CHAPTER IVTHE SCENE

Let thought impart fixed content to the formsThat move across the stage in restless search.—Gœthe.

Let thought impart fixed content to the forms

That move across the stage in restless search.

—Gœthe.

Allthat has been said thus far is supposed to serve as an Ariadne thread through the labyrinth of the moving picture. All individual forms should be bound together and be reminded in this way of their common purpose and objective. For it is impossible, if art is to flourish, to permit each individual section of this manifold complex to scream aloud, and that with all its might, in an endeavor to drown out other sections by coercing them into a parrot’s cage, where the most they can do is to observe an obligatory subserviency.

There is no art in which the star system, the mere existence and independent, inconsiderate activity on the part of a few gifted persons, is so nefarious as in the motion picture. This is an art in which there must be an unreserved ensemble of effort, a friendship of minds, a perfect harmony of creative souls. In the orchestra of productive spirits that plays in the motion picture, no man dare be master, no man dare be assistant. Themanager himself must beprimus inter pares. And neither the author nor the manager is the chief creator of a work: it is created in truth with the idea of equal honor and responsibility for author, manager, actor, operator, and architect. Let each man in this circle of personalities be a professional in his field—and an intelligent person with regard to the fields of each of his colleagues. If anyone fails to perform his full duty, or if anyone pushes his own personality tooobtrusivelyinto the foreground, the inherent value of the film is weakened while its eventual success is jeopardized. This is true, for art is weak and but little capable of defending itself against the fatuous doings and dealings of all that is merely dazzling, just as truth is but little minded to take up effective warfare against the hollow phrase.

The values that have been found in this way solved the problem of the material. An artist soul that is certain of itself will never find any great difficulty in seizing upon the right tools to accomplish its ends; and it will rely upon its feelings in determining what these tools shall be. And yet the labyrinth in which the film artist is supposed to find himself is so ramified and many-sided that even the greatest connoisseurs not infrequently lose their way in the winding maze of paths that lie open and seem to bid for popular usage.

The main wheel in the machinery of film art has been found; the technical bases which decide the limits to which the accomplishments and achievements of the motion pictures may hope to go, these are known. Just as brush and colors, or hammer and chisel, each inartistic means in themselves, circumscribe the arts which they aid in creating, and set up a vigorous resistance to an alien or irrelevant aid, just so does the moving picture mechanism become indignant at the intrusion of any and every foreign contrivance or figuration the essential being of which is beyond its natural control.

These technical means, by which the manifolding of scenes is made possible and their reproduction stimulating, aid in preserving the naturally perishable art work of the scene or act. The actor-scene becomes the pivot of all art consideration. It is from it that all recruiting and recreation radiate; and the fame and glory that attach to the enterprise fall upon those people who delineate the play of the human heart in the visible presence of the spectator.

Fig. 6. Scene fromDestiny.[See p.83]

[See p.83]

The actor on the legitimate stage is a person—that is, aper-sona(a “sounding-through”); he is the speaking tube of the poet. His conception of the rôle he acts is limited, determined, and circumscribed,at least by the words of the poet, and these are, so to speak, anchored in the harbor of his activity. If the art of the actor means “art seen through a temperament,” there still remains the marginal latitude of the temperament, of the personality. Despite this latitude, however, it is unlikely that an actor will be minded to, or be able to, make such self-imposed use of his personality as would be subversive of the ends the poet himself had in mind. The contest, the dispute, the disagreement about the interpretation of a given rôle—we have but to think of the riddle of Hamlet or Mephistopheles—invariably revolves about the question of what the poet himself meant by it when he created it. The stage actor becomes the interpreter of the poetic purpose.

