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FILM
A Montage of Theories
~v
Richard Dyer MacCann was born in Wichita, Kansas, in
1920, and attended the University of Kansas, where he re-
ceived his B.A. in Political Science in 1940. After an M.A. at
Stanford University in 1942 and three-years' service in the
U.S. and Europe during World War II, he completed a Ph.D.
in Government at Harvard in 1951. His dissertation, Docu-
mentary Film and Democratic Government, led him to a
growing concern about communication and public opinion in
the democratic process and to a special interest in the motion
picture. He accepted a position as a staff correspondent in Los
Angeles for the Christian Science Monitor, specializing in
film and television reporting from 1951 to 1957. As Assistant
Professor of Cinema at the University of Southern California
from 1957 to 1962, he continued a weekly Hollywood column
for the Monitor for three years, while teaching courses in
documental y film, film writing, and cinema and society. In
1963, Dr. MacCann was an adviser and teacher,
on a U.S.
State Department Korean National Film Pro-
grant, for the
duction Center in Seoul. The following year he was a pro-
ducer in the program department of Subscription Television,
Inc., in Santa Monica, California. From 1965-70 Dr. Mac-
Cann taught at the University of Kansas, where he was Pro-
fessor of Speech and Journalism and Director of the Center
for Film Studies. In 1970 he joined the faculty of the Uni-
versity of Iowa as professor in charge of the Ph.D. program
in film in the Department of Speech and Dramatic Art. He is
a member of the University Film Association, the Writers
Guild of America, and Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. MacCann is
editor of Cinema Journal, the semi-annual publication of the
national Society for Cinema Studies. His articles have ap-
peared in Yale Review, Film Quarterly, Films and Filming,
and Encyclopedia Americana. He is also the author of Holly-
wood in Transition (1962) and Film and Society (1964).
M
A Montage of Theories

BY
Richard Dyer MacCann

A Dutton [QkfB&] Paperback

NEW YORK
E.P. DUTTON
 This paperback edition of
"film: a montage of theories"
First published 1966 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

Copyright, ©, 1966, by Richard Dyer MacCann

SBN 0-525-47181-2
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever
without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a re-
viewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with
a review written for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper or
broadcasts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission

to quote from copyright material:

V. I. Pudovkin: "The Plastic Material." Excerpts reprinted from

Film Technique and Film Acting by V. I. Pudovkin by permission

of Vision Press Limited, London.

Sergei Eisenstein: "Collision of Ideas." Excerpts reprinted from

"The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" in Film Form
by Sergei M. Eisenstein, edited by Jay Leyda, by permission of
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Copyright, 1949, by Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc.

Rene' Clair: "The Art of Sound." Excerpts reprinted from Reflec-

tions on the Cinema by Rene Clair by permission of Editions
Gallimard, Paris, and William Kimber & Co. Limited, London.
Copyright, ©, 1951 by Editions Gallimard.

Gavin Lambert: "Sight and Sound." Reprinted from Sequence,

Summer 1950, by permission of Gavin Lambert.

Alfred Hitchcock: "Direction." Excerpts reprinted froip Foot-

notes to the Film, edited by Charles Davy, by permission of Peter
Davies Limited, London.
Acknowledgments 5

Alexander Knox: "Acting and Behaving." Excerpts reprinted

from "Acting and Behaving" by Alexander Knox in Hollywood
Quarterly (now Film Quarterly), Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1946, by
permission of The Regents of the University of California and the
author. Copyright, 1946, by The Regents of the University of
California.

Dudley Nichols: "The Writer and the Film." Excerpts reprinted

from "The Writer and the Film" by Dudley Nichols in Great Film
Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols by permission
of Crown Publishers, Inc. Copyright, ©, 1959, by Crown Pub-
lishers, Inc.

Vachel Lindsay: "Sculpture-in-Motion." Reprinted from The Art

of the Moving Picture by Vachel Lindsay, New York, Macmillan,
1922, by permission of The Estate of Vachel Lindsay.

Parker Tyler: "Movies and the Human Image." Reprinted from

The Three Faces of the Film by Parker Tyler by permission of
Thomas Yoseloff. Copyright, ©, 1960, by A. S. Barnes & Com-
pany, Inc.

Hollis Alpert: "The Film is Modern Theatre." Reprinted by

permission of the author.

Allardyce Nicoll: "Film and Theatre." Excerpts reprinted from

"Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theatre" in Film and Theatre
by Allardyce Nicoll by permission of Thomas Y. Crowell Com-
pany. Copyright, 1936, by Thomas Y. Crowell Company, pub-
lishers; copyright, ©, 1964, by Allardyce Nicoll.

Rudolf Arnheim: "Epic and Dramatic Film." Reprinted from

Film Culture, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1957, by permission of Jonas Mekas.

Robert Nathan: "A Novelist Looks at Hollywood." Reprinted

from Hollywood Quarterly (now Film Quarterly), Vol. 1, No. 2,
1945, by permission of The Regents of the University of California
and the author. Copyright, 1945, by The Regents of the University
of California.

George Bluestone: "Novels Into Film." Excerpts reprinted from

"The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film" in Novels
Into Film by George Bluestone by permission of The Johns
Hopkins Press. Copyright, ©, 1957, by The Johns Hopkins Press.
6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ingmar Bergman: "Film Has Nothing To Do With Literature."
Excerpts reprinted from the "Introduction" by Ingmar Bergman in
Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1960, by permission of Janus Films, Incorporated, Cam-
bridge, Mass.

Bela Balazs: "The Faces of Men." Reprinted from The Theory

of Film by Bela Balazs by permission of the publishers, Dennis
Dobson, London.

Ralph Block: "Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting." Re-

printed from The Dial, January 1927, by permission of the author.

Mack Sennett: "Cloud-Cuckoo Country." Reprinted from King

of Comedy by Mack Sennett, New York, Doubleday & Company,
Inc., 1954, by permission of Raymond Rohauer.

Herbert Read: "Towards a Film Aesthetic." Excerpts reprinted

from A Coat of Many Colours by Sir Herbert Read by permission
of Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, and the author.

Slavko Vorkapich: "Toward True Cinema." Reprinted from Film

Culture,March 1959, by permission of Jonas Mekas.

Hans Richter: "The Film as an Original Art Form." Reprinted

from Film Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1955, by permission of
Jonas Mekas.

Arnold Hauser: "Space and Time in the Film." Excerpts re-

printed fromThe Social History of Art (Vintage Edition, 4 Vols.)
by Arnold Hauser by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New
York, and Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., London. Copyright, ©,
1958, by Arnold Hauser.

Susanne Langer: "A Note on the Film." Reprinted from Feeling

and Form by Susanne Langer, pp. 411-415, by permission of
Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1953, by Charles Scribner's
Sons.

John Grierson: "First Principles of Documentary." Reprinted

from Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy, New
York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1947, by permission of the
author.

Cesare Zavattini: "Some Ideas on the Cinema." Reprinted from

Sightand Sound, October 1953, by permission of the author.
Acknowledgments 7
Hugo Mauerhofer: "Psychology of Film Experience." Reprinted
from Penguin Film Review #8, London, 1949, by permission of
Penguin Books Ltd.

Elizabeth Bowen: "Why I Go to the Cinema." Excerpts reprinted

from Footnotes to the Film, edited by Charles Davy, by permission
of Peter Davies Limited, London.

Siegfried Kracauer: "Theory of Film." Excerpts reprinted from

Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Siegfried
Kracauer by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Copy-
right, ©, 1960, by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Michael Roemer: "The Surfaces of Reality." Reprinted from

Film Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Fall 1964, by permission of
The Regents of the University of California and the author. Copy-
right, ©, 1964, by The Regents of the University of California.

Gideon Bachmann, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D. A.

Pennebaker: "The Frontiers of Realist Cinema." Reprinted from
Film Culture, No. 22-23, Summer 1961, by permission of Jonas
Mekas.

A. William Bluem: "Television and the Documentary Quest."

Excerpts reprinted from Documentary in American Television by
A. William Bluem by permission of Hastings House, Publishers,
Inc. Copyright, ©, 1965, by A. William Bluem.

Carl Dreyer: "Thoughts on My Craft." Reprinted from Sight

and Sound, Winter 1955-1956, by permission of the author.

Charles Barr: "CinemaScope: Before and After." Excerpts re-

printed from "CinemaScope: Before and After" by Charles Barr
in Film Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Summer 1963, by permission
of The Regents of the University of California and the author.
Copyright, ©, 1963, by The Regents of the University of Cali-
fornia.

Stan VanDerBeek: "Compound Entendre." Reprinted from

8: Newsletter of 8mm. Film in Education (July 1965), edited
by Joan Rosengren Forsdale, and published by the Project in
Educational Communication of the Horace Mann-Lincoln Insti-
tute of School Experimentation, Teachers College, Columbia
University.
8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jonas Mekas: "Notes on the New American Cinema." Excerpts
reprinted from Film Culture, No. 24, Spring 1962, by permission of
the author.

Pauline Kael: "Are Movies Going to Pieces?" Reprinted from

/Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael by permission of Atlantic
— Little, Brown and Co. Copyright, ©, 1964, by Pauline Kael.

Penelope Houston: "Towards a New Cinema." Reprinted from

The Contemporary Cinema by Penelope Houston by permission of
Penguin Books Ltd. Copyright, ©, 1963, by Penelope Houston.

Francois Truffaut: "We Must Continue Making Progress." Ex-

cerpts reprinted —
from "Francois Truffaut An Interview" In Film
Quarterly, Fall 1963, by permission of Cahiers du Cinema and
The Regents of the University of California. Copyright, ©, 1963,
by The Regents of the University of California.

Federico Fellini: "The Road Beyond Neorealism." Reprinted

from "Federico Fellini: An Interview" by Gideon Bachmann in
Film: Book /, edited by Robert Hughes, New York, Grove Press,
1959, by permission of Gideon Bachmann and Robert Hughes.
Copyright, ©, 1959, by Robert Hughes.

The author wishes to express his appreciation to Erik Barnouw,

Henry Breitrose, Jack Ellis, and Arthur Knight for encouragement
and advice in making the selections for this book. Professor Ellis
was particularly helpful in suggesting the kind of material to
include in the last section.
R.D.M.
 CONTENTS
Introduction 13

The Plastic Material 21

v. i. pudovkin: The Plastic Material 23

sergei eisenstein: Collision of Ideas 34
rene clair: The Art of Sound 38
gavin Lambert: Sight and Sound 45
Alfred hitchcock: Direction 53
Alexander knox: Acting and Behaving 62
Dudley Nichols: The Writer and the Film 73

Film and the Other Arts 89

vachel lindsay: Sculpture-in-Motion 91

parker tyler: Movies and the Human Image 99
hollis alpert: The Film Is Modern Theatre 108
allardyce nicoll: Film and Theatre 113
rudolf arnheim: Epic and Dramatic Film 124
Robert nathan: A Novelist Looks at Hollywood 129
george bluestone: Novels Into Film 132
ingmar bergman: Film Has Nothing To Do With
Literature 142

The Cinematic Essence 147

bela balazs: The Faces of Men 149

ralph block: Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not
Painting 154
mack sennett: Cloud-Cuckoo Country 160
Herbert read: Towards a Film Aesthetic 165
slavko vorkapich: Toward True Cinema 171
hans richter: The Film as an Original Art Form 180
Arnold hauser: Space and Time in the Film 187
susanne langer: A Note on the Film 199
10 CONTENTS
Dream and Reality 205

JOHN grierson: First Principles of Documentary 207

cesare zavattini: Some Ideas on the Cinema 216
hugo mauerhofer: Psychology of Film Experience 229
Elizabeth bowen: Why I Go to the Cinema 236
Siegfried kracauer: Theory of Film 245
Michael roemer: The Surfaces of Reality 255

illustrations 269

An Evolving Art 287

GIDEON BACHMANN, ROBERT DREW, RICHARD LEACOCK,

d. a. pennebaker: The Frontiers of Realist
Cinema 289
a. william bluem: Television and the Docu-
mentary Quest 301
carl dreyer: Thoughts on My Craft 312
Charles barr: CinemaScope: Before and After 318
stan vanderbeek: Compound Entendre 329
jonas mekas: Notes on the New American Cinema 333
pauline kael: Are Movies Going to Pieces? 341
penelope Houston: Towards a New Cinema 355
francjois truffaut: We Must Continue Making
Progress 368
federico fellini; The Road Beyond Neorealism 311
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(Grouped together following page 269)

John Ford: The Informer.

Carl Dreyer: Day of Wrath.

Vittorio de Sica: Umberto D.

Michelangelo Antonioni: La Notte.

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane.

Stanley Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove.

Ingmar Bergman: The Magician.

Federico Fellini: 8V2.

Alain Resnais: Last Year at Marienbad.

Richard Lester: The Knack. (A Woodfall Film released

through United Artists-Lopert.)

Alfred Hitchcock: The Trouble With Harry.

Philippe de Broca: That Man From Rio.

Charles Eames: American National Exhibition in Moscow.

Francis Thompson: N.Y.N.Y.

Francois Truffaut: The 400 Blows.

Michael Roemer: Nothing But a Man.

11
 INTRODUCTION

The art of the film is always in a tortured state of crisis,

tension, —
hope, and despair racked by technical, financial,
and political demands; buffeted by critical whirlwinds; choked
by human pride and vulgar display. Film is praised and at-
tacked by many who do not know what it is, and equally
tormented by those who claim to love and understand.
In America, the traditional middle-class view is that a
movie is merely entertainment. This seems to carry with it
two conflicting attitudes. On the one hand, it does not occur
to most people to include film among the arts at all. The
early reluctance to think of motion pictures as belonging
within the Lincoln Center in New York or the Kennedy
Center in Washington represents a familiar American blind-
ness to the only art we can call our own. On the other hand,
when the motion picture does demand attention by trying to
move or disturb us on moral or social grounds, it may sud-
denly become an object of censorship. Still defined as merely
entertainment, the film nevertheless is thought to have mys-
terious powers of persuasion, for good, perhaps, but certainly
for ill. Thus, by the general run of busy "opinion leaders,"
film is alternately ignored and feared.
Among the informed and intellectual observers of the
cinema there are extremists of other kinds. There are those
who concentrate their praise on films about abortion or racial
violence or some other controversy, because such subjects
are thought to be daring, important, and annoying to con-
servatives. The stereotyped liberal is too busy hating the
censors to love the film. On the other hand, there are the "in"
critics who have decided that primitivism is freedom. They
see no point in going on with recognizable cinematic forms,
but demand that young directors wipe the slate clean of tradi-
tional dramatic structure and start over. Thus film's best
friends tear it apart with ever-narrowing demands.

13
14 INTRODUCTION
This book is for film makers, of course, and for critics and

teachers and students of the film. It is also for fans, whose

enthusiasm for star or story may actually be related to deeper
sources of satisfaction in the art of the film. I hope that the
occasional moviegoer, too, will want to cope with this kind
of book, for he may then be able to place the art of the film
in better perspective as part of his knowledge of contempo-
rary civilization.
The theories conflict. Those who love movies should not be
upset by the fact that there seem to be deep contradictions.
What kind of aesthetic theory can reconcile realism and
fantasy, entertainment and education, mysteries and musicals,
slapstick and spectacle? The true philosopher of film is inter-
ested in every new artistic event. He will admit any subject,
any style, any function for film, setting up his standards of
excellence and noting his personal tastes within the wide
range of these alternatives.
There can no more be a final theory of film than there can
be a definitive theory of what to put in a book. The medium
and its limits can be described, differentiated from other
media, found to possess unique characteristics. But after that,
the storm over style and content will rage forever.
Theory should be stimulating, liberating. It should not be
so inflexible that it drops a negative pall on the artist, limiting
his areas of effort. Theory should lead to something. It should
open up debate and controversy, leading in turn to new
theory, or to experiment and action.
Watch the young man of talent. When works of theory
or criticism are available, he will sit in a corner and devour
them. He may not be able to tell you everything he has read.
He has nevertheless gone through an experience of compara-
tive judgements which has informed him, stirred him, shaken
him. Sometime later, after he has worked a while with film, he
may come to rest at a point in the spectrum of theory where
he feels comfortable. He will have a passion and a position,
rooted in knowledge. He will not be embarrassed to accept
—
an already accepted theory nor driven to be "different" in
order to be noticed. He will have a sense of the best that has
been thought and said about film.
The notion that pragmatic Americans don't like theory is
a notion that blocks progress in both science and art. Theory
rallies enthusiasm and starts achievement. In the history of
Introduction 15

European motion pictures, training schools and film maga-

zines have been crucially important. Eisenstein and Pudovkin
moved back and forth from film making to the state film
school in Moscow; they also published important contribu-
tions to film theory. Luigi Chiarini, the first director of the
Centro Sperimentale in Rome, and founder of the critical
magazine Bianco e Nero, was a prominent film director. In
France, the "new wave" directors were the ones who had
earlier watched films at the Cinematheque or worked on stu-
dent productions at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinemato-
graph iques; Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard wrote
for Cahiers du Cinema, In England, Tony Richardson, Karel
Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson wrote articles for Sequence and
for Sight and Sound before they directed films.
It not to be expected that all of the most interesting
is

directors,now or later, will also be profound thinkers. By the

very nature of their medium and the skills needed to master
that medium, it is certain that many of the best artists will
always be somewhat inarticulate about what they do. The
important thing is for those who work at the art to be exposed
to the arguments, pro and con, to know what alternative cries
have been raised.

In theory, and sometimes in practice, the cinema is an art.

In practice, the motion picture director cannot work alone.
He must dominate an enormous tangle of technical and eco-
nomic apparatus and a baffling variety of people. He must
understand what editing can do, since the art of editing is
basic to the art of the film. He must know the oldest truths
about acting, the newest capabilities of the laboratories. He
must evaluate the set designer's skills, meet the production
manager's schedule, watch for the script clerk's reminders
about matching yesterday's shots. He must be able to control
the camera and the cameraman without being awed by the
demands of the machinery.
Directing involves both collaboration and domination. Even
Eisenstein, who was "all for the collective method of work,"
confessed that "there are cases when a director's 'iron heel' is
not only justified but absolutely necessary." The process is not
a matter of balancing all the elements evenly and democrati-
cally. In film, as in life, justice consists of more than simple
equality. Within the checks and balances of technical and
16 INTRODUCTION
artistic advice, the presidential leadershipof the director must
firmly guide the actors, choose the shots, demand a tempo,
decide the over-all shape of the outcome. In the clamor of
the sound stage, in the loneliness of the cutting room, he must
hold to his vision.
Jean Renoir once told an interviewer that in the studios the
camera has become almost a god, "fixed on its tripod or
crane, which is just like a heathen altar; and about it are the
— —
high priests the director, cameraman, assistants who bring
victims before the camera, like burnt offerings." Mere mastery
of physical arrangements leaves out the life of film.
Methodical men are always dreaming that the arts can be
planned, organized, produced, and distributed according to a
prearranged set of technical skills, one of which is called
"talent." The prerequisite for a good film is no such com-
bination of measurable quantities. It is something altogether
unprecedented, unpredictable, intangible, and indescribable.
It is a spark of electricity which fuses the elements, creating
a brand-new thing in the world.
The notion that there can be mechanical combinations re-
sulting in a work of art is a fable wrapped up in a myth.
Only a scientist or engineer or businessman would give himself
up to such wishful woolgathering. Art comes from encounters
and inspirations, often by chance, usually without warning.
Most of this has to take place before the film writer or direc-
tor begins his work. It is his total life preparation. James
Thurber put it clearly: "Yes, madam, I'm sure your son is
better at drawing than I am. But he hasn't been through
as much."
The mechanics of motion pictures must be thoroughly
—
understood not merely theoretically, but through practical
experience — before a film maker can adequately express him-
self as an artist. But the wise director knows that technical
knowledge is the smallest part of his equipment. After he
understands it, he should be able to leave most of it to others.
He should be thinking, instead, of the orchestration of emo-
tion and mood, duration and rhythm, conflict and climax.
The director who is concerned with the film as an art is
very clear about what film is made of. It is not a mechanical
sandwich composed of a script, a lot of settings and actors,
and a great many careful skills like photography and editing.
It is a magical fusion of light, movement, and sound. It is not
Introduction 17

a simple combination of techniques. It is, as Dudley Nichols

says, "a stream of images."

The motion picture is not an art of repose.

Parker Tyler has compared film to Galatea, who responded
to Pygmalion's prayer, gave up being a statue, and moved.
The moment she moved, she became a problem.
The first essential of the motion picture is motion. Film
seeks action, and not only action but conflict. Some sort of
violent change is almost inherent in its expectations. Movie-
conscious audiences all over the world are pleased when one
thing more in a James Bond film blows up. It is no accident
that Americans —
so loath to wait, so eager for something to
—
happen quickly grasped and developed the film as their
medium. The western, the chase, the de-
favorite storytelling
tective story, the —
war story these have become the staples
of the screen for the most natural and intrinsic reasons.
War, ever since Aeschylus, has been a stimulus for drama.
—
Film loves war and is puzzled by peace. This is part of its
problem, an aspect of its art that has social implications.
Fear and disaster are filmic. Hope is a civilized, static concept,
needing no outward action to maintain its identity or to prove
itself. The film maker who seeks to convey the quiet virtues

of hope, peace, and wise solutions is working against the

tendencies of his medium. He may sometimes succeed, and
he may deserve our blessing, but his obstacles are severe.
It is of course, that movement does not require a
true,
constant succession of vehicles, knives, or bodies whirling
past the camera. The opening of a door, a hand, or an eye
can bring about a climax as thrilling as a crash of locomotives,
if it is properly prepared for in the story and on the screen.

Yet the medium's need for movement and the story's need
for conflict —
from D. W. Griffith's Intolerance to William
Wyler's The Friendly Persuasion — have combined to force
the most dedicated director into firing up his theme with the
western formula. Films "for peace," as Robert Hughes soberly
showed us in his Film: Book 2, are rare in quantity and almost
invariably violent in style. Persuasion by drama is a risky
business. Film's contributions to social stability and orderly
change have come most often from the documentary, with its
steady informational base and its appeal to reason. Narration
in the documentary is a civilizing brake on the action, a
18 INTRODUCTION
restrainton the dramatic forces and the restless movement
inherent in the motion picture.
The second essential aspect of the motion picture is its
physical nature. The camera must photograph material ob-
jects or persons or events. cannot photograph thought
It
(Griffith to the contrary notwithstanding). Thought must be
revealed by an action or an eyebrow, a title or words spoken.
This is a prime limitation on the art of motion as a direct
source of ideas or inspiration.
Film is concerned with experience, not inference. The
revelation of large meanings and great truths put film under
a fearful strain. There is no such thing as religion on film;
there can only be a film about human behavior as it responds
to religious feeling or understanding. The basis of film is its
visibility, its reproduction of a material image. Religion is
concerned with that which is invisible. The cinema is so fre-
quently the target of censorship precisely because its nature
is to reveal the physical aspects of life: it is found far more

often in the bedroom than in the chancel. It loves to pry; it is

uncomfortable with dignity and righteousness.
The physical nature of film does not mean that its visual
art is unable to transmit symbolic and spiritual meanings. The
linking of objects with ideas — from Pudovkin's Mother to
—
John Ford's The Informer has been a notable aspect of the
motion picture'scommunicative power. Robert Flaherty's re-
mark helps us here: "You can't say as much as you can in
writing, but you can say what you say with great conviction."
Most of the performing arts have similar limitations to
challenge the artist. Film has more elements to work with
than music, ballet, drama, or even literature. But its physical
basis gives it a tone of literal realism even when it is trying
hardest to be experimental. For this reason, as Sir Herbert
Read suggests, the poet in film has been slow to appear.
When the poet simply describes, with whatever metaphor, he
is not unlike a painter or photographer; but when he reaches

through abstraction to philosophic thought, the poet's words

cannot be made directly visible.
The third essential aspect of the motion picture is the effect
of film editing: it demolishes the traditional dramatic uni-
ties of place and time. This is film's chief weapon against its
realistic bonds. Time and space are subordinate to imagina-
tion: the viewer can be whisked from here to there, from now
Introduction 19
to then, without warning. Cost alone can keep the film from
going where it pleases and summoning up any part of the past
or future that can be shown effectively by shapes, by light
and dark. This is the wonderful infinity and eternity of the
filmic universe.
This persistence of present time, without limit of place or
period, also gives film its ambivalence between dream and

reality. It abolishes the unities of logic as well as of drama.

Every shot is a separate realistic image, yet the total edited
effect can be much more than a physical report. It can be-
come a dream or a lie. It can give us a vivid rush of excite-
ment, a stream of images with a roller-coaster effect. This
means that the jaded or style-centered film editor may often
be tempted to prefer giddy action to meaningful content.
The nature of film encourages him. Its underlying tendency
is to strain against order, against logic.
Recent experiments with filmic time (Last Year at Marien-
bad is an example) have taken us beyond the dizziness of

edited action, beyond the free association of ideas, into a

self-conscious maze of irrationality. Some observers find this
a sign of creative advance, a suitable reflection of what they
consider the meaningless nature of existence. They are not
attracted especially to the lighthearted, freewheeling wildness
of Hallelujah the Hills or A Hard Day's Night, but rather to
the cool denial of reason in Godard or Antonioni. One critic,
tired of the logic of plots, declares that "exposition belongs
to an age when we thought people did things for reasons." In
this view, dream is no longer escape: it has become more
real than reality. Editing, egged along by Freud, has been
substituted for life.

Arnold Hauser contends, and I think rightly, that "all art

is a game with and a fight against chaos." The film that simply

says life is chaos is a film which has not undertaken the battle
of art.
The danger today, as always, is to suppose that everything
important has been said, and technique is the only frontier.
Music must become electronic; painting must do without con-
tent; literature must take leave of language; movies must
become something altogether different from the works already
known.
Yet the heart of anyfilm is its contact with life, its concern
with humanity, connecting creator and audience. If the artist
20 INTRODUCTION
of the film keeps close to the common life, he will not find
it necessary to leave it out of his work. If he abstracts, it will

be to achieve communication, not to thwart it. If he refines

the language, it will be to say the old things in a way that
may reach us at last and move us to see his vision of life.
And if he decides to come back to the age-old themes within
the old-fashioned rules of construction, his work may still be
art and still be creative.
There is a sense in which Marshall McLuhan's now famous
dictum is true: "The medium is the message." The way film
works does have effects apart from particular stories or
themes. But if we leave it at that and let the film pursue
relentlessly its own uniqueness, we shall be lost on a roller
coaster without a destination.
It is essential to understand the theory of film. But if we
allow ourselves to be bemused by the inner springs of this
machine-art of our time, we may then be tempted to say that
only certain subjects are truly "filmic." This would lead us
sooner or later to aesthetic worship of the motorcycle, the
strip tease, and the nightmare.
The great film maker uses his knowledge of the film me-
dium as he uses the knowledge of technical tools with —
respect, understanding, and an "iron heel." Because he is
concerned with humanity, not with pure theory, he presses
hard against the limitations of his art. He makes them work
in his favor. He has something to tell us that finds the film a
congenial medium but ultimately transcends the medium.
Theorists may —
analyze the essentials of film its movement,
its materiality,freedom in space and time. But no mere
its

theory of image-making can contain the work and thought

of Ford, Renoir, De Sica, or Kurosawa. The artist who shows
us the human condition shows us the true transparency of
film.

Richard Dyer MacCann

The Plastic Material
 V. I. PUDOVKIN

The Plastic Material*

"To show something as everyone sees it is to have accom-

plished nothing"

Direct, succinct, sensible, the great Russian director of

silent films, V. I. Pudovkin, explains his view that film is "not
shot, but built, builtup from the separate strips of celluloid
that are raw material" His emphasis on editing as "the
its

foundation of film art" has sometimes been exaggerated to

mean that the editor needs no one else. A fuller reading of his
essays and lectures reveals the importance he also attributed
to the scenario writer and the director —
so long as they
thought of the film from an editing standpoint.
Pudovkin was the director of Mother (1925), End of St.
Petersburg (1927), and Storm Over Asia (1928), as well as
the sound film Deserter (1933). He was also a teacher at the
state cinema school in Moscow. He is especially wise and
helpful in describing the nature of the scenarist's concern, not
with words, but with "plastic material" the cameraman can
photograph. He also explains the basic shots by which the film
maker directs the attention of the spectator, and the ways
the film has of adjusting space and time, as it "forces itself,
ever striving, into the profoundest deeps of life"

FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO THE

GERMAN EDITION
The foundation of film art is editing. Armed with this watch-
word, the young cinema of Soviet Russia commenced its
progress, and it is a maxim that, to this day, has lost nothing
of its significance and force.

* V. I. Pudovkin, On Film Technique. Translated and annotated

by Ivor Montagu. London, Vision Press, Ltd., 1950. Pp. 15-16,
50-54, 79-82, 83-84, 84-85, 88-89, 91-94.

23
24 V. I. PUDOVKIN
It must be borne in mind that the expression "editing" is
not always completely interpreted or understood in its essence.
By some the term is naively assumed to imply only a joining
together of the strips of film in their proper time-succession.
Others, again, know only two sorts of editing, a fast and
—
a slow. But they forget or they have never learnt that —
rhythm (i.e., the effects controlled by the alternation in cut-
ting of longer or shorter strips of film) by no means exhausts
all the possibilities of editing.
To make clear my point and to bring home unmistakably
to my readers the meaning of editing and its full potentialities,
I shall use the analogy of another art-form —
literature. To the
poet or writer separate words are as raw material. They have
the widest and most variable meanings which only begin to
become precise through their position in the sentence. To that
extent to which the word is an integral part of the composed
phrase, to that extent are its effect and meaning variable until
it is fixed in position, in the arranged artistic form.
To the film director each shot of the finished film subserves
the same purpose as the word to the poet. Hesitating, select-
ing, rejecting,and taking up again, he stands before the sepa-
rate takes, and only by conscious artistic composition at this
stage are gradually pieced together the "phrases of editing,"
the incidents and sequences, from which emerges, step by step,
the finished creation, the film.
The expression "shot" is entirely false, and
that the film is

should disappear from the language. The film is not shot, but
built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its
raw material. . . .

THE PLASTIC MATERIAL

The must bear always in mind the fact that
scenario-writer
every sentence he writes must appear plastically upon the
screen in some visible form. Consequently, it is not the words
he writes that are important, but the externally expressed
plastic images that he describes in these words. As a matter
of fact, it is not so easy to find such plastic images. They
must, before anything else, be clear and expressive. Anyone
familiar with literary work can well represent to himself what
is an expressive word, or an expressive style; he knows that

there are such things as telling, expressive words, as vividly

The Plastic Material 25
expressive word-constructions — sentences. Similarly, he knows
that the involved, obscure style of an inexperienced writer,
with a multitude of superfluous words, is the consequence of
his inability to select and control them. What is here said of
literary work is work of the scenarist,
entirely applicable to the
only the word replaced by the plastic image. The scenarist
is

must know how to find and to use plastic (externally expres-

sive) material: that is to say, he must know how to discover
and how to select, from the limitless mass of material pro-
vided by life and its observation, those forms and movements
that shall most clearly and vividly express the whole content
of his idea.
Let us quote certain illustrative examples.
In the film ToVable David there is a sequence in which a
—
new character an escaped convict, a tramp comes into the —
action. The type of a thorough scoundrel. The task of the
scenarist was to give his characteristics. Let us analyse how it
was done, by describing the series of following shots.
1. The —
tramp a degenerate brute, his face overgrown
with unshaven bristles —
is about to enter a house, but stops,

his attention caught by something.

