Film Form
Page 20
In this Joyce shared the sad fate of all the so-called “left” tendencies in art that reached full flower with the entry of capitalism into its imperialist stage.
And if we examine these “leftist” arts from the viewpoint of the tendency as described, we find an extremely curious explanation of this phenomenon.
On the one hand, there is a firm belief in the permanency of the existing order, and hence—a conviction of the limitations of man.
On the other hand, the arts feel a need to step beyond their limitations.
This frequently produces an explosion, but an explosion directed not outwards, towards the widening of the art’s frame, which is only to be achieved by extending its content in an anti-imperialist and revolutionary direction, but inwards, towards means, not towards content. The explosion is not creative and progressive, but destructive.
The arts themselves can escape the fetters of bourgeois limitations only in a revolutionary ideology and in revolutionary themes.
As for their expressive means, escape here lies in a transition to a more perfected stage of all their potentialities—to cinema.
For only the cinema can take, as the esthetic basis of its dramaturgy, not only the statics of the human body and the dynamics of its action and behavior, but an infinitely broader diapason, reflecting the manifold movement and changing feelings and thoughts of man. This is not merely material for the depiction of man’s action and behavior on the screen, but is also the compositional framework over which is distributed a conscious and sensed reflection of the world and reality.
How easily the cinema is able to spread out in an equal graphic of sound and sight the richness of actuality and the richness of its controlling forces, compelling the theme more and more to be born through the process of cinematographic narrative, written from a position of emotion indivisible from the feeling and thinking man.
This is not a task for the theater. This is a level above the “ceiling” of its possibilities. And when it wishes to leap over the limits of these possibilities it also, no less than literature, has to pay the price of its life-like and realistic qualities. It has to retire into the immateriality of a Maeterlinck, as we have seen in his works, and whose “program” dreamed for the theater found this ideal as elusive as his own blue-bird!
What debris of anti-realism does the theater inevitably land in the moment it sets itself “synthetic” aims! We need only point to two illustrations of this truth: the Théâtre d’Art and the Théâtre des Arts— both opening in Paris, in 1890 and 1910 respectively.
The maxim of the first of these theaters, founded by the symbolist poet Paul Fort, was: La parole crée le décor comme le reste.1
In practice, this led to the productions such as of Pierre Quillard’s La Fille aux mains coupées (1891). This play,
. . . in the form of a dialogue poem, was staged in this way: a narrator, standing at the side of the proscenium, read the prose passages indicating scene-changes and plot-exposition, while on the stage, veiled by a gauze curtain, the actors moved and declaimed the verses against the background of a golden panel representing primitive ikon-like figures of angels in prayer, painted by Paul Séruzier. This stylized scenery was . . . to serve as a means for “disclosing the lyricism imprisoned in the verses.”2
The critic Pierre Véber wrote:
Preference is given the lyrical word. The theater seems to vanish, to make way for dialogue declamation, itself a sort of poetic scenery.
Pierre Quillard demanded that “the scenery be a purely ornamental figment, serving to supplement the illusion by analogies, in color and line, with the drama.”3
Seeking new methods of “inductive contagion” of the spectators, Paul Fort’s theater sought to give the substance of practice to the theory of correspondences between the different senses, a popular idea among the poets and theoreticians of symbolism. . . .4
These new directions in the theater, by no means reprehensible in themselves, led to the most absurd and superficial excesses.
[Paul Fort] presented Le Cantique des Cantiques by J.-Napoléon Roinard “in eight mystical emblems and three paraphrases,” with an accompaniment of music and of perfumes “composed in a tonality corresponding to the various verses.” For the author, inspired by Rimbaud’s Voyelles, by René Ghil’s theory of instrumentation and by the Livre d’orchestration des Parfums by Chardin Hardancourt, sought to establish a harmony of musical tone, of poem and of setting, and of the odors of perfumes.5
I believe that it was an imperfection of correspondence found among the other elements that led to this absurdity.
The program of the latter theater (founded by the wealthy dilettante, Jacques Rouchè) contained many items of a similar nature, such as, “the designers Dethomas, Drésa, and Piot excelled in the invention of conventionalized scenery, attempting to compose ‘a symphony of colors supplementing the symphony of sounds.’”6
All such attempts at synthesis inevitably wreck themselves and lead only to anti-realism.
