Part 2
And all of this is done _with the camera, through action_ presented to the eye. The secret of distortion is in the camera, and the secret of pace in the projector. Regard them for a moment, regard the slap-stick as every moment explains itself, and then go to the picture palace and spend one-third of your time reading the flamboyancies of C. Gardner Sullivan and another third watching the contortions of a famous actress as she “registers” an emotion which action and photography should present directly, and you will see why the comic film is superior. There is virtually no registering in the comedy, there is no senseless pantomime, and the titles are succinct and few. In _Bright Eyes_, as the marriage of convenience is about to take place, the mother sweeps in with these words, “Faint quick--he’s dead broke.” An absurd letter or telegram is introduced to set the play going; the rest is literally silence.
What I have said about Chaplin regards him as a typical slap-stick comedian.[2] The form would have succeeded without him and he has passed beyond the form entirely. The other practitioners of the art come out of his shadow, and some of them are excellent. What makes Chaplin great is that he has irony and pity, he knows that you must not have the one without the other; he has both piety and wit. Next to him, for his work in _His Bread and Butter_ and a few other films, stands Hank Mann, who translates the childlike gravity of Chaplin into a frightened innocence, a serious endeavour to understand the world which seems always hostile to him. He was trained, I have been told, as a tragic actor on the East Side of New York, and he seems always stricken with the cruelty and madness of an existence in which he alone is logical and sane. If he, walking backward to get a last glimpse of his beloved (after “A Waiter’s Farewell,” as the caption has it), steps on the running board of a motor instead of a street car, he is willing to pay the usual fare and let bygones be bygones. His black bang almost meets his eyes, and his eyes are mournful and piteous; his gesture is slow and rounded; a few of the ends of the world have come upon his head and the eyelids are a little weary. He is the Wandering Jew misdirected into comic life by an unscrupulous fate.
His most notable opposite is Harold Lloyd, a man of no tenderness, of no philosophy, the embodiment of American cheek and indefatigable energy. His movements are all direct, straight; the shortest distance between two points he will traverse impudently and persistently, even if he is knocked down at the end of each trip; there is no poetry in him, his whole utterance being epigrammatic, without overtone or image. Yet once, at least, he too stepped into that lunatic Arcadia to which his spirit is alien; not in _Grandma’s Boy_, which might just as well have been done by Charles Ray, but in _A Sailor-made Man_. Here the old frenzy fell upon him, the weakling won by guile, and instead of fighting one man he laid out a mob from behind; something excessive, topsy-turvy, riotous at last occurred in his ordered existence. He is funny; but he has no vulgarity; he is smart. He amuses me without making me laugh, and I figure him as a step toward gentility.
Ben Turpin has progressed, fortunately without taking that step. In _Bright Eyes_ he was mildly absurd; in _His Night Out_, with Chaplin, he was tremendously funny; and what he learned there of the lesson of the master he imported into his private masterpiece, _A Small Town Idol_. Like Chaplin, he disarms you and endears himself; unlike him, and often to Turpin’s advantage, he knows how to be ridiculous. One always sees Chaplin’s impersonations as they see themselves. Is he a count or a pretender, or an English gentleman, or a policeman, or a tramp, the character is completely embodied; Chaplin never makes fun of himself. The process of identification is complete and, apart from the interest and the fun of the action, your chief pleasure is in awaiting the inevitable denunciation. Ben Turpin, who has only a talent for Chaplin’s genius, makes the most of it and lets you see through him. His exaggerations do more than reveal--they betray, and above all they betray the fact that Turpin is aware of the absurdities of his characters; you see them objectively, and through him you see through them.
When he returns home as the Wild West screen hero, and his own picture is shown before those who so recently had despised him, his deprecating gesture before the screen on which his exploits are being shown is so broad, so simple-silly, that it is more than a description of himself as he thinks it is, and lets us perceive his absurdity. He is exactly a zany.
