CHAPTER VTHE SETTING
Thedirector of the legitimate stage is supposed to create an art form which rests essentially upon the spoken word, with its artistic possibilities and potentialities. His entire setting, from curtain decorations to background and supernumerary costumes, is supposed to intimate and indicate in a symbolic way (though it must be conceded that the Meininger Stage strives after ideals of its own in this regard). The word rings out in front of the pictures and traverses a jagged line of the background up to the mountain.
Mimic art calls for a sharp milieu, a pronounced environment. Since the descriptive power of the gesture does not extend beyond the hidden contents of the human soul, the figures of an unenvironed motion picture would float about in empty space.
The world of the spoken drama is limited to the cubic feet of space within the theater; the motion picture, on the contrary, has the world for its field; it moves in perfect freedom. The camera follows the actor wherever he may go.If he betake himself to the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there too. So far, then, as decorative setting in the motion picture is concerned, there is no such thing, from an artistic point of view, as limitation or consideration.
The very freedom, however, which the motion picture enjoys in the way of scenic alternation and variety necessitates constant indulgence in this freedom: a mimic action dare not drag its weary course for hours at a time over the same setting. There must be frequent change of scene. Its psychic powers of expression are too soon exhausted for it to tarry with impunity, or satisfaction, for any considerable length of time on the same scene.
In Germany we have made some experiments with films in which there was no decoration. One of these, the Rex film entitledScherben, is said to have met with success on the other side of the Atlantic. I feel, for my own part, that the unvaried and undecorated scene of this paltry milieu was pretty tiresome. A good film should show an abundance of pictures; it should have threeorfour milieus follow close after each other, rebound against each other. We might as well make up our minds to it that the need for entertainment on the part of the public is so great that nothing short of gay, if not gaudy, variety will suffice.
For this reason,decorationsare made each one of which has a definite stamp or character. Rooms in which human beings live and work must show traces of human habitation. With the stage this may not be necessary, for the illuminating, enlivening power of the poet’s words lifts the mind above the external picture. The stage of Shakespeare transformed the really immutable and altogether unpretentious setting once in Macbeth’s banquet hall, another time in the gray field of the witches—and it did this through the animating phantasy of Shakespeare’s lines. The stage is style art. Indeed, the intellectual would have it this entirely. But the realism of the last century, which brought into being the so-called stage of illusion and fostered this creation until it went to the very last conceivable length in the matter of imitation, is a source of real danger to the essential nature of the spoken word, and to the wings of such fancy as the word may have. The great mass of spectators the world over demand from the stage, and also from the film, that it hold up before them a picture of reality. But in contrast to the film, the spoken stage cannot be regarded as the spiritual property of these masses.
Regarding film setting, the first question that arises, and it is a very fundamental one, is this: Which shall it be—Style or Reality? Shall weprepare scenery that is related to the style of the legitimate stage, or shall we copy life as it is?
The realism of the spoken stage is cumbersome and inadequate. You have got to let the public sit and wait a full half hour to change a single setting of elaborate decoration. And after all, do what we may, it is only a defective and sometimes even miserable transcript of nature that is conjured on to the stage, despite the ingenuity of the machinist and many other near-colleagues. The Berlin performance ofAndalosiarepresented, a few years ago, the forest act as follows: the stage was arranged in hills, covered with tin tubs in which there was a profusion of real fir trees and genuine heather. Diagonally across the stage ran a real brook. Behind an invisible wire cage squirrels hopped about and frightened birds flew from corner to corner.
Such a pompous stage setting as this is absurdly complicated. The stage that goes in exclusively for style will produce the same psychic effect with the most simple and elementary means.
If style decoration is so made as to meet the exact needs of the stage, if it suits the stage in every way, well and good; but this is not in itself irrefutable proof that we should follow the same rules in preparing decoration for the film. The ways and means of the two arts are fundamentallydifferent; and the public that each attracts, and from whose patronage each must survive or perish, is in neither case the same. Moreover, it is the duty of each art to do what it can. It is only a fool who attempts the very thing for which he is not naturally fitted.