The most important means at the disposal of the stage actor is the words, the lines he has to learn. The world in which he acts is relatively the same as the everyday world in which he lives when off the stage and going about his usual business. The northern actor makes but little use of gestures; they mean but little to him. Such concepts as he wishes to transmit to the spectator he feels should and must be transmitted through the aid of speech. Naturally, the stage actor does not speak in the restless, uncertain, and indistinct manner in which he speaks when off the stage. Hislanguage—with the exception of that employed in the hyper-naturalistic drama—is filed and planed, whether it be prose or verse. But he makes himself understood by his dramaturgic colleagues, principally through the same means that he employs when he wishes to convey an idea to them in daily life.

In the frame of the scenic apparatus, the actor plays in the course of a few moments, and inoneprogressive and uninterrupted action, his rôle from beginning to end. In this case there is no such thing as the splitting up of the action that is to be gone through with into a hundred or more different scenes. It is only rare, to be sure, that the artist observes the whole of his playing from the wings, but in the scenes he has to play thecharacterof his rôle is developed in logical sequence, and he has become familiar with the entire play through rehearsals or through previous performances.

He is his own auditor. The lines of the poet are transformed also for him into intoxicating music to which he resigns, by which he is inspired, and on the wings of which he is carried along.

In addition to all of this, there comes that rare and invaluable reciprocal action and reaction between him and his spectator, the force of which lends an inextinguishable and inescapable force to his receptive soul.

There is only one thing that tortures him, and from which there is no possible escape: he sees himself obliged to crawl into a new and strange rôle to-morrow, and into still another new and strange rôle day after to-morrow, and so on throughout his entire career as long as this is in the ascendancy. This being the case, even the greatest creation of the greatest poet is apt, if the danger is not incessantly guarded against, to rattle around in his soul with the emptiness of a hand-organ. But it is right there that we note the real task of the stage actor: he is not supposed to bellow forth scene after scene in uncontrolled eruptions of feelings. On the contrary, he is supposed to study each work of art, rehearse it, say it over, look into it, until heknowsit from every angle and in its every aspect. There is only one state of mind that can be sure of success when it is a question of performing a written play on the legitimate stage: the calm, easy, superior assurance that comes from infinite study and practice. “I seize the passions as the pianist seizes the octaves—without seeing what I am doing!” This confession was made by Salvini.

Compared with his colleagues on the legitimate stage, the film actor has in many ways a much more difficult task. The Italian and the Frenchman,both highly gifted in the art of mimicry, are much better adapted to the art of gesticulation than is the stiff northerner, or the snobbish cosmopolite whom the moving picture of all peoples takes such great delight in portraying. But the feverish gestures of the Romance people is beginning to screech and scream, in the moving picture, with the result, rather astonishing in itself, that the undemonstrative northerner is becoming the most gifted film actor.

Now, why have the film actors of the Romance peoples been a failure? It is easy to answer the question: Because the film showslife, while the Romance film, and particularly that of the Italians, has showntheater, and not always good theater at that.

The film actor is split with doubt; he labors under a dual desire: he is supposed to avail himself of all the means of mimic expression which he consciously neglects and oppresses in daily life—and he is supposed consciously to neglect and suppress the linguistic means of expression which he employs in everyday life. The defective mimic ability of the northerner is revealed in the majority of German, Scandinavian, and American films. So soon as the actor becomes aware that his gestures are not putting the picture across, he begins to speak his soundless language.

His gesture is supposed to embrace the content, in the way of feeling, of the entire scene. In this striving, the actor is supported by the peculiarity of the film mechanism, which catches up even the gentlest and most subdued mimicry and holds it up before the spectator.

It would be impossible, especially for a northerner, to play an entire mimic action, in all its shades and nuances, at one time or in one concerted effort. This explains why the pantomime could never rise above the level of a rather crude art form. But the film dissects the action, winnows its parts, and allocates them to various places or dramaturgic localities. Everything that happens in the same place is assembled, while the picture is being taken, and made into a united and single play. This is done, of course, for practical reasons associated with costumes, decorations, and travels. This being the case, the actor does, and has to, concentrate his entire attention, for a very short time, a time that is generally measured in seconds, on the mimic material and means that are naturally placed at his disposal.

