CHAPTER X

MASTERY IN THE MOVIES

Who is the legitimate master in movie making? It is, of course, the director, and he should take complete command over the plot action of the photoplay, over the players and their accessories, over the settings and those who make the settings, over the camera men, over the cutters, joiners, and title writers; in short, over all those who are co-workers in photoplay making. If this mastery cannot be obtained; if writers and players and scene painters will not agree to shed their royal purple for the badge of service; if all those who co-operate in making a photoplay cannot see that the product must be judged by its total effect and not by mere details of performance, then, of course we shall never have art upon the screen.

But it is usually very difficult for the director to take and keep complete command. Among the first rebels against his authority is the writer of the story which is to be filmed. It would be best, of course, if the director could originate his own plot, as a painter conceives his idea for a painting, or if he could, at least, prepare his own scenario as studiously as the painter makes his own preliminary sketches for a painting. But, under the present system, these two tasks of movie making can only in exceptional cases be performed in detail by the same person. The next best thing, then, is for the writer to limit himself to the bare subject matter of a picture, that is, the general action in which the characters are involved, while the director takes the responsibility for the pictorial treatment of this subject matter.

Now comes an interesting question. Which has the more artistic weight on the screen, the treatment of the subject, that is the presentation of the story pictorially, or the subject as such regardless of its presentation? The same question may be asked of any masterpiece of art; is it distinctive because of the subject matter or because of what the artist has done to that subject matter? In other words, would the subject matter remain distinctive even if it were badly treated?

There are sometimes happenings in real life that can hold one’s unwavering attention, no matter how poorly presented in language or picture. For example, if a panic-stricken idiot were to rush to you and say, “It were quick, oh, explosion by Wall Street and lots of fellers shut up dead and J. P. Morgan’s windows all over bloody men every way,” you would be shocked--not amused--and you would not stop to consider the ridiculous language of the report. And if by some strange coincidence a camera man had secured a motion picture of that explosion in Wall Street, you would be curious to see that picture, and would undoubtedly be impressed by it, no matter how ineffective might be its photography or pictorial composition.

In fiction there may be certain chains of incidents, such as the action of a detective story, which might carry a strong dramatic appeal, even though the language of the narrator were crude, confused, obscure, weak, and of no beauty appropriate to the thing expressed. “There may be,” we say; but all self-respecting writers will agree with us that language-proof stories are extremely rare. The story is usually impressive because of the telling, and not in spite of it.

In the motion picture, naturally, the telling is not in words, but in arrangements of lines and shapes, of tones and textures, of lights and shadows, these values being either fixed or changing, and exhibited simultaneously or in succession. Whatever arrangement the director makes comes directly to us in the theater. Barring accident we see it unchanged on the screen, and, as far as we are concerned, it is the only treatment which the story has.

It is true, of course, that cinematographic treatment may be vaguely suggested by written or spoken words; it may be more definitely suggested by drawings; but it can never actually be given either by words or drawings. Even the director himself cannot know definitely, in advance of the actual rehearsing and taking of the picture, just what the composition will be. He may plan in advance, but he does not actually compose until the players are on the scene and the camera “grinding.” During those moments are created the actual designs which become fixed permanently in the film.

Turning from pictures for a moment, let us consider the relation between plot and treatment in literary art. It is interesting to study Shakespeare’s attitude toward the material which he borrowed for his plays. Glance through the introduction and notes of any school text, and you will see that the plot which came to his hand ready-made was not held sacred. He twisted it, tore out pieces from it, or spun it together with other plots similarly altered. And even then the altered plot, though an improvement over the raw material, was not a masterpiece; it was only a better framework for masterly treatment.

In the art of Shakespeare it is the telling, not the framework, of the story that counts. Hence any play of his becomes a poor thing indeed if you take away from it the tone-color of his words, the rhythm of his lines, the imaginative appeal of his imagery, the stimulating truth in his casual comment on character and deed. When a play of Shakespeare is filmed, those literary values are lost; it cannot in the nature of the motion picture be otherwise.

On the other hand, the distinctive value and particular charm of a photoplay lies in its pictorial treatment, in what the director does pictorially with the subject in hand. And that distinctive value would in turn be lost if some one else attempted to transfer the picture to a literary medium.

In view of all this it is surely fair to say that if a writer and a picture-maker were to co-operate in producing a piece of literature, the writer should be in command; but when they co-operate in producing a picture the picture-maker should be in command.

Now when the director is in command of the story, what does he do with it? He may permit the incidents to stand in their original order, or he may change or omit or add. But in any case he sweeps away the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs which describe the places of the action, and erects instead real settings, or selects suitable “locations” from already existing settings. He marshals forth real human beings to perform the parts which are described in words. He divides the action into limited periods of time, and decides how to connect these periods visually so that the pictorial movement on the screen may be a flowing unity. The director, not the writer, does this; and, if he were satisfied to do less, he would be only partly a director. His work is not the “translation” of literature into motion pictures; it is a complete substitution of motion pictures for literature.

