paper bags full of sandwiches, pickles, apples and pies early on
Saturday mornings. I would not return home until late at night,
my eyes dangerously bloodshot It <was the same story on Sundays.
Having absorbed on those weekends every conceivable gesture, line,
action and plot turn, my friends and I would spend the remainder of
the week practicing our repertoire on street corners and in school-
yards. We became masters of the hip draw, the deathfall, ferocious
jaw clouting, barroom dialect, wse-guyim, cool cawalness, clown-
ing and swooning. Little did we realize then what a fantastic influ-
ence the movies were to become on our lives-on our ethics, public
behavior, clothes,, and even our food.
In the same way, it is no accident that the film has attracted the
attention of some of the finest minds of the past forty years writers
and thinkers who labored all their lives in various fields. Erwin
Panofsky notes in his essay in this book that if suddenly all the
"serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors' 7 stopped
creating, their work would scarcely be missed, whereas if films
came to an abrupt halt, the result would be "catastrophic." Like
painting, sculpture and the dance, the movies need not rely upon
Words to charm beholders throughout the world. Unlike these three
arts, the movies have in their finest works a much wider range of
expression. In one sense it could be said that what painting md
sculpture set out to do the movies complete: a heightened anthro-
pomorphic vision, a continuous -flowing of objects and people
jammed together in moments of tenderness, spleen, melancholy,
profanation md divination. A novelist often spends as much as
twenty-five pages setting up an action that can take place in a sec-
ond on the screen. This is the kind of breath-taking economy that
is the marvel of all art.
Unfortunately today's -film maker has not profited from the older
films. Today's scripts have everybody talking a blue streak, much
of it nonsense. There is nothing wrong 'with dialogue in films, con-
trary to what some aesthetidans think, since dialogue introduces
the possibility of economy in its Q*vm way. We might say that the
XIV FOREWORD
less conspicuous the speech the more effective it becomes. With-
out speech, the actor would be a pure mime. One line cm avoid
several sequences of unnecessary gesture. Such films as Citizen
Kane, A Walk in the Sun and Caught come to mind readily when
I think of how artistically dialogue was used to enrich their content.
We can attribute the failure of the spoken word in films to the in-
discriminate hiring of novelists, dialogue specialists and literary men
to create scenarios. All good films must come primarily from those
who understand the workings of the eye men like Carl Mayer, Jean
Cocteau, Max Ophuls, John Httston and Rene Clair.
If this anthology fails to present much of the important writing
on the film, it is due to the editor's shortcomings. Also there is
always the problem of space limitations, with the result that cer-
tain figures and works are bound to be neglected. The bibliography
takes up some of this slack. It should be useful to all those 'who are
prompted to make -further investigations. If, in sum, these selections
will have been responsible for stimulating the reader into looking
at and thinking about fifans more meaningfully and pleasurably,
then the editor's effort has been worth while. Finally > my thanks
are due to Miss Charlotte Seitlin and Mr. Peter Schwed for their
helpful suggestions.
DANIEL TALBOT
I
Aesthetics,
Social
Commentary
and
Analysis
This section consists of critical
appreciations and evaluations
of the film as an art -form and
a social instrument. The con-
tributors 'write "from such di-
verse backgrounds as art his-
tory and criticism, philosophy,
psychology, poetry, drama
criticism and -film making. All
of these gifted 'writers and
thinkers are intensely aware of
the socially influential and ar-
tistic potentialities of the film
medium. Some of them stress
form (patterns, imagery, etc.),
others content (social, psycho-
logical meaning, etc.), but all
share the conviction that form
cannot be separated from con-
tent in any important work of
art.
The
Art
Q-f
'
fan
Dlj
This selection is taken from a short
book on the film entitled The Art
of Cineplastics (the Four Seas
Company j Boston, 1923. The essay
originally appeared as a series in
English in the pages of The Free-
man, New York), It is one of the
earliest significant comments on
the aesthetics of the film, Mie
Faure, coming to the film as an
art historian, saw in this medium
* ts ^ erent picric an d wchitec-
tural possibilities. Bored by the
theater's static limitations, he was
among the first critics to hail the
film as an exciting new art form.
WITH DRAMATIC STYLE lost, the present is just the moment for the
theater to choose for its attempt to monopolize an art, or at least
the instrument of an art, that is absolutely new; one that is so rich
in resources that, after having transformed the spectacle, it can act
on the aesthetic and social transformation of man himself with a
power which I consider to exceed the most extravagant predictions
made for it. 1 1 see such power in the art of the moving picture that
1 Since this essay was written, the cinegraphic production of the world does
not seem to have improved. The cinema, which was severely injured by the
novel of episode, has turned to the even more wretched melodrama. I still be-
lieve in it, but it is, like the other arts, a victim of the political and social chaos
4 ELIE FAURE
I do not hesitate to regard it as the nucleus of the common spectacle
which everyone demands, as being perfectly susceptible of assum-
ing a grave, splendid, moving Character, a religious character even,
in the universal, majestic sense of the word. It can do so quite as
well as music, which began with some sort of string stretched be-
tween two sticks, struck by the finger of some poor devil, black or
yellow, blind perhaps, to an even and monotonous rhythm; it can
do so quite as well as the dance, which began with some little girl
skipping from one foot to the other, while around her other chil-
dren clapped their hands 5 quite as well as the theater, which began
with the mimicking recital of some adventure of war or the chase
amid a circle of auditors; quite as well as architecture, which began
with the arranging of a cave, in front of which, after a fire had been
lighted, someone stretched the hide of an aurochs; quite as well as
the frescoes, the statues and the perspectives of the temple, which
began with the silhouette of a horse or a deer, dug out with a flint on
a bit of bone or ivory.
The needs and desires of man, fortunately, are stronger than- his
habits. There will some day be an end of the cinema considered as
an offshoot of the theater, an end of the sentimental monkey tricks
and gesticulations of gentlemen with blue chins and rickety legs,
made up as Neapolitan boatmen or Icelandic fishermen, and ladies
really too mature for ingenue parts who, with their eyes turned
heavenward and their hands clasped, ask the benediction of heaven
and the protection of the crowd for the orphan persecuted by the
wicked rich man. It is impossible that these things should not disap-
pear along with the theater of which they are the counterpart.
Otherwise, we must look to America and Asia, the new peoples or
those renewed by death, to bring in with the fresh air of the oceans
and the prairies brutality, health, youth, danger, and freedom of
action.
The cinema has nothing in common with the theater save this,
which is only a matter of appearances, and the most external and
banal appearances at that: It is, as the theater is, but also as are the
in which the whole world is floundering. Is it destined, as I would still like
to think, in a rejuvenated society, to become the art of the mass, the center
of a powerful communion in which new symphonic forms will be born in the
tumult of passion and used with aesthetic ends capable of lifting the heart?
Is it destined, if the customs of democratic society persist, to specialize like
other forms of art, to furnish sentimental insanities for the appetite of the
mob, is it destined to yield its hidden, harmonies only to the initiate? I hope
not. Like the other arts it needs for its regenerationand, in its own particu-
lar case, since it is at the beginning of its career, even to attain its first really
aesthetic phase to be steeped completely in the needs of the people, to
be a prey to some quickening illusion.
THE ART OF CINEPLASTICS 5
.dance, the games of the stadium and the procession, a collective
spectacle having as its intermediary an actor. It is even less near to
the theater than to the dance, the games or the procession, in which
I see only one kind of intermediary between the author and the
public. Actually the cinema presents, between the author and the
public, three intermediaries: the actor let us call him the cinemimic
the camera, and the photographer. (I do not speak of the screen,
which is a material accessory, forming a part of the hall, like the
setting in the theater.) This already establishes the cinema as further
away from the theater than from music, in which there also exist
two intermediaries between the composer and the public i.e., the
player and the instrument. Finally, and especially, there is no speak-
ing in the cinema, which is certainly not an essential characteristic
of the theater. Chariot (Charlie Chaplin), the greatest of cine-
mimics, never opens his mouth; and observe that the best films al-
most completely do without those intolerable explanations of which
the screen is so prodigal.
In the cinema the whole drama unrolls in absolute silence, from
which not only words, but the noise of feet, the sound of the wind
and the crowds, all the murmurs, all the tones of nature are absent
The pantomime? The relationship is scarcely closer there. In the
pantomime, as in the theater, the composition and the realization of
the role change, mbre or less, every evening, which confers on both
a sentimental, even impulsive, character. The composition of the
film, on the other hand, is fixed once for all, and once fixed it does
not change again, which gives it a character that the plastic arts are
the only ones to possess. Besides, pantomime represents, by styl-
ized gestures, the feeling and the passions brought to their essential
attitudes; it is a psychological art before being a plastic art. The
cinema is plastic first; it represents a sort of moving architecture
which is in constant accord in a state of equilibrium dynamically
pursued with the surroundings and the landscapes where it is
erected and falls to the earth again. The feelings and the passions
are hardly more than a pretext, serving to give a certain sequence,
a certain probability to the action.
Let us not misunderstand the meaning of the word "plastic." Too
often it evokes the motionless, colorless forms called sculptural
which lead all too quickly to the academic canon, to helnieted
heroism, to allegories in sugar, zinc, papier mache or lard. Plastics
is the art of expressing form in repose or in movement by all the
means that man commands: full-round, bas-relief, engraving on the
wall or on copper, wood or stone, drawing in any medium, painting,
fresco, the dance; and it seems to me in no wise overbold to affirm
6 ELIE FAURE
that the rhythmic movements of a group of gymnasts or of a pro-
cessional or military column touch the spirit of plastic art far more
nearly than do the pictures of the school of David. Like painting,
moreover and more completely than painting, since a living rhythm
and its repetition in time are what characterize cineplastics the later
art tends and will tend more every day to approach music and the
dance as well. The itaterpenetration, the crossing and the association
of movements and cadences already give us the impression that even
the most mediocre films unroll in musical space.
1 remember the unexpected emotions I received, seven or eight
years before the war, from certain films the scenarios of which, as it
happens, were of an incredible silliness. The revelation of what
the cinema of the future can be came to me one day; I retain an
exact memory of it, of the commotion that I experienced when I ob-
served, in a flash, the magnificence there was in the relationship of a
piece of black clothing to the gray wall of an inn. From that mo-
ment I paid no more attention to the martyrdom of the poor woman
who was condemned, in order to save her husband from dishonor,
to give herself to the lascivious banker who had previously mur-
dered her mother and debauched her child. I discovered, with in-
creasing astonishment, that, thanks to the tone relations that were
transforming the film for me in a system of colors scaling from
white to black and ceaselessly commingled, moving, changing on
the surface and in the depth of the screen, I was witnessing a sudden
coming to life, a descent into that host of personages whom I had
already seenmotionlesson the canvases of El Greco, Firans Hals,
Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer, Courbet, Manet. 2 I do not set
down these names at random, the last two especially. They are
those the cinema suggested to me from the first.
Later, as the medium of the screen was perfected from day to
day, as my eye became accustomed to these strange works, other
memories associated themselves with the earlier ones, till I no longer
needed to appeal to my memory and invoke familiar paintings in
order to justify the new plastic impressions that I got at the cinema.
Their elements, their complexity which varies and winds in a con-
tinuous movement, the constantly unexpected things imposed on the
work by its mobile composition, ceaselessly renewed, ceaselessly
broken and remade, fading away and reviving and breaking down,
monumental for one flashing instant, impressionistic the second fol-
2 May I be permitted in passing to form a wish? It is that smoking be
forbidden in cinema halls, as talking is forbidden in concert halls. At the
end of an hour the atmosphere is saturated with smoke. The finest films are
clouded, lose their transparency and their quality, both in tone and in over-
tone.
THE ART OF CINEPLASTICS y
lowing-all this constitutes a phenomenon too radically new for us
even to dream of classing it with painting, or with sculpture, or
with the dance, least of all with the modern theater. It is an un-
known art that is beginning, one that today is as far perhaps from
what it will be a century hence as the Negro orchestra, composed of
a tom-tom, a bugle, a string across a calabash, and a whistle, is from
a symphony composed and conducted by Beethoven.
I would point out the immense resources which, independent of
the acting of the cinemimics, are beginning to be drawn from their
multiple and incessantly modified relationships with the surroundings,
the landscape, the calm, the fury and the caprice of the elements,
from natural or artificial Hghting, from the prodigiously complex
and shaded play of values, from precipitate or retarded movements,
such as the slow movements of those galloping horses which seem
to be made of living bronze, of those running dogs whose muscular
contractions recall the undulations of reptiles. I would point out,
too, the profound universe of the microscopic infinite, and perhaps
-tomorrow~of the telescopic infinite, the undreamed-of dance of
atoms ^and stars, the shadows under the sea as they begin to be shot
with light. I would point out the majestic unity of masses in move-
ment that all this accentuates without insistence, as if it were play-
ing with the grandiose problem that Masaccio, Leonardo, Rem-
brandt were never quite able to solve. ... I could never come to
the end of it. Shakespeare was once a formless embryo in the narrow
shadows of the womb of a good dame of Stratford.
That the starting point of the art of the moving picture is in
plastics seems to be beyond all doubt. To whatever form of expres-
sion, as yet scarcely suspected, it may lead us, it is by volumes, ara-
besques, gestures, attitudes, relationships, associations, contrasts and
passages of tones the whole animated and insensibly modified from
one fraction of a second to another that it will impress our sensi-
bility and act on our intelligence by the intermediation of our eyes.
Art, I have called it, not science. It is doubly, even trebly art, for
there is conception, composition, creation, and transcription to the
screen on the part of three persons, the author, the producer, the
photographer, and of a group of persons, the cinemimics, as the
actors may properly be called. It would be desirable, and possible,
for the author to make his own film pictures, and better still if one
of the cinemimics, since he cannot be his own photographer, were
to be the composer and producer of the work to which he gives
life and which he often transfigures by his genius. This is, of course,
just what certain American cinemimics are doing, notably the ad-
ELIE FAURE
mirable Charlie Chaplin. It is a moot question whether the author
of the cinematographic scenarioI hesitate to create the word cine-
plast-should be a writer or a painter, whether the cinemimic should
be a mimic or an actor. Charlie Chaplin solves all these questions;
a new art presupposes a new artist.
A certain literary critic has recently deplored the sacrificing of
the theater to the cinema and has bracketed Charlie Chaplin and
Rigadin (an actor who was formerly known in the French theater
under the name of Dranem) in the same terms of reprobation. This
does not mean at all that the critic in question is unequal to his
task when he sticks to the field of literature; it means simply that
he does not realize the artistic significance of the cinema, nor the
difference of quality that necessarily exists between the cinema and
the theater and between one film and another. For, with all due re-
spect to this critic, there is a greater distance between Charlie Chap-
lin and Rigadin than between William Shakespeare and Edmond
Rostand. I do not write the name of Shakespeare at random. It an-
swers perfectly to the impression of divine intoxication that Charlie
Chaplin gives me, for example, in his film An Idyll of the Fields' it
befits that marvelous art of his, with its mingling of deep melan-
choly and fantasy, an art that races, increases, decreases and then
starts off like a flame again, carrying to each sinuous mountain ridge
over which it winds the very essence of the spiritual life of the
world, that mysterious light through which we half perceive that
our laughter is a triumph over our pitiless insight, that our joy is
the feeling of a sure eternity imposed by ourselves upon nothing-
ness, that an elf, a goblin, a gnome dancing in a landscape of Corot,
into which the privilege of reverie precipitates him who suffers,
bears God himself in his heart.
We must, I think, take our stand on this. Chaplin comes from
America, he is the authentic genius of a school that is looming up
more and more as the first in importance in cineplastics. I have
heard that the Americans greatly enjoy our French films, with their
representation of French customs-a fine thing, to be sure, but with-
out the least relation to the effects of motion which are the essen-
tial foundation of cinematographic art. The French film, as we
know it, is resolutely idealistic. It stands for something like the
painting of Ary Scheffer at the time when Delacrok was strug-
gling. 3 The French film is only a bastard form of a degenerate thea-
3 There were in France at the time these lines were written, and there
have been since, interesting efforts in the direction of the true cinema In
particular, those of Monsieur Marcel L'Herbier, Monsieur H. Krauss, Mon-,
sieur Delluc.
THE ART OF CINEPLASTICS O
ter and seems for that reason to be destined to poverty and death if
It does not take a new turn.
The American film, on the other hand, is a new art, full of im-
mense perspectives, full of the promise of a great future. I imagine
that the taste of the Americans for the "damaged goods" that we
export to them is to be explained by the well-known attraction
that forms of art in a state of decomposition exercise on all primitive
peoples. For the Americans are primitive and at the same time bar-
barous, which accounts for the strength and vitality which they in-
fuse into the cinema. It is among them that the cinema will, I be-
lieve, assume its full significance as plastic drama in action, occupy-
ing time through its own movement and carrying with it its own
space, of a kind that places it, balances it and gives it the social and
psychological value it has for us. It is natural that when a new art
appears in the world it should choose a new people which has had
hitherto no really personal art. Especially when this new art is
bound up, through the medium of human gesture, with the power,
definiteness and firmness of action. Especially, too, when this new
people is accustomed to introduce into every department of life an
increasingly complicated mechanical system, one that more and
more hastens to produce, associate and precipitate movements; and es-
pecially when this art cannot exist without the most accurate scien-
tific apparatus of a kind that has behind it no traditions and is or-
ganized, as it were, physiologically, with the race that employs it.
Cineplastics, in fact, presents a curious characteristic which music
alone, to a far less marked degree, has exhibited hitherto. In cine-
plastics it is far from being true, as it is in the case of the other arts,
that the feeling of the artist creates the art; in cineplastics it is the .
art that is creating its artists. We know that the great thing we call
the symphony was engendered little by little by the number and
the increasing complexity of musical instruments; but before even
the instrument with one string, man already sang, clapping his hands
and stamping his feet; here we had a science first, and nothing but a
science. There was required the grandiose imagination of man to
introduce into it, at first by a timid infiltration and later by a pro-
gressive invasion breaking down all barriers, his power of organizing
facts according to his own ideas, so that the scattered objects that
surround him are transformed into a coherent edifice, wherein he
seeks the fecund and always renewed illusion that his destiny de-
velops in conformity with his will.
Hence come these new plastic poems which transport us in three
seconds from the wooded banks of a river that elephants cross,
leaving a long track of foam, to the heart of wild mountains where
10 ELIE FAXJRE
distant horsemen pursue one another through the smoke of their
rifle shots, and from evil taverns where powerful shadows bend over
,-a deathbed in mysterious lights, to the weird half-light of submarine
waters where fish wind through grottoes of coral. Indeed and this
comes at unexpected moments, and in comic films as well as in the
others animals may take part in these dramas, and newborn chil-
dren, too, and they participate by their play, their joys, their disap-
pointments, their obscure dramas of instinct, all of which the thea-
ter, as it seems to me, is quite incapable of showing us. Landscapes,
too, beautiful or tragic or marvelous, enter the moving symphony in
order to add to its human meaning, or to introduce into it, after the
fashion of a stormy sky by Delacroix or a silver sea by Veronese,
the sense of the supernatural.
I have already explained why the Americans have understood, as
by instinct, the direction they should give to their visual imagina-
tion, letting themselves be guided by their love for space, movement
and action. As for the Italians, they might be reborn to the life of
conquest and lose the memory of their classic works, were they to
find in their genius for gesture and attitude and for setting (thanks
in part to the aid of their wonderful sunshine, which is like the sun-
shine of California) the elements of another original school, less
violent and also less sober, but presenting better qualities of compo-
sition than that of the Americans. In the cinema the Italians give us
marvelously the crowd, and the historical drama in the motionless
setting of palaces, gardens, ruins, where the ardent life that charac-
terizes the Italian people goes on, with that quality which is theirs
of never appearing out of time or out of place. A gesticulating
drama it may be, but the gestures are true. The Italian gesture has
been called theatrical; but it is not that, for it is sincere. Giotto's
personages are not acting. If that is the impression we get from
Bolognese painting, it is because the Bolognese no longer repre-
sented the real genius of Italy. Rembrandt, up to the age of forty-
five, and Rubens are far more theatrical than all the Italian masters
down to the painters of Bologna. Italian energy alone will render
the Italian school of cineplastics capable of maintaining, in this new
.art in which the Americans already excel, the plastic genius of Eu-
ropeand that by creating a form that is destined to have a great
future. 4
In any case, the chief triumph in the American conception of
cineplastics-a triumph which the Italians approach most nearly and
4 For the last two years the Italian film seems to be in decay. On the con-
txary, Dr. Caligari has recently revealed the powerful inventive genius of the
German film.
THE ART OF CINEPLASTICS II
the French approach, alas, most remotely seems to me to consist in
this: that the subject is nothing but a pretext. The web of feeling
should be nothing but the skeleton of the autonomous organism
represented by the film. In time this web must be woven into the
plastic drama. It is evident that this drama will be the more moving
in proportion as the moral and psychological pattern that it covers
is strongly, soberly and logically conducted. But that is all. The ex-
pression and the effects of that drama remain in the domain of
plastics; and the web of feeling is there only to reveal and increase
their value.
Shall I dare to dream of a future for the art of the moving pic-
ture, a future distant no doubt, when the actor, or, as I would pre-
fer to call him, the cinemimic, shall disappear or at least be special-
ized, and when the cineplast shall dominate the drama of form that
is precipitated in time? Observe, in the first place, one vital point
that hitherto has not been sufficiently noted, I think, or at least the
poetic consequences of which have not been made sufficiently clear.
The cinema incorporates time in space. More than this, through the
cinema time really becomes a dimension of space. We shall be able
to see dust rising, spreading, dissipating, a thousand years after it
has spurted up from the road under the hoofs of a horse; we shall
be able to see for a thousand years the smoke of a cigarette condens-
ing and then entering the ether and this in a frame of space under
our very eyes. We shall be able to understand how it may be that
the inhabitants of a distant star, if they can see things on earth with
powerful telescopes, are really contemporaries of Jesus, since at the
moment when I write these lines they may be witnessing his cruci-
fixion, and perhaps making a photographic or even cinematographic
record of the scene, for we know that the light that illumines us
takes nineteen or twenty centuries to reach them. We can even
imagine, and this may modify still more our idea of the duration of
time, that we may one day see this film, taken on that distant star,
either through the inhabitants sending it to us in some sort of pro-
jectile or perhaps transmitting it to our screens by some system of
interplanetary projection. This, which is not scientifically impossi-
ble, would actually make us the contemporaries of events which
took place a hundred centuries before us, and in the very place
wherein we live)
In the cinema we have indeed already made of time an instrument
that plays its role in the whole spatial organism, unfurling under our
eyes its successive masses which are ceaselessly brought before us
in dimensions that permit us to grasp their extent in surface area and
12 ELIE FAURE
in depth. Already we find in these masses pleasures of an intensity
unknown hitherto. Stop the most beautiful film you know, make
of it at any moment an inert photograph, and you will not obtain
even a memory of the emotion that it gave you as a moving picture.
Thus in the cinema time clearly becomes necessary for us. In-
creasingly it forms a part of the always more dynamic idea that we
are receiving about the object upon which we are gazing. We play
with it at our ease. We can speed it up. We can slow it down. We
can suppress it. Indeed I feel it as being formerly part of myself, as
enclosed alive, with the very space which it measures and which
measures it, within the walls of my brain. Homer becomes my con-
temporary, as my lamp upon my table before me is my contempo-
rary, since Homer had his share in the elaboration of the image under
which my lamp appears to me. Since the idea of duration enters the
idea of space as a constituent element, we may easily imagine an
expanded cineplastic art which shall be no more than an architec-
ture of the idea, and from which the cinemimic will, as I have said,
disappear, because only a great artist will be able to build edifices
that are made and broken down and remade ceaselessly by imper-
ceptible passages of tone and modeling that are in themselves archi-
tecture at every momentwithout our being able to seize the thou-
sandth part of a second in which the transition takes place.
I remember witnessing something analogous to this in nature it-
self. At Naples, in 1906, I saw the great eruption of Vesuvius. The
plume of smoke, two thousand meters high, that rose above the
mouth of the volcano was spherical, outlined against the sky and
sharply separated from it. Inside this cloud, enormous masses of
ashes assumed form and became formless unceasingly, all sharing in
the modeling of the great sphere and producing an undulation on
its surface, moving and varying, but sustained, as if by an attraction
at the center, in the general mass, the form and dimensions of which
nothing appeared to alter. In a flash it seemed to me as I looked
upon the phenomenon that I had grasped the law of the birth of
planets, held by gravitation around the solar nucleus. It seemed to
me that I was looking at a symbolic form of that grandiose art of
which in the cinema we now perceive the germ, the development
of which the future doubtless holds in store for us, namely a great
moving construction ceaselessly reborn of itself under our eyes by
virtue of its inner forces alone. Human, animal, vegetable and inert
forms, in all their immense variety, have their share in the building
of it, whether a multitude is employed on the work or whether only
one man is able to realize it in its totality.
THE ART OF CINEPLASTICS 13
Perhaps I may explain myself further on this last point. We all
know those animated drawings, very dry and thin and stiff, which
are sometimes projected on the screen and are, when compared with
the forms that I have been imagining, what the outlines in chalk
traced on a blackboard by a child are to the frescoes of Tintoretto
and the canvases of Rembrandt. Now let us suppose three or four
generations devoted to the problem of giving depth to these images,
not by surfaces and lines but by thickness and volumes; three or
four generations devoted to modeling, by values and half tones, a
series of successive movements which after a long training would
gradually enter into our habits, even into our unconscious actions,
till the artist was enabled to use them at will, for drama or idyll,
comedy or epic, in the light or in the shadow, in the forest, the
city or the desert. Suppose that an artist thus armed has the heart of
a Delacroix, the power of realization of a Rubens, the passion of a
Goya and the strength of a Michelangelo; he will throw on the
screen a cineplastic tragedy that has come out of his whole nature,
a sort of visual symphony as rich and as complex as the sonorous
symphonies of the great musicians and revealing, by its precipitation
in time, perspectives of infinitude and of the absolute as exalting by
reason of their mystery and more moving, because of their reality
for the senses, than the symphonies of the greatest of the musicians.
There is the distant future in which I believe, but of which the
full realization is beyond my power of imagining. While we await
the coming of the cineplast, who is as yet in the shadows of the
background, there are today some admiral cinemimics and at least
one cinemimic of genius, who are showing us the promise of that
collective spectacle which will take the place of the religious dance
that is dead, and of the philosophic tragedy that is dead, and of the
mystery play that is dead indeed of all the great dead things
around which the multitude once assembled in order to commune
together in the joy that had been brought to birth in the hearts of
the people by the mastery over pessimism achieved by the poets and
the dancers.
I am not a prophet, I cannot tell what will have become in a
hundred years of the admirable creations of the imagination of a
being, a cinemimic, who, alone among living things, has the privi-
lege of knowing that though his destiny is without hope, he is yet
the only being to live and think as if he had the power to take to him-
self eternity* Yet it seems to me that I already see what the art of
that cinemimic may presume to become if, instead of permitting
itself to be dragged by theatrical processes through a desolating
14 ELIE FAURE
sentimental fiction, it is able to concentrate itself on plastic proc-
esses, around a sensuous and passionate action in which we can all
recognize our own personal virtues.
In every land, mankind is attempting to escape from a form of
civilization which, through an excess of individualism, has become
impulsive and anarchic, and we are seeking to enter a form of plas-
tic civilization that is, undoubtedly, destined to substitute for ana-
lytic studies of states and crises of the soul, synthetic poems of masses
and great ensembles in action. I imagine that architecture will be
the principal expression of this civilization, an architecture whose
appearance may be difficult to define; perhaps it will be the indus-
trial construction of our means of travel ships, trains, automobiles
and airplanes for which ports, docks, pontoons and giant cupolas
will be the places of rest and relay. Cineplastics will doubtless be
the spiritual ornament sought for in this period the play that this
new society will find most useful in developing in the crowd the
sense of confidence, of harmony, of cohesion.
Style
and Medium
in the
Motion Pictures
by Eriuin Panofsky
The following essay is one of
the most important statements yet
made on film aesthetics. Precisely
and compactly written, it covers
an enormous range of ideas and
observations. In a phrase here, a
suggestion there, Erwin Panofsky
opens up a world of insight into
the complex nature of the movie
medium and its context in the his-
tory of art. What makes his ap-
proach so vital are the constant
comparative references to artistic
production of all kinds in epochs
and civilizations gone by. The re-
sult is a remarkably clear and accu-
rate estimate of some of the
excellences and shortcomings in
movies, past and present. First pub-
lished in 1934, it grew out of a talk
made before a Princeton audience
in order to enlist its interest in the
film Library of the Museum of
Modern Art, 'which was then being
started and which, Mr. Panofsky
writes, was considered "a rather
queer project by most people at
that time" Although the essay was
revised twelve years later for Cri-
tique magazine (Critique, Vol. i,
No. 3, January February 1941)
there was no change in the author's
basic tenets, nor does he see any
reason to change them today.
TILM ART is the only art the development of which men now living
have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is
all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to
precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery
and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical in-
vention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a
new art.
From this we understand two fundamental facts. First, that the
primordial basis of the enjoyment of moving pictures was not an
objective interest in a specific subject matter, much less an aesthetic
interest in the formal presentation of subject matter, but the sheer
1 6 ERWIN PANOFSKY
delight in the fact that things seemed to move, no matter what things
they were. Second, that films first exhibited in "kinetoscopes," viz.,
cinematographic peep shows, but projectable to a screen since as early
as 1894 are, originally, a product of genuine folk art (whereas, as
a rule, folk art derives from what is known as "higher art"). At the
very beginning of things we find the simple recording of movements:
galloping horses, railroad trains, fire engines, sporting events, street
scenes. And when it had come to the making of narrative films these
were produced by photographers who were anything but "pro-
ducers" or "directors," performed by people who were anything
but actors, and enjoyed by people who would have been much of-
fended had anyone called them "art lovers."
The casts of these archaic films were usually collected in a "cafe"
where unemployed supers or ordinary citizens possessed of a suitable
exterior were wont to assemble at a given hour. An enterprising
photographer would walk in, hire four or five convenient characters
and make the picture while carefully instructing them what to do:
"Now, you pretend to hit this lady over the head"; and (to the
lady) : "And you pretend to fall down in a heap." Productions like
these were shown, together with those purely factual recordings of
"movement for movement's sake," in a few small and dingy cinemas
mostly frequented by the "lower classes" and a sprinkling of young-
sters in quest of adventure (about 1905, 1 happen to remember, there
was only one obscure and faintly disreputable kino in the whole
city of Berlin, bearing, for some unfathomable reason, the English
name of "The Meeting Room"). Small wonder that the "better
classes," when they slowly began to venture into these early picture
theaters, did so, not by way of seeking normal and possibly serious
entertainment, but with that characteristic sensation of self-conscious
condescension with which we may plunge, in gay company, into
the folkloristic depths of Coney Island or a European kermis; even
a few years ago it was the regulation attitude of the socially or
intellectually prominent that one could confess to enjoying such
austerely educational films as The Sex Life of the Starfish or films
with "beautiful scenery," but never to a serious liking for narratives.
Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only "art"
not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well
but also, besides architecture, cartooning and "commercial design,"
the only visual art entirely alive. The "movies" have re-established
that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption
which, for reasons too complex to be considered here, is sorely at-
tenuated, if not entirely interrupted, in many other fields of artistic
endeavor. Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold,
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES IJ
more than my other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language,
the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public
comprising more than 60 per cent of the population of the earth.
If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors
were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of
the general public would become aware of the fact and a still
smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to
happen with the movies the social consequences would be cata-
strophic.
In the beginning, then, there were the straight recordings of
movement no matter what moved, viz., the prehistoric ancestors of
our "documentaries"; and, soon after, the early narratives, viz., the
prehistoric ancestors of our "feature films." The craving for a
narrative element could be satisfied only by borrowing from older
arts, and one should expect that the natural thing would have been
to borrow from the theater, a theater play being apparently the
genus proximum to a narrative film in that it consists of a narrative
enacted by persons that move. But in reality the imitation of stage
performances was a comparatively late and thoroughly frustrated
development What happened at the start was a very different thing.
Instead of imitating a theatrical performance already endowed
with a certain amount of motion, the earliest films added movement
to works of art originally stationary, so that the dazzling technical
invention migfet-aefeie^e a triumph of its own without intruding
upon the sphere of higher culture. The living language, which is
always right, has endorsed this sensible choice when it still speaks of
a "moving picture" or, simply, a "picture," instead of accepting the
pretentious and fundamentally erroneous "screen play."
The stationary works enlivened in the earliest movies were indeed
pictures: bad nineteenth-century paintings and postcards (or wax-
works a la Madame Tussaud's), supplemented by the comic strips a
most important root of cinematic art and the subject matter of pop-
ular songs, pulp magazines and dime novels; and the films descend-
ing from this ancestry appealed directly and very intensely to a folk
art mentality. They gratified-often simultaneously first, a primitive
sense of justice and decorum when virtue and industry were rewarded
while vice and laziness were punished; second, plain sentimentality
when "the thin trickle of a fictive love interest" took its course
"through somewhat serpentine channels," or when Father, dear
Father returned from the saloon to find his child dying of diph-
theria; third, a primordial instinct for bloodshed and cruelty when
Andreas Hofer faced the firing squad, or when (in a film of 1893-
1 8 ERWIN PANOFSKY
94) the head of Mary Queen of Scots actually came off; fourth, a
taste for mild pornography (I remember with great pleasure a French
film of ca* 1900 wherein a seemingly but not really well-rounded lady
as well as a seemingly but not really slender one were shown chang-
ing to bathing suitsan honest, straightforward porcheria much less
objectionable than the now extinct Betty Boop films and, I am sorry
to say, some of the more recent Walt Disney productions); and,
finally, that crude sense of humor, graphically described as "slap-
stick," which feeds upon the sadistic and the pornographic instinct,
either singly or in combination.
Not until as late as ca. 1905 was a film adaptation of Faust ventured
upon (cast still "unknown," characteristically enough), and not until
1911 did Sarah Bernhardt lend her prestige to an unbelievably funny
film tragedy, Queen Elizabeth of England. These films represent the
first conscious attempt at transplanting the movies from the folk
art level to that of "real art"; but they also bear witness to the fact
that this commendable goal could not be reached in so simple a
manner. It was soon realized that the imitation of a theater perform-
ance with a set stage, fixed entries and exits, and distinctly literary
ambitions is the one thing the film must avoid.
The legitimate paths of evolution were opened, not by running
away from the folk art character of the primitive film but by devel-
oping it within the limits of its own possibilities. Those primordial
archetypes of film productions on the folk art level success or
retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor-
could blossom forth into genuine history, tragedy and romance,
crime and adventure, and comedy, as soon as it was realized that
they could be transfigured not by an artificial injection of literary
values but by the exploitation of the unique and specific possibilities
of the new medium. Significantly, the beginnings of this legitimate
development antedate the attempts at endowing the film with higher
values of a foreign order (the crucial period being the years from
1902 to ca. 1905)5 and the decisive steps were taken by people who
were laymen or outsiders from the viewpoint of the serious stage.
These unique and specific possibilities can be defined as dynami-
zation of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time. This state-
ment is self-evident to the point of triviality but it belongs to that
kind of truths which, just because of their triviality, are easily for-
gotten or neglected.
In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the
stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle,
is unalterably fixed. The spectator cannot leave his seat, and the
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 19
setting of the stage cannot change, during one act (except for such
incidentals as rising moons or gathering clouds and such illegitimate
reborrowings from the film as turning wings or gliding backdrops).
But, in return for this restriction, the theater has the advantage that
time, the medium of emotion and thought conveyable by speech,
is free and independent of anything that may happen in visible
space. Hamlet may deliver his famous monologue lying on a couch
in the middle distance, doing nothing and only dimly discernible to
the spectator and listener, and yet by his mere words enthrall him
with a feeling of intensest emotional action.
With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator
occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an
aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his
eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently
shifts in distance and direction. And as movable as the spectator is,
as movable is, for the same reason, the space presented to him. Not
only bodies move in space, but space itself does, approaching, re-
ceding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it appears through
the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and through
the cutting and editing of the various shots-not to mention such
special effects as visions, transformations, disappearances, slow-
motion and fast-motion shots, reversals and trick films. This opens
up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.
Quite apart from such photographic tricks as the participation of
disembodied spirits in the action of the Topper series, or the more
effective wonders wrought by Roland Young in The Man Who
Could Work Miracles, there is, on the purely factual level, an un-
told wealth of themes as inaccessible to the "legitimate" stage as a
fog or a snowstorm is to the sculptor; all sorts of violent elemental
phenomena and, conversely, events too microscopic to be visible
under normal conditions (such as the life-saving injection with the
serum flown in at the very last moment, or the fatal bite of the
yellow-fever mosquito); full-scale battle scenes; all kinds of opera-
tions, not only in the surgical sense but also in the sense of any
actual construction, destruction or experimentation, as in Louis Pas-
teur or Madame Curie; a really grand party, moving through many
rooms of a mansion or a palace. Features like these, even the mere
shifting of the scene from one place to another by means of a car
perilously negotiating heavy traffic or a motorboat steered through
a nocturnal harbor, will not only always retain their primitive cine-
matic appeal but also remain enormously effective as a means of
stirring the emotions and creating suspense. In addition, the movies
have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psycholog-
20 ERWIN PANOFSKY
ical experiences by directly projecting their content to the screen,
substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the conscious-
ness of the character (as when the imaginings and hallucinations of
the drunkard in the otherwise overrated Lost Weekend appear as
stark realities instead of being described by mere words). But any
attempt to convey thought and feelings exclusively, or even pri-
marily, by speech leaves us with a feeling of embarrassment, bore-
dom, or both.
What I mean by thoughts and feelings "conveyed exclusively, or
even primarily, by speech" is simply this: Contrary to naive expec-
tation, the invention of the sound track in 1928 has been unable to
change the basic fact that a moving picture, even when it has
learned to talk, remains a picture that moves and does not convert
itself into a piece of writing that is enacted. Its substance remains a
series of visual sequences held together by an uninterrupted flow of
movement in space (except, of course, for such checks and pauses
as have the same compositional value as a rest in music), and not a
sustained study in human character and destiny transmitted by ef-
fective, let alone "beautiful," diction. I cannot remember a more
misleading statement about the movies than Mr. Eric Russell Bent-
ley's in the spring number of the Kenyan Review, 1945: "The po-
tentialities of the talking screen differ from those of the silent
screen in adding the dimension of dialogue which could be
poetry." I would suggest: "The potentialities of the talking screen
differ from those of the silent screen in integrating visible move-
ment with dialogue which, therefore, had better not be poetry."
All of us, if we are old enough to remember the period prior to
1928, recall the old-time pianist who, with his eyes glued on the
screen, would accompany the events with music adapted to their
mood and rhythm; and we also recall the weird and spectral feeling
overtaking us when this pianist left his post for a few minutes and
the film was allowed to run by itself, the darkness haunted by the
monotonous rattle of the machinery. Even the silent film, then, was
never mute. The visible spectacle always required, and received, an
audible accompaniment which, from the very beginning, distin-
guished the film from simple pantomime and rather classed it mu-
tatis mutandis with the ballet. The advent of the talkie meant not
so much an "addition" as a transformation: the transformation of
musical sound into articulate speech and, therefore, of quasi panto-
mime into an entirely new species of spectacle which differs from
the ballet, and agrees with the stage play, in that its acoustic com-
ponent consists of intelligible words, but differs from the stage
play and agrees with the ballet in that this acoustic component is
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 21
not detachable from the visual. In a film, that which we hear re-
mains, for good or worse, inextricably fused with that which we
see; the sound, articulate or not, cannot express any more than is
expressed, at the same time, by visible movement; and in a good film
it does not even attempt to do so. To put it briefly, the play or, as
it is very properly called, the "script" of a moving picture is sub-
ject to what might be termed the principle of coexpressibilhy .
Empirical proof of this principle is furnished by the fact that,
wherever the dialogical or monological element gains temporary
prominence, there appears, with the inevitability of a natural law,
the "close-up." What does the close-up achieve? In showing us, in
magnification, either the face of the speaker or the face of the listeners
or both in alternation, the camera transforms the human physiognomy
into a huge field of action where given the qualification of the per-
formersevery subtle movement of the features, almost imperceptible
from a natural distance, becomes an expressive event in visible space
and thereby completely integrates itself with the expressive content
of the spoken word; whereas, on the stage, the spoken word makes a
stronger rather than a weaker impression if we are not permitted to
count the hairs in Romeo's mustache.
This does not mean that the scenario is a negligible factor in the
making of a moving picture. It only means that its artistic intention
differs in kind from that of a stage play, and much more from that
of a novel or a piece of poetry. As the success of a Gothic jamb figure
depends not only upon its quality as a piece of sculpture but also, or
even more so, upon its integrability with the architecture of the por-
tal, so does the success of a movie script not unlike that of an opera
libretto depend, not only upon its quality as a piece of literature but
also, or even more so, upon its integrability with the events on the
screen.
As a result another empirical proof of the coexpressibility princi-
plegood movie scripts are unlikely to make good reading and have
seldom been published in book form; whereas, conversely, good stage
plays have to be severely altered, cut, and, on the other hand, enriched
by interpolations to make good movie scripts. In Shaw's Pygmalion,
for instance, the actual process of Eliza's phonetic education and,
still more important, her final triumph at the grand party, are wisely
omitted; we seeor, rather, hearsome samples of her gradual linguis-
tic improvement and finally encounter her, upon her return from the
reception, victorious and splendidly arrayed but deeply hurt for want
of recognition and sympathy. In the film adaptation, precisely these
two scenes are not only supplied but also strongly emphasized; we
witness the fascinating activities in the laboratory with its array of
22 ERWIN PANOFSKY
spinning disks and mirrors, organ pipes and dancing flames, and we'
participate in the ambassadorial party, with many moments of im-
pending catastrophe and a little counterintrigue thrown in for sus-
pense. Unquestionably these two scenes, entirely absent from the
play, and indeed unachievable upon the stage, were the highlights of
the film; whereas the Shavian dialogue, however severely cut, turned
out to fall a little flat in certain moments. And wherever, as in so
many other films, a poetic emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary
conceit (even, I am grieved to say, some of the wisecracks of
Groucho Marx) entirely lose contact with visible movement, they
strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place. It is certainly
terrible when a soft-boiled he-man, after the suicide of his mistress,
casts a twelve-foot glance upon her photograph and says something
less-than-coexpressible to the effect that he will never forget her. But
when he recites, instead, a piece of poetry as sublimely more-than-
coexpressible as Romeo's monologue at the bier of Juliet, it is still
worse. Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the most
unfortunate major film ever produced; and Olivier's Henry V owes
its comparative success, apart from the all but providential adapta-
bility of this particular play, to so many tours de -force that it will,
God willing, remain an exception rather than set a pattern. It com-
bines "judicious pruning" with the interpolation of pageantry, non-
verbal comedy and melodrama; it uses a device perhaps best desig-
nated as "oblique close-up" (Mr. Olivier's beautiful face inwardly
listening to but not pronouncing the great soliloquy) ; and, most nota-
bly, it shifts between three levels of archaeological reality: a recon-
struction of Elizabethan London, a reconstruction of the events of
1415 as laid down in Shakespeare's play, and the reconstruction of a
performance of this play on Shakespeare's own stage. All this is per-
fectly legitimate; but, even so, the highest praise of the film will al-
ways come from those who, like the critic of the New Yorker, are
not quite in sympathy with either the movies au naturel or Shake-
speare au natureL
As the writings of Conan Doyle potentially contain all modern
mystery stories (except for the tough specimens of the Dashiell Ham-
mett school), so do the films produced between 1900 and 1910 pre-
establish the subject matter and methods of the moving picture as we
know it. This period produced the incunabula of the Western and the
crime film (Edwin S. Porter's amazing Great Train Robbery of 1903)
from which developed the modern gangster, adventure, and mystery
pictures (the latter, if well done, is still one of the most honest and
genuine forms of film entertainment, space being doubly charged
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 23
with time as the beholder asks himself not only "What is going to
happen?" but also "What has happened before?"). The same period
saw the emergence of the fantastically imaginative film (Melles)
which was to lead to the expressionist and surrealist experiments (The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Sang fun Poete, etc.), on the one hand, and
to the more superficial and spectacular fairy tales a la Arabian Nights,
on the other. Comedy, later to triumph in Charlie Chaplin, the still
insufficiently appreciated Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers and the
pre-Hollywood creations of Rene Clair, reached a respectable level
in Max Linder and others. In historical and melodramatic films the
foundations were laid for movie iconography and movie symbolism,
and in the early work of D. W. Griffith we find, not only remarkable
attempts at psychological analysis (Edgar Allan Poe) and social
criticism (A Comer in Wheat) but also such basic technical innova-
tions as the long shot, the flashback and the close-up. And modest
trick films and cartoons paved the way to Felix the Cat, Popeye the
Sailor, and Felix's prodigious offspring, Mickey Mouse.
Within their self-imposed limitations the earlier Disney films, and
certain sequences in the later ones, 1 represent, as it were, a chemically
pure distillation of cinematic possibilities. They retain the most im-
* 1 make this distinction because it was, in my opinion, a fall from grace when
bnow White introduced the human figure and when Fantasia attempted to pic-
turahze The World's Great Music. The very virtue of the animated cartoon
is to animate, that is to say endow lifeless things with life, or Hving things with
a different kind of life. It effects a metamorphosis, and such a metamorphosis
is wonderfully present in Disney's animals, plants, thunderclouds and railroad
trains. Whereas his dwarfs, glamourized princesses, hillbillies, baseball players,
rouged centaurs and amigos from South America are not transformations but
caricatures at best, and fakes or vulgarities at worst. Concerning music, how-
ever, it should ^be borne in mind that its cinematic use is no less predicated
upon the principle of coexpressibility than is the cinematic use of the spolcen
word. There is music permitting or even requiring the accompaniment of visible
action (such as dances, ballet music and any kind of operatic compositions)
and music of which the opposite is true; and this is, again, not a question of
quality (most of us rightly prefer a waltz by Johann Strauss to a symphony
by Sibelius) but one of intention. In "Fantasia the hippopotamus ballet was
wonderful, and the Pastoral Symphony and "Ave Maria" sequences were de-
plorable, not because the cartooning in the first case was infinitely better than
in the two others (cf. above), and certainly not because Beethoven and Schu-
bert are too sacred for picturalization, but simply because Ponchielli's "Dance
of the Hours" is coexpressible while the Pastoral Symphony and the "Ave
Maria" are not. In cases like these even the best imaginable music and the best
imaginable cartoon wiU impair rather than enhance each other's effectiveness.
Experimental proof of all this was furnished by Disney's recent Make Mme
Music where The World's Great Music was fortunately restricted to Proko-
fieff. Even among the other sequences the most successful ones were those in
which the human element was either absent or reduced to a minimum; Willie
the Whale, the Ballad of Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue-Bonnet, and, abov
all, the truly magnificent Goodman Quartet,
24 ERWIN PANOFSKY
portant folkloristic elementssadism, pornography, the humor en-
gendered by both, and moral justicealmost without dilution and
often fuse these elements into a variation on the primitive and inex-
haustible David-and-Goliath motif, the triumph of the seemingly
weak over the seemingly strong; and their fantastic independence of
the natural laws gives them the power to integrate space with time to
such perfection that the spatial and temporal experiences of sight and
hearing come to be almost interconvertible. A series of soap bubbles,
successively punctured, emits a series of sounds exactly corresponding
in pitch and volume to the size of the bubbles; the three uvulae of
Willie the Whale small, large and medium vibrate in consonance
with tenor, bass and baritone notes; and the very concept of stationary
existence is completely abolished. No object in creation, whether it
be a house, a piano, a tree or an alarm clock, lacks the faculties of or-
ganic, in fact anthropomorphic, movement, facial expression and
phonetic articulation. Incidentally, even in normal, "realistic" films
the inanimate object, provided that it is dynamizable, can play the
role of a leading character as do the ancient railroad engines in Buster
Keaton's General and Niagara Walls. How the earlier Russian films
exploited the possibility of heroizing all sorts of machinery lives in
everybody's memory; and it is perhaps more than an accident that the
two films which will go down in history as the great comical and the
great serious masterpiece of the silent period bear the names and im-
mortalize the personalities of two big ships: Keaton's Navigator
(1924) and Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925).