The lens of the moving picture camera sucks up the world about it with unlimited greediness; but it rebels at the mere intimation of perverse or distorted art forms. The materials with which the film deals, which it handles, are far too simple, natural, and human to endure any sort of studied or affected decoration. The spectators in the motion picture want to see an interesting action on the part of human beings; they demand beautiful and picturesque decorations; they wince at, if they do not reject out and out, such pictures as owe their origin to, and would please the art critics.
The urgent need for good and original settings is ubiquitous; every film nation feels it. But strangely enough, it has been given the consideration it calls for neither by the Americans nor by the Swedes. Both peoples, if we may be permitted to say so, are perfectly contented with pretty pictures. But real decoration is a vast deal more than a mere frame enclosing, in rather indifferent fashion, the human heart. Within the compass ofthe play, the psychic or psychological effect and impressiveness have their quite real meaning; they are important. This fact has been recognized, let us state it candidly, by the Germans. The German film may be a very imperfect creation, but you have got to admit that in the way of inventiveness, wealth of ingenuity, and such atmosphere as can be created by decoration, it has accomplished a great deal; indeed, in some instances, it has gone too far.
An instance of excess in the field of decoration was that clever and ingenious film entitledDr. Caligari. It may be referred to as the masterpiece of doubtful decorative art. (Illustrations No. 1 and 2.)
This was the meaning of these decorations: they were intended to surround or accompany the action as a sort of powerful tone; they were so many notes. The action itself was hostile to life, misanthropic, dour. It painted the gruesome phantasies of a mind diseased. It was an unintended, but not on that account ineffective, bit of irony that this picture of a deranged world was enveloped in hyper-impressionistic decoration. The action was that of a madman; the scenery was as it was. One saw oblique and twisted houses painted with all manner of mad flourishes; rooms no wall of which was rectangular or perpendicularor level; passageways of the same description and streets that cannot be described; rhombic windows and doors; bent, warped, and splintered trees which reminded of the monumental drawings that are associated with Chinese painting.
In these pictures (the composition of them was an inimitable success) there was a perfect reflection, in error and knowledge, of the inevitable characteristics of decoration.
Fig. 11. Scene fromGolem.[See p.86]
Fig. 11. Scene fromGolem.[See p.86]
[See p.86]
We had to do, first of all, with the oft-repeated objection to this much-praised and much-calumniated film, that in that insanely distorted milieu the actors moved about in their own human, unfractured, and undeformed bodies. Werner Krauss alone, who played the title rôle, was so unqualifiedly successful in making his being fit in and seem at home with the spooky element of this heap of distortions that the environment apparently enveloped this magician with a singularly magical veil. The unnaturalness of his predicament was made to appear natural. With the others it was altogether different. The magic circle in which they moved left the impression that it was merely a ghostly and ghastly mantle that flopped about their figures. It simply is not possible to squeeze such inherently contradictory material and motivation into a single frame. Thedecoration, always easily changed and varied, must adapt itself to the form and figure of the actor, which is unvariable and cannot be changed. This being the case, the following basic law compels formulation and observance: Setting dare not distort reality.
This law has a meaning of its own: it applies to the whole business of art as this is exploited in the interests of caricatured and twisted expressionism. That expressionism has about fought its last fight and displayed its ultimate lunacy, is a safe and reasoned assumption. The “deformation” of nature as an aid to the inadequate ability of the artist is a hopelessly unsatisfactory emergency aid invoked on behalf of a foul and decayed naturalism in its desperate attempt to conjure up a new style—un coin de la nature, vu à travers d’un tempérament.
