 | CHAPTER XII The art of the moving picture, |  |
CHAPTER XII
THIRTY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PHOTOPLAYS
AND THE STAGE
The stage is dependent upon three lines of
tradition: first, that of Greece and Rome that
came down through the French. Second, the
English style, ripened from the miracle play
and the Shakespearian stage. And third, the
Ibsen precedent from Norway, now so firmly
established it is classic. These methods are
obscured by the commercialized dramas, but
they are behind them all. Let us discuss for
illustration the Ibsen tradition.
Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant.
He must be read aloud. He stands for the
spoken word, for the iron power of life that
may be concentrated in a phrase like the "All
or nothing" of Brand. Though Peer Gynt has
its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in
through the ear alone. He can be acted in
essentials from end to end with one table and
four chairs in any parlor. The alleged punch
with which the "movie" culminates has occurred
up. At the close of every act of the dramas of
this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain
"This the magnificent moving picture cannot
achieve." Likewise after every successful film
described in this book could be inscribed "This
the trenchant Ibsen cannot do."
But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town.
The humor of the prospect was the sort too
deep for tears. My pastor and I reread the
William Archer translation that we might be
alert for every antithesis. Together we went
to the services. Since then the film has been
furiously denounced by the literati. Floyd
Dell's discriminating assault upon it is quoted
in Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret
Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent
number of The Little Review. But it is not
such a bad film in itself. It is not Ibsen. It
should be advertised "The Iniquities of the
Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a
Palatial Setting."
Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his
son, shows the men much as Ibsen outlines
their characters. Of course the only way to be
Ibsen is to be so precisely. In the new plot all
is open as the day. The world is welcome, and
forth to see the elephant and hear the owl.
Provincial hypocrisy is not implied. But
Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere
of secrecy for his human volcanoes to burst
through in the end.
Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her
intelligent and sensitive countenance that she
has a conception of that character. She does
not always have the chance to act the woman
written in her face, the tart, thinking, handsome
creature that Ibsen prefers. Nigel Debrullier
looks the buttoned-up Pastor Manders, even to
caricature. But the crawling, bootlicking carpenter,
Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a respectable,
guileless man with an income. And
his wife and daughter are helpless, conventional,
upper-class rabbits. They do not remind one
of the saucy originals.
The original Ibsen drama is the result of
mixing up five particular characters through
three acts. There is not a situation but
would go to pieces if one personality were
altered. Here are two, sadly tampered with:
Engstrand and his daughter. Here is the
mother, who is only referred to in Ibsen.
Here is the elder Alving, who disappears before
great Ibsen situations in the stage production
are gone. One new crisis has an Ibsen irony
and psychic tension. The boy is taken with
the dreaded intermittent pains in the back of
his head. He is painting the order that is to
make him famous: the King's portrait. While
the room empties of people he writhes on the
floor. If this were all, it would have been one
more moving picture failure to put through a
tragic scene. But the thing is reiterated in
tableau-symbol. He is looking sideways in
terror. A hairy arm with clutching demon
claws comes thrusting in toward the back of
his neck. He writhes in deadly fear. The
audience is appalled for him.
This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest
equivalent that is offered for the whispered
refrain: "Ghosts," in the original masterpiece.
This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain,
three times at least, before this tableau,
each time more dreadful and threatening. It
appears but the once, and has no chance
to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics
of the piece, as it should be, to realize its full
power.
The father's previous sins have been acted out.
has been traced step by step, so the play
should end here. It would then be a rough
equivalent of the Ibsen irony in a contrary medium.
Instead of that, it wanders on through
paraphrases of scraps of the play, sometimes
literal, then quite alien, on to the alleged motion
picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from
the machine. There is no doctor on the stage
in the original Ghosts. But there is a physician
in the Doll's House, a scientific, quietly moving
oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.
Is this photoplay physician such a one?
The boy and his half-sister are in their wedding-clothes
in the big church. Pastor Manders
is saying the ceremony. The audience and
building are indeed showy. The doctor charges
up the aisle at the moment people are told to
speak or forever hold their peace. He has tact.
He simply breaks up the marriage right there.