The evolution from the jerky beginnings to this grand climax offers
the fascinating spectacle of a new artistic medium gradually becoming
conscious of its legitimate, that is, exclusive, possibilities and limita-
tionsa spectacle not unlike the development of the mosaic, which
started out with transposing illusionistic genre pictures into a more
durable material and culminated in the hieratic supernaturalism of
Ravenna; or the development of line engraving, which started out as
a cheap and handy substitute for book illumination and culminated in
the purely "graphic" style of Diirer.
Just so the silent movies developed a definite style of their own,
adapted to the specific conditions of the medium. A hitherto un-
known language was forced upon a public not yet capable of reading
it, and the more proficient the public became the more refinement
could develop in the language. For a Saxon peasant of around 800 it
was not easy to understand the meaning of a picture showing a man
as he pours water over the head of another man, and even later many
people found it difficult to grasp the significance of two ladies stand-
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 25
ing behind the throne of an emperor. For the public of around 1910
it was no less difficult to understand the meaning of the speechless
action in a moving picture, and the producers employed means of
clarification similar to those we find in medieval art. One of these
were printed titles or letters, striking equivalents of the medieval
tituli and scrolls (at a still earlier date there even used to be explainers
who would say, viva voce, "Now he thinks his wife is dead but she
isn't" or "I don't wish to offend the ladies in the audience but I doubt
that any of them would have done that much for her child"). An-
other, less obtrusive method of explanation was the introduction of a
fixed iconography which from the outset informed the spectator
about the basic facts and characters, much as the two ladies behind
the emperor, when carrying a sword and a cross respectively, were
uniquely determined as Fortitude and Faith. There arose, identifiable
by standardized appearance, behavior and attributes, the well-re-
membered types of the Vamp and the Straight Girl (perhaps the
most convincing modern equivalents of the medieval personifications
of the Vices and Virtues), the Family Man, and the Villain, the
latter marked by a black mustache and walking stick. Nocturnal
scenes were printed on blue or green film. A checkered tablecloth
meant, once for all, a "poor but honest" milieu; a happy marriage,
soon to be endangered by the shadows from the past, was symbolized
by the young wife's pouring the breakfast coffee for her husband;
the first kiss was invariably announced by the lady's gently playing
with her partner's necktie and was invariably accompanied by her
kicking out with her left foot. The conduct of the characters was
predetermined accordingly. The poor but honest laborer who, after
leaving his little house with the checkered tablecloth, came upon an
abandoned baby could not but take it to his home and bring it up as
best he could; the Family Man could not but yield, however tem-
porarily, to the temptations of the Vamp. As a result these early melo-
dramas had a highly gratifying and soothing quality in that events
took shape, without the complications of individual psychology, ac-
cording to a pure Aristotelian logic so badly missed in real life.
Devices like these became gradually less necessary as the public
grew accustomed to interpret the action by itself and were virtually
abolished by the invention of the talking film. But even now there
survive quite legitimately, I think the remnants of a "fixed attitude
and attribute" principle and, more basic, a primitive or folkloristic
concept of plot construction. Even today we take it for granted that
the diphtheria of a baby tends to occur when the parents are out and,
having occurred, solves all their matrimonial problems. Even, today
we demand of a decent mystery film that the butler, though he may
26 ERWIN PANOFSKY
be anything from an agent of the British Secret Service to the real
father of the daughter of the house, must not turn out to be the mur-
derer. Even today we love to see Pasteur, Zola or Ehrlich- win out
against stupidity and wickedness, with their respective wives trusting
and trusting all the time. Even today we much prefer a happy finale
to a gloomy one and insist, at the very least, on the observance of the
Aristotelian rule that the story have a beginning, a middle and an
ending a rule the abrogation of which has done so much to estrange
the general public from the more elevated spheres of modern writing.
Primitive symbolism, too, survives in such amusing details as the last
sequence of Casablanca where the delightfully crooked and right-
minded prefet de police casts an empty bottle of Vichy water into
the wastepaper basket; and in such telling symbols of the supernatural
as Sir Cedric Hardwicke's Death in the guise of a "gentleman in a
dustcoat trying" (On Borrowed Time) or Claude Rains's Hermes
Psychopompos in the striped trousers of an airline manager (Here
Comes Mister Jordan) .
The most conspicuous advances were made in directing, lighting,
camera work, cutting and acting proper. But while in most of these
fields the evolution proceeded continuously though, of course, not
without detours, breakdowns and archaic relapses the development
of acting suffered a sudden interruption by the invention of the talk-
ing film; so that the style of acting in the silents can already be eval-
uated in retrospect, as a lost art not unlike the painting technique of
Jan van Eyck or, to take up our previous simile, the burin technique
of Durer.lt was soon realized that acting in a silent film neither
meant a pantomimic exaggeration of stage acting (as was generally
and erroneously assumed by professional stage actors who more and
more frequently condescended to perform in the movies), nor could
dispense with stylization altogether; a man photographed while
walking down a gangway in ordinary, everyday-life fashion looked
like anything but a man walking down a gangway when the result
appeared on the screen. If the picture was to look both natural and
meaningful the acting had to be done in a manner equally dirl erent
from the style of the stage and the reality of ordinary life; speech
had to be made dispensable by establishing an organic relation, be-
tween the acting and the technical procedure of cinephotography
much as in Diirer's prints color had been made dispensable by estab-
lishing an organic relation between the design and the technical pro-
cedure of line engraving.
This was precisely what the great actors of the silent period ac-
complished, and it is a significant fact that the best of them did not
STYLE AN0 MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 2J
come from the stage, whose crystallized tradition prevented Duse's
only film, Cenere, from being more than a priceless record of Duse.
They came instead from the circus or the variety, as was the case of
Chaplin, Keaton and Will Rogers; from nothing in particular, as was
the case of Theda Bara, of her greater European parallel, the
Danish actress Asta Nielsen, and of Garbo; or from everything
under the sun, as was the case of Douglas Fairbanks. The style
of these "old masters" was indeed comparable to the style of
line engraving in that it was, and had to be, exaggerated in comparison
with stage acting (just as the sharply incised and vigorously curved
tallies of the burin are exaggerated in comparison with pencil strokes
or brushwork), but richer, subtler and infinitely more precise. The
advent of the talkies, reducing if not abolishing this difference be-
tween screen acting and stage acting, thus confronted the actors and
actresses of the silent screen with a serious problem. Buster Keaton
yielded to temptation and fell. Chaplin first tried to stand his ground
and to remain an exquisite archaist but finally gave in, with only
moderate success (The Great Dictator). Only the glorious Harpo has
thus far successfully refused to utter a single articulate sound; and
only Greta Garbo succeeded, in a measure, in transforming her style
in principle. But even in her case one cannot help feeling that her first
talking picture, Anna Christie, where she could ensconce herself,
most of the time, in mute or monosyllabic sullenness, was better than
her later performances; and in the second, talking version of Anna
Karenina, the weakest moment is certainly when she delivers a big
Ibsenian speech to her husband, and the strongest when she silently
moves along the platform of the railroad station while her despair
takes shape in the consonance of her movement (and expression)
with the movement of the nocturnal space around her, filled with
the real noises of the trains and the imaginary sound of the "little
men with the iron hammers" that drives her, relentlessly and almost
without her realizing it, under the wheels.
Small wonder that there is sometimes felt a kind of nostalgia for
the silent period and that devices have been worked out to combine
the virtues of sound and speech with those of silent acting, such as
the "oblique close-up" already mentioned in connection with Henry
V; the dance behind glass doors in Sous les Toits de Paris; or, in the
Histoire d'un Tricheur, Sacha Guitry's recital of the events of his
youth while the events themselves are "silently" enacted on the
screen. However, this nostalgic feeling is no argument against the
talkies as such. Their evolution has shown that, in art, every gain
entails a certain loss on the other side of the ledger; but that the gain
remains a gain, provided that the basic nature of the medium is real-
2 8 ERWIN PANOFSKY
ized and respected. One can imagine that, when the cavemen of
Altamira began to paint their buffaloes in natural colors instead of
merely incising the contours, the more conservative cavemen fore-
told the end of paleolithic art. But paleolithic art went on, and so will
the movies. New technical inventions always tend to dwarf the values
already attained, especially in a medium that owes its very existence
to technical experimentation. The earliest talkies were infinitely in-
ferior to the then mature silents, and most of the present technicolor
films are still inferior to the now mature talkies in black and white.
But even if Aldous Huxley's nightmare should come true and the ex-
periences of taste, smell and touch should be added to those of sight
and hearing, even then we may say with the Apostle, as we have said
when first confronted with the sound track and the technicolor film,
"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed,
but not in despair."
From the law of time-charged space and space-bound time, there
follows the fact that the screenplay, in contrast to the theater play,
has no aesthetic existence independent of its performance, and that
its characters have no aesthetic existence outside the actors.
CThe playwright writes in the fond hope that his work will be an
imperishable jewel in the treasure house of civilization and will be
presented in hundreds of performances that are but transient varia-
tions on a "work" that is constant. The script-writer, on the other
hand, writes for one producer, one director and one cast. Their work
achieves the same degree of permanence as does his; and should the
same or a similar scenario ever be filmed by a different director and a
different cast there will result an altogether different "play."
Othello or Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the
playwright They can be played well or badly, and they can be "in-
terpreted" in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no
matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The
character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not
the entity "Othello" interpreted by Robeson or the entity "Nora" in-
terpreted by Duse; it is the entity "Greta Garbo" incarnate in a figure
called Anna Christie or the entity "Robert Montgomery" incarnate
in a murderer who, for all we know or care to know, may forever re-
main anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories. Even
when the names of the characters happen to be Henry VIII or Anna
Karenina, the king who ruled England from 1509 to 1547 and the
woman created by Tolstoy, they do not exist outside the being of
Garbo and Laughton. They are but empty and incorporeal outlines
like the shadows in Homer's Hades, assuming the character of reality
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 29
only when filled with the lifeblood of an actor. Conversely, if a
movie role is badly played there remains literally nothing of it, no
matter how interesting the character's psychology or how elaborate
the words.
What applies to the actor applies, mutatis mutandis, to most of the
other artists, or artisans, who contribute to the making of a film: the
director, the sound man, the enormously important cameraman, even
the make-up man. A stage production is rehearsed until everything is
ready, and then it is repeatedly performed in three consecutive hours.
At each performance everybody has to be on hand and does his
work; and afterward he goes home and to bed. The work of the stage
actor may thus be likened to that of a musician, and that of the stage
director to that of a conductor. Like these, they have a certain reper-
toire which they have studied and present in a number of complete
but transitory performances, be it Hamlet today and Ghosts tomor-
row, or Life 'with Father per saecula saeculorum. The activities of the
film actor and the film director, however, are comparable, respec-
tively, to those of the plastic artist and the architect, rather than to
those of the musician and the conductor. Stage work is continuous
but transitory; film work is discontinuous but permanent. Individual
sequences are done piecemeal and out of order according to the most
efficient use of sets and personnel. Each bit is done over and over
again until it stands; and when the whole has been cut and composed
everyone is through with it forever. Needless to say that this very-
procedure cannot but emphasize the curious consubstantiality that
exists between the person of the movie actor and his role. Coming
into existence piece by piece, regardless of the natural sequence of
events, the "character" can grow into a unified whole only if the
actor manages to be, not merely to play, Henry VIII or Anna Karen-
ina throughout the entire wearisome period of shooting. I have it on
the best of authorities that Laughton was really difficult to live with
in the particular six or eight weeks during which he was doing or
rather beingCaptain Bligh.
It might be said that a film, called into being by a co-operative
effort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence,
is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral; the role of
the producer corresponding, more or less, to that of the bishop or
archbishop; that of the director to that of the architect in chief; that
of the scenario writers to that of the scholastic advisers establishing
the iconographical program; and that of the actors, camermen, cutters,
sound men, make-up men and the divers technicians to that of those
whose work provided the physical entity of the finished product,
from the sculptors, glass painters, bronze casters, carpenters and
30 ERWIN PANOFSKY
skilled masons down to the quarry men and woodsmen. And if you
speak to any one of these collaborators he will tell you, with perfect
bona fides, that his is really the most important jobwhich is quite
true to the extent that it is indispensable.
This comparison may seem sacrilegious, not only because there
are, proportionally, fewer good films than there are good cathedrals,
but also because the movies are commercial. However, if commercial
art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify
the creative urge of its maker but primarily intended to meet the re-
quirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that non-
commercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly re-
cent and not always felicitous exception at that. While it is true that
commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is
equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up
as an old maid. Noncommercial art has given us Seurat's "Grande
Jatte" and Shakespeare's sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the
point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given
us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to
the point of loathsomeness, but also Diirer's prints and Shakespeare's
plays. For, we must not forget that Diirer's prints were partly made
on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market;
and that Shakespeare's plays in contrast to the earlier masques and
intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs
and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who de-
scribed them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp
their intended significancewere meant to appeal, and did appeal, not
only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay
a shilling for admission.
It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial
art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much
more effective for better or for worse. The commercial producer
can. both educate and pervert the general public, and can allow the
general public or rather his idea of the general publicboth to edu-
cate and to pervert himself. As is demonstrated by a number of ex-
cellent films that proved to be great box office successes, the public
does not refuse to accept good products if it gets them. That it does
not get them very often is caused not so much by commercialism as
such as by too little discernment and, paradoxical though it may seem,
too much timidity in its application. Hollywood believes that it must
produce "what the public wants" while the public would take what-
ever Hollywood produces. If Hollywood were to decide for itself
what it wants it would get away with it even if it should decide to
"depart from evil and do good." For, to revert to whence we started,
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES 3 I
in modern life the movies are what most other forms of art have
ceased to be, not an adornment but a necessity.
That this should be so is understandable, not only from a sociologi-
cal but also from an art-historical point of view. The processes of all
the earlier representational arts conform, in a higher or lesser degree,
to an idealistic conception of the world. These arts operate from top
to bottom, so to speak, and not from bottom to top; they start with
an idea to be projected into shapeless matter and not with the objects
that constitute the physical world. The painter works on a blank wall
or canvas which he organizes into a likeness of things and persons ac-
cording to his idea (however much this idea may have been nourished
by reality) ; he does not work with the things and persons themselves
even if he works "from the model." The same is true of the sculptor
with his shapeless mass of clay or his untooled block of stone or wood;
of the writer with his sheet of paper or his dictaphone; and even of
the stage designer with his empty and sorely limited section of space.
It is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that material-
istic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like It or not,
pervades contemporary civilization. Excepting the very special case
of the animated cartoon, the movies organize material things and
persons, not a neutral medium, into a composition that receives its
style, and may even become fantastic or pretervoluntarily symbolic, 2
not so much by an interpretation in the artist's mind as by the actual
manipulation of physical objects and recording machinery. The
medium of the movies is physical reality as such: the physical reality
of eighteenth-century Versailles no matter whether it be the original
or a Hollywood facsimile indistinguishable therefrom for all aesthetic
intents and purposes or of a suburban home in Westchester; the
physical reality of the Rue de Lappe in Paris or of the Gobi Desert,
of Paul Ehrlich's apartment in Frankfurt or of the streets of New
York in the rain; the physical reality of engines and animals, of
Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney. All these objects and per-
sons must be organized into a work of art. They can be arranged in all
sorts of ways ("arrangement" comprising, of course, such things as
make-up, lighting and camera work); but there is no running away
2 1 cannot help feeling that the final sequence of the new Marx Brothers film
Night in Casablanca where Harpo unaccountably usurps the pilot's seat of a
big airplane, causes incalculable havoc by flicking one tiny little control after
another, and waxes the more insane with joy the greater the disproportion
between the smallness of his effort and the magnitude of the disaster is a
magnificent and terrifying symbol of man's behavior in the atomic age. No
doubt the Marx Brothers would vigorously reject this interpretation-, but so
would Diirer have done had anyone told him that his "Apocalypse" fore-
shadowed the cataclysm of the Reformation*
ERWIN PANOFSKY
from them. From this point of view it becomes evident that an attempt
at subjecting the world to artistic prestylization, as in the expres-
sionist settings of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), could be no
more than an exciting experiment that could exert but little influence
upon the general course of events. To prestylize reality prior to tack-
ling it amounts to dodging the problem. The problem is to manipulate
and shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style.
This is a proposition no less legitimate and no less difficult than any
proposition in the older arts?
Film Reality:
The Cinema
and
the Theater
by Allardyce Nicoll
This selection is taken -from a book
called Film and Theatre (Thomas
Y. Crowellj New York, 1936), in
which Mr. Nicoll investigates the
differences in technique between
the theater and the film. The au-
thor's main thesis is that what gen-
erally makes for dramatic credibil-
ityand effectiveness on the stage
falls apart in the film.
W HEN WE WITNESS a film, do we anticipate something we should
not expect from a stage perf ormance, and, if so, what effect has this
upon our appreciation of film acting? At first we might be tempted
to dismiss such a query or to answer it easily and glibly. There is no
essential difference, we might say, save insofar as we expect greater
variety and movement on the screen than we do on the stage; and for
acting, that, we might reply, is obviously the same as stage acting
although perhaps more stabilized in type form. Do we not see Charles
Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, Elisabeth Bergner
now in the theater, now in the cinema? To consider further, we might
say, were simply to indulge in useless and uncalled-for speculation.
33
34 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
Nevertheless, the question does demand just a trifle more of investi-
gation. Some few years ago a British producing company made a film
of Bernard Shaw's Anns and the Mem. This film, after a few exciting
shots depicting the dark streets of a Balkan town, the frenzied flight
of the miserable fugitives and the clambering of Bluntschli onto
Rama's window terrace, settled down to provide what was funda-
mentally a screen picture of the written drama. The dialogue was
shortened, no doubt, but the shots proceeded more or less along the
dramatic lines established by Shaw and nothing was introduced which
he had not originally conceived in preparing his material for the stage.
The result was that no more dismal film has ever been shown to the
public. On the stage Arms and the Man is witty, provocative, inci-
sively stimulating; its characters have a breath of genuine theatrical
life; it moves, it breathes, it has vital energy. In the screen version all
that life has fled, and, strangest thing of all, those characters Blunt-
schli, Raina, Sergius who are so exciting on the boards looked to the
audience like a set of wooden dummies, hopelessly patterned. Per-
formed by a third-rate amateur cast their lifeblood does not so ebb
from them, yet here, interpreted by a group of distinguished profes-
sionals, they wilted and died-died, too, in such forms that we could
never have credited them with ever having had a spark of reality.
Was there any basic reason for this failure?
THE CAMERAS TRUTH
^ The basic reason seems to be simply this-that practically all effec-
tively drawn stage characters are types and that in the cinema we
demand individualization, or else that we recognize stage figures as
types and impute greater power of independent life to the figures
we see on the screen. This judgment, running so absolutely counter to
what would have been our first answer to the original question
posited, may seem grossly distorted, but perhaps some further con-
sideration will demonstrate its plausibility. When we go to the theater,
we expect theater and nothing else. We know that the building we
enter is a playhouse; that behind the lowered curtain actors are making
ready, dressing themselves in strange garments and transforming their
natural features; that the figures we later see on the boards are never
living persons of king and bishop and clown, but merely men pre-
tending for a brief space of time to be like these figures. Dramatic
illusion is never (or so rarely as to be negligible) the illusion of reality;
it is always imaginative illusion, the illusion of a period of make-be-
lieve. All the time we watch Hamlet's throes of agony we know that
the character Hamlet is being impersonated by a man who
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE TttEATJjfc 35
presently will walk out of the stage door in ordinary clothes
and an autograph-signing smile on his face. True, volumes have been
written on famous dramatic characters-Greek, Elizabethan English
and modern Norwegian-and these volumes might well seem to give
the lie to such assumptions. Have not Shakespeare's characters seemed
so real to a few observers that we have on our shelves books specifi-
cally concerned with the girlhood of his heroines-a girlhood the
dramas themselves denied us?
These studies, however, should not distract us from the essential
truth that the greatest playwrights have always aimed at presenting
human personality in bold theatric terms. Hamlet seizes on us, not
because he is an individual, not because in him Shakespeare has de-
lineated a particular prince of Denmark, but because in Hamlet there
are bits of all men; he is a composite character whose lineaments are
determined by dramatic necessity, and through that he Jives. Funda-
mentally, the truly vital theater deals in stock figures. Like a child's
box of bricks, the stage's material is limited; it is the possibilities in
arrangement that are well-nigh inexhaustible. Audiences thrill to see
new situations born of fresh sociological conditions, but the figures
set before them in significant plays are conventionally fixed and
familiar. Of Romeos there are many, and of Othellos legion. Charac-
ter on the stage is restricted and stereotyped and the persons who
play upon the boards are governed not by the strangely perplexing
processes of life but by the established terms of stage practice. Blunt-
schli represents half a hundred similar rationalists; the idealism of
thousands is incorporated in Sergius; and Raina is an eternal stage
type of the perplexing female. The theater is popukted, not by real
individuals whose boyhood or girlhood may legitimately be traced,
but by heroes and villains sprung full-bodied from Jove's brain, by
clowns and pantaloons whose youth is unknown and whose future
matters not after the curtain's fall.
In the cinema we demand something different. Probably we carry
into the picture house prejudices deeply ingrained in our beings. The
statement that "the camera cannot lie" has been disproved by millions
of flattering portraits and by dozens of spiritualistic pictures which
purport to depict fairies but which mostly turn out to be faintly dis-
guised pictures of ballet dancers or replicas of figures in advertise-
ments of night lights. Yet in our heart of hearts we credit the truth
of that statement. A picture, a piece of sculpture, a stage play these
we know were created by man; we have watched the scenery being
carried in backstage and we know we shall see the actors, turned into
themselves again, bowing at the conclusion of the performance. In
every way the "falsity" of a theatrical production is borne in upon us,
3 6 ALLARDYC& NICOLL
so that we are prepared to demand nothing save a theatrical truth.
For the films, however, our orientation is vastly different. Several
periodicals, it is true, have endeavored to let us into the secrets of the
moving-picture industry and a few favored spectators have been per-
mitted to make the rounds of the studios; but for ninety per cent
of the audience the actual methods employed in the preparation of a
film remain far off and dimly realized. New York, we are told,
struts when it constructs a Rockefeller Center. A small town chirps
when it finishes a block of fine cottages. The government gets into the
newspapers for projects like Boulder Dam. It takes Hollywood approxi-
mately three days to build Rome and a morning to effect its fall, but
there is very little hurrah about it. The details are guarded like Victorian
virtue.
There is sound reticence on the part of a community that is usually
articulate about its successes. Hollywood is in the business of building
illusion, not sets. . . . The public likes to feel that the stork brought
The Birth of a Nation. It likes to feel that a cameraman hung in the
clouds mid-Pacific the day that B anymore fought the whale.
That audience, accordingly, carries its prejudices with it intact.
"The camera cannot lie" and therefore, even when we are looking at
Marlene Dietrich or Robert Montgomery, we unconsciously lose
sight of fictional surroundings and interpret their impersonations as
"real" things. Rudolph Valentino became a man who had had in-
numerable sheikish adventures, and into each part she took the per-
sonality of Greta Garbo was incorporated. The most impossible
actions may be shown us in a film, yet Laurel and Hardy are, at their
best, seen as individuals experiencing many strange adventures, not
as virtuoso comedians in a vaudeville act.
How true this is was demonstrated by a film, Once in a Blue Moon,
which has been shown in only a few theaters. The general tone of
Once in a Blue Moon was burlesque. In it was a take-off of certain
Russian films, incidental jibes at a few popular American examples,
and occasional skits directed at prominent players; Jimmy Savo took
the role of Gabbo the Great while one of the actresses made up to
look like Katharine Hepburn. The result was dismal. In Charlie Chap-
lin's free fantasy there is life and interest; throughout the course of
Once in a Blue Moon vitality was entirely lacking. Nor was the rea-
son far to seek. We cannot appreciate burlesque in the cinema be-
cause of the fact that in serious films actor and role are indistinguish-
able; on the stage we appreciate it since there, in serious plays, we can
never escape from separating the fictional character and its creator.
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 37
Stage burlesque is directed at an artistic method, generally the
method employed by an individual player in the treatment of his
parts. To caricature Irving was easy; hardly would a cinematic
travesty of Arliss succeed. The presentation of this single film proved
clearly the difference in approach on the part of cinema and theater
public respectively. These, so generally considered identical, are seen
to be controlled by quite distinct psychological elements.
Charlie Chaplin's free fantasy has been referred to above. This, as-
sociated with, say, the methods of Rene Glair, might well serve to
demonstrate the true resources of the film; comparison with the erring
tendencies of Once in a Blue Moon brings out clearly the genuine
frontiers of the cinematic sphere. In The Ghost Goes West there
was much of satire, but this satire was directed at life and not at art
and, moreover, was kept well within "realistic" terms. Everything in-
troduced there was possible in the sense that, although we might ra-
tionally decide that these events could not actually have taken place,
we recognized that, granted the conditions which might make them
achievable, they would have assumed just such forms as were cast on
the screen. The ghost was thus a "realistic" one, shown now in the
guise of a figure solid and opaque and now in that of a transparent
wraith, capable of defying the laws of physics. In a precisely similar
way is the fantasy of a Chaplin film bound up with reality. We know
that the things which Charlie does and the situations in which he ap-
pears are .impossible, but again, given the conditions which would
make them possible, these are the shapes we know they would assume.
Neither Rene Glair nor Charlie Chaplin steps into the field occupied
by the artistic burlesque; neither is "theatrical." The former works
in an independent world conceived out of the terms of the actual, and
the latter, like George Arliss in a different sphere, stands forth as an
individual experiencing a myriad of strange and fantastic adventures.
The individualizing process in film appreciation manifestly de-
mands that other standards than those of the stage be applied to the
screenplay. In the theater we are commonly presented with characters
relatively simple in their psychological make-up. A sympathetically
conceived hero or heroine is devoted in his or her love affairs to one
object; at the most some Romeo will abandon a visionary Rosaline for
a flesh-and-blood Juliet. For the cinema, on the other hand, greater
complexity may be permitted without loss of sympathy. The heroine
in So Red the Rose is first shown coquetting with her cousin, sugges-
tion is provided that she has not been averse to the attentions of a
young family friend, she sets her cap at a visiting Texan and grieves
bitterly on receiving news of his death, and finally she discovers or re-
discovers the true love she bears to the cousin. AU this is done without
38 ALLARDYGE NICOLL
any hint that she is a mere flirt; her affections are such as might have
been those of an ordinary girl in real life and we easily accept the
filmic presentation in this light. On the stage the character could not
have been viewed in a similar way; there we should have demanded a
much simpler and less emotionally complicated pattern if our sym-
pathies were firmly to be held.
The strange paradox, then, results that, although the cinema intro-
duces improbabilities and things beyond nature at which any theatri-
cal director would blench and murmur soft nothings to the air, the
filmic material is treated by the audience with far greater respect (in
its relation to life) than the material of the stage. Our conceptions of
life in Chicago gangsterdom and in distant China are all colored by
films we have seen. What we have witnessed on the screen becomes
the "real" for us. In moments of sanity, maybe, we confess that of
course we do not believe this or that, but, under the spell again, we
credit the truth of these pictures even as, for all our professed supe-
riority, we credit the truth of newspaper paragraphs.
TYPE CASTING
This judgment gives argument for Pudovkin's views concerning
the human material to be used in a film but that argument essentially
differs from the method of support which he utilized. His views may
be briefly summarized thus: Types are more desirable in film work
because of the comparative restrictions there upon make-up; the di-
rector alone knows the complete script and therefore there is little
opportunity for an individual actor to build up a part intelligently
and by slow gradations; an immediate, vital and powerful impression,
too, is demanded on the actor's first entrance; since the essential basis
of cinematic art is montage of individual shots and not the histrionic
abilities of the players, logic demands the use of untrained human
material, images of which are wrought into a harmony by the di-
rector.
Several of the apparent fallacies in Pudovkin's reasoning have been
discussed above. There is, thus, no valid objection to the employment
of trained and gifted actors, provided that these actors are not per-
mitted to overrule other elements in the cinematic art and provided
the director fully understands their essential position. That casting
by type is deskable in the film seems, however, certain. Misled by
theatrical ways, we may complain that George Arliss is the same in
every screenplay he appears in; but that is exactly what the cinema
demands. On the stage we rejoice, or should rejoice, in a performer's
versatility; in the cinema unconsciously we want to feel that we are
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 39
witnessing a true reproduction of real events, and consequently we
are not so much interested in discerning a player's skill in diversity of
character building. Arliss and Rothschild and Disraeli and Wellington
are one. That the desire on the part of a producing company to make
use of a particular star may easily lead to the deliberate manuf acturing
of a character to fit that star is true; but, after all, such a process is by
no means unknown to the theater, now or in the past. Shakespeare and
Moliere both wrote to suit their actors, and Sheridan gave short senti-
mental scenes to Charles and Maria in The School for Scandal be-
cause, according to his own statement, "Smith can't make love-and
nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins."
To exemplify the truth of these observations no more is demanded
than a comparison of the stage and screen versions of The Petrified
Forest. As a theatrical production this play was effective, moving and
essentially harmonized with the conventions applying to its method
of expression; lifeless and uninteresting seemed the filming of funda-
mentally the same material The reasons for this were many. First was
the fact that the film attempted to defy the basic law which governs
the two forms; the theater rejoices in artistic limitation in space while
the film demands movement and change in location. We admire Sher-
wood's skill in confining the whole of his action to the Black Mesa
but we condemn the same confining process when we turn to see the
same events enacted on the screen. Secondly, since a film can rarely
bear to admit anything in the way of theatricality in its settings,
those obviously painted sets of desert and mountain confused and de-
tracted from our appreciation of the narrative. A third reason may
be sought for in the dialogue given to the characters. This dialogue,
following the lines provided for the stage play, showed itself as far
too rich and cumbersome for cinematic purposes; not only was there
too much of it, but that which sounded exactly right when delivered
on the boards of the theater (because essentially in tune with theatri-
cal conventions) seemed ridiculous, false and absurd when associated
with the screen pictures. Intimately bound up with this, there has to
be taken into account both the nature and the number of the dramatis
personae. Sherwood's stage characters were frankly drawn as types
an old pioneer, a killer, an unsuccessful litterateur, an ambitious girl,
a veteran, a businessman, a businessman's wife each one representa-
tive of a class or of an ideal Not for a moment did we believe that
these persons were real, living human beings; they were typical fig-
ures outlining forces in present-day society. This being so, we had no
difficulty in keeping them all boldly in our minds even when the
whole group of them filled tiie stage. When transferred to the screen,
however, an immediate feeling of dissatisfaction assailed us; these
40 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
persons who had possessed theatrical reality could have no reality in
the film; their vitality was fled; they seemed false, absurd, untrue.
Still further, their number became confusing. The group of repre-
sentative types which dominated the stage proved merely a jumbled
mass on the screen, for the screen, although it may make use of massed
effects of a kind which would be impossible in the theater, generally
finds its purposes best served by concentration on a very limited num-
ber of major figures. The impression of dissatisfaction thus received
was increased by the interpretation of these persons. Partly because
of the words given to them, all the characters save Duke Mantee
seeme'd to be actors and nothing else. There was exhibited a histrionic
skill which might win our admiration but which at the same time was
alien to the medium through which it came to us. A Leslie Howard
whose stage performance was right and just became an artificial fig-
ure when, before the camera, he had to deliver the same lines he had
so effectively spoken on the stage. From the lack of individualization
in the characters resulted a feeling of confusion and falsity; because
of the employment of conventions suited to one art and not to another
vitality, strength and emotional power were lost.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PENETRATION
The full implications of such individualization of film types must
be appreciated, together with the distinct approach made by a cinema
audience to the persons seen by them on the screen. Because of these
things, allied to its possession of several technical devices, the cinema
is given the opportunity of coming into closer accord with recent
tendencies in other arts than the stage. Unquestionably, that which
separates the literature of today from yesterday's literature is the for-
mer's power of penetrating, psychoanalytically, into human thought
and feeling. The discovery of the subconscious has opened up an en-
tirely fresh field of investigation into human behavior, so that whereas
a Walter Scott spread the action of a novel over many years and
painted merely the outsides of his characters, their easily appreciated
mental reactions and their most obvious passions, James Joyce has de-
voted an extraordinarily lengthy novel to twenty-four hours in the
life of one individual. By this means the art of narrative fiction has
been revolutionized and portraiture of individuals completely altered
in its approach.
Already it has been shown that normally the film does not find re-
strictions in the scope of its material advantageous; so that the typical
film approaches outwardly the extended breadth of a Scott novel. In
dealing with that material, however, it is given the opportunity of
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 4!
delving more deeply into the human consciousness. By its subjective
method it can display life from the point of view of its protagonists.
Madness on the stage, in spite of Ophelia's pathetic efforts, has always
appeared rather absurd, and Sheridan was perfectly within his rights
when he caricatured the convention in his Tilburina and her address
to all the finches of the grove. On the screen, however, madness may
be made arresting, terrifying, awful. The mania of the lunatic in the
German film M held the attention precisely because we were enabled
to look within his distracted brain. Seeing for moments the world
distorted in eccentric imaginings, we are moved as no objective pres-
entation of a stage Ophelia can move us.
Regarded in this way, the cinema, a form of expression born of our
own age, is seen to bear a distinct relationship to recent developments
within the sphere of general artistic endeavor. While making no pro-
fession to examine this subject, one of the most recent writers on This
Modern Poetry., Babette Deutsch, has expressed, obiter dicta, judg-
ments which illustrate clearly the arguments presented above.
The symbolists [she says] had telescoped images to convey the rapid
passage of sensations and emotions. The metaphysicians had played in a
like fashion with ideas. Both delighted in paradox. The cinema, and ulti-
mately the radio, made such telescopy congenial to the modern poet, as
the grotesqueness of his environment made paradox inevitable for him.
And again:
The cinema studio creates a looking-glass universe where, without
bottles labled "Drink me" or cakes labeled "Eat me" or keys to impossible
gardens, creatures are elongated or telescoped, movements accelerated or
slowed up, in a fashion suggesting that the world is made of India rubber
or collapsible tin. The ghost of the future glimmers through the immedi-
ate scene, the present dissolves into the past.
Akin to these marvels is the poetry of such a man as Horace Greg-
ory. In his No Retreat: New York, Cassandra, "the fluent images, the
sudden close-ups, the shifting angle of vision, suggest the technique of
the cinema." The method of the film is apparent in such lines as these:
Give Cerberus a nonemployment wage, the dog is hungry.
This head served in the war, Cassandra, it lost an eye;
That head spits fire, for it lost its tongue licking the paws
of lions caged in Wall Street and their claws
were merciless.
42 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
Follow, O follow him, loam-limbed Apollo, crumbling before
Tiffany's window: he must buy
himself earrings for he meets his love tonight,
(Blossoming Juliet
emptied her love into her true love's lap)
dies in his arms.
If the cinema has thus influenced the poets, we realize that inher-
ently it becomes a form of art through which may be expressed many
of the most characteristic tendencies in present-day creative endeavor.
That most of the films so far produced have not made use of the
peculiar methods inherent in the cinematic approach need not blind
us to the fact that here is an instrument capable of expressing through
combined visual and vocal means something of that analytical search-
ing of the spirit which has formed the pursuit of modern poets and
novelists. Not, of course, that in this analytic and realistic method are
to be enclosed the entire boundaries of the cinema. The film has the
power of giving an impression of actuality and it can thrill us by its
penetrating truth to life; but it may, if we desire, call into existence
the strangest of visionary worlds and make these too seem real. The
enchanted forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream will always on the
stage prove a thing of lath and canvas and paint; an enchanted forest
in the film might truly seem haunted by a thousand fears and super-
natural imaginings. This imaginary world, indeed, is one that our
public has cried for and demanded, and our only regret may be that
the producers, lacking vision, have compromised and in compromising
have descended to banalities. Taking their sets of characters, they
thrust these, willy-nilly, into scenes of ornate splendor, exercising
their inventiveness not to create the truly fanciful but to fashion the
exaggeratedly and hyperbolically absurd. Hotels more sumptuous
than the Waldorf-Astoria or the Ritz; liners outvying the pretentions
of the Normandie; speed that sets Malcolm Campbell to shame; melo-
dies inappropriately richthese have crowded in on us again and yet
again. Many spectators are becoming irritated and bored with scenes
of this sort, for mere exaggeration of life's luxuries is not creative
artistically.
That the cinema has ample opportunities in this direction has been
proved by Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dreamy which,
if unsatisfactory as a whole and if in many scenes tentative in its ap-
proach, demonstrated what may be done with imaginative forms on
the screen. Apart from the opportunity offered by Shakespeare's
theme for the presentation of the supernatural fairy world, two
things were specially to be noted in this film. The first was that cer-
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 43
tain passages ^which, spoken in our vast modern theaters with their
sharp separation of audience and actors, become mere pieces of rhet-
oric devoid of true meaning and significance were invested in the film
with an intimacy and directness they lacked on the stage. The power
of the cinema to draw us near to an action or to a speaker served here
an important function, and we could at will watch a group of players
from afar or approach to overhear the secrets of soliloquy. The sec-
ond feature of interest lay in the ease with which the cinema can
present visual symbols to accompany language. At first, we might be
prepared to condemn the film on this ground, declaring that the
imaginative appeal of Shakespeare's language would thereby be lost.
Again, however, second thoughts convince us that much is to be said
in its defense; reference once more must be made to a subject already
briefly discussed. Shakespeare's dialogue was written for an audience
not only sympathetic to his particular way of thought and feeling,
but gifted with certain faculties which today we have lost. Owing to
the universal development of reading, certain faculties possessed by
men of earlier ages have vanished from us. In the skteenth century,
men's minds were more acutely perceptive of values in words heard,
partly because their language was a growing thing with constantly
occurring new forms and strange applications of familiar words, but
largely because they had to maintain a constant alertness to spoken
speech. Newspapers did not exist then; all men's knowledge of the
larger world beyond their immediate ken had to come from hearing
words uttered by their companions. As a result, the significance of
words was more keenly appreciated and certainly was more concrete
than it is today. When Macbeth, in four lines, likened life to a brief
candle, to a walking shadow and to a poor player, one may believe
that the ordinary spectator in the Globe Theatre saw in his mind's
eye these three objects referred to. The candle, the shadow and the
player became for him mental realities.
The same speech uttered on the stage today can hardly hope for
such interpretation. Many in the audience will be lulled mentally in-
sensible to its values by the unaccustomed movement of the lines, and
others will grasp its import, not by emotional imaginative understand-
ing, but by a painful, rational process of thought. A modern audience,
therefore, listening to earlier verse drama, will normally require a
direct stimulus to its visual imagination a thing entirely unnecessary
in former times. Thus, for example, on the bare Elizabethan platform
stage the words concerning dawn or sunlight or leafy woods were
amply sufficient to conjure up an image of these things; latter-day
experiments in the production of these dramas in reconstructed
"Shakespearean" theaters, interesting as these may be and refreshing
44 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
in their novelty, must largely fail to achieve the end so easily and with
such little effort reached among sixteenth century audiences. We
need, now, all the appurtenances of a decorated stage to approach,
even faintly, the dramatist's purpose. This is the justification for the
presentation of Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, not in a re-
constructed Globe Theatre, but according to the current standards of
Broadway or of Shaftesbury Avenue.
The theater, however, can do only so much. It may visually create
the setting, but it cannot create the stimulus necessary for a keener
appreciation of the magic value of Shakespeare's lines. No method of
stage representation could achieve that end. On the screen, on the
other hand, something at least in this direction may be accomplished.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon's appearance behind dark
bespangled gauze, even although too much dwelt on and emphasized,
gave force to lines commonly read or heard uncomprehendingly
"King of Shadows," he is called; but the phrase means little or nothing
to us unless our minds are given such a stimulus as was here provided.
Critics have complained that in the film nothing is left to the imagina-
tion, but we must remember that in the Shakespearean verse there is a
quality which, because of changed conditions, we may find difficulty
in appreciating. Its strangeness to us demands that an attempt be made
to render it more intelligible and directly appealing. Such an attempt,
through the means of expression granted to the cinema, may merely
be supplying something which will bring us nearer to the conditions
of the original spectators for whom Shakespeare wrote.
Normally, however, verse forms will be alien to the film. Verse in
itself presupposes a certain remoteness from the terms of ordinary
life, and the cinema, as we have seen, usually finds its most character-
istic expression in the world that immediately surrounds us. The close
connection, noted by Babette Deutsqh, between cinematic expression
and tendencies in present-day poetry will declare itself, not in a utili-
zation of rhythmic speech, but in a psychological penetration ren-
dered manifest through a realistic method.
THE WAY OF THE THEATER
If these arguments have any validity, then clearly a determined re-
vision is necessary of our attitude toward the stage of today. That the
theater ought not servilely to follow cinematic methods seems un-
necessary of proof, even though we may admit that certain devices
of the film may profitably be called into service by playwright and
director. She Loves Me Not with ample justification utilized for the
purpose of stage comedy a technique which manifestly was inspired
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 45
by the ^technique strictly proper to the cinema, and various experi-
ments in the adapting of the filmic flashback to theatrical require-
ments have not been without significance and value. But this way real
success does not lie; the stage cannot hope to maintain its position
simply by seizing on novelties exploited first in the cinema, and in
general we must agree that the cinema can, because of its peculiar
opportunities, wield this technique so much more effectively that its
application to the stage seems thin, forced and artificial.
This, however, is not the most serious thing. Far more important
is the fundamental approach which the theater during recent years
has been making toward its material. When the history of the stage
since the beginning of the nineteenth century comes to be written
with^that impartiality which only the viewpoint of distant time can
provide, it will most certainly be deemed that the characteristic de-
velopment of these hundred-odd years is the growth of realism and
the attempted substitution of naturalistic illusion in place of a con-
ventional and imaginative illusion. In the course of this development
Ibsen stands forth as the outstanding pioneer and master. At the same
time, this impartial survey may also decide that within the realistic
method lie the seeds of disruption. It may be recognized that, while
Ibsen was a genius of profound significance, for the drama Ibsenism
proved a curse upon the stage. The whole realistic movement which
strove to impose the conditions of real life upon the theater may have
served a salutary purpose for a time, but its vitality was but short-
lived and, after the first excitement which attended the witnessing on
the stage of things no one had hitherto dreamed of putting there had
waned, its force and inspiring power were dissipated. Even if we
leave the cinema out of account, we must observe that the realistic
theater in our own day has lost its strength. No doubt, through fa-
miliarity and tradition, plays in this style still prove popular and,
popular success being the first requirement demanded of dramatic
art, we must be careful to avoid wholesale condemnation; Tobacco
Road and Dead End are things worthy of our esteem, definite con-
tributions to the theater of our day. But the continued appearance and
success of naturalistic plays should not confuse the main issue, which
is the question whether such naturalistic plays are likely in the imme-
diate future to maintain the stage in that position we should all wish
it to occupy. Facing this question fairly, we observe immediately
that plays written in these terms are less likely to hold the attention
of audiences over a period of years than are others written in a differ-
ent style; because bound to particular conditions in time and place,
they seem inevitably destined to be forgotten, or, if not forgotten, to
lose their only valuable connotations. Even the dramas of Ibsen, in-
AIXARDYCE NICOIX
stinct with a greater imaginative power than, many works by his
contemporaries and successors, do not possess, after the brief passing
of forty years, the same vital significance they held for audiences of
the eighties and nineties. If we seek for and desire a theater which
shall possess qualities likely to live over generations, unquestionably
we must decide that the naturalistic play, made popular toward the
close of the nineteenth century and still remaining in our midst, is not
calculated to fulfill our highest wishes.
Of much greater importance, even, is the question of the position
this naturalistic play occupies in its relations to the cinema. At the
moment it still retains its popularity, but, we may ask, because of cine-
matic competition is it not likely to fail gradually in its immediate ap-
peal? The film has such a hold over the world of reality, can achieve
expression so vitally in terms of ordinary life, that the realistic play
must surely come to seem trivial, false and inconsequential. The truth
is, of course, that naturalism on the stage must always be limited and
insincere. Thousands have gone to The Children's Hour and come
away fondly believing that what they have seen is life; they have not
realized that here too the familiar stock figures, the type characteriza-
tions, of the theater have been presented before them in modified
forms. From this the drama cannot escape; little possibility is there of
its delving deeply into the recesses of the individual spirit. That is a
realm reserved for cinematic exploitation, and, as the film more and
more explores this territory, does it not seem probable that theater
audiences will become weary of watching shows which, although
professing to be "lifelike," actually are inexorably bound by the re-
strictions of the stage? Pursuing this path, the theater truly seems
doomed to inevitable destruction. Whether in its attempt to repro-
duce reality and give the illusion of actual events or whether in its
pretense toward depth and subtlety in character drawing, the stage
is aiming at things alien to its spirit, things which so much more easily
may be accomplished in the film that their exploitation on the stage
gives only an impression of vain effort.
Is, then, the theater, as some have opined, truly dying? Must it
succumb to the rivalry of the cinema? The answer to that question
depends on what the theater does within the next ten or twenty
years. If it pursues naturalism further, unquestionably little hope
will remain; but if it recognizes to the full the conditions of its own
being and utilizes those qualities which it, and it alone, possesses, the
very thought of rivalry may disappear. Quite clearly, the true hope
of the theater lies in a rediscovery of convention, in a deliberate
throwing over of all thoughts concerning naturalistic illusion and in
an embracing of that universalizing power which so closely belongs
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 47
to the dramatic form when rightly exercised. By doing these thinos,
the theater has achieved greatness and distinction in the past. We ad-
mire the playhouses of Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England; in
both a basis was found in frank acceptance of the stage spectacle as a
thing of pretense, with no attempt made to reproduce the outer
forms of everyday life. Conventionalism ruled in both, and conse-
quently out of both could spring a vital expression, with manifesta-
tions capable of appealing not merely to the age in which they
originated but to future generations also. Precisely because Aeschylus
and Shakespeare did not try to copy life, because they presented their
themes in highly conventional forms, their works have the quality of
being independent of time and place. Their characters were more
than photographic copies of known originals; their plots took no
account of the terms of actuality ; and their language soared on poetic
wings. To this again must we come if our theater is to be a vitally ar-
resting force. So long as the stage Is bound by the fetters of realism,
so long as we judge theatrical characters by reference to individuals
with whom we are acquainted, there is no possibility of preparing
dialogue which shall rise above the terms of common existence. D
From our playwrights, therefore, we must seek a new foundation.
No doubt many journeymen will continue to pen for the day and the
hour alone, but of these there have always been legion; what we may
desire is that the dramatists of higher effort and broader ideal do not
follow the journeyman's way. Boldly must they turn from efforts to
delineate in subtle and intimate manner the psychological states of in-
dividual men and women, recognizing that in the wider sphere the
drama has its genuine home. The cheap and ugly simian chatter of
familiar conversation must give way to the ringing tones of a poetic
utterance, not removed far off from our comprehension, but bearing a
manifest relationship to our current speech. To attract men's ears
once more to imaginative speech we may take the method of T. S.
Eliot, whose violent contrasts in Murder in the Cathedral are intended
to awaken appreciation and interest, or else the method of Maxwell
Anderson, whose Winter set aims at building a dramatic poetry out of
common expression. What procedure is selected matters little; indeed,
if an imaginative theater does take shape in our years, its strength will
largely depend upon its variety of approach. That there is hope that
such a theater truly may come into being is testified by the recent
experiments of many poets, by the critical thought which has been
devoted to its consummation and by the increasing popular acclaim
which has greeted individual eiforts* The poetic play may still lag
behind the naturalistic or seemingly naturalistic drama in general es-
teem, but the attention paid in New York to Sean O'Casey's Within
48 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
the Gates and Maxwell Anderson's Winters et augurs the beginning
of a new appreciation, while in London T. S. Eliot's Murder in the
Cathedral has awakened an interest of a similar kind. Nor should we
forget plays not in verse but aiming at a kindred approach; Robert
Sherwood's The Petrified Forest and S. N. Behrnian's Rain -from
Heaven, familiar and apparently realistic in form, deliberately and
frankly aim at doing something more than present figures of indi-
viduals; in them the universalizing power of the theater is being
utilized no less than in other plays which, by the employment of verse
dialogue, deliberately remove the action from the commonplaces of
daily existence.