2. Close-up of the face of the watching tramp.
3. Showing what he sees —a tiny, fluffy kitten asleep in
the sun.
4. The tramp again. He raises a heavy stone with the trans-
parent intention of using it to obliterate the sleeping little
beast, and only the casual push of a fellow, just then carrying
objects into the house, hinders him from carrying out his
cruel intention.
In this little incident there is not one single explanatory
title, and yet it is effective, clearly and vividly. Why? Because
the plastic material has been correctly and suitably chosen.
The sleeping kitten is a perfect expression of complete inno-
cence and freedom from care, and thus the heavy stone in the
hands of the huge man immediately becomes the symbol of
absurd and senseless cruelty to the mind of the spectator who
sees this scene. Thus the end is attained. The characterisation
is achieved, and at the same time its abstract content wholly
expressed, with the help of happily chosen plastic material.
Another example from the same film. The context of the
incident is as follows: misfortune is come upon a family of
peasants — the eldest son has been crippled by a blow with a
26 V. I. PUDOVKIN
stone; the father has died of a heart-attack; the youngest son
(the hero of the film), still half a boy, knows who is respon-
sible for all their ills —
the tramp, who had treacherously
attacked his brother. Again and again in the course of the
picture the youngster seeks to be revenged upon the black-
guard. The weapon of revenge —
an old flint-lock. When the
disabled brother is brought into the house, and the family,
dazed with despair, is gathered round his bed, the boy,
half crying, half gritting his
teeth, secretly loads the
flint-lock. The sudden death of the father and the supplica-
tions of the mother, clinging in despair to the feet of her son,
restrain his outbreak. The boy remains the sole hope of the
family. When, later, he again reaches secretly for the flint-lock
and takes it from the wall, the voice of his mother, calling
him to go and buy soap, compels him to hang the gun up
again and run out to the store. Note with what mastery the
old, clumsy-looking flint-lock is here employed. It is as if it
incarnated the thirst for revenge that tortures the boy. Every
time the hand reaches for the flint-lock the spectator knows
what is passing in the mind of the hero. No titles, no explana-
tions are necessary. Recall the scene of soap fetched for the
mother just described. Hanging up the flint-lock and running
to the store implies forgetfulness of self for the sake of an-
other. This is a perfect characterisation, rendering on the
one hand the naive directness of the man still half a child,
on the other his awakening sense of duty.
Another example, from the film The Leather Pushers. The
incident is as follows. A
man sitting at a table is waiting for
his friend. He is smoking a cigarette, and in front of him on
the table stand an ash-tray and a glass half-empty of liquid,
both filled with an enormous number of cigarette ends. The
spectator immediately visualises the great space of time the
man has been waiting and, no less, the degree of excitement
that has made him smokenearly a hundred cigarettes.
Fromthe examples quoted above it will be clear what is
to be understood by the term: expressive plastic material. We
have found here a kitten, a tramp, a stone, a flint-lock, some
cigarette ends,and not one of these objects or persons was
introduced by chance; each constitutes a visual image, re-
quiring no explanation and yet carrying a clear and definite
meaning.
The Plastic Material 27
Hence an important rule for the scenarist: in working out
each incident he must carefully consider and select each visual
image; he must remember that for each concept, each idea,
there may be tens and hundreds of possible means of plastic
expression, and that it is his task to select from amongst
them the clearest and most vivid. Special attention, however,
must be paid to the special part played in by objects.
pictures
Relationships between human beings are, for the most part,
illuminated by conversations, by words; no one carries on
conversation with objects, and that is why work with them,
being expressed by visual action, is of special interest to the
film technician, as we have just seen in these examples. Try
to imagine to yourself anger, joy, confusion, sorrow, and so
forth, expressed not in words and the gestures accompanying
them, but in action connected with objects, and you will see
how images saturated with plastic expression come into your
mind. Work on plastic material is of the highest importance
for the scenarist. In the process of it he learns to imagine
to himself what he has written as it will appear upon the
screen, and the knowledge thus acquired is essential for cor-
rect and fruitful work.
One must try to express one's concepts in clear and vivid
visual images. Suppose it be a matter of the characterisation
of some person of the action —
this person must be placed in
such conditions as will make him appear, by means of some
action or movement, in the desired light (remember the tramp
and the kitten). Suppose it be a matter of the representation
—
of some event those scenes must be assembled that most
vividly emphasise visually the essence of the event repre-
sented. . . .

THE METHODS OF THE FILM

The Americans were the first to discover in the film-play the
presence of peculiar possibilities of its own. It was perceived
that the film can not only make a simple record of the events
passing before the lens, but that it is in a position to repro-
duce them upon the screen by special methods, proper only
to itself.

Let us take as example a demonstration that files by upon

the street. Let us picture to ourselves an observer of that
28 V. I. PUDOVKIN
demonstration. In order to receive a clear and definite im-
pression of the demonstration, the observer must perform
certain actions. First hemust climb upon the roof of a house,
to get a view from above of the procession as a whole and
measure its dimensions; next he must come down and look
out through the first-floor window at the inscriptions on the
banners carried by the demonstrators; finally, he must mingle
with the crowd, to gain an idea of the outward appearance
of the participants.
Three times the observer has altered his viewpoint, gazing
now from nearer, now from farther away, with the purpose
of acquiring as complete and exhaustive as possible a picture
of the phenomenon under review. The Americans were the
first to seek to replace an active observer of this kind by

means of the camera. They showed in their work that it was

not only possible to record the scene shot, but that by ma-
—
noeuvring with the camera itself in such a way that its posi-
tion in relation to the object shot varied several times —
it was

made possible to reproduce the same scene in far clearer and

more expressive form than with the lens playing the part of a
theatre spectator sitting fast in his stall. The camera, until

now a motionless spectator, at last received, as it were, a

charge of life. It acquired the possibility of proper movement,
and transformed itself from a spectator to an active observer.
It followed that the camera, controlled by the director, could

not only enable the spectator to see the object shot, but could
induce him to apprehend it.
It was at this moment that the concepts close-up, mid-shot,
and long-shot first appeared in cinematography, concepts that
later played an enormous part in the creative craft of editing,
the basis of the work of film direction. Now, for the first
time, became apparent the difference between the theatrical
producer and his colleague of the film. In the beginning the
material with which both theatrical producer and film director
worked was identical. The same actors playing through in
their same sequence the same scenes, which were but shorter,
and, at the most, unaccompanied by words. The technique
of acting for the films differed in no respect from that of
stage-acting. The only problem was the replacement, as com-
prehensibly as possible, of words by gestures. That was the
time when the film was rightly named "a substitute for the
stage."
The Plastic Material 29

FILM AND REALITY

But, with the grasping of the concept editing, the position
became basically altered. The real material of film-art proved
to be not those actual scenes on which the camera
lens of the
is directed. The do only with
theatrical producer has always to
real processes —
they are his material. His finally composed
—
and created work the scene produced and played upon the
stage —
is equally a real and actual process that takes place in

obedience to the laws of real space and real time. When a

stage-actor finds himself at one end of the stage, he cannot
cross to the other without taking a certain necessary number
of paces. And crossing and intervals of this kind are a thing
indispensable, conditioned by the laws of real space and real
time, with which the theatrical producer has always to reckon
and which he is never in a position to overstep. In fact, in
work with real processes, a whole series of intervals linking
the separate significant points of action is unavoidable.
If, on the other hand, we consider the work of the film

director, then it appears that the active raw material is no

other than those pieces of celluloid on which, from various
viewpoints, the separate movements of the action have been
shot. From nothing but these pieces is created those appear-
ances upon the screen that form the filmic representation of
the action shot. And thus the material of the film director
consists not of real processes happening in real space and
real time, but of those pieces of celluloid on which these
processes have been recorded. This celluloid is entirely subject
to the will of the director who edits it. He can, in the com-
position of the filmic form of any given appearance, eliminate
all points of interval, and thus concentrate the action in time

to the highest degree he may require. . . .

Between the natural event and its appearance upon the

screen there is a marked difference. It is exactly this difference
that makes the film an art. Guided by the director, the camera
assumes the task of removing every superfluity and directing
the attention of the spectator in such a way that he shall see
only that which is significant and characteristic. When the
demonstration was shot, the camera, after having viewed
the crowd from above in the long-shot, forced its way into
the press and picked out the most characteristic details. These
details were not the result of chance, they were selected, and,
 —

30 V. I. PUDOVKIN
moreover, selected in such a way that from their sum, as from
a sum of separate elements, the image of the whole action
could be assembled. . . .

FILMIC SPACE AND TIME

Created by the camera, obedient to the will of the director

after the cutting and joining of the separate pieces of cel-
luloid — there arises a new filmic time; not that real time
embraced by the phenomenon as
it takes place before the

camera, but a new filmic time, conditioned only by the speed

of perception and controlled by the number and duration of
the separate elements selected for filmic representation of the
action.
Every action takes place not only in time, but also in space.
Filmic time is distinguished from actual in that it is dependent
only on the lengths of the separate pieces of celluloid joined
together by the director. Like time, so also is filmic space
bound up with the chief process of film-making, editing. By
the junction of the separate pieces the director builds a filmic
space entirely his own. He unites and compresses separate
elements, that have perhaps been recorded by him at differing
points of real, actual space, into one filmic space. By virtue
of the possibility of eliminating points of passage and interval,
that we have already analysed and that obtains in all film-
work, filmic space appears as a synthesis of real elements
picked out by the camera. . . .

When we wish to apprehend anything, we always begin

with the general outlines, and then, by intensifying our exami-
nation to the highest degree, enrich the apprehension by an
ever-increasing number of details. The particular, the detail,
will always be a synonym of intensification. It is upon this
that the strength of the film depends, that its characteristic
speciality is the possibility of giving a clear, especially vivid
representation of detail. The power of filmic representation
lies in the fact that, by means of the camera, it continually
strives to penetrate as deeply as possible, to the mid-point of
every image. The camera, as it were, forces itself, ever striv-
ing, into the profoundest deeps of life; it strives thither to
penetrate, whither the average spectator never reaches as he
glances casually around him. The camera goes deeper; any-
thing it can see it approaches, and thereafter eternalises upon
The Plastic Material 31

the celluloid. When we approach a given, real image, we must

spend a definite effort and time upon it, in advancing from
the general to the particular, in intensifying our attention to
that point at which we begin to remark and apprehend details.
By the process of editing, the film removes, eliminates, this
effort. The film spectator is an ideal, perspicuous observer.
And it is the director who makes him so. In the discovered,

deeply embedded detail there lies an element of perception,

the creative element that characterises as art the work of man,
the sole element that gives the event shown its final worth.
To show something as everyone sees it is to have accom-
plished nothing. Not that material that is embraced in a first,
casual, merely general and superficial glance is required, but
that which discloses itself to an intent and searching glance,
that can and will see deeper. This is the reason why the
greatest artists, those technicians who feel the film most
acutely, deepen their work with details. To do this they dis-
card the general aspect of the image, and the points of interval
that are the inevitable concomitant of every natural event.
The theatrical producer, in working with his material, is not
in a position to remove from the view of the spectator that
background, that mass of general and inevitable outline, that
surrounds the characteristic and particular details. He can
only underline the most essential, leaving the spectator him-
self to concentrate upon what he underlines. The film tech-
nician, equipped with his camera, is infinitely more powerful.
The attention of the spectator is entirely in his hands. The
lens of the camera is the eye of the spectator. He sees and
remarks only that which the director desires to show him, or,
more correctly put, that which the director himself sees in
the action concerned.

ANALYSIS

We now perceive that the work of the film director has a

double character. For the construction of filmic form he re-
quires proper material; if he wishes to work filmically, he
cannot and must not record reality as it presents itself to the
actual, average onlooker. To create a filmic form, he must
select those elements from which this form will later be assem-
bled. To assemble these elements, he must first find them.
And now we hit on the necessity for a special process of
32 V. I. PUDOVKIN
analysis of every real event that the director wishes to use
in a shot. For every event a process has to be carried out
comparable to the process in mathematics termed "differentia-
tion" — that is to say, dissection into parts or elements. Here
the technique of observation links up with the creative process
of the selection of the characteristic elements necessary for
the future finished work. In order to represent the woman in
the court scene, Griffith probably imagined, he may even have
actually seen, dozens of despairing women, and perceived not
only their heads and hands, but he selected from the whole
images only the smile through tears and the convulsive hands,
creating from them an unforgettable filmic picture.
Another example. In that filmically outstanding work The
Battleship "Potemkin" Eisenstein shot the massacre of the
mob on the great flight of steps in Odessa. The running of
the mob down the steps is rendered rather sparingly and is not
especially expressive, but the perambulator with the baby,
that, loosed from the grip of the shot mother, rolls down
the steps, is poignant in its tragic intensity and strikes with the
force of a blow. This perambulator is a detail, just like the
boy with the broken skull in the same film. Analytically dis-
sected, the mass of people offered a wide field for the creative
work of the director, and details correctly discovered in
editing resulted in episodes remarkable in their expressive
power.
Another example, simpler, but quite characteristic for film-
work: how should one show a motor-car accident? a man —
being run over.
The real material is thoroughly abundant and complex.
There are the street, the motor-car, the man crossing the
street, the car running him down, the startled chauffeur, the
brakes, the man under the wheels, the car carried forward by
its impetus, and, finally, the corpse. In actuality everything

occurs in unbroken sequence. How was this material worked

out by an American director in the film Daddy? The separate
pieces were assembled on the screen in the following
sequence:

1. The street with cars in movement: a pedestrian crosses the

street with his back to the camera; a passing motor-car hides him
from view.
The Plastic Material 33
2. Very short flash: the face of the startled chauffeur as he
steps on the brake.
3. Equally short flash: the face of the victim, his mouth open
in a scream.
4. Taken from above, from the chauffeur's seat: legs, glimpsed
near the revolving wheels.
5. The sliding, braked wheels of the car.
6. The corpse by the stationary car.

The separate pieces are cut together in short, very sharp

rhythm. In order to represent the accident on the screen, the
director dissected analytically the whole abundant scene,
unbroken in actual development, into component parts, into
elements, and selected from them sparingly —
only the six —
essential. And these not only prove sufficient, but render
exhaustively the whole poignancy of the event represented.
In the work of the mathematician there follows after dis-
section into elements, after "differentiation," a combination
of the discovered separate elements to a whole the so-called —
"integration."
In the work of the film director the process of analysis,
the dissection into elements, forms equally only a point of
departure, that has to be followed by the assemblage of the
whole from the discovered parts. The finding of the elements,
the details of the action, implies only the completion of a
preparatory task. It must be remembered that from these parts
the complete work is finally to emerge, for, as said above,
the real motor-car accident might be dissected by the onlooker
into dozens, perhaps indeed hundreds, of separate incidents.
The director, however, chooses only six of them. He makes
a selection, and this selection is naturally conditioned in
advance by that filmic image of the accident happening not —
in reality but on the screen — that, of course, exists in the
head of the director long before its actual appearance on
the screen. . . .
 SERGEI EISENSTEIN

Collision of Ideas*

"Montage is conflict."

Circuitous, elaborate, intellectual, Sergei Eisenstein, most

famous of the Russian film directors, presents his view that
montage is not built up by linkage of shots, as Pudovkin sug-
gests, but by collision, like atoms in experimental physics. He
compares it to "the series of explosions of an internal com-
bustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for,
similarly, the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving
forward the total film" Even the single frame may be a
"particular, as it were, molecular case of montage" within
which there may be conflicts of masses, movement, and light.
Eisenstein was the director of Potemkin (1925), Ten Days
That Shook the World (1928), Old and New (1929), Alex-
ander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (Parts I and II,
1944-1948). He also taught at the state cinema school in
Moscow. In this selection, he claims that his friend Pudovkin
reached agreement with him, but a study of their films reveals
that each continued to go his own way.

The shot is by no means an element of montage.

The shot is a montage cell.
Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another
order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the
from the shot, there is montage.
dialectical leap
By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently,
its cell — the shot?
By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to
each other. By conflict. By collision.

Sergei from "The Cinematographic Principle and

Eisenstein,
the Ideogram," Film Form, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1949.
Reprinted in paperback by Meridian Books, 1957. Pp. 37-40.

34
Collision of Ideas 35
In front of me lies a crumpled yellowed sheet of paper. On
it isa mysterious note:

"Linkage—P" and "Collision—E."

This is a substantial trace of a heated bout on the subject

of montage between P (Pudovkin) and E (myself).
This has become a habit. At regular intervals he visits me
late at night and behind closed doors we wrangle over matters
of principle. A
graduate of the Kuleshov school, he loudly
defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces.
Into a chain. Again, "bricks." Bricks, arranged in series to
expound an idea.
I confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a
collision. A
view that from the collision of two given factors
arises a concept.
From my point of view, linkage is merely a possible special
case.
Recall what an infinite number of combinations is known
in physics to be capable of arising from the impact (collision)
of spheres. Depending on whether the spheres be resilient,
non-resilient, or mingled. Amongst all these combinations
there is one in which the impact is so weak that the collision
is degraded to an even movement of both in the same
direction.
This is the one combination which would correspond with
Pudovkin's view.
Not long ago we had another talk. Today he agrees with
my point of view. True, during the interval he took the
opportunity to acquaint himself with the series of lectures I
gave during that period at the State Cinema Institute. . . .

So, montage is conflict.

As is conflict (an "imagist" transfor-
the basis of every art
mation of the dialectical principle). The shot appears as the
cell of montage. Therefore it also must be considered from the
viewpoint of conflict.
Conflict within the shot is potential montage, in the devel-
opment of its intensity shattering the quadrilateral cage of the
shot and exploding its conflict into montage impulses between
the montage pieces. As, in a zigzag of mimicry, the mise-en-
scene splashes out into a spatial zigzag with the same shat-
36 SERGEI EISENSTEIN
tering. As the slogan, "All obstacles are vain before Russians,"
bursts out in the multitude of incident of War and Peace.
montage is to be compared with something, then a pha-
If
lanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the
series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving
forward its automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynamics
of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film.
Conflict within the frame. This can be very varied in char-
acter: it even can be a conflict in —the story. As in that
"prehistoric" period in films (although there are plenty of
instances in the present, as well), when entire scenes would
be photographed in a single, uncut shot. This, however, is
outside the strict jurisdiction of the film-form.
These are the "cinematographic" conflicts within the frame:
Conflict of graphic directions.
—
(Lines either static or dynamic)
Conflict of scales.
Conflict of volumes.
Conflict of masses.
(Volumes filled with various intensities of light)
Conflict of depths.
And the following conflicts, requiring only one further
impulse of intensification before flying into antagonistic pairs
of pieces:
Close shots and long shots.
Pieces of graphically varied directions. Pieces resolved in
volume, with pieces resolved in area.
Pieces of darkness and pieces of lightness.
And, lastly, there are such unexpected conflicts as:
Conflicts between an object and its dimension —
and con-
flicts between an event and its duration.
These may sound strange, but both are familiar to us. The
first is accomplished by an optically distorted lens, and the

second by stop-motion or slow-motion.

The compression of all cinematographic factors and prop-
erties within a single dialectical formula of conflict is no empty
rhetorical diversion.
We are now
seeking a unified system for methods of
cinematographic expressiveness that shall hold good for all its
elements. The assembly of these into series of common indica-
tions will solve the task as a whole.
Collision of Ideas 37
.Experience in the separate elements of the cinema cannot
be absolutely measured.
Whereas we know a good deal about montage, in the theory
of the shot we are still floundering about amidst the most aca-
demic attitudes, some vague tentatives, and the sort of harsh
radicalism that sets one's teeth on edge.
To regard the frame as a particular, as it were, molecular
case of montage makes possible the direct application of mon-
tage practice to the theory of the shot.
And similarly with the theory of lighting. To sense this as
a collision between a stream of light and an obstacle, like the
impact of a stream from a fire-hose striking a concrete object,
or of the wind buffeting a human figure, must result in a usage
of light entirely different in comprehension from that em-
ployed in playing with various combinations of "gauzes" and
"spots."
Thus far we have one such significant principle of conflict:
the principle of optical counterpoint.
And let us not now forget that soon we shall face another
and less simple problem in counterpoint: the conflict in the
sound film of acoustics and optics.
 REN6 CLAIR

The Art of Sound*

"The talking film is not everything. There is also the sound

film."

Rene Clair began directing films in France just before the

arrival of sound. He made the transition himself successfully
and smoothly. Le Million (1931) and A Nous la Liberte (1931)
are still favorite comedies at film-society showings. He also
added some permanent contributions to the thinking of film
theorists with his characteristically witty reviews of films of
the day.
He objected to the "hundred per cent talkie/* which he felt
was "not a very exhilarating prospect." He saw little advance
in the art when "pale faces in the night exchanged stentorian
confidences." Clair reminded film makers, too, that the trium-
phant achievement of precise sound effects for every single
thing seen in the picture were becoming hackneyed and tire-
some. He was pleased by Broadway Melody (1929), in which
"we hear the noise of a door being slammed and a car driving
off while we are shown Bessie Love's anguished face watching
from a window." In this way, the sound "has replaced the
shot."

"The talking film exists, and those sceptics who prophesy a

short reign for it will die themselves long before it's over.

"Ittoo late for those who love the art of moving pictures
is

to deplore the effects of this barbaric invasion. All they can

do is try to cut their losses.
"The talking film is not everything. There is also the sound
film —on which the last hopes of the advocates of the silent
film are pinned. They count on the sound film to ward off the

* Rene Clair, Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Vera

Traill. London, Kimber, 1953. Pp. 90^92, 93-96, 96-97.

38
The Art of Sound 39
danger represented by the advent of talkies, in an effort to
convince themselves that the sounds and noises accompanying
the moving picture may prove sufficiently entertaining for the
audience to prevent it from demanding dialogue, and may
create an illusion of 'reality' less harmful for the art than
the talking film.
"However, we have grounds to fear that this solution will
only half-satisfy the public. If there is almost universal agree-
ment over the improvisations of a cinema orchestra, opinions
vary as far as noises accompanying the action are concerned.
The usefulness of such noises is often questionable. If at first
hearing they are surprising and amusing, very soon they
become tiresome. After we have heard a certain number of
sound films, and the first element of surprise has worn off,
we are led to the unexpected discovery that the world of
noises seems far more limited than we had thought. .". .

1950. Although these remarks were written over twenty

years ago, they are just as valid at the present day. The
cinema and the radio do nothing more than reproduce the
sound effects discovered during the first experimental period.
While organized sounds (music or voice) lend themselves to
countless new
combinations, the number of raw sounds which
can be employed for dramatic ends is negligible.
The makers of the first sound films registered very nearly
every sound could be captured by the microphone. But it
was soon observed that direct reproduction of reality created
a completely unreal effect, and that sounds had to be selected
as carefully as photographed objects. (If you find yourself
engrossed in conversation in a busy street, your ear will pay
as little attention to the noise of passing cars as your eye will
to their shapes.)
It is that relative paucity of the catalogue of noises that

accounts for the fact that in sound films music is so fre-

quently, and, we must admit it, so arbitrarily used. There
again, the progress accomplished in twenty years is very
modest. One could have hoped that the sound film would
give birth to a completely new style of music, designed for
the microphone and the loud-speaker and linked so closely
to the film as to become almost inseparable from it. And yet
we must admit that with a few very rare exceptions nothing
of the kind has occurred, and that music composed for films
40 RENE CLAIR
does not show any fundamental originality. In Entr'acte,
made in 1924, the score composed by Erik Satie for the
accompaniment of a silent film is more "cinematic" than any
number of scores written to-day for sound films.

1929. ". . Although the talkies are still in their first, experi-
.

mental stage, they have already, surprisingly enough,

produced stereotyped patterns. We have barely 'heard' about
two dozen of these films, and yet we already feel that the
sound effects are hackneyed and that it is high time to find
new ones. Jazz, stirring songs, the ticking of a clock, a cuckoo
singing the hours, dance-hall applause, a motor car engine or
breaking crockery — all these are no doubt very nice, but
become somewhat tiresome after we have heard them a dozen
times in a dozen different films.
"We must draw a distinction here between those sound
effects which are amusing only by virtue of their novelty
(which soon wears off), and those that help one to understand
the action, and which excite emotions which could not have
been roused by the sight of the pictures alone. The visual
world at the birth of the cinema seemed to hold immeasurably
richer promise. . However, if imitation of real noises seems
. .

limited and disappointing, it is possible that an interpretation

of noises may have more of a future in it. Sound cartoons,
using 'real' noises, seem to point to interesting possibilities.
"Unless new sound effects are soon discovered and judici-
ously employed, it is to be feared that the champions of the
sound film may be heading for a disappointment. We shall
find ourselves left with the 'hundred per cent talkie,' as they
say here, and that is not a very exhilarating prospect.
"In London we can see that the Americans were not ex-
aggerating when they spoke of the extraordinary attraction
exercised on the public by the talking films. From noon till
eleven o'clock at night people pour in successive waves into
the crowded cinemas. A
few months ago Londoners laughed
at the sound of American slang but to-day nobody seems
surprised and to-morrow London speech may be affected by it.
"In the course of the past month three theatres have closed
down and been transformed into cinemas presenting sound
films. (In one of these I watched a very bad film, and how-
ever little affection I may feel for the theatre, I could not
help regretting the brightness of the footlights, the sight of
The Art of Sound 41
the empty orchestra pit covered with flowers like a coffin and
—
of the dim screen that lugubrious setting where pale faces
in the night exchanged stentorian confidences.)" . . .

1929. ". . We need not give too much attention to inferior

.

talkies,which are no rarity, and of which Give and Take and

Strange Cargo are typical examples. In these two films the
visual content is reduced to the role of a mere gramophone
record, the whole spectacle aiming only at the closest possible
'cinematographic' reproduction of the stage play. Three or
four sets form the decor for interminable spoken scenes,
boring for those who do not understand English, and unbear-
able for those who do. The witticisms which adorn the dia-
logue give us a foretaste of what French films will become
in the hands of those of our directors who have already, in
the silent days, shown their attachment to the lowest form
of theatre.
"To these last, if they were not in fact incorrigible, we
would have strongly recommended, before they start on
French sound film production, to go and see Broadway
Melody, a hundred per cent talkie, and Show Boat, which is
partly a talkie, as well as those extraordinary sound cartoons
which represent to-day the least contestable achievement of
the new cinema."

London, May, 1929. "Of all the films now showing in Lon-
don, Broadway Melody is having the greatest success. This
new American film represents the sum total of all the progress
achieved in sound films since the appearance of Jazz Singer
two years ago. For anyone who has some knowledge of the
complicated technique of sound recording, this film is a mar-
vel. Harry Beaumont, the director, and his collaborators (of
whom there are about fifteen, mentioned by name in the
credit titles, quite apart from the actors) seem to delight in
playing with all the difficulties of visual and sound recording.
The actors move, walk, run, talk, shout and whisper, and their
movements and voices are reproduced with a flexibility which
would seem miraculous if we did not know that science and
meticulous organization have many other miracles in store
for us. In this film, nothing is left to chance. Its makers have
worked with the precision of engineers, and their achievement
is a lesson to those who still imagine that the creation of a
42 RENE CLAIR
film can take place under conditions of chaos known as
inspiration.
"In Broadway Melody, the talking film has for the first time
found an appropriate form: it is neither theatre nor cinema,
but something altogether new. The immobility of planes, that
curse of talking films, has gone. The camera is as mobile, the
angles are as varied as in a good silent film. The acting is first-
rate, and Bessie Love talking manages to surpass the silent
Bessie Love whom we so loved in the past. The sound effects
are used with great intelligence, and if some of them still seem
superfluous, others deserve to be cited as examples.
"For instance, we hear the noise of a door being slammed
and a car driving off while we are shown Bessie Love's an-
guished face watching from a window, the departure which
we do not see. This short scene in which the whole effect is
concentrated on the actress's face, and which the silent cinema
would have had to break up in several visual fragments, owes
its excellence to the 'unity of place' achieved through sound.

In another scene we see Bessie Love lying thoughtful and sad;

we feel that she is on the verge of tears; but her face dis-
appears in the shadow of a fade out, and from the screen, now
black, emerges a single sob.
"In these two instances the sound, at an opportune mo-
ment, has replaced the shot. It is by this economy of means
that the sound film will most probably secure original effects.
"We do not need to hear the sound of clapping if we can
see the clapping hands. When the time of these obvious and
unnecessary effects will have passed, the more gifted film-
makers will probably apply to sound films the lesson Chaplin
taught us in the silent films, when, for example, he suggested
the arrival of a train by the shadows of carriages passing
across a face. (But will the public, and, above all, the film-
makers, be satisfied with such a discreet use of sound? Will
they not prefer an imitation of all the noises to an intelligent
selection of a few useful ones?)
"Already in the films we are shown at present, we often
feel that in a conversation it is more interesting to watch the
listener's rather than the speaker's face. In all likelihood
American aware of this, for many of them
directors are
have used the device quite often and not unskilfully. This is
important, for it shows that the sound film has outgrown its
first stage, during which directors were intent on demonstrat-
The Art of Sound 43
ing, with childish persistence, that the actor's lips opened at
exactly the same moment as the sound was heard in short, —
that their mechanical toy worked beautifully.
"It is the alternative, not the simultaneous, use of the visual
subject and of the sound produced by it that creates the best
effects. It may well be that this first lesson taught us by the
birth-pangs of a new technique will to-morrow become this
same technique's law.
"Close Harmony, a younger brother of Broadway Melody,
also presents the back-stage life of a music hall (and not the
lastwe are destined to see Sonore oblige . ) It is an aver-
. . .

age film, containing nothing of outstanding interest, except,

perhaps, a fight in a dance hall, where the two antagonists
remain invisible (hidden by the people who have crowded
to watch them) and the fight is suggested by shouts and
noises.
"As in Broadway Melody, the acting is very good. Charles
Rogers talks, dances, sings and plays all the instruments
which make up a jazz band. The other actors show remark-
able flexibility, and their acting with speech is as natural as
was The total lack of theatri-
their silent acting in earlier films.
makes one think that film actors
cal affectation in their voices
who have never spoken before may prove more suitable for
sound films than stage actors. But it is chiefly in music hall
ifwe are to judge by American examples that the talking —
film will find its best interpreters.
"Both these films are 100 per cent talking. Show Boat is

somewhat different, however. Originally it was probably not

meant to be a talking film. But in the twelve months it took
to shoot, the success of talkies became so apparent that Show
Boat was adapted to the fashion of the day. The result is a
hybrid film in which silent scenes, with the characters express-
ing themselves through written sub-titles, alternate with sing-
ing and dancing episodes. The mixture, however, is not as
shocking as one might expect (although theoretically, the
formula is as indefensible as that of comic opera) and it has ,

produced two excellent scenes.

"The first little theatre on the show boat.
takes place in the
An on stage. They declaim their lines
actor and an actress are
in solemn voices, and at the same time, in whispers, exchange
declarations of love and arrange to meet after the show. All
this takes place in full view of the spectators, deeply moved
44 RENE CLAIR
by the play, and of the producer who, in the wings, is imitating
the song of a nightingale. One can imagine what a skilful
director has been able to achieve with that alternation of the
affected declamation and the sincere whispering, with the
interplay of long shots and close-up. Neither the silentcinema
nor the theatre could have created the same effect.
"Later in the film, a woman singer, miserably dressed, is
singing in a little cafe. The director's intention was to show
us by a short cut, the singer's rise to fame. As the song pro-
ceeds, the singer beqomes invisible, and a series of swift
where the same woman,
flashes take us to a large concert hall
inan evening gown, is singing the last bars of the theme song.
"Skilful cutting, and a proper, flexible utilization of a new
—
medium two fine achievements. ." . .

7929. ". . . Whenever the most faithful devotees of the

silent cinema undertake an impartial study of talking films,
they inevitably lose some of their assurance right at the start,
for, at its best, the talkie is no longer photographed theatre.
It is itself. Indeed, by its variety of sounds, its orchestra of
human voices, it does give an impression of greater richness
than the silent cinema. But are such riches not in fact quite
ruinous to it? Through such 'progressive' means the screen
has lost more than it has gained. It has conquered the world
of voices, but it has lost the world of dreams. I have observed
people leaving the cinema after seeing a talking film. They
might have been leaving a music hall, for they showed no sign
of the delightful numbness which used to overcome us after a
passage through the silent land of pure images. They talked
and laughed, and hummed the tunes they had just heard.
They had not lost their sense of reality."
 GAVIN LAMBERT

Sight and Sound*

'The basic principles of the cinema do not end with the

Odessa steps sequence in Potemkin."

