In the general chase after gold and aristocratic titles, the sailor, Dantès who became the mythically rich Comte de Monte Cristo, served as a splendid “social ideal” for the bourgeoisie who were feverishly enriching themselves. It is not without reason that to this image is ascribed the features of an idealized self-portrait. For Dumas himself, along with the others, bathed in the turbid sea of suspicious gold accumulated through the dubious speculations of the reign of le roi bourgeois.
“A million? That’s exactly the amount I ordinarily carry for pocket money!”
To an identical degree this remark was the unattainable ideal, both of the “fat black,” then the literary sovereign of the newspaper, feuilleton and dramatic world of Paris, squandering words and money with equal recklessness, as well as of the vast hordes of greedy sharpers and rogues, overrunning the economic life of Paris.
However, to sense fully how sharply these social, economical and ideological premises determine every slightest twist of form, and how inseparably they are united in their processes, one must independently and conscientiously trace a continuous and complete creative cycle from start to finish.
Of course, what would be most interesting would be to catch another Goethe or Gogol, place him before an audience and set him to writing a third part of Faust or to create newly a second volume of Dead Souls. But we don’t even have a live Alexandre Dumas at our disposal. So we of the Institute’s third course transform ourselves into a collective director and film-builder.
The instructor is no more than primus inter pares—the first among equals. The collective (and later each member of it individually) works its way through all the difficulties and torments of creative work, through the whole process of creative formation, from the first faint, glimmering hint of the theme, down to a decision on whether the buttons on the leather jacket of the last extra player are suitable for filming purposes.
The instructor’s task is only, by a well-timed dexterous shove, to push the collective in the direction of “normal” and “fruitful” difficulties, and to push it in the direction of the collective’s correct and distinct presentation (to himself) of exactly those questions, the answers to which lead to construction and not to fruitless chatter “around” it.
That is how they teach you to fly in the circus. The trapeze is mercilessly held back, or the pupil finds a fist instead of a helping hand if his timing is false. No great harm if he falls once or twice outside the safety net onto the chairs around the arena. Next time—he won’t make that mistake.
But no less carefully, at each stage of the unfolding creative process, must the indicated secondary material and the experience of the “inherited past,” at the proper place, be thrust into the hands of the entangled or stuck “warriors.” This is not enough, if at hand is not that exhausting synthetic giant of cinema who, at every turn, is more than the “inherited past” and the “living heir,” forming in its own field a solid technique.
Within three years a systematic course in special subjects has replaced at the Institute a thin coating of sporadic lectures by all sorts of “prominent” film-workers. These people ran into the Institute as they would into a street-car, strange and unrelated to each other, just like street-car passengers, rushing to the exit as fast as possible, after blurting 45 minutes’ worth of something unconnected and episodic. Then they were whirled out of the sight of their dazed proselytes, along the orbit of their private activities.
This “little episode” also had to be re-built in a fundamental way. Within the plan of the general course, specialists are invited in at the proper time, to deal with definite, concrete cases, at a definite stage of the general movement of the unfolding creative process. To deal with that particular question in which he is expert.
All this aims at a properly large project in which the collective or, later, the individual, is responsible to the very end. In getting rid of the “little episodes” in the instructional plan, we have also done away with the pitiable “little episodes” prepared by graduating students. These short “études” of the graduates, miscellaneous and miserable, but self-satisfying, even shorter in intelligence than they are in footage, must be dropped as being wholly inexpedient. After working on a graduate project on the scale, say, of a cathedral, the graduate architect usually finds himself building something accessible to everyone—a privy. But, after designing for graduation one tiny pisoir, it is risky to turn to, yes, to what you please! And yet, year after year, we have seen this happen to graduates from the Institute. This has to be fundamentally scrapped.
It is true that in practice a film is broken up into separate episodes. But these episodes all hang from the rod of a single ideological, compositional and stylistic whole.
The art of cinematography is not in selecting a fanciful framing, or in taking something from a surprising cameraangle.
The art is in every fragment of a film being an organic part of an organically conceived whole.
With such organically thought-out and photographed parts of one large significant and general conception, these must be segments of some whole, and by no means with stray, strolling études.
On these filmed segments, on the unfilmed but prepared episodes that are planned to precede or follow these, on the development of montage plans and lists according to the place of these parts in the whole—on such a base creative irresponsibility will be really liquidated among the students.
From beginning to end their work will be examined, simultaneously with responsible demonstrations as to how far they are capable of realizing in practice the firmly planned general concept; although at this stage it is not yet the student’s own individual concept, but the collectively worked out concept, but this already teaches the hard lesson of self-discipline. Self-discipline that will be even more needed at the moment when the concept will be individual and his own.
But before reaching this last stage, this last frontier, already bordering on production away from the school, the students run a long gantlet of living and dead “experts.”