This human weakness—which makes a relatively long and at the same time inspired action impossible—has been made the basis of photographic technique by the American. His reasoning and his technique must be commended. Wherehis European colleagues generally let the apparatus stand during the entire scene and then play a few close-ups later on, the American takes a picture of every individual scene, and from all conceivable angles. His scenario is arranged from the beginning with this end in view. The result is that each scene is wrapped in a spirited, glimmering, glittering unrest which lifts even the most indifferent episode quite up above the shadow of tedium. I am of the opinion that the American film owes a good share of its charm to this distinctly advantageous and manifold dissection of the pictures, just as I believe that the failure of so many German and Swedish films is due to the slowness and tediousness that are familiarly associated with their photographic technique.

Fig. 7. Scene fromThe Children of Darkness.[See p.83]

[See p.83]

This splitting up of the film action, however, into individual scenes, which are not photographed in their logical sequence, brings into the artistry of the film actor that profound psychic cleft, even physical disruption, which fundamentally differentiates his creative activity from that of the actor on the legitimate stage. The action does not carry him into his playing, or into the inner nature of his rôle, in calm, gradual development. On the contrary, the flood-tide of feeling springs up obviously without the proper motivation, and ends with a suddenness that suggests that someone cutit off before it had been fully lived out. There is no such thing as a gliding and swelling of mood such as is necessary, it would seem, to effect a mild and logical transition from scene to scene.

This causes the actor and the manager all manner of difficulty; neither is able to gain a complete survey of the work to be done. Where the regular stage actor brings his mind into the proper equilibrium, we might say equanimity, slowly, step by step, and with a careful studying of the objective that is to be taken, so that the climax of his effort will stand out from the subsidiary efforts that have led up to it, the film actor scatters his entire energy over all the scenes, and some of them are not merely preparatory to the climax, they are in themselves of a distinctly subordinate nature. When a case really arises in which there is perfect artistic gradation, each scene receiving the emphasis it deserves and the climax rising up above all that has gone before, we may be certain that this is due to the solemn fact that both the acting and the management have been in possession of unqualified artistic appreciation, that each has worked in harmony with the other, and that the eventual and final success of the achievement has been due to unusual excellence in the way of creating and producing a picture. When this happens, however, the layman remains altogether unawareof it. He takes it for granted. But even he appreciates the astonishing effect of it all; he somehow knows that the performance was perfect. He feels the perfection though he is unable to explain it.

Take the case of Lubitsch’sSumurun. The histrionic brilliancy of it was due to the fact that it consisted of an unbroken and dazzling chain of episodes and pictures. The truth is, this disadvantage that is inherent in the technique of the film can be removed only by the author. He must see to it that there is a rhythm about his scenes; these must rise and fall naturally and smoothly.

An excess of magnificence is easier to endure than a total lack of ebullient ingenuity. The average film is a tedious, wooden affair that moves along with the slowness of all that is mediocre and commonplace. For in the very inherent inability to get a complete survey of what is taking place lies a hazard which only the best of film actors, and these only when urged on and inspired by the best of producers, can take with ease or success: the hazard lies in the fact that the entire character of a figure is tuned either to a sharp or a flat note, in a major or a minor key, and once set going it works like an unwelcome narcotic. The actor plays on a certain day just one individual scene, now from the first and then fromthe last and still again from some intervening act. Then on still another day he takes up another scene from another act, and so on until the mosaic of all the scenes has been, not composed or arranged in becoming sequence, but heaped up in a veritable pile.

It is perfectly easy to see how that fine feeling that is associated with real art, and which even the least gifted actor in the spoken drama has at his immediate disposal, escapes the less gifted film actor, when this method of playing is in vogue, and especially so if he is not carried along by a colorful bit of poetry. He is simply not in a position to bring new colors, new tones, new passions into his acting, and therefore into his act. The result of all this is that entire film actions are played by one or several actors on a single string. The women of the film fraternity are frequently characterized by this very type of playing; indeed, it is rare that any one of them can boast of the innate possession of that choice ability which enables them to vary the chords that are struck in their souls by the actions they are supposed to depict.