Now a novelist and screenwriter, Gavin Lambert was from

1950-1956 editor of the British film quarterly Sight and
Sound, and was earlier one of the founders of the film maga-
zine Sequence. For one of the last issues of this short-lived
publication, he wrote this perceptive article about the differ-
ences between silent and sound films.
He chides the critics who "had their ideas and standards
formed and fixed by silent cinema" pointing out that film is
still growing and developing, but adds that no doubt it is

harder to work out theoretical essentials in a medium so fast-

growing and involving so many aspects. Using Dovzhenko's
Earth as an example, he suggests that a silent film may be
described as a "poem," but sound films, by their very advan-
tages, diffuse the concentrated essence of communication that
the earlier art offered. Sound films may nevertheless have a
"poetic" feeling: Rene Clair has demonstrated that "the audi-
ble need not inhibit the natural flow of the visible." John
Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, for example, tends to be "human
and intimate in approach rather than epic." Indeed, "sound
and dialogue give us a closer, more immediate impression of
life than images alone."

One may justly observe, I think, that the senior generation

of film theorists in this country —
Rotha, Lindgren, Manvell,
to name the leading ones — had their ideas and standards
formed and fixed by the silent cinema, by the rich and vital
period between, say, Intolerance and Earth. For them, one

• Gavin Lambert, "Sight and Sound," Sequence, Summer 1950.

Pp. 3-7.

45
46 GAVIN LAMBERT
feels,no later activity in the cinema has been as exciting or
appealing. In the revised edition of The Film Till Now, Rotha
let his twenty-year old strictures on the dialogue film stand,
and left the additional survey of the sound period to an
American critic, Richard Griffith. And Movie Parade, ostensi-
bly brought up to date by Rotha and Manvell, devotes less
care, less space —
less sympathy, perhaps —
to the last fifteen
years.
Such critics do not actively underrate later films; but the
coming of sound seems to represent to them more an un-
resolved theoretical problem than a sum of individual achieve-
ments. The sound film as an entity is compared to the silent,
and the general feeling is that the peak of the silent film period
had a completeness and purity which the sound cinema has
not yet equalled. As a result of this, one feels the lack not
only of any attempts to reassess this major problem in the
light of recent years, but of any theoretical approach to the
sound film equivalent to the massive volumes of the early
thirties. There seems, in fact, to be a kind of unwritten law that
if you are a theoretical film critic, as opposed to a reviewer,

you must go back to the silent film to rediscover basic prin-

ciples. Of course, you must —
but without staying there. The
basic principles of the cinema do not end with the Odessa
steps sequence in Potemkin or the milk-separator sequence
in The General Line, admirable as they are. The cinema is a
living organism, still growing and developing; nor is it enough,
when an undisputed contemporary masterpiece arrives, like
Bicycle Thieves or Louisiana Story, to pay homage to it as if
nothing had happened to the cinema since La Passion de
Jeanne d'Arc.
It has become increasingly difficult for a critic who came
to thecinema in the late thirties to realise the feelings of one
whose memories and impressions were fixed first of all by the
best of Griffith or Eisenstein or Dreyer. The masters acclima-
tised themselves to sound no more satisfactorily than their
iconographers, and this may
be held to strengthen the case for
silent supremacy. The sound cinema has produced no figures
of such impregnable stature —
it may be that in twenty years'

time Ford or Renoir will be equally recognised, but to stake

a major claim for them to-day would not go unchallenged.
Part of the trouble is, perhaps, that some people do not see
enough of the contemporary cinema, and others fail to make
Sight and Sound 47
the effort to study silent films. What is called "Film Apprecia-
tion" has sometimes seemed to be stuck in the milk-separator
sequence; on the other hand, the contemporary reviewer is oc-
casionally guilty of patronising the past. Anyone who listened
to the imperceptive discussion of Stroheim's
fantastically
Queen Kelly by the on the B.B.C. will realise that even
critics
a silent film to-day is by no means sure of a just estimation.
The quick, manifold and uneven development of the cinema
seems to have overthrown the worked-out standards and grasp
of essentials so impressive to rediscover in a book like The
Film Till Now.
The last few months in London, however, have provided
an unusual number of rewards for film-goers in the way of
private programmes, and opportunities not only to catch up
on films unavailable or unseen before, to consolidate, but to
—
compare and contrast to find a microcosm of the cinema.
The programmes of the London Film Club and the New
London Film Society, the weekly repertory season of the
British Film Institute, have all proved of great interest and
variety. Weekly Press shows provide a mirror of the contem-
porary, but a distorted one: nothing of interest for three
weeks, then perhaps two important films on the same day.
These other programmes have been carefully filtered; nearly
everything has a context, and even the most unmitigated fail-
ure can be constructive.
Silent film directors whose work has been included in these
programmes are Griffith (Intolerance, Hearts of the World),
Dovzhenko {Earth), Dreyer (Jeanne d'Arc), Lang (Siegfried),
Pabst (Pandora's Box, Joyless Street), Stroheim (Queen
Kelly)', sound films have taken in Pabst (Dreigroschenoper) ,

Lang (You Only Live Once), Clair (Le Million), Renoir

(La Regie du Jeu, La Grande Illusion), Mamoulian (City
Streets), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon). Although a few
—
important later names notably Carne and Ford are not —
represented, it can be said that even if the best films of these
two had been included, the greatest impression of all would
still have been left by Earth and Jeanne d'Arc. I would not

like to say which of these two silent films is, as it stands,

superior to the other, but there is one extremely interesting
point of comparison: Earth could never have gained by being
a sound film, but Jeanne d'Arc is practically a sound film
without dialogue. The addition of music to Dovzhenko's film
 —

48 GAVIN LAMBERT
can reinforce its essential power, but many silent films were
conceived to be shown with musical accompaniment. Dreyer's
film, however, while it still retains an extraordinary intensity,
does so in spite of the limitations of its medium. One is con-
scious that the subtitles, though unavoidable, are too numer-
ous; it is the passion behind the whole film, its slow arresting
rhythm, the revelatory use of close-ups, that make this striving
to go beyond the medium only a minor distraction. But if
Jeanne d'Arc had been made a year or two later as a sound
film, what then? Logically, it could have been that much
better, but one comes up against the fact that in Day of
Wrath, nearly fifteen years later, Dreyer showed that he still
had not really understood the dramatic fusion of sound and
image. Other things apart, the sound-film technique of Day of
Wrath is awkward and primitive.
It must be that for reasons which do not stop at technique

the progression from silent to sound cinema is not always

possible. It would, after all, be impertinent to suggest that
Eisenstein or Dreyer failed to make satisfactory sound films
simply because the technical grasp was beyond them. In the
same way, Eisenstein's original pronouncement on sound
that it had a future only in non-realistic use, that synchronised
dialogue was against all principles of good cinema which—
is reflected by Rotha in The Film Till Now, does not hold

good either. The early-thirties Clair or Hitchcock, the best of

Ford, even The Third Man, are all superbly valid as cinema.
One must also beware, I think, of those who point out, wher-
ever a sizeable wordless sequence occurs in a film to-day, that
the silent cinema is coming back into its own, that directors
are beginning to realise the value of images on their own, etc.,
etc. — as if good directors had always thought that unremitting
dialogue was de rigueur. ("Le cinema sonore," Robert Bresson
remarked, "a surtout invente le silence.") The technical anti-
thesis between silent and sound ceased to be of major impor-
tance as soon as Clair demonstrated in Sous les Toits de Paris
and Le Million that the audible need not inhibit the natural
flow of the visible.
Beyond the textbook standards of what constitutes good or
bad cinema, one becomes aware of a more profound anti-
thesis. Such a film as Earth confounds the orthodox theories:
its only element of virtuosity is its imaginative power —
with-
out words, with very little camera movement, with nothing of
Sight and Sound 49
the quick eye for detail and subtle switching of emphasis that
we like to pick out to-day, the whole burden of the film is on
each image. One knows from many silent films, particularly
German how tedious fine images uninformed by feeling
films,
can be, but Earth is not a succession of striking shots, it is
the communication in great intensity of a personal vision. The
film is heroic and idealistic in mood, and the mood is ex-
pressed through massive self-contained images. This absolute-
ness of fusion, this concentration, makes of Earth a poem.
But when an image speaks, the pure concentration is lost. Its
force is diffused, we have to take in words as well as pictures;
the distilled self-containment that makes a poem is no longer
there. For this reason, perhaps, we may describe a dialogue
film as "poetic" in feeling but never —
as might be said of
—
Earth and for the same reason of Jeanne d'Arc as a "poem."
Sound and dialogue of themselves diffuse the essence of con-
centration with which silent images may be filled. They have
—
many other advantages, of course they can incorporate a
mass of detail which in a silent film would appear pedestrian,
they can extend and fill out characterisation, they can create
more variety, more subtleties of dramatic presentation but —
they do not retain the original intensity of the medium. They
also throw the emphasis more on dramatic narrative; how
little plot has Earth compared with a feature film to-day

and compare, too, for sheer plot value, Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc
with Walter Wanger's. The one brings Jeanne completely alive
through the last (and dramatically least varied) hours of her
life, her trial, and the other starts practically at the beginning,

with voices at Domremy, battle scenes and every contempo-

rary notability. The difference lies not only in the fact that
Wanger is not an artist and Dreyer is; but in the antithetical
silent and sound approaches. In one, the emphasis is on narra-
tive, incident, the diffusions of life; in the other, on concen-
tration, essence, poetry.

The antithesis between silent and sound cinema is emphasised

when we consider some sound films that attain a considerable
—
degree of concentration by swiftness and compression of
narrative and a hard, direct impact. A
film like The Maltese
Falcon has hardly a single image that is powerful in itself.
50 GAVIN LAMBERT
The structure, analytical control and shaping of the
tight
story, atmosphere created by character and incident rather
than descriptive pictorial effect, add up to a notable intensity
— but it is an intensity not from within, but imposed by a
vigorous method of story-telling and firm excision of inessen-
tials. The fact is that the sound cinema obliged a great many
film-makers to look at character far more closely: the "psy-
—
chological" approach was rare in silent cinema one finds it
in Pabst, in Pandora's Box, where curiously enough the
method is much closer to sound cinema than in Jeanne d'Arc,
although in the latter one is more conscious of the absence
of dialogue. Pabst was a superb silent film technician. By
focusing on the players rather than the decor, by filling his
scenes with incident and dexterous observation, he caught the
mood of a decadent society in the German twenties perfectly
in Pandora's Box. But in his sound film, Die Dreigroschenoper,
he concentrated unexpectedly on decor. Andreyev's formalised
sets, the Gassen of Soho (in the heart of dockland) are un-
doubtedly most remarkable, but the visual style of the film,
brilliantly clever as it is, exists in a vacuum. There is no dra-
matic use of sound at all. The cynical, satirical flavour of
Brecht and Weill is almost gone, not only because Pabst prob-
ably misapprehended it, but because the visual style is much
too elaborate for it. Unlike Pabst, Clair not only quickly
understood how to fuse music and dialogue with images, but
worked with a cameraman, Georges Perinal, who used lighter
tones and a simpler texture to maintain the dramatic balance.
The images were not so weighted as to make sound almost
superfluous. This question of "inflated" visuals is very impor-
tant to sound cinema, when we see films also like Day of
—
Wrath, Ivan the Terrible or The Fugitive all of which in
effect depend too much on the devices of silent cinema. Not
necessarily because their directors use sound inexpertly, but
because the visual style is much too heavy, attempting the
kind of enlarged, self-contained effects that have dramatic
significance only in silent cinema. The techniques used by
Gregg Toland with Ford and Wyler in The Grapes of Wrath
and The Best Years of Our Lives might appear distinctly
underdone in a silent film, but in their actual context they
could not have been more effective. Dramatically as well as
visually, they are far more expressive than the over-composed
frames of Figueroa in The Fugitive, which again exist in a
Sight and Sound 51
vacuum. The Fugitive was no doubt aiming at "poetry"; but
The Grapes of Wrath is actually a far more poetic film. The
notion that luscious visuals can make a sound film poetic
seems, in fact, rather naive. The real poetic films of the last
fifteen years —
films like The Grapes of Wrath, Le Jour se
—
Leve, UAtalante, Louisiana Story are those that are true to
character, and bring out visually the character of places and
people rather than make formal designs of them. Because
sound and dialogue give us a closer, more immediate impres-
sion of life than images alone, these films have been human
and intimate in approach rather than epic, like Jeanne d'Arc
or Earth. An image without sound is in itself a formalisation;
an image with sound is a natural combination and makes a
formalised style more difficult to achieve.
Mamoulian in City Streets (1931) made an interesting at-
tempt at imposing an emphatic, slightly florid visual style on
realistic material. It is a gangster story, told not in the Scar-
—
face manner of which The Maltese Falcon, equally terse
—
and objective, is a successor but in a faintly impressionist
way, with calculated camera mobility and a few passages of
Russian-style montage, where cut-in shots of objects heighten
an emotional situation. The most notable of these is a scene
in which a series of shots of ornamental statues of cats in a
woman's room comment on her jealous disposition. Although
uneven, this is a very rewarding film; historically, one may
view it as a rather self-conscious reaction against the passive
naturalism of photographed plays in the early sound period,
but it can also be looked at in another perspective. The direct
personal comment, through symbols or visual similes, has be-
come almost extinct in sound films. Lang experimented with
—
it rather crudely in Fury, where he cut in to a scene of
gossiping townspeople a shot of cackling hens, and very effec-
tively in You Only Live Once, where the frogs croaking in
the lily pond provide an ominous chorus to the lovers' meet-
ing at night. More recently, Thorold Dickinson, in Queen of
Spades, made fine symbolic use of a spider's web. This kind
of experiment is comparatively rare in the sound film — partly
because (remembering the emphasis on narrative) symbolic
imagery in itself is seldom dramatic, partly because the use
of it is apt to look self-conscious or stylistically inappropriate
in a medium of which the keynote has been realism, whether
superficial or true. It remains the prerogative of a certain kind
52 GAVIN LAMBERT
of Mamoulian may be a very minor artist, but his early
stylist;
films had a liberating influence on sound cinema in America,
as Clair's did in France, and a particular value of Queen of
Spades is that it reasserts many plastic and rhythmic refine-
ments of cinema neglected in the general streamlining of nar-
rative by sound. So great is the apparatus of illusion now, so
deceptive can the surface be, that the creative core is more
difficult to reach —and, while
the demands of life itself in the
cinema grow more and the pioneering spirit is most
insistent
acclaimed in directors like de Sica who explore human reality
with a new passion and honesty, it may seem trivial or per-
verse to suggest that the demands of cinema itself are in
danger of being overlooked. But the future of the cinema lies
in the hands of directors who recognise the richness and
variety of their medium as well as of life.

The future of the cinema depends on the films that are made,
and not on theories. Like any other art, the cinema is subject
to a dual pressure — that of its own expressive potentialities,
and of external forces such as popular taste or exploitation.
The external pressure has been increasingly in the direction
of collective rather than individual style. Simply as a com-
mercial undertaking, the sound cinema is far more expensive
than the silent, and its sheer material costliness to-day is a
further obstacle to individual experiment. While box-office
standards are uncertain, as they were in the early days of
sound, some experiment within the industrial framework is
permissible because necessary. The increasing confidence and
power of showmen make for formula rather than experiment.
The most notable individualists in the cinema over the last
fifteen years — directors like Vigo, Carne, Flaherty, de Sica,
Sucksdorff —have worked either in the face of opposition or
have found a way somehow to make films outside the usual
framework. A few others, like Welles, gain a short run of
freedom until they lose too much money or, like Ford, seize
opportunities intermittently. It is hopelessly escapist not to

take practical conditions into account, because their influence,

negative and positive, is an inseparable part of the achieve-
ment of the cinema.
 ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Direction*

"The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing ex-

tremely well."

Alfred Hitchcock has often told friends, reporters, and

movie stars that actors are puppets. He is such a famous
and successful director that he can say such things and still
get important stars to work for him. But it is not comforting
for actors to be told, as Hitchcock says in this article: "Film
work hasn't much need for the virtuoso actor who gets his
effects and climaxes himself. . He has to submit himself
. .

to be used by the director and the camera. Mostly, he is

wanted to behave quietly and naturally."
Perhaps it is because Hitchcock is so fond of suspense
stories that he takes this position. He directed The 39 Steps
(1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Strangers
on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and many others. Different
purposes might call for more sustained creative effort by the
actors. But he declares that the thriller is the best kind of
story for the film medium, and certainly "the screen ought
to speak its own language freshly coined." He is not an advo-
cate of the importance of editing, either. As a director, he
does his editing before he starts shooting: "Working on the
script is the real making of the film, for me."

Many people think a film director does all his work

in the
studio, drilling the actors, making them do what he wants.
That is not at all true of my own methods, and I can write
only of my own methods. I like to have a film complete in
my mind before I go on the floor. Sometimes the first idea one

Alfred Hitchcock, "Direction," from Charles Davy (ed.),

Footnotes to the Film. Lovat Dickson & Thompson, Ltd., London,
1937. Pp. 3-12, 13, 14, 15.

53
54 ALFRED HITCHCOCK
has of a film is of a vague pattern, a sort of haze with a cer-

tain shape. There is possibly a colourful opening developing

into something more intimate; then, perhaps in the middle, a
progression to a chase or some other adventure; and some-
times at the end the big shape of a climax, or maybe some
twist or surprise. You see this hazy pattern, and then you
have to find a narrative idea to suit it. Or a story may give
you an idea first and you have to develop it into a pattern.
—
Imagine an example of a standard plot let us say a con-
flict between love and duty. This idea was the origin of my

first talkie, Blackmail. The hazy pattern one saw beforehand

— — —
was duty love love versus duty and finally either duty or
love, one or the other. The whole middle section was built
up on the theme of love versus duty, after duty and love had
been introduced separately in turn. So I had first to put on
the screen an episode expressing duty.
I showed the arrest of a criminal by Scotland Yard detec-
tives, and tried to make it as concrete and detailed as I could.
You even saw the detectives take the man to the lavatory to
—
wash his hands nothing exciting, just the routine of duty.
Then the young detective says he's going out that evening
with his girl, and the sequence ends, pointing on from duty
to love. Then you start snowing the relationship between the
detective and his girl: they are middle-class people. The love
theme doesn't run smoothly; there is a quarrel and the girl
goes off by herself, just because the young man has kept her
waiting a few minutes. So your story starts; the girl falls in
—
with the villain he tries to seduce her and she kills him.
Now you've got your problem prepared. Next morning, as
soon as the detective is put on to the murder case, you have
—
your conflict love versus duty. The audience know that he
will be trying to track down his own girl, who has done the
murder, so you sustain their interest: they wonder what will
happen next.
The blackmailer was really a subsidiary theme. I wanted
him to go through and expose the girl. That was my idea of
how the story ought to end. I wanted the pursuit to be after
the girl, not after the blackmailer. That would have brought
the conflict on to a climax, with the young detective, ahead
of the others, trying to push the girl out through a window to
get her away, and the girl turning round and saying: "You
can't do that — I must give myself up." Then the rest of the
Direction 55
what he is doing, and say, "Good
police arrive, misinterpret
man, you've got her," not knowing the relationship between
them. Now the reason for the opening comes to light. You
repeat every shot used first to illustrate the duty theme, only
now it is the girl who is the criminal. The young man is there
ostensibly as a detective, but of course the audience know he
is in love with the girl. The girl is locked up in her cell and

the two detectives walk away, and the older one says, "Going
out with your girl to-night?" The younger one shakes his
head. "No. Not to-night."
That was the ending I wanted for Blackmail, but I had to
change it for commercial reasons. The girl couldn't be left
to face her fate. And that shows you how the films suffer
from their own power of appealing to millions. They could
often be subtler than they are, but their own popularity won't
let them.
But to get back to the early work on a film. With the help
of my wife, who does the technical continuity, I plan out a
script very carefully, hoping to follow it exactly, all the way
through, when shooting starts. In fact, this working on the
script is the real making of the film, for me. When I've done
it, the film is finished already in my mind. Usually, too, I
don't find it necessary to do more than supervise the editing
myself. I know it is said sometimes that a director ought to
edit his own pictures if he wants to control their final form,
for it is in the editing, according to this view, that a film is
really brought into being. But if the scenario is planned out
in detail, and followed closely during production, editing
should be easy. All that has to be done is to cut away irrele-
vancies and see that the finished film is an accurate rendering
of the scenario.
Settings, of course, come into the preliminary plan, and
usually I have fairly clear ideas about them; I was an art
student before I took up with films. Sometimes I even think
of backgrounds first. The Man Who Knew Too Much started
like that; I looked in my mind's eye at snowy Alps and dingy
London alleys, and threw my characters into the middle of
the contrast. Studio settings, however, are often a problem;
—
one difficulty is that extreme effects extremes of luxury or
—
extremes of squalor are much the easiest to register on the
screen. If you try to reproduce the average sitting-room in
Golders Green or Streatham it is apt to come out looking
56 ALFRED HITCHCOCK
like nothing in particular, just nondescript. It is true that I
have tried lately to get interiors with a real lower-middle-
class atmosphere — for instance, the Verlocs' living-room in
Sabotage—but there's always a certain risk in giving your
audience humdrum truth.
However, in time the script and the sets are finished some-
how and we are ready to start shooting. One great problem
that occurs at once, and keeps on occurring, is to get the
players to adapt themselves to film technique. Many of them,
of course, come from the stage; they are not cinema-minded
at all. So, quite naturally, they like to play long scenes straight
ahead. I am willing to work with the long uninterrupted shot:
you can't avoid it altogether, and you can get some variety
by having two cameras running, one close up and one farther
off,and cutting from one to the other when the film is edited.
But if I have to shoot a long scene continuously I always feel

I am losing grip on it, from a cinematic point of view. The

camera, I feel, is simply standing there, hoping to catch some-

thing with a visual point to it. What I like to do always is to
photograph just the little bits of a scene that I really need for
building up a visual sequence. I want to put my film together
on the screen, not simply to photograph something that has
been put together already in the form of a long piece of stage
acting. This is what gives an effect of life to a picture —the
feeling that when you see it on the screen you are watching
something that has been conceived and brought to birth di-
rectly in visual terms. The screen ought to speak its own lan-
guage, freshly coined, and it can't do that unless it treats an
acted scene as a piece of raw material which must be broken
up, taken to bits, before it can be woven into an expressive
visual pattern.
You can see an example of what I mean in Sabotage. Just
before Verloc is killed there is a scene made up entirely of
short pieces of film, separately photographed. This scene has
to show how Verloc comes to be killed —
how the thought of
killing him arises in Sylvia Sidney's mind and connects itself
with the carving knife she uses when they sit down to dinner.
But the sympathy of the audience has to be kept with Sylvia
Sidney; it must be clear that Verloc's death, finally, is an acci-
dent. So, as she serves at the table, you see her unconsciously
serving vegetables with the carving knife, as though her hand
were keeping hold of the knife of its own accord. The camera
Direction 51
cuts from her hand to her eyes and back to her hand; then
back to her eyes as she suddenly becomes aware of the knife
—
making its error. Then to a normal shot the man uncon-
cernedly eating; then back to the hand holding the knife. In
an older style of acting Sylvia would have had to show the
audience what was passing in her mind by exaggerated facial
expression. But people to-day in real life often don't show
their feelings in their faces: so the film treatment showed the
audience her mind through her hand, through its unconscious
grasp on the knife. Now the camera moves again to Verloc
—
back to the knife back again to his face. You see him seeing
the knife, realising its implication. The tension between the
two is built up with the knife as its focus.
Now when the camera has immersed the audience so closely
in a scene such as this, it can't instantly become objective
again. It must broaden the movement of the scene without
loosening the tension. Verloc gets up and walks round the
table, coming so close to the camera that you feel, if you are
audience, almost as though you must move back
sitting in the
to make room for him. Then the camera moves to Sylvia
—
Sidney again, then returns to the subject the knife.
So you gradually build up the psychological situation, piece
by piece, using the camera to emphasise first one detail, then
another. The point isdraw the audience right inside the
to
situation instead of leaving them to watch it from outside,
from a distance. And you can do this only by breaking the
action up into details and cutting from one to the other, so
that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audi-
ence and reveals its psychological meaning. If you played the
whole scene straight through, and simply made a photo-
graphic record of it with the camera always in one position,
you would lose your power over the audience. They would
watch the scene without becoming really involved in it, and
you would have no means of concentrating their attention on
those particular visual details which make them feel what the
characters are feeling.
This way of building up a picture means that film work
hasn't much need for the virtuoso actor who gets his effects
and climaxes himself, who plays directly on to the audience
with the force of his talent and personality. The screen actor
has got to be much more plastic; he has to submit himself to
be used by the director and the camera. Mostly he is wanted
58 ALFRED HITCHCOCK
to behave quietly and naturally (which, of course, isn't at all
easy), leaving the camera to add most of the accents and
emphases. I would almost say that the best screen actor is the
man who can do nothing extremely well.
One way of using the camera to give emphasis is the re-
action shot. By the reaction shot I mean any close-up which
illustrates an event by showing instantly the reaction to it of a
person or a group. The door opens for someone to come in,
and before showing who it is you cut to the expressions of
the persons already in the room. Or, while one person is talk-
ing, you keep your camera on someone else who is listening.
This over-running of one person's image with another per-
son's voice is a method peculiar to the talkies; it is one of the
devices which help the talkies to tell a story faster than a silent
film could tell it, and faster than it could be told on the stage.
Or, again, you can use the camera to give emphasis when-
ever the attention of the audience has to be focussed for a
moment on a certain player. There is no need for him to raise
his voice or move to the centre of the stage or do anything
dramatic. A close-up will do it all for him —
will give him, so
to speak, the stage all to himself.
I must say that in recent years I have come to make much
less use of obvious camera devices. I have become more com-
mercially-minded; afraid that anything at all subtle may be
missed. I have learnt from experience how easily small touches
are overlooked.
The other day a journalist came to interview me and we
spoke about film technique. "I always remember," he said,
"a little bit in one of your silent films, The Ring. The young
boxer comes home after winning his fight. He is flushed with
success —wants to celebrate. He pours out champagne all
round. Then he finds that his wife is out, and he knows at

once that she is out with another man. At this moment the
camera cuts to a glass of champagne; you see a fizz of bubbles
rise off it and there it stands untasted, going flat. That one
shot gives you the whole feeling of the scene." Yes, I said,
that sort of imagery may be quite good: I don't despise it and
still use it now and then. But is it always noticed? There was

another bit in The Ring which I believe hardly any one

noticed.
The scene was outside a boxing-booth at a fair, with a
barker talking to the crowd. Inside the booth a professional
Direction 59
is He has always won in the first round.
taking on all-comers.
A man comes running out of the booth and speaks to the
barker: something unexpected has happened. Then a cut
straight to the ringside: you see an old figure 1 being taken
down and replaced by a brand-new figure 2. I meant this
single detail to show that the boxer, now, is up against some-
one he can't put out in the first round. But it went by too
quickly. Perhaps I might have shown the new figure 2 being
—
taken out of a paper wrapping something else was needed
to make the audience see in a moment that the figure for the
second round had never been used before.
The film always has to deal in exaggerations. Its methods
reflect the simple contrasts of black-and-white photography.
One advantage of colour is that it would give you more inter-
mediate shades. I should never want to fill the screen with
colour: it ought to be used economically —to put new words
into the screen's visual language when there's a need for
them. You could start a colour film with a board-room scene:
sombre panelling and furniture, the directors all in dark
clothes and white collars. Then the chairman's wife comes in,
wearing a red hat. She takes the attention of the audience at
once, just because of that one note of colour. Or suppose a
gangster story: the leader of the gang is sitting in a cafe with
a man he suspects. He has told his gunman to watch the table.
"If I order a glass of port, bump him off. If I order green
chartreuse, let him go."
This journalist asked me also about distorted sound —
device I tried in Blackmail when the word "knife" hammers
on the consciousness of the girl at breakfast on the morning
after the murder. Again, I think this kind of effect may be
justified. There have always been occasions when we have
needed to show a phantasmagoria of the mind in terms of
visual imagery. So we may want to show someone's mental
state by letting him listen to some sound — let us say church

bells — and making them clang with distorted insistence in

his head. But on the whole nowadays I try to tell a story in the
simplest possible way, so that I can feel sure it will hold
the attention of any audience and won't puzzle them. I know
there are critics who ask why lately I have made only thrillers.
Am I satisfied, they say, with putting on the screen the equiva-

lent merely of popular novelettes? Part of the answer is that

I am out to get the best stories I can which will suit the film
60 ALFRED HITCHCOCK
medium, and I have usually found it necessary to take a
hand in writing them myself. . . .

choose crime stories because that is the kind of story I

I

—
can write, or help to write, myself the kind of story I can
turn most easily into a successful film. It is the same with
Charles Bennett, who has so often worked with me; he is
essentially a writer of melodrama. I am ready to use other
stories, but I can't find writers who will give them to me in a
suitable form. . . .

To-day you can put over scenes that would have been
ruled out a few years ago. Particularly towards comedy,
nowadays, there is a different attitude. You can get comedy
out of your stars, and you used not to be allowed to do any-
thing which might knock the glamour off them.
In 1926 I made a film called Downhill, from a play by Ivor
Novello, who acted in the film himself, with Ian Hunter and
Isabel Jeans. There was a sequence showing a quarrel between
Hunter and Novello. It started as an ordinary fight; then they
began throwing things at one another. They tried to pick up
heavy pedestals to throw and the pedestals bowled them over.
In other words I made it comic. I even put Hunter into a
morning coat and striped trousers because I felt that a man
never looks so ridiculous as when he is well dressed and fight-
ing. This whole scene was cut out; they said I was guying
Ivor Novello. It was ten years before its time.
I say ten years, because you may remember that in 1936
M.G.M. showed a comedy called Libelled Lady.
is a There
fishing sequence in it: William Powell stumbles about in the
river, falls flat and gets soaked and catches a big fish by acci-
dent. Here you have a star, not a slapstick comedian, made
to do something pretty near slapstick. In The Thirty-nine
Steps, too, a little earlier, I was allowed to drag Madeleine
Carroll over the moors handcuffed to the hero; I made her get
wet and untidy and look ridiculous for the purpose of the
story. I couldn't have done that ten years ago.
I foresee the decline of the individual comedian. Of course,

there may always be specially gifted comedians who will have

films written round them, but I think public taste is turning
to like comedy and drama more mixed up; and this is another
move away from the conventions of the stage. In a play your
divisions are much more rigid; you have a scene then cur- —
tain, and after an interval another scene starts. In a film you
Direction 61

keep your whole action flowing; you can have comedy and
drama running together and weave them in and out. Audi-
ences are much readier now than they used to be for sudden
changes of mood; and this means more freedom for a director.
The art of directing for the commercial market is to know
just how far you can go. In many ways I am freer now to do
what I want to do than I was a few years ago. I hope in time
—
to have more freedom still if audiences will give it to me.
 ALEXANDER KNOX

Acting and Behaving

I believe that as the industry matures the contribution of the

actor will become more important."

This prediction by Alexander Knox has come true, in part,

largely for irrelevant reasons. The change toward so-called
independent production in Hollywood has often placed top
box-office stars in control of new production companies, and
this dominant financial position has enabled them to rewrite
scripts as well as decide whether or not to perform.
Knox is best known, perhaps, for his portrayal of Woodrow
Wilson in 1944. Here, he is concerned to persuade us that the
actor is often the key element in film drama: "A film, like a
novel or a play, shows character in action. Anything that gets
in the way of the action of that character is dramatically
bad. . . . Too often, in film making, trickiness is used not as
a help to the actor but as a substitute for acting." He specifi-
cally objects to some symbolic photography in the Hitchcock
film Spellbound.
While not discounting altogether the kind of performance
in many popular films which he calls "behaving," Knox feels
that the actor of depth and versatility can not only accom-
plish roles that are "far away" from his own personality (to
use an Actors Studio phrase) but can contribute imagination
and nobility to drama on the screen.

In this paper 1 I propose to discuss actors, and to discuss them

as if they had a contribution to make to the joy of living and
to society. On the stage and on the screen there are two

Alexander Knox, "Acting and Behaving," Hollywood Quar-

*
terly, Vol. I, No. 3, Spring 1946. Pp. 260, 262-263, 263-269.
1
A paper from the program of the Motion Picture Panel of the
Conference on American-Russian Cultural Exchange, at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles, December 8, 1945.