Three other buffoons of the old Keystone days retain their capacity to be amusing: the galvanic, jack-in-the-box, Al St John; Mack Swain, and Chester Conklin; they are exactly as they were ten years ago, and one fancies they will never be great. The difficult person to be sure about is Buster Keaton, who came to the pictures from vaudeville, and has carried into his new medium his greatest asset, an enormous, incorruptible gravity. He never smiles, they say, and I have sat through some of his pictures--_The Boat_, for one--without seeing any reason why he should. It was a long mechanical contrivance with hardly any humour, and was considered a masterpiece; while _The Paleface_, in which Keaton played an entomologist captured by Indians, passed unnoticed. It had nearly everything a comic needs, and there were certain movements _en masse_, certain crossings of the lines of action, which were quite perfect. Keaton’s intense preoccupation and his hard sense of personality are excellent. In _Cops_ he took a purely Keystone subject and multiplied and magnified it to its last degree of development: thousands of policemen rushed down one street; equal thousands rushed up another; and before them fled this small, serious figure, bent on self-justification, caught in a series of absurd accidents, wholly law-abiding, a little distracted. I do not think one will soon forget the exquisite close of that picture: the whole police force forming a phalanx, hurled as one body into the courtyard of the station--and then the little figure which, having been trapped within, seems doomed to arrest, coming out, itself accoutred in uniform, and quietly, quietly locking the huge doors behind it. It, yes; for by that time Keaton has become wholly impersonal. So affecting Larry Semon has never been; nor Clyde Cook; and behind them, but _longo intervallo_, come the misguided creatures who make the kind of slap-stick which most people think Sennett makes. I am sure there are other good comedians; but I am not trying to make a catalogue. No one, in any case, has been able to impose himself as these few have; and most of the others are so near in method and manner to these that they require nothing fresh to be said of them.
It seemed for a moment, in 1922, that if a confessed murderer were set free by a jury, he or she went into the movies; but if a moving-picture actor was declared innocent, he was barred from the screen. The justice of this I cannot discuss; yet a protest can be made against the æsthetically high-minded who said that the real reason for barring the films of “Fatty” Arbuckle was their vulgarity and their dulness. For “Fatty” had gone over to a comedy more refined than slap-stick long before 1922; and in 1914 he was neither stupid nor dull. Once indeed, in _Fatty and Mabel Adrift_ (Mabel being Miss Normand) he came near to the best of slap-stick, and the same picture was as photography and printing, for sepia seascapes and light and shade, a superior thing entirely. The fatuous, ingratiating smile was innocent then, in all conscience, and as for vulgarity--
Let us, before we go to the heart of that question, look for a moment at the comedy which was always set against the slap-stick to condemn the custard-pie school of fun--the comedy of which the best practitioners were indisputably Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew. In them there was nothing offensive, except an enervating dulness. They pretended to be pleasant episodes in our common life, the life of courtship and marriage; they accepted all our conventions; and they were one and all exactly the sort of thing which the junior class at high school acted when money was needed to buy a new set of erasers for Miss Struther’s course in mechanical drawing. The husband stayed out late at night or was seen kissing a stenographer; the wife had trouble with a maid or was extravagant at the best shops; occasionally arrived an ingenuity, such as the romantic attachment of the wife to anniversaries contrasted with her husband’s negligence--I seem to recall that to cure her he brought her a gift one day in memory of Washington’s birthday. These things were little stories, not even smoking-room stories; they were acted entirely in the technique of the amateur stage; they were incredibly genteel, in the milieu where “When Baby Came” is genteel; neither in matter nor in manner did they employ what the camera and the projector had to give. And, apart from the agreeable manners of Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew, nothing made them successful except the corrupt desire, on the part of the spectators, to be refined.
Nothing of the sort operated in the far better (feature film) comedies which Douglas Fairbanks made when he was with Fine Arts. To suit his physique, they were almost all adventurous; they were always entertaining. _Flirting With Fate_[3] presented a young man who had decided to die and gave “Automatic Joe,” a gunman, his last fifty dollars to “bump him off” unexpectedly. Once the agreement was made, the tide of fortune turned for the young man, and, desiring earnestly to live, he felt the paid hand of the assassin always upon his shoulder. At the same time the gunman had reformed; his one object was to return the unearned fifty dollars. And the cross-purposes, the chase and flight, were within short distance of high farce. The comedies of Charles Ray were also unpretentious, and also used the camera. These and others were always perfectly decent; but none of them was refined.
And there, essentially, we are back at slap-stick; for the refined comedy was pretentious, and what is pretentious is vulgar in any definition of the word; while slap-stick never pretended to be anything but itself and could be disgusting or tasteless or dull, but it could not be vulgar. I consider vulgar the thing which offends against the canons of taste accepted by honest people, not by imitative people, not by snobs. It is equally bad taste, presumably, to throw custard pies and to commit adultery; but it is not bad taste to speak of these things. What is intolerable only is the pretense, and it was against pretentiousness that the slap-stick comedy had its hardest fight. It showed a man sitting down on a lighted gas stove, and it did not hesitate to disclose the underwear charred at the buttocks which were the logical consequence of the action. There was never the slightest suggestion of sexual indecency, or of moral turpitude, in the Keystones; there was a fuller and freer use of gesture--gesture with all parts of the human frame--than we are accustomed to. The laughter they evoked was broad and long; it was thoracic, abdominal; it shook us because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet. The animal frankness and health of these pictures constituted the ground of their offense. And something more.