There are a few, however, who have the psychic power which spells variety in the creation of character. In Germany there is first of all Mady Christians; and then there is Lil Dagover. Francehas only one such film actress, and she is but little known: Marie-Louise Tribe. In Sweden, Karin Molander and Tora Teje are noted for their genius in this direction. In America, colorful film actresses are as numerous as the sands of the sea. But in all film countries the average film actress is a tired, tedious, washed-out, and worn-out character.

Such lifeless moving pictures present us consequently with the soporific drama of a single sorrow or grief or pain, of a conventional melancholy, sadness, or lament. And these emotions are reiterated time out of mind, and through the abnormal exploitation of sentimentality they become swollen and mendacious. Indeed, even buoyancy and mirth can sound hard and tinny if they are made to trip along without variation or interruption.

It is the task of the author and the producer to work hand and hand with the actor to the end that he may be enabled to put life into his acting. To do this, flashes of light must be shed, in the real and artistic sense, on the action of the play; the individual scene must be made to appear in its true light with regard to the play as a whole—that is to say, this must be done if the complete and completed play is to give the effect of unified art, art as an entity, art in its totality.

The dissection of the action into countless inorganic parts naturally has its effect on the artistic form of the film actor, and gives to his efforts a tone and quality that is altogether different from what we are accustomed to in the case of the actor in the spoken drama.

This is seen first of all in the rehearsal. Such a thing as the learning of a rôle by heart, or the practicing of gestures before the mirror, is unknown to the film actor. With him the rehearsal is rather an experimenting. In America, where the use of the negative plays no rôle, the individual parts of the scenes are turned again and again, until it is possible to establish a “model copy” from which the best parts are chosen. But such a “waste,” which seems to be quite profitable in the end, is unknown in Europe, which, following the lead of its lack of reason, feels that it is too impoverished to indulge in such lavishness. In Europe the apparatus, literally speaking, is turned but once, or, in case the result is wholly unacceptable, it is turned twice, but with a sigh.

The stage actor is a “soul stormer.” But, as contrasted with the film actor, the stage actor can work himself into his rôle gradually and by all manner of psychic cajolery. The film actor is not presented with an entire work of art, but with the merest particle of such a work, and then he is toldto put life into it. “Inspire it!” That is the command to which he must be obedient. “That is the trial by fire of the film actor,” says the doughty Danish director, Urban Gad, “when he can poetize himself, so to speak, into the rôle that he is supposed to create, when he can feel the situation in its entirety. Then he is the born film actor. Otherwise he is merely a more or less well trained circus horse.”

The creative work of the film actor is, consequently, not a matter of slow and possibly even tiresome learning in solo and ensemble; it is a matter of ingenious and spontaneous improvisation. The man who has to stand up before a mirror and see whether this gesture is fitting and another permissible is no film actor. And it is from his ability to rise from nothing to an exalted and passionate art-feeling that the pride and joy of the film player owe their origin; and having originated, they cast a beneficent atmosphere over the art that is called into being.

It is not enough to delude oneself regarding an essentially cold heart by the abundant use of gestures that would seem to indicate that the heart is warm. There are actors on the legitimate stage who, by the traditional use of the merest and veriest routine, can carry their publics along with them and raise them to pinnacles of enthusiasm;make them rage with indignation; or petrify them into horror over the deeds done before them. No film actor has ever yet succeeded in doing that. The lines are creations of the mind; they are spoken with shrewd calculation as to the effects they can evoke; they are declaimed with real consideration. The gestures, on the other hand, are truer than the lines; they come direct from the soul. Moreover, the lens of the familiar apparatus is sharper and less indulgent than the human eye. The lens catches everything; nothing escapes it. It makes a living picture of every attempt to deceive and visualizes all that comes before it. No film actor who is not passionately concerned with and about the incident he is to portray will ever bring other people to the point of passion. The inert playing of comedy which infests the legitimate stage with false and idle pathos, with the spirit of repulsive paint and powder, is utterly out of place, and out of the question, in the moving picture. The film actor has got to be what he plays.