62
Acting and Behaving 63
—
kinds of actors actors who behave and actors who act. I
hope to convince you that there is a difference between acting
and behaving on the screen, and that acting is richer than
behaving.
I start off under a certain difficulty: I am an actor myself;

and the most powerful critic in the country, Mr. George Jean
Nathan, has admitted that no one can have respect for a man
who always has to go to his work up an alley. It is of stage
actors, whom he respects, that he makes this unkind comment,
and he declares that a screen performance bears the same rela-
tion to a stage performance that a hiccup bears to Camille's
tuberculosis. If I make any attempt to answer back, Nathan
asserts with finality: "Coquelin is the only actor who ever
lived who proved that hehad a critical mind in the appraisal
of acting." However, the published words of Minnie Maddern
Fiske and William Gillette, and some of the comments of
George Arliss, Ellen Terry, and others, seem to me to indicate
that Nathan's statement is a trifle sweeping, so I will not allow
it to scare me into silence. . . .

Behaving is a form of acting which is much admired in

Hollywood and elsewhere, mainly on the grounds that it holds
the mirror up to nature. It is natural. But two very good
critics have uttered certain warnings about behaving. Every
young and revolutionary group of actors in the history of the
theatre —and I think this applies with equal force in the
shorter history of the movies —
has seemed more natural than
its predecessors. I have no doubt that, as John Mason Brown

says, "Burbage would have thought Betterton too mild, that

Betterton would have missed strength in Garrick, that Garrick
would have been disappointed in Kean, Kean in Irving, Irving
in Gielgud, and Booth in Barrymore."
John Mason Brown's word of warning about "behaving"
begins, "Actors are commonly supposed to be good actors if
they do not seem to be acting at all," and he continues, later,
"To admire their performances as being the kind of art which
conceals art is one thing, and a just cause for admiration. But
to mistake their acting for not being acting, to applaud them
for this very reason, is not only to insult the actors in question
but to commit the final insanity of slovenly thinking. One of
the pleasantest sensations they can afford us is for them to
make us feel, however mildly, that what is done is done with
a reason and by people who know what they are doing, so
64 ALEXANDER KNOX
that no one mistakes the mirror that is held up to nature for
nature herself."
And Mr. Bernard Shaw, another good critic, puts the same
point more concisely. "The one thing not forgivable in an
actor is being the part instead of playing it."
These two strong statements are in direct opposition to a
great deal of Hollywood thinking. The men who made the
statements are neither of them thoughtless men, nor are they
men who enjoy the dreadful scent of old boiled Ham.
Behaving, at its best, is the kind of art which conceals art.
Edward Dmytryk, a brilliant director who has helped a num-
ber of actors to give excellent performances, has complained
bitterly about Hollywood Ham-worship, which he alleges to
be rife, and he says, "If a man hasn't quite perfected the tech-
nique of naturalness, we say he underplays, but when he has
perfected the technique we say he is only playing himself."
To some, it may seem that Mr. Dmytryk is tilting against a
straw man, since the point he makes is fairly well accepted
and a number of actors who have perfected the technique of
naturalness in Hollywood get a great deal of credit.
In fact, behaving, when it is perfectly done, has always
been the most profitable form of acting, and the form which
inspires most confidence. Behaving makes use of intelligent
observation and an alert contemporary mind. Its power is the
power of reality, and without it no mummer has the right to
call himself an actor.
But behaving is capable of abuse. Behaving is a form of
acting which can be used to display the same kind of empty
idealizations that fill some of the popular magazines and pass
for human beings. The result is that a completely unreal crea-
tion, a man who never did exist on land or sea, is made real
by the misuse of an actor's skill. The process is one of selec-
tion. Whatever imaginary type happens to be the wishful
dream of society at the moment is built up of segments
of a human psyche, and all those which would contradict or
make diffuse the single effect of the whole are conveniently
omitted. . . .

any different? What is it? What can it do? Acting

Is acting
seems to me to be behaving plus interpretation. The differ-
ence between acting and behaving is the difference between
Menuhin and the first violin, the difference between Van
Gogh and Sargent, between William Shakespeare and Ben
Acting and Behaving 65
Jonson. The ability to paint photographically is probably a
necessary part of a painter's equipment, but it does not make
a painter. The ability to play every note in perfect pitch,
volume, and tempo is a necessary part of a violinist's equip-
ment, but it does not make a Menuhin. The ability to be just
like the man next door is a necessary part of an actor's equip-
ment, but it does not make a Chaplin.
Now I am going to attempt the impossible. I am going to
try to tell you what I think acting is. I'm going to hang onto
the beard of the prophet Shaw till I find my balance. Shaw is
speaking about Henry Irving, whom he did not like. He says,
"Irving was utterly unlike anyone else: he could give impor-
tance and nobility to any sort of drivel that was put into his
mouth; and it was this nobility, bound up with an impish
humour, which forced the spectator to single him out as a
leading figure with an inevitability that I never saw again in
any actor until it rose from Irving's grave in the person of a
nameless cinema actor who afterwards became famous as
Charlie Chaplin. Here, I felt, is something that leaves the old
stage and its superstitions and staleness completely behind,
and inaugurates a new epoch."
This is a comment by Shaw on Duse. He is explaining to
Ellen Terry how to become an actress — an occupation most
men would have thought rather impertinent, but Shaw didn't
mind, and neither did Miss Terry. "At first you try to make
a few points and don't know how to make them. Then you
do know how to make them, and you think of a few more.
Finally the points all integrate into one continuous point,
which is the whole part in itself. I have sat watching Duse
in Camille, analyzing all her play into the million or so of
points of which it originally consisted, and admiring beyond
expression the prodigious power of work that built it all up.
Now the actress seems to make no points at all. This rare
consummation Duse has reached."
Here is the poet W. B. Yeats speaking of a performance
of Bjornson's Beyond Human Power by Mrs. Patrick Camp-
bell: "Your acting had the precision and delicacy and sim-
plicity of every art at its best. It made me feel the unity of the
arts ina new way."
Charles Lamb wrote of Bensley, "He seized the moment of
passion with the greatest truth, he seemed to come upon the
stage to do the poet's message simply —
he threw over the part
66 ALEXANDER KNOX
an air of loftiness which one catches only a few times in a
lifetime."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Kean, "To see Kean act
is reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
like
And Hazlitt, one of the most objective and astute of critics,
who held that Shakespeare needed no actors, that his own
imagination was sufficient, when he had seen Mrs. Siddons
and Kean at different times, admitted that each of them had
"raised our imagination of the parts they acted." And some
time later, when Kean played Hamlet, he declared that cer-
tain scenes in the production were "the finest commentary
that was ever made on Shakespeare."
I have chosen these quotations because they understate the
case. There are many more fulsome comments on actors of
the past and present, many comments which are foolish in
their abandonment to a momentary enthusiasm. The com-
ments I have quoted were made by men of taste, each superb
in his own profession, each critical, and each well provided
with standards of comparison, and I suggest that these com-
ments were made on an art which is more than behaving an —
art which has the power to shock and to excite, an art which
has a function and a life and a purpose of its own, an art
which is difficult to understand and even to detect because of
its evanescent nature, an art which is a deep intellectual and

emotional experience, and which leaves the psyche of the

person who has been in contact with it subtly changed.
And if this seems to be a spasm of mystical nonsense, I
would suggest that whoever feels that way about it should
suspend judgment until he has tried to define for himself the
higher reaches of some other art as well. It is not easy.
The inevitable comment will now be made: "These actors
were stage actors. Even supposing there is a certain amount
of validity in your mystical nonsense, how does that apply to
the screen?"
And I have to confess that, with the exception of Chaplin,
I have not seen a sustained performance on the screen to
which I would be inclined to apply similar words. But al-
though sustained performances on this level may not exist
on the screen, we have all seen short bits of film in which
"acting" in this high sense has been caught and held. And
when we think of acting in this way, it is well to remember
that at best it is an interpretative art, and is dead the year
Acting and Behaving 67
after next; it is dead because the manners of the people have
changed. It is dead, but that does not mean it has never been
alive.
I can, from my own memory of films, list a number in

which there were passages of great beauty created solely by

the actor. There is not time to go into these in detail. Many
of you will remember them also. There were superb moments
of performance in Cagney's Yankee Doodle, and in an inferior
film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy had moments
of peculiar effectiveness. Greta Garbo in Camille, Rosalind
Russell in Craig's Wife, Laurence Olivier in Wuthering
Heights, a scene of curious terror in Alice Adams, where
Miss Katharine Hepburn was trying to entertain you at dinner
as well as the boy in the film. Several sustained passages
in Paul Muni's two fine performances, Zola and Pasteur.
Barrymore's Bill of Divorcement, Raimu in La Femme du
boulanger, Nikolai Cherkasov-Sergeyev in General Suvarov,
and a scene in the same film where an actor whose name I do
— —
not know he plays an old soldier by telling a lying story
of his old campaigns creates the kind of excitement that acting
alone can give.
Miss Patricia Collinge played in The Little Foxes in New
York, and she played the same part in the film version with
Miss Bette Davis. Miss Davis' performance was excellent, but
the fact that interested me concerns the scene, almost a mono-
logue, where Birdie (Miss Collinge) lets her niece know that
she has been a secret drinker for some years. It is a ticklish
scene, sometimes on the verge of laughter. I saw the film three
times, at long intervals, and each time there was a curious
attempt at scattered applause at the end of that scene. The
performance was exquisitely skillful, and in a strange way the
film suddenly spoke with unusual eloquence and I felt that
I was watching and listening to something very close to a
"great moment."
The last of these recollections of mine is more recent, and
you will probably all recall it. This performance, which, in
my opinion, more nearly touched the quality of the Keans and
the Duses than most, was given by Barry Fitzgerald in Going
My Way. I saw Mr. Fitzgerald give this performance, in its
beginnings, about fifteen years ago, and it was a great per-
formance then. I am told that Mr. McCarey, whose skill is
unrivaled, told Mr. Fitzgerald on many occasions that the
68 ALEXANDER KNOX
camera would keep on turning until he finished acting, that
he was to do what he felt like, and that he was not to worry
about wasting film. I imagine there are few people who saw
the film who will not carry with them for the rest of their
lives some vivid recollection of Mr. Fitzgerald.
The point about this long recital of memorable bits is an
answer to the widely held belief that acting may be valuable
on the legitimate stage, but only behaving is useful in movies.
Is acting of any use to the screen?
It seems obvious to me that the high qualities of
fine actors
of the past are not confined to the past; equally obvious
it is

that the essential quality that is acting has too seldom been
caught in any sustained way on film. But it has been caught.
If it can be caught in bits, there seems to me no good reason
why it should not be caught more often as a sustained per-

formance.
If it is to be caught, it will have to be caught as acting, not
as behaving. I believe that a thorough study of the customs
and techniques of the sound stage might indicate the reasons
for the somewhat disproportionate preponderance of behav-
ing. To refer again to John Mason Brown's warning against
slovenly thinking, one form of slovenly thinking, which is par-
ticularly difficult to combat, I have noticed more frequently
in some of the younger writers and directors who are vastly
impressed with the power of their medium but whose occa-
sional comments indicate that they literally don't know how
an actor works. The present custom of preventing writers from
working on the set and from meeting actors has something to
do with this, but it is not the whole reason. Pride in the power
of the medium persuades many people to think that the con-
tribution of an actor is very slight,and anyone who knows
the history of the movies at all can point to certain fine films
in which the contribution of an actor was almost nonexistent.
But the fact that such films have been made does not suggest
that no other kind of film can be made, and I believe that as
the industry matures the contribution of the actor will become
more important.
Great plays provide great parts, great parts discover great
actors.There are no great parts without passion, and there is I

no passion without belief. Passion is the emotional expression i

of a deep conviction. Without conviction, which is partly in-

Acting and Behaving 69
tellectual, passion becomes hysteria. Hysteria and the absence
of emotion cannot substitute for passion and restraint.
In the complicated mechanism of a film studio, in the tre-
mendous costs of production, it is at present impossible to
give the necessary time to acting. Behaving, when an actor
has practiced it for years, becomes a finished product, a per-

formance that can be turned on and off with less nervous

strain than acting, which must always give what William
Gillette called "the impression of the first time." But if the
distinction between acting and behaving is understood, I be-
lieve it is possible that improved techniques of the camera may
make acting a steadily more valuable component of films.
Mr. Edward Dmytryk, whom I quoted before, said he had
never seen anyone succeed in changing himself into a different
individual on the screen. "The insecurity of the actor," he
continues, "trying to portray an individual who springs from
a completely unfamiliar environment, is sure to be picked up
by the searching eye of the camera. Result, a self-conscious
performance."
If this is true, it may be due to a number of causes. Mr.
Charles Laughton played Captain Bligh one year and Ruggles
of Red Gap another. I did not find the performances self-
conscious. I thought each fitted its frame about as perfectly
as anyone has a right to ask. Nikolai Cherkasov played Gorki
in Lenin and Alexander Nevsky in the film of that name.
Gorki seemed to me a beautifully simple and subtle perform-
ance, with a curious and telling awkwardness of movement
which helped to make me believe that the actor was the man.
M. Cherkasov played Nevsky in a wide, heroic manner,
impossible for an untrained actor, as if he were a Russian
Galahad. The effect was not one of either insecurity or self-
consciousness.
I have met Mr. Charles Chaplin, Mr. Barry Fitzgerald, and
M. Raimu, and I have not found them "just like" any of the
parts I have seen them play in films. Many of the parts I have
seen them play were characters which sprang from a com-
pletely unfamiliar environment; but the camera did not record
any insecurity, it recorded fragments of what to me was a fine
and sensitive work of imaginative creation. Some of these
"characterizations" take years to perfect; some take minutes,
just as Van Gogh spent a month on one of his self-portraits
70 ALEXANDER KNOX
and a day on one of the canvases of "A Garden at Aries"; but
the time required to do the work has little to do with its
quality. The fact is, the "searching eye of the camera" picks up
what is there, and if a self-conscious performance takes place
in front of it, that's what it records. It is the job of the writer
and the director and the actor to see that the performance is
not insecure or self-conscious. It is a special ability of the

actor, he has suitable material, to provide, first, "the illusion

if

of the first time," and second, a sense of physical, intellectual,

and emotional life which is more vivid than life itself.
One could cite examples of acting for hours, but I am
reasonably cer' vin that the trouble is not with the ability of
the actor, but with the mechanism of the studio.
The most powerful barrier against acting on the screen rises
from the fact that film is only about forty years old, and the
happy writers, cameramen, and directors are still discovering
new things about it. This will be, in the long run, all to the
good, but just at present it makes it awkward for the actor.
Tricky cinematography, from writers, cameramen, and direc-
tors, can destroy illusion faster than anything else I know.
A film, like a novel or a play, shows character in action.
Anything that gets in the way of the action of that character
isdramatically bad, but the boys who are expert at cinema-
tography delight in yanking the audience off to contemplate
a mountain or a goat, the immediate symbolic meaning of
which is clear to everyone, but the dramatic value of which
is not clear to anyone. These tricks are evidences of growing
pains, but they are definitely pains nonetheless.
Actors are frequently asked questions such as, "Don't you
find tricks of direction, photography, writing, and cutting
helpful to the character you are playing?" And the answer
must be a strong affirmative. But there is a great difference
between clarifying a "character" and helping the actor. The
invention of the tractor was a great help to the plowhorse it —
put him out of work. Too often, in film making, trickiness is
used not as a help to the actor but as a substitute for acting,
and the man who knows his craft is therefore deprived of
the advantages which he has a right to assume that knowledge
of his craft will give him.
Actually, most of the tricks of the kind I mean are well
conceived and add tremendously to the effectiveness of film,
but there are some which are not well conceived, and add
Acting and Behaving 71

only to confusion. The difficulty is traceable, as are most diffi-

culties, to the economic necessities of the industry and the
present stage of mechanical development. Film will always be
predominantly an intellectual medium. It consists in the fitting
together of various pieces, one by one. This is done by means
of the intellect, but it should be constantly subject to emo-
tional suggestion. Unless the writer and the director treat film
first emotionally, and then proceed to rationalize, we shall

always see scenes such as the one in which Lenin, admirably

played by Boris Shchukin, finishes ordering the execution of
a batch of bread-hoarders and proving to Gorki that his
harshness was warranted, and then meets a lost child in the
corridor and proceeds to teach her to draw. The object of
this scene was to show that Lenin was kind to children, but
it succeeded in convincing me that the writer was writing his

film from his mind and not his heart. If the two scenes had
followed each other in a play, the first rehearsal would have
convinced the author that the juxtaposition was too sudden,
that a short transition was required. Lenin would not have
been required awkwardly to truncate his emotions about
bread-hoarders and be kind to the child. Or, if he were, he
would have been aware of the awkwardness. The sequence,
as it was cut together, prompted people to groan "propa-
ganda" when, if the emotions of a man in that situation had
been more thoroughly explored by the emotions of the writer
and not by his mind, the very abruptness of the juxtaposition
could have been made effective.
Another bitof trickiness which irritated me and many
others recently came in the very successful picture Spell-
bound. Miss Bergrnan kissed the doctor, and shortly afterward
a series of three doors opened, apparently without help from
human hands. This, my reason told me, symbolized the dawn
of love in Miss Bergman, the beginning of brighter things
the opening of doors —
a literal translation of a literary cliche
to the screen. Personally, I have complete faith in Miss Berg-
man's ability to convince me that doors are opening in her
soul, if she is given adequate material to do it with, and,
frankly, I'd rather look at her opening the doors than see Mr.
—
Hitchcock do it or see them open by themselves.
These are just a few of the things that make acting difficult
on the screen, and, correspondingly, make behaving easy.
Actors, as George Jean Nathan says, are popinjays, but they
72 ALEXANDER KNOX
have something to contribute. Does anyone want that con-
tribution? If the films can use it, I have no doubt they will,
but it will need quite a bit of careful study. Acting will never
bring in the money that behaving will bring in, and acting
is many times more expensive to buy.
 DUDLEY NICHOLS

The Writer and the Film*

"If the ultimate film is have any significant content, throw-

to
ing some new glint of lighton life, it is the writer who will
have to create it."

Dudley Nichols was perhaps the best known of all Holly-

wood screen writers, largely because of his work with the
American director, John Ford. He wrote, among others, The
Informer (1935), Stagecoach (1939), The Long Voyage Home
(1940). He makes clear in this article the importance of the
screen writer. But he lays even greater stress on the inherent
collaborative nature of film-making, and as part of this argu-
ment he gives us a revealing description of the many technical
stages a film goes through. He seems to be saying that the
writer may be primary but the director must be dominant. He
doesn't even mention the role of the producer: this is proba-
bly a carefully calculated oversight.
During the course of his advice for screenwriters, Nichols
memorable phrases about the nature of the
strikes off several
film. He much a vehicle for action
defines the screen as not so
as "the mediumof reaction." He says "it is not so much the
actors on the screen who are in motion as the viewer, com-
fortably seated and quite unaware of riding this witch's
broom, which darts him in at one instant to peer into an
actor's face or at some person or object at which the actor
looks, the next instant jerking him far back to look at the
ensemble, or racing him along in airplane, train, or car."

Ours is the age of the specialist. In older times, before the

Machine, men did specialize of course in the various arts and
* Dudley Nichols, "The Writer and the Film," from John
Gassner and Dudley Nichols (eds.), Great Film Plays. New York,
Crown, 1959. Pp. ix-xiv, xiv, xv-xvii.

73
74 DUDLEY NICHOLS
crafts —
but those arts and crafts were not themselves sub-
divided into specialized functions. The man who painted did
the whole job himself: he was a painter. So with the silver-
smith and the shoemaker and the sculptor. But the Machine
changed all that. The painter today has his materials prepared
by other people, by specialized craftsmen or tradesmen, and
only wields those materials in the final function of creating
pictures. The etcher buys his copper plates already prepared
and seldom pulls his own prints. The sculptor models in clay
and leaves to others the pouring of the mold or the work of
the pointing machine. The writer no longer turns out beautiful
manuscripts that may be passed from hand to hand: he
pounds out a script on the typing machine and passes it on
to his publisher's printing factories. In science and art we
have become specialized, narrowing our fields of study and
work because those fields have grown too enormous for the
single mind to embrace. We
are all specialized, for better or
worse, and it is only natural that the one new art form which
the Machine has produced should be the most highly special-
ized of all. For the motion picture is an art form, whether it

be so regarded or not.
By new art form should be controlled by indi-
rights this
viduals who
include all functions in themselves. They should
be film-makers. But the functions are too diversified and com-
plex to be handled by the creative energy of one individual. So
we break them down into separate crafts — writing, directing,
photography, scenic designing, optical printing and camera
effects, cutting and assembly of film, composing music, re-
cording, mixing and re-recording, the making of dissolves and
—
fades and other transitions into an immense field of works
which require the closest and most harmonious collaboration
to produce excellent results.
This in effect is a detriment to film as an art form and an
obstacle to the development of artists who wish to work in
film. It is too much the modern factory system each man—
working on a different machine and never in an integrated
creation. It tends to destroy that individuality of style which
is the mark of any superior work of art. Individual feeling

gets lost in the complicated process, and standardized products

come off the assembly line. I make these remarks by way of
preface to point out that there is only one way to overcome
The Writer and the Film 75
the impediments —and that is to learn the whole process, to
be a master craftsman within the factory system; to be, in
short, a film-maker first and a writer or director or whatever-
you-will afterwards.
Of course, this poses a dilemma: one cannot under our
present system make films without first learning to make films:
and the only way to learn film-making is by making films.
Hence by subterfuge of one sort or another one must enter
the field as a specialized apprentice and try to learn all the
other specialized functions, so that the individual may return
to his specialty with the full equipment of an artist. A screen-
writer should have knowledge of direction, of cutting, of all
the separate functions, before his imagination and talent can
be geared effectively and skillfully to his chosen line of work.
Unfortunately we are none of us so competent as we might
be, if for no other reason than that Hollywood is too bent on
turning out films to take the time to train its artisans to the
top of their bent. As a result, there is always room for the
interested new worker. A writer can find a place, even with-
out knowing much about film-making, and if he has a secret
star he may glitter into sudden prominence even without
knowing the slightest thing about film-making.
Hollywood is used to taking works of fiction in other forms
and translating them into film; and for this and other reasons
the talented writer does not feel encouraged to write directly
for the screen. This is to be regretted because the screenplay

might easily become a fascinating new form of literature, pro-

vided the studio heads acquired sufficient taste to recognize
and desire literary quality. Yet there have been, there are, and
there will continue to be written, screenplays of quality and
—
sincerity if only because of the dogged efforts of writers

and directors who set themselves high goals and persist fre-
quently against their own material interests.
There is one other circumstance which makes it difficult for
the screenplay to be enjoyed as a literary form in itself: It is
not and never can be a finished product. It is a step, the first
and most important step, in the process of making a film. One
might also say that a play is not a finished product for the
theatre; yet a play relies entirely on the word; idea, character,
and action are projected by means of the word; and a skillful
playreader can enjoy wonderful performances within the
76 DUDLEY NICHOLS
theatre of his own imagination. The screenplay is far less a
completed thing than the play, for the skilled screenwriter
is thinking continuously in terms of film as well as the word.

The filmwriter must be a film-maker at heart, and a film-

maker thinks and lives and works in film. That is the goal, the
—
end result eight or ten thousand feet of negative patched
together to reproduce, upon its unreeling, an illusion of a par-
ticular kind and quality. It is that illusion which the film-
— —
maker and in this instance the filmwriter is pursuing when
he begins to gather together his first nebulous conception.
The truth is that a motion picture undergoes a series of
creations. First it is a novel, a short story, or a conception in
the mind of the screenwriter. That is the point of departure.
Next the filmwriter takes the first plunge toward the finished
negative by building the story in screenplay form. This rough
draft, at least in the case of the present writer, will undergo
two or three revisions, each nearer to the peculiar demands
of cinema. With luck. the director, who must have an equal
sympathy for the drama to be unfolded, will be near at hand
during the groundwork, contributing cinematic ideas here and
there, many of which will not appear in the script but will be
remembered or recorded in other notes to be used when the
time comes.
Ordinarily, when all ideas of cinematic treatment have been
unearthed and the final draft completed, the writer's work is
ended and the creation of the projected film moves on into
the hands of the director and other specialists; this is most
unfortunate for the writer, for his education ceases in the
middle of an uncompleted process. Let us, however, follow
along with the writer who is able to follow the progress to-
ward film. The second creation of the film is in its casting,
which can help or hinder the designed illusion. The novelist
is a fortunate artist who creates his characters out of the flesh

and spirit of his own imagination; they need never be dis-

torted by being embodied by living beings who necessarily
have other traits and characteristics. But the playwright and
the filmwriter must have real people to present their char-
acters— and identity is not to be found. There have been ideal
casts, but even the most perfect will alter indefinably the
shape and mood and meaning of an imagined drama. Now
each of the actors chosen must create his part of the film; and
The Writer and the Film 77
the sum of their parts create another phase of the film. Impli-
cated in this is the personality of the director, who creates the
film by combining (in his own
which may not be the
style,
style of the writer) the contributions of the writer and actors.
It is at this point that a peculiar thing occurs, which must

be understood to discriminate between the stage and screen. I

have never seen this pointed out before, even by film-workers,
and it needs to be set down: Stage and screen are entirely
different media because the audience participates in quite op-
posite ways. The theatre —
and I use the term to embrace both
stage and screen —
demands an audience. It is not complete
without its audience and even derives much of its power from
its audience. Every stage actor knows this and has experi-

enced it. The audience identifies itself with the actor, its col-
lective emotions rush out in sympathy or buffet against him
with antipathy like an unseen electric discharge which in- —
him to
creases the actor's potential, so to speak, permitting
give back his feelings with increased power, which again re-
turns to him, like the oscillating discharge of an electric ma-
chine. It is these heightened moments that create unforgettable
experiences in the theatre when the drama is great both in
itsliterary power and in its acting. Here the relationship be-
tween the actor and the audience is direct and the intelligent
actor can grow by what he experiences, just as the audience
does.
Now, curiously, this phenomenon does
not exist at all in
the cinema; but it does exist at the stage of cinema-making
we are discussing. On the stage of a film studio the actor still
has an audience, though a small one: the half-hundred people
who comprise "the crew" — grips, juicers,
the familiar others. But
cameramen,
he acts in such a
script
girl, and all if style
as to affect this audience solely he is lost, for his actual audi-
ence is miles away and they will see him only through the
uncaring single eye of the camera that looks on like a tripod
man from Mars. The significant thing is that at this point
there is an invisible transition taking place that will break all
the rules of the stage and impose new ones of the screen.
The actors are creating a film, not a stageplay, even though
it appears they are making a stageplay. We are not cameras,

we are living beings, and we cannot see things with the de-
tachment of a lens. In the early days of sound-film I observed
78 DUDLEY NICHOLS
many failures because this was not understood. The action
seemed good on the sound-stage, but it did not come off on
the screen.
The reason is that the audience, the film-theatre audience,
participates in an entirely different way with the projected
images of a film. This is not so strange if we remember that
a motion-picture film will give just as good a performance in
an empty theatre as in a full one. It will not, of course, be so
moving or so amusing to a single spectator as it will to that
same spectator in a crowded theatre: Members of an audience
need each other to build up laughter, sorrow, and joy. But the
film is unaffected; it does not in itself participate as do the
actors on a stage. It is a complete illusion, as in a dream, and
the power of identification (which you must have in any form
of theatre) must be between audience and the visually pro-
jected re-actor.
Unthinking people speak of the motion picture as the me-
dium of "action"; the truth is that the stage is the medium
of action while the screen is the medium of reaction. It is
through identification with the person acted upon on the
screen, and not with the person acting, that the film builds
up its oscillating power with an audience. This is understood
instinctively by the expert film-makers, but to my knowledge
it has never been formulated. At any emotional crisis in a

film, when a character is saying something which profoundly

affects another, it is to this second character that the camera
instinctively roves, perhaps in close-up; and it is then that the
hearts of the audience quiver and open in release, or rock
with laughter or shrink with pain, leap to the screen and back
again in swift-growing vibrations. The great actors of the
stage are actors; of the screen, re-actors.
anyone doubts this, let him study his own emotions when
If
viewing a good film; an experienced film-maker can do this
automatically at the first showing of a film, but very likely
others will have to go a second time, or check it over in
mental review. I once did this with some lay friends after a
showing of Noel Coward's In Which We Serve, and it was
illuminating to find out that they had been most deeply moved
by reactions, almost never by actions: the figure of a woman
when she gets news her husband has been lost at sea, the face
of an officer when told his wife has died. (And how cunningly
Noel Coward had that officer writing a letter to his wife when
The Writer and the Film 79
the radioman entered with the news; the reaction then was
continued to the point where the officer goes on deck and
drops the letter into the sea, a reaction extended into action,
so to speak.) In the same film one of the most affecting scenes
was the final one where the captain bids good-by to the re-
mainder of his crew; and while this appears to be action, the
camera shrewdly presented it as reaction: It is the faces of
the men, as they file past, that we watch, reaction to the
whole experience even in their laconic voices in the weary
figure of the captain.
It is because the film can, at any moment of high emotional
tension, pull an entire audience close to the faces of the
actors, that reaction exerts more powerful effects on the screen
than on the stage. Thus, in the final climax of The Bridge on
the River Kwai (to name a more recent film), we see the
anguished bewilderment of the Colonel, played by Alec Guin-
ness, as he realizes what is actually occurring; and this reaction
goads him to the final enigmatic action which blows up the
bridge. The intention behind this final act remains ambiguous,
but the dramatic moment is the Colonel's realization of his
terrible dilemma, which realization we read in his face. On
the stage, this mental process would have to be projected in
speech. On the screen, where nothing is so eloquent as the
silent image, any utterance would be fatal.
Despite the importance of reaction in cinema, the film is
regarded as a medium of action, or at least of motion, and we
fail to perceive that it is the audience which is in motion. In
the stage-theatre (the so-called legitimate theatre), each mem-
ber of the audience sits in a fixed chair and is free to observe
this character or that, or the ensemble; he is free to make his
own montage or accumulation of impressions; in short, he sees
through his own untrammeled eyes. But in the film-theatre,
though he sits in a seemingly fixed chair, he can see only
through the roving eye of the camera and must continually
shift his position and point of view at the command of the
camera.
Paradoxically, it is not so much the actors on the screen

who are in motion as the viewer, comfortably seated and

quite unaware of riding this witch's broom, which darts him
in at one instant to peer into an actor's face or at some person
or object at which the actor looks, the next instant jerking
him far back to look at the ensemble, or racing him along in
80 DUDLEY NICHOLS
airplane, train, or car to watch the actions and reactions of
actors and share emotions and excitement. The viewer
their
of a film is no longer an autonomous individual as in the
stage-theatre. He can see only what the film-maker commands.
It is this absolute control over the audience which makes the

cinema essentially different from the traditional theatre and

its plays. It is also, triumphantly, the very source of the art
of the film.
This not to say that the two theatre forms, stage and
is

screen, has borrowed many things

are opposed. Stagecraft
(the flashback, for instance) from cinema, just as filmcraft
has borrowed from the stage. And long before film was
dreamed of, the Elizabethan stage, by leaving location and
background to the imagination and continually shifting scenes,
anticipated aspects of the technique of film. In any case, bear-
ing these fundamental principles of film-writing and direction
in mind, we initiate a film, working first with the pen and
next with the camera.
This brings us to the next phase in the making of a film, or
next "creation" if you prefer. I have said that a film ensues
from a series of consecutive creations, which were enumer-
ated from the first stage of concept to the point where the first
recording on film is made. The director, the actors, the art
director, the cameraman, the whole crew in fact, have fol-
lowed after a fashion (but with many inevitable departures
in which the writer, if he is fortunate, has collaborated) the
final draft of the screenplay. Now you have perhaps a hun-
dred thousand feet of film, the negative of which is safely
tucked away in the laboratory while you have for your study
a "work print." Now the film is in the cutting room, in a thou-
sand strips or rolls, some strips perhaps only a few feet long,
some four or five hundred. Every foot-and-a-half is a second
of time in the projection room, and you do not want your
finished film to be one second longer than is determined by
dramatic necessity. Every good artist, every good workman,
has a passion for economy; if you can do a thing in one
stroke, don't use two; if a certain mood or atmosphere is
essential to the illusion you are after and it requires a hundred
strokes, use them. By elimination and rough assembly the
cutter patches together a work print, say, fourteen thousand
feet long: two or three miles of strips of film, assembled con-
The Writer and the Film 81

secutively on seventeen or eighteen reels. That is the first

creation of the cutter.
Now another job begins, one of the most delicate and sensi-
tive jobs of all.Rough cutting was determined by the screen-
writer, but this did not and could not include the interior
cutting of the director and cameraman. Since terminology is
not yet standardized in film-making, I designate the cutting
of the director on the set the "montage," using a word which
the Russians apply for all cutting or editing. It is determined
by the style of the director, his feeling for photographed
images, the way he rests the eye of the audience or gives it
sudden pleasures, moving in at different angles on his scenes
and characters. Had the writer attempted to anticipate the
director and set down all this montage on paper, his script
would have become a useless mess, for this interior cutting
cannot be determined precisely (though many attempt to do
so) before arriving on the set. The manner of shooting and
handling the camera must be guided by spontaneous feeling
and by discoveries made on the set. I for one have no patience
with the growing method of having every camera shot
sketched beforehand so that director, cameraman, and actors
can work by rote. It destroys that spontaneity of feeling which
is the essence of film art; though of course many films are so

unimportant that it does not matter how they are shot: they
never were alive at any moment.
To continue following our film through to its finish, you
now have a rough assembly which is far overlength, the cut-
ting of which was largely determined by the script and direc-
tion. But this is only a provisional arrangement. Everything
depends on the final cutting, elimination, and rearrangement.
And the only compass to guide you in this final orchestration
of images is your own feeling. The final test is to project the
film on the screen and see how the arrangement you have
made affects you. By this time you have grown weary of every
foot of the film but you doggedly keep your feeling fresh as
the only touchstone, until you have wearily said, "That's the
best we can make of it." And I promise you disappointment
in every film, for it is far removed from the perfection of
imagination, as is everything that is realized.
Yet you have not finished with this scratched and tattered
work print, which now looks as tired as yourself. There are
 —

82 DUDLEY NICHOLS
two final stages, sound and music recording, and finally the
re-recording of the whole thing. Sound is a magic element,
and part of your design as a screenwriter or director has been
the effect of sound. In the case of This Land Is Mine, which
was directed by a great film-maker, Jean Renoir, one of the
focal points of the drama was a railroad yard, and as we
could not shoot the action in an actual railroad yard we deter-
mined to create it largely by sound. We spent endless days
gathering sound tracks and trying to orchestrate our sounds
as carefully as if they were music. And finally came the scor-
ing of the music itself, not a great deal of it but every bar
important: choosing Mendelssohn here, Mehul there, original
composition for the rest, and getting it re-recorded in a har-
monious whole.
At last you have, say, nine or ten thousand feet of image
film and a second sound film of the same length synchronized
to the split second. Every frame of both films is numbered,
corresponding with the thousands of feet of negative in the
laboratory. You send your final work prints to the laboratory,
the negative is cut, the sound track printed alongside and —
you receive your first composite print. And, if the composite
print checks, your work is finished and the negative is shipped,
ready for countless prints to be made and released through
the theatres of the world. This is what you set out to make
or rather help to make —
when you began writing your rough
draft of a screenplay. And this is what you had to keep in
mind all the wearisome while.

