CHAPTER VITHE POET

I will praise the sons of Atreus,Of Cadmus will I sing—But my harp will be in tune withA theme that makes love ring.—Anacreon.

I will praise the sons of Atreus,

Of Cadmus will I sing—

But my harp will be in tune with

A theme that makes love ring.

—Anacreon.

Wehave progressed with our subject up to a certain point, proceeding at all times from the external to the internal; from that which is without to that which is within. As we have done this, the parts have been placed in our hands: the mechanism and the scenic picture. The individual who unites these two parts into a coherent whole, and who breathes the breath of a full and pulsating world into these united parts, is the poet. The means are in his hand, just as hammer and chisel; the picture stands before his soul.

The longing of every artist is to fashion and give shape to a heaven and an earth; he longs to compress the whole of bubbling life into his picture. But the marble block gapes at him and says: “Of sound in me there is not a note. I am immovable. Colors do not radiate from me. Fashion me into a living picture! Give me form and life!”

It is even so with the moving picture. It has its own world, a narrow, hard, unwieldy world that is not unlike the heartless chunk of marble. Locked up in this world of the moving picture are the fates and visions which dream of the amiable artist who will some day chance to take them unto himself, and give them the life they feel is theirs by every right.

The poet of the motion picture! From his soul come forth the pictures—those that have never been seen, that are never to be seen. The divine grace of completing a work of his own is not given to him; he is given the torture associated with excavating confused and heterogenous visions from the mountain of desire. This is his part. Though the better, he does not choose it; it is assigned to him by virtue of the things that have been given him, and have not been given to other men.

The dramatist, the poet of the legitimate stage, has a final form at his immediate disposal—the word. This word rings out from the stage in unamended and unadulterated form, and is caught up, with gratitude, by the sympathetic friends in the pit, stalls, and boxes. He is rewarded with thanks—even though the thanks he receives come merely from hearts momentarily exuberant.

Those who make their living from the creativeactivity of the motion picture poet are famous people. They live in the very atmosphere of renown. Their names are household words. Their pictures are displayed in the plateglass show-windows of the cities.

But the motion picture poet himself? Who knows anything about Carl Mayer, the author ofDr. Caligariand theHintertreppe? Who ever heard of Hans Gaus, the man who wroteMadame Recamier? Who is in any way familiar with the name of Hans Kräly, who, in collaboration with Lubitsch, wroteDie Puppe,Kohlhiesels Töchter, and a number of our other most brilliant scenarios? Truth to tell, if Lubitsch had been only a writer of scenarios and not at the same time one of our very greatest managers and producers, it would be impossible to make a circus dog bark at the mention of his name.

This is all due in part to the inherent nature of the case. The motion picture is art for the masses. And the masses are naturally accustomed to admire that artist who submits his creations to them in tangible, palpable, and finished form. The man who chopped the crude picture from the marble block was called an apprentice, a laborer, a pupil. But in contradistinction to the poet of the motion picture, the apprentice did not create the completed and complex picture.

To be a poet is to be a brooder. In order to acquire the title of poet, one must be able to conjure a coveted picture from the refractory clay.

The poets of German Romanticism did their creative work in rain-soaked, wind-rattled attic rooms far from every vestige of external culture. They suffered the inconvenient pangs of hunger while so engaged. But no one has ever become fat from their creations at the same time that the thanks they have received have come from the heart, and have been repaid a thousandfold.

To be a motion picture poet means that you have got to keep your feet on the ground. In this art—which is hopelessly bound up with the bank account and the pocketbook—there is no place for the idealist of romanticism. Such an individual can only stand alone in the corner, embittered and sterile.

The film writer is still held in rather low esteem in Germany. It is impossible to get along without him, for without new ideas and actions the entire apparatus of the film corporation stands idle. As things are at present, however, the method of procedure is incorrect: his material is taken from him, he is kept at what seems a safe distance from the ateliers, and the duty of building his material up into an actable and effective motion picture is left to the producer and manager.The author is poorly paid; consequently he finds it materially and spiritually unwise to torture himself for any great length of time with any one work. Quantity, not quality, has to be his shibboleth if he is to meet his very ordinary financial obligations.

The mistake that is being made is naturally a two-sided one. The film author’s place is in the studio; he should be the silent witness of every scene; he should be thoroughly conversant with such technical progress as has been made and is being made in the way of illumination and psychic photography. But he dare never forget that a film work is not the work of an individual.

An author has to have, if success is to crown his efforts, a great store of general information, a store such as reaches far out beyond the studio. He should have a general but clear idea as to what it costs to mount a film. He should be familiar with what other film companies have accepted and produced; he should study the film output of foreign film peoples—if he does not, collisions are apt to occur and these have been known to result in lawsuits based on the charge of plagiarism. He should be skilled in the distribution and placing of such decorations as are to be used with his scenario, and thus be able to avoid the embarrassment that arises when a colossalscenery has been bought and paid for, though the scene that it is supposed to decorate is ofLilliputiandimensions. He should know what people are talking about, how they are most easily entertained, most intelligently amused. If he fails in this regard, he is apt to expend his creative energy in the lining out of a film that is in its place in an established institution for the blind.