One saw an irrationally perverse and eccentric, painted and plotted picture of a city (the surface in the background of illustration No. 1). Two insane people stood before it, one of whom pointed at the singular picture and said: “My native city!” Of the feeling of art there was not a trace. The spectator, going at the thing in a purely rational way, figured it out as follows: the lunatic was born in a little hilly city. The magic of the words “native city” was not even hinted at, to say nothingof being exhausted. In a mimic and sensuous moving picture it does not suffice to portray a painted surface as a picture. Such scenery will do on the legitimate stage, but, in the motion picture, the symbolism of it fails to reach the heart. The decoration of the film must be plastic.
Such a film can have only one meaning; it can be important in only one way: it is an experiment, and experiments are rarely useless. They may even be quite valuable; for to start out on a wrong road is not useless in itself, since we thereby learn that it is the wrong road. We learn that we are in a blind alley, that there is no use to try to go any farther, that any attempt at a new creation is beaten at the beginning, and can hope to end only in the most wretched of conditions—such as those find themselves committed to who have arrived late. Any achievement in the way of film scenery can have and be of enduring value then and only then when it serves as a stimulus to colleagues in other branches of the same art; it must leave some room for many minds.
A film such as that ofDr. Caligari, which begins with irony and ends with resignation, can never be regarded as more than a curiosity. The Decla Company made another expressionistic film entitledGenuine, die Geschichte einer Blutsäuferin(“The Tale of a Vampyre”). It revealed thesame artistic principles as those ofDr. Caligari, but with this difference: they had now become petrified after the fashion of a regular mask. I am of the opinion that for an achievement in this field to be of real value, in technique as well as in art, it has got to be taken from life and follow lifelike lines. For this reason, the possibility of a fruitful development in this direction seems remote indeed.
This gigantic spring-tide which surged forth with unqualified suddenness from the chaos of film evolution has about ebbed away and been absorbed by a few remarkable decorations. Its effects are still noticeable here and there on the upper surface; this much must be conceded. But the great storm that reached down to the depths and brought about a complete revolution and reformation in the domain of film scenery, has never taken place, though it was prophesied and promised by its leading adherents at the time. Wherever we can still recognize a faint echo of it, it has quieted down into a milder, calmer form which first coquettes with nature and flirts with life, only to become gradually but completely reconciled to them in the end.
The tendency to invention of phantastic settings was immensely aroused byDr. Caligari. Illustration No. 3. for example, shows what may bedone in the way of an art form that is supposed to follow nature, though it is conceived in error, and though it is a specimen of such nature as we get when it is constructed rather than allowed to grow, and constructed with the inescapable contortions that characterize this type of thing. The unreasoned and unbalanced twisting and the laborious padding of these mountain lines are without a trace of either warmth or truth; they lack inner genuineness. The sunflowers in the foreground at the left are simply idiotic. Illustration No. 4 is a trifle better in the calm flow of its lines. It is astonishingly true to life, though the thought of a castle that has been chiseled from the solid rock does not exactly remind one of home, or if so, it merely emphasizes the saying that there is no place like home.
Illustration No. 5 is thoroughly saturated with the romantic clarity of feeling for nature. The reconciliation of the inventive artist with the forms of nature has been perfected; it is complete. There is, moreover, a remarkable freedom of invention coupled with astonishing fidelity to nature.
In all of these pictures we recognize an ever-increasing moderation, an intimate and sympathetic pressing forward to the forms of reality that are not slavishly copied; they are felt, and that in a vigorous and natural way. Before weenter upon the open road of scenery that is faithful to reality, however, we must follow for a season romantic setting by way of familiarizing ourselves with a number of its amiable ramifications.
The playing or sportive mind of the artist in pictures roams about and remains resting, in time, toying like a butterfly, on the bizarre forms of the phantastic world. Illustration No. 6, for example, shows us a magic garden in Asia. There is an easy and refreshing humor about it; it is charming as a picture. It has only one fault: it is inappropriate as a bit of decoration for a film. For the film picture passes by in a few seconds, and it is not the business of the decoration to draw attention away from the action. Such complicated pictures, with all their captivating by-products, can be studied in detail and with much thought and consideration, but not in the film—there is no time for them there.