Established on these terms native to its very existence and conse-
quently far removed from the ways of the film, the theater need
have no fear that its hold over men's minds will diminish and fail. It
will maintain a position essentially its own to which other arts may
not aspire.
THE WAY OF THE FILM
For the film are reserved things essentially distinct. Possibility of
confusion between the two has entered in only because the playhouse
has not been true to itself. To the cinema is given a sphere where the
subjective and objective approaches are combined, where individual-
ization takes the place of type characterization, where reality may
faithfully be imitated and where the utterly fantastic equally is
granted a home, where Walt Disney's animated flowers and flames
exist alongside the figures of men and women who may seem more
real than the figures of the stage, where a visual imagery in moving
forms may thrill and awaken an age whose ears, while still alert to
listen to poetic speech based on or in tune with the common language
of the day, has forgotten to be moved by the tones of an earlier dra-
matic verse. Within this field lies the possibility of an artistic
expression equally powerful as that of the stage, though essentially
distinct from that. The distinction is determined by the audience
reactions to the one and to the other. In the theater the spectators are
confronted by characters which, if successfully delineated, always
possess a quality which renders them greater than separate individuals.
When Clifford Odets declares that by the time he came to write his
first play, Awake and Sing! he understood clearly that his interest
was not in the presentation of an individual's problems, but in those of
a whole class. In other words, the task was to find a theatrical form with
which to express the mass as hero . . .
FILM REALITY: THE CINEMA AND THE THEATER 49
he is doing no more than indicate that he has the mind and approach
of a dramatist. All the well-known figures created in tragedy and
comedy since the days of Aristophanes and Aeschylus hare presented
m this way the lineaments of universal humanity. If the theater stands
thus for mankind, the cinema, because of the willingness on the part
of spectators to accept as the image of truth the moving forms cast
on the screen, stands for the individual It is related to the modern
novel in the same respect that the older novel was related to the stage.
Impressionistic and expressionistic settings may serve for the theater
-even may we occasionally fall back on plain curtains without com-
pletely losing the interest of our audiences; the cinema can take no
such road, for, unless in frankly artificially created films (such as the
Walt Disney cartoon), we cling to our preconceived beliefs and
clamor for the three-dimensional, the exact and the authentic. In a
stage play such as Yellow Jack we are prepared to accept a frankly
formal background, because we know that the actors are actors
merely; but for the treatment of similar material in The Prisoner of
Shark Island and The Story of Pasteur cinematic authenticity is de-
manded. At first glance, we might aver that, because of this, the film
had fewer opportunities for artistic expression than the stage; but
further consideration will demonstrate that the restrictions are amply
compensated for by an added scope. Our illusion in the picture house
is certainly less "imaginative" than the illusion which attends us in
the theater, but it has the advantage of giving increased appreciation
of things which are outside nature. Through this the purely visionary
becomes almost tangible and the impossible assumes shapes easy of
comprehension and belief. The sense of reality lies as the foundation
of the film, yet real time and real space are banished; the world we
move in may be far removed from the world ordinarily about us; and
symbols may find a place alongside common objects of little or no
importance. If we apply the theory of "psychological distance" to
theater and the film we realize the force of each. For any kind of
aesthetic appreciation this distance is always demanded; before we
can hope to feel the artistic qualities of any form we must be able to
set ourselves away from it, to experience the stimulus its contempla-
tion creates and at the same time have no call to put the reactions to
that stimulus into play. This distance obviously may be of varying de-
grees; sometimes it is reduced, sometimes it provides a vast gulf be-
tween the observer and the art object Furthermore the variation may
be of two kinds variation between one art and another, and variation
between forms within the sphere of a single art. Music is further re-
moved from reality than sculpture, but in music there may be an ap-
proach toward commonly heard sounds and in sculpture abstract
50 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
shapes may take the place of familiar forms realistically delineated.
Determination of the proper and legitimate approach will come from
a consideration of the sense of distance between the observer and the
object; the masterpieces in any art will necessarily be based on an
adaptation to the particular requirements of their own peculiar me-
dium of expression.
Applying this principle to theater and cinema, we will recognize
that whereas there is a strong sense of reality in audience reactions to
the film, always there is the fact that the pictures on the screen are
two-dimensional images and hence removed a stage from actual con-
tact with the spectators. What may happen if successful three-dimen-
sional projection is introduced we cannot tell; at present we are con-
cerned with a flat screen picture. This gulf between the audience and
the events presented to them will permit a much greater use of realism
than the stage may legitimately employ. The presence of flesh-and-
blood actors in the theater means that it is comparatively easy to break
the illusion proper to the theater and in doing so to shatter the mood
at which any performance ought to aim. This statement may appear
to run counter to others made above, but there is no essential contra-
diction involved. The fact remains that, when living person is set be-
fore living person actor before spectator a certain deliberate con-
ventionalizing is demanded of the former if the aesthetic impression
is not to be lost, whereas in the film, in which immediately a measure
of distance is imposed between image and spectator, greater ap-
proaches to real forms may be permitted, even though these have to
exist alongside impossibilities and fantastic symbols far removed from
the world around us. This is the paradox of cinematic art.
Herein lies the true filmic realm and to these things the cinema, if it
also is to be true to itself, must tend, just as toward the universalizing
and toward conventionalism must tend the theater if it is to find a se-
cure place among us. Fortunately the signs of the age are propitious;
experiments in poetic drama and production of films utilizing at least
a few of the significant methods basically associated with cinematic
art give us authority for believing that within the next decade each
will discover firmer and surer foothold and therefore more arresting
control over their material. Both stage and cinema have their par-
ticular and peculiar functions; their houses may stand side by side, not
in rivaling enmity, but in that friendly rivalry which is one of the
compelling forces in the wider realm of artistic achievement.
f\ rlQt The following is from Susanm
Langefs book on the philosophy
of aesthetics. Feeling and Form
(Charles Scribner's Sons, New
York, 25)53). For Miss Langer the
film is a new poetic art, one that
appears to the beholder in 'what
s ^ e terms the dream mode? In
the endless succession of images
moving through space, past and
present, the film drains upon some
of the characteristics of literature,
Susanne I anapr d ? ama > p ^ y > *"***& muic md
*7U3Ufirf LUiiyVi dance. This omnivorous use of
many elements, Miss Longer be-
lieves, accounts for one of the
fihrfs most interesting aspects.
M ERE is a new art. For a few decades it seemed like nothing more
than a new technical device in the sphere of drama, a new way of
preserving and retailing dramatic performances. But today its devel-
opment has already belied this assumption. The screen is not a stage,
and what is created in the conception and realization of a film is not
a play. It is too early to systematize any theory of this new art, but
even in its present pristine state it exhibitsquite beyond any doubt,
I think not only a new technique, but a new poetic mode. . . .
The moving camera divorced the screen from the stage. The
straightforward photographing of stage action, formerly viewed
as the only artistic possibility of the film, henceforth appeared as
52 SUSANNE LANGER
a special technique. The screen actor is not governed by the stage,
nor by the conventions of the theater, he has his own realm and con-
ventions; indeed, there may be no "actor" at all. The documentary
film is a pregnant invention. The cartoon does not even involve per-
sons merely "behaving."
The fact that the moving picture could develop to a fairly high
degree as a silent art, in which speech had to be reduced and con-
centrated into brief, well-spaced captions, was another indication
that it was not simply drama. It used pantomime, and the first aesthe-
ticians of the film considered it as essentially pantomime. But it is
not pantomime; it swallowed that ancient popular art as it swallowed
the photograph.
One of the most striking characteristics of this new art is that it
seems to be omnivorous, able to assimilate the most diverse mate-
rials and turn them into elements of its own. With every new inven-
tionmontage, the sound track, Technicolor its devotees have
raised a cry of fear that now its "art" must be lost. Since every such
novelty is, of course, promptly exploited before it is even technically
perfected, and flaunted in its rawest state, as a popular sensation, in
the flood of meaningless compositions that steadily supplies the show
business, there is usually a tidal wave of particularly bad rubbish in
association with every important advance. But the art goes on. It
swallows everything: dancing, skating, drama, panorama, cartoon-
ing, music (it almost always requires music).
Therewithal it remains a poetic art. But it is not any poetic art we
have known before; it makes the primary illusion virtual history
in its own mode.
This is, essentially, the dream mode. I do not mean that it copies
dream, or puts one into a daydream. Not at aE; no more than litera-
ture invokes memory, or makes us believe that we are remembering.
An art mode is a mode of appearance. Fiction is "like" memory in
that is is projected to compose a finished experiential form, a "past"
not the reader's past, nor the writer's, though the latter may make
a claim to it (that, as well as the use of actual memory as a model,
is a literary device). Drama is "like" action in being causal, creating
a total imminent experience, a personal "future" or Destiny. Cinema
is "like" dream in the mode of its presentation; it creates a virtual
present, an order of direct apparition. That is the mode of dream.
The most noteworthy formal characteristic of dream is that the
dreamer is always at the center of it. Places shift, persons act and
speak, or change or fade facts emerge, situations grow, objects
come into view with strange importance, ordinary things infinitely
valuable or horrible, and they may be superseded by others that are
A NOTE ON THE FILM 53
related to them essentially by feeling, not by natural proximity. But
the dreamer is always "there," his relation is, so to speak, equidistant
from all events. Things may occur around him or unroll before his
eyes; he may act or want to act, or suffer or contemplate; but the
immediacy of everything in a dream is the same for him.
This aesthetic peculiarity, this relation to things perceived, char-
acterizes the dream mode: it is this that the moving picture takes
over, and thereby it creates a virtual present. In its relation to the
images, actions, events that constitute the story, the camera is in the
place of the dreamer.
But the camera is not a dreamer. We are usually agents in a dream.
The camera (and its complement, the microphone) is not itself "in"
the picture. It is the mind's eye and nothing more. Neither is the
picture (if it is art) likely to be dreamlike in its structure. It is a
poetic composition, coherent, organic, governed by a definitely con-
ceived feeling, not dictated by actual emotional pressures.
The basic abstraction whereby virtual history is created in the
dream mode is immediacy of experience, "givenness," or "authen-
ticity." This is what the art of the film abstracts from actuality,
from our actual dreaming.
The percipient of a moving picture sees with the camera; his
standpoint moves with it, his mind is pervasively present. The cam-
era is his eye (as the microphone is his ear-and there is no reason
why a mind's eye and a mind's ear must always stay together). He
takes the place of the dreamer, but in a perfectly objectified dream
that is, he is not in the story. The work is the appearance of a
dream, a unified, continuously passing, significant apparition.
Conceived in this way, a good moving picture is a work of art
by all the standards that apply to art as such. Sergei Eisenstein speaks
of good and bad films as, respectively, "vital" and "lifeless"; 1 speaks
of photographic shots as "elements," 2 which combine into "images,"
which are "objectively unpresentable" (I would call them poetic
impressions), but are greater elements compounded of "represen-
tations," whether by montage or symbolic acting or any other
means. 3 The whole is governed by the "initial general image which
originally hovered before the creative artist" 4 the matrix, the com-
manding form; and it is this (not, be it remarked, the artist's emo-
tion) that is to be evoked in the mind of the spectator.
Yet Eisenstein believed that the beholder of a film was somewhat
1 The Film Sense y p. 17.
, p; 8.
4 Ibid., p. 31.
54 SUSANNE LANGER
specially called on to use his imagination, to create his own experi-
ence of the story. 5 Here we have, I think, an indication of the
powerful illusion the film makes not of things going on, but of the
dimension in which they go on a virtual creative imagination; for
it seems one's own creation, direct visionary experience, a "dreamed
reality." Like most artists, he took the virtual experience for the
most obvious fact. 6
The fact that a motion picture is not a plastic work but a poetic
presentation accounts for its power to assimilate the most diverse
materials and transform them into nonpictorial elements. Like dream,
it enthralls and commingles all senses; its basic abstractiondirect
apparition is made not only by visual means, though these are para-
mount, but by words, which punctuate vision, and music that supports
the unity of its shifting "world." It needs many, often convergent,
means to create the continuity of emotion which holds it together
while its visions roam through space and time.
It is noteworthy that Eisenstein draws his materials for discussion
from epic rather than dramatic poetry; from Pushkin rather than
Chekhov, Milton rather than Shakespeare. That brings us back to
the point that the novel lends itself more readily to screen dramatiza-
tion than the drama. The fact is, I think, that a story narrated does
not require as much "breaking down" to become screen apparition,
because it has no framework itself of fixed space, as the stage has;
and one of the aesthetic peculiarities of dream, which the moving
picture takes over, is the nature of its space. Dream events are spa-
tial, often intensely concerned with space intervals, endless roads,
bottomless canyons, things too high, too near, too far-but they are
not oriented in any total space. The same is true of the moving picture
and distinguishes it-despite its visual character-from plastic art;
its space comes and goes. It is always a secondary illusion.
The fact that the film is somehow related to dream, and is in fact
in a similar mode, has been remarked by several people, sometimes
for reasons artistic, sometimes nonartistic. R. E. Jones noted its free-
dom not only from spatial restriction, but from temporal as well
. , p ' 33 : ". the spectator is drawn into a creative act in which his
individuality is not subordinated to the author's individuality, but is opened
up throughout the process of fusion with the author's intention, just as the
individuality of a great actor is fused with the individuality of a great play-
wright in the creation of a classic scenic image. In fact, every spectator
creates an image in accordance with the representational guidance, suggested
by the author, leading him to understanding and experience of the author's
theme. This is the same image that was planned and created by the author, but
this image is at the same time created also by the spectator himself."
6 Compare the statement in Ernest Lindgren's The Art of the Film, p. 92,
apropos of the moving camera: "It is the spectator's own mind that moves."
A NOTE ON THE FILM 55
Motion pictures [he said] are our thoughts made visible and audible.
They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do,
and their speed, with their flashbacks like sudden uprushes of memory
and their abrupt transition from one subject to another, approximates
very closely the speed of our thinking. They have the rhythm of the
thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or back-
ward in space or time. . . . They project pure thought, pure dream, pure
inner life."*
The "dreamed reality" on the screen can move forward and back-
ward because it is really an eternal and ubiquitous virtual present.
The action of drama goes inexorably forward because it creates a
future, a Destiny; the dream mode is an endless Nowfl
7 The Dramatic Imagination, pp. 17-18.
Hollywood's
T I
I yl
This is a chapter from The Holly-
wood Hallucination (Creative Age
Press, New York, 1944), a book
on film, aesthetics. The camera, as
Parker Tyler suggests, is the soul
of the film. With its range of mo-
bility, its faculties of displacement
and inclusion, it is finally respon-
sible for the execution of all the
imagistic power that a movie pro-
vides (or for a film's lack of such
power). Here Mr. Tyler explores
the camera's intricate potentialities
and limitations,
UISPLACEMENT, so familiar and democratic in surrealism and dreams,
is the unofficial, veiled dictator of Hollywood. In this way, the
movie city is being true to its own deep tradition. When pictures
first moved, the photographer showed off their virtuosity by imitat-
ing the visual illusions of magicians displacement of the kind prac-
ticed by sleight-of-hand artists. But the original delight-in-displace-
ment has traveled a long road, one strewn with "corpses" of the
technical advances of the cinema. Museums, such as the Museum of
Modern Art Film Library in New York City, hold the documents
tracing this advance, though one might say that on the surface, at
least, they are placements rather than displacements; and just in the
HOLLYWOOD'S SURREALIST EYE 57
sporting sense, like an ace shot in tennis which somehow suggests
a perfect "close-up," or the cinematic angle shot which displaces the
normal point of vision and obtains a view unexpected of the circum-
stances. And there is the "swimming close-up": an eye that moves
through the air with the greatest of ease, as supple as a fish in dodging
the obstacles between it and the climax of its passage; one such in
Citizen Kane goes through electric signs and past the glass of a sky-
light to settle its cold nose against the heroine's cheek.
As a recorder and creator of movement, the movie camera has
been inevitably an instrument capable of as much displacing as plac-
ing, as much alienation as familiarizing. In moving with a more pyro-
technic virtuosity than the human eye, it has displaced the body of
the spectator and rendered it, as carriage of perception, fluid; the eye
itself has become a body capable of greater spatial elasticity than
the human body, insofar as it seems a sort of detachable organ of
the body. By turning one's head, one can accomplish much more
In scope of perception than the movie camera, being able to see
more, as they say, "at one glance." But one does not add to the
clarity of that perception excepting through the limited devices of
the telescope and microscope. These very instruments demonstrate
that clarity of vision is largely a question of attention and thus of
exclusion, narrowing. It remains for the peculiarly alienating faculty
of the movie camera to clarify and "selectify" vision in a generally
significant sense. Was it not possible to see at one glance the most
extraordinary possibilities in such an art medium? Was the camera
not a kind of monster capable of projecting marvels? Mechanical
marvels, when they have appeared, have become commonplaces,
but some of them manage to retain permanently the faculty of creat-
ing the wonderful.
The very soul of the cinematic medium, the camera, is the dis-
placement of those visual conditions upon which, as a recording in-
strument, the camera is directly based. A wise man has said, "The
camera does not lie." Why should it? Its truths are illimitable. Like
all man's instruments, it is made to serve him in every potential fiber
of its being. The camera first displaced color by making it implicit
in pictorial values and then, in restoring it, provided a color gamut
not that of either lif e or painting. But it displaced something more
subtle than color; even more radically, it displaced that complacence
which men had in subconsciously saying of a photograph, "It is
very lifelike. Thank heaven it does not move!" and the movie came
as just as great a shock to those who secretly yearned to say, ". . .
and look, it moves too!" Galatea moved, and answered Pygmalion's
prayer; but in terms of pure movement, these having become a
58 PARKER TYLER
problem as soon as Galatea lived, Pygmalion's desire was an invita-
tion to a greater catastrophe than perpetual and absolute inertia.
The movies alienated photography from painting by placing
within it movement. This was so radical a challenge to reality that
reality became a rival! After the novelty of the fantastic effects of
the French pioneer Melies wore off, it was plain that the conquest
of "reality" remained. The illusion of normally clear vision and,
above all, of dimension, had to be created in the artificial eye. By
embracing movement, the still camera had initiated a new and diff er-
ent movement. The first law to be satisfied was not dimension, how-
ever, but the general articulation of the image: value and line.
Melies, of course, emphasized curiously the issue of dimension in
his Trip to the Moon, yet at that time both still and the moving
cameras had much distance to advance toward the technical per-
fection of the single moment of vision.
Even as late as 1925 (I am thinking specifically of The Big Pa-
rade) , the illusion of normal pace in movement had not been created
nor, for that matter, had the distribution of values yet become
easy to the eye. In order to get enough light into the picture, that
is, in order to see the delineation of the image well enough, the
pattern had to be broken up too much. Lines were too sharp in dis-
tinction to the modulation of masses the same effect which in the
still photograph of that time had provided the same virtue with-
out the eye being overtaxed. Thus, an extra effort to see came into
being over and above the mental and visual concentration necessary
for so variegated a spectacle as the movie. It was a long time before
anyone connected with the industry understood how to solve the
problem of pace, of having the actor move so as to create an illusion
of normal action, and by that time the camera itself was improving
so much that only a subtle remodulation was necessary. Movies
were then photographedand run off at completely arbitrary paces,
creating unhappily unintentional effects.
Depth in intimate scenes that is, of scenes in ordinary rooms-
was difficult to achieve and was solved in one way by using over-
sized sets, there being no effort to preserve the illusion of a normal-
sized room. This dual mode de convenance and artifice to create
depth have a curious echo in the contemporary cinema musical
which sometimes, in depicting a theater stage within a movie, em-
ploys effects which could not possibly exist on any stage mechanism
in use in the contemporary theater. Only the mobility of the camera
makes such effects possible. Everything connected with the moving
photograph eventually had to move in its peculiar manner and as-
sume a specific role in the whole mechanism of movie making. When
HOLLYWOOD'S SURREALIST EYE 59
sound came, it was poor since, at first, the microphone remained
stationary and since reproduction was not perfected. When the
microphone moved with the same ease as the camera, sound became
both "natural" and adequate to the effect desired. Hence the history
of cinema technique involves perpetual displacements and replace-
ments; transparent and egregious artifices have inevitably given
way to concealed or "nonchalant" ones. In one sense, while the
mechanism has become more complicated, the effects have become
simpler, more "natural" and direct, and, though greater in number,
are complex only in proportion to the trivial content they some-
times bear. At one end of the scale is the spectacle, which is supreme
today as the musical comedy; at the other is the cinema trick-the
bravura offering of the keyhole type of exploitation, and by "key-
hole" I mean merely the concentration on detail.
^ Even as actors on the stage, movie actors had to use make-up
"for seeing's sake." Historically, stage make-up means character,
as in masks; that is, the distance between the actor and the spectator
was a definite element in determining the character mask. Primarily,
the mask had meant a disguise of the real which permanently joined
it to convention and symbols. Inherent, however, in the magically
alienating faculty of the movies was that movie make-up implied
a gradual displacement of the traditional objective of the means of
make-up. This was because the invention of the still camera sig-
nified men's scientific desire to see more clearly-a desire to isolate
reality and look at it at leisure. Thus, implying realism in culture,
it implied it in artistic media. By photographing a mask, the artifice
of the mask was expressed in distinction to the reality of the illusion;
that is to say, the means and the end fell apart on the cinema screen
to reveal a new problem in the chess of vision. The whole body
of reality had in various ways to be "made up," but only in order
to be more itself, to bring it closer. Therefore, in creating a purely
visual intimacy between actor and audience that never before had
existed, the movie displaced all the established visual conventions of
dramatic expression, especially so far as the actor's person went. The
point was not that actors should express emotions with their faces,
but rather the reverse, that they should express their faces with emo-
tionsto prove they were rea not waxworks, faces. Because of the
primitive crudity of lighting, the actor's mouth, for instance, tended
to become two almost undifferentiated black lines.
Moreover, the first movies were silent. Reality and artistic conven-
tion alike were alienated from the human portrayal. It is chiefly the
absence of Bernhardt's voice which makes a somewhat grotesque
marvel of her anachronistic style when seen in the movies. Visible
6o
PARKER TYLER
on her face, alas, is a rapt listening to her own voice. The positive
absence of sound swept away an element of reality from all living
and inert images and revealed a fabulously alienated world of move-
ments. We must not forget that normal people suddenly fixed on
the moving image the concentration of the deaf. Not only was
written dialogue and narrative in the form of captions soon deemed
necessary to the photograph when it moved and told a story, but
the spectator began to feel need of a further device to create the
artistic illusion of unitythe "whole of reality." This was music.
Why music? Obviously because it was auditory, but, more than
that, because, being organized sound, music tended to contribute
to the totalized effect of silent movement assisted by literature.
Still self-mindful, the movie camera produced clearer and more
"seeable" photographs until all of a sudden a thing which people
had hardly noticed-a "surrealism" of make-up was brought to
being: The black-and-white make-up, unlike the stage medium,
seemed a disguise, an impediment to the reality of the effect. The
presence of middle values, articulated grays, which had been rela-
tively easy for the still camera, was suggested in cinema by the very
fact that the actor's face, because it was painted, looked abnormally
highlighted; it looked too black and white because it is in the cam-
era's nature as an instrument of accuracy to seek effects of realism.
Even after a definite middle register had been reached, expressionist
values in the foreign films exploited this very abnormal, black-and-
white effect. In this medium, the cinema found its photographic
science displaced by the abstract dimensional devices of painting.
Modern painting, with its plastic conception of movement, had in-
vaded the field of photography from which it was previously exiled.
In the most extreme example of expressionist cinema, The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, fantastic in content as well as in manner, the sets
were painted structural designs conveying dynamic movement and
a sense of space. But this was obviously a relative, by-the-wayside
device, since in the movies it is the actually mobile means which are
absolute, and hence there was no contribution to the genuine cine-
matic marvel through such means.
In early films, however, including all those made in America,
the black-and-white effects were an absolute condition of the photog-
raphy and spread through the total atmosphere of the movement
without demarcation between static and mobile means of conveying
movement. In total relationship, paradoxically, the object in relief
tended to recede, that is, to draw together because of internally
unarticulated value, in relation to the arbitrary black-and-white
value, which came forward purely as a result of the camera lens and
HOLLYWOOD'S SURREALIST EYE 61
the reproductive medium. This was old-fashioned movie photog-
raphy. At one time Cecil B. De Mille mimicked this quality in flat
decors and costume, so that Gloria Swanson's face was merely the
stylistic climax of the entire chiaroscuro. Nothing like an expres-
sionist or illusory decor was used. Instead, it wa$ a matter of the
regular or realistic interior, "stepped up" in dramatic black and
white, and sometimes almost caricatured. This was by no means
altogether the accident of primitive studio lighting or unassisted
exteriors (the "sunlight studio"). Two classical types of the simple,
tendential black-and-white motif, shy of middle values, were the
bathing-girl comedy and the Keystone-cop comedy, usually com-
bined. The female figures against the sand of the beach, the black
uniforms of the cops against every light valuethis was the super-
real vision of the early camera; namely, the displacement of mobile
detail in respect to a totality of the single moving image. The spor-
tive nature of the content, embellished by the flagrant designs of
bathing-suit modes, assisted in this type of "dramatization" of cinema.
Unforgettable also is Charlie Chaplin's silhouette against the broad
glare of the road (he still uses it), as well as that fat eel, his mustache,
frantically imprisoned in the fishbowl of his face.
"Beautiful" photography in 1944 is a platitude in every first-rate
* studio in Hollywood I mean specifically photography freed from
every condition limiting the total representational means with clarity
as an end. Yet one kind of displacement occurred in Hollywood that
is altogether characteristic of its middle period of inventiveness.
When the camera began to show off its realism, its ability to catch
action in all its detail as well as its sweep, the spectator was brought
into the aesthetic realm of physical effort and its illusory crisis of dan-
ger in a more directly visual sense than the stage could provide. This
special effect was only gradually understood. From the beginning,
Griffith, for instance, never ceased to expand the area of action (even
if it meant placing a desk in the center of a large unoccupied area),
desiring only to outdo the scope of the dramatic spectacle and yet to
create its mobile details with some leisure. While as an artist re-
markably intelligent, he failed to understand the natural possibilities
of the camera, in that he assumed it was primarily extroversive, while
it is equally introversive. He made many technical advances the
close-up, for example, as an accessory to the long shot, and vice versa.
Working thus dialectically, this pioneering director added enor-
mously to the dramatic vocabulary of the movies. But dependent
upon the visual psychology there is more than one kind of narrative.
While inferior to Griffith in ingenuity, Cecil De Mille, his successor,
penetrated into the most primitive nature of the movie camera when
62
PARKER TYLER
he touched symbolically in his "bedroom dramas" upon the intimate
genius of cinematic narration of images. He introduced bathroom se-
quences whose immodest whites exposed to the camera a secret place
of light: a white mystery. In a wholly different way, Eisenstein, the
Russian pioneer, realized intimacy with montage, which depends
upon detail and stresses the fundamental imagery of the mind and
its process of creating total thought by using objects as parts of
thoughts. Thus, as a generality, the cinematic use of detail creates the
subjectivity of mental states in narrative namely, psychology.
Yet, of course, unless the content is dreamlike, the total effect of
cinema cannot be psychological in type. Elsewhere I have stressed
those forces in Hollywood working positively against that unity of
effect sometimes obtained even in a second- or third-rate work of
literature. Hence, when I refer to "total effects" or suggest them, I
am necessarily limited to speaking of technique only. If there be no
primary unity-this very rarely occurs in American pictures, much
more often in foreign pictures there is incomplete receptiveness in
the spectator toward the events on the screen as they aim at a total
aesthetic effect. Hence, especially if one is sensitive, he resists many
aspects of the movies and automatically displaces them in the total
(or "charade") scheme of cinema values. What is left then?
Always with us must be the positive accidents occurring as results
of this curious struggle between forces, which we, as unusually pas-
sive spectators, reflect automatically rather than consciously. Conse-
quently a displacement occurs in us corresponding to the first dis-
placement within normal vision when the photograph appeared. I
would call this an almost magical, perhaps a "surrealist," displacement
of taste and accustomed finality of judgment a ritual which begins
with the sound of our change sliding down to us from the change
machine at the box ofiice. Observe that the most potent contribution
of the movie camera, which is its intimate genius in recording physi-
cal action, is quite capable of isolating itself. Scenes of great and in-
tense action, with which Hollywood movies especially have been
filled, grip us most when we are involved with their intimacy, their
visual selfness, wherein we are the miraculously protected partici-
pants through unique courtesy of the camera. This does not mean
that we measure our enjoyment by equating the effect of the physical
mode with that of the spiritual and emotional mode! Alas, no.
Having solved so many problems of portraying action, Hollywood
technicians employ the camera's genius for sheerly pyrotechnical
ends; thus, the beauty of the camera may seem most eloquent just
when its material is most incongruous and trivial. In its apparently
scientific function of analyzing movement (vide the superspeed
HOLLYWOOD'S SURREALIST EYE 63
camera and its revelations) and of bringing us into closer visual
proximity with the physical world than the eye is normally capable
of achieving, the Hollywood camera is capable of introducing us into
and then out of an imaginative idea with the utmost arbitrariness of
timing, and with a purely bravura energy. So the camera seems to
possess the wildness, the compulsiveness and the interior meaning of
the most instinctive life, such as that symptomatic in dreams, romantic
poetry and surrealist art.
When we go over a cliff in an automobile without being in it and
see^a gun being fired at us without being hit by the bullet (things
which we imagine by a simple transposition of spatial points), the
camera^ eloquence automatically is alienated from the content of
the movie and becomes a more or less independent effect. Yet be-
cause the causation is evident and simple, such thrills seem as per-
petually amusing as discovering how the rabbit may appear from the
empty hat. The most moving effect can be derived from such an epi-
sode as one recently in A Woman's Face, a chase on horse sleigh
through snowy mountain trails. This beautifully and dynamically
photographed sequence, because its given human motives were of al-
most no interest, can be filled with almost any content involving
human terror, and in this situation the most available content is that
of dreams, half-remembered associations of our past, or subcon-
scious or conscious literary memories. The fact that we are so physi-
cally relaxed in our theater seats corresponds to our effort to woo
the visual blank of sleep, and hence our eyes are peculiarly prepared
for the unexpected and the overwhelming.
Like its first imaginative efforts on the part of Melies and others,
and like the extreme literary sophistication of Cocteau's The Blood
of a Poet, the protean personality of the movie camera is romantic
and of an unpredictable and shocking entrance. It catches us like
guilty or timid children in an unguarded moment. Even in certain
French, German and Russian films of high artistic quality, it is
evident that, in order to create the illusion of artistic unity, to keep
the literary conception foremost, either fullness or depth of feeling,
on the one hand, or the cinematic possibilities of narrative exploita-
tion, on the other, have had to be slighted. The movie camera is un-
believably hospitable, delightfully hospitable-but supremely con-
ceited. The spectator must be a suave and wary guest, one educated
in a profound, naive-sophisticated conspiracy to see as much as he cm
take away with him.
: The -following selection is a frag-
ment of a chapter from Arnold
Hauser's The Social History of
Art (Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1951. Translated by Stanley God-
man). This two-volume work,
which was ten years in the writing,
is one of the ?nore important art
histories of recent times. Proceed-
ing from the point of view that
the problems of art and literature
are fundamentally sociological, Mr.
Hauser examines Western art from
MII the carvings in the caves of Alta-
mira to the present-day film. In
Arnold H/iHCor the * ast cha P ter t the book> from
/iinOlM rill USer which the following is excerpted,
he analyzes the similarities between
the -film and the prose of Proust,
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others.
I HE THEATER is in many respects the artistic medium most similar to
the film; particularly in view of its combination of spatial and tem-
poral forms, it represents the only real analogy to the film. But what
happens on the stage is partly spatial, partly temporal; as a rule spa-
tial and temporal, but never a mixture of the spatial and the tem-
poral, as are the happenings in a film. The most fundamental differ-
ence between the film and the other arts is that, in its world-picture,
the boundaries of space and time are fluidspace has a quasi-tern->
poral time, to some extent, a spatial character. In the plastic arts, as
also on the stage, space remains static, motionless, unchanging, with-
out a goal and without a direction; we move about quite freely in
64
THE FILM AGE
it, because it is homogeneous in all its parts and because none of the
parts presupposes the other temporally. The phases of the move-
ment are not ^stages, not steps in a gradual development; their se-
quence is subject to no constraint. Time in literature above all in
the drama-on the other hand, has a definite direction, a trend of de-
velopment^ an objective goal, independent of the spectator's expe-
rience of time; it is no mere reservoir, but an ordered succession.
Now, these dramaturgical categories of space and time have their
character and functions completely altered in the film. Space loses its
static quality, its serene passivity, and now becomes dynamic; it
comes into being as it were before our eyes. It is fluid, unlimited,
unfinished, an element with its own history, its own scheme and
process of development. Homogeneous physical space here assumes
the characteristics of heterogeneously composed historical time. In
this medium the individual stages are no longer of the same kind, the
individual parts of space no longer of equal value; it contains spe-
cially qualified positions, some with a certain priority in the develop-
ment and others signifying the culmination of the spatial experience.
The use of the close-up, for example, not only has spatial criteria,
it also represents a phase to be reached or to be surpassed in the tem-
poral development of the film. In a good film the close-ups are not
distributed arbitrarily and capriciously. They are not cut in inde-
pendently of the inner development of the scene, not at any time
and anywhere, but only where their potential energy can and should
make itself felt. For a close-up is not a cut-out picture with a frame;
it is always merely part of a picture, like, for instance, the repoussoir
figures in baroque painting which introduce a dynamic quality into
the picture similar to that created by the close-ups in the spatial
structure of a film.
But as if space and time in the film were interrelated by being in-
terchangeable, the temporal relationships acquire an almost spatial
character, just as space acquires a topical interest and takes on tem-
poral characteristics; in other words, a certain element of freedom
is introduced into the succession of their moments. In tiie temporal
medium of a film we move in a way that is otherwise peculiar to
space, completely free to choose our direction, proceeding from one
phase of time into another, just as one goes from one room to an-
other, disconnecting the individual stages in the development of
events and grouping them, generally speaking, according to the prin-
ciples of spatial order. In brief, time here loses, on the one hand, its
uninterrupted continuity, on the other, its irreversible direction. It
can be brought to a standstill: in close-ups; reversed: in flash-backs;
repeated: in recollections; and skipped across: in visions of the fu-
66 ARNOLD HAUSER
ture. Concurrent, simultaneous events can be shown successively,
and temporally distinct events simultaneouslyby double exposure
and alternation; the earlier can appear later, the later before its time.
This cinematic conception of time has a thoroughly subjective and
apparently irregular character compared with the empirical and the
dramatic conception of the same medium. The time of empirical
reality is a uniformly progressive, uninterruptedly continuous, ab-
solutely irreversible order, in which events follow one another as if
on a conveyor belt. It is true that dramatic time is by no means
identical with empirical time the embarrassment caused by a clock
showing the correct time on the stage comes from this discrepancy
and the unity of time prescribed by classicistic dramaturgy can even
be interpreted as the fundamental elimination of ordinary time, and
yet the temporal relationships in the drama have more points of
contact with the chronological order of ordinary experience than
the order of time in a film. Thus in the drama, or at least in one and
the same act of a drama, the temporal continuity of empirical reality
is preserved intact. Here too, as in real life, events follow each other
according to the law of a progression which permits neither inter-
ruptions and jumps nor repetitions and inversions and conforms to
a standard of time which is absolutely constant, that is, undergoes
no acceleration, retardation or stoppage of any kind within the sev-
eral sections (acts or scenes). In the film, on the other hand, not only
the speed of successive events, but also the chronometric standard
itself is often different from shot to shot, according as to whether
slow or fast motion, short or long cutting, many or few close-ups
are used.
The dramatist is prohibited by the logic of scenic arrangement
from repeating moments and phases of time, an expedient that is
often the source of the most intensive aesthetic effects in the film.
It is true that a part of the story is often treated retrospectively in
the drama, and the antecedents followed backward in time, but
they are usually represented indirectly either in the form of a co-
herent narrative or of one limited to scattered hints. The technique
of the drama does not permit the playwright to go back to past
stages in the course of a progressively developing plot and to insert
them directly into the sequence of events, into the dramatic present
that is, it is only recently that it has begun to permit it, perhaps
under the immediate influence of the film, or under the influence of
the new conception of time, familiar also from the modern novel
The technical possibility of interrupting any shot without further
ado suggests the possibilities of a discontinuous treatment of time
from the very outset and provides the film with the means of height-
THE FILiM AGE -
ening the tension of a scene either by interpolating heterogeneous
incidents or assigning the individual phases of the scene to different
sections of the work. In this way the film often produces the effect of
someone playing on a keyboard and striking the keys ad libitum,
up and down, to right and left. In a film we often see the hero first
at the beginning of his career as a young man, later, going back to
the past, as a child; we then see him, in the further course of the
plot, as a mature man and, having followed his career for a time,
we finally may see him still living after his death, in the memory
of one of his relations or friends. As a result of the discontinuity
of time, the retrospective development of the plot is combined with
the progressive in complete freedom, with no kind of chronolog-
ical tie, and through the repeated twists and turns in the time con-
tinuum, mobility, which is the very essence of the cinematic ex-
perience, is pushed to the uttermost limits. The real spatialization
of time in the film does not take place, however, until the simulta-
neity of parallel plots is portrayed. It is the experience of the si-
multaneity of different, spatially separated happenings that puts the
audience into that condition of suspense which moves between space
and time and claims the categories of both orders for itself. It is the
simultaneous nearness and remoteness of things their nearness to
one another in time and their distance from one another in space-
that constitutes that spatiotemporal element, that two-dimensionality
of time, which is the real medium of the film and the basic category
of its world-picture.
It was discovered in a comparatively early stage in the history
of the film that the representation of two simultaneous sequences
of events is part of the original stock of cinematic forms. First this
simultaneity was simply recorded and brought to the notice of the
audience by clocks showing the same time or by similar direct in-
dications; the artistic technique of the intermittent treatment of
a double plot and the alternating montage of the single phases of
such a plot developed only step by step. But later on we come across
examples of this technique at every turn. And whether we stand
between two rival parties, two competitors or two doubles, the
structure of the film is dominated in any case by the crossing and
intersecting of the two different lines, by the bilateral character
of the development and the simultaneity of the opposing actions.
The famous finish of the early, already classical Griffith films, in
which the upshot of an exciting plot is made to depend on whether
a train or a car, the intriguer or the "king's messenger on horse-
back," the murderer or the rescuer, reaches the goal first, using the
then revolutionary technique of continuously changing pictures,
ARNOLD HAUSER
flashing and vanishing like lightning, became the pattern of the
denouement since followed by most films in similar situations*
The time experience of the present age consists above all in an
awareness of the moment in which we find ourselves in an aware-
ness of the present. Everything topical, contemporary, bound to-
gether in the present moment is of special significance and value
to the man of today, and, filled with this idea, the mere fact of si-
multaneity acquires new meaning in his eyes. His intellectual world
is imbued with the atmosphere of the immediate present, just as
that of the Middle Ages was characterized by an otherworldly
atmosphere and that of the Enlightenment by a mood of forward-
looking expectancy. He experiences the greatness of his cities, the
miracles of his technics, the wealth of his ideas, the hidden depths
of his psychology in the contiguity, the interconnections and dove-
tailing of things and processes. The fascination of "simultaneity,"
the discovery that, on the one hand, the same man experiences so
many different, unconnected and irreconcilable things in one and
the same moment, and that, on the other, different men in diff erent
places often experience the same things, that the same things are hap-
pening at the same time in places completely isolated from each
other, this universalism, of which modern technics have made con-
temporary man conscious, is perhaps the real source of the new con-
ception of time and of the whole abruptness with which modern art
describes life. This rhapsodic quality, which distinguishes the modern
novel most sharply from the older novel, is at the same time the char-
acteristic accountable for its most cinematic effects. The discontinuity
of the plot and the scenic development, the sudden emersion of the
thoughts and moods, the relativity and the inconsistency of the
time standards, are what remind us in the works of Proust and
Joyce, Dos Passes and Virginia Woolf of the cuttings, dissolves
and interpolations of the film, and it is simply film magic when
Proust brings two incidents which may lie thirty years apart as
closely together as if there were only two hours between them. The
way in which, in Proust, past and present, dreams and speculation
join hands across the intervals of space and time, the sensibility,
always on the scent of new tracks, roams about in space and time,
and the boundaries of space and time vanish in this endless and
boundless stream of interrelations all this corresponds exactly to
that mixture of space and time in which the film moves, Proust
never mentions dates and ages; we never know exactly how old the
hero of his novel is, and even the chronological relationships of
the events often remain rather vague. The experiences and happen-
ings do not cohere by reason of their proximity in time, and the
THE FILM AGE ,
69
attempt to demarcate and arrange them chronologically would be
all the more nonsensical from his point of view as, in his opinion,
every man has his typical experiences which recur periodically The
boy, the youth and the man always experience fundamentally the
same things; the meaning of an incident often does not dawn on
him , until years after he has experienced and endured it; but he can
hardly ever distinguish the deposit of the years that are past from
the experience of the present hour in which he is living. Is one not
m every moment of one's life the same child or the same invalid or
the same lonely stranger with the same wakeful, sensitive, unap-
peased nerves? Is one not in every situation of life the person capable
of experiencing this and that, who possesses, in the recurring features
ot Jus experience, the one protection against the passage of time?
Do not all our experiences take place as it were at the same time?
And is this simultaneity not really the negation of time? And this
negation is it not a struggle for the recovery of that inwardness
of which physical space and time deprive us?
Joyce fights for the same inwardness, the same directness of ex-
perience, when he, like Proust, breaks up and merges well-articulated
chronologically organized time. In his work, too, it is the inter-
changeability of the contents of consciousness which triumphs over
the chronological arrangement of the experiences, for him, too, time
is a road without direction, on which man moves to and fro. But he
pushes the spatialization of time even further than Proust and shows
the inner happenings not only in longitudinal but also in cross sec-
tions. The images, ideas, brain waves 1 and memories stand side by
side with sudden and absolute abruptness; hardly any consideration
is paid to their origins, all the emphasis is on their contiguity, their
simultaneity. The spatialization of time goes so far in Joyce that one
can begin the reading of Ulysses where one likes, with only a rough
knowledge of the context-not necessarily only after a first reading,
as has been said, and almost in any sequence one cares to choose'.
The medium in which the reader finds himself is hi fact wholly
spatial, for the novel not only describes the picture of a great city
but also adopts its structure to some extent, the network of its streets
and squares, in which people stroll about, walking hi and out and
stopping when and where they like. It is supremely characteristic
of the cinematic quality of this technique that Joyce wrote his novel
not in the final succession of the chapters, but-as is the custom in
the production of films-made himself independent of the sequence
of the plot and worked at several chapters at the same time.
We meet the Bergsonian conception of time, as used in the film
and the modern novel though not always so unmistakably as here
70 ARNOLD HAUSER ,
in all the genres and trends of contemporary art. The simultaneite
des etats (fames is, above all, the basic experience connecting the
various tendencies of modern painting, the futurism of the Italians
with the expressionism of Chagall, and the cubism of Picasso with
the surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico or Salvador Dali. Bergson dis-
covered the counterpoint of spiritual processes and the musical
structure of their interrelationships. Just as, when we listen properly
to a piece of music, we have in our ears the mutual connection of
each new note with all those that have already sounded, so we al-
ways possess in our deepest and most vital experiences everything
that we have ever experienced and made our own in life. If we un-
derstand ourselves, we read our own souls as a musical score, we re-
solve the chaos of the entangled sounds and transform them into
a polyphony of different parts. All art is a game with and a fight
against chaos; it is always advancing more and more dangerously
toward chaos and rescuing more and more extensive provinces of
the spirit from its clutch. If there is any progress in the history of
art, then it consists in the constant growth of these provinces
wrested from chaos. With its analysis of time, the film stands in the
direct line of this development; it has made it possible to represent
visually experiences that have previously been expressed only in
musical forms. The artist capable of filling this new possibility,
this still empty form, with real life has not yet arrived, however.
The crisis of the film, which seems to be developing into a chronic
illness, is due above all to the fact that the film is not finding its
writers or, to put it more accurately, the writers are not finding their
way to the film. Accustomed to doing as they like within their own
four walls, they are now required to take into account producers,
directors, script-writers, cameramen, art directors and technicians
of all kinds, although they do not acknowledge the authority of
this spirit of co-operation, or indeed the idea of artistic co-opera-
tion at all. Their feelings revolt against the idea of the production
of works of art being surrendered to a collective, to a "concern,"
and they feel that it is a disparagement of art that an extraneous
dictate, or at best a majority, should have the last word in decisions
the motives of which they are often unable to account for them-
selves. From the point of view of the nineteenth century, the sit-
uation with which the writer is asked to come to terms is quite
unusual and unnatural. The atomized and uncontrolled artistic en-
deavors of the present now meet for the first time with a principle
opposed to their anarchy. For the mere fact of an artistic enterprise
based on co-operation is evidence of an integrating tendency of
which if one disregards the theater, where it is in any case more
THE FILM AGE yj
a matter of the reproduction than the production of works of art-
there had really been no perfect example since the Middle Ages,
and, in particular, since the masons' lodge. How far removed film
production still is, however, from the generally accepted principle
of an artistic co-operative group is shown not only by the inability
of most writers to establish a connection with the film, but also by-
such a phenomenon as Chaplin, who believes that he must do as
much as possible in his films on his own: the acting of the main part,
the direction, the script, the music. But even if it is only the begin-
ning of a new method of organized art production, the for the
present still empty framework of a new integration, nevertheless
here too, as in the whole economic, social and political life of the
present age, what is being striven for is the comprehensive planning
without which both our cultural and material worlds threaten to
go to pieces. We are confronted here with the same tension as we
find throughout our social life: democracy and dictatorship, special-
ization and integration, rationalism and irrationalism colliding with
each other. But if even in the field of economics and politics plan-
ning cannot always be solved by imposing rules of conduct, it is all
the less possible in art, where all violation of spontaneity, all forcible
leveling down of taste, all institutional regulation of personal in-
itiative are involved in great though certainly not such mortal
dangers as is often imagined.
But how, in an age of the most extreme specialization and the
most sophisticated individualism, are harmony and an integration of
individual endeavors to be brought about? How, to speak on a prac-
tical level, is the situation to be brought to an end in which the most
poverty-stricken literary inventions sometimes underlie the tech-
nically most successful films? It is not a question of competent
directors against incompetent writers, but of two phenomena belong-
ing to different periods of time the lonely, isolated writer depend-
ent on his own resources, and the problems of the film which can
only be solved collectively. The co-operative film unit anticipates
a social technique to which we are not yet equal, just as the newly
invented camera anticipated an artistic technique of which no one
at the time really knew the range and power. The reunion of the
divided functions, first of all the personal union of the director and
the author, which has been suggested as a way to surmount the
crisis, would be more an evasion of the problem than its solution,
for it would prevent but not abolish the specialization that has to be
overcome, would not bring about but merely avoid the necessity
of the planning which is needed. Incidentally, the monistic-individ-
ual principle in the discharge of the various functions, in place of
72 ARNOLD HAUSER
a collectively organized division of labor, not merely corresponds
externally and technically to an amateurish method of working,
but it also involves a lack of inner tension which is reminiscent of
the simplicity of the amateur film. Or may the whole effort to
achieve a production of art based on planning have been only a
temporary disturbance, a mere episode, which is now being swept
away again by the torrent of individualism? May the film be per-
haps not the beginning of a new artistic era, but merely the some-
what hesitant continuation of the old individualistic culture, still
full of vitality, to which we owe the whole of postmedieval art?
Only if this were so would it be possible to solve the film crisis by
the personal union of certain functions that is, by partly surrender-
ing the principle of collective labor.