. .screen plays are

. not complete works in themselves;
. . .

they are blueprints of projected films. Many factors may have

intervened to make the finished films different from the de-
signed illusion, for better or worse.
The most noticeable feature of a skillful screenplay is its
terseness and bareness. This is because the eye is not there,
the eye which fills and enriches. Nor does the screenwriter
waste time with much descriptive matter or detailing of photo-
graphic moods. These have all been discussed at length with
the director, art director, and others. It is the writer's job to
invent a story in terms of cinema or to translate an existing
story into terms of cinema. He creates an approximate con-
The Writer and the Film 83
tinuity of scenes and images, suggesting cinematic touches
where he can. Hewill write "close-up" of a character with-
out setting down the most important thing, which is what that
character is feeling during that close-up, because the text
clearly shows what the character is supposed to be experi-
encing. The director will take care of that. If he is an artist,
the director will submit the actor to that experience while
photographing the close-up, by playing the actual scene out
of range of the camera.
Writing for the screen, if long practiced, also seduces one
to write dialogue in a synoptic fashion, which may show itself
to the eye when printed on a page, but should never reveal
itself to the ear when spoken from the screen. Stage dialogue,
no matter how wonderful in quality, cannot be directly shifted
to the screen; it must be condensed, synopsized. The reason is
obvious: on the stage the actor depends for projection upon
the word; on the screen he relies upon visual projection. And
it is hard to describe visual projection in a screenplay; that

must be left to the director and cast. . . .

. . almost everyone who is seriously interested in the

.

cinema has seen The Informer on the screen, and as the film
projects the screenplay with great fidelity I am prompted by
Mr. Gassner to explain the method by which I translated Mr.
OTlaherty's novel into the language of film. In 1935 this was
in a certain sense an experimental film; some new method had
to be found by which to make the psychological action photo-
graphic. At that time I had not yet clarified and formulated
for myself the principles of screenwriting, and many of my
ideas were arrived at instinctively. I had an able mentor as
well as collaborator in the person of John Ford and I had
begun to catch his instinctive feeling about film. I can see now
that I sought and found a series of symbols to make visual the
tragic psychology of the informer, in this case a primitive man
of powerful hungers. The whole action was to be played out
in one foggy night, for the fog was symbolic of the groping
primitive mind; it is really a mental fog in which he moves
and dies. Aposter offering a reward for information con-
cerning Gypo's friend became the symbol of the evil idea of
betrayal, and it blows along the street, following Gypo; it will
not leave him alone. It catches on his leg and he kicks it off.
But still it follows him, and he sees it like a phantom in the
air when he unexpectedly comes upon his fugitive friend.
84 DUDLEY NICHOLS
So it goes all through the script; some of the symbolism
is obvious, much of it concealed except from the close ob-
server. The uses a stick when he pushes the blood
officer
money to Gypo
headquarters, symbolic of contempt. The
at
informer encounters a blind man in the dark fog outside and
The blind man is a symbol of
grips his throat in sudden guilt.
the brute conscience, and Gypo releases him when he dis-
covers the man cannot see. But as Gypo goes on to drown his
conscience in drink, the tapping of the blind man's stick fol-
lows him; we hear it without seeing the blind man as Gypo
hears his guilt pursuing him in his own soul. Later, when he
comes face to face with his conscience for a terrifying mo-
—
ment, he tries to buy it off by giving the blind man a couple
of pounds, a lordly sum. But I shall not continue this
. . .

account of a screenplay that cannot be presented in this book.

Sufficient to say that the method of adaptation in this instance
was by a cumulative symbolism, to the very last scene where
Gypo addresses the carven Christ, by which the psychology
of a man could be made manifest in photographic terms. In
this case I believe the method was successful. 1 might add that
I drama from its original, rather
transferred the action of the
special setting to a larger and more dramatic conflict which
had national connotations. Whether that was any gain I do
not know. Size of conflict in itself I hold to be unimportant.
It is the size of characters within a conflict and how deeply

they are probed that matters.

So much for an adaptation. For the problems of writing an
original screenplay I can only rely on my personal experi-
ences. It is not easy to trace the origin of a story. It is easier
to say that a work of happens. But that is not exact,
fiction
for a story existence because of some inner neces-
comes into
sity of the individual. Every human being contains creative
energy; he wants to make something. A man may make a
chair, or a pair of shoes, a masterpiece of painting, or a pulp-
magazine story; precisely what he makes is dictated by his
imagination, temperament, experience, and training. But the
act of creation is dictated by desire. I should imagine this
runs through the universe as a law, since it is so with man,
and man is a part of the universe. If the Supreme Will desires
M
to build a Universe, the Universe will "happen. It is all a
matter of the degree of intensity of desire. A storyteller is

passionately interested in human beings and their endless con-

The Writer and the Film 85
with their fates, and he is filled with desire to make some
flicts

arrangement out of the chaos of life, just as the

intelligible
chairmaker desires to make some useful and beautiful arrange-
ment out of wood. Frustrate those creative desires in man,
and his forces will be turned toward destruction; for energy
cannot remain unexpended, it is not static, it must swing one

way or another.
Stories for the purpose of entertainment alone are com-
monplace fiction and can be redeemed only by a dazzling
style, a sheer delight in the materials of storytelling, a touch
of the poet. The cinema is only in its infancy as an art form,
and its usual fate so far has been to be used only for entertain-
ment and making money. Because it is a very costly medium
it will continue to be employed for making money until money

ceases to be the great desire of the people of the world. Most

motion pictures are mere entertainment, and accordingly the
screenwriter can work with only half of himself; his satisfac-
tion must usually be in artistry of manner, skill in the way he
accomplishes his work, without much regard for the content
of the film. For this reason the story of serious intention can
rarely be written within a film studio; and for this reason
serious writers in other fields, novelists and dramatists, have
given great aid to the development of the cinema. For the
powers-that-be will buy the film rights of a serious novel if it
seems to have enough readers, and though the contents of the
novel are sometimes perverted by film censorship or bad taste,
enough remains to make a notable motion picture. But the
screenwriter who desires to make an original story has no
readers, at least not for the projected story. If the story pro-
poses to make a serious statement beyond mere entertaining,
it will seem off the beaten track and the writer will very likely

meet opposition. It is for this reason and this reason alone

that so few stories of any account originate within Hollywood.
In France, before World War II, the film-makers were largely
their own entrepreneurs and for this reason produced many
brilliant original works. They were storytellers functioning
freely in the new medium of film.
Nevertheless the serious film-writer cannot resign himself to
Hollywood's barriers against original work designed for the
screen. The average Hollywood entrepreneur is an intelligent
man, and it is up to writers and directors to prove to him that
films which probe into the chaos of life can be successful.
86 DUDLEY NICHOLS
John Ford made The Informer in spite of studio resistance;
even after its completion it was held to be a failure and a
waste of money by certain entrepreneurs. But the film did go
out and make a profit. There was an audience for the realistic
film. In spite of this and other instances I will say in all
fairness that usually the studio heads have been right and
the film-makers wrong —
because usually the film-makers
have not measured up to their task and their responsi-
bilities when granted freedom. They have not measured up
or they have wanted both money and freedom, which are in-
compatible. It is an axiom that no one will pay you to be a
free artist. You are hired for profit — that is common sense.
Very you must stop working for salary; you must
well, then,
devote yourself to the task in hand as do the novelist and
dramatist, and only be recompensed if the film makes a profit.
Economically I believe the writer and director will fare even
better with this arrangement than under the salary system.
Spiritually they will become whole men and work with in-
tegrity.
have not attempted to explain the secrets of screenwriting
I

—because there are no secrets. There are certain prescribed

forms, but the forms are not final. Others will come along and
do better work as we come to understand more clearly the
peculiar demands of cinema. Meanwhile, those people who
may become interested in screenwriting as a vocation must
study the best examples of screenplays available and then have
a try at it themselves. I do not touch on technical jargon, such
as fade, lap dissolve, dolly, or pan, because they are quite un-
necessary to the craft. And no matter where you write them
into your script, the completed film will make its own de-
mands in the cutting room and very likely change your imag-
ined plan. This terminology can safely be ignored; it is merely
a convenience.
We try to formulate a classical form for the cinema but
there are no final rules. Film continuity can be as broken and
erratic as a dream, if it is a potent dream and by some inner
need requires that sort of continuity. There are really no rules,
in spite of what Hollywood will tell you. A film in its con-
tinuity is a stream of images, and if they combine into an
exciting, intelligible whole you have accomplished your pur-
pose. Most film technique today very imperfect, as we are
is

still groping for the pure form. The cinema is still a giant in
The Writer and the Film 87
chains, and a giant who has not even yet stood up and shaken
his chains. Those chains are censorship, commercialism, mo-
nopoly, specialization — all the faults that are indigenous to
industrial society and not just characteristic of the cinema. If
control of film production should fall into the hands of gov-
ernment, any government, the old chains will be struck off
only to be replaced by heavier ones. And because of the potent
propaganda effect of film, that is a danger. No art, including
the wonderful medium of sound film, can serve one set of
ideas— it must be free or perish.

In conclusion, I hope that in sketching the successive steps

of making a film I have not underrated the importance of the
screenplay. It is, in my opinion, pre-eminent in the field of
film-making. It is the writer who is the dreamer, the imaginer,
the shaper. He works in loneliness with nebulous materials,
with nothing more tangible than paper and a pot of ink; and
his theatre is within his mind. He must generate phantoms out
of himself and live with them until they take on a life of
their own and become, not types, but characters working out
their own destinies. If the ultimate film is to have any signifi-
cant content, throwing some new glint of light on life, it is
the writer who will have to create it. Yet it is the director who
has always dominated the field and will no doubt continue to
dominate it, for various good reasons. It is the director who
must realize the imagined people on film, who must know all
the technological processes, and command the extravagantly
costly tools of film art. Writing costs are negligible by com-
parison. The can afford to bow to the director; and
film-writer
if it be one of the world's few great directors, he can do so

with pride and gratitude. For there are few satisfactions to

match seeing a story you have created, or even re-created in
terms of film, come to a powerful life on the screen a new —
creation with all the writing washed invisibly away.
Film and the Other Arts
 VACHEL LINDSAY

Sculpt ure-in- Mot ion *

I desire in motion pictures, not the stillness, but the majesty

of sculpture."

With the zest of a fan and the skill of a poet, Vachel

Lindsay urges the film maker to notice how much he can
learn from statues. "I do not advocate for the photoplay the
mood of the Venus of Milo," he says; but look rather at
the Victory of Samothrace, and "when you are appraising
a new film, ask yourself: 'Is this motion as rapid, as godlike,
as the sweep of the wings of the Samothracian?' " Why should
we not expect, in time, to find a Michelangelo or a Rodin or
even a Borglum of the films? "Whoever is to photograph
horses, let him study the play of light and color and muscle-
texture" in Gutzon Borglum's Mares of Diomedes.
The troubadour author of The Congo (1914) and The Chi-
nese Nightingale (1917), who toured the South selling draw-
ings and poems for pennies, is not so snobbish as to suppose
that the comparisons go only one way. He clips illustrations
from movie magazines of that early day and alerts us to the
sculptural value of a group awaiting a villain, of "a scene of
storm and stress in an office," in which "the eye travels with-
out weariness, as it should do in sculpture, from the hero to
the furious woman, then to the attorney behind her." In his
book there are comparisons with other arts; Lindsay does not
expect everything filmic to be in high relief. There are times,
however, when sculpture is a valid study: "Even in a simple
chase-picture, the speed must not destroy the chance to enjoy
the modelling"

The George Gray Barnard is responsible for none of

sculptor
the views in this discourse, but he has talked to me at length
about his sense of discovery in watching the most ordinary
* Vachel Lindsay, "Sculpture in Motion," from The Art of the
Moving Picture. New York, Macmillan, 1922. Pp. 84-96.

91
92 VACHEL LINDSAY
motion pictures, and his delight in following them with their
endless combinations of masses and flowing surfaces.
The little far-away people on the old-fashioned speaking
stage do not appeal to the plastic sense in this way. They are,
by comparison, mere bits of pasteboard with sweet voices,
while, on the other hand, the photoplay foreground is full of
dumb giants. The bodies of these giants are in high sculptural
relief. Where the lights are quite glaring and the photography
is bad, many of the figures are as hard in their impact on the

eye as lime-white plaster-casts, no matter what the clothing.

There are several passages of this sort in the otherwise beauti-
ful Enoch Arden, where the shipwrecked sailor is depicted on
his desert island in the glaring sun.
What materials should the photoplay figures suggest? There
are as many possible materials as there are subjects for pic-
tures and tone schemes to be considered. But we will take for
illustration wood, bronze, and marble, since they have been
used in the old sculptural art.
There found in most art shows a type of carved wood
is

gargoyle where the work and the subject are at one, not only
in the color of the wood, but in the way the material masses
itself, in bulk betrays its qualities. We will suppose a moving-

picture humorist who is in the same mood as the carver. He

chooses a story of quaint old ladies, street gamins, and fat
aldermen. Imagine the figures with the same massing and
interplay suddenly invested with life, yet giving to the eye a
pleasure kindred to that which is found in carved wood, and
bringing to the fancy a similar humor.
Or there is a type of Action Story where the mood of the
figures is that of bronze, with the aesthetic resources of that
metal: emphasis on the tendon, ligament, and
its elasticity; its

bone, rather than on the muscle; and an attribute that we will

call the panther-like quality. Hermon A. MacNeil has a
memorable piece of work in the yard of the architect Shaw,
at Lake Forest, Illinois. It is called "The Sun Vow." A little

Indian is shooting toward the sun, while the old warrior,

crouching immediately behind him, follows with his eye the
direction of the arrow. Few pieces of sculpture come readily
to mind that show more happily the qualities of bronze as
distinguished from other materials. To imagine such a group
done in marble, carved wood, or Delia Robbia ware is to
destroy the very image in the fancy.
Sculpture-in-Motion 93
The photoplay of the American Indian should in most in-
stances be planned as bronze in action.The tribes should not
move so rapidly that the panther-like elasticity is lost in the
riding, running, and scalping. On the other hand, the abo-
rigines should be far from the temperateness of marble.
Mr. Edward S. Curtis, the super-photographer, has made
an Ethnological collection of photographs of our American
Indians. This work of a life-time, a supreme art achievement,
shows the native as a figure in bronze. Mr. Curtis' photoplay,
The Land of the Head Hunters (World Film Corporation), a
romance of the Indians of the North-West, abounds in noble
bronzes.
I have gone through my old territories as an art student, in
the Chicago Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum, of
late, in special excursions, looking for sculpture, painting, and
architecture that might be the basis for the photoplays of the
future.
The Bacchante of Frederick MacMonnies is in bronze in

the Metropolitan Museum and in bronze replica in the Boston

Museum of Fine Arts. There is probably no work that more
rejoices the hearts of the young art students in either city.
The youthful creature illustrates a most joyous leap into the
air. She is high on one foot with the other knee lifted. She
holds a bunch of grapes full-arm's length. Her baby, clutched
on the other hand, is reaching up with greedy mouth toward
the fruit. The bacchante body is glistening in the light. This is
joy-in-bronze as the Sun Vow is power-in-bronze. This spe-
cial story could not be told in another medium. I have seen
in Paris a marble copy of this Bacchante. It is as though it
were done in soap. On the other hand, many of the Renais-
sance Italian sculptors have given us children in marble in
low relief, dancing like lilies in the wind. They could not be
put into bronze.
The plot of the Action Photoplay is literally or metaphori-
cally a chase down the road or a hurdle-race. It might be well
to consider how typical figures for such have been put into
carved material. There are two bronze statues that have their
replicas in all museums. They are generally one on either side
of the main hall, towering above the second-story balustrade.
First, the statue of Gattamelata, a Venetian general, by
Donatello. The original is in Padua. Then there is the figure
of Bartolommeo Colleoni. The original is in Venice. It is by
94 VACHEL LINDSAY
Verrocchio and Leopardi. These equestrians radiate authority.
There is more action in them than in any cowboy hordes I
have ever beheld zipping across the screen. Look upon them
and ponder long, prospective author-producer. Even in a
simple chase-picture, the speed must not destroy the chance
to enjoy the modelling. If you would give us mounted legions,
destined to conquer, let any one section of the film, if it is
stopped and studied, be grounded in the same bronze con-
ception. The Assyrian commanders in Griffith's Judith would,
without great embarrassment, stand this test.
But it may not be the pursuit of an enemy we have in
mind. It may be a spring celebration, horsemen in Arcadia,
going to some happy tournament. Where will we find our
precedents for such a cavalcade? Go to any museum. Find the
Parthenon room. High on the wall is the copy of the famous
marble frieze of the young citizens who are in the procession
in praise of Athena. Such a rhythm of bodies and heads and
the feet of proud steeds, and above all the profiles of thor-
oughbred youths, no city has seen since that day. The delicate
composition relations, ever varying, ever refreshing, amid the
seeming sameness of formula of rider behind rider, have been
the delight of art students the world over, and shall so remain.
No serious observer escapes the exhilaration of this company.
Let it be studied by the author-producer though it be but an
idyl in disguise that his scenario calls for: merry young
farmers hurrying to the State Fair parade, boys making all
speed to the political rally.
Buy any three moving-picture magazines you please. Mark
the illustrations that are massive, in high relief, with long lines
in their edges. Cut out and sort some of these. I have done
it on the table where I write. After throwing away all but the

best specimens, I have four different kinds of sculpture. First,

behold the inevitable cowboy. He is on a ramping horse,
filling the entire outlook. The steed rears, while facing us. The
cowboy waves his hat. There is quite such an animal by
Frederick MacMonnies, wrought in bronze, set up on a gate
to a park in Brooklyn. It is not the identical color of the
photoplay animal, but the bronze elasticity is the joy in both.
Here is a scene of a masked monk, carrying off a fainting
girl. The hero intercepts him. The figures of the lady and the
monk are in sufficient sculptural harmony to make a formal
sculptural group for an art exhibition. The picture of the hero,
strong, with well-massed surfaces, is related to both. The fact
Sculpture-in~Motion 95
that he is evening dress does not alter his monumental
in
quality. All three are on a stone balcony that relates itself to
the general largeness of spirit in the group, and the semi-
classic dress of the maiden. No doubt the title is: The Morn-
ing Following the Masquerade Ball. This group could be made
in unglazed clay, in four colors.
Here is an American lieutenant with two ladies. The three
are suddenly alert over the approach of the villain, who is not
yet in the picture. In costume it is an everyday group, but
those three figures are related to one another, and the trees
behind them, in simple sculptural terms. The lieutenant, as is
to be expected, looks forth in fierce readiness. One girl stands
with clasped hands. The other points to the danger. The rela-
tions of these people to one another may seem merely dra-
matic to the superficial observer, but the power of the group
is in the fact that it is monumental. I could imagine it done

in four different kinds of rare tropical wood, carved un-

polished.
Here is a scene of storm and stress in an office where the

hero iscaught with seemingly incriminating papers. The table

is in confusion. The room is filling with people, led by one

accusing woman. Is this also sculpture? Yes. The figures are

in high relief. Even the surfaces of the chairs and the littered
table are massive, and the eye travels without weariness, as it
should do in sculpture, from the hero to the furious woman,
then to the attorney behind her, then to the two other revilers,
then to the crowd in three loose rhythmic ranks. The eye
makes this journey, not from space to space, or fabric to
fabric, but first of all from mass to mass. It is sculpture, but
it is the sort that can be done in no medium but the moving

picture itself, and therefore it is one goal of this argument.

But there are several other goals. One of the sculpturesque
resources of the photoplay is that the human countenance can
be magnified many times, till it fills the entire screen. Some
examples are in rather low relief, portraits approximating
certain painters. But if they are on sculptural terms, and are
studies of the faces of thinking men, let the producer make a
pilgrimage to Washington for his precedent. There, in the
rotunda of the capitol, is the face of Lincoln by Gutzon
Bcrglum. It is one of the eminently successful attempts to
get at the secret of the countenance by enlarging it much, and
concentrating the whole consideration there.
The photoplay producer, seemingly without taking thought,
96 VACHEL LINDSAY
is apt to show a sculptural sense in giving us Newfoundland

fishermen, clad in oilskins. The background may have an un-

conscious Winslow Homer reminiscence. In the foreground
our hardy heroes fill the screen, and dripping with sea-water
become wave-beaten granite, yet living creatures none the less.
Imagine some one chapter from the story of Little EmTy in
David Copperfield, retold in the films. Show us Ham Peggotty
and old Mr. Peggotty colloquy over their nets. There are
in
many powerful bronze groups to be had from these two, on to
the heroic and unselfish death of Ham, rescuing his enemy
in storm and lightning.
have seen one rich picture of alleged cannibal tribes. It
I

was a comedy about a missionary. But the aborigines were

like living ebony and silver. That was long ago. Such things
come too much by accident. The producer is not sufficiently
aware that any artistic element in his list of productions that
is allowed to go wild, that has not had full analysis, reanalysis,

and final conservation, wastes his chance to attain supreme

mastery.
Open yourhistory of sculpture, and dwell upon those illus-
trations which are not the normal, reposeful statues, but the
exceptional, such as have been listed for this chapter. Imagine
that each dancing, galloping, or fighting figure comes down
into the room life-size. Watch it against a dark curtain. Let it

go through a series of gestures in harmony with the spirit of

the original conception, and as rapidly as possible, not to lose
nobility. If you have the necessary elasticity, imagine the
figures wearing the costumes of another period, yet retaining
in their motions the same essential spirit. Combine them in
your mind with one or two kindred figures, enlarged till they
fill the end of the room. You have now created the beginning

of an Action Photoplay in your own fancy.

Do this with each most energetic classic till your imagina-
tion flags. I do not want to be too dogmatic, but it seems to
me this is one way to evolve real Action Plays. It would, per-
haps, be well to substitute this for the usual method of evolv-
ing them from old stage material or newspaper clippings.
There is in the Metropolitan Museum a noble modern
group, the Mares of Diomedes, by the aforementioned Gutzon
Borglum. It is full of material for the meditations of a man
who wants to make a film of a stampede. The idea is that
Hercules, riding his steed bareback, guides it in a circle. He is
Sculpture-tn-Motion 97
fascinating the horses he has been told to capture. They are
held by the mesmerism of the circular path and follow him
round and round they finally fall from exhaustion. Thus
till

the Indians of the West capture wild ponies, and Borglum, a

Far Western man, imputes the method to Hercules. The
bronze group shows a segment of this circle. The whirlwind
is at its height. The mares are wild to taste the flesh of Her-

cules. Who ever is to photograph horses, let him study the

play of light and color and muscle-texture in this bronze.
And let no group of horses ever run faster than these of
Borglum.
An occasional hint of a Michelangelo figure or gesture ap-
pears for a flash in the films. Young artist in the audience,
does it pass you by? Open your history of sculpture again and
look at the usual list of Michelangelo groups. Suppose the
seated majesty of Moses should rise, what would be the quality
of the action? Suppose the sleeping figures of the Medician
tombs should wake, or those famous slaves should break their
bands, or David again hurl the stone. Would not their action
be as heroic as their quietness? Is it not possible to have a
Michelangelo of photoplay sculpture? Should we not look for
him in the fulness of time? His figures might come to us in
the skins of the desert island solitary, or as cave men and
women, or as mermaids and mermen, and yet have a force
and grandeur akin to that of the old Italian.
Rodin's famous group of the citizens of Calais is an exam-
ple of the expression of one particular idea by a special tech-
nical treatment. The producer who tells a kindred story to
that of the siege of Calais, and the final going of these humble
men to their doom, will have a hero-tale indeed. It will be not
only sculpture-in-action, but a great Crowd Picture. It begins
to be seen that the possibilities of monumental achievement
in the films transcend the narrow boundaries of the Action
Photoplay. Why not conceptions as heroic as Rodin's Hand
of God, where the first pair are clasped in the gigantic fingers
of their maker in the clay from which they came?
Finally, I desire in moving pictures, not the stillness, but
the majesty of sculpture. I do not advocate for the photoplay
the mood of the Venus of Milo. But let us turn to that sister
of hers, the great Victory of Samothrace, that spreads her
wings at the head of the steps of the Louvre, and in many an
art gallery beside. When you are appraising a new film, ask
98 VACHEL LINDSAY
yourself: "Is this motion as rapid, as godlike, as the sweep of
the wings of the Samothracian?" Let her be the touchstone
of the Action Drama, for nothing can be more swift than the
winged Gods, nothing can be more powerful than the on-
coming of the immortals.
 PARKER TYLER

Movies and the Human Image

'Human identity in art was given a new meaning through its

additional element: Kinesis."

Parker Tyler, a because he comes

"difficult" writer partly
to film criticism with the equipment and bibliography of a
social criticand an art critic as well, is here concerned with
tracing the attitudes of historic schools of painting toward the
human figure. He proposes that "classical" traditions of art
assumed "the moral preeminence of Man —man
as a theo-
not perfect being." Even
retically or 'rationally / perfectible if
—
some of the most modern schools surrealism, for example —
attacked only the complacency or the sterile aspects of preced-
ing schools, not the basic tenet of concern with humanity.
Abstract painting, on the contrary, he says, was a direct
challenge to the human image, a break in the cultural tradi-
tion. And at this very moment, when the older tradition was
turning into dull academism and "twentieth century painting
was girding itself to make a complete break with representa-
tionalism, the 'representational' movies came into being and
cast their universal public spell." Film is therefore "a positive
antidote to this extreme convention of modern painting" be-
cause it is basically a medium of content, a mirror of the world
of man.

One wonders photography competes with art in the way

if

that— as E. E. Cummings once poignantly noted poetry —

competes with elephants and El Greco. The consciousness
of such a hypothesis may depend on the development of
one's competitive sense. Intellectually, our more or less re-

* Parker Tyler, "Movies and the Human Image," from The

Three Faces of the Film. New York, Thomas Yoseloff, 1960.
Pp. 139-144. Reprinted from Forum magazine, 1958.

99
100 PARKER TYLER
mote ancestors had to deal, when deciding any great moral
issue (including the aesthetic), with fewer factors than we.
A "global" community of nations has meant, whatever the
specific problem, that more factors must be considered, all at
once, on parallel levels. So asking the question "Have the
movies prolonged the life of the classic human image?" I am
aware that one might attack the problem by many routes,
some deceptively simple and yet all really devious. One pre-
sumes that the issue is vital, if not to the movies, at least to
art. Perhaps the movies —
aside from the avant-garde ranks,
—
which are very, very small don't care whether their imagery
has an aesthetic status, so-called, and perhaps abstract artists,
for their part, are by now so convinced of their canon's public
and financial triumph that the notion of the movies' doing
anything in our time to revive the prestige of the classic hu-
—
man image seem frivolous if not downright irrelevant.
Merely to equate the terms in my formulation brings up
startling contradictions within the formulation. First of all:
Is an equivalence between photography and classical art not
far more "statistical" and "documentary" than aesthetic? For
instance, what vital, artistically critical relation has the con-
ventional image of the movies to an antique sculptural frieze
or to Poussin's version of such a frieze? This objecting query
might emanate from the admirers of Poussin as well as from
true film devotees, who would urge that the photographic
image per se is what holds the movies back. Indeed, to con-
sider the atmospheric effects possible to modern photography,
as well as the distortion possible through objective and labora-
tory means, is to conclude that an equation of photography

with "classic" form represents an old-fashioned prejudice for

which commercial filmdom alone is to blame. Through sheer
—
movement with its attendant blur of instantaneous imagery
and the rapidity producing a purely psychic "blur" highly —
expressionistic, no less than surrealistic, effects have been, and
are, obtained by imaginative movie-makers.
Where does this reflection leave the present equation be-
tween photography and classic art? Just about no place in-
evitable. Granting that, with imaginative photography and its
increasing technical resources, a highly realistic, stylized
imagery is obtainable for the film screen, a stubborn element
persists in the aesthetic equation I have proposed: an element
against the grain. Abstract painting of the non-objective kind
Movies and the Human Image 101

seriously differs from all filmic imagery except that which

(sometimes without photography) exactly and exclusively
imitates such painting; that is, non-objective painting disposes
of literal and unmistakable referents to human experience. A
seeming paradox naturally follows: howsoever, this is not to
say that non-objective abstractionism is an art wholly outside
human experience. An important point is to be observed of
extreme abstract painting from Mondrian to Rothko, Rein-
hardt and company: it tends to offer viewers not, precisely
speaking, a picture, but rather a creative decor of the mural
type.
A Mondrian or a late Rothko, purified of figure and pri-
marily "inactive," —
remains pure design though design-
—
atmosphere would be a better term because late Rothkos
look like tranquilly pulsing atmospheres of color. This pure
design is intended as the modulation of a wall, whether pri-
vate ormuseum wall, and is the dernier cri of interior design.
Itspretension to being art, rather than mere decoration, is
based on a quite simple idea: an aesthetic image need not be
a statement concerning something external to itself; it may
any other object does. This theoretical posi-
"state" itself as
tion has animated the practice of pure-abstract art from the
beginning, when Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pevsner, Gabo, Male-
vich and Delaunay talked like philosophers and advocated, in
one respect or another, a new "realism." Non-objective art
("extreme" or "pure" abstraction) is a statement period (.)
Supposedly, it evokes a "mood," a psychic vibration of some
kind. But, thus, it enters life like any other motivation, cause
—
or visual happening as would a meteor from outer space or
a perfect stranger on the doorstep. The said meteor and the
said stranger may affect one's life or not affect it at all. Like
Kilroy, it "was here," and sometimes one remembers it, en-
counters its mark, or prefers to keep it, even falling in love
with it. . . .