He does not tell the guests why. But he
takes the wedding party into the pastor's
study and there blazes at the bride and groom
the long-suppressed truth that they are brother
and sister. Always an orotund man, he has
the Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency.
He brings to one's mind the tearful book,
much loved in childhood, Parted at the Altar,
or Why Was it Thus? And four able actors
have the task of telling the audience by facial
expression only, that they have been struck by
moral lightning. They stand in a row, facing
the people, endeavoring to make the crisis
of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing
melodrama.
The final death of young Alving is depicted
with an approximation of Ibsen's mood. But
the only ways to suggest such feelings in
silence, do not convey them in full to the
audience, but merely narrate them. Wherever
in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the
slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay
we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant
work. Instead there are endless writhings and
rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but
destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen.
Up past the point of the clutching hand this
film is the prime example for study for the
person who would know once for all the differences
between the photoplays and the stage
dramas. Along with it might be classed Mrs.
Fiske's decorative moving picture Tess, in
which there is every determination to convey
voice and breathing presence. To people who
know her well it is a surprisingly good tintype
of our beloved friend, for the family album.
The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere
to be found. There are two moments of
dramatic life set among many of delicious
pictorial quality: when Tess baptizes her
child, and when she smooths its little grave
with a wavering hand. But in the stage-version
the dramatic poignancy begins with the
going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends.
The prime example of complete failure is
Sarah Bernhardt's Camille. It is indeed a
tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every
group entire, and taken at full length. Much
space is occupied by the floor and the overhead
portions of the stage setting. It lasts as
long as would the spoken performance, and
wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine
said conversation if we can. It might be compared
to watching Camille from the top gallery
through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped
with cotton.
It would be well for the beginning student to
find some way to see the first two of these
three, or some other attempts to revamp the
reproduction of Vanity Fair, bearing in mind
the list of differences which this chapter now
furnishes.
There is no denying that many stage managers
who have taken up photoplays are struggling
with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian
traditions in the new medium. Many
of the moving pictures discussed in this book
are rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith
of Bethulia, is a pronounced success. But in
order to be real photoplays the stage dramas
must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out
and upside down. The successful motion picture
expresses itself through mechanical devices
that are being evolved every hour. Upon
those many new bits of machinery are founded
novel methods of combination in another field
of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic.
But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays,
begin by making curious miniatures of stage
presentations. They try to have most things as
before. Later they take on the moving picture
technique in a superficial way, but they, and
the host of talented actors in the prime of life
and Broadway success, retain the dramatic
state of mind.
It is a principle of criticism, the world over,
that the distinctions between the arts must be
clearly marked, even by those who afterwards
mix those arts. Take, for instance, the perpetual
quarrel between the artists and the half-educated
about literary painting. Whistler fought
that battle in England. He tried to beat it
into the head of John Bull that a painting is
one thing, a mere illustration for a story another
thing. But the novice is always stubborn.
To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign
languages, therefore just alike. The book
illustration may be said to come in through
the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagination.
And the other is effective with no title
at all. The scenario writer who will study to
the bottom of the matter in Whistler's Gentle
Art of Making Enemies will be equipped to
welcome the distinction between the old-fashioned
stage, where the word rules, and the photoplay,
where splendor and ritual are all. It is
not the same distinction, but a kindred one.
But let us consider the details of the matter.
The stage has its exits and entrances at the
side and back. The standard photoplays have
their exits and entrances across the imaginary
and battle scenes. In Judith of Bethulia,
though the people seem to be coming from
everywhere and going everywhere, when we
watch close, we see that the individuals enter
at the near right-hand corner and exit at the
near left-hand corner, or enter at the near
left-hand corner and exit at the near right-hand
corner.
Consider the devices whereby the stage actor
holds the audience as he goes out at the side
and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides.
With what studious preparation he ripens his
quietness, if he goes out that way. In the
new contraption, the moving picture, the hero
or villain in exit strides past the nose of the
camera, growing much bigger than a human
being, marching toward us as though he would
step on our heads, disappearing when largest.
