Part 18

There was very little _acting_ in these films and in the Wild West exhibitions. There was a great deal of _action_. I can’t recall Pearl White _registering_ a single time; I recall only movement, which was excellent. It was later that your acting developed; up to this time you were working with people who hadn’t succeeded in or were wholly ignorant of the technique of the stage; they moved before the camera gropingly at first, but gradually developing a technique suited to the camera and to nothing else. I am referring to days so far back that the old Biograph films used to be branded with the mark AB in a circle, and this mark occurred in the photographed sets to prevent stealing. In those days your actors and actresses were exceptionally naïve and creative. You were on the point of discovering mass and line in the handling of crowds, in the defile of a troop, in the movement of individuals. Mr Griffith had already discovered that four men running in opposite directions along the design of a figure 8 gave the effect of sixteen men--a discovery lightly comparable to that of Velasquez in the crossed spears of the Surrender of Breda. You would have done well to continue your experiments with nameless individuals and chaotic masses; but you couldn’t. You developed what you called personalities--and after that, actresses.

Before _The Birth of a Nation_ was begun Mary Pickford had already left Griffith. I have heard that he vowed to make Mae Marsh a greater actress--as if she weren’t one from the start, as if acting mattered, as if Mary Pickford ever could or needed to act. Remember that in _The Avenging Conscience_ at least four people: Spottiswood Aiken, Henry Walthall, Blanche Sweet, and another I cannot identify--the second villain--_played_ superbly without acting. Conceive your own stupidity in not knowing what Vachel Lindsay discovered: that “our Mary” was literally “the Queen of my People,” a radiant, lovely, childlike girl, a beautiful figurehead, a symbol of all our sentimentality. Why did you allow her to become an actress? Why is everything associated with her later work so alien to beauty? You did not see her legend forming; you began to advertise her salary; you have, I believe unconsciously, tried to restore her now by giving her the palest rôle in all literature, that of Marguerite in _Faust_. You are ten years too late. In the same ten years Blanche Sweet has almost disappeared and Mae Marsh has not arrived; Gishes and Talmadges and Swansons and other fatalities have triumphed. You have taken over the stage and the opera; you have filmed Caruso and Al Jolson, too, for all I know. You now have acting and no playing.

This is a matter of capital importance and I am willing to come closer to a definition. Acting is the way of impersonating, of rendering character, of presenting action which is suitable to the stage; it has, in the first place, a specific relation to the size of the stage and to that of the auditorium; it has also a second important relation to the lines spoken. Good actors--they are few--will always suit the gesture to the utterance in the sense that their gesture will be on the beat of the words; failure to know this ruined several of John Barrymore’s soliloquies in _Hamlet_. Neither of these two primary and determinant circumstances affect the moving picture. It should be obvious that if good acting is adapted to the stage, nothing less than a miracle could make it also suitable to the cinema. The same thing is true of opera, which is in a desperate state because it failed to develop a type of representation adapted to musical instead of spoken expression. Opera and the pictures both needed “playing”--by which I cover _other forms_ of representation, of impersonation, characterization, without identifying them. It is unlikely that opera and pictures require the same kind of playing; but neither of them can bear acting. Chaplin, by the way, is a player, not an actor--although we all think of him as an actor because the distinction is tardily made. I should say that Mae Marsh, too, was a player in _The Birth_. So was H. B. Warner in a war play called _Shell 49_ (I am not sure of the figure); and there have been others. I have never seen Conrad Veidt or Werner Kraus on the stage; in _Caligari_ they were players, not actors. Possibly since Kraus is considered the greatest of German actors, he acted so well that he seemed to be playing. But that requires genius and the Gishes have no genius.