Every actor, however, has his own personality; his own world. There is an atmosphere about him that is his. He cannot escape it; it makes itself felt; and it causes him to have a definite, even unique, disposition, temperament, character. Now if the circumference of his soul is very large, thecompass of his soul will be equally large—and he will provide us with a wonderful drama—the drama of a man who can create one character to-day, another to-morrow, and in so doing renew himself as a molder of personalities.

The moving picture, with its spontaneous creation, is a high grade and first-class measurer of temperament. The world has a plentiful supply of actors and actresses who can depict robbers and prostitutes of the lowest as well as of the highest classes of society. But the world has only a few, a very few artists, in whom a royal and proud, a fine and demure, a rich and colorful soul plays its part.

The suddenness with which these feelings must be conjured up demands rapidity of inspiration, an ever-ready excitability (the managers are well aware of this!), a pliability of mood, an unrestrained capacity to enter into the spirit of complete renunciation, compared with which the ability on the part of the regular stage actor to feel himself into his rôle is a calm and subdued sauntering about, a mere strolling through the mazes of the human heart. The film actor is not fired on to intense passion by the words of the poet; he has to kindle the potential flame within his heart by the fire that he himself strikes, and with the aid of such fuel as he himself can assemble forthe purpose. But in doing all this, his faithful colleague, the manager, stands by his side, and his dare not be an unvibrant soul. The manager is duty bound to find words that will inspire even the most lethargic of film actors. The will power, one might say the will violence, of the best of managers is so strong that, guided by them, the actor plays as in a hypnotic state.

Without inspired and intelligent direction, the actual necessity of ensemble playing, and the necessities imposed by the desire for such playing are easily forgotten, with the result that lack of discipline dissipates the general effect, and such art as might have been revealed goes the way of all weakness. The reason for this safe assertion is patent: in the motion picture, the feelings burst forth from momentarily calm hearts. Unusual diligence must, consequently, be exercised in the working-up of emotions, in the emphasis that is to be laid on significant scenes and on climaxes.

For these nervous and sensitive people, the restraint of feelings is a distinct torture. The endless waiting in the hot and noisy glass house, the disturbing feature of the apparatus while the picture is being taken, the garish light which hurts the eye, the lamp which not infrequently explodes with the subsequent danger to such combustible paraphernalia as ball dress and wig, and thedirector, this disagreeable person who is always around, watching what is going on, interrupting here with a word of constructive criticism and there with a sentence of plain abuse—these are a few of the things that make the film actor’s life a hard one. And added to them must be the solemn fact that there is no public there to give wings to the actor’s soul. This being the case, an actually mad desire to create a character has got to come over and settle down upon the actor if he is to come into the right frame of mind. That he has got to be a man of perfect self-forgetfulness while surrounded by this hubbub of haste and confusion need not be stated.

The means at the disposal of the film actor is his body, which admits of unmeasured and unaccounted possibilities in the way of expressing emotions. It was only a few years ago that we learned that there is no condition of the soul for which the body does not have its appropriate and interpretative movement; and to-day we hardly have an inkling of the profound depths of the soul for which bodily agitations or affections may be found, and will be found, once the generations that are to come shall have learned the true significance of mimicry. In the future, mimicry must develop into an intimate and familiar language. In thedances of antiquity and in the pantomime of past centuries, the soul wrestled with the body, for it had already sensed its ability to speak through the body. But the spectators sat too far away, the ring of the gesture was drowned out by space, and the bodies had to shriek, as it were, in order to be understood. But a tender feeling can do nothing more than whisper, for it is averse to all that is loud. The soul gave up the struggle as hopeless; pantomime became petrified, or stereotyped, into the conventional ballet which has dragged its weary course through the centuries.

