CHAPTER XI

THE MYSTERIOUS EMOTIONS OF ART

The end of all aspiring mastery in the movies is to provide for every beholder the thrills of art. These thrills are not like the emotions which are aroused by other experiences of life, by sports, for example, or adventure, or amusements, or industry, or war. They are stirring experiences quite different from those of him who makes a “home run” or a “touch-down,” or “loops the loop” in the air, or sinks a submarine, or has a play accepted, or discovers a new way of evading some obnoxious law. It is true that the dramatic content of a photoplay may sometimes seem so real that the beholder forgets where he is and responds with such natural feelings as fear and triumph, love and hate, pride, selfish desire and hope; but it is also true that the pictorial form of a photoplay, that is, the mere arrangement of the substance, considered apart from its meaning, can arouse strange, pleasurable emotions which are peculiar to the enjoyment of art.

When we recall the masterpieces of painting which have thrilled us we must admit that much of their appeal came from other factors besides the content of the picture. Think of a portrait of some Dutchman painted by Rembrandt. The painting stirs you as the Dutchman himself in real life never could have stirred you. You may be impressed by the likeness of the portrait, by the engaging character of the person portrayed, and by some significant truth expressed in that portrayal. But that is not all. You are also stirred by the colors in the painting, by the peculiar arrangement of lines and shapes. That emotion which you get from the form and medium itself, rather than from the subject, is a characteristic art-emotion.

We are not now speaking of such qualities as unity, emphasis, balance, and rhythm. They are indeed fundamental needs in pictorial composition, and yet a photoplay may have all of those qualities without possessing any strong appeal as art. A motion picture, like a painting, must possess other, more subtle, qualities if it is to make any lasting impression upon our souls. What these mysterious qualities really are, we do not presume to know. At the same time we believe that a discussion of them will be stimulating and helpful both to “movie fans” and movie makers. Suppose we endeavor to isolate four of these mysterious qualities in art and call them poignancy, appeal to the imagination, exquisiteness, and reserve.

Any one who goes frequently to the movies must have felt more than once a certain poignancy, a strange fascination in some pictorial arrangement, in some curiously appealing movement on the screen. Perhaps such a feeling came when you saw a “dissolve” for the first time. Perhaps the slow dying away of a scene, even while a new one was dawning before you, gave a pang of pleasure never felt before, not even in the magic blending of dreams. A “queer feeling” you may have called it, and you may have been less aware of it as the novelty wore off in later shows. Then it came again when you saw an accelerated motion picture which showed a plant growing from seed to blossom within a few minutes. And still again you felt it when in some slow-motion picture you saw a horse floating through the air. But time went on and the frequent repetition of these effects made their appeal less poignant.

In each case the thing that stirred you was due to a novelty of mechanics, a trick of cinematography. But you can get that emotion without waiting for a new mechanical invention. It may come also from the pictorial composition, from some peculiar patternings of things, whether fixed or moving, within the picture itself. A striking illustration of this may be found in the German photoplay, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” which has been described in the preceding chapter. It contains at least two scenes in which extremely simple arrangements kindle strange flares of emotion. One of these moments comes in the scene which is represented by the “still” shown opposite page 179. Here we see Cesare, the hypnotized sleep-walker, slinking along an alley of weird lights and shadows. We know from earlier scenes that he is bent on committing some new crime. His face is ghastly and his lanky frame is tightly clothed in black. He emerges into a bright glare and stretches forth his arm in an unhuman gesture, as though he were going to glide serpent-wise up the very side of the wall. This movement makes a strange pattern and sends through us a flash of--shall we call it a sweet shudder or a horrible delight?--something poignant and unforgettable.

A similar experience of emotion comes to us a few minutes later in the same play when Cesare carries off the heroine from her bedchamber. This scene reveals a broad sea of billowy linen, evidently a bed, yet large enough for a whole bevy of heroines. Cesare appears outside a window, which seems to crumble at his touch. He enters the chamber and, dagger in hand, reaches out toward the head of the sleeping lady. We gasp at her fate, because we forget that this is only a play. That gasp is an expression of pity, a familiar emotion. But a mysterious emotion is in store for us. Cesare is spellbound by the lady’s beauty. He drops his dagger. Then suddenly he gathers her up, and, holding her against the side of his body, starts for the window. As he does so a sudden striking pattern is produced by the movement. In his haste Cesare has caught up some of the bed linen along with his prey, and this white expanse darts after him in a sudden inward-rushing movement from the remote corners of the bed. Instantly a strange sensation shoots through us. This sharp emotion, both painful and pleasing, is not pity, or hate, or fear. It does not relate itself to the villain’s violence against an innocent, defenseless girl. It is merely a “queer feeling” caused by that striking motion-pattern of the snowy linen whisked unexpectedly from the bed.