All decorative scenery has to be well arranged; it must be lucid, clear, and easy of survey. Illustration No. 7 is confused and hard to read. Moreover, this scenery has nothing to do with the action. No one would ever suspect that this room was occupied by an American millionairess. Let the decoration be as grand and glorious as the human mind can make it, if it is not a frame, ora framework, for the things that go on in the human heart, its effect is swollen, disingenuous, and undesirable from every point of view.
The odd and fanciful device fails if it is not truly and inwardly affiliated with human fate. This is proved by Illustration No. 8, the cramped and even convulsive style of which, with its black and white norm, does not convince. The plastic effect is altogether inadequate and defective. This picture is shown here because it is a brilliant refutal of the oft-repeated assertion that the film, as an art-form, has to do with and rests upon the art of black and white. There is neither artistic nor objective value in the picture; it is merely a curio, a bit of nourishment for under-bred curiosity, and was born of a deformed notion.
Fig. 12. Scene fromDestiny.[See p.87]
Fig. 12. Scene fromDestiny.[See p.87]
[See p.87]
The curiosity, however, of phantastic forms is not to be ruthlessly denounced and rejected if back of it lies a graceful notion, a happy idea. Illustration No. 9 shows such an original scene of vibrant freshness. The dancing girl is pictured as an undisciplined, capricious little creature, and one is bound to admit that a setting of this sort throws a captivating and intriguing frame about the radiant soul of man. This picture has nothing in the world to do with naturalism. It is of merely momentary significance and, like Illustration No. 8, has but little bearing on, and consequentlybut little significance for, the real value of decoration. But in contrast to that pale black and white drawing, this dance scenery gives evidence of a brilliant artistic brain from which ingenuity radiates and in which confidence may be placed when it is a question of brightening up a film. One sees that it comes from a brain which creates pictures in an easy even if extravagant mood, pictures which fire the imagination somewhat after the fashion of a cool flask of seasoned and sparkling champagne.
We had a wonderful fulfillment of the phantastic decoration in Wegener’sGolem, that fairy tale which told of the breathing of life into a figure of clay through the magic power of a Jewish Rabbi, who made the monster his servant—until it, having reached the point where it had real feelings, turned against its lord and master. Poelzig had created the milieu for the romantic action, Illustration No. 10. A fairy play of spooky streets and ghost-like alleys, the old, old house of which bent and crouched under the vault of heaven. There was the doomed and damned world of the Ghetto, isolated from all things agreeably human and threatened by gigantic walls.
The sober fact of the business is that when genius takes a hand in the matter of scenery, and visualizes its ingenuity, doubts disappear andfaith rules supreme. We give in; we resign. Was this world a copy of reality? Was it the sole product of the artist’s wish? The whole thing was a play, a marvelous mask, the expression of an animated and enlivened will.
There was much more style to the interior of the rooms. And for this very reason they were less natural; they were more alien to free and easy conception. But the room of the Rabbi, with its low, crooked, burdened walls, the stairway of which the least that can be said was that it was heavily constructed (Illustration No. 11) was entirely in keeping with the city sighing as it was under its mighty load.
ButGolemlay apart; it was a unique picture. The swirling, over-decorated flourishes of this world which had become so introspective, which had retired unto itself, and which retires unto itself again and again and at every opportunity, did not somehow make the right replies to the questions of our soul. The final echo, the longed-for repercussion of those wishes that creep into the hearts of the children of men, are always and invariably lacking in phantastic art. Such art may cause curiosity to grow; on such curiosity may batten; but it is never the creation that at once constitutes the longing and stills the longing that has been aroused.
The film is not the art in which a visionary fancy may rage until its rage is over. On the contrary, the film represents the most perfect union of active and modern life with the symphony of feelings. And it is not until we reach the point where the film dips down into hard reality—whether it be the reality of the present or of bygone ages is of but little consequence—that its art of decoration is confronted with those problems and tasks at the sight of which the human eye begins to glisten with ardent enthusiasm—is confronted with those works of the film in which every picture, every feeling, and every gesture preaches itsTua res agitur.