The emergence of Mary Pickford and the production of _The Birth of a Nation_ make the years 1911–14 the critical time of the movies. Nearly all your absurdities began about this time, including your protest against the word movies as no longer suited to the dignity of your art. From the success of _The Birth_ sprang the spectacle film which was intrinsically all right and only corrupted Griffith and the pictures because it was unintelligently handled thereafter. From the success of Mary Pickford came the whole tradition of the movie as a genteel intellectual entertainment. The better side is the spectacle and the fact that in 1922 the whole mastery of the spectacular film has passed out of your hands ought to be sufficient proof that you bungled somewhere. Or, to drive it home, what can you make of the circumstance that one of the very greatest successes, in America and abroad, was _Nanook of the North_, a spectacle film to which the producer and the artistic director contributed nothing--for it was a picture of actualities, made, according to rumour, in the interests of a fur-trading company? You will reply that my assertions are pure theory. It is true that I have never filmed a scenario in my life. But as a spectator I am the one who is hard headed and you the theorists. What I and several million others know is that something wrong crept into the spectacle film. We know absolutely that the overblown idea of _Intolerance_ was foisted on the simple tale of _The Mother and the Law_, and that while single episodes of this stupendous picture were excellent, the whole failed of effect. In _The Birth_ Mr Griffith had two stories with no perceptible internal relation, but with sufficient personal interest to carry; even here not one person in ten thousand saw the significance of the highfalutin title. But after the time of _Intolerance_ Mr Griffith receded swiftly, and his latest pictures are merely lavish. It is of no significance that Mr Griffith treats Thomas Burke as though the latter were a great writer instead of a good scenario writer; the prettifying of _Broken Blossoms_ was so consistent, and the fake acting such good fake, that the picture almost succeeded. Everywhere Mr Griffith now gives us excesses--everything is big: the crowds, the effects, the rainstorms, the ice floes, and everything is informed with an overwhelming dignity. He has long ago ceased to create beauty--only beautiful effects, like set pieces in fireworks. And he was the man destined by his curiosity, his honesty, his intelligence, to reach the heights of the moving picture.

It is a hard thing to say, but it is literally true that something in Mr Griffith has been corrupted and died--his imagination. _Broken Blossoms_ was a last expiring flicker. Since then he has constructed well; I understand that his success has been great; I am not denying that Mr Griffith is the man to do _Ben-Hur_. But he has imagined nothing on a grand scale, nor has he created anything delicate or fine. People talk of _The Birth_ as if the battle scenes were important; they were very good and a credit to Griffith, who directed, and to George Bitzer, who photographed them; the direction of the ride of the Klansmen was better, it had some imagination. And far better still was a moment earlier in the piece, when Walthall returned to the shattered Confederate home and Mae Marsh met him at the door, wearing raw cotton smudged to resemble ermine--brother and sister both pretending that they had forgotten their dead, that they didn’t care what happened. And then--for the honours of the scene went to Griffith, not even to the exquisite Mae Marsh--then there appeared from within the doorway the arm of their mother and with a gesture of unutterable loveliness it enlaced the boy’s shoulders and drew him tenderly into the house. To have omitted the tears, to have shown nothing but the arm in that single curve of beauty, required, in those days, high imagination. It was the emotional climax of the film; one felt from that moment that the rape and death of the little girl was already understood in the vast suffering sympathy of the mother. So much Mr Griffith never again accomplished; it was the one moment when he stood beside Chaplin as a creative artist--and it was ten years ago.

Of course if Griffith hasn’t come through there is hardly anything to hope for from the others. Mr Ince always beat him in advertized expenditure; Fox was always cheaper and easier and had Annette Kellerman and did _The Village Blacksmith_. The logical outcome of Griffithism is in the pictures he didn’t make: in _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ and in _Robin Hood_, neither of which I could sit through. The lavishness of these films is appalling; the camera runs mad in everything but action, which dies a hundred deaths in as many minutes. Of what use are sets by Urban if the action which occurs in them is invisible to the naked eye? The old trick of using a crowd as a background and holding the interest in the individual has been lost; the trick of using the crowd as an individual hasn’t been found because we must have our love story. The spectacle film is slowly settling down to the level of the stereopticon slide.

Comparison with German films is inevitable. They are as much on the wrong track as we are; and the exception, _Caligari_, is defective because in a proper attempt to relieve the camera from the burden of recording actuality, the producers gave it the job of recording modern paintings for background. The acting was, however, playing; and the destruction of realism, even if it was accomplished by a questionable expedient, will have much to do with the future of the film. Yet even in the spectacle film the Germans managed to do something. _Passion_ and _Deception_ and the Pharaoh film and the film made out of _Sumurun_ were not lavish. And in the manipulation of material (not of the instrument, where we know much more than they) there came occasionally flashes of the real thing. In _Deception_ there was a scene where the courtyard had to be cleared of an angry mob. Every American producer has handled the parallel scene and every one in the same way, centring in the mêlée between civilians and police. What Lubitsch did was to form a single line of pike staffs and to show a solid mass of crowd--the feeling of hostility was projected in the opposition of line and mass. And slowly the _space behind_ the pike staffs opened. The bright calm sunlight fell on a wider and widening strip of the courtyard. One was hardly aware of struggle; all one saw was that gradually broadening patch of open, uncontested _space in the light_. And suddenly one knew that the courtyard was cleared, one seemed to hear the faint murmur of the crowd outside, and then silence. I am lost in admiration of this simplicity which involves _every correct principle of the æsthetics of the moving picture_. The whole thing was done with movement and light--the movement massed and the light on the open space. That is the true, the imaginative camera technique, which we failed to develop.[29]