To one who has been emotionally affected by such things as the “dissolve” and retarded motion and the peculiar effects in “Dr. Caligari” the above paragraphs may give some idea of what we mean by poignancy in composition. It is a real quality tinged with an unreality that allies it with the effects which we experience in dreams. Any cinema composer who can strike this note of poignancy at least once in every photoplay that he produces may justly demand that his work be classed with the fine arts.

Another elusive quality, found all too seldom in the movies, is the appeal to imagination. Such an appeal may come from things in real life or from that life which art reflects; it may come also from the artist’s medium and composition. Thus, for example, some people can imagine melodious sounds when they look at colors in a painting, and nearly every one can imagine colors when listening to music. The motion picture’s appeal to the imagination has been treated at some length in Chapter VI of “The Art of Photoplay Making,” and we shall, therefore, be brief about it here. An illustration may be furnished by a sea-shell. We hold it to our ears and hear a low musical sound which makes us imagine the surf of the sea, sweetly vague. A similar, yet more subtle, delight may come from a picture of some person doing the same thing. Such a picture is to be found in the Fox film version of Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” Gabriel picks up a sea-shell and holds it to his ear. Instantly we imagine the sound which he hears. We also imagine the sea which that imagined sound suggests. And, if we are particularly sensitive, we may even try to imagine what Gabriel imagines. All this is delightful, a genuine emotional response to the art of the screen. But we are immediately insulted by an ugly anti-climax. Quick as a flash, our fancies are killed by a cut-in picture of a stretch of real sea. Now we must look; we may no longer imagine.

The above is a typical example of both imaginative and unimaginative treatment in a motion picture. Any reader can go to the movies and collect a hundred similar examples in a few evenings. Over and over again a director will lead us to the threshold of beautiful fancy, only to slam the door of hard realism against our faces. Why is this? Is it because the director thinks that audiences are incapable of exercising and enjoying their imaginations? Or is it only because he wants to get more footage for the film?

As though it were not bad enough to spoil the pictorial beauty of cinema composition, many directors proceed to spoil the charm of other arts, too. Poetry, for instance, may weave her spells elsewhere, but not upon the screen. Even the simplest poetic statement must be vulgarized by explanation. “Movie fans” are not considered intelligent enough to be trusted with the enjoyment of even such harmless imagery as

“There is a tide in the affairs of men Which taken at the turn leads on to fortune.”

During all the three hundred years since those lines were written, probably no illustrator of Shakespeare’s plays ever felt called upon to draw a picture of that tide, and probably no actor ever strove to represent it on the stage by voice or gesture. But in De Mille’s photoplay “Male and Female,” where the passage is quoted, the lines on the screen must be accompanied by a photograph of surf, which was evidently intended to represent the tide!

Shakespeare’s poetic image was thus killed by a single shot. But it sometimes takes more ingenuity to destroy a charm. Take, for instance, this descriptive line from “Evangeline”:

“When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”

Those words are surely full of emotional, imaginative appeal. Yes, but not for the director of the Fox “Evangeline.” He inserts the line as a title, then shows Evangeline strolling over a forest path, and then “cuts in” a close-up of hands playing across the strings of a gigantic harp!

There is nothing mysterious about the emotions of any moderately intelligent person who sees things like that on the screen. “Movie stuff!” he groans, and wonders “how they have the nerve to get away with it.” We have a quarrel with the director, not because he has failed to picturize the imagined sweetness of that silence which comes when exquisite music has ceased, but because he has considered it necessary to picturize anything at all in support of the poet’s words.

This brings us again to the question whether art should strive to present any beauty other than that of the subject represented. Was he a great artist who, according to an old fable, painted fruit so realistically that the birds came to peck at it? And would Michelangelo have been a better artist if he had given his marble statues the colors of real flesh, or if he had made statues with flesh soft to the touch and capable of perspiring on a hot day? We think not.

Art may please through illusion, but never by deception. We get a peculiar emotional experience from imagining that Michelangelo’s “Moses” is alive with human grandeur, but we should not like to be caught in a mob of idiots staring at some more realistically sculptural Moses, in the expectation that he was about to make a speech or perform a trick. Neither can we go into ecstasies over the fact that the fur mantle in some portrait is so skillfully painted that all the women want to stroke it.