For the Keystone offended our sense of security in dull and business-like lives. Few of us imagined ourselves in the frenzy of action which they set before us; none of us remained unmoved at the freedom of fancy, the wildness of imagination, the roaring, destructive, careless energy which it set loose. It was an ecstasy of comic life, and in our unecstatic lives we fled from it to polite comedy, telling ourselves that what we had seen was ugly and displeasing. Often it was. I am stating the case for slap-stick, but I do not wish to make myself responsible for the millions of feet of stupidity and ugliness which have been released as comic films. I have seen Ham and Bud and the imitators of Charlie Chaplin; I have seen an egg splattered over a man’s face with such a degree of nauseous ugliness that it seemed I could never see a comic again. But as like as not, on the same bill was the James Young screen version of _The Devil_ with George Arliss, or Geraldine Farrar in _Carmen_, or the “_‘Affairs of’ Anatol_.” And when people who have seen these “artistic” films, or the barber-shop scene in a Hitchcock revue or Eddie Cantor in a dentist’s chair, exclaim (falsely) that moving-picture comedians do nothing but throw pies, I am moved to wonder what on earth they are expected to throw. They are using the eternal materials of their art, precisely as Aristophanes used them and Rabelais, with already far too many concessions to a debased and cowardly and artificial taste. At the two extremes simple and sophisticated people have looked directly at the slap-stick screen and loved it for itself alone; in between are the people who can see nothing without the lorgnettes of prejudice provided by fashion and gentility. The simple ones discovered and prospered the slap-stick screen long before the sophisticated were aware of its existence; they took it for what it was and cared nothing for the fact that it was made by inartistic people and shown in reeking rooms for a nickel. For long the poison of culture was powerless to enter; but not long enough.
I feel moderately certain that the slap-stick comedy is a good thing for America to have; yet, being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a reformer, I have to put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds. It has given me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see it saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to banish the bleak refinement which is setting in upon it.
Seven years ago, in an imaginary conversation, I made Mr David Wark Griffith announce that he would produce _Helen of Troy_, and I made him defend the Keystone comedy. It seemed to me then as now that there is nothing incongruous in these subjects; properly made, they would be equally unrefined, but _Helen of Troy_, being in the grand manner, would be called “artistic.” Mr Griffith has not made _Helen of Troy_, and the pre-eminent right to make it has passed from his hands. The Keystone, with its variations, needs still an authoritative defender and an authoritative critic. It is one of the few places where the genteel tradition does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where imagination is still riotous and healthy. In its economy and precision are two qualities of artistic presentation; it uses still everything commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it has refrained from using the broad farces of literature--Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière--as material; it could become happily sophisticated, without being cultured. But there is no fault inherent in its nature, and its virtues are exceptional. For us to appreciate slap-stick may require a revolution in our way of looking at the arts; having taken thought on how we now look at the arts, I suggest that the revolution is not entirely undesirable.
_An Imaginary Conversation_
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
_The theatre of Dionysos. A great crowd is just leaving the amphitheatre and as the attendants roll back the heavy awnings and unleash the tent-poles, the moon, which has been excluded for the performance, begins to filter in, and presently the stone begins to throw off faint shimmers, and dark shadows fall across the stage. The builded temple, which has been screened, is now revealed, and its colours glow again, albeit in shades not known to the light of day. The porticos of temples look down upon the theatre, and olive trees stand dark and beautiful on the hills. From afar the bustle of the town dies away, and, perhaps, in a moment of unutterable stillness, the murmur of the many-sounding sea can be heard._
_The spectators of the strange entertainment have at last departed, and the long e’s, ungrateful to the ear of the Attic scholar, are heard no more. In the far centre of the theatre a man is taking apart a mechanism--that from which the deus sprang in this evening’s play. Two other men remain. One walks musing and absorbed, looking toward that entrance whereby Orestes was wont to make his way to the stage. The other walks slowly round about the theatre, marking its aspects, and thinking of practical things. Presently they meet at the spot where once the choragus stood. They salute each other._
MR GRIFFITH
I am sorry that you should have been here to-night. To you, I suppose, this has been only a sacrilege. I am sorry that you should feel that I am gloating over my success. But perhaps I am mistaken. Are you, or are you not, Walter Pritchard Eaton?
MR EATON
I am. And you are David Wark Griffith, are you not? [_D. G. nods._] We are well met, then--if I may make use of a phrase which the drama, and not your _métier_ has made famous. By the way, ought I to “register” pleasure in any conventional way?
D. G.
Score one for you. I have sinned. But since you say we are well met, can’t we chat for a moment about things? You see, I am not altogether unaffected by this scene--the light, and the ancient theatre, and the memories of it all.