There is a tremendous amount of work attached to the domain which the film author feels is his; there is so much technique, so much specializing in the modern motion picture, that the author is unquestionably an indispensable member of the court that creates the film; he does not make it alone, but it cannot be made without him. His opinions must be respected, otherwise he avenges himself by an action which bears on its very brow the stamp of mere affectation and technique; you can see that it has been invented; that it is not of sterling inspiration. And so far as the recognition of the film author is concerned, I am bound to say that things are still in a serious plight in my native land.

Fig. 13. Scene fromSumurun.[See p.88]

[See p.88]

If the moving picture writer is paid precisely the same money for a subtle, well-studied, artistic, and purified bit of poet action that he would be paid, or is paid, for a bit of cheap, meretricious, and insidious cajolery, there is no hope. Thengood-bye soul, and welcome to the martyrdom that ensues when other people wax fat on the creation that has made the author lean! He says to himself, and he cannot be expected to say anything else, “To the Devil with idealism!” This explains why Hans Gaus is not writing anotherMadame Recamier, why he is not writing any more passionate, brilliant, disciplined film poetry. And it explains, too, alack and alas, why he is turning out cleverly devised, invented, and not felt, film pieces that keep the pot boiling. This explains, of course it does, why the battalions of rather talented motion picture writers are fabricating whole libraries of scenarios that reveal nothing more than the cold hand of invention.

The motion picture itself suffers most from this unenviable state of affairs. But this, in itself, is a rather impersonal theme for lament, for it is the film corporations that must bear the major part of this misfortune. And why? Because a good scenario, one that glows with the heat of informed inspiration, forces its way into the soul of the spectator, invites him to come back, and even goes so far as to have the hope well forth in his bosom that, having now seen twenty moving pictures in which the swollen effusions of uninspired tricks have left him cold and disappointed, he will go the twenty-first time with enough faithin human nature to fancy that he may at last be rewarded for his persistence. A motion picture is successful only when an unusually good andextraordinarilyinspired scenario chances to lift it up above the colorless odds in numerical superiority and enables it, for this reason and for other reasons, to shine forth like a lighthouse on a sea of near-darkness.

It is sometimes amazing to see what enormous sums of money may be expended, and what an abundance of ability may be lavished on utterly inadequate and ineffective poetry. Such a film can never hope for wide or world-success. Everything that is deserving of attentive interest is in the picture itself. Once it has been played there is no more to it; that is the end of it. There may be architects of real imagination and education, managers who are inherently clever and not at all afraid of work, a select company of actors and actresses—all of which is fine. But in this circle of people there is one who is missing: the author. He should be there, for it is he who is to reflect on the ways of the world and project a new world on the screen. It is he in whom and through whom the work of the others is to acquire the breath of real life.

But, though it is a hard statement, it is true: Inthisart not a finger is being moved in the exclusiveinterests of the idea of æsthetic progress. And yet, and yet—for the film companies to further the cause of the poet is to put money into their own pockets. The best field the film companies can possibly develop is the mind, heart, and soul of the naturally gifted film author. The film companies will never have splendid and effective scenarios to work on until they have made up their minds to reward, in a practical way, the film author, splendidly and effectively, for his labors, to recognize him, in a practical way, just as they at present “recognize” the leading manager and actor.

I am ready to contend that the best film actions are written in Germany—but that the very worst manuscripts and clue-books are also written in Germany. This is true of the average. Those companies in which the film author enjoys the same rights and privileges that the manager enjoys, and in which the two work hand in hand, are having one success after another. I need but mention the Decla-Bioscop, a company that is altogether unique in that its records show that one of the most brilliant film authoresses Germany has thus far produced, Thea von Harbou, is married to Fritz Lang, one of our very best managers.

It is a remarkable fact that no one can write a film alone—and that it should not on this accountbe attempted. A good film, other things being equal, is created when two adequately endowed writers, one of whom can depict action, the other of whom can arrange the scenes, rub elbows in a common and mutual effort. When it is done in this fashion, the film glows with the fire of creative genius and is altogether vivacious.

From an artistic point of view, there is but one way to solve the problem of the film writer, and that is to have the author—as Griffith, Lubitsch, and a number of others are doing—stage and produce their own works. The idea of the action has been crystallized in their souls in a thousand pictures. No other person, however gifted he may be and be his intentions the very best, can appreciate the picture even approximately as well as the author himself who dreamed it into existence.