The film crisis is, however, also connected with a crisis in the
public itself. The millions and millions who fill the many thousands
of cinemas all over the world from Hollywood to Shanghai and
from Stockholm to Cape Town daily and hourly, this unique world-
embracing league of mankind, have a very confused social struc-
ture. The only link between these people is that they all stream into
the cinemas, and stream out of them again as amorphously as they
are pumped in; they remain a heterogeneous, inarticulate, shapeless
mass with the only common feature of belonging to no uniform
class or culture. This mass of cinema-goers can hardly be called a
"public" proper, for only a more or less constant group of patrons
can be described as such, one which is able to some extent to guar-
antee the continuity of production in a certain field of art. Public-
like agglomerations are based on mutual understanding; even if
opinions are divided, they diverge on one and the same plane. But
with the masses who sit together in the cinemas and who have un-
dergone no previous common intellectual formation of any kind,
it would be futile to look for such a platform of mutual understand-
ing. If they dislike a film there is such a small chance of agreement
among them as to the reasons for their rejection of the film that one
must assume that even general approval is based on a misunder-
standing.
The homogeneous and constant public units which, as mediators
between the art producers and the social strata with no real interest
in ait, had always discharged a fundamentally conserving function
were, as we know, dissolved with the advancing democratization of
the enjoyment of art. The bourgeois subscription audiences of the
state and municipal theaters of the last century still formed a more
or less uniform, organically developed body, but with the end of
the repertory theater even the last remains of this public were scat-
THE FILM AGE 73
tered and since then an .integrated audience has come into being only
in particular circumstances, though in some cases the size of such
audiences has been bigger than ever before. It was on the whole
identical with the casual cinema-going public which has to be
caught by new and original attractions every time and over and
over again. The repertory theater, the serial-performance theater
and the cinema mark the successive stages in the democratization
of art and the gradual loss of the festive character that was formerly
more or less the property of every form of theater. The cinema
takes the final step on this road of profanation, for even to attend
the modern metropolitan theater showing some popular play or
other still demands a certain internal and external preparation in
most cases seats have to be booked in advance, one has to keep to
a fixed time and to prepare for an occupation that will fill the whole
eveningwhereas one attends the cinema en passant, in one's every-
day clothes and at any time during the continuous performance.
The everyday point of view of the film is in perfect accordance
with the improvisation and unpretentiousness of cinema-going.
The film signifies the first attempt since the beginning of our
modern individualistic civilization to produce art for a mass public.
As is known, the changes in the structure of the theater and read-
ing public, connected at the beginning of the last century with the
rise of the boulevard play and the feuilleton novel, formed the real
beginning of the democratization of art which reaches its culmina-
tion in mass attendance of cinemas. The transition from the private
theater of the princes' courts to the bourgeois state and municipal
theater and then to the theater trusts, or from the opera to the op-
eretta and then to the revue, marked the separate phases of a devel-
opment characterized by the effort to capture ever wider circles
of consumers, in order to cover the costs of the growing invest-
ments. The outfit for an operetta could still be sustained by a me-
dium-sized theater, that of a revue or a large ballet had already to
travel from one big city to the next; in order to amortize the in-
vested capital, the cinema-goers of the whole world have to con-
tribute to the financing of a big film. But it is this fact that deter-
mines the influence of the masses on the production of art. By their
mere presence at theatrical performances in Athens or the Middle
Ages they were never able to influence the ways of art directly;
only since they have come on the scene as consumers and paid the
full price for their enjoyment have the terms on which they hand
over their shillings become a decisive factor in the history of art.
There has always been an element of tension between the quality
and the popularity of art, which is not by any means to say that
74 ARNOLD HAUSER
the broad masses of the people have at any time taken a stand against
qualitatively good art in favor of inferior art on principle. Nat-
urally, the appreciation of a more complicated art presents them
with greater difficulties than the more simple and less developed,
but the lack of adequate understanding does not necessarily prevent
them from accepting this art albeit not exactly on account of its
aesthetic quality. Success with them is completely divorced from
qualitative criteria. They do not react to what is artistically good
or bad, but to impressions by which they feel themselves reassured or
alarmed in their own sphere of existence. They take an interest in
the artistically valuable, provided it is presented so as to suit their
mentality that is, provided the subject matter is attractive. The
chances of success of a good film are from this point of view better
from the very outset than those of a good painting or poern. For,
apart from the film, progressive art is almost a closed book today
for the uninitiated; it is intrinsically unpopular, because its means of
communication have become transformed in the course of a long
and self-contained development into a kind of secret code, whereas
to learn the newly developing idiom of the film was child's play
for even the most primitive cinema public. From this happy con-
stellation one would be inclined to draw far-reaching optimistic
conclusions for the future of the film, if one did not know that
that kind of intellectual concord is nothing more than the state of
a paradisian childhood and is probably repeated as often as new arts
arise. Perhaps all the cinematic means of expression will no longer
be intelligible even to the next generation, and certainly the cleft
will sooner or later arise that even in this field separates the layman
from the connoisseur. Only a young art can be popular, for as soon
as it grows older it is necessary, in order to understand it, to be ac-
quainted with the earlier stages in its development. To understand
an art means to realize the necessary connection between its formal
and material elements; as long as an art is young, there is a natural,
unproblematical relation between its content and its means of ex-
pressionthat is to say, there is a direct path leading from its subject
matter to its forms. In the course of time these forms become in-
dependent of the thematic material, they become autonomous,
poorer in meaning and harder to interpret, until they become ac-
cessible only to a quite small stratum of the public. In the film this
process has hardly begun, and a great many cinema-goers still be-
long to the generation which saw the birth of the film and witnessed
the full significance of its forms. But the process of estrangement
already makes itself felt in the present-day director's forgoing of
most of the so-called "cinematic" means of expression. The once so
THE FILM AGE 75
popular effects produced by different camera angles and maneuver-
ings, changing distances and speeds, by the tricks of montage and
printing, the close-ups and the panoramas, the cut-ins and the flash-
backs, the fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves, seem affected and
unnatural today, because the directors and cameramen are concen-
trating their attention, under the pressure of a second, already less
film-minded generation, on the clear, smooth and exciting narration
of a story and believe they can learn more from the masters of the
piece bien faite than from the masters of the silent film.
The
Bankruptcy
of
Cinema
as Art
by Seymour Stern
Written in 1936, the following is
an interesting example of how po-
lemical film criticism can get. In
it the author reveals a crusader's
concern for the unlimited poten-
tialities of the fil?n as art, and an
enraged frustration at the poor
quality of the movies made at that
time. Some of the films which Mr.
Stern regarded as "half-baked"
have since become, through a dis-
torted sense of values } screen
"classics" This piece appeared
originally in an anthology entitled
The Movies on Trial, compiled
and edited by William J. Perlman,
and published by The Macmillan
Company, New York, 1936. Most
of the selections, including the
Seymour Stern piece, 'were written
originally for that book.
THE MOVIE PRODUCERS, being men of low intelligence and even
lower courage, refused to experiment." GILBERT SELDES, The
Movies md the Talkies.
"The American film industry has above all lacked originality,
courage and resource. It has left such things to the despised Scandi-
navians, Germans, and Russians." JOHN GOULD FLETCHER, The
Crisis of the Film.
"When the Future of Hell is written in this series, a large num-
ber of pages will have to be reserved for the Americans who make
films." ERNEST BETTS, Heraclitus, or the Future of Films.
I WENTY YEARS AFTER The Birth of a Nation, nineteen years af-
ter Intolerance) and ten after Potemkin, the cinema as a fine art, in
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART ? -
every country of the world, presents a picture of absolute bank-
ruptcy. In those countries, notably Germany and the Soviet Union
where within the last decade the most promising and fruitful creative
developments were witnessed, today there exists absolutely nothing
which can be considered as evidence of a noble use of the film as an
instrument of creative expression. The initial promise of the German
cinema, projected during the early ' 2OS in a number of films of a hioh
order of excellence-!^ Last Laugh, Variety, Siegfried, KriemU&s
Revenge Dr. Mabuse, The Golem, Secrets of the Soul, The Street,
Vamna, Lubitsch's The Loves of Pharaoh and Sumurun, Caligari,
Buchowetzki's Damon, etc.- wa s forced to remain unfulfilled the
German onema, the first important one to develop on the Euro'pean
continent, had already fallen into a condition of premature decay at
least five years before Hitler came into power. By 1933 little was left
of it to be destroyed by the Nazis, and it is said that their use of the
Him tor purposes of war propaganda has proved singularly dull in-
effective and beneath the standards of the lowest American commer-
cialism.
In the U.S.S.R.-the only country that can boast a film university-
the picture is almost as dismal. In 1925 Eisenstein's Potaakm marked
the beginning of the golden age of the Soviet cinema. This epochal
nlm was to Soviet film art what Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was
to the cinema in general: the first major creative achievement. In the
subsequent five years there emerged in the Workers' and Peasants'
Republic at least three directors of extraordinary creative ability-
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko-
and there appeared, both by them and by their students and followers
at least a dozen other films-Tew Days That Shook the World Old
and New, The End of St. Petersburg, Mother, Storm over Asia r
Arsenal, Earth, A Fragment of an Empire, The New Babylon, Old Si-
beria, China Express, Turk-Sib, and others-which collectively repre-
sent the greatest advance in the field of cinematic art since the master-
pieces of David Wark Griffith. Sometime around 1930, this torrential
Russian outburst of creativity began to slacken. Today, a mere decade
after the production of Potemkin, it is a matter of common observa-
tion that Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, though alive and in
excellent health, have practically stopped producing films in the land
of the Soviets. Not a single other Russian director has arisen who even
remotely approaches any one of these three in originality and power,
and the best that contemporary Soviet production can offer may be
seen in such meager tripe as The Youth of Maxim and in such mere-
tricious or hopelessly ordinary films as Three Songs about Lenin,
Petersburg Nights and the much vaunted Chapayev. Whatever the
SEYMOUR STERN
7 8
reasons, the fact remains that film art in any large and ample sense of
the term is now a thing of the past, perhaps also of the future, in the
Soviet Republic. But it is not a thing of the present there.
Casting a swift eye across the rest of Europe, we see nothing in the
form of significant creative film work that deserves even passing no-
tice. The commercial cinemas of England and the Continent continue
to grind out their heavy-handed imitations of the standardized Holly-
wood program product. Up to a few years ago, this dreary spectacle
was relieved on occasion by isolated French productions (not to
mention the German art cinema at the height of its glory) of a definite
creative caliber F/iV Terrae, The Fall of the House of Usher, David
Golder, The Little Match Girl, Faces of Children, Tragedy of the
Street, Foil de Carotte, etc. and by the enthusiastic constructive ac-
tivity of the English film societies and film magazines. But today, no
alternatives to the market junk of the big commercial European film
companies gladden the eye. The French experimental cinema has
been dead for at least three years; no single picture equal in aesthetic
merit or in sincerity of conception to The Passion of Joan of Arc, or
to the earlier Crainquebille, has been put forth in France or elsewhere
on the Continent; no spectacle of a dignity and significance remotely
comparable to that of the early Monna Vanna, the greatest of all
European mass films, has even been attempted within the past five
years; Rene Clair, who at best is absurdly overrated, has long de-
generated into a formula; and the film-art movement of England,
which barely managed to summon up enough energy two years ago
to register a feeble and belated protest against Upton Sinclair's de-
struction of Eisenstein's Mexican film, 1 today is all but a pleasant
memory of yesteryear. In a word, while the European film industries
continue uninterruptedly with their programs of popular drivel and
their desperate duplications of Hollywood, the European cinema as a
creative force in Western civilization is utterly and hopelessly dead.
If we turn to the United States, we may possibly expect to find a
1 For the benefit of readers not familiar with the details of Eisenstein's Mexi-
can film: The film epic of Mexico originally known as "Que Viva Mexico!"
was privately financed by Mr. and Mrs. Upton Sinclair and a few of their
friends during the Russian director's sojourn in America in 1931-32. After the
production was completed, Sinclair had the entire negative of 232,000 feet
edited, under his own supervision, by an independent commercial producer.
Eisenstein's original intention was ignored, the original conception of "Que
Viva Mexico!" hopelessly distorted, and the negative indiscriminately mutilated.
Sinclair s handiwork was released as Thunder over Mexico. The outrage was
vigorously protested by radicals, intellectuals and art lovers everywhere; in
Mexico, Sinclair's market version was banned after threat of a general strike
by Mexican labor. The original negative, however, has not yet been saved.
I his catastrophe definitely marks die end of a long period of splendidly
creative film work throughout the wotld.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 79
very different state of affairs here. America, after all, is the birthplace
of the motion picture; it was America that produced Griffith, the
first creative force in this medium. But we are slated to receive a great
disappointment if we entertain any notions that the American cinema,
creatively considered, is in a better condition than the current Euro-
pean or Soviet cinema. Griffith has ceased to be the "dominant mind"
(as Gilbert Seldes once called him), i.e., the single major creative in-
fluence, of the American screen, after twenty years of unchallenged
ascendancy; Stroheim, for all his titanic labors on Greed, today
struggles for dictatorship; and the original crowd of cloak-and-suit
manufacturers who gained possession of the industry in its pioneer
days before it had half a chance to realize a fraction of the creative
aims and functions envisioned for it by its early enthusiasts are more
solidly in the saddle of power than ever before. It is worse today be-
cause now they have the big bankers behind them, who lend financial
and strategic support to their position. Their regimentation of Holly-
wood, of those working on their payrolls, has been complete; they
have successfully suppressed any single creative mind that might get
out of hand and attempt to use the cinema according to some other,
possibly more civilized, conception than their own. It is their tradi-
tion of film making, their interpretation of what the public wants,
their tastes and standards that have triumphed. Except for a handful
of intelligent but futile subproducers, they have peopled their studios,
from executive office to prop department, with their own kind.
As the special concern of this essay is with the American rather
than with the world cinema, it will be worth while to examine more
closely the present condition of the medium in this country and to
make a sweeping survey of the causes which have led to its debase-
ment.
Even a superficial inspection of contemporary American cinema
reveals certain inescapable features. First of all, no conceivable mental
gymnastics can lead one to imagine that a film art worthy of the name
exists here today. Every consistent student of the motion picture
knows that the present period of American cinema represents a dis-
tinct degeneration from the period dominated by Griffith. Between
The Birth of a Nation (1915) and JW* Life Wonderful? (Griffith's
last important picture, released in 1925), there appeared a number of
works of major value Intolerance^ Broken "Blossoms, America, Stro-
heim's Greed to which there are not even near-counterparts today.
These remain unrivaled save by the grand masterpieces of the silent
Soviet cinema possibly also, with reservations, by a few isolated in-
dependent productions such as Murnau's Tabu. Already five years
before the advent of the talk film, a rank misconception of the nature
80 SEYMOUR STERN
of film montage 2 had gained ascendancy over the formal creative
experimentations of Griffith, and when Isn't Life Wonderful? ap-
pearedI consider it the last serious creative film work to have been
done in the United States it failed at the box office; though it con-
tained superficially popular elements, its subtly formalized treatment
of the material could not compete with the smooth, brilliant and
highly polished surface finish of such uncinematic bits of persiflage as
Lubitsch's sex comedies (how inferior, by the way, to his fine film
work in Germany), or with such pseudoartistic concoctions as Mur-
nau's Sunrise and King Vidor's The Crowd.
After 1925 Griffith's decline was rapid and complete. His elemental,
but exciting and dramatically adequate, formal methods were super-
seded, first by the dubious camera tricks which marred even the best
of the German films and which inevitably captured the fancy of the
Hollywood people, who used the new "foreign" devices to spice up
their stereotyped product; and a short time later by the great Russian
silent films, where his methods of photography and cutting were
realized to the nth degree and developed, at least in some instances,
into entirely new forms. Since Griffith's decline as the foremost
American director, it is a simple matter to trace the progressive artistic
degradation of the American film. Unfortunately, space does not
permit of such details as would make a review of this process dramat-
ically exciting to the film student. Six months ago Seldes informed
the readers of Scribner's magazine that in the past five years, i.e., since
the inception of the talk film, not a single picture of the highest order
of importance had been produced in the United States. If to this
statement be added the fact that Griffith's style form (the first in the
history of the cinema) has not been supplanted here by any other
equally potent formal development, but has merely been followed by
a strictly utilitarian, cut-and-dried technique, of doubtful aesthetic
value and which for the most part does not belong to the medium,
the creative bankruptcy of the latter can be duly estimated.
However, this condition is neither freakish nor ephemeral, as may
be the case at present in Russia, nor is it a mere temporary setback
to a normally abundant artistic growth. Its roots, I believe, are fixed
fast in the subsoil of the American screen world in the caliber of
v 2 Montage: For .the benefit of readers to whom this term is new, it will
suffice to define it here as the formative creation, through the agency of
lm cutting, of the movements and rhythms of the photographed film and
their organization into a continuity pattern. The creative act, or process, of
film montage is the very essence of cinematic art^In Hollywood the term has
been characteristically distorted to mean something to which it has absolutely
no relation i.e., a short transitional or connective sequence consisting of a
rapid jumble of trick shots photographed from unusual angles.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 8 1
personality that prevails among the film makers themselves, and ulti-
mately, of course, in the mentality of American audiences. Simply
stated, the fundamental cause amounts to the failure of the American
film people to apprehend the real powers, capacities and resources
of the cinema, beyond those necessary to a standardized, straight-
forward narrative technique. Their failure may be partially explained
in that the majority of them, particularly the directors, cameramen
and executives, are not, and have never been, essentially of the
cinema. Essentially they are vaudevillians, stage people, circus
people, manufacturing people, shrewd merchants, but not, except in
a small number of instances, people who were "born to the element."
It is certainly significant that they refer to themselves as "showmen,"
and to the cinema as the "show business." For while they have man-
aged the mechanical apparatus with professional skill, the technical
and artistic culture of the film, its revolutionary traditions, its un-
touched creative capacities, its inherent potentialities as a thing freed
from theater, from painting and from literature these have all es-
caped them, the very issues implicit in these phases of cinema remain-
ing as foreign to their experience as a book of Chinese verse. Thus, it
is no wonder that every new Russian or German or French film of
creative significance takes them by surprise, sweeps them off their
feet, dazzles, frightens them; they had never suspected these new
forms, these fresh, yet easily conceivable ways of picturizing content,
these new patterns of photographic style and filmic continuity. A
Potemkin, a Ten Days That Shook the World,, a Passion of Joan of
Arc, a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Tisse's photographic work on "Qne
Viva Mexico!" such products of creative ingenuity and experimental
daring shock and bewilder the Hollywood practitioners who, with,
or perhaps despite, their wealth of resources and studio machinery,
have not managed to conceive a single new form of montage relation-
ships in all the years that have passed since Intolerance. The industry's
one experiment along these lines was the Fox film The Power and the
Glory (1933). In spite of the solemnity of certain critics who praised
it, this picture was a sadly half-baked attempt to dramatize the retro-
spect of a man's life by projecting its salient episodes in nondnono-
logical order a departure from the simple, straight-line structure of
traditional American continuity, which amounted to nothing more
than Fejos' The Last Moment in a new framework, with two or three
sequences placed "out of order"' (as the Fox people explained it) to
lend "novelty" to the retrospect. In itself this device was merely one
of half a dozen radical measures of the same category which Griffith
invented as far back as 1916 when he designed Intolerance on four
parallel lines of sectional flashbacks and united the separate climaxes
82 SEYMOUR STERN
in a single gigantic filmic rhythm. The industry's film, made by pro-
fessional experts, failed. The juggling around of the retrospect epi-
sodes was not dramatically sagacious or psychologically imperative;
on the screen it merely demonstrated what had been in the minds of
its creators from the firsta pointless, and somewhat vulgar, novelty.
But Intolerance, a work achieved independently of the American
film industry, was no mere showman's novelty. Conceived and ex-
ecuted as a creative experiment, it projected a system of image rela-
tionshipsrhythm and counterpoint, present action and retrospect,
detail and totality, close-up and perspective in a grand architectonic
design which became, under Griffith's direction, a cinematic fugue.
Yet this monumental work, the supreme masterpiece of the American
screen, dates back practically twenty years when the movies were
"in their infancy." How can it be maintained, as it is today by a few
misguided critics and intellectuals, that the American film has ad-
vanced as an art form when in the interim it has not dared one-tenth
as much as this? The point is, of course, that it has not only not ad-
vanced, it has definitely retrogressed. For in the beginning there was
Griffith; but today what is there? Standardized routine continuity;
standardized photography; standardized laboratory process; mock
realism; artificial landscapes; a submergence per formula of all pic-
torial elements inherent in any given story; and, as a crowning feature
of Hollywood professionalism, the trick transitional or connective
sequence, with standardized "montage" by Vorkapich a sample of
the "influence" of Soviet film technique on American film pro-
duction!
It is an unalterable principle of aesthetic criticism that no art ac-
tually progresses except as it learns to express itself in its own native
terms. On this basis, the American screen, creatively viewed, is hardly
entitled to the grandiose claims of "progress" which its publicity de-
partments and its deluded magnates are continually making for it.
"No new form of art," writes Fletcher, "has ever been brought into
the world under such favorable circumstances as has the film; and no
new form of art has so little justified its claim to be ranked as an art at
all. That is the extraordinary paradox that lies at the root of all dis-
cussion of cinema ait." At any rate, no art has ever been so heavily
financed; but to what advantage even at its experimental best? David
Copper field? This embarrassingly overrated film was neither fish nor
fowl; (i) it was only middling Dickens, and (2) it was decidedly
poor cinema. The hopeless state of film criticism in this country is
beautifully demonstrated by the acclaim with which this picture was
received in the more unsophisticated intellectual circles. Crime with-
out Passion? Can this piece-so far superior to the Hollywood prod-
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 83
uct, yet so far beneath even the minor achievements of world cinema
-possibly be admitted as a "contribution"? 3 Our Daily Bread? Was it
not a shame to waste this excellent title? In brief, the best "bold," "au-
dacious," "different," "experimental" attempts that Hollywood dares
to offer are easily put to shame by a Soviet documentary film, a Ger-
man legend picture, a French surrealiste work. It cannot be other-
wise. For to their ignorance on a multitude of intellectual and artistic
matters the Hollywood film people add ignorance of the powers and
capacities of their own medium; to a superficial knowledge of elemen-
tary film technique even the best of them fail to apply a willingness
to experiment. A few camera tricks, some very good photography
and lighting in their own native style, a vague notion that montage
means "trick transitions" or "a lot of quick cuts"-this is the full ex-
tent both of the knowledge and of the practice, by Hollywood, of
cinema as art.
All this leads to the conclusion that in at least one respect the Holly-
wood people have scored a major victory. One traditional intention,
heroically sustained since the earliest days of the film industry, has
been realized at last with a literalness and a consistency that are
positively breathtaking. This is the age-old dream of the Hollywood
movie crowd, executives and directors alike, to make the screen the
living duplicate of the stage. Stupendous triumph! No longer need
they wrestle with the stringent dynamic exigencies of the silent,
black-and-white film! Today the talk film, color film, depth film
make feasible a literal, a devastatingly absolute transplantation of the
stage onto the screen, andthink of it! Broadway can be brought to
Middletown! This was the dream, the one serious longing of the
movie magnates (apart from money), that animated all their efforts
in the earliest days, that later caused them to hire renowned stage
directors in the face of Griffith's repeated demonstrations of the fu-
ture of the motion picture along native lines of development. But
Griffith's films, which should have taught them everything, taught
them nothing beyond elementary lessons in the technique of climax
construction the best things in his films were too subtle and delicate;
they were not adaptable to story treatment of a cheaper fiber. True,
the movie people stood in awe of The Birth of a Nation (they have
maintained a decent respect for it down the years principally because
3 The Informer? Much was heard through the industry in praise of this film;
the experts had forgotten, or probably had never known, Grime's The Street,
the San Francisco sequences of Greed. Though unquestionably the most dis-
tinguished American picture of the current year, it was nevertheless not in any
degree the masterpiece that critics, "experts" and newcomers to the screen im-
agined it, and after several viewings one wondered whether the director's acci-
dental moment of filmic consciousness could be repeated.
84 SEYMOUR STERN
of the eighteen million, dollars' profit which it brought in), but from
Griffith's other important pictures, especially those (Intolerance and
Broken Blossoms) from which they should have taken a cue as to the
further development of film technique, they learned exactly nothing.
Even the more obvious mechanical innovations which came in abun-
dance from Griffith in the earlier days were slow in penetrating. Thus,
they saw Intolerance, with its myriad moving-camera shots, yet they
did not see it; five years later, when the German films took them by
storm, they became aware of the moving camera, which they
promptly hailed as a German invention! 4 This slowness in utilizing
new cinematic devices has not been a characteristic of American film
activity during the past five years. A multitude of effective innova-
tions are in use today. But their use is appallingly superficial; they
are surface ornaments of the film. No revolutionary organic change
has come into the humdrum technique of film production in America.
Of course, underlying this barbarous indifference to the evolution
of the motion picture along its only legitimate path has always been
Hollywood's notorious obsession with the idea of turning the screen
into a living replica of the stage. Already in 1921, only five years
after the release of Intolerance, the Hollywood crowd was con-
sciously striving to break away from any and all forms of film mon-
tage that tended to shorten the individual shot and extend the dynam-
ics of the shot into complex forms of shot relationship. Griffith's
use of overtone in Broken Blossoms (anticipating Eisenstein and Pu-
dovkin by nearly ten years) meant as little to them as if it had never
existed. This was not the sort of evolution the movie magnates had in
mind when they screamed to the public about the "progress" of the in-
dustry. The kind of progress they meant was precisely the progres-
sive approximation of film technique to the technique of the speaking
stage. Thus, though Griffith had created thousands of separate shots in
The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (despite the immense number
of subtitles, both these pictures are impeccable models of continuity
pattern and filmic rhythm), the movie crowd of the 'zos, as if ani-
4 Readers not familiar with the history of the American film industry may
find it difficult to appreciate this delicious bit of irony. The joke consists in
Griffith's introduction of advanced styles of moving-camera shots in the
Babylonian and modern episodes of Intolerance, produced in 1916. Hollywood,
with the wealth of a kingdom behind it, ignored this new device by the leading
American director and waited for five years until the Germans, with practi-
cally no production money to speak of, copied the device a d nauseam and sent
it back under the banner of German studio craftsmanship! The American pro-
ducers thereupon reproached their directors for not having thought of it first
themselves! This is only one of a thousand examples of that phenomenal
opaqueness which has characterized the "picture minds" of the professional
Hollywood experts from the first days of the industry to the present.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 85
mated by a perverse instinct, argued that this basis of film construc-
tion was wrong. Why mount the separate elements of a movement in a
series of related images when you can show the movement in its en-
tirety in one or two general shots? Rhythm? Rhythm? That's really
Art, isn't it? Then why bother with it? Their reasoning, such as it was,
ran very much along this line. The result was-the lengthening of the
individual shot on the screen nearly a decade before the actual inven-
tion of the talk film. Almost any American production during the pe-
riod of the 19205, if examined today, will testify to this progressive
degeneration in continuity form (since the time of Griffith's major
film work), with its corresponding loss in dramatic vitality. The
Hollywood people went blithely ahead, holding the shot on the
screen immeasurably longer than Griffith's incorruptible cinematic
instinct had ever allowed him to hold it even in his bad pictures, and
through this practice, utterly devastating in its effect on the formal
principles established by Griffith, other idiocies set in. The most
glaring of these was the reduction to a minimum of the number of
detail shots; attention to significant detail, which is a characteristic of
all true creative expression, is to this day consistently avoided in
Hollywood pictures. Second: the elimination of practically all close-
ups except those featuring the star; it ought to be plain to everyone
that a voluptuous concentration on the superficial glamour of the
featured players of a film is hardly provocative of an intelligent re-
sponse. Third: an extensive, and frequently wholesale, substitution
of the lap dissolve for the direct cut in almost every American film
from 1925 down to the present. No technical knowledge is required
to realize that when an endless number of shots "melt" (dissolve) into
each other in slow "mixes," without regard to the tempo of the action
in each shot, the rhythm of the continuity is bound to suffer. But
rhythm, which is the moving spirit of Art, is a minus quantity in
Hollywood. Its existence has hardly been suspected by the experts.
Fourth: increased use of the trick shot for its own sake to compensate
(at intervals) for the slowing down of the cutting pace of the picture.
In contrast, note the work of two stylists, Griffith and Stroheim. Note
the extremely sparing, and then very cunning, use of any kind of
trick shot in Griffith's films; the practically complete absence of trick
shots in Greed. Montage, which merely means the system of relation-
ship between the shots, is practically canceled out of existence when
the continuity is dominated by trick shots. In short, what happened
may be summed up as a general alteration of the technique of picture
making to meet the requirements of the u make-the-screen-like-the-
stage" idea, whiqh demanded smoothness in place of dynamics, sur-
face finish in place of significant emphasis, clever transitional "effects"
86 SEYMOUR STERN
in place of organic structural development of the whole continuity.
By 1930, the mechanical realization of the talk film invention re-
lieved the Hollywood people of the burdensome necessity of creating
silent talk films through subtitles and sustained shots, as they had been
doing for years during the "silent era." Arrival of the apparatus-
they had been waiting for it eagerly since the beginning was merely
a signal to adjust themselves from what had been talk films in effect
to films that talked in actuality: the "revolution," as the publicity de-
partments termed it, was a quite bloodless and easy affair because
in reality it was no revolution at all! In one of the early talkies, The
Letter, single shots of characters speaking run on the screen for four
and five minutes at a time. This was a great step "ahead"; in the silent
days it would have been necessary to intercut these same shots with
at least two or three subtitles, and none of the shots would have
lasted on the screen for more than about one minute (a long time as
screen action goes). Now, thanks to actual speech, it was possible to
reduce both camera and cutting to their minimum functionsthe
nearest step yet made toward their complete eradication. Today, five
years after the appearance of the invention, the length of the average
shot in the average Hollywood picture has been slightly shortened
again cutting is slightly more frequent. But by no stretch of the
imagination can it be held that, in making a picture under Hollywood
studio restrictions (other limitations aside), it is either feasible or per-
missible for a director to mount a film with emphasis on the cutting
pace or with subordination of dialogue to continuity pattern and
filmic rhythm. On the eve of the final victory (i.e., perfection of the
three-dimensional film) of the "make-the-screen-like-the-stage" idea,
these lines by Gilbert Seldes, written many years ago, have a re-
sounding pertinence:
It ought to have been clear to everyone that the alliance between the
stage and the screen was a mistake. It had actually failed. But its effect
persisted. This muddle-headed idea that because the screen could use
the material and the people of the stage, it was at its best when doing so,
is responsible for the retarded development of the movie in America,
giving it, at the age of twenty-five, the mentality of a child of six. . . .
Like a child brought up in a dark room, it shrank from the light, like a
cripple it preferred not to move. And light and movement are its life. 5
The Hollywood people have never been impressed by such stric-
tures. They cannot conceive of taking Film seriously, that is, as Art,
and there is something faintly ironical in the fact that the volumes
5 The Movies and the Talkies, p. 54.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 87
of analytical material which have been written on the motion pic-
ture during the past twenty years have completely escaped them.
Today, with the three-dimensional film practically ready for use,
they await its arrival with something akin to the excitement of a
child who expects a new toy. This statement by Gregg Toland, one
of the leading cameramen of Hollywood, may be taken as represent-
ative of the attitude of the entire industry:
It will mean that we will not need so many close-ups in our movies
as we use today ['<?]. Now we must bring the camera close to the face
of the actor to show the important emotions. But with the actors stand-
ing out clearly and roundly, as in our three-dimensional experiments, we
can keep our camera back and follow them, like on a stage, and each
motion will be clearly recorded, 6
The statement would be complete had he added that their en-
thusiasm for the three-dimensional film has nothing whatever to
do with the possibilities of its amplifying the resources of film mon-
tage, but is due solely to the realization that this invention will
literally fulfill the American producers' dream of making the screen
resemble the stage to the nth degree of similitude.
After the foregoing rather wholesale condemnation of the Amer-
ican cinema, it would seem only fair and an evidence of plain com-
mon sense to add a word of appraisal of the Hollywood entertain-
ment film as such i.e., not as serious art; in other words, to give the
devil his due. If it is true that Hollywood as an institution is the
enemy of real art, of culture per se, it is also true that, purely as a
popular entertainment catering to an inevitably shallow vein of sen-
timent, the Hollywood product during the past five or six years
has undergone a great improvement. (Incidentally, this improve-
ment has come about wholly within the industry itself and in. spite
of the repressive influence of those perennial pests, the Church and
the censor boards, which continue to have a deplorable effect on
film making in this country.) Taken for what it is, the American
entertainment film stands today as the best of its kind in the world.
Compare the average Hollywood picture with the average European
program product; the superiority of the former is overwhelming
and beyond dispute. Of course, this may be merely another way of
saying that one brand of poison is better than other brands of the
same poison; but, however you choose to look at it, the fact remains
that the Hollywood movie is immeasurably superior to its many
imitations throughout the world. True, the pretentious vacuities
6 New York Times, January 20, 1955. Italics mine.
88 SEYMOUR STERN
of Josef "von" Sternberg and the lumbering theatrics of Cecil B.
De Mille are still here; but over and against these, the more modern
type of picture represents a new set of values that is greatly in ad-
vance of the formulas of the older showmen.
The brilliant advances in surface finish and in swiftness, economy,
and ingenuity of plot that have been made since the advent of the
talkie are a matter of striking observation. These are the qualities
thanks to which the American entertainment film justly outshines
its rivals on the world market. It possesses most of the good points
of any fine manufactured product, such as a car, a refrigerator or
an aluminum utensil. It is efficiently contrived and put together;
it fits its purpose as a popular emotional excitant, just as these arti-
cles fulfill a universal utility, and, like these, it possesses immense,
if superficial, physical attractiveness. 7 A beautiful example of a com-
mon program picture that hits the high-water mark of this type of
mechanical excellence was The Mystery Woman, produced by
Fox Films early in 1935. The story of this film was the usual slick
affair devised out of a most plausible improbability and lubricated
throughout by a perfectly ubiquitous cleverness. Hundreds of such
products are turned out of the Hollywood factories. At best these'
pictures manifest a vigilant attention to dramatic efficacy, which,
however, more often than not degenerates into the mere opportun-
ism of melodrama but which at least has the minimum virtue of
keeping audiences awake. Like all popular art, much vitality, much
spontaneous dash and animation, together with much that is meretri-
cious and hackneyed, goes into the content of these films; like all
popular art, they belong to "the people." As such they are naturally
full of a primitive optimism; not infrequently, as in films of the type
of Seventh Heaven and Life Begins, they seem almost grotesque in
their amiable acceptance of the bitterest tragedies. Such attitudes,
however, are quite in keeping with the dominant quality of the
Hollywood product, surface finish i.e., the sensuous lushness with
which each scene is pictorially realized. The seductive glamour of
physical objects in these films clothes, furniture, automobiles, draw-
ing rooms, not to mention the complexion and figures of the screen
7 The strictly utilitarian function of the Hollywood "entertainment" film
cannot be sufficiently emphasized. Consider, for example, the increasing output
of propaganda pictures for war and fascism. These pictures, glorifying the
Army, the Navy, the gangster-police, the right of the individual to acquire
wealth through the exploitation of others, etc., may be so much rubbish, cul-
turally speaking, but they are supremely effective in sustaining the prestige of
the ruling class at times when the American system speeds to ruin. Like the
Church, Hollywood serves its prescribed utilitarian mission in the interests of
wealth, war and the psychological enslavement of the populace.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART g ?
stars-is considered the supreme triumph of Hollywood photogra-
phers and laboratories. Like refrigerators, automobiles and kitchen
utensils, their product must "sell."
In this regard arises the question of whether or not the superficial
progress of the Hollywood film warrants a shift in critical attitude.
It is the fashion nowadays, especially among the young intellectuals
who write for the liberal magazines, to temporize agreeably with
current film production, and they have even managed to discover
a number of self-styled "classics" in the course of their new rapport
with the industry. Thus, we find them acclaiming a picture like
It Happened One Night as a "classic of the American screen. 91 It
Happened One Night was, in effect, a delightfully spontaneous and
charming picture, not without its priceless moments of humor.
However, it is absolutely certain that it will not be remembered
five years hence; as comedy, neither the film nor the mind behind it
transcended the framework of strictly popular values. This fact
alone, as every developed critic knows, is sufficient to damn any
effort that becomes a candidate for the title of a work of art. But the
acclaim which this and similar pictures receive from the intellectuals
is painful evidence of the laxness and vague-mindedness of American
film criticism. Even the most picture-wise of the New York news-
paper critics (usually excepting Andre Sennwald), who ordinarily
may be expected to know better, take a cue from the bright boys
of the liberal press; it is not uncommon to find them writing sol-
emnly about the "style" of such directors as Milestone, Sternberg,
Capra, Boleslavsky, Le Roy, Cukor, King Vidor, etc., as if there
were any fundamental distinctions to personalize the single stand-
ardized style common to all of them, or about some good routine
program film as if it were a fresh, new, singular contribution to Film
Art, flouting the formulas and conventions of popular, entertain-
ment. This practice is tantamount to writing profound critical essays
about the "style" of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Elinor Glyn, Rex
Beach and Harold Bell Wright; yet it does not seem to disturb the
film critics. Despite Vachel Lindsay and Gilbert Seldes, motion
picture criticism has never succeeded in becoming a vital branch, of
American letters; but it seems to me on a lower level today than it
was ten or even fifteen years ago.
In the last analysis, the whole issue comes down to this: Putting
aside the individual achievements of Griffith and the single master-
piece of Stroheim, the American cinema of the past two decades has
made no fundamental progress. None of its advances, except along
strictly mechanical lines, has been of real significance; none of the
basic viewpoints of its practitioners toward the making of motion
<)O SEYMOUR STERN
pictures has changed or progressed in any real sense. Twenty years
after the capital American achievements in the realm of cinematic
art Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation the Hollywood film
industry remains, as in the far-gone days of the nickelodeons, the
foe of real art, the retarder of real cinematic progress in short, the
greatest single retroactive, anticultural influence in the world today.
Projected in the light of a noble conception of Film Art, the best
Hollywood products of our time are poor and contemptible things;
in them there are no horizons, no imaginative heights, no passion,
no ecstasy. Even in their "serious" moments, they are essentially
trivial, ordinary, banal like the businessmen who produce, direct
and photograph them, and like the masses who, hypnotized by
Hollywood surface finish, give the businessmen ample reason to
continue production along the same lines. In preparing a subject
for the screen, every idea, every situation, has to be "adapted," i.e.,
translated into the visual and dynamic terms of Film. But in Holly-
wood, this process of screen adaptation means something else be-
sides: It means the reduction of every story to the lowest level of
human intelligence, the assimilation of every idea to the spirit and
grain of the universal Average Man. This is merely another way
of saying that Hollywood film production automatically implies the
suppression of creative imagination, the elimination of any and all
possible moments of poetry in any given subject, and an enforced
standardization of the style of the individual director, an obliteration
of his temperament, to meet the requirements of popular taste. The
outcome of this factory process, through which every subject is
put, may be, and frequently is, more charming, more "entertaining,"
than description of the process itself would indicate. But even at its
best, the Hollywood product invariably emerges from the factory
a negative quantity. A major agency of expression, it has neither
enriched human life nor added one jot to the development of human
consciousness. It has not presented a single fresh perspective of the
world, nor projected a single significant vision of man and his des-
tiny (the one American eifort in this direction, Intolerance, dates
back two decades). In brief, except in the case of Griffith, the
American screen has not contributed to the general enlightenment of
the human race in any degree commensurate with its powers to do so.
In place of this culture, it has offered what the movie merchants call
"sensational show values" the half-truths, the superstitions, the
vapid and sensual daydreams of the crowd.
It goes without saying that these severe strictures are, and have
been, repeated ad nauseam^ that they are sadly and brutally obvious.
Certain alarming symptoms of contemporary film criticism, together
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 91
with the increasing indifference to higher values of the more intelli-
gent sections of the film-going public, necessitate a reiteration of the
facts. The real danger is that the intelligent minority audiences, for
want of better filmic nourishment, will come to reject anything
better than the current movie fare of tinsel and candied pseudo art.
Then the prostitution of taste will be complete.
One question remains: What, if anything, can be done to regen-
erate this wayward behemoth, the American cinema? Any and all
suggestions are apt to be feeble in view of the really formidable
obstacles that beset the problem. In spite of the best possible reme-
dies, the fact must not be lost sight of that control of the film
industry proper is still vested in the present crowd and that the
vacuous entertainment film will continue to be produced in immense
quantities for a long time to come. Nevertheless, one or two radical
innovations should be obvious:
1. Above everything else, a university of the cinema, patterned
after the one in Moscow but with emphasis on the formal and
aesthetic problems of the motion picture, should definitely be estab-
lished here. It is a trifle absurd to consider that the Soviet Union, a
new nation confronted with a thousand and one crucial problems
involving its very survival as a society, should be the only country
in the world today that can boast of an institution of film culture,
while in the United States, where the cinema as art received its
original impetus, nothing exists except a few courses of doubtful
value in "cinematography" in universities of Southern California
and a highly commercialized course in "scenario writing" in a New
York university. An American film university should be subsidized
by the government in the interests of America's foremost art. The
courses should be completely divorced from the exigencies of com-
mercial film production, and under no circumstances, save at the
peril of the university's future, should a single magnate, executive,
supervisor or producer from the Hollywood film industry be per-
mitted to be a member of the board of trustees or perform any
function whatever unless it be that of a voluntary benefactor. As a
symbol of the university's educational direction and of its attitude
toward Film as a cultural medium, a statue of Griffith should dom-
inate the main foyer.
2. A Theater of the Cinema should be established in at least every
large city of the United States. Here the great films of all countries
and of all periods should be projected in constant revivals. Each
theater should have a library of the cinema, consisting of well-
preserved prints of old films and also of literature on the motion
picture. To obviate the danger of control by ignorant distributors
92 SEYMOUR STERN
and petty racketeers, as happened with several of the film-arts guild
organizations five or six years ago, all the theaters throughout the
country should be controlled by a central theater in New York
City, in the same manner as the branches of a great metropolitan
library. A nationwide system of exhibition centers of this nature
would solve the distribution problem for minority audiences who
are fed up with the standard entertainment product.
3. Entirely apart from the Theater of the Cinema, the film-art
movement itself should be revived. There should be a resurrection
of film societies for purposes of discussion of the nature and destiny
of the cinema, just as there are music clubs, Dickens societies, etc.
The chief purpose of these clubs, however, will be to heighten
interest in the exhibition of classics and experimental films at the
theaters of the cinema. Through these organizations, thousands of
new individuals will be attracted to Film Art. All the organizations
together should issue a magazine, along the lines of Experimental
Cinema, for the twofold purpose of making propaganda for the
film-art movement and publishing critical and technical articles of
value.
4. Independent creative film production should be subsidized by
the government as the logical fruition of its support of the film
university. The tragic exclusion from the industry of thousands of
talented young men and women all over the country in favor of
distinctly inferior and even degenerate talent should give the gov-
ernment pause. The money for these projects can be obtained by
levying a culture tax on all members of the Hollywood film industry
receiving salaries of $100 a week and over.
5. A nationwide campaign should be organized, using the screen
itself as the principal instrument of propaganda, against censorship
of the motion picture by the Church and the censor boards. The
American film will never become a mature art form until its cham-
pions succeed in freeing it from these ancient pests. Until this is
done, it will be useless further to discuss the question of "what is
wrong with the movies."
A concluding word: I am fully aware that this program for the
regeneration of the American screen is hopelessly ideal and that it
has not one chance in a million of being realized here for at least a
century to come. I offer it, nevertheless, because only in this light
can we see what is wrong with and about our greatest art. The
practical solutions of practical men have all inevitably failed; they
have been concerned with immediate stopgaps and surface reforms,
not with fundamental changes that really change. As with society
itself, so with the motion picture, the "practical" minds are the
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CINEMA AS ART 93
impractical ones; the shortest, easiest solution is the longest, hardest
solution. One Griffith is worth the whole tribe of movie magnates;
one Intolerance is worth all the "good" films Hollywood has ever
made. This is merely another way of saying that the only final
remedy for whatever ails any medium of human expression is a
creative remedy, not a moral or a social or a political remedy. When
this idea is fully understood by those who wish to "revolutionize"
the movie in this country, a real revolution will be possible; then,
and not before then, will the cinema become the glory, instead of
the pointless joke, of American civilization.
The
Mechanized
Muse
Margaret Kennedy
In this witty essay (published as a
P.E.N. Book by George Allen
& Unwin, Ltd., London, 1942)
Margaret Kennedy examines the
atmosphere in which scenarios are
created and the plight of the
screenwriter who is given books,
plays, biographies to adapt. It is
particularly frustrating, Miss Ken-
nedy notes, for the screenwriter
with aspirations of becoming a
"screen Keats" What emerges on
the screen is usually a far cry from
his original intention a situation
that could be remedied, she sug-
gests, by allowing the writer to
edit the film.
WNCE UPON a time, about fifteen years ago, the manufacturers and
salesmen of a particular patent collar stud met for their annual lunch-
eon at a famous London hotel. It was a genial gathering, for they had
brought their wives with them, and champagne cocktails were served
freely. The percentage of old acquaintance was high. Conversation
was animated, for Travelers know how to talk. Backs were slapped
and good stories were told in corners. Little wives simpered shyly;
big wives were graciously patronizing.
These people looked happy and they had sound reasons for being
94
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 95
so. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they wanted.
The Collar Stud, from which all blessings flowed, brooded over
them like a tribal totem. None of them was troubled by any doubts as
to the nature and purpose of a collar stud. They made it and they
sold it. It provided them with a job and a future, it paid rent, rates
and school bills, it put new three-pieces onto the backs of the little
wives and pearls round the necks of the big ones. All collar studs are
good and useful objects, and their own was the best on the market.
In the general hubbub the arrival of several queer-looking strangers
was at first overlooked. Later on everybody began to wonder who
they could be. For they seemed ill at ease and friendless. They drank
but did not talk, and stood eying their neighbors with a kind of suspi-
cious curiosity. Beside the dapper, eupeptic Collar Studs they looked
shabby and bilious. And they had a peevish expression which no re-
tailer would have found persuasivethe air of people who dislike
what they are doing and are far from sure of what they want.
After an interval they began to drift together into a little group.
They seemed to have met before, though they took little visible
pleasure in recognizing one another. Finding themselves thus stranded
in an alien kraal, they were forced into a kind of Stanley-Living-
stone cordiality and exchanged a few moody salutations. They mar-
veled to see themselves, and each other, where they were. No suspi-
cion had as yet crossed their minds that they must have got into the
wrong party. On the contrary, the entrance of a famous actress
strengthened their conviction that they had got into the right one.
Everybody stared at her, and nobody felt inclined to tell her that
she ought not to be there. For the Collar Studs, who had worshiped
her for years, were delighted to meet her and to have the privilege of
bringing her a cocktail. Besides, she gave nobody a chance to get in a
word edgewise . She picked out, at a glance, their Big Chief and told
him that his idea was simply marvelous. She was crazy about it. But did
he really think that the films, now that they had begun to talk, would
kill the stage?
"I'm afraid," he stammered, "that I can't . . ."
"You can't say what's going to happen? Oh, I know. Nobody can.
That's why this party is such a wonderful idea, with the entire film
world turned upside down and everything. Because the sooner we all
get together ... I mean, what is a talking film? A sort of photo-
graphed play? Because, in that case . . ."
At this point a well-known stage director appeared and took her
away, explaining that this was the wrong party. She went, with a show
of reluctance which delighted the Collar Studs.
"Why do I have to go? This is a lovely party. I'm sure it's nicer
96 MARGARET KENNEDY
than your party. They don't belong here either-" pointing to the
Stanley-Livingstone group, "and you don't make them come."
The director looked them over and recognized one or two faces.
He said, without much enthusiasm, "They don't. I must. They're
authors. ..."
He shepherded his morose flock upstairs and downstairs and along
corridors and round corners until they reached the right party, which
was indeed not nearly so nice. An act of hospitality was being com-
mitted, but nobody was quite sure by whom, or for what purpose.