At a certain stage this will take the form of a long discussion of the type, image, and character of the characters in his project. The ashes of Balzac, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Ben Jonson will be stirred in such discussions. The question will arise as to the personification of such a type, image, or character. Here we’ll depend on Kachalov’s confession of his work on the role of the “Baron” in The Lower Depths, Batalov will talk with us, or Max Shtraukh will tell us of the mechanics of creating Rubinchik in Zarkhi’s Joy Street.
Moving through the forests of story-construction, we’ll pull apart with Aksënov the skeletons of the Elizabethans, we’ll listen to Dumas pere and Victor Shklovsky on the outlining of story structures, and on the methods of Weltmann’s works. And then, having talked over dramatic situations with the late John Webster, Nathan Zarkhi and Volkenstein, we shall interest ourselves in how these situations are clothed in words.
Alexei Maximovich Gorky will probably not refuse to initiate us in the methods of writing the dialogue for The Lower Depths or Yegor Bulichev and Others. Nikolai Erdmann will tell us how it is done in his plays. And Isaac Babel will speak of the specific texture of image and word and of the technique of the extreme laconism of literature’s expressive means—Babel who, perhaps, knows in practice better than anyone else, that great secret, that “there is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period, placed at the right moment.”8 And he may speak of how, with this laconism, was created so inimitably his wonderful (and far from being sufficiently appreciated) play Sunset. This is perhaps the best example of fine dramatic dialogue in recent years.
All this will arise at the corresponding stages of the single progressing creative process of our collective director on his film.
The fusing of the separate stages along independent analytical excursions is not so very strange. Construction of theme and story can sometimes be completely independent of the development in words. Aren’t both
Revizor and Dead Souls brilliant examples of the development of stories “set” Gogol from outside?*
The question of a musical accompaniment for the sound medium. The question of material means. Analysis of a number of examples of our “heritage” in other areas as well, and each from the angle of that special need where it, and peculiarly it, can be doubly useful.
James Joyce and Emile Zola.
Honoré Daumier and Edgar Degas.
Toulouse-Lautrec or Stendhal.
And lengthily and circumstantially will be analyzed by Marxist and Leninist specialists the question of the correct ideological formulation of the problem from the standpoint of approach to the theme and to a social understanding of this thing. In this way we expect to secure those, mobilized with experience and qualified by sustained guidance, who will be capable of creating films.
And the most serious and interesting part of this work—the central part of the director’s creative work—is to train students in “treatment” and to work up with them the process of how this proceeds and is carried out.
We work essentially on such a low-experimental triviality of simplified perceived tasks, that we simply do not have occasion to observe works that are original, living, creative, that have an inter-related social treatment and conception, with developed form.
Our works are on such a level of simplification that one recalls the famous cartoon of the automatic sausage factory: from one side enter boxes with handles containing pigs, at the other side the same boxes come out, now containing sausages.
Between the schematic scraped skeleton of slogan and the empty skin of outer form there are no layers of tangible, living flesh and muscle.
There are no organs, acting in relation to each other. And then people are surprised that the skin hangs so formlessly. And through its pitifully thin simplification juts the sharp bones of a mechanical perception of “social” thematics. Not enough flesh and muscle.
That is why Gorky’s Yegor Bulichev and Others was greeted with such unanimous joy. Even though the work has not answered a basic problem of ours: the men and women shown in it are not yet ours, and of today. We’ll continue to wait for these from the mind of Alexei Maximovich.*9
On the other hand, here is flesh. Here is muscle. And this flesh was made today, when all around us on stage and screen are not even the “men in boxes” that Chekhov wrote about, but simply boxes without men. Whereas, tightly packed as they are with vulgar citations, our works resemble the barbed wire of harsh truth, covered with muslin—and we are astonished that blood doesn’t circulate through these barbs, and that the muslin doesn’t beat an excited pulse.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is one step. From a sublimely premised idea, formulated in a slogan, to a living work of art—is several hundred steps. If we take but one step, we achieve only the ridiculous result of the accommodating trash of the present.
We must begin to learn how to do three-dimensional, rounded works, going from the two-dimensional flat patterns with a “direct wire” from the slogan to the story—without a transfer.
How an ideological concept works, making a serious approach towards a film, we can trace in my own work, although in somewhat unusual social circumstances. This was in Hollywood. In the world of Paramount Pictures, Inc. And the mat ter concerned the treatment and script of a work of exceptionally high quality.
Even though not beyond ideological defects, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser is a work that has every chance of being numbered among the classics of its period and place. That this material contained the collision of two irreconcilable viewpoints—the “front office’s” and ours—became clear from the moment of submitting the first rough draft of a script.
“Is Clyde Griffiths guilty or not guilty—in your treatment?” was the first question from the head of Paramount, B. P. Schulberg.