Now the only sensible, irreducible and unavoidable thing

to say about this conception of the work of art as a "non-
objective" phenomenon, which is really objective after all, is
that it produces a gaping hole in the tradition of human cul-
ture —which it tries to fill up exactly as though it had made
an actual hole in a wall. In my aforesaid proposition, there-
fore, the issue concerning the photographic in relation to the
classic human image devolves not upon the question of style.
102 PARKER TYLER
or so-called distortion in art, but upon the question of hu-
manity's ability to produce and assess works of art through
conscious means having nothing to do with the necessary
dependence of form upon content; nothing to do with the
classic aesthetic dualism of form united with its content. By its
nature, photography possesses a highly prejudiced standpoint
on this issue. As many have already observed, the aesthetic
character of the movies begins by being so naturalistic, so
"documentary," as a notation of life that, among all the arts,
the movies evoke the most urgent sense of comparison and
contrast with life itself. Film is the art —
and this is a pivotal
definition —where the finished "form" the most easily solu-
is

ble into raw "content" or ingredients of meaning. Both psy-

chologically and technically, the photographic lens is a mirror,
even if a sometimes flattering one. For this reason, the relation
of photography to the classic human image is simple and di-
rect. Classic Western art evolved through the aesthetic desiffe
to come as close to nature (or "content") as possible while in
the same act "idealizing" it: giving it a flattering look (or
"form").
Now, if, in time, the idealism of the ancient Greeks pro-
duced the aesthetic coldness of Neo-CIassicism and its remote-
ness from common experience —
something that was radically
—
challenged by nineteenth-century artists this became true
not because Poussin and David failed to be great painters, but
because what they painted, and to some extent how they
painted it, became irrelevant and objectionable to a vital social
experience composed of various new moral factors: the con-
gruent rise of individualism and the bourgeoisie, the French
Revolution, and so on. Yet soon a reaction set in against the
nineteenth-century "revolution" in painting. When the Impres-
sionists came along, they seemed quite as disinterested in
violent feelings as they were in violent actions. And if the
Post-Impressionists, carrying forward Van Gogh's violence
through the Fauves, returned to activized brushes and acti-
vized feelings, theirs was simply a reaction to a reaction. In
fact, when the twentieth-century began, painting was a more
or less restless heap of "school" reactions, a heap both topped
and toppled, temporally speaking, by the chaotic nihilism of
the Dadaists and Surrealists.
All the same, in artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Jacques
Lipchitz and Marcel Duchamp, this century has produced
Movies and the Human Image 103
heroic figures who have used art — however debonairly as in
the case of the Dada-nurtured Duchamp —
as a highly organ-
ized aesthetic instrument both creating and criticizing human
values. Andre Breton, the best-known theorist of Surrealism,
is notable for his classical poise and his equally classical lit-

erary style. After all, nothing in the tradition of classical

humanism interdicts violent or positive feelings; all artistic
discipline, indeed, requires initiative and decisiveness, which
cannot exist without their own driving power. Chirico's art is
proof-simple that the style-atmosphere of Greek classicism,
the mainstay of the humanist tradition, had a twentieth-
century application: was convertible into a new art idiom;
his art displays the most serious use of the Surrealist postulate
of synthetic vision: the "psychological" as opposed to the
"natural" landscape. But when has the painted landscape ever
been quite "natural"? Romanticism once had its psychological
landscape, and as for the Baroque before that, its landscapes
were nothing if not "theatrical."
It may be time to insert the question of why we tend to
equate our cultural history with man as specifically the "classic
human image." The essence of Christian-pagan idealism is
necessarily philosophic and therefore "humanist" in the widest
possible as well as the narrowest sense. In this specifically
humanist role of classicism, the aesthetic tradition has actually
subsumed all "revolutions" and "reactions," Neo-Classicism,
Romanticism and Cubism alike. Historically, classicism is
—
nothing but the moral preeminence of Man man as a theo-
retically,or "rationally," perfectible if not perfect being. Pre-
ferably and conventionally, man is inspired by God, but at
least he is given his basic meaning by the ability to reason,
to relate himself to gods, other men, and nature as well as to
art. All the aesthetic revolutions of "schools," even some in
the twentieth century, have tacitly assumed this "classic" tenet
of art.
The Dada-Surrealists, in their animosity against the "con-
ventional" image of man and his world — what roughly may
—
be called the photographic image were attacking not the
means of art, but its end; not the image of man and nature in
all its variety and possibility, but the lack of imaginative en-
ergy with which the classical-humanist tradition was being
preserved by the pictorial and literary arts. Even Futurism's
violent conversion of the Cubist schema to machine imagery
104 PARKER TYLER
did not suit the Dadaists' revolt; this was because they could
sense the academic future of so systematic a formal procedure
as Cubism proposed; surely enough, today abstract art has
arrived at its own rigid, sterile academism.
It was, then, in behalf of the inherent vitality of classical-
humanism that the Dada-Surrealist spirit proceeded with its
kudos, its tricks, its shocks and its chef-d'oeuvres of which —
certainly Duchamp's great glass, The Bride Denuded (etc.),
owned by the Philadelphia Museum since it acquired the
Arensburg Collection, is one of the most important: a com-

bined trick,shock, kudo and chef-d'oeuvre. Here man is in-

sect, mannikin, hieroglyph, and even "thing." What, exactly,
does The Bride "say"? It says that man exists by showing how
very specially he can exist. ... On the other hand non objec-
tive art is actually pre-human if post-humanist: the world-
—
without-man the world that, like original nature, could exist,
and did exist, before man; it is a world, moreover, not neces-
sarily implying that crucial evolutionary movement of nature
that brought —
man into being man, one should add, with all
his astonishing ability to transform and "distort" himself and
the world around him. . . .

Accordingly, something most significant lies in the fact that,

at the same moment that twentieth-century painting was gird-
ing itself make a complete break with representationalism,
to
the "representational" movies came into being and cast their
universal public spell. If Surrealist painting and collage, with
its supreme dislocation, its fragmented and as it were "para-
plegic" world of the senses, was to attack classical humanism,
it was to attack its complacency, not its historical roots in
man. On the contrary, in embracing the non-representational
world, abstract art ultimately took the most radical step pos-
sible against human and social consciousness as the cradle,
critic and creator of aesthetic values. Hence, automatically,
while in a prejudiced and deceptive way, the movies adopted
a hostile position toward abstract art, though on a moral
rather than an artistic basis; in this distinction within the
character of the movies' opposition to abstract art lies the
"rub" of complexity and vagueness about the issue I have
proposed: whether as an art they have prolonged the life of
the classical human image. For, as I have said, they can be,
and have been, as expressionistic, as highly "formal," even as
abstract as they please; the obstacle in the way of their being
Movies and the Human Image 105
as much so as they please is not technical limitation, but sim-
ply the arbitrary premises of filmdom's highly organized —if
now wobbly —commercial art.
One need not stress why these premises are so "arbitrary."
The point at issue is why, commercially or not, the movies
may be said to take the aesthetic side of the classic human
image. Let me point out the naive "magic of effect" that
clings to the junkiest movie. The movies' hallucination of
reality is a theme to which I have devoted many thousands

of words, and always with the assumption that the terms of

the~formulation, "reality" and "hallucination," have an equal
and reflexive weight. Reality in the movies reasserts "content"
in the classic aesthetic dualism, hallucination reasserts "form."
What made the timing of the movies' advent so significant was
exactly that the whole tradition which a painter such as Ingres
had inherited from the Renaissance, and the super-photo-
graphic perfection he gave that tradition, was swiftly turning
into dullacademism, which seemed to the Romantics, and
and the Cubists, to have a static,
finally the Expressionists
unbearably complacent look.
Just at this moment of greatest peril for the classic human
image, the mechanism of photography intervened to mock the
accumulated craft of the hand and the pencil, the hand and
the brush. One might argue that photography — despite its
early motives both "aesthetic" and "romantic" — killed aca-
demic art; well and good, but suppose it also killed the classic
human image? If I think that photography did not do this,
but the opposite, revived the classic human image, it is only
because photography began to move: became the movies. Sud-
denly man's representational image was galvanized, and in
this sense human identity in art was given a new meaning
through its additional element: kinesis. Painting and sculpture
"move" in a quite different sense from the cinema. It is in-
structive that not until after the movies were invented, and
had progressed in technique, did the artist's eye, through
Futurism, dedicate itself to an isolated "aesthetic" of move-
ment; to a plastic which, in substance, was merely the analysis
of optical mechanism made possible by the camera.
Of course, movement in the movies is already largely —
owing to the requirements of the commercial product —
monotonous, by no means sufficiently aesthetic, cult. Yet one
finds serious theorists of the film almost automatically insisting
106 PARKER TYLER
on the value of movement as such: on broad panoramas and
swift changes of the centers of action. To be sure, this is only
one of the aesthetic conditioned reflexes of a still young art,
an art still naively inflamed by the extent to which it surpasses
stage action in narrative scope and significance. On one side,
the movies challenge the novel in this scope and significance,
while on the other they have the literal vision of the stage
(and of painting) and at last has assimilated the stage's oral
dialogue. But it is fatal to dwell on the achievements of the
movies as a "great" synthetic art. Among the manifold at-
tempts to reproduce famous novels and "expand" famous
plays on the screen, merely a handful have lacked the most
disastrous flaws, and even with these, it would be dangerous
to try to prove they deserve to be compared with the originals.
My object here is not to exalt specimens of the film but to
hail the movies as the probable savior of the classic human
—
image in our age certainly, as an aesthetic force which has
specifically "prolonged" the life of that image. What academic
painting had shown as overrefined and static, the movies
began to present as crude if refinable nature and as notably
fluid. No art medium can convey so immediate a sensation of
time in its changes, its whims and provocative shifts, as the
movies. And yet, because basically photography remains a
mirror (something it is very hard for it not to remain), the
world of man, with man as the chief actor, is incontestably
the abiding subject of this sensationally mirrored flux. To ex-
clude man and nature as organic surfaces, as the actual con-
texture of the social world, would be, for the movies, simply
to give movement not to life as such, but to the canon which
non-objective art has bestowed on life; to the non-mirroring
wall-decor of extreme abstractionism where man is not
. . .

his own spectacle and where the only "recognizable" elements

are atmosphere and geometric form.
Shall it be asked, now, whether it is necessary for man to
be his own spectacle? Maybe human self-consciousness, for
all its supposed glories, is actually it is not
a handicap; maybe
only unnecessary, maybe it is undesirable! Do not the moral
disquisitions of the new existentialist schools of philosophy
hint as much? Maybe human existence was a pretentious and
arrogant error. Maybe, too, all that is the bad conscience of
idealism itself —of man as consciously the perfectible being.
I wish to suggest, nevertheless, that in failing to report man
Movies and the Human Image 107
in the fluid grip of his historic fate as man, non-objectivism
has created a gap in the texture of consciousness itself, which
only the absolute withdrawal of the individual from the world
can adequately mend. This is doubtless a prejudiced, though
not necessarily an inflexible, view of the values of non-
objective painting. Possibly there should be, as there are and
have been, moments of human as well as individual self-
negation. But is not such self -negation always the function of
—
thought itself? and does not the crude experience of the
world supply it aside from all reaching toward aesthetic feel-
ings and artistic creation? Maybe the "gap" is inherent in
consciousness. But objectively, blank walls and the void have
always supplied this gap, and oftener than one may like;
philosophy is its traditional antidote, art its traditional mirror.
Maybe non-objective paintings are so many portraits of the
void in its fluid and static moods. . .But such a "portrait
.

art"— —
a mirror of its own would seem, in comparison with
the whole of human experience, both narrow and tending to
barrenness. I suggest that the lowly movies are, after all, a posi-
tive antidote to this extreme convention of modern painting;
that even the banes of commercial films, the superspectacle
and the mad melodrama, are athletic fields where the classic
human image continues to prove its eligibility in the Olympiad
of the art forms.
 HOLLIS ALPERT

The Film Is Modern Theatre*

"Whether a story is presented to us on a screen or on a stage,

it is still a theatrical presentation."

// sound and had arrived together, as Edison originally

film
intended, there would have been far less mystique about the
art of the silent film. This, Hollis Alpert insists, would have
been a very good thing. It would have kept us from thinking
that the motion picture is something separate and aloof from
theatre and that it is somehow at its best when it does not
speak.
It is a larger step from this position to the standpoint that
"the film is not so much an art form as it is modern theatre.*'
Without discussing the documentary and experimental tradi-
tions, Alpert centers his attention on the mass audience, inter-
ested in movies only for their dramatic stories. He says that
movies often do the job better than the theatre because they
have "the freedom of the novelist" to replace dialogue with
flashback or photographic revelation.
Alpert is a novelist and short-story writer, and was associate
fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1950-1956.
He has written about films in The Dreams and the Dreamers
(1962) and has been a motion-picture critic for the Saturday
Review since 1950.

There is a school of thought that the movies as a possible art

form came to a halt when the soundtrack was invented. The
cinematic medium thereafter proceeded to limp along, im-
peded and cluttered by this thing called words. In some circles,
which consider the theatre to be a privileged (and embattled)
sanctuary, movies have never been admitted to be a branch
* Hollis Alpert, "The Film Is Modern Theatre," article prepared
for U.S. Information Service for use by newspapers, magazines,
and radio stations abroad, December, 1957.

108
The Film Is Modern Theatre 109
i

of the drama. Theatre geared to a stream of words was to be

found only on the stage.
But movies refused to stay silent, and now and then they
can be found talking very well indeed. It's even time to con-
sider the possibility that the film, with its newly expanded
screen and its superior resources for staging, is not only
— —
a form of theatre, but in almost all ways by far the best
form.
This, however, is seldom admitted. One film historian upon
being asked recently to list the ten best movies of all time
quickly named ten pictures made before 1928. The list was a
familiar one, including such movies as The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari, City Lights, and Variety. Nothing made after the
era of sound came into being seemed, in his view, the equal
of these silent classics. There are little cinema societies, all
across the land, which meet periodically to worship before the
altar of the silent screen. The prints are dark, scratched, nearly
eroded away, but still they flicker on for rapt audiences of
ten or twenty.
The theory held by many who attend these showings is that
the cinema, first and last, is a visual medium and that its
primary language is movement. The movement is created by a
change in the image, or by a succession of images. The images
can be made meaningful by clever juxtaposition, and by
technical tricks such as the dissolve.

Movies did not talk from the very beginning because they
did not know how true that a silent-movie technique
to. It is
developed and that it was often used beautifully, but why
should silence be the language of the movies for all time? The
reason the movies developed a language separate from speech
was the need for a substitute. That movies have been en-
riched as a result goes without question, but to confine the
movies to the silent technique would be like confining acting
to pantomime.
To
stay with the theoretical a bit longer —
the movie camera
does not necessarily take moving pictures, nor is the taking
of moving pictures its prime function. The camera is but one
step in an operation that has the object of deceiving the eye
and creating an illusion. The reason that fifty or sixty million
Americans go each week to the movies is not to have their
eyes washed (as is sometimes assumed) but to see lifelike
 —
110 HOLLIS ALPERT
illusions, and, more than anything else, to be told dramatic
stories. The film is not so much an art form as it is modern
theatre. Whether a story is presented to us on a screen or on
a stage, k a theatrical presentation. The movies are, in
is still

essence, popular theatre. When the mass audience goes to the

movies rather than to a stage play, it is not only because
tickets are cheaper or because the material is more easily
comprehended, but because it is getting, in many ways, a
better show.
This mass audience, from year to year, has come in for
some extraordinary lambasting. The movie public is derided
as being made up largely of adolescents, or of having a twelve-
year-old mentality, of lacking taste and discrimination, of
being fickle, capricious, ignorant, and vulgar. It is supposed
to be an audience that punishes thought, that shies from the
controversial, that laps up puerility, foolishness, the sensa-
tional,and the saccharine. Periodically on the stage will appear
a play showing Hollywood to be a hotbed of asininity and
cynicism, making products for the entertainment of morons.
The movies, either out of courage or abject humility, will then
buy the play and make a movie showing the same point.
On the other hand, the theatre audience is something else
again. It is assumed to have taste, discrimination, a mature
mentality, background, breeding, and, above all, a feeling for
theatre.

Meanwhile, in spite of a passionate love for theatre on the

part of a good many, the theatre continues its decline. There
are now about seventy Broadway productions a year, in con-
trast to more than two hundred shows on the boards twenty-
fiveyears ago.
Luckily, the movies, more through accident than by design,
are currently filling the gap, and providing us with theatre
good, bad, and indifferent, but theatre nevertheless. . . .

It took Laurence Olivier's Henry V to make a good many

of us realize that a Shakespeare play could come on film to a
stunning life never possible on the stage. Olivier's subsequent
Hamlet, the Mankiewicz-Houseman Julius Caesar, Castellani's
Romeo and Juliet, have made the realization clearer. All the
cumbersome and obsolete stage trappings were thrown in the
discard; the Elizabethan speech was able to shine amidst
new, but quite proper settings. Interpretations may always
The Film Is Modern Theatre 111

be quarreled with; in staged Shakespeare as well as filmed

Shakespeare. In the films there were cuts, excisions, even the
elimination of a character here and there. When someone
complains gloomily about the cuts in Romeo and Juliet it is
considered only polite not to ask which of the speeches were
most sorely missed, and to assume, instead, that every culti-
vated person reads the play at least once every two weeks.
I, for one, will not look the gift horse in the mouth too

closely. I would rather recognize the fact that Shakespeare

now has a popular audience no one prior to 1930 could ever
have dreamed of.
This isn't only because the movies can stage the Battle of
Agincourt when the theatre cannot. In the cases I have men-
tioned above the lines came out clearer and more richly. They
are, after all, spoken under optimum conditions; they can be
heard as well by the pauper as by the rich man. In the
Mankiewicz Julius Caesar millions have seen a magnificent
—
even fabulous portrayal of Cassius, now also the possession
of generations to come, as Booth's Hamlet was not. Part of
the success of Cassius' interpretation by John Gielgud was
made possible by the use of the close-up, a tool unavailable
to the stage.

This notion that the theatre is one thing and the film quite
another has been widespread for a long time. It has failed to
take into account the continual development of the motion-
picture form, from silence (and the eerie acting style the
silence engendered) to the full use of modern screen and stage
techniques. So astute a critic as the late James Agate put
himself on record as follows:

I regard theatregoing as one thing, and filmgoing as quite another,

and do not allow my films to impinge upon my plays. It is in the
spectacular as opposed to the dramatic category that I place the
films. The theatre, which talks about things rather than shows
them, necessarily calls for a certain amount of imagination on
the part of the playgoer, whereas the film, by showing everything,
calls for no imagination at all.

I enjoy reading Agate, but on the above point I am afraid

he was seeing through the mirror very darkly. It is axiomatic

that, for dramatic effect, it is far more efficient to show some-
112 HOLLIS ALPERT
thing happening rather than to talk about it. Dialogue on the
stage, the screen, or in fiction has its best use when it advances
the action, and characterizes. That the movies were able to
eliminate that opening scene in which the maid and the butler
talked about how late the master came home last night has
been a relief to all of us. And when it is necessary to explain
why Aunt Sadie behaves so curiously it is sometimes better
not to have a friend of the family explain it, but instead to
backflash and show the significant moment that changed Aunt
Sadie. The movies in this respect have the freedom of the
novelist, a freedom playwrights have always envied. Talking
about things on the stage all too often brings on boredom,
instead of stimulating the imagination.
—
But good dialogue talk that interests and that also ad-
—
vances the action can occur in movies as in plays. Films
stimulate the imagination if the stories they tell are imagina-
tively stimulating. The limitation is not in the form, but in
the material.
Recently I had occasion to see some movies made from
Broadway plays of a few seasons ago. How much more satis-
fying, it struck me, to see Summertime (made from The Time
of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents) in its film version. Instead
of a stage Venice, we have a real Venice.
It is also astonishing how movies of mature content appear
more and more frequently. The Country Girl (enhanced con-
siderably in its transition from stage to screen) catapults its
star to an Academy Award, and sets the producers to won-
dering which of its ingredients caused its success. Was it the
stars, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly? Then Marty, without
name stars, comes along, a low-budget film that has become
one of the more successful of recent years. The writing is of
a high order in both these pictures; the characterizations are
sound and sensitive. It is no wonder that Hollywood currently
is bidding for plays, the best television scripts, novels, and

short stories. The audience, having grown increasingly more

selective in recent years, is showing a desire for the intelligent
motion picture. . . .
 ALLARDYCE NICOLL

Film and Theatre*

'If the theatre stands thus for mankind, the cinema stands
for the individual."

In this comparison of drama and film, written not long after

the coming of sound, A Hardy ce Nicoll, then professor of the
history of drama at Yale, speaks up firmly for accepting the
—
conventions of the stage its essential nature as a bold, imagi-
native, poetic, or spectacular illusion. Like Walter Kerr in our
own day, he declares that "the realistic theatre" has lost its
strength; we must reject naturalism, "the cheap and ugly
ff
simian chatter of familiar conversation.
Evidently the film has more to do than take over this latter
function, for he suggests that realism in the film has unre-
stricted scope and therefore expands our imagination in out- —
door environment, in visual imagery, in Disney cartoon form.
Nicoll does not try to include in his theory the epic sense of
the crowd and of history found in documentary films from
Potemkin to The True Glory. The essential thing, he says, is
to become aware that in the dramatic realm, "absolutely
counter to what would have been our first answer," stage
characters are types, speaking lines that challenge mankind,
whereas we "impute greater power of individual life to the
figures we see on the screen."

When we witness a film, do we anticipate something we should

not expect from a stage performance, 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

* Allardyce Nicoll, "Film Reality: The Cinema and the Thea-

tre," from Film and Theatre. New York, Crowell, 1936. Pp. 164-
168, 171, 177-178, 182-186, 186-191.

113
114 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
we expect greater variety and movement
say, save in so far as
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 stabilised in type form. Do we not see Charles
Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, Elizabeth
Bergner now in the theatre, now in the cinema? To consider
further, we might say, were simply to indulge in useless and
uncalled-for speculation.
Nevertheless, the question does demand just a trifle more of
investigation. Some few years ago a British producing com-
pany made a film of Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. 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 Raina's window terrace,
settled down to provide what was fundamentally 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 stageArms and the Man is
witty, provocative, incisively 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 —
Bluntschli, Raina,
Sergius —
who are so exciting on the boards, looked to the
audience like a set of wooden dummies, hopelessly patterned.
Performed by a third-rate amateur cast their life-blood does
not so ebb from them, yet here, interpreted by a group of
distinguished professionals, 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 CAMERA'S TRUTH

The basic reason seems to be simply this — that practically
all effectively drawn stage characters are types and that in
the cinema we demand individualisation, or else that we rec-
ognise 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
Film and Theatre 115
been our first answer to the original question posited, may
seem grossly distorted, but perhaps some further considera-
tion will demonstrate its plausibility. When we go to the thea-

tre, we expect theatre 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 pretending 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 real-

ity: it is always imaginative illusion, the illusion of a period

of make-believe. All the time we watch Hamlet's throes of
agony we know that the character Hamlet is being imper-
sonated by a man who 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 Nor-
—
wegian and these volumes might well seem to give the lie to
such assumptions. Have not Shakepeare's characters seemed
so real to a few observers that we have on our shelves books
specifically concerned with the girlhood of his heroines —
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 personality in bold theatric terms. Ham-
human
let seizes on because he is an individual, not because
us, not
in him Shakespeare has delineated a particular prince of Den-
mark, 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 lives. Fundamentally,
the truly vital theatre 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 condi-
tions,but the figures set before them in significant plays are
conventionally fixed and familiar. Of Romeos there are many,
and of Othellos legion. Character 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. Bluntschli repre-
sents half a hundred similar rationalists; the idealism of thou-
 —
116 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
sands is incorporated in Sergius; and Raina is an eternal stage
type of the perplexing feminine. The theatre is populated, not
by real individuals whose boyhood or girlhood may legiti-
mately 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 disguised pictures of
ballet-dancers or replicas of figures in advertisements 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 back stage and we know we shall see
the actors, turned into themselves again, bowing at the con-
clusion of the performance. In every way the "falsity" of a
theatrical production is borne in upon us, so that we are pre-
pared 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 permitted to make the rounds of the studios; but
from ninety per cent of the audience the actual methods em-
ployed in the preparation of a film remain far off and dimly
realised. . . .

The strange paradox, then, results: — that, although the

cinema introduces improbabilities and things beyond nature at
which any theatrical director would blench and murmur soft
nothings to the air, the filmic material is treated by the audi-
ence with far greater respect (in its relation to life) than the
material of the stage. Our conceptions of life in Chicago gang-
sterdom 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 superiority, we credit the truth of newspaper para-
graphs. . . .

That most of the films so far produced have not made use
Film and Theatre 117
of the peculiar methods inherent in the cinematic approach
need not blind us to the fact that here is an instrument capa-
ble of expressing through combined visual and vocal means
something of that analytical searching 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 supernatural
imaginings. This imaginary world, indeed, is one that our pub-
lic 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 splendour, exercising their inventiveness, not to create
the truly fanciful but to fashion the exaggeratedly and hyper-
bolically 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;
—
melodies inappropriately rich these 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.. . .

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 development
of these hundred-odd years is the growth of realism and the
attempted substitution of naturalistic illusion in place of a
conventional and imaginative illusion. In the course of this
development stands forth Ibsen as the outstanding pioneer and
master. At the same time, this impartial survey may also de-
cide that within the realistic method lie the seeds of disrup-
tion. It may be recognised 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 theatre may
118 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
have served a salutary purpose for a time, but its vitality was
but shortlived and, after the first excitement which attended
the witnessing on the stage of things no one had hitherto
dreamt of putting there had waned, its force and inspiring
power was dissipated. Even if we leave the cinema out of
account, we must observe that the realistic theatre in our own
days has lost its strength. No doubt, through familiarity 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
contributions to the theatre of our day. But the continued
appearance and success of naturalistic plays should not con-
fuse the main issue, which is the question whether such natu-
ralistic plays are likely in the immediate 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
different 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, instinct 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 theatre which shall possess
qualities likely to live over generations, unquestionably we
must decide that the naturalistic play, made popular towards
the close of the nineteenth century and still remaining in our
midst, is not calculated to fulfil 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 cinematic competition, is it not likely
to fail gradually in its immediate appeal? 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 Chil-
dren's Hour and come away fondly believing that what they
Film and Theatre 119
have seen is life; they have not realised that here too the

familiar stock figures, the type characterisations, of the theatre

have been presented before them in modified forms. From this
the drama cannot escape; little possibility is there of its delv-
ing 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 proba-
ble that theatre audiences will become weary of watching
shows which, although professing to be "lifelike," actually are
inexorably bound by the restrictions of the stage? Pursuing
this path, the theatre truly seems doomed to inevitable de-
struction. Whether in its attempt to reproduce reality and give
the illusion of actual events or whether in its pretence towards
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 theatre, as some have opined, truly dying?

Must it succumb to the rivalry of the cinema? The answer to

that question depends on what the theatre does within the
next ten or twenty years. If it pursues naturalism further, un-
questionably little hope will remain; but if it recognises to the
full the conditions of its own being and utilises those qualities
which it, and it alone, possesses, the very thought of rivalry
may disappear. Quite clearly, the true hope of the theatre lies
in a rediscovery of convention, in a deliberate throwing-over
of all thoughts concerning naturalistic illusion and in an em-
bracing of that universalising power which so closely belongs
to the dramatic form when rightly exercised. By doing these
things, the theatre has achieved greatness and distinction in
the past. We admire the playhouses of Periclean Athens and
Elizabethan England; in both a basis was found in frank ac-
ceptance of the stage spectacle as a thing of pretence, with no
attempt made to reproduce the outer forms of everyday life.
Conventionalism ruled in both, and consequently out of both
could spring a vital expression, with manifestations capable
of appealing not merely to the age in which they originated
but to future generations also. Precisely because ^Eschylus
and Shakespeare did not try to copy life, because they pre-
sented 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
120 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
known took no account of the terms of
originals; their plots
actuality; and their language soared on poetic wings. To this
again must we come if our theatre is to be a vitally arrest-
ing 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 possi-
bility of preparing dialogue which shall rise above the terms
of common existence.
From our playwrights, therefore, we must seek for 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 individual
men and women, recognising 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. . . .

Established on its very existence, and

these terms native to
consequently far removed from the ways of the film, the
theatre 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. Pos-
of confusion between the two has entered in only
sibility
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 individualisation takes the

place of type characterisation, 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
Film and Theatre 121

moved by the tones of an earlier dramatic verse. Within this

of an artistic expression equally power-
field lies the possibility
ful 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 theatre the spectators are con-
fronted 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

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
.#Cschylus have presented in this way the lineaments of uni-
versal humanity. If the theatre 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 theatre —even may we back on
occasionally fall

plain curtains without completely 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 clamour
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's Island and The Story of Pasteur cine-
matic authenticity is demanded. 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 theatre, but it has the advantage of giving increased
122 ALLARDYCE NICOLL
appreciation of things which are outside nature. Through this
the purely visionary becomes almost tangible and the impossi-
ble assumes shapes easy of comprehension and belief. The
sense of reality lies at 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 theatre and film we realise the force of each. For any kind
of aesthetic appreciation this distance is always demanded; be-
fore 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 contemplation creates and same time have
at the
no put the reactions to that stimulus into play. This
call to
distance obviously may be of varying degrees; sometimes it is
reduced, sometimes it provides a vast gulf between the ob-
server 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 removed from reality than sculpture, but in
music there may be an approach towards commonly heard
sounds and in sculpture abstract shapes may take the place
of familiar forms realistically delineated. Determination of
the proper and legitimate approach will come from a con-
sideration 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 medium of expression.
Applying this principle to theatre and cinema, we will rec-
ognise that whereas there is a strong sense of reality in audi-
ence reactions to the film, yet always there is the fact that the
on the screen are two-dimensional images and hence
pictures
removed a stage from actual contact with the spectators. What
may happen if successful three-dimensional projection is in-
troduced we cannot tell; at present we are concerned 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 theatre means that it is com-
paratively easy to break the illusion proper to the theatre and
in doing so to shatter the mood at which any performance
ought to aim. This statement may appear to run counter to
Film and Theatre 123

others made above, but there is no essential contradiction in-

volved. The fact remains that, whenliving person is set before
living person — actor —
before spectator a certain deliberate
conventionalising 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 approaches to real forms may be per-
mitted, even although these have to exist alongside impossi-
bilities 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
towards the universalising and towards conventionalism must
tend the theatre if it is to find a secure place among us. For-
tunately the signs of the age are propitious; experiments in
poetic drama and production of films utilising 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 particular and peculiar functions; their
houses may
stand side by side, not in rivalling enmity, but in
that friendly rivalry which is one of the compelling forces in
the wider realm of artistic achievement.
 RUDOLF ARNHEIM

Epic and Dramatic Film

"The epic style ... is not concerned with change and solution
but with the presentation of invariable existence."

In this provocative note on the difference between two gen-

eral types of film, Rudolf Arnheim quotes from an essay by
Goethe: "The epic poem preferably describes man as he acts
outwardly: battles, travels, any kind of enterprise that requires
some sensuous breadth; tragedy shows man led toward the
inside/ He suggests that the dramatic film undertakes the
9

solution of a particular problem, which may succeed or fail,

whereas "the epic style of narration has a preference for
stringing episodes in sequences"
Like all dichotomies, this one probably cannot be made to
cover all, or even most, cases, but film spectacles, documen-
taries, and biographies might deserve further study in the light
of such a definition. Arnheim further urges that "there is no
documentary theatre, but there are documentary films, and
they are epic," and adds that biography is often in epic form.
"Here the central figure does not journey through space, as
does Ulysses, but through time." Professor Arnheim is a mem-
ber of the psychology faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and
is the author of Film as Art and Art and Visual Perception.