Settings befitting reality do not necessarily have to be smooth, unconditional, and unconditioned copies of reality. The chief desideratum is to have life and atmosphere in them; they must be filled with tender emotion, gentle animation. The following pictures belong to this category. Illustration No. 12 reveals in a kindly, loving way the milieu of a South German village. It is full of fancy, yet it is faithful to reality. The sole point in connection with this picture lies in this question: A German film company made this picture; very few people took part in it. Would it then not have been better and, in the end, less expensive, if the company had actually gone toone of the countless South German villages and taken the photographs on the spot?
Illustration No. 13 is a trick setting from Lubitsch’sSumurun. It is only a few yards in height, and the effect produced is so natural that one fancies one is really surrounded by colossal buildings that stand out all alone.
Illustrations No. 14 and 15 offer an interesting study in comparisons. In No. 14, the grandiose scene fromMadame Dubarry(smaller minds have all too often been influenced by this scene, to their own detriment), we have a chaotic fullness from the masses, and an architectural ensemble in the buildings included that is rather hard to study in the right perspective. It seems on the whole somewhat disconnected. But in this very lack of composition the picture reveals a fabulous fidelity to life; this is just such a scene as real life throws on the canvas. In contrast to this we have the bold composition of the pictures fromAnne Boleyn. It is in beautiful style, in the manner of the Meininger Stage. There is fullness and there is order; it shows genuineness instead of truth.
A continuation in the development of this imitation, which in this case is ramified and multiplied down to the last and minutest bit of gim-crack on the houses, is no longer possible. Such additions as may be made will have to consist, not inmaking the decoration more intensive, but in making it more extensive; it must have to do with surface and not with depth (as in the buildings of theIndisches Grabmal), for the limit in intensity and depth has been reached. This being the case, the only thing that can be expected in the future is a sort of wild goose-chase after every conceivable species of scenic extravaganza. One architect tries to outdo the other in building high buildings and big buildings and complex buildings, with the result that the firm that has the greatest resources, or the best credit, will, in the end, carry off the prize. The man who really tries to further art will be forced into the background; the material, the mass makes itself felt.
Scenic views have, in truth, already been constructed every detail of which, and there are many, rather militates against real effect so far as the film is concerned. This is proof that the way of film setting is unique unto itself; there are such things as faithful imitations of indispensable film style, but to follow them is to be led out on to distant paths that are alien to the essential objective; for lavishness is never a sign of control.
The prime prerequisite of a good film picture is that one glance is sufficient to take it in; from this truth there is no escape. And despite this, the film picture dare not lack atmosphere. Theimitation of reality is all right in itself and quite beautiful. But so soon as the reality that is imitated becomes excessive in detail so that easy survey of it is impossible, we have to depart from it with an indulgent farewell, otherwise it will become distorted, caricatured, and naturally annoying where it is meant to be illuminating.
Film decoration calls for an elaborate and calm flow of lines, lines which surround the action like a mighty and manifold frame, but which do not wean our attention away from the film itself; on it our eye at least must be kept riveted. Those details, which are as expensive as they are useless, are to be avoided, while emphasis is to be placed on the essentials in the scenery.
Illustration No. 16 is on the border line between a faithful copy and a clever diversity or manifolding. The scene is extravagant only in composition; the details have been worked out with just enough completeness to give the impression of absolute reality.
The settings of the following pictures are of a remarkably impressive and artistic power. They give visual evidence of an elaborate style, the chief concern of which is suitability. It is a style which, thanks to the sketchy means of the wings, reproduces the decisive line without becoming lost in ornamental set-off and too much ramification.Illustration No. 17, a quite unostentatious setting, shows, with unreserved fidelity to life, a house wing of plain compactness, and of an unusually modest atmosphere, which encompasses the action and aids in its effective visualization.