Its totem was the Sound Film, which had recently burst upon the
world and placarded London with invitations to the public to SEE AND
HEAR their favorite stars. Most of the guests were strangers to one
another. Members of the upside-down film world were there, hoping
to be turned right way up by closer contact with the stage, with
authors, with anyone who might tell them what to do next. The stage
was there in the hope that this new portent might signify translation
rather than death. Authors were there because their agents had told
them to go.
As a totem, the Sound Film was neither so familiar nor so kindly
as the Collar Stud. It might be big with benefits but it was also a
menace and threatened ruin to numberless people. There was money
in it; everybody was sure of that, but they were sure of nothing else.
Even those who hoped to make it and sell it had no clear idea as to
its nature and purpose. They could scarcely have come to any agree-
ment as to what it ought to be.
It is wonderful that so many people should still be able to share the
optimism of Mr. Lambkin, in his prize poem:
When Science has discovered something more,
We shall be happier than we were before.
For Science is always showering down upon us these disconcerting
benefits, these miraculous implements, which we neither desire nor
deserve. And our attempts to make use of them, though sometimes
comic, are often grim.
On this occasion comedy prevailed. Science was offering a wonder-
ful baby, a Midas, an infant Hercules, to anyone who could improvise
a cradle large enough to hold it. None of the Arts felt inclined to
accept responsibility. The showmen, the purveyors of entertainment,
were ready enough to accept paternity and pay for its keep, but they
could not cradle it. Nor could they purvey something which did not
as yet exist The tools, only, existed. Nobody knew how it should be
cherished, nurtured and fed.
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 97
Nothing quite like this has ever happened before in the whole
history of Art. It is to be hoped that nothing like it will ever happen
again; but Science has grown so fond of presenting us with these un-
specified tools, means without an end, that further surprises of this
kind are more than likely. Development, in the past, has always fol-
lowed a reverse order. The inspiration, the idea, the desire to make a
pattern, has preceded the technical apparatus. The painter has devised
new methods, has experimented with new colors and surfaces, the
better to execute designs which are already in his head. Stages have
been enlarged and improved for the better performance of a drama
already in existence.
But in this case technical apparatus outran inspiration. Here was a
new medium of expression, a way of telling stories, of creating sus-
pense, exciting emotion, arousing both the intellect and the imagina-
tion; here was spectacle assisted by sound, music interpreted visually,
and drama set free from the limitations of the stage. But nobody felt
any impulse to make use of it. Cave men, scratching bison and deer
upon the rock, would have found little in a modern studio that they
could use. Shepherds, piping on their oaten reeds, would have made
sad work of most of the instruments in a Wagnerian orchestra. Peas-
ant mummers, bellowing St. George in a farmhouse kitchen, felt no
need of a curtain and a revolving stage. Yetcave man, shepherd and
peasant each had his own rough, primitive idea of what a satisfactory
drawing, or tune, or play, should be. As much can scarcely be said of
the first fabricators of sound films. They had no notion of what they
wanted to make. Nor had the public much notion of what it wanted
to see and hear. The artist and his audience were equally at a loss.
The unlimited possibilities of this new medium were in themselves
drawbacks which mitigated its value to Art. For all the arts grow
up from the soil, as it were, of their own limitations. In every medium
there must always be some things which the artist cannot do, and
some which are not worth doing. He works within these bounds.
And the sense of being unable to do certain things drives him ever
more deeply into the study of what is possible. It is a challenge, and
his response is to make a pattern. He invents a form, a shape, a charac-
ter, a design, which defeats the impossible by making it irrelevant.
Where nothing seems to be impossible it is difficult for form to
emerge.
Form, in Art, is constantly changing, as the tools improve and the
field widens. But it is always there, and always must be there, for
it is the very essence of the whole business. The fewer, the more
primitive, the tools, the more rigid the form; the more limited the
medium, the greater the compensation sought in pattern.
98 MARGARET KENNEDY
For twenty years the silent film, developing inside its inherent
limitations, had been making progress toward its own kind of form
and shape. Sound was denied to it; therefore its tendency was to
make sound irrelevant. Obliged to rely upon the eye alone, it was
exploring the field of visual experience and learning how to reject all
material which could not be treated visually. Captions were disap-
pearing. The picture was less and less liable to be interrupted by
printed placards telling the audience what was happening and what
the characters were saying to one another. A technique had been
evolved which could largely dispense with them. Actors emerged
who felt no need of speech. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, felt the
need of it so little that, when the sound film was invented, he
refused the new tool and continued, for many years, to act silently.
For him, as for all great artists, the limitation had become the
inspiration; the impossible was also the superfluous. Truth, for him,
was not to be found in speech.
A comparison of pictures made in 1906 with those made in 1926 will
immediately demonstrate how fast human beings were catching up
with the machine; how intelligence and imagination were getting to
work with a new tool. It is true that the mechanics also improves. The
pictures of 1926 do not wink and blink and jerk, as do those of 1906.
Better cameras, projectors, lighting and apparatus of all sorts had been
introduced. But the progress in the mechanical element is small
compared with the progress in the human element, in treatment and
cutting, in the ground covered by actors and directors. The actors
in the earliest pictures were ridiculous, not because they were badly
photographed, but because they did not understand the first prin-
ciples of screen acting. They were stage actors playing at dumb
crambo; at every turn they were hampered because they could not
speak. And they tried, by a violent multiplicity of gesture, to make
up for the dialogue which had been denied to them.
One of the earliest screen dramas, shown now as a museum piece,
contains a scene between a Roman Patrician and a Christian Maiden
who is awaiting martyrdom in the amphitheater. He wishes to per-
suade her to recant and marry him. Both parts were played by
skilled actors, artists on the three-dimensional stage. But their per-
formance would have disgraced a charade in the nursery.
He flings his hands out persuasively, a great many times.
She shakes her head vehemently and points upward.
He shrugs his shoulders.
She makes the Sign of the Cross.
He joins his hands in earnest entreaty.
THE MECHANIZED MUSE AQ
Again she shakes her head and points upward.
He takes to looking upward too.
He falls on his knees and begins to pat his own head, in order to
indicate that he desires immediate baptism.
She smiles and nods repeatedly.
The lions, to whom this tongue-tied pair were eventually thrown,
were far better screen actors because they felt no wish to talk,
Human beings were reduced to the level of Robinson Crusoe and
Man Friday, conversing by signs and pointing down their own
throats to show that they were hungry.
Yet we have often known that Charlie was hungry, though he
did not point down his own throat and no caption informed us of
the fact. Our fellow creatures tell us an infinite number of things
about themselves, without words and without Man Friday gestures,
had we but eyes to see. Hungry men do not invariably announce
that they starve, yet they can be recognized. So can lovers, any day
of the week. Direct verbal statements are crude and often mislead-
ing. Very few people reveal themselves in what they say. They are
not capable of defining their thoughts and feelings with any degree
of accuracy. Or, if they are, they generally prefer to keep their
mouths shut. A frightened man may speak bravely; it is only by
small involuntary gestures that he betrays himself. He yawns, not
because he is sleepy, but in a reflex action from nervous tension.
Little boys, going in to bat in a house match, yawn as they stroll
nonchalantly out across the pitch. The company assembled in a
dentist's waiting room may rustle the illustrated weeklies with out-
ward calm, but the silence is punctuated by enormous yawns.
Privates John Bates, Alexander Court and Michael Williams, grum-
bling, joking and arguing in undertones as they waited for day to
break over the field of Agincourt, may have had a great deal to say
for themselves, but nothing more eloquent than the yawns which
probably filled up the pauses.
In fact, all the brouhaha of the spoken word often obscures truth
instead of revealing it. And deaf people, who must rely upon their
eyes, are sometimes abnormally sensitive to the emotional atmos-
phere around them.
These were truths which the silent film had begun to explore in
the years between 1906 and 1926. It treated speech as something
superfluous. It concentrated upon all those other ways in which
humanity reveals itself. It asked the public to use its eyes, to develop
some of the extra visual sensibility of the deaf, and the pubEc was
beginning to respond.
100 MARGARET
Captions and clumsy symbolism were discarded as film acting
drew nearer to truth. In 1912 an innocent young girl was always
obliged to go about hugging an armful of lilies, at any rate in the
earlier sequences of the picture, in order that the audience might
know just exactly what sort of girl she was. If, on first catching
sight of the villain, she dropped these lilies, and if he was subse-
quently seen to trample on them, the public again knew what to
expect; nobody was surprised to see her, after a suitable time lapse,
wandering in the snow with a little shawled bundle in her arms. By
1926 these devices were out of date. They were no longer necessary,
because the acting was nearer to truth and audiences were quicker
in the uptake. Screen actresses had learned how to look, approxi-
mately, like inexperienced girls; the public was more ready to
recognize an unsophisticated girl when it saw one. Both had come to
realize that such a girl, even if she can speak, does not go about the
world loudly proclaiming her own inexperience. Far from it. She
is probably consumed by the ambition to be thought extremely
sophisticated, and it would be a great mistake to listen to the little
dear. Her conversation is intended to convince the world that she
is the Scarlet Woman. But her eyes, her mouth, her hands, her feet,
the majestic poise with which she conceals her inner uncertainties,
the little hops and skips into which she lapses when she is off her
guard these proclaim her for what she is.
After twenty years the art of the silent film was still only in its
infancy. It was still crude. But it was developing, and the response,
the awareness, of the public was developing too. Things easily per-
ceived and understood by the average film fan in 1926 would have
passed right over his head in 1912. Moreover this art had already
become, in some degree, esoteric. The average film fan could take
points which were imperceptible to people who seldom visted the
cinema.
^ In the early days, the dumb-crambo days, many intelligent, cul-
tivated, sensitive people rushed to the conclusion that art could
never emerge from moving pictures. Moved by curiosity, they
visited the cinema once or twice, admitted its marvelous ingenuity
and then decided that they had no more time to waste on it. They
could not believe that it would ever become a vehicle of truth or
beauty. What they had seen was crude, childish and ridiculous.
Even as a joke it palled.
For many years they never went near a picture house and derided
those who did. They continued to cultivate their imaginations,
intellects and sensibilities in other ways. But, in the nineteen-twen-
THE MECHANIZED MUSE IOJ
ties, they began to drift back to the cinema, lured by the genius of
Chaplin and other great comedians, and prepared to scoff at any-
thing which was not farce. They still found much at which to scoff
1 he thing was still crude, childish and ridiculous. But it was some-
thing else. It had developed, in the interval, a kind of subtlety which
was new to them and which they could not always follow, for all
their superiority of taste.
"They ask so much of the imagination," complained one old gentle-
man, who would never have grumbled at the imaginative demands
made by any other form of art. "I suppose if you see the things
often enough you get a sort of knack. I must say I could follow it
better when they used to throw words on the screen to tell us what
had happened."
The ground covered in twenty years had been considerable.
How the silent film would have developed, and what it would have
been today, is now merely a matter for speculation. For, in the late
nmeteen-tweimes, Science discovered something more. Sound was
added to sight. The machine once more took charge of the artist
and a discarded element had to be reintroduced into the pattern.
II
Of all the guests assembled at that luncheon party, the authors
had most to hope for and least to fear. Their own profession was not
seriously threatened. Nobody had gone so far as to suggest that
Talking Films might kill the circulating library.
_ Authors' film rights had been a valuable subsidiary source of
income for several years, and there seemed to be no likelihood that
the demand for stories would diminish. But hitherto the author had
been chiefly concerned with the sale of his material and had had
little to do with the retelling of his story in the new medium. He
might be invited to collaborate in alterations to the story line, or to
edit the captions, but he could not have much say in a business
where the technique so essentially differed from his own. Many
authors deliberately abstained from ever seeing the film versions of
their books, taking it for granted that little or nothing of their
original conception would survive. Words were their medium.
Their art lay in the manipulation of words, both in dialogue and
in narrative. They could not avoid a certain distrust for a form of
storytelling which had dispensed with words.
Now, however, the case was altered. Words were going to be
needed again. Screen characters were going to talk. It seemed likely
IO2 MARGARET KENNEDY
that word experts would be called in. Authors began to hope that
their special technical experience might be hired out very profitably.
Hired out it was, on a scale so lavish as to astonish even their
agents. Hollywood briefed them recklessly; it was no rare thing to
find three or four distinguished novelists and playwrights at work
upon one story. They were hired on the strength of their success in
their own craft, and not because they had had any previous interest
in, or experience of, picture making. For a certain number of days,
weeks or months they worked on the script. Frequently they dis-
liked one another, and sometimes they never even met. As the shoot-
ing date drew nearer, and the script became more chaotic, more
authors were called in. Nor did this period of activity come to an
end because the script was ready, or because anybody concerned
was satisfied with it. Only when the picture had to go on the floor
did it stop. During the last available twenty-four hours some Emi-
nence Grise, who lurks unseen in every studio, produces a shooting
script.
The shooting script is a kind of lucky dip. It resembles no previous
script but has traces of half a dozen earlier versions scattered over
it. Screen credit for the authors is assured to them under their con-
tracts, but most of them are secretly determined to disown it in the
Last Day.
It may seem surprising that distinguished novelists and play-
wrights should have submitted to such treatment. The very high
pay is not the only explanation. Screen work was a new and amusing
experience to many of them, and some became genuinely interested
and anxious to explore the possibilities of this new medium. The
more conscientious suffered severe twinges, for they had really
made some effort to understand what it was that they were required
to do, and nobody could tell them, for nobody knew. They did
not like to take money and credit when not a line of their dialogue,
not one of their suggestions, had survived in the shooting script.
Nor could they ever be quite sure whether their material was
rejected because it was unsuitable or simply because "these silly
people don't even know their own silly business."
Others became excessively knowing and acquired a technical
vocabulary which should have impressed the cameraman, if any
cameraman ever read a script. They knew all about panning and
tracking and were careful to distinguish between a dissolve and a
fade-out. But in the final lucky dip they seldom fared better than
their colleagues.
"I think I could 40 it all very well," said an elderly novelist who
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 103
had been engaged to work on her first screen adaptation, "if it
wasn't for this Continuation they keep talking about. But I am to
have a Continuation Expert to help me."
By this she meant Continuity, a bugbear which haunted all authors
at that time. We hear less of it nowadays; in fact it is growing so
old-fashioned that our younger screenwriters will soon be asking
what it was. But ten years ago it was regarded as something so
mysterious, so highly technical, that nobody outside the Industry
could possibly be expected to understand it. When first authors
were hired to write scripts they usually found themselves yoked
with Continuity Experts, bred in the studios, who also wrote scripts
but who did not seem to rate as authors.
Continuity merely means the bridging of gaps in time and space.
It is the art of informing the audience that the scene has leaped from
London to Paris, or that an hour, a week, a month have elapsed in
the twinkling of an eye. In the very early days it was thought
sufficient to display a caption which said:
PARIS!
And a time lapse was marked by another caption saying:
ONE WEEK LATER.
Subsequently it was felt that these bald little notices broke the
illusion. An attempt was made to elaborate them and to infuse them
with some emotional significance. They said:
CAME THE DAWN. . . .
Or:
THE PLAYGROUND OF EUROPE ST. MORITZ*
In the next stage they were eliminated altogether. It was incom-
patible with the growing artistry of the silent film that the audience
should be continually switching from pictures to letter print, from
looking to reading. Information of this kind must be conveyed
pictorially. When the story moved to Paris, a shot of the Eiffel
Tower was inserted. If a week had to elapse y a calendar was shown
with a hand coining up and tearing off the leaves.
But then it was felt that these Eiffel Towers and calendars, pop-
ping irrelevantly into the picture, were scarcely an improvement
104 MARGARET KENNEDY
on captions. Continuity devices became more elaborate. Efforts
were made to weave them into the fabric of the story itself.
In 1932 an author received a story outline with the direction,
"Emily proceeds to Venice by a suitable continuity device." In a
mood of ill-judged merriment she asked if the train would be con-
sidered a suitable continuity device. She learned that it would not.
For if all the people in screen dramas were to be seen getting into
trains every time they go somewhere else, then there would be too
many pictures of people getting into trains. But, it was added, this
was not a matter which need worry her. A continuity expert would
attend to it. And the continuity expert took Emily for a ride in a
punt at Henley and then dissolved the punt, with Emily in it, into
a gondola, and that was a continuity device. But the story had to be
knocked about considerably in order to lure Emily into the punt
All this, in its turn, became old-fashioned a year or two later.
Script Managers discovered that elaborate continuity devices were
unnecessary. Something much more abrupt and natural would
suffice, after all. Why, anyway, did Emily go to Venice? Not to
ride in a gondola but to see her dying mother. The audience is
interested in Emily, not geography. It will be quite sufficient to
cut from a picture of Emily snatching up a suitcase to a picture of
a table covered with medicine bottles.
Somebody ill! says the audience. This must be Mother in that
-foreign place. Yes! There she is . . . lying in bed. Coo! Doesn't
she look bad? Emily will be properly upset to find her like this.
Who^s this? A mm? Ah, they have nuns to nurse them in -foreign
places. This must be this place Venice and soon we shall see Emily
coming. . . .
These developments sprang from a growing sensitiveness to the
reactions of the audience, a more accurate power to forecast what
the audience will think and feel. With the power to forecast came
the artist's desire, and the artist's skill, to control these reactions, to
rivet attention on the essential and significant. If Emily is the theme,
then, the purpose of every object shown to the audience must be to
excite more and more interest in Emily. In the earliest pictures it
would have been quite possible to see Emily's face registering ter-
ror, with open mouth and staring eyeballs, at some perfectly unex-
plained cause. The effect of this was to make us want to leave off
looking at Emily. It filled us with curiosity to know what had
frightened her so much and we wanted to see it too. The picture
would then shift to a herd of maddened buffaloes charging down
the gorge. After this interruption it would go back, with somewhat
diminished impetus, to Emily. In a modern picture these shots
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 105
would almost certainly be reversed. We would see Emily strolling
all unconscious down the gorge. We would then see the buffaloes,
realize her danger, and immediately feel a strong deske to see Emily
again and watch her as she realizes it too. The sight of her terrified
face has then a double effect, as it fulfills a wish already in our minds.
We may believe that we wish to see Emily because she is our
favorite star. We do not realize how much this wish has been stim-
ulated by a transposition of shots. Her acting and personality would
have been handicapped in the earlier sequence. The later sequence
enhances them.
The Industry, having taken thirty-five years to make all these
discoveries, was naturally inclined to regard them as technical
mysteries, very difficult for a newcomer to understand. At least
another thirty-five years must elapse before authors could be
trusted to grasp them. Even today an author is only reluctantly
permitted to undertake entire responsibility for a script. He may
have had ten years' experience, he may have a dozen scripts to his
credit, but he is still offered the services of some stripling who will
explain to him the dangers of a time lapse and make sure that he
gets Emily and the buffaloes in the right order.
Authors are called in by the Industry to do three things: (i) To
adapt novels, plays, biography and other material for the screen.
(2) To supply dialogue. (3) To write original stories. They are
sometimes asked for an adaptation without dialogue and are fre-
quently asked for dialogue alone. They might also be asked for an
original story without dialogue. Jane Austen, had she lived today,
might have been asked to supply the "story" of Pride and Prejudice
without any of the characterization, any of the idiomatic touches,
which lie in her dialogue. "Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth"
would have been thought sufficient. No more from her, as an artist,
would have been required. And the actual proposal of Mr. Collins
might then have been written by Mr. Ernest Hemingway. Nor is
this all. She might well be asked to supply the story with dialogue,
and, in the shooting script, half of her original dialogue might be
retained and the other half might have been rewritten by Mr. P. G.
Wodehouse, Mr. Charles Morgan and Miss Stevie Smith, if her
employers could secure their services.
To playwrights and novelists this may seem fantastic. But it is
very natural that dialogue should not be rated highly among people
who have spent twenty years learning how to do without it, and
who never asked to have it put back into the pattern. Back it is,
but its relative importance is still undetermined. For emphasis, in the
106 MARGARET KENNEDY
talking picture, is still visual rather than aural. It is not a duet of
sight and sound. Disney, in some of his later cartoons, especially
Fantasia, has made experiments in this direction. He has tried to
create such a duet by dint of the extreme simplification of cartoon
drawing, which makes a comparatively small demand upon the eye.
But, even so, many people found that the simultaneous demands
upon eye and ear were too much for them that if they looked they
could not listen and if they listened they could not look.
It may be that the public will catch up with Disney; the human
race may, in a year or two, develop new faculties of co-ordinated
attention. Or perhaps Disney may experiment upon lines of still
greater simplification until he has discovered how much the average
human being can see and hear simultaneously. But all these experi-
ments will only carry the art of the moving cartoon still further
away from the art of the moving photograph, which frankly sub-
ordinates the ear to the eye.
ADAPTATIONS
In the case of a novel this means cutting out a great deal of
material and turning comment into action. Where the novelist
explains, the film must exhibit. The screen writer must find a
dramatic visual substitute for a passage like this:
Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To have lost the God-
like conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have acquired a
homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper which
. . . forswears compromise. But, if congenial to philosophy, it is apt to be
dangerous to the Commonwealth. (EUSTACIA VYE in The Return of the
Native.)
This is not as difficult as might at first appear. Such a character
is not uncommon. Many people in the audience may have met such
a woman, and summed her up, though not quite in the same words.
She cries -for the moon, they might say, and nothing else will satisfy
her. Ifs impossible to argue with such people and they make a lot
of trouble. They will recognize the type, when they meet it on the
screen, if something about the woman reminds them of old Aunt
Isobel, who eventually grew so impossible that she had to be shut
up. Aunt Isobel would march straight through ponds and rivers,
straight past notices which told her to keep off the grass or beware
of the bull, and, when she came to a nine-foot brick wall which she
could not climb, she just sat down and screamed. If Eustacia is seen
THE MECHANIZED A1USE 1 07
doing something of the sort, on her first appearance in the picture,
she will be recognized as an incipient Isobel.
The author must devise these slight, natural, easily recognized
indications of type. And, in any case, he must try to explain to his
employers the meaning of such a passage. For he is working with
people who seldom read, who have a profound and intelligible
mistrust of the written word. That is one of the reasons why he has
been called in. He is accustomed to take the written word quite
seriously, and he will tell them what is in the book.
"I don't get this girl, this Eustacia Vye," they will say. "Why did
she act that way? What sort of girl was she? How do you see her,
Mr. Scribble?"
"Like your Aunt Isobel," says Scribble, if he knows his job.
As soon as this is clear they may possibly show more ingenuity
than he does in devising signposts which shall direct the memory
of the audience to its own Aunt IsobeL But they do not easily
recognize a written description of a character. They do not deal in
words. They scarcely think in words. Scribble, whose profession it
is to manipulate words, who is never satisfied until he has found
the mot juste, may jump to the conclusion that there is no such
thing as wordless cerebration, and that the Industry does not, can-
not, think. He is completely wrong. But the thought processes of
the Industry must always be a profound mystery to him.
Here is a true story. An actor once held up all activity on the floor
for half an hour while he complained that one of his lines was
out of character. He was playing an impoverished aristocrat show-
ing the heroine round his house and apologizing for its disorder.
The line was "You see, there has been no lady in the house since my
mother died." He maintained that "lady" was quite wrong; "no
woman in the house" would be more natural. What? said the In-
dustry. Call his mother a woman? Surely not? The man was an aristo-
crat!
The argument grew heated. Scribble, who was present, supported
the actor. He said bitterly that "woman" had been the word in his
script, but that some so-and-so had altered it to "lady" in the shoot-
ing script. But he merely embittered the contest by flourishing the
Old School Tie and asserting that all Etonians call their mothers
women. Whereupon those present who did not happen to have been
educated at Eton came out strongly on the side of "lady." At last
the actor solved the problem by demanding a Bible.
After a good deal of agitation and telephoning^ just as a lorry was
about to set out for London with orders to bring back a gross of
Bibles, news went round that there was one, actually in the studio.
108 MARGARET KENNEDY
It belonged to somebody's dresser. It was brought to the actor and
he looked up a text.
" 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' There! You see? Our
Lord called His mother a woman. And what was good enough for
Our Lord ought to be good enough for anybody."
This carried immediate conviction and "woman" was adopted, to
the profound astonishment of Scribble. As an argument, it grows
more telling the more one considers it. Here was a controversy on
a matter of taste. How are such things ever to be settled? Woman or
lady, napkin or serviette who is to be the arbiter? Can any authority
be cited? Was there ever any person whose taste is likely to be ac-
cepted as infallible by all sorts and conditions of men? Only one.
But Scribble would never have thought of it, in spite of his preoc-
cupation with the mot juste.
Generally speaking, literary merit in the material to be adapted
greatly hampers the screenwriter. The finer the novel or play, the
more formidable the difficulties of adaptation. In a great work of
art nothing is irrelevant. To cut any part of it is to damage the whole.
In a great work of art the medium is so wedded to the subject that it
becomes impossible to think of them apart. To take the 'writing out
of a great novel is to run a risk of emptying out the baby with the
bath. And, if any story has been perfectly told in one medium, what
motive can there be for retelling it in another?
Most screenwriters prefer to work on an ill-written, second-rate
book, toward which they have no conscience, but which has some
situation or character which has caught at their imagination. This
serves as a Jew of Malta to their Merchant of Venice. A bald literal
translation of some inferior Continental novel is ideal material, pro-
vided that the book has some tinder in it which will kindle the tow
of the storyteller's imagination.
Not infrequently authors are required to retell some foreign novel
or play, Anglicizing the characters and giving the story an English
setting. This is a very tricky business. The characters can speak in
a perfectly colloquial idiom, wear English clothes, play cricket and
drink tea. But they remain obstinately foreign. Their actions are
never quite comprehensible to an English audience.
Very small slips can do a great deal of damage. When the French
picture Prison sons Baneaux was retold in an English version, the
scene was laid in France but most of the Gallic flavor was removed,
with unhappy results. This was most apparent in a sequence where
a cow gave birth to a calf in a byre attached to a sort of female
Borstal. By a series of misunderstandings, the prison doctor was called
in and remained closeted in the byre for most of the night, with one
THE MECHANIZED MUSE IO n
of the inmates of the prison, a young girl of seventeen; and this tete-
a-tete was too much for his discretion. In the French version this
girl wore a long black dress and clutched round her thin shoulders
a little white shawl, the kind of shawl that Frenchwomen are fond
of wearing in emergencies, because emergencies are often so drafty.
Its "foreignness" carried off the unlikelihood of such an incident.
They do so many queer things on the Continent In a French reform-
atory, one thought, it is perhaps possible that the pensionnaires are
allowed to spend their nights in byres, alone with attractive young
men. But in the English version she wore a businesslike white linen
coat, and the whole incident became incredible. The authorities
who provided that coat would never have allowed such a thing to
happen.
The great difficulty, in such adaptations, is the translation of sen-
timent. The material is rarely first-rate and its popularity in its own
country has therefore been largely sentimental. And, just as the
sentiment of one generation becomes the laughingstock of the next,
so does the sentiment of one nation leave another cold. Characters
created on a purely sentimental formula have often no appeal save
for a local and temporary public. And sometimes they will take the
grand tour; outmoded in their country, they will find a new public
elsewhere. Our grandfathers wept over Little Nell. We mock at
her. But she is said to have had a tremendous vogue in Russia in the
nineteen-twenties.
Some years ago an English author was discussing with a Central
European director the plot of a Hungarian novel which he wished
her to transpose into English suburban life. She complained that there
was not one passably decent character in the book. They all acted
solely from motives of greed, appetite, cowardice or self-interest,
they showed the most complete callousness in their attitude to one
another and seemed to be entirely devoid of any sense of responsi-
bility or moral obligation. She feared that they might be thought
unsympathetic and asked if the story might not be altered a little.
Could they not behave rather less badly? Might not extenuating
circumstances be introduced? Might it not at least be possible for
some of them to show signs of distress, scruple, or inner conflict?
The director said coldly, "That is your British hypocrisy. In my
country an audience interests himself in a girl who has stealed five
pounds because she is wanting a new hat In your country she must
have stealed for bread for her old grandmother."
"Perhaps," said Miss Scribble, somewhat nettled. "But I really do
think I had better turn some of these cads into hypocrites*"
HO MARGARET KENNEDY
"Cads? Oh, well ... all the people in this book are cads."
"So? Then everybody is cad."
"That is a very sentimental thing to say."
"If you will excuse, it is you that I find sentimental. If you wish,
I am cynic."
Miss Scribble heatedly asserted that there is not a pin to choose
between cynicism and sentimentality. Both are ways of dodging
truth. Both spring from timidity and conceit.
"Both have the lie in the soul," said she, "and if one stinks of moral
cant, the other stinks of intellectual cant."
This tirade achieved an unexpected and undeserved success. The
director's English was scanty but he did recognize one word which
he had often heard in Hollywood. His integrity as a cynic wavered.
"It will stink?" he said anxiously. "Why aren't you telling me this
before? If it will stink the story must be altered so."
British sentiment and, if we are to judge by the pictures which
come to us from the United States, American sentiment is of the
kind which appeals to extroverts. We like a conflict, hearts of gold,
and a happy ending. We like to see men challenging fate and bat-
tling with circumstances. We like to see good triumph over evil.
We overstress, perhaps, the importance of action, and we like to be-
lieve that some kindly Providence will always intervene to make
sure that "the Boy gets the Girl and the dough." We do not want
to see the real world but a world "remolded nearer to the heart's
desire."
European sentiment, in many countries during the past twenty
years, has often been defeatist and fatalist. It dwells on the futility
of action and shows men as the helpless pawns of circumstance. This
has found frequent expression in the Little Victim theme, in stories
of cruelty to children, such as Mddchen in Uniform, Foil de Garotte,
Maternite, and in numerous stories of prisons and convicts. These
spectacles of unbridled injustice, oppression and sadism, of children
mishandled, of confidence and innocence betrayed, have generally
been somewhat misunderstood by English audiences. They have
been received as stern human documents, scarcely to be rated as
entertainment, and their realism has been commended by people who
imagine that sentimentality always wears rose-colored spectacles. But
these subjects can evoke a purely sentimental response luxurious
tears and a cozy sense that we are all poor things and all bound to get
a raw deal People who regard themselves as victims like pictures about
victimization. They can feel with the victim and, at the same time,
somewhat perversely revel in the power of the oppressor. They do not
THE MECHANIZED MUSE III
want to see good triumph over evil. That has not been their own ex-
perience and they are unwilling to believe that anyone, anywhere, is
getting a better deal. They too do not want to see the real world.
They would rather see something a little worse than the truth. But this
brand of sentimentality, though nearly all the Little Victim pictures
were intended to purvey it, completely misses fire with an English
audience. Extroverts invariably begin to ask why somebody did not
interfere. In most of these stories there are one or two kindly charac-
ters, nurses, warders, teachers, doctors or priests, who see and deplore
what is going on, but who never seem to have heard of the National
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. An English audi-
ence sits waiting impatiently for somebody to do something and goes
away feeling that they cannot have got any N.S.P.C.G in these
foreign places.
This fact is so well known that such films are generally modified
before they are sent to London, The final sequences are reshot.
Somebody does interfere, at the last moment, and a perfunctory
happy ending is tacked on as a concession to "British sentimentality."
The version of Madchen in Unifot'm shown everywhere on the
Continent ended with a tortured child leaping from the top of a
building to lie, mangled and dead, at the feet of the fiendish head
mistress. But a special version was made for England, in which her
schoolmates pulled her back into safety and the sympathetic junior
mistress, on whom our hopes had been vainly fixed throughout the
picture, and who had been a passive spectator of the scene, observed
smugly, "A great tragedy has been averted."
The adaptation of a stage play presents a new series of problems.
To indicate character is a comparatively simple matter, for the dram-
atist has already done a good deal of the work. Unlike the novelist,
he has been obliged to forgo the advantage of telling the audience
about his characters and has maneuvered them into revealing them-
selves. Also there is less material to be cut. Expansion rather than
compression is the problem; the task is to break up a form which
hampers screen narrative. Scenes which, in the play, all took place
in one room now more naturally occur in different parts of the
house. The characters can be sent out of the house to play cricket,
as in Quiet Wedding. Incidents which the dramatist has been obliged
to indicate as happening "off" must be brought back into the story,
since very few things can be allowed to happen "off" on the screen.
The whole buildup of the scenes and acts must be broken until
no trace of it remains. For the film, like life, has neither curtains nor
112 MARGARET KENNEDY
intervals. It goes right on. Each act, in a play, is built up so as to
lead to a climax and a curtain, upon which the audience is content
to pause and to be told nothing more for ten minutes. The intervals
have their place in the rhythm of a play. But in a film this climax
must be so treated that the audience is prepared to go on without a
pause. Each scene, in a play, is shaped as a steppingstone to the cli-
max, therefore each scene must be reshaped. In a film there are no
exits and entrances. An actor does not make an exit from the picture;
the picture moves away from him. And stage dialogue, though it has
some superficial resemblance to screen dialogue, can seldom be trans-
posed without great alteration in emphasis.
DIALOGUE
Since they are wordmongers, authors are perhaps entitled to re-
gard themselves as dialogue specialists. And it is true that good dia-
logue can add greatly to the value of a film, just as a good libretto
is of value in an opera. But, where there is so much to engage the
eye, the audience does not listen very attentively; dialogue should
not demand too much concentration. It should be natural and con-
vincing, but it should be used to illustrate and amplify points which
are made in many other ways.
Screen dialogue is much more natural than stage dialogue, for
stage actors are obliged to reveal themselves almost entirely by
speech. It is true that they support speech by timing, gesture and ex-
pression, but these do not play so large a part as they can in a film,
where the faces of the actors can be equally well seen by everybody
in the audience and where emphasis can be increased by close-ups or
changes of shot. A film can show a man talking in a high moral tone,
and then call attention to his foot pressing the foot of his neighbor's
wife under the table. That man is revealed as a hypocrite without a
word of dialogue, by a gesture and a change of shot which makes sure
that everyone sees it. Because of this peculiar capacity for emphasizing
small but significant things it can afford to be more lifelike than the
stage; it can dispense with the overemphasis upon which stage actors
often have to depend in order to get a point across.
It makes a perfectly different use of setting and background.
When the curtain goes up on a scene in a theater the audience im-
mediately takes in the setting, receives the intended impression of
luxury, squalor, respectability or Bohemianism, and then takes it
for granted through the rest of the scene. In a film the setting can
be brought forward at any time to reinforce the action. On the stage
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 113
a woman mourning the death of her child has to be given words to
convey the terrible emptiness of her life and heart, in order that the
audience may understand why it is that she tries to steal somebody
else's child. On the screen a shot of the empty, tidy nursery, with the
toys all put away on their shelves, will tell part of this story without
any words from her.
Rhetoric is very difficult to manage on the screen, and so are any
long, intricately built-up speeches. This is partly because of the
frequent changes of shot and angle, necessitated by the inherent
flatness of the screen. The audience is kept from being irritated by
this flatness because the camera goes round the subject giving fre-
quent, but slight, variations of distance and angle, so that an illusion of
roundness is produced. These shots are so skillfully strung together
that the audience is hardly aware of them; but they interrupt the
rhythm of long speeches. It would be impossible, for instance, to hold
the same shot during the whole of one of Hamlet's soliloquies, and
very difficult to synchronize it with a variety of shots. It can be done;
but a screenwriter should not ask too much of the boys in the cutting
room. If he finds that more than half of "To be or not to be" is gone,
he must not jump to the conclusion that this is because they do not
appreciate poetry. They may appreciate it so well that they shrink
from the task of breaking it up into shots.
Television, which is far more stereoscopic, is a more suitable me-
dium for poetry or rhetoric. If Science should discover something
more, in the shape of a stereoscopic screen projector, one shot could
be held much longer before an audience would grow tired of it. But,
in that case, screen technique would have to be scrapped entirely
and we should all have to start all over again. The eye would become
quite dizzy, whirled from one scene to another, if it saw all those
scenes in the round. The whole of screen technique is based on the fact
that a number of objects can be shown to people in rapid succession.
Important or informative screen dialogue should be carried on in
short speeches and short sentences. There is no place for the out-
burst, the torrent of words running up to a climax and a dramatic
announcement, which so often heralds a curtain on the stage. These
outbursts nearly always have to be "written down" in a screen adap-
tation. They are not natural. In real life, people do not say, "Oh this
is the last straw! I won't bear it. I've kept silent for years, but now
. . . wallah . . . wallah . . . wallah . . . because he is my son!"
(Curtain.) They do not shout for five minutes before coming to the
matter nearest their hearts. They begin with it. They say, "He's my
son! Yes he is! I've kept quiet about it for years, but now this is the
114 MARGARET KENNEDY
last straw . , . wallah , . . wallah . . . wallah. . . ." And they go
on and on, repeating themselves and letting fall further items of
startling information, until somebody brings them an aspirin.
On the other hand, long discursive monologues, of the kind fa-
vored by Miss Bates, can be very effective on the screen. They can
run on like a kind of obbligato accompaniment. There is, in Fem?ne
du Boulanger, an immensely long drunken monologue by Raimu.
It accompanies him from place to place, to church, through the
streets, to the presbytery, back to his own bakery; it ranges over
a multitude of topics and it is addressed to many different people;
it contains no information necessary to the story and there is no
one sentence in it which could not quite well be cut. The whole
is a most poignant, most convincing utterance of a heartbroken man.
To hear it is to be grateful that sound has been brought back into the
pattern,
ORIGINAL STORIES
An author is seldom invited to write an original screen story un-
less a vehicle is wanted for a particular star. And that task is tolerable
only if he happens to have an overwhelming admiration for the star's
personality. Unless he himself desires to see nothing save that one
face, to hear nothing save that one voice, he will find it hard to write
dialogue which is to be treated, for the most part, unilaterally, so
that anything said by actors other than the star will be said by face-
less ghosts, while the attention of the audience is concentrated on
the star's face listening. In fact he must be convinced that nothing
he writes can have any value unless it is interpreted, directly or in-
directly, by that one individual.
But any author can, if he is enough of an enthusiast, write an orig-
inal script, all out of his own head, and try to persuade some com-
pany to accept it. Should he succeed in doing this he will be pretty
certain to break his heart. For it is only then that he will f ully realize
how anomalous his position is, and how small the chance that any
fraction of his idea will ever find its way to the screen. So long as
his task has been merely to adapt other people's material he may
manage to accept this fate philosophically. But, where his own crea-
tion is concerned, he cannot feel the same detachment. It will come
as a bitter blow to him if he finds that some other author has been
summoned to alter his story line or touch up his dialogue.
The practice of hiring several authors to work, often quite inde-
pendently, on the same story is comprehensible only when it is re-
THE MECHANIZED MUSE fl r
membered that the Industry is composed of self-contained groups
of experts. Each group knows its own job but makes no pretense of
knowing much about the jobs of the others. Authors are not regarded
as creators. They are merely called upon to supply an ingredient in
the pudding. The chef is a director whom they may possibly have
never met. They are specialists and should stick to their lasts. A
Bessarabian novel, by an unknown Mr. Protopopov, has been pur-
chased because it contains material congenial to a Lithuanian star.
It is a story about the love of a sophisticated society woman for a
plowboy. Mr. Michael Arlen is a specialist in sophisticated society
women. Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith knows all about plowboys. There-
fore it would seem very natural to the Industry to invite them to
collaborate on the script, or to ask Miss Kaye-Smith to make a treat-
ment and then send it to Mr. Arlen so that he might put in some
sophistication. No insult would be intended to either. But these pos-
sibilities are intolerable to the author of an original script.
^ It is true that a few, a very few, authors command sufficient pres-
tige to secure a clause in their contracts stipulating that nothing in
their scripts shall be changed. This means that a script written by
them, and them alone, lies about on chairs in the studio while the pic-
ture is being shot. But that is very often all it means. In the present
conditions of picture making there is no Guardian Angel to watch
over the story on its perilous journey from script to screen. No
clause in any contract can ensure that the author's true conception
will survive.
Much has been said of the changes which can overtake a play
during production. A group gets to work on it and each person in
that group has a slightly different idea of what it ought to be. The
author continually finds that the emphasis is altered, that serious
scenes are being played for comedy, that comic scenes are being
treated very solemnly, and that the wrong character is walking
away with the play. But this is negligible in comparison with what
can happen to a screen story by the time directors, art directors,
actors, cameramen, sound technicians and cutters have done with it.
Even if all these gentry were willing and anxious to carry otit the
author's ideas (and many of them are) he has no established means of
communicating with them or of explaining what he wants. He has
some sort of position in the theater. Everybody knows who and what
he is. But he has none in the studio. There is his script, lying about
on chairs. But no script, however persuasive, can convey Ms ideas
to a community which never reads. So long as the poor fellow con-
fines himself to setting down his ideas on paper, he may as well stick
1 1 ^ MARGARET KENNEDY
to dialogue assignments, or to adapting Bessarabian novels for Lith-
uanian stars.
Ill
And why, it may here be asked, should any author ever want to
write an original script? It is true that the art of the screen is daily
becoming more beautiful, more subtle and more significant; that
pictures are being made which challenge the most critical standards.
But what does the screen offer to the storyteller which the novel
and the play do not offer? As a medium, has it any unique advan-
tages?
It has, in the first place, an arbitrary power over the attention
of its audience which no other storytelling medium can exert. It can
completely exclude the irrelevant and decide absolutely what is to be
seen and heard.
It has an unlimited range of emphasis an emphasis which can be
intolerably crude but which can also be infinitely subtle. It can call
attention at any moment to any object, indicate a contrast, or build
up an association of ideas. Its power to suggest, rather than to state,
is limited of course by the degree of suggestibility in the public,
but that is a limitation which applies to every medium. At present
the common denominator of suggestibility may be low, because the
art is still in its infancy and has to create its own public as it develops.
But the unexplored regions in this field are vast and fascinating,
The screen is more natural and lifelike than the stage, and it has
a greater freedom of movement in time and space. It is more dramatic
than the novel. It can suggest, in a few seconds, things which the
novelist must take many pages to describe. It has the apparatus for
saying what cannot be said in <word$. What the novelist is forced
to make explicit the film can merely imply.
It can, for instance, show how the same person, the same scene,
can appear quite differently to different people. It can show the
world as seen by two lovers, dining together in a popular restaurant
a noble hall, vast, commodious and beautifully decorated, faultless
service, exquisite music, and themselves, superbly handsome in each
other's eyes, the center of the scene. The picture carries us from
their minds to the mind of a jaundiced old gentleman sitting at the
next table. The camera becomes his eye instead of theirs. And simply
by dint of ingenious photography, by a change in angles, shots and
lighting, by emphasis on other details, the same scene appears quite
differently. A shabby, awkward boy and his fat sweetheart are
THE MECHANIZED MUSE
' overcrowd ^ room, where the
waiters have duty hands and the band plays out of tune
It can show how the same scene appears quite differently to one
person on different occasions: It can carry us from the mind of child-
hood to the mind of middle age and show how the vast lake the
mysterious ; forest, and the lofty mountain can shrink, in later years,
to a small duckpond, a copse and a hillock.
It can indicate those variations of pace, those deviations in our
sense of toe, of which we are hardly conscious, but which are
implicit m all our emotions. For it is a fact that we seldom live at
the same pace for two consecutive hours. Whatever our watches
may tell us, we know that an hour spent with a bore is ten times
longer than an hour spent with our heart's choice. The pace quickens
as we grow older. The days of childhood are endless. In middle age
the weeks rattle past like telegraph posts beside a train. When we
say, of a recent event, "How long ago that seems!" we mean that
intervening emotional experiences have set a wide gulf between
then and now. When we say, of a long-past event, "Why! It seems
only yesterday!" we mean that the emotional gap, in this respect,
is small. To many people nowadays the year I937 must seem as
remote as the Flood. But a happy couple, celebrating their golden
wedding, may still feel that they have only just got back from their
honeymoon because their love, during fifty years, has remained
unchanged.
The more violent the emotion, the more erratic does our time
sense become. Anyone who has been through a car or railway acci-
dent will testify to this. Between the moment when a crash is seen
to be inevitable and the moment when it actually occurs there may
be a time lapse of a few seconds. To the people concerned it may
seem like a hundred years. Very slowly the two cars creep toward
each other. There appears to be ample opportunity for everyone to
get out, walk home, eat a good supper and go to bed. "It was like a
slow-motion picture," they say when describing the experience
afterward. Or they may have had the reverse impression. "Every-
thing seemed to happen at once," they say, meaning that a number
of things happened consecutively but that their own emotional
state was such that they were unaware of any time lapse at all.
Most people would declare that these are illusions; that the rational
conception of time, as something measured out to us by the Green-
wich Observatory, is the true conception. But many, having said
this, will go to church and sing, with perfect conviction, "A thousand
ages in Thy sight Are like an evening gone." This statement ignores
Il8 MARGARET KENNEDY
Greenwich completely and suggests that our emotional illusions
about time do really bring us nearer to ultimate truth than do our
rational faculties.
This see-saw in our dual conception of time is one of
. . . those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized . . .
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,
To perish never. . . .
There can be no higher function for Art than to concern itself
with those truths which perish never, and to stress those obstinate
questionings. No human activity can properly be described as an art
unless it can do this. For, surely, it is those very questionings which
have driven men, in all ages, to break out into art to seek for a
harmony, a design, a rhythm, which they desire and which they do
not find in sense and outward things.
In the matter of our double time sense, the film can suggest far
more than a play or a novel simply by turning a handle at a varying
pace, by making things happen more quickly or more slowly, so
that we are aware of that rhythm in our lives which defies both
reason and the clock. This is a field which has been as yet scarcely
explored, but it surely will be. Experiments were made, even in the
days of the silent film, in such pictures as Warning Shadows. And a
very effective use of varying pace was made in the opening sequence
of Carnet de Bal, where a woman is recollecting her youth and her
first ball. Everything is a little slower than normal life; in a fairylike
ballroom, with snowy pillars and regal chandeliers, a long row of
white-clad girls stands waiting . . . the long row of beautiful young
men advances step by step . . . each couple, moving as if half in a
dream, begins to waltz. The effect is one of timeless ecstasy, with all
life, all the years, still to come, still to be enjoyed.
Toward the end of the picture she returns to the same town and
the same hall and dances there, for old time's sake, with one of her
former beaux, now a prosperous barber and the father of a large
THE MECHANIZED MUSE n n
family. The hall is a tawdry, dingy place, only half its remembered
size. Sulky girls sit waiting for partners. The dancers trot round
and round perfunctorily. But among them, for a moment, she catches
a glimpse of a ghost, a young girl in a white dress, and across the
screen waltz those other feet, moving in a slower rhythm.
But the greatest advantage of the screen medium is a power which
it shares with poetry to fuse humanity with its setting, to charge
even Inanimate objects with emotional significance.
It can show the entrance to a hospital, with one of those wooden
bars which swing to and fro as the people go in and out, full of their
own cares and fears. A woman appears-a woman whose story we
know. Someone she loves has just died in the hospital. She walks
straight down the steps, pushes through the barrier and passes swiftly
out of the picture. The camera holds the wooden bar which swings,
after she has passed, backward and forward, until it comes to rest.
Like rings spreading out on water when a stone is thrown into a
pool, this movement can amplify the significance of the sorrow
which has passed by, can remind us that she is not the first, nor will
she be the last, to set that bar swinging.
This is poetry. Only a poet can do this with a piece of wood. In
this way does a poet achieve that touch of universality which is
essential if pathos is to be raised to tragedy. In any story of individual
suffering there must be a point at which we feel that it touches some
greater theme not so much that this is the common lot as that this is
part of something greater than any one person's lot, that it has echoes
of "the still, sad music of humanity." If we cannot be made to feel
this, if we are not lifted on the wings of poetry, a spectacle of suf-
fering becomes simply painful and constricting. It does not elevate
our minds or expand our hearts.
Poetry has this power to enlarge the individual by catching up,
into his emotional orbit, so much that we usually think of as outside
ourselves, as inanimate and insensible. When Wordsworth's Lucy
died, the whole vast, turning earth had for him but one significance.
It was a grave for Lucy.
No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees:
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
Very little screen poetry has been made as yet. Fifty years of
experiment have not lifted this new art much above the level of
MARGARET KENNEDY
prose. But it is possible to hope that, at the end of another fifty years,
poets may have taken to making pictures. And when they do, then
at last full use will be made of the medium, with its suggestive sub-
tlety, its rhythm, its deliberate variation of pace, its complete exclu-
sion of anything outside the pattern.