There is an explosive power about the mildest
motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or
the reverse. The people left in the scene are
pygmies compared with each disappearing
cyclops. Likewise, when the actor enters again,
his mechanical importance is overwhelming.
Therefore, for his first entrance the motion
picture star does not require the preparations
not need to warm the spectators to the problem,
then talk them into surrender.
When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning
photoplay producer tries to give us a dialogue
in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull
no one follows. He does not realize that his
camera-born opportunity to magnify persons
and things instantly, to interweave them as
actors on one level, to alternate scenes at the
slightest whim, are the big substitutes for dialogue.
By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after
flash: cottage, field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top,
cottage, we have a conversation between
three places rather than three persons. By
alternating the picture of a man and the check
he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When two
people talk to each other, it is by lifting and
lowering objects rather than their voices. The
collector presents a bill: the adventurer shows
him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl
accepts it. Moving objects, not moving lips,
make the words of the photoplay.
The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he
is getting nowhere, but still helpless, puts the
climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the
climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the
changes of time and place and a few such
elementary matters before the episode is fully
started. The climax of a motion picture scene
cannot be one word or fifty words. As has been
discussed in connection with Cabiria, the crisis
must be an action sharper than any that has
gone before in organic union with a tableau more
beautiful than any that has preceded: the breaking
of the tenth wave upon the sand. Such
remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in
the main chase of the photoplay film are but
guide-posts in the race toward the goal. They
should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be
laboriously lifted and lowered while the horses
stop, mid-career.
The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to
the soul through the silence, requires no quotation
from Keats to explain her, though Keats
is the equivalent in verse. Her setting in the
great French Museum is enough. We do not
know that her name is Venus. She is thought
by many to be another statue of Victory.
We may some day evolve scenarios that will
require nothing more than a title thrown upon
the screen at the beginning, they come to the
eye so perfectly. This is not the only possible
films might give them a charm akin to that of
the Songs without Words.
The stage audience is a unit of three hundred
or a thousand. In the beginning of the first
act there is much moving about and extra
talk on the part of the actors, to hold the crowd
while it is settling down, and enable the late-comer
to be in his seat before the vital part
of the story starts. If he appears later, he
is glared at. In the motion picture art gallery,
on the other hand, the audience is around two
hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only
crime is to obstruct the line of vision. The
high-school girls can do a moderate amount of
giggling without breaking the spell. There is
no spell, in the stage sense, to break. People
can climb over each other's knees to get in or
out. If the picture is political, they murmur
war-cries to one another. If the film suggests
what some of the neighbors have been doing,
they can regale each other with the richest
sewing society report.
The people in the motion picture audience
total about two hundred, any time, but they
come in groups of two or three at no specified
hour. The newcomers do not, as in Vaudeville,
Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama.
If they disapprove, there is grumbling under
their breath, but no hissing. I have never
heard an audience in a photoplay theatre clap
its hands even when the house was bursting
with people. Yet they often see the film
through twice. When they have had enough,
they stroll home. They manifest their favorable
verdict by sending some other member of
the family to "see the picture." If the people
so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may
ask the man at the door if he is going to bring
it back. That is the moving picture kind of
cheering.
It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned
stage actor was rendered unimportant by his
scenery. But the motion picture actor is but
the mood of the mob or the landscape or the
department store behind him, reduced to a
single hieroglyphic.
The stage-interior is large. The motion-picture
interior is small. The stage out-of-door
scene is at best artificial and little and is
generally at rest, or its movement is tainted
with artificiality. The waves dash, but not
dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly.
as the universe. And only pictures of the
Sahara are without magnificent motion.
The photoplay is as far from the stage on the
one hand as it is from the novel on the other.
Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the
short story, or the lyric poem. The key-words
of the stage are passion and character; of
the photoplay, splendor and speed. The stage
in its greatest power deals with pity for some
one especially unfortunate, with whom we grow
well acquainted; with some private revenge
against some particular despoiler; traces the
beginning and culmination of joy based on the
gratification of some preference, or love for some
person, whose charm is all his own. The drama
is concerned with the slow, inevitable approaches
to these intensities. On the other hand, the
motion picture, though often appearing to deal
with these things, as a matter of fact uses
substitutes, many of which have been listed.