The object of that technique is _the indirect communication of emotion_--indirect because that is the surest way, in all the arts, of multiplying the degree of intensity. The American spectacle film still communicates a thrill in the direct way of a highwayman with a blackjack. But the American serious film drama communicates not even this: it is at this moment entirely dead, or in other words, wholly bogus. I may be wrong in thinking that our present position develops out of the creation of Mary Pickford as a star. The result is the same.

For as soon as the movie became “the silent drama” it took upon itself responsibilities. It had to be dignified and artistic; it had to have literature and actors and ideals. The simple movie plots no longer sufficed, and stage and novel were called upon to contribute their small share to the success of an art which seriously believed itself to be the consummation of all the arts. The obligation remained to choose only those examples which were suitable to the screen. It was, however, not adaptability which guided the choice, but the great name. Eventually everything was filmed because what couldn’t be adapted could be spoiled. The degree of vandalism passes words; and what completed the ruin was that good novels were spoiled not to make good films, but to make bad ones. _Victory_ was a vile film in addition to being a vulgar betrayal of Conrad; even the good Molnar with his exciting second-rate play, _The Devil_, found himself so foully, so disgustingly changed on the screen that the whole idea, not a great one, was lost and nothing remained but a sentimental vulgarity which had no meaning of its own, quite apart from any meaning of his. In each of these the elements are the same: a psychological development through an action. By corrupting the action the producers changed the idea; bad enough in itself, they failed to understand what they were doing and supplied nothing to take the place of what they had destroyed. The actual movies so produced refused to project any consecutive significant action whatsoever.

It would be futile to multiply examples--as futile as to note that there have been well-filmed novels and plays. The essential thing is that nearly every picture made recently has borrowed something, usually in the interest of dignity, gentility, refinement--and the picture side, the part depending upon action before the camera, has gone steadily down. Long subtitles explain everything except the lack of action. Carefully built scenes are settings in which nothing takes place. The climax arrives in the masterpieces of the de Mille school. They are “art.” They are genteel. They offend nothing--except the intelligence. High life in the de Mille manner is not recognizable as decent human society, but it is refined, and the picture with it is refined out of existence. Ten years earlier there was another type of drama: the vamp, in short, and Theda Bara was its divinity. I have little to say in its defense because it was unalterably stupid (I don’t say I didn’t like it). But it wasn’t half so pretentious as the de Mille social drama, and not half so vulgar. What it had to say, false or banal or ridiculous, it said entirely with the camera. It appealed to low passions and it truckled to imitative morality; there was in it a sort of corruption. Yet one could resist that frank ugliness as one can’t resist the polite falsehood of the new culture of the movies.

It would be easy to exaggerate your failures. Your greatest mistake was a natural one--in taking over the realistic theatre. You knew that a photograph can reproduce actuality without significantly transposing it, and you assumed that that was the duty of the film. But you forgot that the rhythm of the film was creating something, and that this creation adapted itself entirely to the projection of emotion by means _not realistic_; that in the end the camera was as legitimately an instrument of distortion as of reproduction. You gave us, in short, the pleasure of _verification_ in every detail; the Germans who are largely in the same tradition--they should have known better because their theatre knew better--improved the method at times and counted on significant detail. But neither of you gave us the pleasure of _recognition_. Neither you nor they have taken the first step (except in _Caligari_) toward giving us the highest degree of pleasure, that of escaping actuality and entering into a created world, built on its own inherent logic, keeping time in its own rhythm--where we feel ourselves at once strangers and at home. That has been done elsewhere--not in the serious film.