Poets have already written some very good scripts. Here is one
which could be shot as it stands. It is a sequence showing the escape
of two lovers from a castle full of enemies; they are living in terms
of obstacles and dangers, so that every lamp is a menace, every
fluttering curtain a threat.
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain dropped lamp was flickering by each door.
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide;
There lay the porter in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flagon by his side.
The wakeful bloodhound rose and shook his hide.
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones.
The key turns,
and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone. . . .
IV
But there is really no such thing as screen writing. A script is not
meant to be read, as novels, poems and plays are read. It is no more
a work of literature than is the recipe for a pudding. So long as the
meaning is grasped, and the recipe followed, it would serve its pur-
pose if it were written in pidgin English. The trouble is that the
recipe is never followed; the orchestra never plays the notes which
the composer has set down.
THE MECHANIZED MUSE 121
But the screen can tell a story. And storytellers have, for some hun-
dreds of years, made use of the written word; so that there Is still a
tendency to call all storytellers writers.
The ^ wholesale buying up of novels and plays must be only a
phase in the development of screen storytelling. Why should the
Industry send out for its material in this manner? Simply because it
has, as yet, so few screen composers of its own. Most storytellers
still prefer to say what they have to say In some other medium, in
spite of the possibilities offered to them by the screen.
And why is this?
It is because the conditions of screen storytelling are, at present,
so discouraging to any genuine artist. The screen composer has no
place in the scheme of things, no means of carrying his vision of life
and truth safely through this dogfight of technicians. Nor has he any
position in the cutting room, where the emphasis, which is the true
soul of his story, will be determined.
A picture must be a group production, just as operas, symphonies
and plays are group productions. But no group production can ever
be classed as a great work of art unless it has the stamp of one pre-
dominating, creative mind. This single signature, in screen art, is at
present the signature of the director. And while this is the case no
screen Keats is ever likely to supply scripts.
It may be asked why directors do not take to writing their own
stories. They are fine artists. Why should they be content with
such unsatisfactory material? Surely they could themselves turn
out something better than the mangled remains of a Bessarabian
novel, chewed over by half a dozen Scribbles? Why should not one
of them turn poet and write his own script?
The answer is probably that they would if they could but they
can't. As well might it be suggested that Toscanini and Beecham,
since they are fine artists, ought to be able to compose their own
symphonies. The art of direction, of ruling groups of people
and inducing them to supply certain effects, does not often coexist
with that contemplative faculty which is essential to a poet. For
poets are seldom at their best when bellowing through a megaphone.
They do not like crowds; they have no special talent for leadership
or organization. They like to lead quiet lives in the country, or in
small university towns. They need regular meals and a good deal of
sleep. But a director lives in the arena. He often has to do without
sleep for weeks on end and subsists on ham sandwiches, gulped down
between spells at the megaphone.
If screen poetry should ever reach the heights destined for it,
perhaps the supremacy of directorship may turn out to have been a
122 MARGARET KENNEDY
passing phase. It may be that in time screen composers will have
fought their way into such a position that they can insist on their
own signature. That is to say, they will write their score, their recipe,
turn it over to a director to be shot, and supervise the cutting person-
ally, so as to secure that particular design, rhythm and emphasis
upon which their poetry depends. They would have to learn how to
be cutters as an essential part of their training. The director's role
would more nearly approximate that of the conductor of an
orchestra.
Such a development seems, at the moment, to be impossible. The
immense cost of picture making stands in its way and hampers
experiment. Screen art is obliged to serve a very large public and
must seek a common denominator in taste, and in emotional and
intellectual appeal. But many things may operate, as time goes on,
to reduce the cost of picture making.
The popularity of the cinecamera, among amateurs, was growing
rapidly before the war. In its wake came the home projector. This
at present is silent. But a sound projector in every home is not a
more fantastic idea than the promise of wireless telegraphy in every
home would have seemed thirty years ago. And, when a great many
homes have their own projectors, their owners will not be content
merely to see the films they have made of themselves surf -bathing
last summer. The buying and hiring of films may grow up, just as
the sale of gramophone records has grown up. A vast new field
would be opened to picture makers. They would be able to deal with
the public more directly; they would not have to be governed by the
policy or prejudice of distributors. Films of all lengths and kinds, on
all subjects, would be demanded: stories, documentaries, nature
and travel films. If this new market grows up, the Industry will have
to branch out in many ways to supply it.
Films intended for a small audience, a family, possibly only one
person, in a dwelling room, would have to be different from those
intended for a crowd in a hall. Anyone who has seen a popular film
run through in a small room, for one or two spectators, must have
noticed how wrong the pitch seems to be. It is directed at something
in him which he should share with several hundred people who are
not there. But if films for the home are ever produced there will not
be this need to seek, and satisfy, a great common denominator. There
will not be one film public but dozensas many publics as there are
for novels or gramophone records. And among these publics the
screen Keats may get his chance.
If the signature of a great poet is ever to be put on a film, some
corner in the studio must be found for him and his ivory tower; he
THE MECHANIZED MUSE
must have a face and a name and the Industry must recognize him
for what he is. But it is difficult at present to guess in which depart-
ment the materials for that ivory tower are being collected.
The practice of hiring "authors" to write for the screen is already
on the wane. There is growing up, in the Industry, an increasing
supply of screenwriters who are not interested in any other form of
storytelling, who can do all that novelists and playwrights used to
do, and who understand much better what is wanted. What original
scripts they may keep locked away in their desks is best known to
themselves; they are generally kept busy on the works of Mr. Proto-
popov. Their signature is not known to the public, though their
names appear in credit titles. But perhaps they may one day produce
a screen Keats.
The notion of an author-cutter, with sufficient authority to sit on
a director, is so revolutionary that most screenwriters would reject
it. They talk hopefully of their ambition someday to make their
own pictures. But at present the only man who makes pictures is
a director. And if they ever become directors they will inevitably
find that they are making other people's pictures. Nor is it probable
that those of them who might succeed in directorship have got the
most interesting screen poetry locked away in their desk drawers.
So that it is not certain that our screen Keats will emerge from the
script department.
Perhaps, one day, some cutter will grow tired of making patterns
out of other people's material, and the mutiny may start at that end
of the studio.
Or perhaps some director may desert the arena for the ivory tower.
He may decide that his art is creative rather then executive. Retain-
ing all his prestige and decisive authority, he may toss his megaphone
to some trusted subordinate and quit the hurly-burly of the floor. In
.his office he will build a sanctuary where he can be vacant and pen-
sive, and cultivate that "inward eye" which turns the thing seen into
the imagined thing; where he can woo this foundling, this Tenth
Muse, this dea ex machina, of whom we know, at present, so little.
John Grierson was largely respon~
stbk 1 or the wide use of docu-
mentary films by the British
Government Service public-infor-
th& mation program in the 1920$. He
was the first to use the word
"documentary" in describing Rob-
en Flaherty's Moana, In writing
about feature "story" films he in-
evitably based his criticisms on
their social and political content.
The following selection is taken
from Grierson on Documentary
Lf. fy*L M /~.*^i^>% M (Harcourt, Brace. New York,
by John (jnerson \ 941}y ed - ted by ' ForS y th Hardy.
It gives a kaleidoscopic view of
the work of some of the well-
known directors of the 19305.
JOE STERNBERG is one of the few directors whose every work one
sees as a matter of course. He stepped rather suddenly into the film
world in 1925 with a film called The Salvation Hunter s } which he
had financed with his last five thousand dollars. He has been interest-
ing ever since. The Salvation Hunters was a young man's gamble.
His stars were taken from the ranks of Poverty Row extras; his
story was right outside the Hollywood tradition. It was a sad roman-
tic affair of how a young man tried to escape from the dreary
existence of a dredger. The dredger with its slime was, of course,
symbolic. The ending, with its two young lovers moving off into the
124
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES I2 -
rising sun, was equally symbolic. Sternberg began with a great han-
kering for good things.
The simple, rather naive and sentimental idealism of that first
effort should be remembered when Shanghai Express is considered
Dietrich stars. Like that exotic and meaningless lady herself, the film
is a masterpiece of the toilette. That only. Its photography is astonish-
mg; its sets are expensive and detailed to an ingenious and extravagant
degree; its technique in dissolve and continuity is unique. The film
might be seen for its good looks alone. But it is cold-bloodedly lack-
ing in every virtue which made Stemberg a lad of promise.
A great deal must have happened over the years to turn the simple
romanticist into this sophisticated purveyor of the meretricious Diet-
rich. I wish I knew what it was. I knew Sternberg just after his
Salvation Hunters and liked him immensely. He had made a fine
picture for Metro called The Exquisite Sinner and had been heaved
off the payroll for adding some genuine local color to a Breton scene.
It struck me that sensibility of his peculiarly intensive and intro-
spective sort was not a very healthy equipment for a hard world, and,
in face of his strange progress, I am sure I was right. There is, as you
can imagine, no place for the introspectionist in a commercial film
world which is as objective in its conceptions as in its accounts. A
director of this instinct is bound to have a solitary and (as commerce
goes) an unsuccessful life of it. Sternberg, I think, was weak. Hating
the notion of this commercial unsuccess, he has thrown his sensi-
bility to the winds and accepted the hokum of his masters. His
aesthetic conscience is now devoted to making the hokum as good-
looking as possible. It is, indeed, almost pathologically good-looking,
as by one whose conscience is stricken.
I detail this Sternberg saga because it tells more clearly than any
personal story I know how even great spirits may fail in film. The
temptation of commercial success is a rather damnable one. There
are dollars past dreaming and power and publicity to satisfy every
vanity for anyone who will mesmerize the hicks of the world/
I watched Sternberg make still another picture, The Woman of
the Sea. for Chaplin. The story was Chaplin's, and humanist to a
degree: with fishermen that toiled, and sweated, and lived and loved
as proletarians do. Introspective as before, Stemberg could not see
it like Chaplin. Instead, he played with the symbolism of the sea till
the fishermen and the fish were forgotten. It would have meant
something just as fine in its different way as Chaplin's version, but
he went on to doubt himself. He wanted to be a success, and here
plainly and pessimistically was the one way to be unsuccessful. The
I2 ^ JOHN GRIERSON
film as a result was neither Chaplin's version nor Sternberg's. It was
a strangely beautiful and empty affair possibly the most beautiful I
have ever seen of net patterns, sea patterns and hair in the wind.
When a director dies, he becomes a photographer.
With Shanghai Express Joe Sternberg has become the great Josef
von Sternberg, having given up the struggle for good: a director so
successful that even Adolf Zukor is pleased to hold his hand for a
brief condescending moment. He has made films with Jannings and
George Bancroft: Paying the Penalty, Docks of New York, others
of equally exquisite hokum; and Paramount has blessed his name for
the money they made. Once from the top of the tree he made a last
desperate gesture to his past in The Case of Lena Smith, a fine film
which failed; but that is now forgotten and there will never be a
repetition. He has found Dietrich and is safe for more dollars, more
power, more success than ever. What irresolute director would not
launch a thousand cameras for Dietrich, giving up hope of salvation
hereafter? Sternberg has. He has the "Von" and the little warm
thankful hand of Adolf Zukor for his pains. 1
Shanghai Express follows the progress of a train from Peking to
Shanghai, finding its story among the passengers as The Blue Express
did. Dietrich is Shanghai Lily, a lady of no reputation. Clive Brook
is an old lover meeting her again, hating her past, but still very much
in love with her. They fall into the hands of Chinese revolutionaries
and Dietrich saves Clive, and Clive saves Dietrich; and in that last
mutual service the dust is shaken out of the Lily's petals and the
doubter damns himself for having doubted. This high argument is
staged with stupendous care, stupendous skill, and with an air of
most stupendous importance.
I remember one shot of the Shanghai express pulling into a way-
side station in the early evening. It is one of the half-dozen greatest
shots ever taken, and I would see the film for that alone. It is, how-
ever, the only noble moment in the film. The scenes of Chinese life
are massive, painstaking to the point of genius in their sense of detail
and presented very pleasantly in dissolve; the minor acting is fine;
but the rest is Dietrich. She is shown in seven thousand and one poses,
each of them photographed magnificently. For me, seven thousand
poses of Dietrich (or seventy) are Dietrich ad nauseam. Her pose of
mystery I find too studied, her make-up too artificial, her every
i Among later films in which Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich were The
Devil Is a Woman and The Scarlet Empress. In 1938 Sternberg visited Britain
and announced his intention to make a film version of Zola's Germinal During
the war Sternberg directed a short documentary, The Town, for the U S O -
W.L F.H. '
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES 12 J
gesture and word too deliberate for any issue in drama save the very
gravest. Sternberg perhaps is still after that ancient intensity. When
themes are thin it is a hankering that can bring one very close to
the ridiculous.
Erich von Stroheim is the crazy man of the film world. He cut
Greed to sixty reels and defied Hollywood to make it less, at which
they sacked him and hired an infidel to bring it down to a humble ten.
They are always sacking Von Stroheim. The infidel cut and cut
and gave up at twenty-five, and, when he too was fired, explained
that Stroheim's sixty was a masterpiece, anyway.
Of course, Hollywood respected Von Stroheim for his stand at
sixty. Anyone who will threaten to entertain you for twelve hours
on end is plainly in the grand manner. They gave him yet another
and yet another film to do. Each time the story has been the same.
Stroheim has gone whoopee and shot to the moon, and found him-
self unemployed before the picture hit the headlines.
He paid himself into the premiere of his own Merry Widow,
though The Merry Widow went on to make a fortune. The Wed-
ding Marchj which followed, became one of those traditional pro-
ductions, like Ben Hur y which company after company fail on. It
soared into the millions. I saw great slices of it shot and great hunks
of financiers' hair torn from the roots in the process. But not a frame
of what I saw appeared in the final version. When Paramount bought
and finished the film, Stroheim was on the outside as before.
Yet for most of us Von Stroheim is the director of all directors,
and I think largely because of this superlative disregard for the finan-
ciers who back him. If he feels like shooting, he shoots, and damns
the pennies. If he wants one last detail on a set, he will hold up the
world at a thousand dollars per tick to get it. If the gesture of a
single tenth-rate extra is to be perfected, he will rehearse it for a
couple of hours and hold every star in the cast waiting till it is done.
The public Issue of the film means nothing to him in comparison
with its issue in craftsmanship.
The principals in the desert scene of Greed he put into hospital
by actually shooting the scene in Death Valley and sweating them
under the Californian sun till they achieved the realism he wanted.
That sort of thing does not, I know, prove him a great artist, but it
does demonstrate a virtue which is necessary in some measure to
every director. Surrounded by a thousand technicians and a thousand
interests which conflict with his job of pure creation, a director has
to have something of Lenin in him to come through. Strangely
enough, there is not an artist who ever appeared under him who will
128 JOHN GRIERSON
hear a word against Von Stroheim. In a world of commercial flip-flap
he does stand so surely for the larger intensities of art. 2
The Lost Squadron uses him as an actor only, in yet another of
those sinister Teutonic roles he made famous. The interesting point
is that he is cast as the crazy film director he is supposed to be: with
such a passion for realism that he pours acid on control wires and
sacrifices the lives of his stunt airmen for a movie effect.
This sort of thing, of course, is not quite the measure of Von
Stroheim the director; for if he did smash things to pieces to get his
stuff, be sure he took the biggest wallop himself.
Just for a minute, however, you do get something like a genuine
picture of the man: when, standing dreadfully erect before the set,
he screams, "Cameras!" I have seen him do that with very similar
passion, and I have seen him go off the hoop as he does subsequently,
and be very much the bloodcurdling creature of temperament he
demonstrates. It is worth seeing. He is the villain of the piece in this
case, but you may believe with me that a single gesture of such
villainy is worth a great deal of more flat-footed orthodoxy. "What
are a few deaths to the art of Benvenuto?"
The case of William Wyler is a rather curious one. He is an odd
member of the Laemmle tribe: origin Swiss; and, like every other
member of the tribe across the world, he has answered the tocsin
of Uncle Carl and joined the family at Universal City. But there
must be something in the Laemmle blood, because Wyler has taken
a line of his own. He is very nearly the most serious of Hollywood's
directors, and almost certainly the best poet. I have a notion he will
become the director we once expected Vidor to be* Like Vidor he
wanders in strange country but, unlike Vidor, he has the courage
of it.
HelPs Heroes, a film of the early thirties, told the queer story of
three bad hombres who sacrificed their lives to deliver a child to a
frontier town, and Wyler directed it magnificently. With its per-
verse parallel to the tale of the Three Wise Men, the delivery of the
child on Christmas Day, and the last man falling dead as the local
choir broke into the carol of "Holy Night," the story itself missed
hokum by a hairbreadth. Only a director of unusual ability could
have steered it past into genuine emotion.
In A House Divided, Wyler lives dangerously again. Here the
2 Although he has made regular appearances as an actor in American and
French films, Von Stroheim has not directed any further films. He wrote a
novel of Hungarian gypsy Hfe r Paprika^ in 1935 ^d a story for M-G-M which
was filmed as Between Two Women (1937) . FJL
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES 129
story concerns the father-and-son theme which Eugene O'Neill
made great In Desire under the Elms and Douglas in The House
^with the Green Shutters. In this case the son is weak and the father
Is strong, the father takes a new wife, and wife and son fall in love
with each other. The story is set against a background of sea. Walter
Huston plays the father.
I saw Huston play the father role in the New York Theatre
Guild's production of Desire wider the Elms. He played it for the
great and intense thing It is, and caught the Calvlnist passion of the
role with a certainty that seemed a trifle bewildering in the atmos-
phere of metropolitan America. When Calvinism has disappeared
from its own country, dare one expect to find it honored among
the Philistines? But if that was strange, it is stranger still to find
the outlook and the issue reappearing in a Hollywood film.
I am all for this William Wyler; he has a taste for the greater
gestures and is still steering them past the hokum they so easily
invoke. It is difficult to stage a tough old warrior of the Calvinist
school, and achieve sympathy for him. If there is kindness in him, he
would not show it; and ninety per cent of the slovenly little hu-
manities which people expect will wither under his discipline. But
Wyler and Huston put him over. It is not often that the ancient
virtue of pity and terror creeps into a film. Here it does.
Cecil B. De Mille is out of fashion among the critics. But, as is my
custom, I have seen The Sign of the Cross twice over and am still
an unrepentant admirer. There is no director to touch him in com-
mand of the medium: certainly none who strikes such awe into my
professional mind. I have only to see his crowds and continuities,
yes, and images too, to think of the Milestones and Pudovkins as
so many amateurs. How good and fine an artist he is may possibly be
another matter. Too many judges announce contempt for his bath-
tubs and debauches for me to disrespect their finding. Personally I
like both his bathtubs and his debauches, for the sufficient (I hope
technical) reason that they are the biggest and the best in cinema.
No man short of a Napoleon of movie would dare them, and De
Mille is almost casual in their making.
There is another measure of De Mille. He is the only Jewish 3
director who is not afraid of being his Jewish self; and the thin and
squeamish Western mind may not therefore be fit judge of his
Oriental opulence. He is our only Oriental director. Not a picture
of his but comes slap out of the Old Testament. They are the hotcha
a This is an error. Cecil B. De Mille was an Episcopalian.-B.T,
JOHN GRIERSON
bits the Old Testament only mentions: the fiestas in Gomorrah, the
celebrations before the calf of gold, the amami nights in the palace of
Solomon; the living, pulsing, luxuriating aspect of the Hebrew life,
which the parsons, Hebrew and otherwise, have suppressed.
The Sign of the Cross by a curious irony is the best of them all,
better even than The Ten Commandments. It takes a Jew possibly
to appreciate the Christian story, and for a number of reasons. It is at
heart a Jewish story; it is a story of a humility which no other race
knows anything about; and the oppression which is the other half
of it can properly be understood only by a people who, back of
everything they say, do or pretend, have the most vivid sense and
knowledge of oppression in the world. On both sides, Basil Wright
told me that the Negroes in Jamaica went crazy over The Sign of the
Cross: for the same reason, I suggest, that De Mille went whoopee
in the making of it. The luxury of Poppaea's bath of asses' milk and
of the Lesbian dance in the house of Marcus is out-luxuried by the
massacre of the Christians before Nero. It is gloriously horrifying,
as by one who understands both the delight of Nero and the delight
of the Christians. Only a Jew, I believe, could understand both
points of view.
G. W. Pabst, in Kameradschaft, tells how French miners and
German miners help each other in a mining disaster and break
through the frontier to help each other. The frontier is the enemy,
with every foolish enmity and every foolish memory of war and
international misunderstanding symbolized in it. The conquering
spirit of the future is the realization of common feelings and common
ends on both sides of it.
Pabst has a fierce international idealism tucked away in his Teu-
tonic interior. It blazes up in this film and adds both power and
importance to everything he describes. The miners, the villages, the
scrambling crowds, the desperate sorties in the exploding mine
might be the ordinary material of melodrama. The larger theme
invests them with the quality of epic. These people achieve something
beyond themselves.
I think the mixture of French and German in which the dialogue
is carried on is no deterrent in taking the points of the story. The
whole affair swings ahead in unmistakable fashion, from the German
side to the French, from family to family, and from the mine disaster
itself to the ethical issue of the film.
Pabst's construction is the one I like best in cinema. He builds his
little individual stories only slightly into the march of events. They
punctuate it and give it point, and whatever the emphasis on lost sons
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES 131
and brothers and lovers, the march of events never ceases to be the
principal concern. The mining exteriors are superb: the crowd
scenes are handled with a skill which I doubt if many other directors
in cinema can match. The staging (and particularly the finishing)
of single episodes is brief and strong and-f or the most part-natural
The disaster itself is all the more impressive because it does not
tumble over itself to be sensational The explosion comes with a low
half-suppressed roar, which is sinister by the very suppression. There
are a hundred other such details of fine direction: of tappings which
go frantic at the realization of relief, of men that laugh when they
find their relatives are alive, of others so distraught that they can
only see back through rescuing gas masks to the gas masks of war.
There are effects in the film which tear one to shreds.
My only complaint against Pabst is an old one. He means the best
things in the world, but he means them sometimes too obviously.
He cannot let well alone, but must keep on underlining things al-
ready emphasized. He is the Galsworthy of the screen: similar in
the quality of his mind though a trifle superior in the field of his
sympathies. The frontier theme, for example, is played to the point
of symbolic handclasps and international embraces. The excellence
of the previous demonstration makes both of them feeble and un-
necessary. Pabst wags a finger at you and insults your imagination
like any parson.
On a swift generalization it is remarkable how Fritz Lang's instinct
runs to bigger ideas than any other director; but it is just as remark-
able how little he ever makes of them. M is in the grandiose manner
Lang established in such films as Metropolis. Its theme is taken from
the Diisseldorf murders. Its hero is a sex pervert who murders little
girls.
By its subject matter the film is unusual in all conscience, but I
doubt if, on examination, it proves to be anything more than a plain
thriller. Lang's photography is always excellent, of course, and his
description of a mood or situation can often be brilliantly brief. In
this example the murder of one child is followed in the adventures
of a toy balloon; and the approaching growing and finally command-
ing mania of the murder is translated in the simple whistling of a
motif from Grieg. But, if we look behind to the theme itself, we find
that Lang's inspiration is only second-rate.
Metropolis, for all its pretension of setting and high-flying issue
between capital and labor, concluded sillily and sentimentally that
"it was love that made the world go round." As H. G. Wells pointed
out at the time, it was an infant conception, without knowledge of
I3 2 JOHN GRIERSON
society or science. Lang, I think, only ever peeps into the great
problems. Looking into the hinterlands of space and time and the
mind itself in The Girl in the Moon, in Metropolis, in Mabuse, and
in M he is satisfied in the end with the honors of melodrama. 4
The concluding scene of M is in the basement of an old battered
distillery. The murderer has been run down, not by the police but
by the thieves of the town, who find that the now desperate activities
of the law are spoiling their business. To effect his running down,
the thieves have organized the city beggars to watch every quarter,
every street and every section of a street. But with the murderer
crushed and cringing before the underworld, the whole drama is
climaxed in a trial scene in which thief and pervert argue the relative
merits of their case. It is a fantastic way of bringing so derelict a
spirit as the Diisseldorf murderer into the realms of sympathy, but
obviously not a tragic way.
It may possibly be asked if the whole idea of the film is not a little
perverse: if anything is to be gained by creating sympathy for such
a character. The test is always in the telling. Whatever the derelict
a creature of jealousy like Othello, or ambition like Macbeth, or of
madness like this man from Diisseldorf it makes no odds in theory to
the writer of tragedy. As a human figure, both possible in fact and
relatable in fact to the warring issues of existence, he can be brought
to sympathy and made an instrument of great appreciation and great
art. The sociological argument is beside the point. If he must be
kicked from the social midst hanged, imprisoned, or shut in a padded
cell the sociologist may be done with him. The artist is not. By that
very fate he becomes for the tragedian the broken, incomplete
figure of man who gives him his occasion and his opportunity.
When Peter Lorre, who plays the murderer, screams out "I
couldn't help it!" you will probably be moved. That is the center
of the piece, the theme itself; terrifying and, in the usual curious
way, uplifting. But in that poignant moment one appreciates all the
more the opportunity that has been lost. If this was the story, if this
possession by devils and most foul destruction by devils was the
story, the film's theatrical excursions into underworld organization,
housebreaking and the like are irrelevant. Lang has, as usual, peeped
into his big subject and been satisfied with a glimpse. The best that
4 Fritz Lang left Germany in 1933 *&&* ne na cl made Das Testament von
Dr. Mabuse, described as "the first anti-Nazi film." In Hollywood he has made,
among other films, Fury and You Only Live Once on themes with a strong
sociological basis. Man Hunt and Hangmen Also Die were wartime anti-Nazi
films. His current films, Woman m the Window and Scarlet Street) are psycho-
logical thrillers. KM.
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES
SvT^ * A e fflm is that n W ou
have thought of the Diisseldorf murderer for his hero. In this Lana
shares honors W1 th Dostoevsky and the best of them. But Lang has
onlythought of his subject; he has not felt i, M, like Frank^,
is a fuU-blown tragedy that has been diminished in the creation to a
mere sensational."
Ernst Lubitsch is one of the master craftsmen of the cinema.
Consider for example, The Man I Killed, the tragic antiwar story of
the French youth who, conscience-stricken for his killing of a Ger-
man youth goes to make peace with the German's people. You may
consider the story sentimental in its substance-for, war or no war,
we do a lot of falling in our day-but you will have no doubt at all
about Lubitsch. I cannot remember a film so beautifully made so
completely fine in its execution.
Perhaps I can indicate its quality better by describing a simpler
lustration. Before Flaherty went off to the Aran Islands to make
K 15 ? ^ m> l ^ ^ U P k the Bkck Countr 7 doin g
the E.M.B. He passed from pottery to glass, and from glass to steel,
making short studies of English workmen. I saw the material a hun-
dred times, and by all the laws of repetition should have been bored
with it. But there is this same quality of great craftsmanship in it
which makes one see it always with a certain new surprise. A man is
making a pot, say. Your ordinary director will describe it- your
good director will describe it well. He may even, if good enough,
pick out those details of expression and of hands which bring char-
acter to the man and beauty to the work. But what will you say if
the director beats the potter to his own movements, anticipating
each puckering of the brows, each extended gesture of the hands in
contemplation, and moves his camera about as though it were the
mind and spirit of the man himself? I cannot tell you how it is done,
nor could Flaherty. As always in art, to feeling which is fine enough
and craft which is practiced enough, these strange other-world
abilities are added.
Lubitsch does not often depart from comedy to make serious
films. His last one was The Patriot in the late days of the Silents, with
Emil Jannings as the mad Czar Paul. It was a huge performance with
great acting, intense action, and some amazing camera movements in
the corridors of the palace.
The Man 1 Killed is a simpler film, lower in key, with none of the
mad happenings of The Patriot to build on. The youth, praised by
the priest, goes on his journey. The German family, living on the
134 J HN GRIERSON
memory of their dead son, receive him as a friend of the son, and he
finds it impossible to make the confession he intended. There are
scenes of the old citizens of the German town at their beer; there are
some homely interiors; and the only happenings are that the old
father comes to like this foreign youth and turns from his hatred of
the French, and the German youth's girl falls in love with the man he
was killed by. Little enough, if you like, to make movement of, or
make climactic intensities of. But Lubitsch's camera glides magically
in and out of these ordinary scenes, taking the details of expression
and character and essential story on its way. Watch it particularly
in the last scene, as it goes from the youth playing his violin to the
girl, to the old couple, and watch how there is expectation, and
expectation surprised, in every foot of the gyro's passage. The actors
are Lionel Barrymore, Phillips Holmes and Nancy Carroll. As always
happens under Lubitsch direction, they were never so modulated or
so good.
Lubitsch sketches his character with a single pose, or a single
gesture, taken in the camera's stride. He does his work so easily that
you hardly know it is being done.
Only half a dozen directors make a personal contribution to their
work which is recognizable and unique. Rene Clair is one. He may
not be as solid a performer as Pudovkin nor as slick a one as Lubitsch,
but for his power to do something new and fine and entirely his own
he stands as high as any of them. He has power of fantasy and fairy
tale; he can jumble sound and sight together to make a crazy quilt of
good sense; and he is, above all, French.
For sheer brilliance of direction I begin to think that there are only
two directors worth recording: Clair himself and Lubitsch. Lubitsch
perhaps has an advantage on the big sets, but when it comes to the
intimacies, none can pull a face out of a crowd or build up a sequence
of tenement detail like Clair. And, in liking his neighbors as he does,
he has the unique distinction of liking them all equally, whether
they are artists or apaches or policemen or thieves or doctors or duns,
or moral or not.
Le Million is a bright and brilliant film, full of wit and fun, and
very, very ably directed. The story is a delightful trifle about an
artist who wins a million francs in a lottery but whose winning ticket
is stolen with his coat and passed from hand to hand over the length
and breadth of Paris. The pursuit of the coat is a slapstick affair with
Clair squeezing each sequence of studio and underworld and police
station and opera house for its every detail of fun. In lesser hands
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES
Le Million would have been a comedy. In Glair's it has become a
fairy tale. There is magic in it. 5
A new Hitchcock film is something of an event in the English
year. Hitchcock has a personal style of his own in direction, which
can be recognized. He has a long record of good work, with large
slices here and there of supremely intelligent work. He is known to
have a freer hand than most in direction and to have odd thoughts
of greatness. It is no wonder, therefore, if in criticism we exalt him
a trifle. With a national cinema growing up under our eyes, we need
strong and individual directors more than anything else. Financiers
and impresarios you can buy two a penny. Directors who have some-
thing to say and the power to say it, you can only close your lingers
and wish for.
Rich and Strange is the story of a young couple who cross the
earthball on a holiday, and drift, in shipboard fashion, to new loyal-
ties. An adventuress so-called disrupts the male and a colonial planter
disrupts the female. In the main it is a meandering tale built up on the
slim behaviorism of two or three characters and the minutiae of their
relationships. The end of the story is that the couple are shipwrecked
and saved by a Chinese junk. In that oddest of all spots in the world
they discover the great mercy of having a baby.
The most important thing about the film is not so much the story.
It is the sudden emphasis it lays on weaknesses in Hitchcock's make-
up. I have guessed before that these existed, but have never seen so
clearly what new opportunities of direction must be given him if
he is to build up his talent to the very grand affair we expect it to be.
In trying new material Hitchcock has found himself outside both
his experience and his imagination. He has already proved himself as
a director of London types and Londonesque melodrama. This new
and greater canvas of seven seas and half a world has caught him
short. Think of the theme for a moment. You have in the background
the journey across the earthball, and Marseilles and Suez, and Co-
lombo and Singapore to play with. That must surely mean something
to the story. You may think of it simply as a cosmic journey on
which something happened to happen. You may think of it more
deeply as a demonstration of the fact that even the world and its
5 Clair made A Nous la Liberte, Le Quatorze ]mllet > and Le Dernier Milliar-
daire in France before coming to Britain to direct The Ghost Goes West for
Korda. His Hollywood films have included It Happened Tomorrow a futuris-
tic fantasy, and Ten Little Indians, adapted from the story by Agatha Christie.
He returned to France shortly after the end of the War. F.H.
136 JOHN GRIERSON
wonders can only teach people to be themselves. Whatever you
think, you cannot avoid the background. It is the material of your
drama and your cinema both.
The success of the film as a study of people and as a slice of cinema
depended, therefore, on Hitchcock's ability to make that journey
live. He fails, and entirely because his mind does not quite appreciate
the wonders of the world he is trying to use. He is in this sense the
supreme provincial your true-born Londoner tends to be. He knows
people, but not things, situations and episodes, but not events. His
sense of space, time and the other elements of barbarian religion is
almost nil.
The shipwreck is like the ship itself, a fake and a frost, composed
of half a dozen studio effects. The scenes abroad have nothing that
influence the story even by a trifle. They cannot be rich and strange
because not one of them is newly observed. It would have been good
to have added to the film some sense of strange trafficking and curious
merchandise, but, if anything, the greater weakness is the weakness
of the ship. By its very nature a ship is a living thing, worth the grace
of cinema, and in missing it Hitchcock has very literally missed the
boat. It is not as Hitchcock makes it, just a collection of rails to look
over, and evening skies to go moony about. It moves; it passes with
not a little triumph through an entire ocean, with all sorts of things
stowed away in its mysterious belly.
But let me indicate the charm of Hitchcock's direction of his
separate episodes. You will have heard before now of "the Hitchcock
touch." This consists in his great ability to give a novel twist to his
sketch of an episode. The man and woman are quarreling desperately
in some Oriental room: Hitchcock punctuates that episode with the
apologetic entry of a Chinese who wants to sweep the floor. The
man, again, has just clinched his appointment for a first essay in in-
fidelity: he walks idiotically into a ventilator. The film is full of de-
tails of the kind, sometimes amusing, always clever, sometimes merely
clever.
I would suggest that Hitchcock's concentration on such details
is at least a part of his worry in the world. Reaching for the smart
touch, as often as not he irresponsibly destroys the characters he has
been building up and throws away his sequence. In Chaplin you do
not mind the beaded story of moments and episodes. In a dramatic
director like Hitchcock you must. A film is not like the celebrated
Rosary, an affair of moments to be counted over, every one apart.
It is a procession -of people and events that march along: preferably,
of course, going somewhere.
I believe the highbrows, in their praise of him, have sent Hitch-
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES
cock off in the wrong direction, as they have sent many another:
Chaplin, for example. They have picked out his clever little pieces,
stressed them and analyzed them till they are almost everything in
his directorial make-up. We have waited patiently for the "swing of
event (preferably of great event) to come into his films, something
that would associate him more profoundly with the dramatic wants
of common people. Something serious, I am afraid, will have to hap-
pen to Hitchcock before we get it. 6
I have seldom seen an English film that gave me so much pleasure
as Dance Pretty Lady. If you would see how movement should be put
together and most ordinary exits and entrances turned into a poetry
of movement, you will find a whole curriculum in this film. And
more. One of Anthony Asqukh's great talents is his power of giving
conversational point to action and character. He slips in details of
observation which are, on their own account, a running commentary
on both. Plastered hair, a stiff collar, or a room's decorations become
in his hands a character sketch; the window of a hansom cab under-
lines a period. There is no other director can do It so well; there is
no other director can even do it,
Always, too, looking at Asquith's films, you realize how well he
knows his painters. I suppose the little references to one or another,
the consciousness in this case that Degas should not be shamed in his
own subject, can mean little to some audiences. Asquith can at least
defend himself on the Kantian maxim, that one may only appreciate
as one would wish the whole world to appreciate. It is a maxim
never, never in evidence in the film world, but heaven knows cinema
could do with a little of it.
Dance Pretty Lady is a delight to the eye: be assured of that. I
cannot, however, say so much for its appeal to the imagination. It
represents filigree work, most delicate, on a story that could not
possibly make a big film. A little ballet dancer (much too young to
be allowed to fall in love with anybody) falls in love with a sculptor.
She will not let him have her "because she would feel a sneak," The
sculptor goes off in a tantrum. The girl, annoyed by the tantrum,
lets another man, "a dirty rotter," have her instead. The sculptor
conies back for a quick and sudden and quite banal happy ending.
That is the tiding of great joy which Asquith (of Balliol and I
and Strange (1931) followed Blackmail and preceded Hitchcock's
crime thrillers which were to become part of the British film tradition. His
later British films included The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine
Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Jamaica Inn (with Charles Laughton). American
productions have included Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Shadow
of a Doubt, and the controversial Life boat. VM.
138 JOHN GRIERSON
know not what other traditions of English leadership) has spent a
year in fetching us. A more cynical and shameful waste of time I
cannot imagine. I may tend to overemphasize our need for leadership
and the film's great capacity for giving it, but was there ever another
film director trained so specifically and deliberately and cold-blood-
edly for the job as Asquith? This is it, bless you. Claptrap about a
virginity. Why, the entire sentiment that makes a plot like that pos-
sible went into discard with the good prosperous complacent old
Victoria. It was, relatively, an important matter then. But it is mere
infant fodder now when you consider the new problems we carry in
our bellies, and think of the new emphases we must in mercy to our-
selves create out of our different world.
Flaherty was sitting with me at Dance Pretty Lady, and he is a
good judge. He was as fascinated as I was myself. But his summing up
was this: "If that boy ever gets a story you will see the film of your
life." It is a trouble to know whether Asquith is denied the big story
by his masters, or is by his own nature powerless to find it. 7
I think, myself, that like many other brilliant young men of his
training and generation, he is a damned sight too remote from ordi-
nary things to discover it easily. It is not enough to recognize big-
ness by its classical reference (for this Asquith can do on his head) ;
it must be recognized, without reference at all, out of one's own
most private sense of importance, if there is to be power of revela-
tion. I cannot tell you what the secret is, but it should be plain on
the face of it that there are more powerful spirits to be called from
the deep than you are likely to get from stories of this sort.
Michael Powell is a young director who promises to stand up
presently in the publicity line with Asquith and Hitchcock. I threw
him a bouquet for his film Ry?iox, and in Star Reporter he again dem-
onstrates the same solid ability and (more important still) the same
solid certainty of himself. The story is by Philip MacDonald, the
detective writer, and by Ralph Smart, who made the film on Port
Sunlight. Powell not only makes a slick businesslike job of it, but
gets a very considerable size into his presentation of one or two of
the sequences. This is going some for a film produced at speed.
The passage showing the arrival of the Berengaria demonstrates
a unique power of observation which promises much. His angles are
strong, his continuity, shot by shot, direct and definite. Powell can
7 Asquith's most successful film in the pre-war period was Pygmalion, made
with Leslie Howard. His war films included Freedom Radio, We Dive at Daton,
a story of the submarine service, and The Way to the Stars (in America Johnny
in the Clouds) a notably fine story-documentary of Anglo-American co-opera-
tion in the air. F.H.
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES
certainly see things. One only waits now for evidence of his powers
to recognize ideas. Rynox was the story of an insurance swindle;
Star Reporter is the story of a stolen diamond with a Fleet Street re-
porter marrying into Mayfair. This sort of thing may be all right
to practice on but it obviously cannot be taken seriously. Powell
must step presently into something more sensible. 8
It is a waste of time to consider what Eisenstein would have done
with Thunder Over Mexico, if he had been allowed to cut it. The
fact is that he was not allowed, and alibis that the cutting was done
"in exact accord" with Eisenstein's script are merely silly. One might
as well talk of writing a George Moore novel from George Moore's
notes; for with Eisenstein, as with Moore, the style is nearly
everything. He is not a poet like Pudovkin, whose conceptions are
themselves emotional and uplifting, nor a finely descriptive director
like Flaherty, whose observations are of themselves intimate. His
raw material is common documentary, and sometimes very common.
It is his power of juxtaposition that counts, his amazing capacity for
exploding two or three details into an idea. It is not how his actors
act, nor yet how the camera looks at them, that is important in Eisen-
stein, for his acting is often bad and his camera work meretricious:
it is the odd reference he adds to his actors' presence that gives mean-
ing and tempo to their lives. Say this for brief, that Eisenstein is de-
tailed and cold in his shooting, and that he only warms his stuff to
life when he starts putting it together. It is his method of approach;
and there could be no genuine Eisenstein film without it.
Thunder Over Mexico might have been a good film with Eisen-
stein, or it might not; without him it is pretty dull stuff, without
style, without idea, and without construction. What I hear was in-
tended to be a vast description of the Mexican spirit turns out to be a
niggardly slow-told tale of how a peasant girl was raped by a feudal
lord and how her peasant lover rebelled and was executed.
There is a symbolic sequence at the beginning which is meant to
describe the age-long suffering of the Mexican people. It is full of
dissolves, superimpositions and wipes, in a manner never before asso-
ciated with Eisenstein; and I cannot understand its presence. If Eisen-
stein intended it, he has certainly deviated from his own stalwart
doctrine. He was always an enemy of such vague methods of mental
8 It was not long before this invitation was accepted. Powell made The Edge
of the World (1935-37) on Foula in the Shetlands and, during the war, films of
such quality as 4$th Parallel (The Invaders in America) , The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, A Canterbury Tale, and / Know
Where Pm Gomg.--p.il.
140 JOHN GRIERSON
association as are represented by the draping of symbolic figures
across the landscape; and I remember how he raged at the symbolic
example of Joan of Arc when I once put it to him. This sequence,
if it is anything, is just bad Joan of Arc. The tale of rape follows, in
a setting of heavily filtered clouds and foreground cactus. The clouds
and the cactus will pass for great photography among the hicks, but
they are, of course, easy meat for anyone with a decent set of filters.
The lovely molding of form, the brilliance of near and intimate ob-
servation, which you get in Moana, say, are a mile away and beyond.
These are superficial qualities only. But, as I suggest, one never
looked to Eisenstein for great photography or intimate observa-
tion, and one's only disappointment is that Hollywood has fallen for
these clouds and things and let the film go to the devil for the sake
of its glycerined scenic effects. The types on the other hand are
superb, for no one holds a candle to Eisenstein when it comes to
picking face. The acting, too, is much better than we have associated
with Eisenstein in the past, though never as fine in its nuances of
reaction as we get in Pudovkin.
But there you are and what of it? The significance that Eisenstein
might have added to the tale is not there; and types, acting and glyc-
erined clouds cannot turn a simple tale of village rape into the pas-
sion of a people. There were other things up Eisenstein's sleeve, or
he is not the dialectician I have always taken him for.
Pudovkin's A Simple Case was a dreadful little film with an ingen-
ious use of slow motion, a host of lovely images, and no point. De-
serter is Pudovkin on the rebound: more complex in his effects, surer
in his technical hand, and even stronger in his theme than he was in
The End of St. Petersburg. If you remember your Dostoevsky or
your Joyce or your Melville you will know how leisurely the master-
pieces may sometimes proceed: how, damning the audience, they
may sometimes fly suddenly off the earth, or, by perversity, from
off the earth back to terra firma again, without a by your leave:
taking good pains to bore the lesser minds with inconsequent ponder-
ing on the guts of whales and the exact clinical nature of disease and
disaster. Deserter has something of this curious strength. If, in its
hobbling from one odd chapter to another, as it freely does, the film
extends your patience, you will respect it, as like as not, for the size
it brings. Only the little fellows care what twiddling echoes go
round your pipes and, sycophantically, measure the music to suit
you. The big fellows call their own tune. You will certainly have
time to consider this matter, for the film runs nearly a couple of
hours, in innumerable acts and subdivisions of acts, shifting from
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES J 4 !
scene to scene in titles, and sometimes plain blackouts, as I cannot
remember anything doing so variously since Antony and Cleopatra.
When you^come to consider the continuing theme of the film
you will be wise to look for none, but content yourself with the vast
description it gives of the world today: of high-powered industry,
of unemployment, of poverty, of the accumulating fire of public ef-
fort, of the stresses and storms between men and men which eco-
nomic disaster has brought in its train. The net effect is of great
tragedy, in which the beauties of blue sky and morning, ships and
machinery, young faces and hopeful faces, are strangely stifled in
the common disaster. For long passages there is argument: as of dic-
tatorship, leadership, solution; and you will not need to know Rus-
sian to know every turn of the dialectic. But you will regard even
this as part of a necessary effort.
For my part, I shall only record that no film or novel or poem
or drama has sketched so largely the essential story and the essential
unhappiness of our time, or brought them so deeply to the mind.
I have met some of the great men of cinema, but can think of none
more impressive in his mind and presence than the American-born,
Canadian-trained explorer, Robert Flaherty. Since 1921 when he
brought Nanook out of the arctic and abandoned his discovering
of Belcher Islands and mapping of Northern Labrador for cinema,
he has stood uncompromisingly for everything that is fine in film.
The story of his long fight with Hollywood is perhaps the best of
all Hollywood stories, because it is the single one in which personal
advantage has been sacrificed at every turn for a decent result.
Nanook was the simple story of an Eskimo family and its fight
for food, but its approach to the whole question of film-making was
something entirely novel at the time it was made. It was a record of
everyday life so selective in its detail and sequence, so intimate in its
shots, and so appreciative of the nuances of common feeling, that
it was a drama in many ways more telling than anything that had
come out of the manufactured sets of Hollywood. In Moma Flaherty
adopted the same method with the Samoans. Without actors, almost
without acting, he built up in his camera what he considered the
essential story of their lives. The second film stated the difference
of his approach even better than Nmook. Because of the great fi-
nancial success of the first film Flaherty found himself commissioned
by the film people to a make another Nanook" It is their way to re-
peat themselves. Hollywood could only think of other food agonies,
the different climate and circumstance of Samoa notwithstanding.
In, the issue it was disappointed, as it was bound to be. Flaherty's
JOHN GRIERSON
film was the story of how the Samoans, blessedly freed from the
more primitive pains of life, had still to invent pain to demon-
strate their manhood. He made the story of the Tattoo. Hollywood,
asking for battles with sharks, got the loveliness of a ceremonial
prayer to the gods. And asking for dark-skinned bathing belles, they
got a quiet, dignified young heroine with a flower in her ear, who
danced superbly but could not possibly be confused with whoopee.
In desperation they issued the film as "The Love Life of a South Sea
Siren," and gave it a prologue of jangling guitars and shimmying
chorus girls.
After even more desperate battles in the making and abandoning
of White Shadows of the South Seas (the bathing belles this time
included), and a film on the Red Indian rain dance, which crashed
because of a Hollywood insistence on love story, Flaherty made his
expedition to the Aran Islands and was given a decent independence.
When I spoke with him on the Arans he was full of the possibili-
ties of the British documentary cinema. If on these islandsonly so
many hours from Londonthere was this story of romantic life ready
to the camera, how many more must there be! He mentioned the Heb-
rides and the Highlands, and sketched out a film of Indian village
life. He spoke of the tales of fine craftsmanship which must be tucked
away in the Black Country. But first, he emphasized, there must be
the process of discovery and freedom in discovery: to live with the
people long enough to know them. He talked with a certain rising
fury of the mental attitude of the studio-bred producer who hangs
a slicked-out story of triangles against a background of countryside
or industry. Rather must the approach be, to take the story from
out the location, finding it essentially there: with patience and in-
timacy of knowledge as the first virtues always in a director. He
referred to a quotation I once wrote for him in New York, when
his seemingly tardy method of production was first an issue in the
studios. It was Plato's description of his metaphysic where he says that
no fire can leap up or light kindle till there is "long intercourse with
the thing itself, and it has been lived with." No doubt the studios,
with their slick ten or fifteen-day productions of nothing in par-
ticular, still disagree with Flaherty and Plato profoundly. His idea
of production is to reconnoiter for months without turning a foot,
and then, in months more perhaps, slowly to shape the film on the
screen: using his camera first to sketch his material and find his
people, then using his screen, as Chaplin uses it, to tell him at every
turn where the path of drama lies.
No director has the same respect as Flaherty for the camera; in-
deed very few of them even trouble to look through the camera
DIRECTORS OF THE THIRTIES
while it is shooting their scenes. Flaherty, in contrast, is always his
own ''first cameraman." He spoke almost mystically of the camera's
capacity for seeing beyond mortal eye to the inner qualities of things.