“Not guilty,” was our answer.
“But then your script is a monstrous challenge to American society . . .
We explained that we consider the crime committed by Griffiths the sum total of those social relations, the influence of which he was subjected to at every stage of his unfolding biography and character, during the course of the film. For us this was, essentially, the whole interest of the work.
“We would prefer a simple, tight whodunit about a murder . . .”
. . .and about the love of a boy and girl,” someone added, with a sigh.
The possibility of two such basically opposed treatments of the work’s protagonist should not astonish you.
Dreiser’s novel is as broad and shoreless as the Hudson; it is as immense as life itself, and allows almost any point of view on itself. Like every “neutral” fact of nature itself, his novel is ninety-nine per cent statement of facts and one per cent attitude towards them. This epic of cosmic veracity and objectivity had to be assembled in a tragedy—and this was unthinkable without a world-attitude of direction and point.
The studio heads were disturbed by the question of guilt or innocence from another point of view: guilty would mean-unattractive. How could we allow a hero to seem unattractive? What would the box-office say?
But if he weren’t guilty . . .
Because of the difficulties around “this damned question” An American Tragedy lay inactive for five years after its purchase by Paramount. It was approached—but no more than approached—even by the patriarch of films, David Wark Griffith, and Lubitsch, and many others.
With their customary cautious prudence the “heads,” in our case too, dodged a decision. They suggested that we complete the script “as you feel it,” and then, “we’ll see. . . .”
From what I have already said, it must be perfectly evident that in our case, as distinct from previous handlings, the matter of a difference of opinion was not based on a decision as to some particular situation, but was far deeper, touching the question of the social treatment—wholly and fundamentally.
It is now interesting to trace how in this way a taken aim begins to determine the modeling of the separate parts and how this particular aim, with its demands, impregnates all problems of determining situations, of psychological deepening, and of the “purely formal” aspect of the construction as a whole—and how it pushes one toward completely new, “purely formal” methods which, when generalized, can be assembled into a new theoretical realization of the guiding discipline of cinematography as such.
It would be difficult to set forth here the entire situation of the novel: one can’t do in five lines what Dreiser required two bulky volumes to do. We shall touch upon only the outer central point of the outer story side of the tragedy—the murder itself, though the tragedy, of course, is not in this, but in that tragic course pursued by Clyde, whom the social structure drives to murder. And fundamental attention is drawn to this in our script.
Clyde Griffiths, having seduced a young factory girl employed in a department managed by him, cannot help her obtain an illegal abortion. He sees himself forced to marry her. Yet this would ruin all his visions of a career, as it would upset his marriage with a wealthy girl who is in love with him.
Clyde’s dilemma: he must either relinquish forever a career and social success, or—get rid of the girl.
Clyde’s adventures in his collisions with American realities have by this time already molded his psychology, so that after a long internal struggle (not with moral principles, but with his own neurasthenic lack of character), he decides on the latter course.
He elaborately thinks out and prepares her murder—a boat is to be upset, apparently accidentally. All the details are thought out with the over-elaboration of the inexperienced criminal, which subsequently entangles the dilettante in a fatal mesh of incontrovertible evidence.
He sets out with the girl in a boat. In the boat the conflict between pity and aversion for the girl, between his characterless vacillation and his greedy snatching at a brilliant material future, reaches a climax. Half-consciously, half-unconsciously, in a wild inner panic,
the boat is overturned. The girl drowns.
Abandoning her, Clyde saves himself as he had planned beforehand, and falls into the very net that he had woven for his extrication.
The boat episode is effected in the way that similar incidents take place: it is neither fully defined nor completely perceived—it is an undifferentiated tangle. Dreiser presents the matter so impartially that the further development of events is left formally, not to the logical course of the story, but to the processes of law.
It was imperative for us to sharpen the actual and formal innocence of Clyde within the very act of perpetrating the crime.
Only thus could we make sufficiently precise the “monstrous challenge” to a society whose mechanism brings a rather characterless youth to such a predicament and then, invoking morality and justice, seats him in the electric chair.
The sanctity of the formal principle in the codes of honor, morality, justice, and religion—is primary and fundamental in America. On this is based the endless game of advocacy in the courts, and the elaborate games among lawyers and parliamentarians. The essence of what is being formally argued is an altogether subsidiary matter.
Therefore the conviction of Clyde, though essentially deserved by his role in this affair (which concerns no one), in spite of proof of his formal innocence, would be regarded in America as something “monstrous”: a judicial murder.
It was therefore imperative to develop the boat scene with indisputable precision as to Clyde’s formal innocence. Yet without whitewashing Clyde in any way, nor removing any particle of blame.
We chose this treatment: Clyde wants to commit the murder, but he cannot. At the moment that requires decisive action, he falters. Simply from weakness of will.
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