When we analyze pictorial composition on the screen we must proceed as we have done throughout this book. We must look at it from the point of view of the spectator in the theater. The spectator does not see the setting with one eye and the actors with the other, he does not separate the respective movements of human beings, animals, trees, water, fire, etc., as they play before him, and he does not disconnect any one scene from the scenes which precede or follow it. To him everything on the screen is connected with everything else there. The connection may be strong or weak, bad or beautiful, but it is nevertheless a connection. This ought to be clear enough to any one who gives the matter any thought; yet there are scene designers who appear to believe that their setting is a complete work of art quite independent of the actors, for whom and with whom it ought to be composed, and there are certainly any number of players who look upon themselves as stars that dwell apart.

We do not underestimate the individual power of the player as an interpreter of the deeds and emotions of dramatic characters. Pantomimic acting is one of the most personal of arts, yet the acting in a photoplay is a somewhat smaller factor in the total result than acting in the stage pantomime; and neither kind of acting can compare in importance with acting in the stage play, where the magic of the actor’s voice works its spell upon the audience.

In the photoplay the player, whether at rest or in action, is usually the emphatic part of the picture; but he is only a part, and the relation between that part and the other parts of the picture can best be established by the director. If the player attempts to compose the picture in which he appears, he is handicapped, not only because he cannot see himself, but also because he cannot see any other portion of the composition from the same point of view as the ultimate spectator who is temporarily represented by the director. He is, in fact, in danger of spoiling his own pantomime, of destroying his own power.

The frequent abuse of the close-up, for example, is often due to the mistaken idea that an actor’s facial expression is the sole means of representing emotion. To think that dramatic pantomime consists of making faces is just as foolish as to think that dancing is merely a matter of shaking the feet and legs. It is really as important for a screen actress to be able to show grief with her elbows or knees as for a dancer to have rhythm in her neck. The “star” actress, therefore, who insists on several facial close-ups per reel reveals a lack of capability in her own art, as well as an over-developed appreciation of her own looks. The further objection to the close-up is that it takes the player out of the picture. For the moment all the setting, all the other players are shut off from sight. It is as though a painter, while entertaining a group of friends with a view of a newly finished work, were suddenly to cover the whole painting except a single spot, and then to say, “Now forget the rest of the picture, and just look at this spot. Isn’t it wonderful?”

The player should, of course, always be in perfect union with the rest of the picture, yet carrying as much emphasis as the story demands. But even when the player wisely desires to remain in the picture, he should not be allowed to determine his own position, pose, or movement there. He is, after all, only a glorified model with which the artist works.

When an actress moves about in a room, for example, she cannot know that to the eye of the camera her nose seems to collide with the corner of the mantel-piece, that her neck is pressed out of shape by a bad shadow, that her gesture points out some gim-crack of no dramatic significance at the moment, that her movement is throwing her out of balance with some other movement in the scene, that her walking, sitting, or rising appears awkward, in spite of the fact that it feels natural and rhythmical to her. These and a thousand other accidents of composition can be avoided only by the player’s instant obedience to an alert and masterful director who can stop or guide the moving factor in the picture as surely as a painter can stop or guide his brush.

When the action takes place out of doors, or in an interior setting with considerable depth, the player is still more ignorant of what the composition looks like to the eye of the camera. Whether the movement of a particular person will harmonize with a swaying willow tree and with the shadows playing over the ground, can be discovered only by experiments viewed from the angle of the camera. And even then, after the action has been carefully planned through a succession of rehearsals, it may have to be varied during the actual “shooting.” A sudden change of wind or light or an unexpected movement of a dog or horse may bring in a new factor that must be instantly taken into account.

At the beginning and end of a scene the player should be especially pliable under the hands of the director, because the latter alone knows what the cinematic connection is to be with the preceding and following scenes. The lack of control in this pictorial continuity is often evident on the screen. Separate scenes become little dramas in themselves, and the whole photoplay is then really a succession of acts, with a structure always tending to fall apart, instead of cohering firmly into a unity. The peculiar difficulty in the movies is that the scenes are not taken in the same order as they are projected in the theater. On the screen the scenes shift more quickly than the actors could pass from one setting to the next, and yet the actual taking of those actions may have been weeks or even months apart. This is so because it is more economical to let the particular setting, and not the continuity of action, determine the grouping of the “shots.”

Thus, for example, the scenes numbered 9, 22, 25, 41, 98, and 133, with a drawing-room as setting, may all be taken on a single day, while numbers 8, 40, and 134, with a street as setting, may be taken some other day. And still another group of disconnected scenes may be taken a month later “on location” hundreds of miles away. This may be a fine system of efficiency for the manufacturer, but it often plays havoc with pictorial continuity. When an actress goes directly from