There are essentially three properties of film as an artistic

medium that need to be considered when
comes to deciding
it

which kinds of narrative subject matter are suitable and how

they should be presented. First of all, film is a visual art,
which tells its stories to the eyes —
even when sound is also
used. Second, the pictures that tell the story are obtained
mechanically by photography, that is, they can portray reality

* Rudolf Arnheim, "Epic and Dramatic Film," Film Culture,

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1957. Pp. 9-10.

124
Epic and Dramatic Film 125
with documentary faithfulness. Third, these pictures can be
made to follow each other in an uninterrupted sequence even
though they may show the most different settings and actions
taken at different times. As an additional and more practical
condition the film maker is expected to remember that on
the average the telling of the story should not take longer
than an hour and fifteen minutes.
Two concepts that have proved to be useful in literary criti-
cism can be applied fruitfully also to the film. In an essay
"On Epic and Dramatic Poetry," written in 1797, Goethe
asserts: "The epic poem preferably describes man as he acts
outwardly: battles, travels, any kind of enterprise that re-
quires some sensuous breadth; tragedy shows man led toward
the inside, therefore the plot of a genuine tragedy requires
little space." For Goethe this distinction coincided with that

between an action told in the form of a poem or novel (epic)

and one performed on the stage (dramatic). Indeed, the
broad descriptions of varying settings and extensive happen-
ings, which are characteristically epic, hardly suit the theatre.
The stage no more than alludes to the setting of the action;
it is limited to narrow space and can move from one location

to the other only by means of clumsy devices. We may say

of the film that it has put the epos on the stage. In fact, this is
one of the main characteristics of the film medium.
When the two concepts are applied to film, they no longer
designate the difference between outwardly and inwardly di-
rected action. What distinguishes the "dramatic" film is rather
that it undertakes the solution of a particular problem: it ties
the knot by presenting the problem, describes the conflict
caused by it, then attempts to find a solution, and finally the
catastrophe of the hero wrecked by his failure to solve the
insoluble. Dramatic film, just as the dramatic stage play, is
dynamic. It presents a plot that proceeds from step to step,
and one of its most characteristic effects is "suspense." Also
it rigorously limits the presentation to what is needed to ex-
plain the motives of the characters and to make the events
progress. There is no time for broad description in dramatic
film. As much as possible it cuts down on references to what
happened before the beginning of the actual story, and it does
not linger on the aftermath of the catastrophe. Also, second-
ary plots are kept in the background of the main conflict.
The epic film, on the other hand, neither deals with a prob-
126 RUDOLF ARNHEIM
lem nor offers a solution. True, it also can seize upon the great
discords of life, which create human suffering, but, unlike the
dramatic film, it limits itself to describing their manifesta-
tions. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a typically dramatic film,
poses a problem. A
man gravely clashes with his environ-
ment because the good and the bad aspects of his nature have
produced two independent personalities. The film develops
the problem, creates suspense, and finally shows the protago-
nist killed by his environment, thus indicating that the conflict
was insoluble. Compare this kind of treatment with Don
Quixote, where again a man clashes with his world this one —
impelled by ideals of human perfection, nobility, and beauty.
But the problem is neither analyzed nor solved. The one per-
manent and unchanging conflict is shown in a sequence of
examples, which, however, do not represent steps toward a
solution. More or less accidentally, the story comes to an
end —or rather fails to continue — at some point. Epic film
is static.

Epic tasks may naturally be expressed through the film

because of its capacity to describe reality in all its detail and
to ignore the impediments of time and space. There is no
documentary theatre, but there are documentary films, and
they are epic. On the other hand, the film, just as the theatre,
can develop a plot in the dramatic manner and create sus-
pense. Almost invariably, however, the dramatic film will be
found also to have epic, descriptive aspects. Even the kind
of intimate film play that limits itself strictly to a limited
space, a few characters, and a minimum of external action
will seem descriptive when compared to similar plays on the
stage because the camera inevitably captures with a single
sweep so many details of the setting that the stage looks bare
and abstract in comparison.
Film describes, but it describes swiftly. It leaps from one
place to the other, from small objects seen at close quarters
to the encompassing survey of the whole, and thus in a few
seconds records hundreds of things which the epic poet could
not enumerate in pages. It is for this reason that film can treat
an epic subject in little more than an hour.
The epic style of narration has a preference for stringing
episodes in sequences. Such chainlike composition stresses the
static character of the tale. Don Quixote passes through a
Epic and Dramatic Film 127
series of adventures; so does Ulysses. Sometimes the central
figure a mere pretext, which provides a common denomina-
is

tor for a series of descriptions, or he is a sharply drawn type

whose conflicts with his surroundings are shown in ever new
examples. The films of Chaplin and Buster Keaton are proto-
types of the epic form. These films have been accused of lack-
ing structure, of being episodes patched together. Of course,
even an epic work needs unity and structure; but the basic
shape of these films merely applies the ancient principle of
epic narration. To some extent, the episodes that constitute
them are mutually exchangeable, and even the famous end-
ings (Chaplin walks away and disappears on the horizon
without having married the pretty girl) are not only a personal
expression of resignation but first of all a necessary feature
of the epic style, which is not concerned with change and
solution but with the presentation of invariable existence.
Occasionally three or four of Chaplin's short films have
been combined to a full-sized "feature" film. The result
seemed satisfactory because the epic film invites such enu-
meration whereas dramatic films that deserve the name would
be expected to resist the same treatment.
Attempts have also been made to go beyond the narrow
span of the movie theatre program and to create larger epic
cycles. The films of Chaplin or those of Buster Keaton or
Mickey Mouse form together a kind of continuing narrative,
which can be presented in installments because each episode
is self-contained. This is less true for the continuing adven-

tures of some hero that used to keep the attention of the

audiences from chapter to chapter over long stretches of time.
The chase after a criminal, for instance, was presented, and
the fans would wait for the next chapter as avidly as they were
looking forward to the daily installment of a current novel in
the newspaper.
A noteworthy variety of the epic film is the biography.
Here the central figure does not journey through space as does
Ulysses, but through time. We watch a man maintaining him-
self against afflictions that turn up through the years but
remaining basically the same person in spite of the changes
time imposes upon him. Externally, a man's entanglement
with time appears as dynamic or dramatic because the pass-
ing of time suggests a progression; but basically it is static
128 RUDOLF ARNHEIM
and epic. Therefore, biography suits the film medium well,
and so does the historical presentation of several generations
as in Cavalcade, Here not a single person but a central group
of people serves as the nucleus around which a panorama of
changing periods, mores, and fashions evolves. In such films
the fundamental task of the epic style is clearly revealed: it
insists on the unchangeable nature of man.
 ROBERT NATHAN

A Novelist Looks at Hollywood

"A picture is not at all like a play ... it is like a novel, but
a novel to be seen, instead of told."

Robert Nathan says he was surprised to learn, when he

came to Hollywood, that his own "craft of the novelist" was
more valuable than that of dramatic writing. He further dis-
covered that making use of "the elements of the picture itself
can create the same effect of style as in the most excellent
paragraph of prose. It may not sound like beauty; it will look
like it."
This brief note by a master of the short novel (One More
Spring; The Enchanted Cottage) offers much compact obser-
vation and some encouragement for the screenwriter. He
points out that in the novel there is likely to be, in any case,
"the counterparts of long shots and close-ups, trucking shots
and dissolves." History has caught up with one of his points:
"the quiet, contemplative flow of the novel" has found, after
all, a fairly close counterpart on the screen with the work of

Antonioni in Italy. Perhaps there are more "singular and

lonely" viewers today, or at least it is no longer necessary to
"appeal to the full congregation."
Mr. Nathan has requested this editor to point out to the
reader that his article was written twenty years ago and that
he would not necessarily make the same observations about
the film industry of today.

When I first Hollywood, to work in pictures, I

came to
thought that I should have to learn to be a dramatist, that
the craft of the novelist would be of no use to me. I was
mistaken.

* Robert Nathan, "A Novelist Looks at Hollywood," Hollywood

Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1945. Pp. 146-147.

129
130 ROBERT NATHAN
I do not pretend to be a very good screenwriter; one does
not learn an entire art in a single thrust. But I have learned
something about it—enough, for instance, to recognize the
screen play or story as a valid form; and enough to feel a
profound respect for those master screen writers whose work,
never published, usually slighted by the critics, seems to me
some of the best writing being done anywhere in the country.
I also learned, to my surprise, that a picture is not at all
like a play; that on the contrary, it is like a novel, but a novel
to be seen, instead of told.
Of course, seeing is simply another way of telling. But
eye and ear are different organs, and to be treated each with
courtesy. One of the most difficult lessons I had to learn was
never to entice the ear too much, away from the eye. Eye
and ear must march together, or else fly apart; the evocation
of beauty or its opposite through words, is something to be
delicately examined; it must never interfere with the eye
which watches.
At the same time, the writer who uses his camera, who
makes use of all the elements of the picture itself, can create
the same effect of style as in the most excellent paragraph
of prose. It may not sound like beauty; it will look like it.
The picture has other characteristics of the novel: it ranges
where it pleases, it studies the reactions of single characters,
it deals in description and mood, it follows, by means of the
camera, the single, unique vision of the writer. You will find,
in every novel, the counterparts of long shots and close-ups,
trucking shots, and dissolves; but you will find them in words
addressed to the ear, instead of in pictures meant for the eye.
It is true that so far, at least, the quiet, contemplative flow

of the novel has no counterpart on the screen. Quiet and

contemplation are for the singular and lonely reader; when
people come together to be entertained, the pace and rhythm
of entertainment must be set for them. It must be set to please
them all, each singly, and all together, for all together they
give back to the screen an emotional response which is as
much a part of the picture as the writing or direction. That
is why it is difficult to judge a picture in the projection room;

and why we have previews. The audience adds its own ele-
ment to a picture; what emerges is a give-and-take, an
intangible (but very real) relationship between the two.
There is something in itself exciting about pace, whether
A Novelist Looks at Hollywood 131
on the screen or the tennis court, the hockey
rink, or the
podium. It is a pattern of satisfaction; the pulse; the
it stirs
eye, the ear, the heart moves from suspense to suspense,
from climax to climax; it is a kind of inner dance.
In writing for the films, the writer is not altogether master
of his pace. For in the end, the rhythm of the picture depends
lessupon words than upon direction, and cutting. The written
dialogue might be as lean as Hemingway's, and yet seem
slow, if the director's pulse is slow —
or if the cutter fails to
use his shears at the right moment. What that right moment
may be, no writer can ascertain from the written page; the
proof is on the film itself.
There are other disadvantages. The written novel is all;
it is the complete work of art. The script is only a part of

the final whole; and even in the script, many accents are
heard; voices of producer, director, and supervisor. In a
sense, they are editors; their eye is on the audience, they
imagine for themselves the finished picture, they warn, and
advise. And once the picture goes into production, still other
editors appear and take over; the camera, the composer,
designers, architects, the many technicians, all superb masters
of their crafts; and finally, of course, the actors. In the end,
the picture belongs to all of them —
but first, in the begin-
ning, from the small idea to the finished script, it is the
writer's; this much, if he wishes, he can do his best.
and with
That disappointment often, discouragement, and even
heartbreak await him in Hollywood, I do not deny. There
are so many things he cannot write about, so much he cannot
say. It is not altogether the fault of the industry; rather, it
is the fault of a youthful art, which, like the first miracle

plays, or the paintings of the early masters, must appeal to

the full congregation.
So much for the cons, and for the pros. There is something
to be said on either side; I have tried to suggest here what
that may be. I do not believe that to the reading eye the
script will ever displace or even seriously dispute the novel,
for general satisfaction; or that the novelist will find it alto-
gether a sufficient form. But it is a form, and one which I
believe presents a challenge to the novelist on his own
grounds.
 GEORGE BLUESTONE

Novels Into Film*

The history of the fitful relationship between novel and

film: overtly compatible, secretly hostile."

Rejecting the assumption that actual visual metaphors from

literary sources can ever be transcribed in screen language,
George Bluestone insists that the two forms are necessarily
distinct, "Between the percept of the visual image," he says,
"and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference
between the two media"
This young literary critic, now at the University of Wash-
ington, whose book based upon his doctoral dissertation in
is

the aesthetics of literature at Johns Hopkins University, con-

cludes his introductory chapter with this statement: "The
filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably
become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is
based." This is because the newer art has limits which depend
on "a moving image, mass audience, and industrial produc-
tion!* Any adaptation is not concerned with the unique
aspects of the novel but only with the events in it, as raw
material.

THE TWO WAYS OF SEEING

Summing up his major intentions in 1913, D. W. Griffith is
reported to have said, "The task I'm trying to achieve is above
all to make you see." 1 Whether by accident or design, the
statement coincides almost exactly with an excerpt from Con-
rad's preface to Nigger of the Narcissus published sixteen

* George Bluestone, 'The Limits of the Novel and the Limits

of the Film," Novels Into Film. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press,
1957. Pp. 1-2, 5-6, 20-21, 24, 25-27, 61-64.
1 Lewis
Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film. New York,
1939, p. 119.

132
Novels Into Film 133

years earlier: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by

the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make
—
you feel it is, before all, to make you see" 2 Aside from the
strong syntactical resemblance, the coincidence is remarkable
in suggesting the points at which film and novel both join and
part company. On the one hand, that phrase "to make you
see" assumes an affective relationship between creative artist
and receptive audience. Novelist and director meet here in a
common intention. One may, on the other hand, see visually
through the eye or imaginatively through the mind. And
between the percept of the visual image and the concept of
the mental image lies the root difference between the two
media.
—
Because novel and film are both organic in the sense that
aesthetic judgments are based on total ensembles which in-
—
clude both formal and thematic conventions we may expect
to find that differences in form and theme are inseparable
from differences in media. Not only are Conrad and Griffith
referring to different ways of seeing, but the "you's" they
which
refer to are different. Structures, symbols, myths, values
might be comprehensible to Conrad's relatively small middle-
class reading public would, conceivably, be incomprehensible
to Griffith's mass public. Conversely, stimuli which move the
heirs of Griffith's audience to tears, will outrage or amuse
the progeny of Conrad's "you." The seeming concurrence of
Griffith and Conrad splits apart under analysis, and the two
arts turn in opposite directions. That, in brief, has been the
history of the fitful relationship between novel and film:
overtly compatible, secretly hostile.
On the face of it, a close relationship has existed from the
beginning. The reciprocity is clear from almost any point of
view: the number of films based on novels; the search for
filmic equivalents of literature; the effect of adaptations on
reading; box-office receipts for filmed novels; merit awards
by and for the Hollywood community.
The moment the film went from the animation of stills to
telling a story, it was inevitable that fiction would become the
ore to be minted by story departments. Before Griffith's first
year as a director was over, he had adapted, among others,
Jack London's Just Meat (For Love of Gold), Tolstoy's

2 Joseph Conrad, A Conrad Argosy, New York, 1942, p. 83.

134 GEORGE BLUESTONE
Resurrection, and Charles Reade's The Cloister and the
Hearth. Sergei Eisenstein's essay "Dickens, Griffith, and the
Film Today"*3 demonstrates how Griffith found in Dickens
hints for almost every one of his major innovations. Particular
passages are cited to illustrate the dissolve, the superimposed
shot, the close-up, the pan, indicating that Griffith's interest
in literary forms and his roots in Victorian idealism4 pro-
vided at least part of the impulse for technical and moral
content. . . .

Such statements as: "The film true to the spirit of the

is

book"; "It's incredible how they butchered the novel"; "It

cuts out key passages, but it's still a good film"; "Thank God

—
they changed the ending" these and similar statements are
predicated on certain assumptions which blur the mutational
process. These standard expletives and judgments assume,
among other things, a separable content which may be de-
tached and reproduced, as the snapshot reproduces the kitten;
that incidents and characters in fiction are interchangeable
with incidents and characters in the film; that the novel is a
norm and the film deviates at its peril; that deviations are
permissible for vaguely defined reasons —
exigencies of length
—
or of visualization, perhaps but that the extent of the devia-
tion will vary directly with the "respect" one has for the
original; that taking liberties does not necessarily impair the
quality of the film, whatever one may think of the novel, but
that such liberties are somehow a trick which must be con-
cealed from the public.
What is common to all these assumptions is the lack of
awareness that mutations are probable the moment one goes
from a given set of fluid, but relatively homogeneous, con-
ventions to another; that changes are inevitable the moment
one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium. Finally,
it is insufficiently recognized that the end products of novel

and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from

each other as ballet is from architecture.
The film becomes a different thing in the same sense that
a historical painting becomes a different thing from the his-

3 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form. Translated by Jay Leyda. New

York, 1949, pp. 195-255.
4 Jacobs,
pp. 98-99.
Novels Into Film 135
torical event which it illustrates. It is as fruitless to say that
film A is better or worse than novel pronounceB as it is to
Wright's Johnson's Wax Building better or worse than
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. In the last analysis, each is auton-
omous, and each is characterized by unique and specific
properties. . . .

Where the moving picture comes to us directly through

perception, language must be filtered through the screen of
conceptual apprehension. And the conceptual process, though
allied to and often taking its point of departure from the
percept, represents a different mode of experience, a different
way of apprehending the universe.
The distinction is a crucial one, for it generates differences
which run all the way down the line from the media's ability
to handle tropes, affect beholders, render states of conscious-
ness (including dreams, memories, feelings, and imagination),
to their respective methods of handling conventions, time,
and space.
The linguistic trope is way of rendering
the novel's special
the shock of resemblance. By
juxtaposing similar qualities in
violently dissimilar things, language gets its revenge on the
apparent disorder of life. It binds together a world which
seems atomized and therefore chaotic to the primitive mind.
Modern theories of symbolic thinking demonstrate that we
necessarily see resemblances in themost ordinary perceptions.
Arnheim points out that an illusion, to be strong, does not
have to be complete in every detail: "everyone knows that a
clumsy childish scribble of a human face consisting of two
dots, a comma, and a dash may be full of expression and
depict anger, amusement, fear. ..." A kind of basic tropism
is involved in such a process: the mind sees resemblances in
the disparate sources of scribbled drawing and angry face.
So similar are linguistic and cognitive processes in finding
resemblances that critics like Cleanth Brooks build their
analytical systems around the metaphor. The difference be-
tween the artist who coins metaphors and the ordinary mind
which classifies objects derives largely from the fact that the
artist casts his net much wider. Where the cognitive mind
finds common traits in collies and boxers and calls them dogs,
the maker of tropes finds common qualities in slings, arrows,
and outrageous fortune. Literary tropes, however, are distin-
136 GEORGE BLUESTONE
guished from cognitive classification, first, by their verbal
origins and, second, by a kind of connotative luxuriance. Not
only does the power of the trope inhere in its figurative
character but in its ability to compound itself without damage
to intended meanings. Virginia Woolf, contrasting the novel
and film, is especially sensitive to the unique power of the
figure of speech. The images of a poet, she tells us, are com-
pact of a thousand suggestions, of which the visual is only the
most obvious:

Even the simplest image: "my love's like a red, red rose, that's
newly sprung in June," presents us with impressions of moisture
and warmth and the flow of crimson and the softness of petals
inextricably mixed and strung upon the lift of a rhythm which
is itself the voice of the passion and the hesitation of the love. All

this, which is accessible to words, and to words alone, the cinema

must avoid. 5

editing: the cinematic trope

If the film thus severely restricted in rendering linguistic
is

tropes (despite dialogue which will be discussed presently),

it has, through the process of editing, discovered a meta-
phoric quality all its own. . . .

Building his design out of individual strips, always thinking

plastically, the film-maker may use almost endless spatial
combinations. He may, for example, use contrast ironically.
When Alec Guinness, in The Promoter, achieves a social
triumph by dancing with the Countess of Chell, the film cuts
to a shot of greasy sausage frying in a skillet. It is the next
day and the "card's" mother is preparing his meal in their
dingy kitchen. Or the director may use what the Feldman
brothers call parallel editing. 6 A
wife, to make her husband
jealous, is seen flirting with a willing lover. We cut to an
office where the husband is seen making advances to his
secretary. The director may use symbolism. In Strike, the

5 Virginia Woolf, "The Movies and Reality," New Republic,

xlvii (August 4, 1926), 309.
6 Joseph and Harrv Feldman, Dynamics of the Film. New York,
1952, p. 86.
Novels Into Film 137

shooting down of workers is punctuated by shots of the

slaughter of a steer in a stockyard. In The Blue Angel, birds
are used with consummate artistry as a kind of leitmotif. In
the opening scene, Professor Unrat coos at a caged canary.
Later, having devoted himself to Lola, a music-hall singer, he
watches pigeons flying up against a clock whose bronze
figures ominously mark the passage of time. And at the height
of his degradation, the Professor crows like a cock. The pos-
comments like these, as distinct from verbal
sibility for plastic
renditions of the same effects, is unprecedented in the arts.
A new kind of relationship between animate and inanimate
objects springs up, a relationship which becomes the key to
plastic thinking. Pudovkin points out quite cogently that rela-
tionships between human beings are, for the most part,
illumined by conversation, by words. No one carries on con-
versation with objects, and that is why an actor's relationship
to objects of special interest to the film technician.
is

Within the composition of the frame, the juxtaposition of

man and object becomes crucial. "The performance of an
actor linked with an object and built upon it will always be
one of the most powerful methods of filmic construction." 7
We have only to think of Chaplin to see the principle in
operation. The dancing rolls in The Gold Rush, the supple
cane, the globe dance in The Great Dictator, the feeding
machine in Modern Times, the flowers and drinks in Mon-
sieur Verdoux, the flea skit in Limelight —
these are only
isolated examples of Chaplin's endless facility for inventing
new relationships with objects. He leans on a doorman as
on a lamppost, and the animate becomes inanimate. The
spring of the watch in The Pawnshop comes alive, and the
inanimate becomes animate. The confusion dynamizes the
relationship, and the distinction between man and object
is obliterated. Man and object become interchangeable, and

the inanimate joins the animate as an actor. Certainly this

accounts for a good part of Chaplin's filmic genius.
Not only has the film discovered new ways to render
meanings by finding relationships between animate and inani-
mate objects, but the human physiognomy itself has been

7 V. I. Pudovkin, On Film Technique. Translated by Ivor

Montagu. London, 1929, p. 115.
138 GEORGE BLUESTONE
rediscovered. So pervasive has been the power of the close-up
to convey emotion that in "Der Sichtbaie Mensch" Bela
Balazs places the film on a par with the invention of the
printing press. The method of conveying meaning by facial
expression, a method which according to Balazs fell into
desuetude with the advent of printing, has been revived by
the "microphysiognomy" of the screen image. The face
becomes another kind of object in space, a terrain on which
may be enacted dramas broad as battles, and sometimes more
intense. Physiognomy preempts the domain of nonverbal
experience: "The gestures of visual man are not intended
to convey concepts which can be expressed in words, but
such experiences, such nonrational emotions which
inner
would remain unexpressed when everything that can be
still

told has been told." 8

Just as words are not merely images expressing our
thoughts and feelings, but in many cases their a priori limit-
ing forms, the subtleties of the mobile face not only render
hitherto unrecorded experiences but also create the conditions
for new experiences to come into being. If, then, "the film
increases the possibilities for expression, also widen
it will
the spirit can express." If Balazs goes too far in calling for
it

an "encyclopedia of comparative gesturology," he at least

draws attention to the unprecedented possibilities of the
human face. These possibilities have given rise to a wholly
different kind of acting. The microdrama of the human
countenance permits the reading of the greatest conflicts in
the merest flicker of an eye. Understatement becomes the
key to film characterization. The subtleties of Mme. Falco-
netti's face in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, or of
Giulietta Masina's in Fellini's La Strada would have been
incomprehensible to anyone in the dramatic arts before 1900.
In a real sense, then, Pudovkin is right when he says, "In
the discovered, deeply imbedded detail there lies an element
of perception, the creative element that gives the event shown
its final worth." By selecting and combining, by comparing

and contrasting, by linking disparate spatial entities, photo-

graphed images of "the deeply imbedded detail" allow the

8 Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film. Translated by Edith Bone.

New York, 1953, p. 40.
Novels Into Film 139
film-maker, through editing, to achieve a uniquely cinematic
equivalent of the literary trope.
What Griffith meant by "seeing," then, differs in quality
from what Conrad meant. And effecting mutations from one
kind of seeing to another is necessary not only because the
materials differ but also because the origins, conventions, and
audiences differ as well.
What happens, therefore, when the fllmist undertakes the
adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that
he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts is a kind
—
of paraphrase of the novel the novel viewed as raw material.
He looks not to the organic novel, whose language is insepa-
rable from its theme, but to characters and incidents which
have somehow detached themselves from language and, like
the heroes of folk legends, have achieved a mythic life of
their own. Because this is possible, we often find that the
film adapter has not even read the book, that he has depended
instead on a paraphrase by his secretary or his screen writer.
That is why there is no necessary correspondence between
the excellence of a novel and the quality of the film in which
the novel is recorded.
Under we should not be surprised to
these circumstances,
find a long list of discontented novelists whose works have
been adapted to motion pictures. The novelist seems per-
petually baffled at the exigencies of the new iridium. In film
criticism, it has always been easy to recognize how a poor
film "destroys" a superior novel. What has not been sufficiently
recognized is that such destruction is inevitable. In the fullest
sense of the word, the filmist becomes not a translator for
an established author, but a new author in his own right.
Balazs has, perhaps, formulated the relationship most
clearly. Recognizing the legitimacy of converting the subject,
story, and plot of a novel into cinematic form, Balazs grants
the possibility of achieving successful results in each. Success
is possible because, while "the subject, or story, of both
works is identical, their content is nevertheless different. It
is this different content thatadequately expressed in the
is

changed form resulting from the adaptation." It follows that

the raw material of reality can be fashioned in many different
forms, but a content which determines the form is no longer
such raw material. If I see a woman at a train station, her
140 GEORGE BLUESTONE
face sad, a desperate, watching the approach of a hissing
little

engine, and begin to think of her as a character in a story,

I

she has already, according to Balazs, become "semi-

fashioned" artistic content. If I begin to think of how to
render her thoughts in words, I have begun to evolve a char-
acter in a novel. But if, returning to my impression of that
woman at the station, I begin to imagine Garbo in the role
of Anna Karenina, I have again transformed her into a new
artistic content. 9
In these terms, says Balazs, the fully conscious film-maker
who sets out to adapt a novel.

. . . may
use the existing work of art merely as raw material,
regard from the specific angle of his own art form as if it were
it

raw reality, and pay no attention to the form once already given
to the material. The playwright, Shakespeare, reading a story
by Bandello, saw in it not the artistic form of a masterpiece of
story-telling but merely the naked event narrated in it.

Viewed in these terms, the complex relations between novel

and film emerge in clearer outline. Like two intersecting lines,
novel and film meet at a point, then diverge. At the intersec-
tion, the book and shooting-script are almost indistinguishable.
But where the lines diverge, they not only resist conversion;
they also lose all resemblance to each other. At the farthest
remove, novel and film, like all exemplary art, have, within
the conventions that make them comprehensible to a given
audience, made maximum use of their materials. At this
remove, what is peculiarly filmic and what is peculiarly
novelistic cannot be converted without destroying an integral
part of each. That is why Proust and Joyce would seem as
absurd on film as Chaplin would in print. And that is why
the great innovators of the twentieth century, in film and
novel both, have had so little to do with each other, have
gone their ways alone, always keeping a firm but respectful
distance. . . .

9 For an excellent analysis of contrasting ways in which a lit-

erary story, a filmed story, and human consciousness order reality,

see Albert Laffay, "Le Recit, le Monde, et le Cinema," Les Temps
Modernes, No. 20 (May, 1947), pp. 1361-1375; No. 21 (June,
1947), pp. 1579--1600. See, too, Siegfried Kracauer, "The Found
Story and the Episode," Film Culture, n, No. 1 (1956), 1-5.
Novels Into Film 141

An art whose depend on a moving image, mass audi-

limits
ence, and industrial production is bound to differ from an

art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and

individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of
certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different
artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.
 INGMAR BERGMAN

Film Has Nothing To Do With Literature

"I would say that there is no art form that has so much in
common with film as music."

lngmar Bergman, who retains his position as the leading

stage director in Sweden, has had the rare good fortune to be
substantially free to make films in his own way at Svenskfilm-
industri. Among known titles are The Seventh Seal,
the best
Wild Strawberries, and The Magician. His work, and his way
of working, have stirred both admiration and envy in directors
around the world, many of whom would be glad of the
chance to make films directly in the way an author writes A
book. Not all of them would be so firm as he is, however, in
saying that "we should avoid making films out of books. The
irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its exist-
ence, is often untranslatable into visual terms —
and it, in turn,
destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film."
Even a script, for Bergman, is "an almost impossible task."
Once he has caught a glimpse of an idea, "a brightly colored
thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious,'* he
tries to pursue the delicate task of materializing it, and this
continues throughout the direction and production process.
Montage is "the vital third dimension,'* the musical rhythm
and relationship of pictures, and this indescribable pulsation
is what makes the film breathe. His remarkable description
of the process of creation is followed by a statement about
the dangers of individualism in art —
contrasting with his
practice, yet stirring in its challenge to a widely held ideal.

* lngmar Bergman, "Introduction," Four Screenplays of lngmar

Bergman. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1960. Translated from
the Swedish by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner. Pp. xv-
xviii, xxi-xxii.

142
Film Versus Literature 143

A film for me
begins with something very vague —
a chance
remark or a of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event
bit
unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of
music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes in my
work at the theatre I have envisioned actors made up for yet
unplayed roles.
These are split-second impressions that disappear as quickly
as they come, yet leave behind a mood — like pleasant dreams.
It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding
in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly
colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the uncon-
scious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do it carefully,
a complete film will emerge.
This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form,
moving in a way that may be lazy and half asleep at first.
Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms which
are very special and unique to each film. The picture se-
quences then assume a pattern in accordance with these
rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my
original stimulus.
embryonic substance seems to have enough strength
If that
to be made into a film, I decide to materialize it. Then comes
something very complicated and difficult: the transformation
of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones
and scents into words and sentences, into an understandable
screenplay.
This an almost impossible task.
is

The onlything that can be satisfactorily transferred from

that original complex of rhythms and moods is the dialogue,
and even dialogue is a sensitive substance which may offer
resistance. Written dialogue is like a musical score, almost

incomprehensible to the average person. Its interpretation

demands a technical knack plus a certain kind of imagination
—
and feeling qualities which are so often lacking, even among
actors. One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered,
its rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between lines

all this must be omitted for practical reasons. Such a detailed

script would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as to
location, characterization and atmosphere into my screenplays
in understandable terms, but the success of this depends on
my writing ability and the perceptiveness of the reader, which
are not always predictable.
144 INGMAR BERGMAN
Now we come by which I mean montage,
to essentials,
rhythm and the —
one picture to another the vital
relation of
third dimension without which the film is merely a dead
product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a key, as
in a musical score, nor a specific idea of the tempo which
determines the relationship of the elements involved. It is
quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which the film
"breathes" and pulsates.
I have often wished for a kind of notation which would
enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my
vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film. For
when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere of the
studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and irritating
details that go with motion-picture production, it often takes
a tremendous effort to remember how I originally saw and
thought out this or that sequence, or what was the relation
between the scene of four weeks ago and that of today. If I
could express myself clearly, in explicit symbols, then this
problem would be almost eliminated and I could work with
absolute confidence that whenever I liked I could prove the
relationship between the part and the whole and put my finger
on the rhythm, the continuity of the film.
Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a
film. And there is another important point in this connection
which I should like to mention. Film has nothing to do with
literature; the character and substance of the two art forms
are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with
the receptive process of the mind. The written word is read
and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with
the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the
emotions. The process is different with a motion picture.
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves
for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for
it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly
on our feelings.
Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there
is no art form that has so much in common with film as

music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.
And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in
continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been
my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often
experience a film or play musically.
Film Versus Literature 145

It is mainly because of this difference between film and

literature that we should avoid making films out of books.
The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its
existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms —
and it,
in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film.
If, despite this, we wish to translate something literary into

film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated

adjustments which often bear little or no fruit in proportion
to the effort expended.
I myself have never had any ambition to be an author. I
do not want to write novels, short stories, essays, biographies,
or even plays for the theatre. I only want to make films
films about conditions, tensions, pictures, rhythms and char-
acters which are in one way or another important to me. The
motion picture, with its complicated process of birth, is my
method of saying what I want to my fellow men. I am a
film-maker, not an author.