With Fairbanks he agrees that children and animals are the finest of
all movie actors, because they are spontaneous, but talks also of the
movements in peasants and craftsmen and hunters and priests as
having a special magic on the screen because time or tradition has
worn them smooth. He might also add-though he would not-that
his own capacity for moving the camera in appreciation of these
movements is an essential part of the magic. No man of cameras,
to my knowledge, can plan so curiously, or so bewilderingly antici-
pate a fine gesture or expression.
Flaherty's ideal in the new medium is a selective documentation
of sound similar at all points to his selective documentation of move-
ment and expression in the silent film. He would use the microphone,
like the camera, as an intimate attendant on the action: recording the
accompanying sounds and whispers and cries most expressive of it,
He says the language does not matter at all, not even the words, if
the spirit of the thing is plain. In this point as in others, Flaherty's
cinema is as far removed from the theatrical tradition as it can pos-
sibly be. His screen is not a stage to which the action of a story is
brought, but rather a magical opening in the theater wall, through
which one may look out to the wide world: overseeing and over-
hearing the intimate things of common life which only the camera
and microphone of the film artist can reveal
Although James Agee wrote this
article in 1949 (it was published in
the September 5, 1949, issue of Life),
nothing has happened to American
film comedy in the interim to out-
date it. In fact, if he were f writing
this piece as of today, his convic-
tion that the works of Charlie
Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Mack
Sennen and Harold Lloyd stand
out as cinematic monuments would
be stronger than ever. Possibly the
comic P oten ^alities of Ernie Ko-
vacs would be worth mentioning,
but he is still new to films. One can
only hope that Kovacs will be
given a chance to display his end-
less bag of tricks. This would seem
unlikely, however, for the sad fact
i remains that the difference be-
tween today's and yesterday's
comedians is that the former are
at the merc y O f tbe com pi exities
and difficulties of large-scale pro-
duction, while the latter had total
control over their material
IN THE LANGUAGE of screen comedians four of the main grades of
laugh are the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh and the boff o. The titter
is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had
the pleasure knows all about a belly laugh. The boffo is the laugh
that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played,
would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled
degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake,
wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. Then,
after the shortest possible time out for recuperation, he would
feel the first wicked tickling of the comedian's whip once more and
start up a new ladder.
144
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA I4 r
The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of
screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has
had that treatment. The best of comedies these days hand out plenty
of titters and once in a while it is possible to achieve a yowl without
overstraining. Even those who have never seen anything better must
occasionally have the feeling, as they watch the current run or,
rather, trickle of screen comedy, that they are having to make a little
cause for laughter go an awfully long way. And anyone who has
watched screen comedy over the past ten or fifteen years is bound
to realize that it has quietly but steadily deteriorated. As for those
happy atavists who remember silent comedy in its heyday and the
belly laughs and boff os that went with it, they have something close
to an absolute standard by which to measure the deterioration.
When ji modern comedian gets hit on the head, for example, the
most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit
on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license,
and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to
be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance
of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for
loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a land of
poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might
do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with
such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same
instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it-look vague, smile like an
angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms down-
ward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe,
prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he
sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor and there signi-
fied nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.
Startled by a cop, this same comedian might grab his hatbrim with
both hands and yank it down over his ears, jump high in the air,
come to earth in a split violent enough to telescope his spine, spring
thence into a coattail-flattening sprint and dwindle at rocket speed
to the size of a gnat along the grand, forlorn perspective of some
lazy back boulevard.
Those are fine cliches from the language of silent comedy in its
infancy. The man who could handle them properly combined
several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the
dancer, the clown and the mime. Some very gifted comedians, un-
forgettably Ben Turpin, had an immense vocabulary of these cliches
and were in part so lovable because they were deep conservative
classicists and never tried to break away from them. The still more
gifted men, of course, simplified and invented, finding out new and
146 JAMES AGEE
much deeper uses for the idiom. They learned to show emotion
through it, and comic psychology, more eloquently than most lan-
guage has ever managed to, and they discovered beauties of comic
motion which are hopelessly beyond reach of words.
It is hard to find a theater these days where a comedy is playing;
in the days of the silents it was equally hard to find a theater which
was not showing one. The laughs today are pitifully few, far be-
tween, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they
used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a
machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster. Sad-
dest of all, there are few comedians now below middle age and there
are none who seem to learn much from picture to picture, or to try
anything new.
To put it unkindly, the only thing wrong with screen comedy
today is that it takes place on a screen which talks. Because it talks,
the only comedians who ever mastered the screen cannot work, for
they cannot combine their comic style with talk. Because there is a
screen, talking comedians are trapped into a continual exhibition of
their inadequacy as screen comedians on a surface as big as the side
of a barn.
At the moment, as for many years past, the chances to see silent
comedy are rare. There is a smattering of it on television too often
treated as something quaintly archaic, to be laughed at, not with.
Some two hundred comedies long and short can be rented for
home projection. And a lucky minority has access to the comedies
in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, which is
still incomplete but which is probably the best in the world. In the
near future, however, something of this lost art will return to regular
theaters. A thick straw in the wind is the big business now being done
by a series of revivals of W. C. Fields's memorable movies, a kind
of comedy more akin to the old silent variety than anything which
is being made today. Mack Sennett now is preparing a sort of pot-
pourri variety show called Down Memory Lane made up out of his
old movies, featuring people like Fields and Bing Crosby when they
were movie beginners, but including also interludes from silents.
Harold Lloyd has re-released Movie Crazy, a talkie, and plans to
revive four of his best silent comedies, Grandma's Boy, Safety Last,
Speedy and The Freshman. Blister Keaton hopes to remake at feature
length, with a minimum of dialogue, two of the funniest short com-
edies ever made, one about a porous homemade boat and one about a
prefabricated house.
Awaiting these happy events, we will discuss here what has gone
wrong with screen comedy and what, if anything, can be done about
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA I47
it. But mainly we will try to suggest what it was like in its glory in
the years from 1912 to 1930, as practiced by the employees of Alack
Sennett, the father of American screen comedy, and by the four
most eminent masters: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the late Harry
Langdon and Buster Keaton.
^Mack Sennett made two kinds of comedy: parody laced with slap-
stick, and plain slapstick. The parodies were the unceremonious
burial of a century of hamming, including the new hamming in seri-
ous movies, and nobody who has missed Ben Turpin in A Small
Town Idol, or kidding Erich von Stroheim in Three Foolish Weeks
or as The Shriek of Araby, can imagine how rough parody can get
and still remain subtle and roaringly funny. The plain slapstick, at
its best, was even better: a profusion of hearty young women in
disconcerting bathing suits, frisking around with a gaggle of insanely
incompetent policemen and of equally certifiable male civilians sport-
ing museum-piece mustaches. All these people zipped and caromed
about the pristine world of the screen as jazzily as a convention of
water bugs. Words can hardly suggest how energetically they col-
lided and bounced apart, meeting in full gallop around the corner of
a house; how hard and how often they fell on their backsides; or
with what fantastically adroit clumsiness they got themselves fouled
up in folding ladders, garden hoses, tethered animals and each other's
headlong cross-purposes. The gestures were ferociously emphatic;
not a line or motion of the body was wasted or inarticulate. The
reader may remember how splendidly upright wandlike old Ben
Turpin could stand for a Renunciation Scene, with his lampshade
mustache twittering and his sparrowy chest stuck out and his head
flung back like Paderewski assaulting a climax and the long babyish
back hair trying to look lionlike, while his Adam's apple, an orange
in a Christmas stocking, pumped with noble emotion. Or huge Mack
Swain, who looked like a hairy mushroom, rolling his eyes in a man-
ner patented by French romantics and gasping in some dubious
ecstasy. Or Louise Fazenda, the perennial farmer's daughter and the
perfect low-comedy housemaid, primping her spit curl; and how her
hair tightened a good-looking face into the incarnation of rampant
gullibility. Or snouty James Finlayson, gleefully foreclosing a
mortgage, with his look of eternally tasting a spoiled pickle. Or
Chester Conklin, a myopic and inebriated little walrus stumbling
around in outsize pants. Or Fatty Arbuckle, with his cold eye and his
loose, serene smile, his silky manipulation of his bulk and his Satanic
marksmanship with pies (he was ambidextrous and could simul-
taneously blind two people in opposite directions).
J 48 JAMES AGEE
The intimate tastes and secret hopes of these poor ineligible dunces
were ruthlessly exposed whenever a hot stove, an electric fan or a
bulldog took a dislike to their outer garments: agonizingly elaborate
drawers, worked up on some lonely evening out of some Godfor-
saken lace curtain; or men's underpants with big round black spots
on them. The Sennett sets delirious wallpaper, megalomaniacally
scrolled iron beds, Grand Rapids in extremis outdid even the under-
wear. It was their business, after all, to kid the squalid braggadocio
which infested the domestic interiors of the period, and that was al-
most beyond parody. These comedies told their stories to the unaided
eye, and by every means possible they screamed to it. That is one
reason for the India ink silhouettes of the cops, and for convicts
and prison bars and their shadows in hard sunlight, and for bare-
footed husbands, in tigerish pajamas, reacting like dervishes to
stepped-on tacks.
The early silent comedians never strove for or consciously thought
of anything which could be called artistic "f orm," but they achieved
it For Sennett's rival, Hal Roach, Leo McCarey once devoted almost
the whole of a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler to pie throwing. The
first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically. Then
innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex. At full
pitch it was Armageddon. But everything was calculated so nicely
that until late in the picture, when havoc took over, every pie made
its special kind of point and piled on its special kind of laugh.
Sennett's comedies were just a shade faster and fizzier than life.
According to legend (and according to Sennett) he discovered the
tempo proper to screen comedy when a green cameraman, try-
ing to save money, cranked too slow. 1 Realizing the tremendous
drumlike power of mere motion to exhilarate, he gave inanimate ob-
jects a mischievous life of their own, broke every law of nature the
tricked camera would serve him for and made the screen dance like
a witches' Sabbath. The thing one is surest of all to remember is how
toward the end of nearly every Sennett comedy, a chase (usually
called the "rally") built up such a majestic trajectory of pure an-
archic motion that bathing girls, cops, comics, dogs, cats, babies,
automobiles, locomotives, innocent bystanders, sometimes what
seemed like a whole city, an entire civilization, were hauled along
head over heels in the wake of that energy like dry leaves following
an express train.
1 Silent comedy was shot at twelve to sixteen frames per second and was
speeded up by being shown at sixteen frames per second, the usual rate of
theater projectors at that time. Theater projectors today run at twenty-four,
which makes modern film taken at the same speed seem smooth and natural.
Jtsut it makes silent movies fast and jerky.
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
"Nice" people, who shunned all movies in the early dap, con-
demned the Sennett comedies as vulgar and naive. But millions of less
pretentious people loved their sincerity and sweetness, their wild-
animal innocence and glorious vitality. They could not put these feel-
ings into words, but they flocked to'the silents. The reader who gets
back deep enough into that world will probably even remember the
theater: the barefaced honky-tonk and the waltzes by Waldteufel,
slammed out on a mechanical piano; the searing redolence of peanuts
and demirep perfumery, tobacco and feet and sweat; the laughter of
unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent
and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall
Sennett wheedled his first financing out of a couple of ex-bookies
to whom he was already in debt. He took his comics out of music
halls, burlesque, vaudeville, circuses and limbo, and through them
he tapped in on that great pipeline of horsing and miming which
runs back unbroken through the fairs of the Middle Ages at least
to ancient Greece. He added all that he himself had learned about the
large and spurious gesture, the late decadence of the Grand Manner,
as a stage-struck boy in East Berlin, Connecticut, and as a frustrated
opera singer and actor. The only thing he claims to have invented is
the pie in the face, and he insists, "Anyone who tells you he has dis-
covered something new is a fool or a liar or both."
The silent-comedy studio was about the best training school the
movies have ever known, and the Sennett studio was about as free
and easy and as fecund of talent as they carne. All the major comedi-
ans we will mention worked there, at least briefly. So did some of the
major stars of the 'zos and since notably Gloria Swanson, Phyllis
Haver, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressier and Carole Lombard. Direc-
tors Frank Capra, Leo McCarey and George Stevens also got their
start in silent comedy; much that remains most flexible, spontaneous
and visually alive in sound movies can be traced, through them and
others, to this silent apprenticeship. Everybody did pretty much as
he pleased on the Sennett lot, and everybody's ideas were welcome.
Sennett posted no rules, and the only thing he strictly forbade was
liquor. A Sennett story conference was a most informal aff air. During
the early years, at least, only the most important scenario might be
; jotted on the back of an envelope. Mainly Sennett's men thrashed out
a few primary ideas and carried them in their heads, sure that better
stuff would turn up while they were shooting, in the heat of physical
: action. This put quite a load on the prop man; he had to have the most
improbable apparatus on hand bombs, trick telephones, what not
to implement whatever idea might suddenly turn up. All Mnds of
things did and were recklessly used. Once a low-comedy auto got
J 5 JAMES AGEE
out of control and killed the cameraman, but he was not visible in the
shot, which was thrilling and undamaged; the audience never knew
the difference.
,.- Sennett used to hire a "wild man" to sit in on his gag conferences,
whose whole job was to think up "wildies." Usually he was an all
but brainless, speechless man, scarcely able to communicate his idea;
but he had a totally uninhibited imagination. He might say nothing
for an hour; then he'd mutter, "You take . . ." and all the relatively
rational others would shut up and wait. "You take this cloud . . ."
he would get out, sketching vague shapes in the air. Often he could
get no further; but thanks to some kind of thought transference,
saner men would take this cloud and make something of it. The wild
man seems in fact to have functioned as the group's subconscious
mind, the source of all creative energy. His ideas were so weird and
amorphous that Sennett can no longer remember a one of them, or
even how it turned out after rational processing. But a fair equiva-
lent might be one of the best comic sequences in a Laurel and Hardy
picture. It is simple enough-simple and real, in fact, as a nightmare.
Laurel and Hardy are trying to move a piano across a narrow sus-
pension bridge. The bridge is slung over a sickening chasm, between
a couple of Alps. Midway they meet a gorilla.
Had he done nothing else, Sennett would be remembered for giv-
ing a start to three of the four comedians who now began to apply
their sharp individual talents to this newborn language. The one
whom he did not train (he was on the lot briefly but Sennett barely
remembers seeing him around) wore glasses, smiled a great deal and
looked like the sort of eager young man who might have quit divinity
school to hustle brushes. That was Harold Lloyd. The others were
grotesque and poetic in their screen characters in degrees which ap-
pear to be impossible when the magic of silence is broken. One, who
never smiled, carried a face as still and sad as a daguerreotype through
some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying
physical comedy ever invented. That was Buster Keaton. One looked
like an elderly baby and, at times, a baby dope fiend; he could do more
with less than any other comedian. That was Harry Langdon. One
looked like Charlie Chaplin, and he was the first man to give the si-
lent language a soul.
When Charlie Chaplin started to work for Sennett he had chiefly
to reckon with Ford Sterling, the reigning comedian. Their first pic-
ture together amounted to a duel before the assembled professionals.
Sterling, by no means untalented, was a big man with a florid Teu-
tonic style which, under this special pressure, he turned on full blast.
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA 15 j
Chaplin defeated him within a few minutes with a wink of the mus-
tache, a hitch of the trousers, a quirk of the little finger.
With Tiltie>s Punctured Romance, in 1914, he became a major star.
Soon after, he left Sennett when Sennett refused to start a landsEde
among the other comedians by meeting the raise Chaplin demanded.
Sennett is understandably wry about it in retrospect, but he still says,
"I was right at the time." Of Chaplin he says simply, "Oh well, he's
just the greatest artist that ever lived" None of Chaplin's former ri-
vals rates him much lower than that; they speak of him no more jeal-
ously than they might of God. We will try here only to suggest the
essence of his supremacy. Of aU comedians he worked most deeply
and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and
is up against The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity,
as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and It seems unlikely that
any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety
or poignancy of motion. As for pure motion, even if he had never
gone on to make his magnificent feature-length comedies, Chaplin
would have made his period in movies a great one singlehanded even
if he had made nothing except The Cure, or One AM. In the latter,
barring one immobile taxi driver, Chaplin plays alone, as a drunk try-
ing to get upstairs and into bed. It is a sort of inspired elaboration on
a soft-shoe dance, involving an angry stuffed wildcat, small rugs on
slippery floors, a Lazy Susan table, exquisite footwork on a flight of
stairs, a contretemps with a huge, ferocious pendulum and the fun-
niest and most perverse Murphy bed in movie history and, always
made physically lucid, the delicately weird mental processes of a man
ethereally sozzled.
Before Chaplin came to pictures people were content with a couple
of gags per comedy; he got some kind of laugh every second* The
minute he began to work he set standards and continually forced
them higher. Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook
trout in The Gold Rushy or embarrassed by a swallowed whistle in
City Lights, has seen perfection. Most of the time, however, Chaplin
got his laughter less from the gags, or from milking them in any or-
dinary sense, than through his genius for what may be called inflection
the perfect, changeful shading of his physical and emotional atti-
tudes toward the gag. Funny as his bout with the Murphy bed is, the
glances of awe, expostulation and helpless, almost whimpering desire
for vengeance which he darts at this infernal machine are even better.
A painful and frequent error among tyros is breaking the comic
line with a too-big laugh, then a letdown; or with a laugh which is
out of key or irrelevant. The masters could ornament the main line
beautifully; they never addled it. In A Night Out Chaplin, passed out,
1 52 JAMES AGEE
is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by staggering
Ben Turpin. His toes trail; he is as supine as a sled. Turpin himself
is so drunk he can hardly drag him. Chaplin comes quietly to, realizes
how well he is being served by his struggling pal, and with a royally
delicate gesture plucks and savors a flower.
The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most
poignant poetry were in Chaplin's work. He could probably panto-
mime Bryce's The American Commonwealth without ever blurring a
syllable and make it paralyzingly funny into the bargain. At the end
of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the
Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated
him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred
to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his
shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he
recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in
her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the
emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to
o'hrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the
highest moment in movies.
Harold Lloyd worked only a little while with Sennett. During most
of his career he acted for another major comedy producer, Hal Roach.
He tried at first to offset Chaplin's influence and establish his own in-
dividuality by playing Chaplin's exact opposite, a character named
Lonesome Luke who wore clothes much too small for him and whose
gestures were likewise as un-Chaplinesque as possible. But he soon
realized that an opposite in itself was a kind of slavishness. He dis-
covered his own comic identity when he saw a movie about a fight-
ing parson: a hero who wore glasses. He began to think about those
glasses day and night. He decided on horn rims because they were
youthful, ultravisible on the screen and on the verge of becoming
fashionable (he was to make them so). Around these large lensless
horn rims he began to develop a new character, nothing grotesque or
eccentric, but a fresh, believable young man who could fit into a
wide variety of stories.
Lloyd depended more on story and situation than any of the other
major comedians (he kept the best stable of gagmen in Hollywood,
at one time hiring six) ; but unlike most "story" comedians he was also
a very funny man from inside. He had, as he has written, "an unusually
large comic vocabulary." More particularly he had an expertly ex-
pressive body and even more expressive teeth, and out of his the-
saurus of smiles he could at a moment's notice blend prissiness, breezi-
ness and asininity, and still remain tremendously likable. His movies
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
were more extroverted and closer to ordinary life than any others of
the best comedies: the vicissitudes of a New York taxi driver; the
unaccepted college boy who, by desperate courage and inspired in-
eptitude, wins the Big Game. He was especially good at putting a
very timid, spoiled or brassy young fellow through devastating
embarrassments. He went through one of his most uproarious
Gethsemanes as a shy country youth courting the nicest girl in town
in Grandmas Boy. He arrived dressed "strictly up to date for the
Spring of 1862," as a subtitle observed, and found that the ancient
colored butler wore a similar flowered waistcoat and moldering cut-
away. He got one wandering, nervous forefinger dreadfully stuck
in a fancy little vase. The girl began cheerfully to try to identify
that queer smell which dilated from him; Grandpa's best suit was
rife with mothballs. A tenacious litter of kittens feasted off the
goose grease on his horne-shined shoes.
Lloyd was even better at the comedy of thrills. In Safety Last,
as a rank amateur, he is forced to substitute for a human fly and to
climb a medium-sized skyscraper. Dozens of awful things happen to
him. He gets fouled up in a tennis net. Popcorn falls on him from a
window above, and the local pigeons treat him like a cross between
a lunch wagon and St. Francis of Assisi. A mouse runs up his britches
leg, and the crowd below salutes his desperate dance on the window
ledge with wild applause of the daredevil. A good deal of this full-
length picture hangs thus by its eyelashes along the face of a building.
Each new floor is like a new stanza in a poem; and the higher and
more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets.
In this movie Lloyd demonstrates beautifully his ability to do more
than merely milk a gag, but to top it. (In an old, simple example of
topping, an incredible number of tall men get, one by one, out of
a small closed auto. After as many have clambered out as the joke
will bear, one more steps out: a midget. That tops the gag. Then the
auto collapses. That tops the topper.) In Safety Last Lloyd is driven
out to the dirty end of a flagpole by a furious dog; the pole breaks
and he falls, just managing to grab the minute hand of a huge clock.
His weight promptly pulls the hand down from IX to VI. That would
be more than enough for any ordinary comedian, but there is further
logic in the situation. Now, hideously, the whole clockface pulls
loose and slants from its trembling springs above the street. Getting
out of difficulty with the clock, he makes still further use of the in-
strument by getting one foot caught in one of these obstinate
springs.
A proper delaying of the ultrapredictable can of course be just as
funny as a properly timed explosion of the unexpected. As Lloyd
*54 JAMES AGEE
approaches the end of his horrible hegira up the side of the building
in Safety Last, it becomes clear to the audience, but not to him, that
if he raises his head another couple of inches he is going to get mur-
derously conked by one of the four arms of a revolving wind gauge.
He delays the evil moment almost interminably, with one distraction
and another, and every delay is a suspense-tightening laugh; he also
gets his foot nicely entangled in a rope, so that when he does get hit,
the payoff of one gag sends him careening head downward through
the abyss into another. Lloyd was outstanding even among the master
craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and gettino- out
of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next. Harsh experience
also taught him a deep and fundamental rule: Never try to get "above"
the audience.
Lloyd tried it in The Freshman. He was to wear an unfinished,
basted-together tuxedo to a college party, which would gradually,
fall apart as he danced. Lloyd decided to skip the pants, a low-comedy
cliche, and lose just the coat. His gag men warned him. A preview
proved how right they were. Lloyd had to reshoot the whole expen-
sive sequence, build it around defective pants and climax it with the
inevitable. It was one of the funniest things he ever did.
When Lloyd was still a very young man he lost about half his right
hand (and nearly lost his sight) when a comedy bomb exploded pre-
maturely. But in spite of his artificially built-out hand he continued
to do his own dirty work, like all of the best comedians. The side of
the building he climbed in Safety Last did not overhang the street,
as it appears to. But the nearest landing place was a roof three floors
below him, as he approached the top, and he did everything, of
course, the hard way, i.e., the comic way, keeping his bottom stuck
well out, his shoulders hunched, his hands and feet skidding over
perdition.
If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter, Lloyd
was not a great comedian. If plain laughter is any criterion-and it is
a healthy counterbalance to the other-few people have equaled him,
and nobody has ever beaten him.
Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd were all more like each other,
in one important way, than Harry Langdon was like any of them.
Whatever else the others might be doing, they all used more or less
elaborate physical comedy; Langdon showed how little of that one
might use and still be a great silent-screen comedian. In his screen
character he symbolized something as deeply and centrally human,
though by no means as rangily so, as the Tramp. There was, of course,
an immense difference in inventiveness and range of virtuosity. It
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
seemed as if Chaplin could do literally anything, on any instrument
in the orchestra. Langdon had one queerly toned, unique little reed.
But out of it he could get incredible melodies.
Like Chaplin, Langdon wore a coat which buttoned on his wish-
bone and swung out wide below, but the effect was very different:
he seemed like an outsized baby who had begun to outgrow his
clothes. The crown of his hat was rounded and the brim was turned up
all around, like a little boy's hat, and he looked as if he wore diapers
under his pants. His walk was that of a child which has just got sure
on its feet, and his body and hands fitted that age. His face was kept
pale to show off, with the simplicity of a nursery school drawing,
the bright, ignorant, gentle eyes and the little twirling mouth. He had
big moon cheeks, with dimples, and a Napoleonic forelock of mousy
hair; the round, docile head seemed large in ratio to the cream-puff
body. Twitchings of his face were signals of tiny discomforts too
slowly registered by a tinier brain; quick, squirty little smiles showed
his almost prehuman pleasures, his incurably premature trustfulness.
He was a virtuoso of hesitations and of delicately indecisive motions,
and he was particularly fine in a high wind, rounding a corner with
a kind of skittering toddle, both hands nursing his hatbrim.
He was as remarkable a master as Chaplin of subtle emotional and
mental process and operated much more at leisure. He once got a
good three hundred feet of continuously bigger laughs out of rub-
bing his chest, in a crowded vehicle, with Limburger cheese, under
the misapprehension that it was a cold salve. In another long scene,
watching a brazen show girl change her clothes, he sat motionless,
back to the camera, and registered the whole lexicon of lost inno-
cence, shock, disapproval and disgust, with the back of his neck. His
scenes with women were nearly always something special. Once a
lady spy did everything in her power (under the Hays Office) to
seduce him. Harry was polite, willing, even flirtatious in his little way.
The only trouble was that he couldn't imagine what in the world she
was leering and pawing at him for, and that he was terribly ticklish.
The Mata Hari wound up foaming at the mouth.
There was also a sinister flicker of depravity about the Langdon
character, all the more disturbing because babies are premoraL He
had an instinct for bringing his actual adulthood and figurative baby-
ishness into frictions as crawly as a fingernail on a slate blackboard,
and he wandered into areas of strangeness which were beyond the
other comedians. In a nightmare in one movie he was forced to fight
a large, muscular young man; the girl Harry loved was the prize. The
young man was a good boxer; Harry could scarcely lift his gloves.
The contest took place in a fiercely lighted prize ring, in a prodigious
JAMES AGEE
pitch-dark arena. The only spectator was the girl, and she was rooting
against Harry. As the fight went on, her eyes glittered ever more
brightly with blood lust and, with glittering teeth, she tore her big
straw hat to shreds.
Langdon came to Sennett from a vaudeville act in which he had
fought a losing battle with a recalcitrant automobile. The minute
Frank Capra saw him he begged Sennett to let him work with him.
Langdon was almost as childlike as the character he played. He had
only a vague idea of his story or even of each scene as he played it;
each time he went before the camera Capra would brief him on the
general situation and then, as this finest of intuitive improvisers once
tried to explain his work, "I'd go into my routine." The whole tragedy
of the corning of dialogue as far as these comedians were concerned
and one reason for the increasing rigidity of comedy ever since
can be epitomized in the mere thought of Harry Langdon confronted
with a script.
Langdon's magic was in his innocence, and Capra took beautiful
care not to meddle with it. The key to the proper use of Langdon,
Capra always knew, was "the principle of the brick." "If there was
a rule for writing Langdon material," he explains, "it was this: His
only ally was God. Langdon might be saved by the brick falling on
the cop, but it was verboten that he in any way motivate the brick's
fall." Langdon became quickly and fantastically popular with three
pictures, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, The Strong Man and Long Pants;
from then on he went downhill even faster. "The trouble was," Capra
says, "that high-brow critics came around to explain his art to him.
Also he developed an interest in dames. It was a pretty high life for
such a little fellow." Langdon made two more pictures with high-
brow writers, one of which (Three's a Crowd) had some wonderful
passages in It, including the prize-ring nightmare; then First National
canceled his contract. He was reduced to mediocre roles and two-
reelers which were more rehashes of his old gags; this time around
they no longer seemed funny. "He never did really understand what
hit him," says Capra. "He died broke [in 1944]. And he died of a
broken heart. He was the most tragic figure I ever came across in
show business."
Buster Keaton started work at the age of three and a half with his
parents in one of the roughest acts in vaudeville ("The Three
Keatons"); Harry Houdini gave the child the name Buster in admira-
tion for a fall he took down a flight of stairs. In his first movies Keaton
teamed with Fatty Arbuckle under Sennett. He went on to become
one of Metro's biggest stars and earners; a Keaton feature cost about
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
$200,000 to make and reliably grossed $2 million. Very early in his
movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen.
He didn't realize he didn't. He had got the deadpan habit in variety;
on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never oc-
curred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just
once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much
the most deeply "silent" of the silent comedians that even a smile was
as deafeningly out of key as a yell In a way his pictures are like a
transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe
Is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's
effortless, uninterested face.
Keaton's face ranked almost with Lincoln's as an early American
archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was
irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a
deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One
can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as
his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids
and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges.
The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and
it floats away.
No other comedian could do as much with the deadpan. He used
this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-
track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturb-
ability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being
can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power
to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Every-
thing that he was and did bore out this rigid face and pkyed laughs
against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a
statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles^
governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphorelike arm to
point, you could almost hear the electrical impulse in the signal block.
When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to
easy jog trot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston
sprint always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouch-
able facewere as distinct and as soberly In order as an automatic
gearshift.
Keaton was a wonderfully resourceful inventor of mechanistic gags
(he still spends much of his time fooling with Erector sets) ; as he ran
afoul of locomotives, steamships, prefabricated and overelectrified
houses, he put himself through some of the hardest and cleverest pun-
ishment ever designed for laughs. In Sherlock Jr. y boiling along on
the handlebars of a motorcycle quite unaware that he has lost his
driver, Keaton whips through city traffic, breaks tip a tug-of-war, gets
158 JAMES AGEE
a shovelful of dirt in the face from each of a long line of Rockette-
timed ditchdiggers, approaches at high speed a log which is hinged
open by dynamite precisely soon enough to let him through and,
hitting an obstruction, leaves the handlebars like an arrow leaving a
bow, whams through the window of a shack in which the heroine
is about to be violated, and hits the heavy feet first, knocking him
through the opposite wall. The whole sequence is as clean in motion
as the trajectory of a bullet.
Much of the charm and edge of Keaton's comedy, however, lay
in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal
deadpan. Trapped in the side wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself
from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside
the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern
was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not
as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd,
abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a
sugar lump.
Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so
far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal
besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard
laughter his nineteen short comedies the negatives of which have
been lostwere even better.) He was the only major comedian who
kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure
physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion
he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturb-
ing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it,
there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of mel-
ancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there
was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much
of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of
Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The
Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors
along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam
shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.
Perhaps because "dry" comedy is so much more rare and odd than
"dry" wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those
who do cannot care mildly.
As soon as the screen began to talk, silent comedy was pretty well
finished. The hardy and prolific Mack Sennett made the transfer;
he was the first man to put Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields on the
screen. But he was essentially a silent-picture man, and by the time
the Academy awarded him a special Oscar for his "lasting contribu-
COMEDY'S GREATEST ERA
tion to the comedy technique of the screen" (in 1938), he was no
longer active. As for the comedians we have spoken of in particular,
they were as badly off as fine dancers suddenly required to appear
in plays.
Harold Lloyd, whose work was most nearly realistic, naturally
coped least unhappily with the added realism of speech; he made
several talking comedies. But good as the best were, they were not
so good as his silent work, and by the late '305 he quit acting. A few
years ago he returned to play the lead (and play it beautifully) in
Preston Sturges' The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, but this exceptional
picture-which opened, brilliantly, with the closing reel of Lloyd's
The^ Freshman-has not yet been generally released.
^ Like Chaplin, Lloyd was careful of his money; he is still rich and ac-
tive. Last June, in the presence of President Truman, he became
Imperial Potentate of the A.A.O.N.M.S. (Shriners). Harry Langdon,
as we have said, was a broken man when sound came in.
^ Up to the middle '305 Buster Keaton made several feature-length
pictures (with such players as Jimmy Durante, Wallace Beery and
Robert Montgomery) ; he also made a couple of dozen talking shorts.
Now and again he managed to get loose into motion, without having
to talk, and for a moment or so the screen would start singing again.
But his dark, dead voice, though it was in keeping with the visual
character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the
illusion within which he worked. He gallantly and correctly refuses
to regard himself as "retired." Besides occasional bits, spots and minor
roles in Hollywood pictures, he has worked on summer stages, made
talking comedies in France and Mexico and clowned in a French
circus. This summer he has played the straw hats in Three Men on a
Horse. He is planning a television program. He also has a working
agreement with Metro. One of his jobs there is to construct comedy
sequences for Red Skelton.
The only man who really survived the flood was Chaplin, the only
one who was rich, proud and popular enough to aif ord to stay silent.
He brought out two of his greatest nontalking comedies, City Lights
and Modern Times, in the middle of an avalanche of talk, spoke gib-
berish and, in the closing moments, plain English in The Grettt Dicta-
tor, and at last made an all-talking picture, Monsieur Verdoux, creat-
ing for that purpose an entirely new character who might properly
talk a blue streak. Verdowc is the greatest of talking comedies though
so cold and savage that it had to find its public in grimly experienced
Europe.
Good comedy, and some that was better than good, outlived silence,
but there has been less and less of it The talkies brought one great
l6o JAMES AGEE
comedian, the late, majestically lethargic W. C. Fields, who could not
possibly have worked as well in silence; he was the toughest and the
most warmly human of all screen comedians, and It's a Gift and The
Bank Dicky fiendishly funny and incisive white-collar comedies, rank
high among the best comedies (and best movies) ever made. Laurel
and Hardy, the only comedians who managed to preserve much of the
large, low style of silence and who began to explore the comedy of
sound, have made nothing since 1945. Walt Disney, at his best an
inspired comic inventor and teller of fairy stories, lost his stride during
the war and has since regained it only at moments. Preston Sturges has
made brilliant, satirical comedies, but his pictures are smart, nervous
comedy-dramas merely italicized with slapstick. The Marx Brothers
were sidesplitters but they made their best comedies years ago.
Jimmy Durante is mainly a night-club genius; Abbott and Costello
are semiskilled laborers, at best; Bob Hope is a good radio comedian
with a pleasing presence, but not much more, on the screen.
There is no hope that screen comedy will get much better than it is
without new, gifted young comedians who really belong in movies,
and without freedom for their experiments. For everyone who may
appear we have one last, invidious comparison to offer as a guidepost.
One of the most popular recent comedies is Bob Hope's The Pale-
face. We take no pleasure in blackening The Paleface; we single it
out, rather, because it is as good as we've got. Anything that is said
of it here could be said, with interest, of other comedies of our time.
Most of the laughs in The Paleface are verbal. Bob Hope is very adroit
with his lines and now and then, when the words don't get in the way,
he makes a good beginning as a visual comedian. But only the begin-
ning, never the middle or the end. He is funny, for instance, reacting
to a shot of violent whisky. But he does not know how to get still
funnier (i.e., how to build and milk) or how to be funniest last (i.e.,
how to top or cap his gag) . The camera has to fade out on the same
old face he started with.
One sequence is promisingly set up for visual comedy. In it, Hope
and a lethal local boy stalk each other all over a cow town through
streets which have been emptied in fear of their duel. The gag here
is that through accident and stupidity they keep just failing to find
each other. Some of it is quite funny. But the fun slackens between
laughs like a weak clothesline, and by all the logic of humor (which is
ruthlessly logical) the biggest laugh should come at the moment, and
through the way, they finally spot each other. The sequence is so
weakly thought out that at that crucial moment the camera can't
afford to watch them; it switches to Jane Russell.
Now we turn to a masterpiece. In The Navigator Buster Keaton
COMEDY S GREATEST ERA
works with practically the same gag as Hope's duel Adrift on a ship
which he believes is otherwise empty, he drops a lighted cigarette. A
girl finds it. She calls out and he hears her; each then tries to find the
other. First each walks purposefully down the long, vacant starboard
deck, the girl, then Keaton, turning the corner just in time not to see
each other. Next time around each of them is trotting briskly, very
much in earnest; going at the same pace, they miss each other just
the same. Next time around each of them is going like a bat out of
hell. Again they miss. Then the camera withdraws to a point of van-
tage at the stern, leans its chin in its hand and just watches the whole
intricate superstructure of the ship as the protagonists stroll, steal
and scuttle from level to level, up, down and sidewise, always man-
aging to miss each other by hairbreadths, in an enchantingly neat
and elaborate piece of timing. There are no subsidiary gags to get
laughs in this sequence and there is little loud laughter; merely a quiet
and steadily increasing kind of delight. When Keaton has got all he
can out of this fine modification of the movie chase he invents a fine
device to bring the two together: the girl, thoroughly winded, sits
down for a breather, indoors, on a plank which workmen have left
across sawhorses. Keaton pauses on an upper deck, equally winded
and puzzled. What follows happens in a couple of seconds at most:
Air suction whips his silk topper backward down a ventilator; grab-
bing frantically for it, he backs against the lip of the ventilator,
jackknifes and falls in backward. Instantly the camera cuts back to
the girl. A topper falls through the ceiling and lands tidily, right
side up, on the plank beside her. Before she can look more than
startled, its owner follows, head between his knees, crushes the
topper, breaks the plank with the point of his spine and proceeds to
the floor. The breaking of the plank smacks Boy and Girl together.
It is only fair to remember that the silent comedians would have as
hard a time playing a talking scene as Hope has playing his visual ones,
and that writing and directing are as accountable for the failure as
Hope himself. But not even the humblest journeymen of the silent
years would have let themselves off so easily. Like the masters, they
knew, and sweated to obey, the laws of their craft
The
Westerner
by Robert Warshou?
Because of its obvious symbolism,
scenic possibilities and message-
proneness, the Western movie has
always been a favorite among film
makers. Unfortunately a lot of
nonsense has been written about
the alleged hidden meanings in
Westerns. Robert Warshow^s anal-
ysis of several well-known West-
erns is a distinct exception (pub-
lished in Partisan Review, March
7^54). It is one of the very few
statements that fully explores the
significance of style and content
in this genre.
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
I he two most successful creations of American movies are the
gangster and the Westerner: men with guns. Guns as physical ob-
THE WESTERNER
jects, and the postures associated with their use, form the visual and
emotional center of both types of films. I suppose this reflects the
importance of guns in the fantasy life of Americans; but that is a
less illuminating point than it appears to be.
The gangster movie, which no longer exists in its "classical" form,
is a story of enterprise and success ending in precipitate failure. Suc-
cess is conceived as an increasing power to work injury, it belongs
to the city, and it is of course a form of evil (though the gangster's
death, presented usually as "punishment," is perceived simply as de-
feat). The peculiarity of the gangster is his unceasing, nervous activ-
ity. The exact nature of his enterprises may remain vague, but his
commitment to enterprise is always clear, and all the more clear
because he operates outside the field of utility. He is without culture,
without manners, without leisure, or at any rate his leisure is likely
to be spent in debauchery so compulsively aggressive as to seem only
another aspect of his "work." But he is graceful, moving like a dancer
among the crowded dangers of the city.
Like other tycoons, the gangster is crude in conceiving his ends but
by no means inarticulate; on the contrary, he is usually expansive
and noisy (the introspective gangster is a fairly recent development),
and can state definitely what he wants: to take over the North Side,
to own a hundred suits, to be Number One. But new "frontiers" will
present themselves infinitely, and by a rigid convention it is under-
stood that as soon as he wishes to rest on his gains, he is on the way to
destruction.
The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression
of a profound worldly wisdom. He appeals most to adolescents with
their impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more gen-
erally he appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in
the "normal" possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster
is the "no" to that great American "yes" which is stamped so big over
our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really
feel about our lives. But the gangster's loneliness and melancholy are
not "authentic"; like everything else that belongs to him, they are
not honestly come by: he is lonely and melancholy not because life
ultimately demands such feelings but because he has put himself in a
position where everybody wants to kill him and eventually some-
body will. He is wide open and defenseless, incomplete because un-
able to accept any limits or come to terms with his own nature, fear-
ful, loveless. And the story of his career is a nightmare inversion of
the values of ambition and opportunity. From the window of Scar-
face's bulletproof apartment can be seen an electric sign proclaiming,
"The World Is Yours," and, if I remember, this sign is the last thing
ROBERT WARSHOW
we see after Scarface lies dead in the street. In the end it is the
gangster's weakness as much as his power and freedom that appeals
to us; the world is not ours, but it is not his either, and in his death
he "pays" for our fantasies, releasing us momentarily both from the
concept of success, which he denies by caricaturing it, and from the
need to succeed, which he shows to be dangerous. 1
The Western hero, by contrast, is a figure of repose. He resembles
the gangster in being lonely and to some degree melancholy. But his
melancholy comes from the "simple" recognition that life is unavoid-
ably serious, not from the disproportions of his own temperament.
And his loneliness is organic, not imposed on him by his situation but
belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness. The
gangster must reject others violently or draw them violently to him.
The Westerner is not thus compelled to seek love; he is prepared to
accept it, perhaps, but he never asks of it more than it can give, and
we see him constantly in situations where love is at best an irrele-
vance. If there is a woman he loves, she is usually unable to under-
stand his motives; she is against killing and being killed, and he finds
it impossible to explain to her that there is no point in being "against"
these things: they belong to his world,
Very often this woman is from the East and her failure to under-
stand represents a clash of cultures. In the American mind, refine-
ment, virtue, civilization, Christianity itself, are seen as feminine,
and therefore women are often portrayed as possessing some kind of
deeper wisdom, while the men, for all their apparent self-assurance,
are fundamentally childish. But the West, lacking the graces of
civilization, is the place "where men are men"; in Western movies,
men have the deeper wisdom and the women are children. Those
women in the Western movies who share the hero's understanding
of life are prostitutes (or, as they are usually presented, barroom
entertainers) women, that is, who have come to understand in the
most practical way how love can be an irrelevance, and therefore
"fallen" women. The gangster, too, associates with prostitutes, but
for him the important things about a prostitute are her passive avail-
ability and her costliness; she is part of his winnings. In Western
movies, the important thing about a prostitute is her quasi-mascu-
line independence: nobody owns her, nothing has to be explained
to her, and she is not, like a virtuous woman, a "value" that demands
to be protected. When the Westerner leaves the prostitute for a
virtuous woman-for love-he is in fact forsaking a way of life,
II discussed gangster movies at greater length in an article called "The
Gangster as Tragic Hero" (PjR, February 1948) .
THE WESTERNER I( j
though the point of the choice is often obscured by having the pros-
titute killed by getting into the line of fire.
The Westerner is par excellence a man of leisure. Even when he
wears the badge of a marshal or, more rarely, owns a ranch, he ap-
pears to be unemployed. We see him standing at a bar, or playing
poker-a game which expresses perfectly his talent for remaining
relaxed in the midst of tension-or perhaps camping out on the
plains on some extraordinary errand. If he does own a ranch, it is
in ^ the background; we are not actually aware that he owns any-
thing except his horse, his guns, and the one worn suit of clothing
which is likely to remain unchanged all through the movie. It comes
as^a surprise to see him take money from his pocket or an extra
shirt from his saddlebags. As a rule we do not even know where he
sleeps at night and don't think of asking. Yet it never occurs to us
that he is a poor man. There is no poverty in Western movies, and
really no wealth either; those great cattle domains and shipments of
gold which figure so largely in the plots are moral and not material
quantities, not the objects of contention but only its occasion. Pos-
sessions too are irrelevant.
Employment of some kind usually unproductive is always open
to the Westerner, but when he accepts it, it is not because he needs
to make a living, much less from any idea of "getting ahead." Where
could he want to "get ahead" to? By the time we see him, he is
already "there"; he can ride a horse faultlessly, keep his countenance
in the face of death, and draw his gun a little faster and shoot it a
little straighter than anyone he is likely to meet. These are sharply
defined acquirements, giving to the figure of the Westerner an ap-
parent moral clarity which corresponds to the clarity of his physi-
cal image against his bare landscape; initially, at any rate, the West-
ern movie presents itself as being without mystery, its whole universe
comprehended in what we see on the screen.
Much of this apparent simplicity arises directly from those "cine-
matic" elements which have long been understood to give the West-
ern theme its special appropriateness for the movies: the wide
expanses of land, the free movement of men on horses. As guns con-
stitute the visible moral center of the Western movie, suggesting
continually the possibility of violence, so land and horses represent
the movie's material basis, its sphere of action. But the land and the
horses have also a moral significance; the physical freedom they rep-
resent belongs to the moral "openness" of the West corresponding
to the fact that guns are carried where they can be seen. (And, as
we shall see, the character of land and horses changes as the West-
ern film becomes more complex.)
ROBERT WARSHOAV
The gangster's world is less open, and his arts not so easily identi-
fiable as the Westerner's. Perhaps he too can keep his countenance,
but the mask he wears is really no mask; its purpose is precisely to
make evident the fact that he desperately wants to "get ahead" and
will stop at nothing. Where the Westerner imposes himself by the
appearance of unshakable control, the gangster's pre-eminence lies
in the suggestion that he may at any moment lose control; his
strength is not in being able to shoot faster or straighter than others,
but in being more willing to shoot. "Do it first," says Scarface, ex-
pounding his mode of operation, "and keep on doing it! " With the
Westerner, it is a crucial point of honor not to "do it first"; his gun
remains in its holster until the moment of combat.
There is no suggestion, however, that he draws the gun reluc-
tantly. The Westerner could not fulfill himself if the moment did
not finally come when he can shoot his enemy down. But because
that moment is so thoroughly the expression of his being, it must
be kept pure. He will not violate the accepted forms of combat
though by doing so he could save a city. And he can wait. "When
you call me that smile! "the villain smiles weakly, soon he is
laughing with horrible joviality, and the crisis is past. But it is al-
lowed to pass because it must come again; sooner or later Trampas
will "make his play," and the Virginian will be ready for him.
What does the Westerner fight for? We know he is on the side
of justice and order, and of course it can be said he fights for these
things. But such broad aims never correspond exactly to his real
motives; they only offer him his opportunity. The Westerner him-
self, when an explanation is asked of him (usually by a woman), is
likely to say that he does what he "has to do." If justice and order
did not continually demand his protection, he would be without a
calling. Indeed, we come upon him often in just that situation, as
the reign of law settles over the West and he is forced to see that
his day is over; those are the pictures which end with his death or
with his departure for some more remote frontier. What he de-
fends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image in fact his honor*
This is what makes him invulnerable. When the gangster is killed,
his whole life is shown to have been a mistake, but the image the
Westerner seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat
as in victory: he fights not for advantage and not for the right, but
to state what he is, and he must live in a world which permits that
statement. The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies
which over and over again tell Ms story are probably the last art
form in which the concept of honor retains its strength.
Of course I do not mean to say that ideas of virtue and justice
THE WESTERNER I y
and courage have gone out of culture. Honor is more than these
things; it is a style, concerned with harmonious appearances as much
as with desirable consequences, and tending therefore toward the
denial of life in favor of art "Who hath it? he that died o 3 Wednes-
day-" On the whole, a world that leans to FalstafFs view is a more
civilized and even, finally, a more graceful world. It is just the
march of civilization that forces the Westerner to move on; and if
we actually had to confront the question it might turn out that the
woman who refuses to understand him is right as often as she is
wrong. But we do not confront the question. Where the Westerner
lives it is always about igyo-not the real 1870, either, or the real
Westand he is killed or goes away when his position becomes
problematical. The fact that he continues to hold our attention is
evidence enough that, in his proper frame, he presents an image of
personal nobility that is still real for us.
Clearly, this image easily becomes ridiculous; we need only look
at William S. Hart or Tom Mix, who in the wooden absoluteness
of their virtue represented little that an adult could take seriously;
and doubtless such figures as Gene Autry or Roy Rogers are no
better, though I confess I have seen none of their movies. Some
film enthusiasts claim to find in the early, unsophisticated Westerns
a "cinematic purity" that has since been lost; this idea is as valid,
and finally as misleading, as T. S. Eliot's statement that Everyman
is the only play in English that stays within the limitations of art.
The truth is that the Westerner comes into the field of serious art
only when his moral code, without ceasing to be compelling, is seen
also to be imperfect. The Westerner at his best exhibits a moral
ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity;
this ambiguity arises from the fact that, whatever his justifications,
he is a killer of men.