But to review: its first substitute is the excitement
of speed-mania stretched on the framework
of an obvious plot. Or it deals with delicate
informal anecdote as the short story does, or
fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or great
surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic
And the further it gets from Euripides, Ibsen,
Shakespeare, or Molière — the more it becomes
like a mural painting from which flashes of
lightning come — the more it realizes its genius.
Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker
are almost wasting their genius on the theatre.
The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet
for their type of imagination.
The typical stage performance is from two
hours and a half upward. The movie show
generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and
forty minutes. And it should last but three
reels, that is, an hour. Edgar Poe said there
was no such thing as a long poem. There is
certainly no such thing as a long moving picture
masterpiece.
The stage-production depends most largely
upon the power of the actors, the movie show
upon the genius of the producer. The performers
and the dumb objects are on equal
terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is
bad for the stage because the minor parts are
smothered and the situations distorted to give
the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the motion
pictures because it obscures the producer.
While the leading actor is entitled to his glory,
not overshadow the latest inspirations of the
creator of the films.
The display of the name of the corporation
is no substitute for giving the glory to the producer.
An artistic photoplay is not the result
of a military efficiency system. It is not a
factory-made staple article, but the product of
the creative force of one soul, the flowering of
a spirit that has the habit of perpetually renewing
itself.
Once I saw Mary Fuller in a classic. It was
the life and death of Mary Queen of Scots.
Not only was the tense, fidgety, over-American
Mary Fuller transformed into a being who was
a poppy and a tiger-lily and a snow-queen and
a rose, but she and her company, including
Marc Macdermott, radiated the old Scotch
patriotism. They made the picture a memorial.
It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett's novel
The Queen's Quair. Evidently all the actors
were fused by some noble managerial mood.
There can be no doubt that so able a group
have evolved many good films that have escaped
me. But though I did go again and again,
never did I see them act with the same deliberation
and distinction, and I laid the difference
Even baseball players must have managers.
A team cannot pick itself, or it surely
would. And this rule may apply to the stage.
But by comparison to motion picture performers,
stage-actors are their own managers,
for they have an approximate notion of how
they look in the eye of the audience, which is
but the human eye. They can hear and gauge
their own voices. They have the same ears as
their listeners. But the picture producer holds
to his eyes the seven-leagued demon spy-glass
called the kinetoscope, as the audience will do
later. The actors have not the least notion
of their appearance. Also the words in the
motion picture are not things whose force the
actor can gauge. The book under the table is
one word, the dog behind the chair is another,
the window curtain flying in the breeze is
another.
This chapter has implied that the performers
were but paint on the canvas. They
are both paint and models. They are models
in the sense that the young Ellen Terry was
the inspiration for Watts' Sir Galahad. They
resemble the persons in private life who furnish
the basis for novels. Dickens' mother was the
into Wilkins Micawber. But these people are
not perpetually thrust upon us as Mr. and Mrs.
Dickens. We are glad to find them in the
Dickens biographies. When the stories begin,
it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we want, and
the Charles Dickens atmosphere.
The photoplays of the future will be written
from the foundations for the films.
The soundest actors, photographers, and producers
will be those who emphasize the points
wherein the photoplay is unique. What is
adapted to complete expression in one art
generally secures but half expression in another.
The supreme photoplay will give us things
that have been but half expressed in all other
mediums allied to it.
Once this principle is grasped there is every
reason why the same people who have interested
themselves in the advanced experimental
drama should take hold of the super-photoplay.
The good citizens who can most
easily grasp the distinction should be there to
perpetuate the higher welfare of these institutions
side by side. This parallel development
should come, if for no other reason, because
the two arts are still roughly classed together
public what the drama is till they show them
precisely what the photoplay is and is not.
Just as the university has departments of both
History and English teaching in amity, each
one illuminating the work of the other, so these
two forms should live in each other's sight in
fine and friendly contrast. At present they
are in blind and jealous warfare.
| CHAPTER XII The art of the moving picture, | |