It was not until our own day—the ancient arts of which are tired to death and foul to the very marrow of their bones—a day in which it seemed that art could take no hope, that technique stepped in and made inventions as a result of which the gesture took on fullness and acquired sound. Modern technique has invented the film, and the film is the violin of the human body.

Before one recognized the nuances of which the film was potentially capable, it had to wander along through the crude errors of pantomime. That the imperfect films of the first decades offered only imperfect, at times even repellent, pictures, is altogether natural. The intellectuals of all nations, and those who had schooled their eye and their heart on the perfection and beauty of theold and established arts, were terrified, if not horrified, at and by the unlicked antics of this new contraption. They saw in the motion picture nothing more than a machine to entertain, chiefly to amuse, the populace. They damned it outright; they found it a perverter of youth, just as they had and have found those cheap, vulgar and badly printed paper volumes which are to be had for a few pennies, and which poison the youthful mind so that the expenditure of millions in charity and philanthropy cannot reclaim them.

There were as yet no artists who could play on this new and novel fairy violin. The evolution of the film is quite logical: it began with devices and agencies which were inadequate, both artistically and technically.

Fig. 8. Scene fromAlgol.[See p.84]

[See p.84]

It is our duty and our pleasure to do homage at this point to an artist who took up with the film, and resigned herself to it, at a time when artists in general poured contempt without measure and derision without thought on it. This artist was the Dane—Asta Nielsen. She has been dethroned, unquestionably a prima donna of the old school by whose playing we can now do no more than evaluate the tremendous progress that has been made by her pupils and successors. But in Europe she was the queen, the standard-bearer of the film. Her large, dark eyes, and the symmetricalplay of her limbs, captivated and converted many of different faith to the cause. Her gestures were taken from the pantomime: she moved across the canvas in slow, long, ostentatious tread. There was, indeed, something about her movements that might be described as obtrusive, importunate. But Asta Nielsen was—let us repeat, in Europe—the first of that great herd of joblessartistesand beggarly paid servants who took up her position before the revolving camera in a really and truly artistic way. She was filled with a passion, and endowed with a faith in art that was unknown to and unappreciated by the great majority, as she played the lachrymose and vapid tales that were then being turned out for visualization on the screen.

She was originally an actress; she abandoned the legitimate stage and went over to the motion picture. Now, the actor on the regular stage is one kind of individual; the actor for the motion picture is quite another. The stage has a limited and well-defined category of beings and shadows, of vessels, so to speak, for the fancy of the poet in words. There is the youthful lover, the sentimental dame of uncertain years, the first hero, the first heroine, the doughty old father, the droll old lady, and so on. The list need not be filled out; it is a familiar one.

Anything that fits into one of these classifications is played,summa summarum, by the actor engaged to take the part. The actor of the spoken stage has a clear and definite being; his character, his make-up, is known. He is a comedian, a boneless man who can slip into this rôle to-day and into another to-morrow. In his position, whatever it may be at any given time, he engages in a really fraudulent and affected game. That is the comedy which devours in time the very character of that actor whose gifts are naturally none too great. He becomes a player of all parts; he creates all rôles; he grows into a poseur without truth of soul. Only the tremendous characters of the rarely gifted, of a Garrick or a Kainz, win the victory over the insidious phrase, assimilate any rôle they essay to interpret, and transform it into a part of their own being.

I do not know whether Asta Nielsen was a great artist on the legitimate stage or not; I hardly believe that she was. For there is the atmosphere of “comedy” about her rôles, an eternal conflict between truth and phraseology. No one had even a remote conception of the unsparing nature of the film lens in the early days of her histrionic glory. One schematized a rôle in accordance with the traditions of the legitimate stage. Nor was this all; the first great film artisthad to do everything. She was worth her weight in gold; and she was exploited. This week she would take the part of a demoniac prostitute in silk and satin; next week she would play the part of a young girl whose youthfulness was not surpassed by her chastity, and whose beauty was the cynosure of vigilant eyes.

Two things, consequently, were to be recognized, and to be overcome: the phraseology of the pantomime gesture, and the insincerity of the rôle. The legitimate stage portrays and represents shadows—speaking tubes of the poet; the film uses real human beings.