W. P. E.
They would all do admirably for a picture--for one of those extraordinary scenic effects which you create as no other man can create them. But the memories--those at least are mine. Surely you are not thinking of--
D. G.
No. Not just now. I am humble at times. But let us say that you are the great antagonist of the movies, and I the protagonist. I want very much to understand what you mean when you attack them. I remember you said that my spectacle, _The Birth of a Nation_, was violently unfair because it was wordless. Am I not right?
W. P. E.
I said some such thing.
D. G.
And you are a defender of the theatre. May I assume that _The Clansman_, which was a spoken drama, was more fair than my spectacle?
W. P. E.
At least, in the play, there was a reply in kind to every attack. The dumb-show for which you are responsible showed only one side.
D. G.
Then you are attacking the movie for being a propaganda, and are displeased with the propaganda because it is one-sided. May I say that possibly the movie was made as an artistic spectacle, and had no such object? And do I not recall the surprise with which such a play as _Strife_ was received because it did show two sides? After all, I did not make it impossible for you to put on _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ as a reply to me.
W. P. E.
It would be fruitless to continue the discussion on this point. I spoke of your movie in passing, because I am always hearing about it. For the most part let us admit that it was not cheap. Can you say as much for the others?
D. G.
No. The movie is a vulgar art--it is _the_ vulgar art. And certainly I do not purpose to rob that statement of its effectiveness by saying that the word must be taken in its best, or even in its original, meaning. It must be taken in its worst meaning. The movie is vulgar, but it is art. The best of it is none too good--yet. But the worst of it is not so bad as you think.
W. P. E.
I am willing to grant you that in the representation of spectacle, in the realm of trick photography and in the preservation of the events of the moment, the movie has its place. I question it only when it invades the drama. There you must pardon me. I have the drama close to my heart.
D. G.
You have been warming the viper quite a long time. It is about to sting. I am willing to grant you that in musical comedy, in purely intellectual engagements, and in the exploitation of sound, the drama has its place. But I have noticed in your own complaints that in the things that touch the heart, in the grand manner, in the projection of high emotion, you find the drama of to-day a pretty sad affair.
W. P. E.
Who is to blame for it?
D. G.
Who killed Cock Robin? Not I. I had not heard that the Comédie-Française was seriously affected by the activities of Pathé Frères. I have yet to learn that music has been driven into hiding by the movies, although I have heard that the ride of the Valkyries is more familiarly known to-day as the “Klan-theme” from _The Birth_. Didn’t your theatre die--if it has died--because it stifled itself? Hadn’t you noticed the decline ten years ago?
W. P. E.
I am not blaming the movie. I am deploring it. I do not think that it is good for people to be eternally fed on whatever is cheapest, nearest, easiest of comprehension. I object to it all the more when something high and fine is butchered to make a movie holiday.
D. G.
I deplore that as much as you. I do not think that _Cabiria_ was cheap, or easy of comprehension. There was enough on the surface to make it popular. But there was also enough in the depths to make it grand.
W. P. E.
The movie is still two-dimensional, Mr Griffith. Can we speak of depths?
D. G.
Ah, you say “still”! Then we have a future. In the theatre there was a long succession of little known men, and then came the men whose plays made these stones sacred to you. There were many Elizabethans before Shakespeare. Will you call me the Marlowe of the movies? I believe in them enough to hope for a Shakespeare. But don’t you see that we are young; we are without conventions--
W. P. E.
Pardon me. You are with far too many. I remember that in the early days, when you went about on tiptoe for fear of waking up the revengeful Muses, you employed actors without any technique. There was an uncouth, a delightful freshness, about your work. I had hopes then that you would contribute to the stage. Instead you have taken from it. You have borrowed all its worst conventions. And you have added some of your own. There is the dreadful convention of registering.
D. G.
Isn’t that from the stage?
W. P. E.
Hardly.
D. G.
Your actors and actresses register.
W. P. E.
Not as yours do. The long training in the expression of emotions has developed a suitable medium, the slightest variation on which becomes inestimably precious. In the moving picture the variation is unknown. And, although I am the last person to want to advantage the movie, let me tell you why. I can hear the voice of the director, just as the misguided husband leaves his wife--a favorite situation in the movies and very novel--I can hear him crying out, “Register grief!” If he does not cry out, the inner voice of the actress cries out. Not “feel,” not “express the feeling,” but express the semblance of grief. It is an art of superficies. Perhaps your actresses--and why, dear sir, do you choose such impossibly blond, pretty and stupid actresses?--have worked out a new expression, a new registration. At the terrible moment they forget. They register as they, or another actress as well paid and as hotly advertised, registered six months before. I am as tired of heaving breasts and eyes turned to heaven as I am tired of Charlie Chaplin’s walk when he does not walk it. Conventions? There is no end to them. What your art, as you call it, lacks, is limitations.
D. G.
You mean there are no limits to it? That is a strange remark for you to make.
W. P. E.