In The Virginian., which is an archetypal Western movie as Scar-
face or Little Caesar are archetypal gangster movies, there is a
lynching in which the hero (Gary Cooper), as leader of a posse,
must supervise the hanging of his best friend for stealing cattle.
With the growth of American "social consciousness," it is no longer
possible to present a lynching in the movies unless the point is the
illegality and injustice of the lynching itself; The Ox-Bow Incident,
made in 1943, explicitly puts forward the newer point of view and
can be regarded as a kind of "anti- Western." But in 1929, when
The Virginian was made, the present inhibition about lynching was
not yet in force; the justice, and therefore the necessity, of the
hanging is never questionedexcept by the schoolteacher from the
East, whose refusal to understand serves as usual to set forth more
1 68 ROBERT WARSHOW
sharply the deeper seriousness of the West. The Virginian is thus
in a tragic dilemma where one moral absolute conflicts with another
and the choice of either must leave a moral stain. If he had chosen
to save his friend, he would have violated the image of himself that
he had made essential to his existence, and the movie would have
had to end with his death, for only by his death could the image
have been restored. Having chosen instead to sacrifice his friend to
the higher demands of the "code" the only choice worthy of him,
as even the friend understands he is none the less stained by the
killing, but what is needed now to set accounts straight is not his
death but the death of the villain Trampas, the leader of the cattle
thieves, who had escaped the posse and abandoned the Virginian's
friend to his fate. Again the woman intervenes: Why must there be
more killing? If the hero really loved her, he would leave town, re-
fusing Trampas' challenge. What good will it be if Trampas should
kill him? But the Virginian does once more what he "has to do"
and in avenging his friend's death wipes out the stain on his own
honor. Yet his victory cannot be complete: no death can be paid for
and no stain truly wiped out; the movie is still a tragedy, for though
the hero escapes with his life, he has been forced to confront the
ultimate limits of his moral ideas.
This mature sense of limitation and unavoidable guilt is what
gives the Westerner a "right" to his melancholy. It is true that the
gangster's story is also a tragedy in certain formal ways more
clearly a tragedy than the Westerner's but it is a romantic tragedy,
based on a hero whose defeat springs with almost mechanical inev-
itability from the outrageous presumption of his demands: the gang-
ster is bound to go on until he is killed. The Westerner is a more
classical figure, self-contained and limited to begin with, seeking
not to extend his dominion but only to assert his personal value, and
his tragedy lies in the fact that even this circumscribed demand
cannot be fully realized. Since the Westerner is not a murderer but
(most of the time) a man of virtue, and since he is always prepared
for defeat, he retains his inner invulnerability and his story need
not end with his death (and usually does not) ; but what we finally
respond to is not his victory but his defeat.
Up to a point, it is plain that the deeper seriousness of the good
Western films comes from the introduction of a realism, both physi-
cal and psychological, that was missing with Tom Mix and William
S. Hart. As lines of age have come into Gary Cooper's face since
The Virginian, so the outlines of the Western movie in general have
become less smooth, its background more drab. The sun still beats
THE WESTERNER 169
upon the town, but the camera is likely now to take advantage of
this illumination to seek out more closely the shabbiness of build-
ings and furniture, the loose, worn hang of clothing, the wrinkles
and dirt of the faces. Once it has been discovered that the true
theme of the Western movie is not the freedom and expansiveness
of frontier life, but its limitations, its material bareness, the pres-
sures of obligation, then even the landscape itself ceases to be quite
the arena of free movement it once was, but becomes instead a great
empty waste, cutting down more often than it exaggerates the stat-
ure of the horseman who rides across it. We are more likely now
to see the Westerner struggling against the obstacles of the physical
world (as in the wonderful scenes on the desert and among the
rocks in The Last Posse) than carelessly surmounting them. Even
the horses, no longer the "friends" of man or the inspired chargers
of knight-errantry, have lost much of the moral significance that
once seemed to belong to them in their careering across the screen.
'It seems to me the horses grow tired and stumble more often than
they did, and that we see them less frequently at the gallop.
In The Gunfighter, a remarkable film of a couple of years ago,
the landscape has virtually disappeared. Most of the action takes
place indoors, in a cheerless saloon where a tired "bad man" (Greg-
ory Peck) contemplates the waste of his life, to be senselessly killed
at the end by a vicious youngster setting off on the same futile
path. The movie is done in cold, quiet tones of gray, and every ob-
ject in itfaces, clothing, a table, the hero's heavy mustache is
given an air of uncompromising authenticity, suggesting those dim
photographs of the nineteenth-century West in which Wyatt Earp,
say, turns out to be a blank untidy figure posing awkwardly before
some uninteresting building. This "authenticity," to be sure, is only
aesthetic; the chief fact about nineteenth-century photographs, to
my eyes at any rate, is how stonily they refuse to yield up the
truth. But that limitation is just what is needed: by preserving some
hint of the rigidity of archaic photography (only in tone and decor.,
never in composition), The Gunfighter can permit us to feel that
we are looking at a more "real" West than the one the movies have
accustomed us to harder, duller, less "romantic" and yet without
forcing us outside the boundaries which give the Western movie its
validity.
We come upon the hero of The Gunfighter at the end of a career
in which he has never upheld justice and order, and has been at times,
apparently, an actual criminal; in this case, it is clear that the hero
has been wrong and the woman who has rejected his way of life has
been right. He is thus without any of the larger justifications and
1 70 ROBERT WARSHOW
knows himself a ruined man. There can be no question of his "re-
deeming" himself in any socially constructive way. He is too much
the victim of his own reputation to turn marshal as one of his old
friends has done, and he is not offered the sentimental solution of a
chance to give up his life for some good end; the whole point is that
he exists outside the field of social value. Indeed, if we were once al-
lowed to see him in the days of his "success," he might become a
figure like the gangster, for his career has been aggressively "anti-
social" and the practical problem he faces is the gangster's problem:
there will always be somebody trying to kill him. Yet it is obviously
absurd to speak of him as "antisocial," not only because we do not
see him acting as a criminal, but more fundamentally because we do
not see his milieu as a society. Of course it has its "social problems"
and a kind of static history: civilization is always just at the point of
driving out the old freedom; there are women and children to repre-
sent the possibility of a settled life; and there is the marshal, a bad man
turned good, determined to keep at least his area of jurisdiction at
peace. But these elements are not, in fact, a part of the film's "real-
ism," even though they come out of the real history of the West; they
belong to the conventions of the form, to that accepted framework
which makes the film possible in the first place, and they exist not to
provide a standard by which the gunfighter can be judged, but only
to set him off. The true "civilization" of the Western movie is always
embodied in an individual, good or bad is more a matter of personal
bearing than of social consequences, and the conflict of good and bad
is a duel between two men. Deeply troubled and obviously doomed,
the gunfighter is the Western hero still, perhaps all the more because
his value must express itself entirely in his own being in his presence,
the way he holds our eyesand in contradiction to the facts. No
matter what he has done, he looks right, and he remains invulnerable
because, without acknowledging anyone else's right to judge him,
he has judged his own failure and has already assimilated it, under-
standingas no one else understands except the marshal and the bar-
room girl that he can do nothing but play out the drama of the gun
fight again and again until the time comes when it will be he who
gets killed. What "redeems" him is that he no longer believes in this
drama and nevertheless will continue to play his role perfectly; the
pattern is all.
The proper function of realism in the Western movie can only be
to deepen the lines of that pattern. It is an art form for connoisseurs,
where the spectator derives his pleasure from the appreciation of
minor variations within the working out of a pre-established order.
One does not want too much novelty; it comes as a shock, for instance,
THE WESTERNER 17 I
when the hero is made to operate without a gun, as has been done in
several pictures (e.g., Destry Rides Again), and our uneasiness is
allayed only when he is finally compelled to put his "pacifism" aside.
If the hero can be shown to be troubled, complex, fallible, even
eccentric, or the villain given some psychological taint or, better,
some evocative physical mannerism, to shade the colors of his villainy,
that is all to the good. Indeed, that kind of variation is absolutely
necessary to keep the type from becoming sterile; we do not want to
see the same movie over and over again, only the same form. But
when the impulse toward realism is extended into a "reinterpretation"
of the West as a developed society, drawing our eyes away from the
hero if only to the extent of showing him as the one dominant figure
in a complex social order, then the pattern is broken and the West
itself begins to be uninteresting. If the "social problems" of the
frontier are to be the movie's chief concern, there is no longer any
point in re-examining these problems twenty times a year; they have
been solved, and the people for whom they once were real are dead.
Moreover, the hero himself, still the film's central figure, now tends
to become its one unassimilable element, since he is the most "unreal.' 7
The Ox-Bow Incident, by denying the convention of the lynching,
presents us with a modern "social drama" and evokes a corresponding
response, but in doing so it almost makes the Western setting irrele-
vant, a mere backdrop of beautiful scenery. (It is significant that
The Ox-Bow Incident has no hero; a hero would have to stop the
lynching or be killed in trying to stop it, and then the "problem" of
lynching would no longer be central.) Even in The Gunfighter the
women and children are a little too much in evidence, threatening
constantly to become a real focus of concern instead of simply part
of the given framework, and the young tough who kills the hero has
too much the air of juvenile criminality; the hero himself could never
have been like that, and the idea of a cycle being repeated therefore
loses its sharpness. But the most striking example of the confusion
created by a too conscientious "social" realism is in the celebrated
High Noon.
In High Noon we find Gary Cooper still the upholder of order
that he was in The Virginian, but twenty-four years older, stooped,
slower moving, awkward, his face lined, the flesh sagging, a less beau-
tiful and weaker figure, but with the suggestion of greater depth that
belongs almost automatically to age. Like the hero of The Gunfighter,
he no longer has to assert his character and is no longer interested in
the drama of combat; it is hard to imagine that he might once have
been so youthful as to say, "When you call me that smile!" In fact^
when we come upon him he is hanging up his guns and his marshal's
r 7 2 ROBERT WARSHOW
badge in order to begin a new, peaceful life with his bride, who is a
Quaker. But then the news comes that a man he sent to prison has
been pardoned and will get to town on the noon train; three friends of
this man have come to wait for him at the station, and when the freed
convict arrives the four of them will come to kill the marshal. He is
thus trapped; the bride will object, the hero himself will waver much
more than he would have done twenty-four years ago, but in the end
he will play out the drama because it is what he "has to do." All this
belongs to the established form (there is even the "fallen woman"
who understands the marshal's position as his wife does not). Leaving
aside the crudity of building up suspense by means of the clock, the
actual Western drama of High Noon is well handled and forms a
good companion piece to The Virginian, showing in both conception
and technique the ways in which the Western movie has naturally
developed.
But there is a second drama along with the first. As the marshal
sets out to find deputies to help him deal with the four gunmen, we
are taken through the various social strata of the town, each group
in turn refusing its assistance out of cowardice, malice, irresponsi-
bility, or venality. With this we are in the field of "social drama"~of
a very low order, incidentally, altogether unconvincing and display-
ing a vulgar antipopulism that has marred some other movies of
Stanley Kramer's. But the falsity of the "social drama" is less impor-
tant than the fact that it does not belong in the movie to begin with.
The technical problem was to make it necessary for the marshal to
face his enemies alone; to explain why the other townspeople are not
at his side is to raise a question which does not exist in the proper
frame of the Western movie, where the hero is "naturally" alone and
it is only necessary to contrive the physical absence of those who
might be his allies, if any contrivance is needed at all. In addition,
though the hero of High Noon proves himself a better man than all
around him, the actual effect of this contrast is to lessen his stature:
he becomes only a rejected man of virtue. In our final glimpse of him,
as he rides away through the town where he has spent most of his
life without really imposing himself on it, he is a pathetic rather than
a tragic figure. And his departure has another meaning as well; the
"social drama" has no place for him.
But there is also a different way of violating the Western form.
This is to yield entirely to its static quality as legend and to the
"cinematic" temptations of its landscape, the horses, the quiet men.
John Ford's famous Stagecoach (1958) had much of this unhappy
preoccupation with style, and the same director's My Darling Clem-
entine (1946), a soft and beautiful movie about Wyatt Earp, goes
THE WESTERNER
further along the same path, offering indeed a superficial accuracy
of historical reconstruction, but so loving in execution as to destroy
the outlines of the Western legend, assimilating it to the more sentit
mentd legend of rural America and making the hero a more dangerous
Mr. Deeds. (Powder River, a recent "routine" Western shamelessly
copied from My Darling Clementine, is in most ways a better film-
lacking the benefit of a serious director, it is necessarily more con-
cerned with drama than with style.)
The highest expression of this aestheticizing tendency is in George
Stevens' Shane, where the legend of the W is virtually reducfd
to its essentials and then fixed in the dreamy clarity of a fairy tale.
There never was so broad and bare and lovely a landscape as Stevens
puts before us, or so unimaginably comfortless a "town" as the little
group of buddings on the prairie to which the settlers must come for
their supplies and to buy a drink. The mere physical progress of the
film, following the style of A Place in the Sun, is so deliberately
graceful that everything seems to be happening at the bottom of a
c ear lake. The hero (AlanLadd) is hardly a man at aU, but something
lie the Sprit of the West, beautiful in fringed buckskins. He emerge?
mysteriously from the plains, breathing sweetness and a melancholy
which is no longer simply the Westerner's natural response to
experience but has taken on spirituality; and when he has accom-
plished his mission, meeting and destroying in the black figure of Jack
Palance a Spirit of Evil just as metaphysical as his own embodiment
of virtue, he fades away again into the more distant West, a man
whose "day is over," leaving behind the wondering little boy who
might have imagined the whole story. The choice of Alan Ladd to
play the leading role is alone an indication of this film's tendency
Actors like Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck are in themselves, as
material objects, "realistic," seeming to bear in their bodies and their
faces mortality, imitation, the knowledge of good and eviL Ladd is
a more "aesthetic" object, with some of the "universality" of a piece
of sculpture; his special quality is in his physical smoothness and
serenity, unworldly and yet not innocent, but suggesting that no
experience can really touch him. Stevens has tried to freeze the
Western myth once and for all in the immobility of Alan Ladd's
countenance. If Shane were "right," and fully successful, it might
be possible to say there was no point in making any more Western
movies; once the hero is apotheosized, variation and development
are closed off.
Shane is not "right," but it is still true that the possibilities of
fruitful variation in the Western movie are limited. The form can
174 ROBERT WARSHOW
keep its freshness through endless repetitions only because of the
special character of the film medium, where the physical difference
between one object and another above all, between one actor and
another is of such enormous importance, serving the function that
is served by the variety of language in the perpetuation of literary
types. In this sense, the "vocabulary" of films is much larger than
that of literature and falls more readily into pleasing and significant
arrangements, (That may explain why the middle levels of excellence
are more easily reached in the movies than in literary forms, and
perhaps also why the status of the movies as art is constantly being
called into question,) But the advantage of this almost automatic
particularity belongs to all films alike. Why does the Western movie
especially have such a hold on our imagination?
Chiefly, I think, because it offers a serious orientation to the prob-
lem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else in our
culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized
opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This
refusal is a virtue, but like many virtues it involves a certain willful
blindness and it encourages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be
shocked or bored by cultural images of violence, and our very concept
of heroism tends to be a passive one: we are less drawn to the brave
young men who kill large numbers of our enemies than to the heroic
prisoners who endure torture without capitulating. In art, though
we may still be able to understand and participate in the values of the
Iliad, a modern writer like Ernest Hemingway we find somewhat
embarrassing: there is no doubt that he stirs us, but we cannot help
recognizing also that he is a little childish. And in the criticism of
popular culture, where the educated observer is usually under the
illusion that he has nothing at stake, the presence of images of violence
is often assumed to be in itself a sufficient ground for condemnation.
These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence
in our culture but, if anything, have helped to free it from moral
control by letting it take on the aura of "emancipation." The cele-
bration of acts of violence is left more and more to the irresponsible
on the higher cultural levels to writers like Celine, and lower down
to Mickey Spillane or Horace McCoy, or to the comic books, tele-
vision, and the movies. The gangster movie, with its numerous vari-
ations, belongs to this cultural "underground" which sets forth the
attractions of violence in the face of all our higher social attitudes.
It is a more "modern" genre than the Western, perhaps even more
profound, because it confronts industrial society on its own ground
the city and because, like much of our advanced art, it gains its
effects by a gross insistence on its own narrow logic. But it is anti-
THE WESTERNER
social, resting on fantasies of irresponsible freedom. If we are brought
finally to acquiesce in the denial of these fantasies, it is only because
they have been shown to be dangerous, not because they have given
way to a better vision of behavior. 2
In war movies, to be sure, it is possible to present the uses of violence
within a framework of responsibility. But there is the disadvantage
that modern war is a co-operative enterprise; its violence is largely
impersonal, and heroism belongs to the group more than to the
individual The hero of a war movie is most often simply a leader,
and his superiority is likely to be expressed in a denial of the heroic:
you are not supposed to be brave, you are supposed to get the job
done and stay alive (this too, of course, is a kind of heroic posture,
but a new-and "practicaP-one). At its best, the war movie may
represent a more civilized point of view than the Western, and if it
were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might
hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama. But it cannot
supply the values we seek in the Western.
Those values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on
his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even
that he "believes in violence." But the drama is one of self-restraint:
the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to
its special laws, or else it is valueless. There is little cruelty in Western
movies, and little sentimentality; our eyes are not focused on the
sufferings of the defeated but on the deportment of the hero. Really,
it is not violence at all which is the "point" of the Western movie,
but a certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly
in violence. Watch a child with his toy guns and you will see: what
most interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting
others, but to work out how a man might look when he shoots or is
shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.
Whatever the limitations of such an idea in experience, it has always
been valid in art and has a special validity in an art where appearances
are everything. The Western hero is necessarily an archaic figure;
we do not really believe in him and would not have him step out of
his rigidly conventionalized background. But his archaicism does not
take away from his power; on the contrary, it adds to it by keeping
him just a little beyond the reach both of common sense and of
2 1 am not concerned here with the actual social consequences of gangster
movies, though I suspect they could not have been so pernicious as they were
thought to be. Some of the compromises introduced to avoid the supposed bad
effects of the old gangster movies may be, if anything, more dangerous, for the
sadistic violence that once belonged only to the gangster is now commonly
enlisted on the side of the kw and thus goes undefeated, allowing us (if we wish)
to find in the movies a sort of "confirmation" of our fantasies.
176 ROBERT WARSHOW
absolutized emotion, the two usual impulses of our art. And he has,
after all, his own kind of relevance. He is there to remind us of the
possibility of style in an age which has put on itself the burden of
pretending that style has no meaning, and, in the midst of our anxie-
ties over the problem of violence, to suggest that even in killing or
being killed we are not freed from the necessity of establishing satis-
factory modes of behavior. Above all, the movies in which the
Westerner plays out his role preserve for us the pleasures of a complete
and self-contained drama and one which still effortlessly crosses the
boundaries which divide our culture in a time when other, more
consciously serious art forms are increasingly complex, uncertain,
and ill-defined.
K 4 x* **!
Manny
Films such as those noted in the
following essay (Commentary,
Nov. 1957) modest, unpretentious
films with a hard core of what Mr.
Farber calls "masculine" truthare
rarely produced these days. The
more risky and BIG film production
becomes, the less likelihood there is
f or l ^ e ma & n 1 tight, flawlessly
executed melodramas, a genre
'which achieved distinction during
the past twenty -five years. There
is room for debate about the ate-
mate wtistic value of these fil?m y
but there cm be no question about
their expert craftsmanship or their
sharp observation of the details of
human behavior.
I HE SADDEST THING in current films is watching the long-neglected
action directors fade away as the less-talented De Sicas and Zinne-
manns continue to fascinate the critics. Because they played an anti-
art role in Hollywood, the true masters of the male action filmsuch
soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks,
William Wellman, William Kieghley, the early, ipxe-Stagecoach
John Ford, Anthony Mann have turned out a huge amount of un-
prized second-gear celluloid. Their neglect becomes more painful
to behold now that the action directors are in decline, many of
them having abandoned the dry, economic, life-worn movie style
that made their observations of the American he-man so reward-
177
178 MANNY FARBER
ing. Americans seem to have a special aptitude for allowing His-
tory to bury the toughest, most authentic native talents. The same
tide that has swept away Otis Ferguson, Walker Evans, Val Lewton,
Clarence Williams, and J. R. Williams into near oblivion is now in
the process of burying a group that kept an endless flow of interest-
ing roughneck film passing through the theaters from the depression
onward. The tragedy of these film-makers lies in their having been
consigned to a Sargasso Sea of unmentioned talent by film review-
ers whose sole concern is not continuous flow of quality but the
momentary novelties of the particular film they are reviewing.
Howard Hawks is the key figure in the male action film because
he shows a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least
amount of flat foot. His best films, which have the swallowed-up
intricacy of a good soft-shoe dance, are Ceiling Zero, Only Angels
Have Wings, The Big Sleep, and The Thing. Raoul Walsh's films
are melancholy masterpieces of flexibility and detailing inside a
lower-middle-class locale. Walsh's victories, which make use of
tense broken-field journeys and nostalgic background detail, include
They Drive By Night, White Heat, and Roaring Twenties. In any
Bill Wellman operation, there are at least four directors a sentimen-
talist, deep thinker, hooey vaudevillian, and an expedient short-cut
artist whose special love is for mulish toughs expressing themselves
in drop-kicking heads and somber standing around. Wellman is at
his best in stiff, vulgar, low-pulp material. In that set-up, he has a
low-budget ingenuity which creates flashes of ferocious brassiness,
an authentic practical- joke violence (as in the frenzied inadequacy
of Ben Blue in Roxie Hart) and a brainless hell-raising. Anthony
Mann's inhumanity to man, in which cold mortal intentness is the
trademark effect, can be studied best in The Tall Target, Winches-
ter 77, Border Incident, and Railroaded. The films of this tin-can De
Sade have a Germanic rigor, caterpillar intimacy, and an original
dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body. Mann has
done interesting work with scissors, a cigarette lighter, and steam,
but his most bizarre effect takes place in a taxidermist's shop. By in-
tricate manipulation of athletes' bodies, Mann tries to ram the eyes
of his combatants on the horns of a stuffed deer stuck on the wall.
The film directors mentioned above did their best work over a
decade ago when it was possible to be a factory of unpretentious
picture-making without frightening the front office. During the
same period and later, less prolific directors also appear in the uncom-
promising action film. Of these, the most important is John Farrow,
an urbane vaudevillian whose forte, in films like The Big Clock and
His Kind of Woman, is putting a fine motoring system beneath the
UNDERGROUND FILMS
veering slapstick of his eccentric characterizations. Though he has
tangled with such heavyweights as Book-of~the-Month and Heming-
way, Zoltan Korda is an authentic hard-grain cheapster telling his
stones through unscrubbed action, masculine characterization, & and
violent explorations inside a fascinating locale. Korda's best films-
Sahara, Counterattack, Cry the Beloved Country-zxz strangely active
films in which terrain, jogs, and people get curiously interwoven in a
ravening tactility. William Kieghley, in G Men and Each Dawn I Die,
is the least sentimental director of gangster careers. After the bloated
philosophical safecrackers in Huston's Asphalt Jungle, the smallish
cops and robbers in Kieghley's work seem life-size. Kieghley's han-
dling is so right in emphasis, timing, and shrewdness that there is no
f eeUng of the director breathing, gasping, snoring over the film.
The tight-lipped creators whose films are mentioned above com-
prise the most interesting group to appear in American culture since
the various groupings that made the 19205 an explosive era in jazz,
literature, silent films. Hawks and his group are perfect examples of
the anonymous artist, who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypoc-
risy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art. To go'at his
most expedient gait, the Hawks type must take a withdrawn, almost
hidden stance in the industry. Thus, his films seem to come from the
most neutral, humdrum, monotonous corner of the movie lot. The
fascinating thing about these veiled operators is that they are able to
spring the leanest, shrewdest, sprightliest notes from material that
looks like junk, and from a creative position that on the surface seems
totally uncommitted and disinterested. With striking photography,
a good ear for natural dialogue, an eye for realistic detail, a skilled
inside-action approach to composition, and the most politic hand in
the movie field, the action directors have done a forbidding stenog-
raphy on the hard-boiled American handyman as he progresses
through the years.
It is not too remarkable that the underground films, with their
twelve-year-old's adventure-story plot and endless palpitating move-
ment, have lost out in the film system. Their dismissal has been caused
by the construction of solid confidence built by daily and weekly
reviewers. Operating with this wall, the critic can pick and discard
without the slightest worry about looking silly. His choice of best
salami is a picture backed by studio build-up, agreement amongst his
colleagues, a kyout in Life Magazine (which makes it officially rea-
sonable for an American award), and a list of ingredients that anyone's
unsophisticated aunt in Oakland can spot as a distinguished film. This
prize picture, which has philosophical undertones, pan-fried domestic
sights, risque crevices, sporty actors and actresses, circuslike gym-
MANNY FARBER
nasties, a bit of tragedy like the main fall at Niagara, has every reason
to be successful. It has been made for that purpose. Thus, the year's
winner is a perfect film made up solely of holes and evasions, covered
up by all types of padding and plush. The cavity filling varies from
one prize work to another, from High Noon (cross-eyed artistic
views of a clock, silhouettes against a vaulting sky, legend-toned
walking, a big song), through From Here to Eternity (Sinatra's
private scene-chewing, pretty trumpeting, tense shots in the dark and
at twilight, necking near the water, a threatening hand with a broken
bottle), to next year's winner which will probably be a huge ball of
cotton candy containing either Audrey Hepburn's cavernous grin
and stiff behind or more of Zinnemann's glaceed picture-making. In
terms of imaginative photography, honest acting, and insight into
American life there is no comparison between an average under-
ground triumph (The Tall Target} and the trivia that causes a critical
salaam across the land. The trouble is that no one asks the critics'
'alliance to look straight backward at its "choices," i.e. a horse-drawn
truckload of liberal schmaltz called The Best Years of Our Lives.
These ridiculously maltreated films sustain their place in the halls of
fame simply because they bear the label of art in every inch of their
reelage. Praising these solemn goiters has produced a climate in which
the underground picture-maker, with his modest entry and soft-shoe
approach, can barely survive.
However, any day now, Americans may realize that scrambling
after the obvious in art is a losing game. The sharpest work of the
last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-
destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists. When the day
comes for praising infamous men of art, some great talent will be
shown in true light: people like Weldon Kees, the early Robert
DeNiro, James Agee, Isaac Rosenf eld, Otis Ferguson, Val Lewton, a
dozen comic-strip geniuses like the creator of "Harold Teen," and
finally a half dozen directors, such as the master of the ambulance-
speedboat, flying-saucer movie: Howard Hawks.
The films of the Hawks-Wellman group are underground for more
reasons than the fact that the director hides out in the subsurface
reaches of his work. The hard-bitten action film finds its natural
home in caves; the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified
tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big
cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a
nightmarish atmosphere of guzzling, snoring, clicking flashlights,
ice-cream vending, and amazing restlessness. After a while, the clatter
and congested tinniness is swallowed by the atmosphere of shabby
transience, prints that seem, overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks
UNDERGROUND FILMS
infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action
films go by, and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged
from a giant sponge.
The cut-throat atmosphere in the itch house is reproduced in the
movies shown there. Hawks's The Big Sleep not only has a slightly
gaseous, sub-surface, Baghdad-ish background, but its gangster action
is engineered with a suave, cutting efficacy. Walsh's Roaring Twen-
ties is a jangling barrelhouse film which starts with a top gun bouncing
downhill, and, at the end, he is seen slowly pushing his way through
a lot of Campbell's Scotch broth. Wellman's favorite scene is a group
of hard-visaged ball bearings standing around-for no damned reason
and with no indication of how long or for what reason they have been
standing. His worst pictures are made up simply of this moody,
wooden standing around. All that saves the films are the little flurries
of bulletlike acting that give the men an inner look of credible orneri-
ness and somewhat stupid mulishness. Mann likes to stretch Ms victims
in crucifix poses against the wall or ground, and then peer intently at
their demise with an icy surgeon's eye. Just as the harrowing machine
is about to run over the wetback on a moonlit night, the camera
catches him sprawled out in a harrowing image. At heart, the best
action films are slicing journeys into the lower depths of American
life: dregs, cast-outs, lonely hard wanderers caught in a buzz saw of
niggardly intricate devious movement
The projects of the underground directors are neither experimen-
tal, liberal, slick, spectacular, low-budget, epical, improving, or
flagrantly commercial like Sam Katzman two-bitters. They are face-
less movies taken from a type of half-polished trash writing that
seems like a mixture of Burt L. Standish, Max Brand, and Raymond
Chandler. Tight, cliche-ridden melodramas about stock musclemen.
A stool pigeon gurgling with a scissors in his back; a fat, nasal-
voiced gang leader, escaped convicts, power-mad ranch owners with
vengeful siblings, a mean gun with an Oedipus complex and mi-
graine headaches, a crooked gambler trading guns to the redskins,
exhausted GIs, an incompetent kid hoodlum hiding out in an East
Side building, a sickly-elegant Italian barber in a plot to kill Lincoln,
an underpaid shamus signing up to stop the blackmailing of a tough
millionaire's depraved thumb-sucking daughter.
The action directors accept the role of hack so that they can in-
volve themselves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types
of action: barnstorming, driving, bulldogging. The important thing
is not so much the banal-seeming journeys to nowhere that make up
the stories, but the tunneling that goes on inside the classic Western-
gangster incidents and stock hoodkun-dogface-cowboy types. For
I8 2 MANNY FARBER
instance, Wellman's lean elliptical talents for creating brassy cheap-
sters and making gloved references to death, patriotism, masturba-
tion, suggest that he uses private runways to the truth, while more
famous directors take a slow, embalming surface route.
The virtues of action films expand as the pictures take on the
outer appearance of junk jewelry. The underground's greatest mis-
haps have occurred in art-infected projects where there is unlimited
cash, studio freedom, an expansive story, message, heart, and a lot
of prestige to be gained. Their flattest, most sentimental works are
incidentally the only ones that have attained the almond-paste-flavored
eminence of the Museum of Modern Art's film library, i.e. GI Joe,
Public Enemy y and Scar-face. Both Hawks and Wellman, who made
these overweighted mistakes, are like basketball's corner man: their
best shooting is done from the deepest, worst angle. With material
that is hopelessly worn out and childish (Only Angels Have Wings},
the underground director becomes beautifully graphic and modestly
human in his flexible detailing. When the material is like drab con-
crete, these directors become great on-the-spot inventors, using their
curiously niggling, reaming style for adding background detail
(Walsh), suave grace (Hawks), crawling mechanized tension
(Mann), veiled gravity (Wellman), svelte semicaricature (John Far-
row), modern Gothic vehemence (Phil Karlson), and dark, modish
vaudeville (Robert Aldrich).
In the films of these hard-edged directors can be found the un-
heralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-word
detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every
step. The Hawks film is as good on the mellifluous grace of the im-
pudent American hard rock as can be found in any art work; the
Mann films use American objects and terrainguns, cliffs, boulders,
an 1865 locomotive, telephone wires with more cruel intimacy than
any other film-maker; the Wellman film is the only clear shot at the
mean; brassy, clawlike soul of the lone American wolf that has been
taken in films. In other words, these actioneers Mann and Hawks
and Kieghley and, in recent times, Aldrich and Karlson go com-
pletely underground before proving themselves more honest and
subtle than the water buffaloes of film art: George Stevens, Billy
Wilder, Vittorio De Sica, Georges Clouzot. (Clouzot's most success-
ful work, Wages of Fear, is a wholesale steal of the mean physicality
and acrid highway inventions in such Walsh- Wellman films as They
Drive by Night. Also, the latter film is a more flexible, adroitly ad-
libbed, worked-in creation than Clouzot's eclectic money-maker.)
Unfortunately, the action directors suffer from presentation prob-
lems. Their work is now seen repeatedly on the blurred, chopped,
UNDERGROUND FILMS 183
worn, darkened, commercial-ridden movie programs on TV. Even
in the impossible conditions of the "Late Show," where the lighting
is four shades too dark and the porthole-shaped screen defeats the
movie's action, the deep skill of Hawks and his tribe shows itself.
Time has dated and thinned out the story excitement, but the abilitv
to capture the exact homely-manly character of forgotten locales
and misanthropic figures is still in the pictures, along with pictorial
compositions (Ford's Last of the Mohicans) that occasionally seem
as lovely as anything that came out of the camera box of Billy Bitzer
and Mathew Brady. The conditions in the outcast theaters-the
Lyric on Times Square, the Liberty on Market Street, the Victory
on Chestnut are not as bad as TV, but bad enough. The screen
image is often out of plumb, the house lights are half left on during
the picture, the broken seats are only a minor annoyance in the un-
predictable terrain. Yet, these action-film homes are the places to
study Hawks, Wellman, Mann, as well as their near and distant
cousins.
The underground directors have been saving the American male
on the screen for three decades without receiving the slightest credit
from critics and prize committees. The hard, exact defining of male
action, completely lacking in acting fat, is a common item only in
underground films. The cream on the top of a Framed or Appoint-
ment with Danger (directed by two first cousins of the Hawks-
Walsh strain) is the eye-flicking action that shows the American
body arms, elbow, legs, mouths, the tension profile linebeing used
expediently, with grace and the suggestion of jolting hardness.
Otherwise, the Hollywood talkie seems to have been invented to
give an embarrassingly phony impression of the virile action man.
The performance is always fattened either by coyness (early Robert
Taylor), unction (Anthony Quinn), histrionic conceit (Gene
Kelly), liberal knowingness (Brando), angelic stylishness (Mel Fer-
rer), oily hamming (Jose Ferrer), Mother's Boy passivity (Rock
Hudson), or languor (Montgomery Clift). Unless the actor lands
in the hands of an underground director, he causes a candy-coated
effect that is misery for any spectator who likes a bit of male truth
in films.
After a steady diet of undergrounders, the spectator realizes that
these are the only films that show the tension of an individual intel-
ligence posing itself against the possibilities of monotony, bathos, or
sheer cliche. Though the action film is filled with heroism or Its ab-
sence, the real hero is the small detail which has arisen from a stormy
competition between lively color and credibility. The hardness of
these films arises from the aesthetic give-and-go with banality. Thus,
184 MANNY FARBER
the philosophical idea in underground films seems to be that noth-
ing is easy in life or the making of films. Jobs are difficult. Even the
act of watching a humdrum bookstore scene from across the street
has to be done with care and modesty to evade the type of butter-
slicing glibness that rots the Zinnemann films. In the Walsh film, a
gangster walks through a saloon with so much tightroped ad-libbing
and muscularity that he seems to be walking backward through the
situation. Hawks's achievement of moderate toughness in Red River,,
using Gift's delicate languor and Wayne's claylike acting, is remark-
able. As usual, he steers Clift through a series of cornball fetishes
(like the Barney Google Ozark hat and the trick handling of same)
and graceful, semi-collegiate business: stances and kneelings and
snake-quick gunmanship. The beauty of the job is the way the cliche
business is needled, strained against without breaking the naturalistic
surface. One feels that his is the first and last hard, clamped-down,
imaginative job Clift does in Hollywood his one non-mush per-
formance. Afterward, he goes to work for Zinnemann, Stevens,
Hitchcock.
The small buried attempt to pierce the banal pulp of underground
stories with fanciful grace notes is one of the important feats of the
underground director. Usually, the piercing consists in renovating a
cheap rusty trick that has been slumbering in the "thriller" direc-
tor's handbook pushing a "color" effect against the most resistant
type of unshowy, hard-bitten direction. A mean butterball flicks a
gunman's ear with a cigarette lighter. A night-frozen cowboy shud-
ders over a swig of whisky. A gorilla gang leader makes a cannon-
aded exit from a barber chair. All these bits of congestion are like
the lines of a hand to a good gun movie; they are the tracings of
difficulty that make the films seem uniquely hard and formful. In
each case, the director is taking a great chance with cliches and forc-
ing them into a hard natural shape.
People don't notice the absence of this hard combat with low,
commonplace ideas in the Zinnemann and Huston epics, wherein the
action is a game in which the stars take part with confidence and
glee as though nothing can stop them. They roll in parts of drug
addicts, tortured sheriffs, success depending on how much senti-
mental bloop and artistic japery can be packed in without encoun-
tering the demands of a natural act or character. Looking back on
a Sinatra film, one has the feeling of a private whirligig performance
in the center of a frame rather than a picture. On the other hand,
a Cagney performance under the hands of a Kieghley is ingrained
in a tight, malignant story. One remembers it as a sinewy, life-marred
UNDERGROUND FILMS 185
exactness that Is as quietly laid down as the smaller jobs played by
the Barton MacLanes and Frankie Darros.
A constant attendance at the Lyric-Pix- Victory theaters soon im-
presses the spectator with the coverage of locales in action films.
The average gun film travels like a shamus who knows his city and
likes his private knowledges. Instead of the picture-postcard sights,
the underground film finds the most idiosyncratic spot of a city and
then locates the niceties within the large nicety. The California
Street hill in San Francisco (Woman in Hiding) with its old-style
mansions played in perfect night photography against a deadened
domestic bitching. A YMCA scene that emphasizes the wonderful
fat-waisted-middle-aged-physicality of people putting on tennis
shoes and playing handball (Appointment with Danger). The ter-
rorizing of a dowdy middle-aged, frog-faced woman (Born to Kill)
that starts in a decrepit hotel and ends in a bumbling, screeching,
crawling murder at midnight on the shore. For his big shock effect,
director Robert Wise (a sometime member of the underground)
uses the angle going down to the water to create a middle-class
mediocrity that out-horrors anything Graham Greene attempted in
his early books on small-time gunsels.
Another fine thing about the coverage is its topographic grimness,
the fact that the terrain looks worked over. From Walsh's What
Price Glory to Mann's Men at War, the terrain is special in that it
is used, kicked, grappled, worried, sweated up, burrowed into,
stomped on. The land is marched across in dark threading lines at
twilight, or the effect is reversed with foot soldiers in white parkas
(Fixed Bayonets) curving along a snowed-in battleground as they
watch troops moving back in either case the cliche effect is worked
credibly inward until it creates a haunting note like the army diag-
onals in Birth of a Nation. Rooms are boxed, crossed, opened up as
they are in few other films. The spectator gets to know these rooms
as well as his own hand. Years after seeing the film, he remembers
the way a dulled waitress sat on the edge of a hotel bed, the weird
elongated adobe in which ranch hands congregate before a Chisholm
Trail drive. The rooms in big-shot directors' films look curiously
bulbous, as though inflated with hot air and turned toward the audi-
ence, like the high-school operetta of the 19205.
Of all these poet-builders, Wellman is the most interesting, par-
ticularly with Hopper-type scenery. It is a matter of drawing store
fronts, heavy bedroom boudoirs, the heisting of a lonely service
station, with light furious strokes. Also, in mixing jolting vulgarity
(Mae Clarke's face being smashed with a grapefruit) with a space
MANNY FARBER
composition dance in which the scene seems to be constructed be-
fore your eyes. It may be a minor achievement but when Wellman
finishes with a service station or the wooden stairs in front of an
ancient saloon, there is no reason for any movie realist to handle
the subject again. The scene is kept light, textural, and as though it
is being built from the outside in. There is no sentiment of the type
that spreads lugubrious shadows (Kazan), builds tensions of per-
spective (Huston), or inflates with golden sunlight and finicky hot
air (Stevens).
Easily the best part of underground films are the excavations of
exciting-familiar scenery. The opening up of a scene is more con-
certed in these films than in other Hollywood efforts, but the most
important thing is that the opening is done by road-mapped strate-
gies that play movement against space in a cunning way, building
the environment and event before your eyes. In every underground
film, these vigorous ramifications within a sharply seen terrain are
the big attraction, the main tent. No one does this anatomization of
action and scene better than Hawks, who probably invented it at
least, the smooth versionin such 19305 gunblasts as The Crowd
Roars. The control of Hawks's strategies is so ingenious that when
a person kneels or walks down the hallway, the movement seems to
click into a predetermined slot. It is an uncanny accomplishment
that carries the spectator across the very ground of a giant ranch,
into rooms and out again, over to the wall to look at some faded
fight pictures on a hotel wallas though he were in the grip of a
spectacular, mobile "eye." When Hawks landscapes action-the cut-
ting between light tower and storm-caught plane in Ceiling Zero,
the vegetalizing in The Thing, the shamus sweating in a greenhouse
in The Big Sleep tht feeling is of a clever human tunneling just
under the surface of terrain. It is as though the film has a life of its
own that goes on beneath the story action.
However, there have been many great examples of such veining
by human interactions over a wide plane. One of the special shockers,
in Each Da<wn I Die, has to do with the scissoring of a stooly dur-
ing the movie shown at the penitentiary. This Kieghley-Cagney
effort is a wonder of excitement as it moves in great leaps from
screen to the rear of a crowded auditorium: crossing contrasts of
movement in three points of the hall, all of it done in a sinking
cavernous gloom. One of the more ironic criss-crossings has to do
with the coughings of the stuck victim played against the screen
image of zooming airplanes over the Pacific.
In the great virtuoso films, there is something vaguely resembling
this underground maneuvering, only it goes on above the story.
UNDERGROUND FILMS 1 87
Egocentric padding that builds a great bonfire of pyrotechnics over
a gapingly empty film. The perfect example is a pumped-up fist
fight that almost closes the three-hour Giant film. This ballroom
shuffle between a reforming rancher and a Mexican-hating lunch-
eonette owner is an entertaining creation in spectacular tumbling,
swinging, back-arching, bending. However, the endless masturba-
tory "building" of excitement beautiful haymakers, room-covering
falls, thunderous soundsis more than slightly silly. Even if the room
were valid, which it isn't (a studio-built chromium horror plopped
too close to the edge of a lonely highway), the room goes unex-
plored because of the jumbled timing. The excess that is so notice-
able in Stevens' brawl is absent in the least serious undergrounder,
which attains most of its crisp, angular character from the modesty
of a director working skillfully far within the earthworks of the
story.
Underground films have almost ceased to be a part of the movie
scene. The founders of the action film have gone into awkward,
big-scaled productions involving pyramid-building, a passenger
plane in trouble over the Pacific, and postcard Westerns with
Jimmy Stewart and his harassed Adam's-apple approach to gutty
acting. The last drainings of the underground film show a tendency
toward moving from the plain guttural approach of G Men to a
Germanically splashed type of film. Of these newcomers, Robert
Aldrich is certainly the most exciting a lurid psychiatric stormer
who gets an overflow of vitality and sheer love for movie-making
into the film. This enthusiasm is the rarest item in a dried, decayed-
lemon type of movie period. Aldrich makes viciously anti-Some-
thing moviesAttack stomps on Southern rascalism and the officer
sect in war, The Big Knife impales the Zanuck-Goldwyn big shot
in Hollywood. The Aldrich films are filled with exciting charac-
terizationsby Lee Marvin, Rod Steiger, Jack Balance of highly
psyched-up, marred, and bothered men. Phil Karlson has done some
surprising modern Gothic treatments of the Brink's hold-up (Kansas
City Confidential) and the vice-ridden Southern town (The Phenix
City Story). His movies are remarkable for their endless outlay of
scary cheapness in detailing the modern underworld. Also, Karl-
son's work has a chilling documentary exactness and an exciting
shot-scattering belligerence.
There is no longer a literate audience for the masculine picture-
making that Hawks and Wellman exploited, as there was in the
19308. In those exciting movie years, a smart audience waited around
each week for the next Hawks, Preston Sturges, or Ford film shoe-
stringers that were far to the side of the expensive Hollywood film.
l88 MANNY FARBER
That underground audience, with Its expert voice In Ferguson and
its ability to choose between perceptive trash and the Thalberg pep-
sin-flavored sloshing with Tracy and Gable, has now oozed away.
It seems ridiculous, but the Fergusonite went into fast decline dur-
ing the mid- 1 9405 when the movie market was flooded with fake
underground films plushy thrillers with neo-Chandler scripts and
a romantic style that seemed to pour the gore, histrionics, decor
out of a giant catsup bottle. The nadir of these films: an item called
Singapore with Fred MacMurray and Ava Gardner.
The straw that finally breaks the back of the underground film
tradition is the dilettante behavior of intellectuals on the subject of
oaters. Aesthetes and upper bohemians now favor horse operas al-
most as wildly as they like the cute, little-guy worshipings of De
Sica and the pedantic, interpretive reading of Alec Guinness. This
fad for Western films shows itself in the inevitable little magazine
review which finds an affinity between the subject matter of cow-
boy films and the inner aesthetics of Cinemah. The Hawks-Wellman
tradition, which is basically a subterranean delight that looks like a
cheap penny candy on the outside, hasn't a chance of reviving
when intellectuals enthuse in equal amounts over Westerns by Ford,
Nunnally Johnson, J. Sturges, Stevens, Delmar Daves. In Ferguson's
day, the intellectual could differentiate between a stolid genre
painter (Ford), a long-winded cuteness expert with a rotogravure
movie sense (Johnson), a scene painted with a notions-counter eye
and a primly naive manner with sun-hardened bruisers (John Stur-
ges), and a Boys' Life nature lover who intelligently half prettifies
adolescents and backwoods primitives (Daves). Today, the audience
for Westerns and gangster careers is a sickeningly frivolous one that
does little more than play the garbage collector or make a night
court of films. With this highbrow audience, which loves banality
and pomp more than the tourists at Radio City Music Hall, there
is little reason to expect any stray director to try for a hidden,
meager-looking work that is directly against the serious-art grain.
In the following essay, which has
been revised slightly for this book,
Miss Kael expresses justifiable de-
s ^ a * r Qlver ^ " ma ^ e ^ lac y of much
film criticism as well as the do f um-
right stateness of Hollywood and
a ^ so f wtny avant-garde film mak-
ers. In suggesting that today^s m~
dience has been conditioned by
suave-looking films that probably
* , 'would have been passed up by the
f\fl more adult and more discriminating
audiences of the twenties and thir-
ties,, she has hit upon a useful p
_ proach for judging movies. (This
essay was published originally in
^ e Berkley Book of Modern
Writing No. 3, edited by Wmiam
Phillips md Philip Rufe s the Berk-
ley Publishing Corp., Neiv York,
I HE FILM CRITIC in the United States k In a curious position; the
greater his interest in the film medium, the more enraged and nega-
tive he is likely to sound. He can assert his disgust, and he can find
ample material to document it, but then what? He can haunt film
societies and re-experience and reassess the classics, but the result
is an increased burden of disgust; the directions indicated in those
classics are not the directions Hollywood took. A few writers, and
not Americans only, have taken a rather fancy way out: they turn
films into Rorschach tests and find the most elaborate meanings in
them (bad acting becomes somnambulism, stereotyped situations be-
come myths, and so forth). The deficiency of this technique is that
189
PAULINE KAEL
the writers reveal a great deal about themselves but very little about
films.
SIZE
Hollywood films have attempted to meet the "challenge" of tele-
vision by the astonishingly simple expedient of expanding in size;
in the course of this expansion the worst filmic tendencies of the
past thirty years have reached what we may provisionally call their
culmination. Like a public building designed to satisfy the widest
public's concept of grandeur, the big production loses the flair, the
spontaneity, the rhythm of an artist working to satisfy his own
conception. The more expensive the picture, the bigger the au-
dience it must draw, and the fewer risks it can take. The big film is
the disenchanted film: from the outset, every element in a multi-
million-dollar production is charged with risk and anxiety, the fear
of calamitous failure the loss of "big" money. The picture becomes
less imaginative in inverse ratio to its cost. But the idiot solution has
worked: size has been selling, and Hollywood has learned to inflate
everything, even romance (Three Coins in the Fountain) or mur-
der mystery (Black Widow) the various genres become indistin-
guishable. A "small" picture would probably seem retrogressive to
Hollywood as if the industry were not utilizing its full resources,
and, indeed, when the CinemaScope screen contracts for an "old-
fashioned"-size picture, the psychological effect is of a going back.
Films must be big to draw the mass audience, but the heroes and
heroines, conceived to flatter the "ordinary," "little" persons who
presumably make up the audience, must be inanities who wiU offend
no one.
The magic that films advertise is the magic of bloated production
methods it is no longer the pyramid the company photographed at
Gizeh which is th 