I would be glad to temper all of this with praise: for Anita Loos’ captions and John Emerson’s occasionally excellent direction; for George Loane Tucker, for Monte Katterjohn’s flashes of insight into what makes a scenario. I have liked many more films than I have mentioned here. But you are familiar with praise and there remains to say what you have missed. The moving picture when it became pretentious, when it went upstage and said, “dear God, make me artistic” at the end of its prayers, killed its imagination and foreswore its popularity. At your present rate of progress you will in ten years--if you survive--be no more a popular art than grand opera is. You had in your hands an incalculable instrument to set free the imagination of mankind--and the atrophy of our imaginative lives has only been hastened by you. You had also an instrument of fantasy--and you gave us Marguerite Clark in films no better than the “whimsy-me” school of stage plays. Above all, you had something fresh and clean and new; it was a toy and should have remained a toy--something for our delight. You gave us problem plays. Beauty you neither understood nor cared for; and although you talked much about art you never for a moment tried to fathom the secret sources, nor to understand the secret obligations, of art.

Can you do anything now? I don’t know and I am indifferent to your future--because there is a future for the moving picture with which you will have nothing to do. I do not know if the movie of the future will be popular--and to me it is the essence of the movie that it should be popular. Perhaps there will be a period of semi-popularity--it will be at this time that you will desert--and then the new picture will arrive without your assistance. For when you and your capitalizations and your publicity go down together, the field will be left free for others. The first cheap film will startle you; but the film will grow less and less expensive. Presently it will be within the reach of artists. With players instead of actors and actresses, with fresh ideas (among which the idea of making a lot of money may be absent) these artists will give back to the screen the thing you have debauched--imagination. They will create with the camera, and not record, and will follow its pulsations instead of attempting to capture the rhythm of actuality. It isn’t impossible to recreate exactly the atmosphere of Anderson’s _I’m a Fool_; it isn’t impossible (although it may not be desirable) to do studies in psychology; it is possible and desirable to create great epics of American industry and let the machine operate as a character in the play--just as the land of the West itself, as the corn must play its part. The grandiose conceptions of Frank Norris are not beyond the reach of the camera. There are painters willing to work in the medium of the camera and architects and photographers. And novelists, too, I fancy, would find much of interest in the scenario as a new way of expression.[30] There is no end to what we can accomplish.

The vulgar prettiness, the absurdities, the ignorances of your films haven’t saved you. And although the first steps after you take away your guiding hand may be feeble, although bogus artists and culture-hounds may capture the movie for a time--in the end all will be well. For the movie is the imagination of mankind in action--and you haven’t destroyed it yet.

_Before a Picture by Picasso_

BEFORE A PICTURE BY PICASSO

For there are many arts, not among those we conventionally call “fine,” which seem to me fundamental for living.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

It was my great fortune just as I was finishing this book to be taken by a friend to the studio of Pablo Picasso. We had been talking on our way of the lively arts; my companion denied none of their qualities, and agreed violently with my feeling about the bogus, what we called _le côté Puccini_. But he held that nothing is more necessary at the moment than the exercise of discrimination, that we must be on our guard lest we forget the major arts, forget even how to appreciate them, if we devote ourselves passionately, as I do, to the lively ones. Had he planned it deliberately he could not have driven his point home more deeply, for in Picasso’s studio we found ourselves, with no more warning than our great admiration, in the presence of a masterpiece. We were not prepared to have an unframed canvas suddenly turned from the wall and to recognize immediately that one more had been added to the small number of the world’s greatest works of art.

I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn’t even important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and overwhelming thing to me was that I held the work a masterpiece and knew it to be contemporary. It is a pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and _know_ that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect, yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself--that is a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect--after one had gone away and begun to be aware of effects--was to make one wonder whether it is worth thinking or writing or feeling about anything else. Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day, it isn’t sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn’t, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest--that the real opposition is between them, allied, and the polished fake. To that position I returned a few days later: it was a fortunate week altogether, for I heard the _Sacre du Printemps_ of Strawinsky the next day, and this tremendous shaking of the forgotten roots of being gave me reassurance.

More than that, I am convinced that if one is going to live fully and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence, one must care for both. It is possible to do well enough with either, and much depends on how one derives pleasure from them. For no one imagines that a pedant or a half-wit, enjoying a classic or a piece of ragtime, is actually getting all that the subject affords. For an intelligent human being knows that one difference between himself and the animals is that he can “live in the mind”; to him there need be present no conflict between the great arts and the minor; he will see, in the end, that they minister to each other.