The development of the film has been different in different countries. In one country its growth has been noticeably slow; in another it has been remarkably rapid. Film actors put in their appearance, were carried along for a while on the wave of popularity, and then vanished—or they still fight on—Asta Nielsen is a case in point—in a mad and ineffectual attempt to regain or retain their thrones. This development of the film has been recognized nowhere. It has not come to light. It has been brought about in perfect accord with that instinctive necessity with which the healthy never fails to blaze its trail and find its way.

Man versus rôle, individual versus a stagephantom—that is the situation. In America, where cumbersome traditions are rare, in the realm of art, the goal was reached more quickly than elsewhere. It was in America that we witnessed the complete defection from the stage actor and a consequential preference for the type. There is to be no mimicking; there is to be no playing of theater; each man has his own character, and this character he projects on the screen, again and again, now in this disguise, now in another, but it is always the same character. He projects his own ego; and for this reason he never fails, for a man can find his own mouth with the spoon, it makes no difference how dark the dining-room may be.

Fig. 9. Scene fromDr. Mabuse: The Great Unknown.[See p.84]

[See p.84]

There is another country which, by virtue of its well-nigh complete isolation from the hardened traditions of the Mediterranean nations, found the truth and genuineness of the film with marked rapidity: Sweden. The Swedish player is very rarely a great “actor.” His face, with its broad Finnish cheek bones, is rather immovable. His eyes dream, but inwardly. They turn at times with an expression of unqualified skepticism toward the things of the outer world only to return to the same soul from which they derived their initial characteristics and inspiration. The figures are not yet entirely awakened; they stretch themselvesafter the fashion of young trees. But in these Swedish men lies deep breath: it is the dreamy melancholy of their native land. Every one of them has the warm blood of life coursing through his veins, and the atmosphere of truth is about them all, even when we feel that they are all a bit alike in the matter of elegiac temperament. When steel and stone are rubbed together, sparks fly; the Swedes are all constituted, more or less, of the same resilient wood.

The film theater of the Romance peoples was simply fearful. The ostentatious gesticulation, the long-drawn-out echo of feelings, the false pomp of their operatic style have been the cause of many a bankruptcy among film companies and producers in sunny Italy. The Italian film industry represents, in truth, in the year 1923, nothing but a heap of ruins from which here and there, but only rarely, a patch of green prosperity raises its intimidated tuft. A great many Italians are coming up to Germany to-day, the film gestures of which appeal to them as being relatively tolerable. The sober, phraseless vibration of American acting gets on the hot-blooded nerves of these sons of the South.

We Germans, however, are fully convinced that the way we had been following, in the matter of gestures, up to 1923 was a false one. Our producersrarely have the courage to go fishing for film actors, for new and youthful faces, in the great stream of humanity that flows by them without ceasing. Until only one year ago, we fancied that no one was fitted for the screen unless he had proved his ability on the stage. That was a grievous error.

We have, to be sure, some clever character players whose psychic powers were not corrupted by the pathos of the stage. I mention, among others, the famous Jennings, Wegener, and Schünzel. They are great on the stage for the very evident and simple reason that they dominate any part they play and make it yield to the dictates of their own personalities. But we have no youthful favorite among the ladies; we do not have the smiling hero, who lustily packs up life and carries it off on one shoulder. But our greatest lack is in another direction: we have no young woman; we have no radiant girl. She is lacking, but only in our moving pictures; in life she is present. And if we wish to bring these charming and lovely young girls into the moving picture world and project them on the screen, we have got to make up our minds that there is but one place where they can be found: in life itself. We have got to recruit them from the flowing naturalness of their laughter.

We begin with a decided aversion to the star system. And it must be said that all of those presumptive and presumptuous film princesses, whose abilities would be remarkable indeed if they bore the slightest relation to their caprices, have disappeared from the studios. These stars made, until quite recently, the production of a picture in Germany an excessively expensive undertaking because of their lack of willingness to work, and their eternal talking. This explains why Fritz Lang, of the Decla-Bioscop, showed so many new and strange faces in his marvelous picture based on the Nibelungen saga.