But if the film author has no ability as a director, the only course left open to him is to submit his scenario to a second party, or at least the germ, the central idea of it. The only thing this second party can then do is to raise a strange flower from the seed the author sowed. A sympathetic understanding of the two artists, in this case, is a wish that has not yet been fulfilled. For the two artists to work at random, to say nothing of working against each other, is to create confusionworse confounded, and such is not art. In the end the will of the one or of the other will have made itself felt. And we can hardly demand of the poet that he accede to revisions and emendations of his poetry without cavil, inquiry, or interest.

It frequently happens, however, that a talented poet is wholly unfamiliar with the nature and technique of the motion picture. In such a case, the artistic and financial success of the picture depends upon a complete revision of the scenario as originally submitted, and this revision is undertaken either by the stage manager, who must have a fair measure of the poet in him even if he has not written, or by that creature known as the dramaturge: he is part stage critic, part stage manager.

The old-fashioned dramaturge is, as should be known, the man who has no idea of his own but who is an ingenious thief. He still vegetates in all countries, sad specimen though he is. No man is a good dramaturge who is not also a poet. He should be the second poet who collaborates with the author. The author is not infrequently maladroit, dream-burdened, and obsessed with unfilm-like notions. The dramaturge has to be a malleable connoisseur, one who can scent out of the wealth of good passages the weak spots of a filmmanuscript, and then lift them out before it is too late. To work with such a dramaturge is a pleasure. The author stands ashamed and humiliated in the presence of pictures the existence of which the dramaturge first challenges and then kills. One affable moment follows another of the same enviable description. A creative fever comes over both of them; they are convulsed when the heroes suffer; they revel in satisfaction when jolly situations rebound against each other.

This is however an idealized situation. Generally speaking, the dramaturge is an ambitious, avaricious, sterile wiseacre who spills his caustic criticism all over the author’s creation and leaves it a thing of shreds and patches. With heedless, listless scorn, he derides and lampoons any idea that did not originate in his anointed head. He robs in time the author of every vestige of desire to create so that he (the author) avoids future encounters with him (the dramaturge) as he would avoid a plague. From that time on, the author writes his manuscripts alone and sends them in to the dread dramaturge, who is at liberty to do with them as his conscience dictates. Good, delicate, and amiable film manuscripts do not arise in this way.

There are poets and managers who do not know what the essential prerequisites of a goodmotion picture are. Here is where the dramaturge comes in. It is his lofty task to effect a reconciliation between idealism and materialism. That he judge the work solely on its artistic merits and from the artistic point of view is out of the question. The first film that arose under such conditions would be a commercial failure; the second would spell the bankruptcy of the company that produced it. It is, at the same time, lamentable, pitiable, when the dramaturge judges a submitted manuscript solely from the point of view of its potential commercial success. Let this type of dramaturge have his way, and the film will suffer complete deterioration, decay, and death. Moreover, such film works have not the slightest chance of success in foreign countries. To concoct a good and “safe” thing that will take on the local corner—any man can do that. But the film must be so great and grandiose that nobody else can do it. Detective, revolver, and sensation films find devotees in the movie halls of the entire world who can do this trick just as well as anybody else; and they know it. Such films have from the very beginning powerful competition. Why has Charlie Chaplin been such a ubiquitous success? Because he is unique; his achievements are his own; his accomplishments are inimitable. A film manuscript is good then and then only when it promisesan artistic and an economic success. Art and business—let us repeat—must be united in this case.

To judge a film manuscript on this dual basis is, however, not so difficult. The motion picture is art for the masses. This truth eliminates of itself all cold-blooded and un-felt texts. A warm, vivacious, animated, artistically valuable motion picture book has got to please—that is, it has got to lead up to a commercial success. The dramaturge who takes this view of his business is an exceedingly important personage among his company’s acquaintances. He is its artistic conscience; he is its reliable guarantee against failure.

The basic condition of what he does is perfect knowledge and ability in the field in which he works. He has toknowthe nature of the motion picture; he has to be able to see in advance its possibilities of success. And this knowing, this seeing, must be second-nature to him; he must be saturated with them. This alone will give him the ability to select, from the mass of manuscripts that are submitted to him, those that are in every way available. He must be the good physician, the unbribable custodian of those imperfect and yet redeemable papers that lie on his desk for investigation. Nor is this all. In case the manager does not elect to stage the film work himself, the dramaturge must be able to get everything that is in every scene out of it.

Fig. 14. Scene fromMadame Dubarry.[See p.88]

[See p.88]

The basic condition of his very being is the perfect, the universal recognition of his position, a position that he has to fight for just as strenuously as the dramaturge of the legitimate stage has to fight for his. The film dramaturge is by no means the fifth wheel on the wagon. Indeed, every art, including the art of the theater, moves along on many wheels every one of which must be in working order if the wagon in question is to enjoy easy and unimpeded motion, and is eventually to reach the point where those who are driving it, in this way and in that, would have it go.

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