CHAPTER IIITRICKS
Onwhat planet was the man of the moving picture born? Did he, and does he, first see the light of day on some magic star where the established laws of nature fail to function? Where time stands still, or runs backward? Where spread tables emerge from the earth? Where the wish suffices to enable a man to fly through the air, or to disappear without a trace into the ground beneath him?
Long before the World War, when the real power of the motion picture to represent feelings was as yet unknown, and when serious literature, on this subject or on that, was as yet unable to rise above the low level of the cheap pamphlet, one of the most valiant of German literati—Julius Bab—referred to the trick film, the fairy film, as the exclusive species of creation with which the so-called moving picture could legitimately lay claim to success, achieved or potential. The pedagogues rushed to his support; they showered him withapplause; they demanded the fairy film; they hated and even damned the serious motion picture.
But never mind! Let us grant that the film Bab and his supporters had in mind enjoys substantial possibilities in the way of setting forth certain types of pictures. Their contention merely increased the scope of the moving picture. But did the picture they had in mind add to the artistic scope of the business at hand? Bab wrote at that time these words: “For the motion picture, and in the motion picture, it is easy to have water run uphill, to have a venerable costermonger of the gentler sex soar through the empyrean heights, to have a snail overtake an express train.”
Now, there is at least one irrefutable proof that a given thing is not art: unlimited possibilities. These make up the stock-in-trade of the trick film. In such a production there is no development; there is nothing in which the artist soul triumphs over the soul of the merest mechanic. There is none of the torture or anguish that goes with the act of real creation. There is nothing more than a trick played on the object in question. The trick film is the work of a cold hand. The inventive mind is constantly bringing out new and quite ingenious tricks—magic tricks. Having become experienced in this, “it has the Devil kidnap a railway train and make off with it through theair.” But this is not art; it belongs to the variety shows; it is in place where all that is asked for and paid for is physical cleverness, legerdemain, art without soul.
There comes a time where we really feel sorry for the motion picture artist—when he finds tricks indispensable if he is to give an adequate idea of the miraculous magic in which he is interested. We will concede that in the trick film, and particularly in the fairy film, a certain measure of inner and intimate development is possible, and is at times evident. This “art,” however, always has a flaw in it that defies mending. Any art that forms an alliance with pure mechanisms in order to be effective, or to bring out the intended effects, is to be distrusted from the very beginning. For art ceases when mechanismus begins to play a rôle that can in any way be considered creative or important. The purpose of art is clear: it is to serve in the colorful reproduction of a scene.
Fig. 5. Scene fromThe Nibelungs.[See p.82]
Fig. 5. Scene fromThe Nibelungs.[See p.82]
[See p.82]
This fact should be recognized, and in the films that set forth that reality which makes the warping and twisting of natural laws impossible, there should be just as little use made of tricks as the situation allows; and when employed, they should be employed with extreme caution. For the spectator, enlightened as he may become through the papers and magazines, is all too apt to catch onto these tricks. And it is never wise to grant the man whose art-sense is undeveloped, and whose æsthetic understanding is anything but mellow, a peep behind the scenes. The sole place that the artistically immature can occupy with impunity is in front of the stage.
Many film tricks are, indeed, distinctly deceptive—or fraudulent. If the incomparable detective is to land in an automobile that is whirring by at a fearful rate of speed, he goes about his undertaking in a quite calm way: four pictures a second, and the car making sixty miles an hour. What really happens? Twenty or thirty-second pictures, mad speed, foolhardy defiance of every known danger, and so on and so on. But woe to the final effect if the average spectator sees through the thing!
Even when there is no great or real mystery about the applied tricks, the artistic effect of them is rather weak. The spectator looks at it all, and so many technical questions arise in his mind as to how the feat is accomplished that his attention is drawn away from the picture itself. “How do they do that?” is one question that distracts him. Another is: “Is it real?” Indeed, the legitimate stage not infrequently finds it hard to resist the temptation to amaze and bewilder the spectator through the use of technical appliances.
Simple tricks, such as the sudden appearance of a dream figure, the unforeseen vanishing of magic people right in the middle of the picture may, in urgent cases, be employed. They rarely radiate anything that even distantly approaches what might be called psychic power, as did, for example, the unpretentious and altogether laudable tricks employed in theIndisches Grabmal. The truth is, we are reluctant about submitting to these mechanical devices; we refuse to be duped. Be the management and mounting ever so clever, we feel too keenly the presence of the cold mechanism.
More complicated and more difficult tricks, which really deceive no one, are the appearance of the same person twice in the same picture. When such takes place, two thoughts, or feelings, fight rather vigorously for dominance: we don’t like to refuse homage to the at times marvelous art of the actor (as in the case of Henny Porten inKohlhiesels Töchter, or Ossy Oswalda inPuppe); and the situation can be so captivating that it is out of the question for us to witness it and remain cold. But the point is eventually reached where we feel the impossibility, indeed the very absurdity of it all: “Just hand the old quockerwodger over to me! I’ll cut him in half and each part will dance on the rope just as comicallyas you please!” This is all very well, but you cannot expect a man to be an earth-worm, for which dual dancing of this type would be a mere trifle. Any pleasure that we might otherwise be enabled to draw from such a performance is vitiated by the ineluctable consciousness that we are witnessing a trick of a distinctly technical virtuosity.
But it is still more impossible to feel that we are in the presence of an artistic performance when—and it is common enough—the scene demanding that a man be pushed off some dangerous ledge or routed from some death-giving height, a big stuffed doll is substituted for the mortal thus to be visualized. InGolem, for example, we know full well that it is not the actor, Lothar Müthel, who is swept from the tower by the raging ghost. And we merely smile when the Golem drags a stuffed doll around by the hair. The presence of Mirjam’s clothing helps neither one way nor the other. Or take another type of situation: Where would it be possible to find an actor who was willing to have himself hurled high into the air on the occasion of one of the numerous and popular automobile collisions? In such a scene, where the living actor, of course, does not take part, the most that even the naïvest of spectator experiences is a quasi-thrill just as the “hero” receiveshis bump. After that there is nothing left but the disagreeable feeling on the part of the spectator that the staging of the piece was inadequate.
The man of the moving picture is born upon the same earth upon which all the rest of us live, move, and have our being. The established laws of nature apply to him just as they apply to us. Flying through the air, disappearing into the earth—these are the inartistic little simpletons that belong to the “movie” in its most desperate and degraded age. It is not the degree to which we can imitate that makes art: art is determined by the degree in which figures are fashioned that have souls in them.
The fairy-tale imitation on the part of the motion picture is fearful, at least in those instances in which, in order to carry out the trick, the lion’s share is allotted to the text. The fairy film is a bit of merry nonsense, a charming piece of roguery and skylarking, which takes place here on this earth, and which is not supposed to reflect the profound seriousness of the really poetic world of fairies or other supernatural creatures.
But we are at a loss to know what to do with the fairy film, for the fairy world—in this hard, sober, material, and at times, brutal world of ours—has become about extinct, depopulated, dead.For this reason alone, the fairy film cannot hope to succeed as a business proposition.
Within the last year, the magic tricks that were once so common have almost completely disappeared from the screen. The Swedes—the most artistic of all film peoples—have never found the trick necessary, not even in their fairy films, though the Swedes belong to a race that loves reverie, likes to dream, and enjoys visions.