The scenery in Illustration No. 18—the picture is fromVögelöd—is inimitable. The loneliness and desertion of the two people is seemingly in the act of beginning to strike up a deep note, just as if one were to draw the bow across the bass string of a violin.
This is the kind of reserved and unobtrusive clarity of lines that has got to be practiced if we are to solve the problem of film decoration in a successful way. Such practice absorbs and assimilates the fundamental elements of all styles and tones them down into one grandiose picture—such as Illustration No. 19. It leads one out beyond the narrow confines of the atelier and on to piles of human occupancy in the open air, creations of the architect’s mind which make no attempt at a microcosmic delineation of details; it has the whole, the entity, rather tower up before us, in microcosmic fashion, and uses to this end, not the pebbles of excessive embellishment, but the huge square stones of all great buildings. Instances of such are Illustrations Nos. 20 and 21.
It must be conceded that settings, if strenuouslycomposed, as we have indicated, call for a certain simplicity in the matter of photography, a simplicity the strict observance of which necessitates the taking of the photographs at a considerable distance and from obvious points of vantage. For it is clear that it is impossible to get a picture of such objects at any or every angle. Such strong compositions are practicable only in the films that have to do with heroic subjects. We may lay it down as a general rule that a heavy composition, because of its heavy arches, can easily become disadvantageous to the lines. The quiet, peaceful day of rest in Illustration No. 21 is beautiful.
But it is not merely setting that must be made with due regard for the effectiveness of the film for which it is intended; the costume that the actor wears must also be given discriminating attention. We want a replica of reality; this goes without saying. But wherever the reality is unattractive, or characterized, to be specific, by a bewildering fullness of lines, then it is that we need probability—or better still, verisimilitude. To play some great episode in the same costume in which it originally took place is in itself a noble idea. But it means nothing to the film to place the costumes of that time, glittering with color and bedizened with all manner of spangles and buckles, beforethe, after all, color-blind eye of the camera. The big, balloon-like costumes of the Renaissance, the Italian as well as the German, make a rather poor picture of unknown colors and indifferent lines. To take a picture of this kind and do it effectively requires an artist who is cautious in his exploitation of all things stylistic, modest in his desire to display his inventive power, and trained in the art school of experience. We may say, in general, that there is no single costume of any age or all ages that is entirely effective on the screen. It is a serious fact that cannot be lost sight of that, in this domain of the moving picture, the effects we so ardently strive after depend not so much on genuineness as on the appearance of genuineness. Take the frontispiece. What a splendid clarity and lucidity of line! But the costumes of those times were like the ones that constitute the glory of this picture only in general proportions and outlines.
And thus it comes about—just as in the most exalted works of art of all ages—that each individual part serves the whole, and there is none of that greediness for isolated triumph that results, if unleashed, in a dazzling and distracting display of the arts of the virtuoso.
Our film world is a business affair, but every sane man is willing and eager to let the grandideas of real art have the fullest possible play—provided these ideas are effective and imbued with sufficient life to work in harmony with our business interests.
The motion picture is art for the masses; there is not a shred of use to try to deny this, or to evade the conditions that this unpliable fact necessitates. Such decoration as it calls to its aid must, consequently, be of such simple, even primitive, impressiveness that its place in the motion picture becomes at once clear even to the untrained and obtuse eye. It is injudicious to launch out on any artistic enterprise which cannot be felt and appreciated by the masses. Such æsthetic hardiness as characterizedDr. Caligari, with its voguish art forms, can never be regarded as more than an unusual attempt which took the masses by surprise. Let that kind of moving picture become the rule rather than the exception, and the people who have hitherto flocked to the motion picture will fail to re-enter it and, bent on entertainment of some kind, they will betake themselves to the kino—to those narrow, moldy pits in which the canvases that are displayed consist of a spiced and peppery potpourri that is especially concocted to seduce the eye—canvases that are born of low but intense avidity, and which are given to such children of men as are most easily moved by the same impulse.