The depressing thing about many movies is that they are to the ideal photoplay what the wax figure of a shop window is to sculpture. Instead of dancing lightly through a rich atmosphere of suggestion they are anchored heavily with bolts of dollar-marked material. And worse days are to come if the “stunt” workers are fed with applause. They promise us pictures in natural colors, more natural than any now produced. They promise us pictures that have depth so real that the beholder may be tempted to take a stroll into them. They promise us pictures that talk, and whistle, and chirp, and bark. And perhaps somewhere they are even promising pictures that will give off scents.

All these wonders will create industrial activity. They will make good advertising, and will doubtless bring crowds to the theaters. But they will not bring happiness to those fortunate individuals who can enjoy art because it is art, who can get a finer thrill from a painting that felicitously suggests interesting trees, than from one which looks so much like a real orchard that the birds and bees swarm in through the gallery doors.

Let the motion picture look like a motion picture of life, and not like life itself. Let the mobilization of characters in a photoplay start fancies and stir emotions finer and deeper than any which we can experience by observing our neighbors or by reading sensational newspapers. Let the lights and shadows on the screen, the lines and shapes, the patterns and movements suggest to our imaginations richer beauties than those which are actually shown to our eyes. Let the motion picture become as romantic as music, and yet remain equally consistent with reality and truth.

Thus we have considered two mysterious art-emotions, namely, that which is aroused by a peculiar artistic poignancy in the cinema design itself, and that which is aroused when the suggestions and associations of the design make our own imaginations creative. A third art-emotion comes from the conscious or sub-conscious appreciation of something exquisite in the finished product.

Exquisite values and exquisite combinations are present in the masterpieces of every art. The sweet blending of musical tones which leads into a delicacy of overtones that no ear can distinguish; the subtle shadings of color in a painting, soft touches of pictorial harmony which can be felt more surely than they can be seen; tender curves in the most vigorous statue, and marble surfaces surging so slightly that their shadows scarcely linger; crisp edges of acanthus leaves in a Greek capital and the almost imperceptible swelling of the column beneath; the sparkle, the caper and the organ-music of a poem you love--these are the exquisite things in art. And there are many others less tangible. They thrill you again and again with feelings too refined for description in words.

Can the motion picture achieve a similar refinement? Or must it always deserve the epithet “crude”? When half of the typical movie’s brute strength and snorting speed can be exchanged for tenderness and spirituality we shall have a new era in cinema history. That era may dawn while the doubters are still slumbering. Even now we occasionally see motion pictures which are sparkling without the so-called “flashes” of scenes, pictures which flow firmly, one into the next, with delicate mingling of tones and patterns, pictures in which sometimes the moving elements are as airy as gossamer threads blown by a fairy’s breath.

This quality of exquisiteness is something which the director cannot produce by taking thought or signing a contract. Other values he may develop by study and experiment, but not this one. He may bring balance and unity to his pictorial elements; he may accent the interests properly; he may succeed in starting a vital rhythm and stimulating the beholder’s fancy, all this through determined application of skill; but he will need the help of inspiration before he can create the charm of exquisiteness. The gods have granted that mysterious help to other artists; they will grant it to the cinema composer, too, whenever he proves worthy.

There is at least another peculiar art-emotion which the cinema composer should be able to arouse. It is the emotion which comes over us at the overwhelming discovery that a given masterpiece of art has a wealth of beauty that we can never hope to exhaust. That emotion is stimulated by the reserve which lies back of all really masterful performance in art. We feel it when we have read a poem for the twentieth time and know that if we read it again we shall find new beauties and deeper meaning. We feel it in a concert hall listening to a symphony that has been played for us repeatedly since childhood and yet reveals fresh beauties to our maturing powers of appreciation. We feel it in the mystic dimness of some cathedral beneath whose arches a score of generations have prayed and the most eloquent disbeliever of today stands gaping in silence. Behind the human power which wrote the poem, or composed the music, or built the cathedral lies a vast reserve; and, though it was not drawn upon, we seem to glimpse that reserve forever in the finished masterpiece.

Has any reader of this book gone to see the same photoplay ten times? And if so, why? Was it because of some irresistible, undying lure in the content of that photoplay or in the pictorial form of that content? Did you go of your own free will? Did you even make a sacrifice to see it the tenth time? If so, then you have known the calm joy of a reserve power in the newest of the arts.