People ask what are my intentions with my films my aims. —

It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an
evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condi-
tion, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy every-
one, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I
would like my aim to be.
There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was
struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands
of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant
procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the
cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was
completed —master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noble-
men, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and
no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which
are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art
lost its basic creative drive the moment was separated from
it

worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own

sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days
the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory
of God. He lived and died without being more or less im-
portant than other artisans; "eternal values," "immortality"
and "masterpiece" were terms not applicable in his case. The
146 INGMAR BERGMAN
ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished in-
vulnerable assurance and natural humility.
Today the individual has become the highest form and
the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or
pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were
of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his
subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally
gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our
loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing
that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists
stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each
other. We walk by our own anxieties that
in circles, so limited
we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between
the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.
Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose
of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the
artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a
dragon's head, an angel, a devil —
or perhaps a saint out of —
stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction
that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether
I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collec-
tive building of the cathedral.
The Cinematic Essence
 BELA BALAZS

The Faces of Men*

"Man has again become visible."

The Hungarian critic Bela Baldzs looked forward to a

thoroughly revolutionary role for the art of the film. His
vision was not so much political, however as idealistic. His
',

book, Theory of Film, is sprinkled with dubious references to

the "dialectic of history" and other Hegelian-Marxist assump-
tions, but it is basically a collection of insights and suggestions
about ways to use camera, sound, and editing.
Writing in 1923, when the silent film was at a peak of
development in Germany, Baldzs forecast his later interest in
film in an eloquent article. Seldom has anyone so sweepingly
—
declared the value of the visual the many -leveled communi-
cation of action, gesture, facial expression, duration, and de-
sign. "The gestures of visual man are not intended," he
explains, "to convey concepts which can be expressed in
words, but such inner experiences, such non-rational emotions
which would still remain unexpressed when everything that
can be told has been told." It is for this reason he welcomed
the silent film as a rediscovery of man himself, of the spirit
which had become so fragmented, so word-conscious, since
the age of printing.

The discovery of printing gradually rendered illegible the

faces ofmen. So much could be read from paper that the
method of conveying meaning by facial expression fell into
desuetude.
Victor Hugo wrote once that the printed book took over
the part played by the cathedral in the Middle Ages and
became the carrier of the spirit of the people. But the thou-

* Bela Balazs, "Der Sichtbare Mensch," Theory of Film. Lon-

don, Dobson, 1952. Pp. 39-43.

149
150 BELA BALAZS
sands of books tore the one spirit, embodied in the cathedral,
into thousands of opinions. The word broke the stone into a
thousand fragments, tore the church into a thousand books.
The visual spirit was thus turned into a legible spirit and
visual culture into a culture of concepts. This of course had
its social and economic causes, which changed the general

face of life. But we paid little attention to the fact that, in

conformity with this, the face of individual men, their fore-
heads, their eyes, their mouths, had also of necessity and quite
concretely to suffer a change.
At present a new discovery, a new machine is at work to
turn the attention of men back to a visual culture and give
them new faces. This machine is the cinematographic camera.
Like the printing press, it is a technical device for the multi-
plication and distribution of products of the human spirit; its
effect on human culture will not be less than that of the
printing press.
For not to speak does not mean that one has nothing to say.
Those who do not speak may be brimming over with emo-
tions which can be expressed only in forms and pictures, in
gesture and play of feature. The man of visual culture uses
these not as substitutes for words, as a deaf-mute uses his
fingers. He does not think in words, the syllables of which he
sketches in the air like the dots and dashes of the Morse code.
The gestures of visual man are not intended to convey
concepts which can be expressed in words, but such inner
experiences, such non-rational emotions which would still
remain unexpressed when everything that can be told has been
told. Such emotions lie in the deepest levels of the soul and
cannot be approached by words that are mere reflexions of
concepts; just as our musical experiences cannot be expressed
in rationalized concepts. What appears on the face and in
facial expression is a spiritual experience which is rendered

immediately visible without the intermediary of words.

In the golden age of the old visual arts, the painter and
sculptor did not merely fill empty space with abstract shapes
and forms, and man was not merely a formal problem for
the artist. Painters could paint the spirit and the soul without
becoming "literary," for the soul and the spirit had not yet
been confined in concepts capable of expression only by
means of words; they could be incarnated without residue.
That was the happy time when paintings could still have a
The Faces of Men 151

"theme" and an "idea," for the idea had not yet been tied to
the concept and to the word that named the concept. The
artist could present in its primary form of manifestation the
soul's bodily incarnation in gesture or feature. But since then
the printing press has grown to be the main bridge over which
the more remote interhuman spiritual exchanges take place
and the soul has been concentrated and crystallized chiefly in
the word. There was no longer any need for the subtler means
of expression provided by the body. For this reason our bodies
—
grew soulless and empty what is not in use, deteriorates.
The expressive surface of our body was thus reduced to
the face alone and this not merely because the rest of the body
was hidden by clothes. For the poor remnants of bodily ex-
pression that remained to us the little surface of the face
sufficed, sticking up like a clumsy semaphore of the soul and
signalling as best it could. Sometimes a gesture of the hand
was added, recalling the melancholy of a mutilated torso. In
the epoch of word culture the soul learnt to speak but had
grown almost invisible. Such was the effect of the printing
press.
Now the film about to inaugurate a new direction in our
is

culture. Many million people sit in the picture houses every

evening and purely through vision, experience happenings,

characters, emotions, moods, even thoughts, without the need
for many words. For words do not touch the spiritual con-
tent of the pictures and are merely passing instruments of as
yet undeveloped forms of art. Humanity is already learning
the rich and colourful language of gesture, movement and
facial expression. This is not a language of signs as a substi-
tute for words, like the sign-language of the deaf-and-dumb
it is the visual means of communication, without intermediary

of souls clothed in flesh. Man has again become visible.

Linguistic research has found that the origins of language
lie in expressive movement, that is, that man when he began
to speak moved his tongue and lips to no greater extent than
the other muscles of his face and —
body just as an infant does
to-day. Originally the purpose was not the making of sounds.
The movement of tongue and lips was at first the same spon-
taneous gesturing as every other expressive movement of the
body. That the former produced sounds was a secondary,
adventitious phenomenon, wnich was only later used for prac-
tical purposes. The immediately visible message was thus
152 BELA BALAZS
turned into an immediately audible message. In the course of
this process, as in every translation, a great deal was lost.
It is the expressive movement, the gesture, that is the aborig-
inal mother-tongue of the human race.
Now we are beginning to remember and re-learn this
tongue. It is still clumsy and primitive and very far removed
as yet from the refinements of word art. But already it is be-
ginning to be able sometimes to express things which escape
the artists of the word. How much of human thought would
remain unexpressed if we had no music! The now developing
art of facial expression and gesture will bring just as many
submerged contents to the surface. Although these human
experiences are not rational, conceptual contents, they are
nevertheless neither vague nor blurred, but as clear and un-
equivocal as is music. Thus the inner man, too, will become
visible.
But the old man no longer exists to-day and the new
visible
visible man not yet in existence. As I have said before, it
is

is the law of nature that unused organs degenerate and dis-

appear, leaving only rudiments behind. The animals that do

not chew lose their teeth. In the epoch of word culture we
made little use of the expressive powers of our body and have
therefore partly lost that power. The gesturing of primitive
peoples is frequently more varied and expressive than that of
the educated European whose vocabulary is infinitely richer.
A few more years of film art and our scholars will discover
that cinematography enables them to compile encyclopedias
of facial expression, movement and gesture, such as have long
existed for words in the shape of dictionaries. The public,
however, need not wait for the gesture encyclopaedia and
grammars of future academies: it can go to the pictures and
learn it there.
We when we neglected the body as a means
had, however,
of expression, lostmore than mere corporal power of expres-
sion. That which was to have been expressed was also
narrowed down by this neglect. For it is not the same spirit,
not the same soul that is expressed once in words and once in
gestures. Music does not express the same thing as poetry in
a different way —
it expresses something quite different. When

we dip the bucket of words in the depths, we bring up other

things than when we do the same with gestures. But let no
one think that I want to bring back the culture of movement
The Faces of Men 153

and gesture in place of the culture of words, for neither can

be a substitute for the other. Without a rational, conceptual
culture and the scientific development that goes with it there
can be no social and hence no human progress. The connect-
ing tissue of society is the word spoken and written,
modern
without which organization and planning would be impos-
all
sible. On the other hand fascism has shown us where the
tendency to reduce human culture to subconscious emotions
in place of clear concepts would lead humanity.
What I am talking about is only art and even here there is
no question of displacing the more rational art of the word.
There is no reason why we should renounce one sort of
human achievement in favour of another. Even the most
highly developed musical culture need not crowd out some
more rational aspect of culture.
But to return to the simile of the bucket: we know that the
wells that dry up are the wells from which no water is dipped.
Psychology and philology have shown that our thoughts and
feelings are determined a priori by the possibility of expressing
them. Philology is also aware that it is not only concepts and
feelings that create words, but that it is also the other way
round: words give rise to concepts and feelings. This is a form
of economy practised by our mental constitution which desires
to produce unusable things just as little as does our physical
organism. Psychological and logical analysis has shown that
words are not merely images expressing our thoughts and
feelings but in most cases their a priori limiting forms. This
is at the root of the danger of stereotyped banality which so

often threatens the educated. Here again the evolution of the

human spirit is a dialectical process. Its development increases
its means of expression and the increase of means of expres-
sion in its turn facilitates and accelerates its development.
Thus if then the film increases the possibilities of expression,

it will also widen the spirit it can express.

 RALPH BLOCK

Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting

'The movie is a primitive art, equally as the machine age is

a new primitive period in time."

The moralists, on the one hand, and the aestheticians, on

the other, are incapable of measuring the meaning of the
movies, Ralph Block says. This is partly because films are
expected to be like painting or sculpture, arts which he says
"have completed their cycle" The movies exist "a powerful —
psychic magnet, an educing force which draws submerged
dreams from hidden places to the surface of the common life"
It will be some time before we can judge the movies by their
own laws. By that time, they "will have lost their excitement,
but at least they will be aesthetically correct"
Block suggests that literate, cultivated gentlemen don't
make good movie Such men may think of movies
directors.
as a form of theatre or literature, but "it demands at best a
unique kind of imagination a special kind of feeling
. . .

about the relationship between things and things, events and

events The movie is in other words a new way in which
. . .

to see life."

An art may have a large body of aesthetic tradition and be

moribund. It may have none to speak of and be very much
alive. The movies are this kind of art. It is not possible to
understand them, much less truthfully see them, within the
limitations, judgements, and discriminations of the aesthetic
viewpoint. The movies are implicit in modern life; they are in
their very exaggerations — as a living art often may be —an
* Ralph Block, "Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting,"
The Dial, January 1927. Quoted in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), Introduc-
tion to the Art of the Movies. New York, Noonday, 1960. Pp.
101-106.

154
Not Theatre, Not Literature 155
essentialization of that which they reflect. To accurately size
them up, they should be seen functionally, phenomenalistic-
ally, in relation to their audience.
Like music, painting, and the drama in their primitive
stages, the movies are manifestations in some kind of aesthetic
form of a social will and even of a mass religion. They are in
effect a powerful psychic magnet, an educing force which
draws submerged dreams from hidden places to the surface
of the common life. By releasing wishes which are on the
margin of accepted behavior, they partake of the social func-
tion of art. In a transitional civilization the mores of the
people no longer reflect their real social and tribal require-
ments, nor to any appreciable extent their individual and
social hungers. The movies help to disintegrate that which
is socially traditional, and to clear the field for that which, if

not forbidden, has been at least close to the shade of the

tabooed.
Primitive art is usually recognized as art only after it has
become classical. In the manner of ah primitive expression,
the movies violate accepted contemporary canons of taste.
Even as they arouse the sentinels of moral tradition, so they
draw the attack of aestheticians, who are unconsciously meas-
uring expressive works by the standards of those arts that
have completed their cycle, especially painting and sculpture.
But it is absurd to praise or blame the movies in their present
state, or do any more than try to understand them. Whether
the movies or what they reflect represent the Good Life
depends on whose Good Life is being selected. They exist
massively, ubiquitous. It will be time enough to judge them as
an art when they become a historical method of presenting
selected truth, mellowed and tested by time, and captured by
—
an audience saturated with tradition acclimated by use to an
understanding of the laws, intentions, and refinements of the
medium. The movies by that time will have lost their excite-
ment, but at least they will be aesthetically correct.
The movie is a primitive art, equally as the machine age is
a new primitive period in time. But being a machine, the
motion camera is not a simple instrument. Like the pianoforte,
it is an evolved instrument, predicated on the existence and

development of other forms. It is itself still in an evolving

state. Indeed those who make use of it and those who appre-
ciate it without empirical knowledge of its use, have failed
156 RALPH BLOCK
to grasp, except in a loose intuitive sense, a full understanding
of the complicated laws that govern it. Here and there in its
past performance are startling bits of technical excellence,
discoveries of how
the instrument may be properly used in its
own field. Bound
together these form a rude body of tech-
nique, already complicated, but not yet pushed to any im-
portant limits by personal genius, nor classified significantly
in use by any development of important schools.
It is fashionable to say that the camera is impersonal, but
those who use the camera know this is untrue. Indeed, even
abstractly, no more impersonal than a steel chisel, or a
it is

camel's-hair brush. The camera is on the one hand as inti-

mate as the imagination of those who direct it; on the other
hand it has a peculiar selective power of its own. Its mechan-
ism is governed by an arbitrary set of rhythms sixteen —
—
images to each foot of celluloid and reality is seized by the
camera according to a mathematical ratio, established between
the tempo of what is in front of the lens and the tempo of the
machine itself. The camera is also governed by another set of
relations, which have to do with light and its refraction
through lenses. These are no less arbitrary in a physical sense,
but within their limits they are open to a large number of
gradations and variations, according to the human will behind
them. Far from being impersonal, the camera may be said to
have pronounced prejudices of rhythm.
Most critical discussion of pantomime in the movies is
vapor. Screen pantomime is not pantomime in the conven-
tional Punch and Judy sense. In the theatre, pantomime is in
the large, a matter of long curves of movement. On the screen
the lens intervenes between the eye and its objective. The
camera not only magnifies movement but it also analyzes
action, showing its incompletions. It is indeed more prejudiced
than the human helping the eye to detect false
eye itself,
rhythms in the utterance of action, or an absence of relation-
ship between sequences of movement, where the eye alone
might fail. The intervention of the camera necessitates not
only a modification of what might be called the wave length
of pantomime for the screen, but also a more closely knitted
flow of movement. Traditional pantomime on the stage is a
highly schematized and rigid organization of units of move-
ment in which every motion has a definite traditional mean-
ing. But for the camera, movement must be living, warm,
Not Theatre, Not Literature 157
vital, and flowing rather than set and defined an alpha-
in
bet of traditional interpretation. Like Bergsonian time, it must

seem to renew and re-create itself out of the crest of each

present moment. It is in this sense that it resembles music.
It is also because of this necessity that the stage actor who
essays the screen is often exposed at the outset in all the
barrenness of habitual gesture and stock phrasing of move-
ment.
Experience rather than theory has taught many actors on
the screen the need of plasticity, composure, modulation of
gesture, and an understanding of how to space movement
a sense of timing. The screen actor at his best the Beerys, —
—
Menjous, and Negris tries to give fluency to pantomime, so
that action may melt out of repose into repose again, even
in those moments when an illusion of arrested action is in-
tended. He recognizes that against his own movement as a
living organic action is the cross movement of the celluloid.
It is only by long experience that the motion-picture actor

discovers a timing which is properly related to the machine;

but that experience has already produced screen pantomimists
whose rhythmic freshness and vitality the modern stage can
rarely match.
The actor is the living punctuation of reality. He is con-
scious and has the power to make his action valid in an
imaginative sense. But Appearance —
the face of Nature is —
itself sprawling and only vaguely connotative. Words are
packed with the reverberations of human history; Appear-
ance on the other hand, must be selected, organized, and re-
lated to ideas that conform to the limitations and possibilities
of the camera, before it can be robbed of inanity and made
significant.
All this is the function of the director. The movies are full
of mediocre directors. But, comparatively, there are not as
many poor motion-picture directors as there are poor musi-
cians, painters, and creative writers in the world; it is easier
to go to school and become any of these than it is to direct
a motion picture. In its present state of development, motion-
picture direction demands not only logic, tact, sensibility, the
ability to organize and control human beings and multifarious
materials, and the power to tell a story dramatically, but it
also requires a gift which cannot be learned in any school.
This is a richness, even grossness, in the director's feeling for
158 RALPH BLOCK
Life, and abundance of perception, a copious emotional reflex
to the ill-assorted procession of existence.
Good motion-picture direction has little to do with literacy
or cultivation in its conventional sense. Several of the most
cultivated and literate gentlemen in the movies are among
the most prosaic directors. They have brought with them a
knowledge of other arts, which has blinded them to the essen-
tial quality of the camera. They think of the movies as a form

of the theatre, of literature, or of painting. It is none of these

things. It demands at best a unique kind of imagination which
parallels these arts but does not stem from them. It is true
that the rigid economic organization of the modern studio
demands the same kind of prevision and preparation on the
part of the director as on the part of any other creator. Even
aside from urgencies of this kind, the St. Clairs, Lubitschs,
Duponts, Eisensteins, are under the same imaginative neces-
sity to organize their material as a Cezanne or Beethoven. But
there the similarity ceases. Directors of this kind know that
their greatest need is the power to seize reality — in its widest
sense —and make it significant in forms of motion. This power,
this understanding, is a gift by itself. It requires a special kind
of eye, a special kind of feeling about the relationship between
things and things, events and events, and an intuitive as well
as empirical knowledge of how to make the camera catch
what that eye sees and that imagination feels. It has nothing
to do with words, as such, nor with history or politics or any
of the traditional matters which are politely assumed to repre-
sent cultivation, and which so often debase the metal of the
imagination.
The movie is in other words a new way in which to see life.
a way born to meet the needs of a new life. It is a way
It is
of using the machine to see what the machine has done to
human beings. It is for this reason that the best motion-
picture directors arise from strange backgrounds, with a
secure grasp on techniques of living rather than on academic
attitudes. They are not always preoccupied with proving that
life is so small that it can be caught in the net of art. It is
the pragmatic sanction hovering over them which offends
academicians.
Here and there are indications that the movie is arising out
of its phenomenalistic background into the level now occu-
pied by the novel and the theatre, touched by the same spirit
Not Theatre, Not Literature 159

of light irony, and predicating the orientation of a special

audience. But there are no signs at the moment that it can
rise higher than this point. Pictures such as The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari are interesting laboratory results in experimental
psychology, but they have as little to do with the direct suc-
cession of the motion picture as Madame Tussaud's has to do
with Rodin. The Last Laugh and The Battleship Potemkin
are technical explosions, important only in their power to
destroy old procedures and light the path ahead.
American directors have always mistaken cruelty on the
one hand and sentimental realism on the other, for irony.
Satisfaction for the sadistic hunger of the crowd is present in
almost all popular entertainment. Griffith early understood this
crowd desire, and his technique in exploiting it has filtered
through a thousand pictures since. De Mille, Von Stroheim,
Brenon, and the many unnamed have all used it in one form
or other. But none has reached irony empty of brutality an —
unobstructed god-like view of the miscalculations of existence,
yet touched by human compassion. There are no Hardys nor
Chekhovs in the movies. The Last Laugh dribbled out into
German sentimentality, although in substance it seemed fa-
miliarly like one of Constance Garnett's translations. The
—
comedians Keaton and Langdon as well as Chaplin have —
touched near the edge of true irony, but only as children
might. Chaplin rose to the intention in A Woman of Paris,
but his forms were conventional and worn, cast in the cliches
of irony of cheap fiction.
In the end, what remains wonderful about the movie is its
instrument. Its ideas are still sentimental or bizarre, reflecting
the easy hungers of and of today's shifting surface of
life,

life; it fails as yet to draw from the deep clear wells of human

existence. Aside from its need of another kind of audience

even another world, a deep ironic point of view in the motion
picture would require a great individual spirit equipped with
a true knowledge of the medium. And none of this kind has
arisen. He is rare in any art and any time.
 MACK SENNETT

Cloud-Cuckoo Country*

"We made funny pictures as fast as we could for money.

1

Creator of slapstick, discoverer of the custard pie, pro-

moter of "bathing beauties" and launcher of the Keystone
Cops, Mack Sennett was the first and perhaps the greatest
impresario of comedy. Presiding over his inner circle of direc-
tors and accountants from an enormous bathtub housed in a
tower, he literally kept watch over the hard-pressed shenani-
gans of a horde of ill-paid jesters. Ruthless in the cutting room,
as in the story conference, he showed the world what to do
with fast action, wild characterization, and camera tricks. He
took the commonplaces of daily life and carried them to
hilarious extremes of absurdity. He used the resources of the
screen to satisfy everyone's suppressed desire to see things
blow up.
Recent wide-screen comedies of the chase and even some—
—
of the more solemn spy pictures are actually tributes to
Sennett, fondly imitating (sometimes with embarrassing literal-
ness) the fantastic mayhem he put on the screen. "We knew
we were experimenting with something new," he says. But he
is when he notes that "it seems to
his old mischievous self
be fashionable among educated writers to claim that we cre-
ated a new art form in those morning-glory times" The critics
and historians, he points out, taking us down a peg or two,
always come after the event, with "all the philosophizing and
the explaining and the phrases with lace on them."

We heard our first picture before we saw it, although sound

didn't arrive in motion pictures until fifteen years later. A
Shriners' parade, stepping to oom-pah and brass, was march-
ing up Main Street.

* Mack Sennett, King of Comedy (as told to Cameron Shipp).

Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1954. Pp. 86-90.

160
Cloud-Cuckoo Country 161

"A gorgeous welcome to you it is indeed, O Maestro Mack

Napoleon Sennett!" said Mabel.
"Now, hold your gorgeous, yapping mouth shut for just a
minute," I said. "Maybe it is exactly that. Let's have a look
and make a dollar."
The parade was a whopper and itwould take a long time
to pass a given point. A given point in my mind was a free
lunch or wherever I could set up the camera and shoot unpaid
actors.
"We got us a spectacle, kids," I said. "Bauman and Kessel
are always hollering about costs. Look at that crowd scene
all free!"
Ford Sterling was hungry, Mabel wanted to go to the hotel.
Fred Mace had seen a parade before. They held back. Pathe
Lehrman got what I meant.
"What's the story, boss?" Pathe asked.
"Got no story. We'll make it up as we go along," I said.
"Pathe, run over there to the department store and buy a
baby doll. Here's a dollar and a half. Jim, you get the camera
set up on the corner. Ford, you put on a tall overcoat and
make like an actor."
Mabel Normand could throw herself into any part instantly,
even into a part that didn't exist.
"Who am I?" was all she asked when she saw we were
under way.
"A mother," I said.
"I would be the last to know," Mabel commented.
"Now take this doll," I ordered. "It's your baby. Get
going. Run up and down the line of march and embarrass
those Shriners. Make out that
—
—I'm a poor
" lorn working girl, betrayed in the big city,
searching for the father of my chee-iuld." Mabel finished the
sentence. "This characterization requires a shawl. Who ever
heard of a poor, forlorn little mother without a shawl over
her poor little head?"
"Right," I said. "Get her a shawl, Pathe."
Mabel put on the comicalest act you ever clapped eyes on,
pleading, stumbling, holding out her baby and the reactions —
she got from those good and pious gentlemen in the parade
were something you couldn't have caught on film after six
days of D. W. Griffith rehearsals. Men were horrified,
162 MACK SENNETT
abashed, dismayed. One kind soul dropped out and tried to
help Mabel.
"Move in, Ford," I told Sterling. Ford leaped in and started
a screaming argument with the innocent Shriner, who didn't
know he was being photographed to make a buck for Key-
stone.
The police moved on Ford and Mabel. Ford fled, leaping,
in
insulting the police, — —
and they God bless the police! they
chased him. I helped the cameraman and we got it all.
The Shriners were good, but the best scenes we nabbed
were the running cops. I never got their names, but if there
are any retired gentlemen of the Los Angeles Police Depart-
ment who remember taking part in that incident, let them
bask in fame: they were the original Keystone Cops.
We didn't even pause at the Alexandria Hotel. We went
straight out to Edendale to our little studio, shot a few more
scenes and close-ups to tie the picture together, and we had
our first comedy. I wired Kessel and Bauman: "Got a spec-
tacle first day and it's a whopper."
Kessel insisted for years later that the wire said, "Got
pickled first day and it was a whopper."
Anything on film made money.
The only requirement was that it be reasonably new. Thea-
tres, states'-rights franchise holders, distributors were starved
for pictures. That is why some of the unlikeliest people in
the world became parents of the new art. Some were sweat-
shop operators, bicycle repairmen, junk-heap scavengers,
cloak-and-suit manufacturers, ex-bookmakers, and there was
a prominent ex-boilermaker named Mack Sennett.
Well, pioneers are seldom from the nobility. There were
no dukes on the Mayflower,
We hopped aboard the new thing and went to town. The
town you think of in association with movies is Hollywood,
but in the era when Woodrow Wilson was proving that a
great scholar could be a great president, and tap-dancing with
his daughters after supper in the White House, we were mainly
concerned with the carryings-on in Edendale. Time does
gallop on: the site of the first custard pie, Keystone Cops,
and Bathing Beauty studio is now halfway between two newer
landmarks, Aimee Semple McPherson's temple and Forest
Lawn Cemetery.
Overnight our place was busting its seams with idiotics.
Cloud-Cuckoo Country 163

Anything went, and every fool thing you might think of under
the influence of hashish or a hangover went big.
We were awash with pretty women, clowns, and story-
tellers who couldn't write. We made a million dollars so fast
my fingers ached from trying to count.

Let me catch my breath before leaping into that Cloud-

Cuckoo land of laissez faire and turvy-topsy. Hear this:
Nowadays it seems to be fashionable among educated
writers to claim that we created a new art form in those
morning-glory times. They proclaim that our chase sequences
and rhythms derived from classic ballet. Critics have come
up with grand new phrases like "cineplastic art" and "unfailing
precision of technique." A famous Frenchman wrote a book
about us in which he claimed we were "poetic creators of
myths and symbols who conceived the universe in its totality
and translated it in terms of motion pictures."
My! . . .

Now, won't contradict anybody, not right out in public,

I

anyway, who wants to announce me as a wonderful fellow

and the creator of a new kind of art. When you consider it
and when you tell your false modesty to quit squirming, we
did create a new kind of art. But while we were doing it
we had no more notion of contributing to aesthetics than a
doodlebug contributes to the Atlantic Monthly.
We did the best we could with what we had.
We made funny pictures as fast as we could for money.
We knew we were experimenting with something new but —
has there ever been a performer, or a creative person of any
kind, from a talented potato peeler to Picasso, who didn't
think he was original? But we didn't rear back and publish
manifestoes like the modern poets and painters nobody can
understand. All the philosophizing and the explaining and the
phrases with lace on them, like "cineplastic art," came much
later.
Of course comedy is a satire on the human race. It always
has been. That is what clowns have been up to ever since kings
kept fools. Our specialty was exasperated dignity and the dis-
combombulation of Authority. We whaled the daylights out
of everything in sight with our bed slats, and we had fun
doing it. We cut our pictures sharply, having learned how
from D. W. Griffith, and we did get "pace" into them. But if
164 MACK SENNETT
someone had pointed out that our sequences of leaping cops
and fleeing comedians were an art form derived from the
classic ballet, we'd have hooted like crazy and thrown a pie
at him.
I never saw a ballet.
This brings me around to a contradiction. My people were
—
artists, all right, and great ones. Chaplin well, you can use
all the learned words you want to about him and you'll proba-
bly be right. A genius. Mabel, and the Conklins, Mace, Buster
Keaton, Ben Turpin, W. C. Fields, all those wonderful clowns
were persons of enormous talent.
But not self-conscious. We merely went to work and tried
to be funny, and there really was a wonder and a miracle
then that no amount of expensive grammar can explain: I,
Mack Sennett, the Canadian farm boy, the boilermaker, was
the head man.
 HERBERT READ

Towards o Film Aesthetic*

"Film is the art of space-time: it is a space-time continuum."

Sir Herbert Read, a philosopher and student of aesthetics,

wrote these notes on the art of the film in 1932 and 1933,
long before he was knighted for his contributions to the under-
standing of art. His interest in the film was that of a truly
educated man, who feels the need to be curious and to analyze
any important phenomenon.
When he lists the dimensions of movement on the screen,
he misses one of the important ones the movement brought —
about by the editing process itself. But he is aware of the
importance of editing: "Montage is mechanized imagination.
. .It is the most important stage in the whole process of
.

film-production, aesthetically considered.'* He says that paint-

ing concerned with synthesis, whereas the cinema is "es-
is

sentially analysis." He reminds us that the film "must be

composed directly out of the lumbering material of the actual
visible world." He also suggests that the film is so free it is

"a runaway," that "itsonly unity is continuity."

The aesthetic of an art is always resented by the practitioner,

and perhaps there is a particular reason why theory should not
obtrude itself on the art of the film. That art is not yet formed,
and to theorise about something which is not yet fully in
being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion. But one
kind of aesthetics is essentially a priori: it is the discovery of
universal laws of art, and if the film is to be an art, then these

* Herbert
Read, "Towards a Film Aesthetic," Cinema Quar-
terly,Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1932, pp. 7-10, 11. Also "The Poet
and the Film," Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer 1933,
p. 202.

165
166 HERBERT READ
theoretical considerations are as relevant to it as to any
other and can guide its line of development.
art,
// the film is an art —
but what else can it be? A technical
process? But so is etching, for example; so is every art that
uses a tool. To determine whether a given process is an art
—
or not, we need ask only one question does it involve selec-
tion? For selection implies (a) a standard for which selection
is made; (b) sensibility to distinguish according to this stand-

ard. The exercise of sensibility in the interests of a standard

is an elementary definition of art. Selection, I think it can be

shown, is the very first principle of the film; the film is there-
fore essentially an art.
The film is visual. That fact immediately links it from the —
point of view of aesthetics —
with the visual or, as they are
more commonly but less accurately called, the plastic arts.
— —
"Moving pictures" the Movies that is the most descriptive
title which has ever been given to the film. Picture and Move-

ment: that is the definition of a film, and if we can introduce

into the aesthetics of pictorial art the modifications required
by this new
factor, then we shall have an aesthetic of the film.
But not so simple as it sounds. To introduce this new
it is

factor into the picture involves conditions which almost en-

tirely separate pictorial art (let us say painting) from the film.
—
This is the essential distinction even opposition between —
the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjec-
tively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the func-
tion of the scenario writer —
in actual practice it is rated very
—
low we must recognise that the film is not composed directly
and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like
paint, but must be composed directly out of the lumbering
material of the actual visible world.
Painting is a synthesis (I ignore the crude notion that it
is imitation); the film is essentially analysis. The painter com-

poses within his mind (that is to say, makes a synthesis of)

selected elements of his visual experience. (In the actual proc-
ess of composition he goes beyond his experience, guided by
imagination and sensibility.) The director of a film begins
with the same visual experience, but he is anchored to his
material. To make his material significant significant of —
—
more than its actuality, its news value he must break the
—
continuity of his vision jump from one stepping-stone of
Towards a Film Aesthetic 167
significance to another. He must analyse the scene for its sig-

nificant aspects. (For example, in films like Rain or Pierement

the camera's motto is "Say when." The producer goes about<