It is rare, in the case of the legitimate stage, that a part is written for a special actor. Whoever fits the part is assigned to it, and he creates the character. No other course of procedure is thinkable, for a drama is written for a thousand stages. There is something solitary about the film; we regard it as something that “takes place” but once. It is difficult to write good film characters if the writer is unfamiliar with the players that create the characters. Hampered by this lack of personal acquaintance, the most that can be accomplished by the author is an acceptable sketch. One has to associate with the prospective film actors, and study their personalities without letting them become aware of the end in view andthe caution that is being exercised in attaining it. One has to study the player’s unconscious movements; the mirthful action of his hand; the sensuous expression of his eye; his gait; his manner of sitting down. The whole man is sometimes revealed by the way in which he smokes a cigarette. One must make the actor angry and nervous. Each expression of impatience, of joy, of tedium that is characteristic of a given man must be noted down in the film book. One has got to make a portrait of the man who is going to play the part the author has in mind.

He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. There it finds itself again, safe and carefully guarded: it smiles, and develops its flowers.

It is only in this way that the characters grow from their own power. Made to grow in this fashion, they reveal in their every movement, asin every deed they do, the saving sign of inner truth. They convulse the spectator through the unadulterated naturalness of their art; and by virtue of their own ability, they can make an improbable situation seem natural, for their own life is natural, just as it is peculiar to them alone, and virile.

It is impossible to be a great film actor if one is small and unworthy. The person who is cold by nature, and who carries an unsympathetic heart in his breast, will never be able to do more than simulate real feelings. I do not believe that a prostitute would ever be able to play the rôle of an angelic creature in a film. Behind and back of the keyboard on which the film writer improvises there must be a set of beautifully tuned strings. Otherwise nothing comes of the effort but the banal clanging of the hand-organ.

The film actor must be first of all a human being, a real man, a clear and unequivocal character of life and from life. The picture of his soul is found only in everyday life, never on the stage. And his adaptability to the moving picture is determined by the manner in which he conducts himself in the life he leads from day to day with other men. If he is beautiful, if his body is erect and pliable, so much the better. But he must be a man of character.

Character and temperament—two things that cannot be learned. One can learn, however, the business of playing while facing the camera; one can learn, in this position, to control one’s gestures, and to give a cautious expression of the feelings.

On the legitimate stage it is quite permissible, it is indeed necessary, for the actor to express his emotions through a certain exaggeration, with the most beautiful pathos known to gesticulation. The opposite is true of the film: in it, suppression of emotions, muffling of feelings, is necessary. Why? Because in actual life feelings are after all expressed in a subdued way, behind the veil, so to speak, of that on which the interested party is to eavesdrop. Every time we notice any such emotion as ecstasy on the screen we remain cold; we become in truth disenchanted because of what we have sensed. Experience has already taught us that exaggeration has no place in the moving picture; it is ineffective. This lesson we have learned from the Italians. All good film actors are noted for a certain measure of immovability; they are cautious with and sparing of their gestures.

Fig. 10. Scene fromGolem.[See p.85]

[See p.85]

In the good film manuscript, the feelings are not poured in a lavish way over every single scene. Over the majority of scenes there should rest asplendid freshness, a sunny everyday life filled with a wholesome humor the chief inspiration of which is the very joy of living and the atmosphere of activity. The isolated scenes of real feeling should be played all the more quietly and calmly if the natural instinct of the actor prompts him to display unusually strong feelings. In other words, the more excited the actor the less excited his acting should be. I personally place the wreath of honor on the head of that actor who creates the coveted effects with the least expenditure of visible energy. In every gesture, in every flash or darkening of the eye, there should be concealed a deep truth which is illumined and illuminated, secretly, by the warmth of the feelings that the artist in reality experiences.

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