Unfortunately reserve is not characteristic of the movies. It is seldom indeed that a photoplay contains anything of value that cannot be caught during the first showing. In fact, it happens rather frequently that a photoplay uses up every ounce of its own proper power and then is forced to call in the help of something known as “padding” before it measures up to the commercial fullness of five reels, or whatever the contract stipulates. If you poke around through this padding, you will find that it is usually made up of innocent kittens, ducklings, calves, human babies, and other “ain’t-it-cunnin’” stuff, which may arouse emotions, to be sure, but not the emotions which make up the enjoyment of art as art.

Another typical lack of reserve is illustrated in the building and decoration of settings. Avalanches of furniture are apparently necessary to show that a character is well-to-do. The heroine’s boudoir must look like a gift shop, and her dressing table like a drug store counter, in order to convince the audience that she spends a few sacred moments of the day attending to her finger nails. Walls of rooms must be paneled off by scores of framed pictures, mirrors, etc., so that, no matter where the actor stands, his head will be strikingly set off by some ornamental frame. Floors must look partly like an Oriental bazaar and partly like a fur market. Chairs, tables, cabinets, beds, and what-nots, must carry our minds to Versailles and the Bronx, to Buckingham Palace, and Hollywood. Hangings of plush and silk, tapestries of cloth of gold, curtains of lace or batiked silk, cords of intricate plaiting, must flow from the heights, waving in the breeze to prove that they are real. All this extravagance must be, we presume, in order to show that the heroine lives on an income and not a salary, and in order to give the brides in the audience new ideas for mortgaging their husbands’ futures at the installment-plan stores.

With such extravagance of materials in a picture there can be no simplicity or reserve in the pictorial composition, if indeed there can be any composition at all. Whatever design the director gives to the miscellaneous lines and shapes will seem rather like a last despairing effort than the easy, happy touch of a master’s hand.

The hysterical extravagance of the movies is further illustrated in the breathless speed which so often characterizes every moving thing on the screen. We feel that, at the end of the road, horses must expire from exhaustion and automobiles must catch fire from excessive friction. Clouds are driven by hurricanes, rivers shoot, trees snap, and the most dignified gentleman dog-trots. It is true that some of this breathlessness carries with it a certain thrill for the spectator, but that thrill is by no means to be classed as an æsthetic emotion. It has nothing of that abiding joy which comes from the consciousness of restrained energy in art.

Much of this feverish activity, this “jazz” of the screen, is due to rapidity of projection; and yet the director is responsible, for he certainly knows the probable rate of projection and can control his composition accordingly by retarding actions or by selecting slower actions in place of those which cannot be retarded. Slowness of movement, where it is not unnatural, is pleasant to the eye, as we have said in preceding chapters, but it has a peculiar appeal for the emotions, too. It fills us with a sense of the majesty that none can shake, of the deep currents that none can turn aside.

How to produce a picture that shall impress an audience with its inexhaustible reserve is a secret that remains with him who has the power. So, too, with the other pictorial qualities discussed in this chapter. We know of no formulas by which the mysterious art-emotions can be aroused. Yet if directors and spectators alike ponder over these mysteries, it will surely help them to separate the gold from the dross.

Let us vision an ideal photoplay. It is entrancing, yet restful, to the eye. Its composition is both vigorous and graceful, as harmonious as music. Our sympathies are stirred warmly by the experiences of the persons in the story. We are held in keen suspense as to the dramatic outcome. And we get also the more subtle art-emotions. Our souls are shot through by the poignancy of fixed and flowing designs. We are fascinated by these designs at the same time that our fancies pass through and beyond them. The visible work of the artist is only a mesh-work through which our imaginations are whirled away into rapturous regions of experiences unlived and unexpressed. Such transports may be brief, yet they are measureless in their flights. Our attention swings back from these far flights into a quiet response to the delicacy of arrangement of line and shape, of texture and tone, of blending and weaving and vanishing values. We feel an exquisiteness too fine for understanding, which tapers away at last until it is too fine for the most sensitive feeling. And during all the while that we are rapt by the poignancy, the imagination, the exquisiteness of the master’s production, we feel that a rich reserve lies beyond our grasp or touch. We cannot quite soar to the master’s heights, or plumb his depths, or separate the airy fibers of his weaving.

Yet, when such beauty comes to the screen, who shall say that it is a miracle, that the manner of its coming is above every law and beyond all conjecture? And who shall say that the hour of its coming has not been hastened by the million spectators whose judgments have been whetted and whose sympathies have been deepened by taking thought about the nature of art?

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

Page 14: “propellors” was printed that way.

Page 120: “Pavlowa” was printed that way.