Yet when these same aims are set for cinema, they not only do not lead it away from realism, but actually increase the power of its realistic affect.
The unexpected “informing” narrator, for example, who is patterned after the narrator in the Kabuki theater, was perfectly and organically interwoven in the form of sub-titles into the texture of the film even in its silent period.
Today the sub-title still unobtrusively narrates “prose passages indicating scene-changes and plot-exposition,” while leaving the lyrical experience of the characters to the pictorial element of the film.
Even in the silent film we made attempts to move further in this direction by weaving the sub-titles into the very thick of the action, dramatizing them with montage and varying proportions within the frame. Recall the titles within the opening sequence of Old and New, which were brought directly into the emotional rhythm and the atmosphere of the film.
and so on.7
In the sound-film the sub-title, maintaining its place among the expressive means (try to remove the titles from Minin and Pozharsky* and see what is left!), and its counterpart, the actual voice of the narrator (a “convention” nearly identical with that of the theaters we have been describing), are successfully employed. The latter means is a voice whose dramatically weaving potentialities have scarcely been touched by the cinema.
The late Pirandello used to dream aloud of what could be done with this voice, when we met in Berlin in 1929.
How close is such a voice, intervening in the action from outside the action, to Pirandello’s whole concept! Its employment for ironical purposes was quite successfully demonstrated by René Clair in Le dernier milliardaire, and even more cleverly by Kuleshov in his O. Henry film, The Great Consoler.
In Soviet films the only dramatic and even tragic design has been given this voice by Esther Schub and the author of her commentary, Vsevold Vishnevsky, in Spain, though its effect was obscured by insufficiently considered composition of the narration and by poor recording. However, the original for this and many other similar uses in the documentary film can be found in Ernest Hemingway’s text, written and spoken for Ivens’s The Spanish Earth.
The “mystery” of the gauze stretched across the stage of the Théâtre d’Art apparently lies in a desire to “unify” the diversity of the materially real environment of painted scenery, three-dimensional people, and real textures (such as gilded surfaces).
This is the most difficult of problems for the theater (a solution for it has been sought in hundreds of variations, almost always leading to some degree of meaninglessness), but the cinema is able to solve the problem with the greatest of ease, operating as it does with photographically captured images equally as real in appearance as the objects themselves. In the mysteries of fanciful, active, and not merely naturalistically passive sound-recording, lies the similar secret potentiality of harmonizing sounds, which in their direct, life-like substance, may not be capable of combination and orchestration.
No, this is in a victory within reach of the cinema alone.
This is a genuine and complete “disclosure of the lyricism imprisoned in the verses,”—that lyricism which inevitably possesses the author of a film in its particularly emotional passages.
We have remarked the frustrating results of this attempt in both the “left” theater and in “left” literature.
The solution of this problem has been left entirely to the cinema.
Only here can real events, preserving all the richness of material and sensual fullness, be simultaneously—
epic, in the revelation of their content,
dramatic, in the treatment of their subject, and
lyrical to that degree of perfection from which is echoed the most delicate nuance of the author’s experience of the theme-possible only in such an exquisite model of form as the system of audio-visual images of the cinema.
When a film-work or any part of one achieves this triple dramatic synthesis, its impressive power is particularly great.
The three sequences which I consider most successful in my own work have this character: they are epic, dramatic, and at the same time, most lyrical, if lyricism is understood as those nuances of multiple individual experience which determine the resulting forms.
These sequences are the “Odessa steps” and “meeting the squadron” in Potemkin, and the “attack of the knights” in Alexander Nevsky. I have written in detail* of the first and third of these sequences, saying of the steps sequence that in its compositional progress “it behaves like a human being in a state of ecstasy,” and that the advancing gallop of the knights is “in subject—the beat of hoofs; in structure—the beat of an excited heart . . .
The same may be said of the Potemkin’s meeting with the fleet, where the pounding machinery was meant to embody the excited collective heart of the battleship, while the rhythm and cadences of this beating were meant to reproduce the lyrical experience of the author as he imagined himself in the position of the rebellious ship.
Cinema solves such problems with the utmost ease.
But the point is not the ease with which it does so, nor that it can do so at all. What matters is the concreteness, materiality, and absolute compatibility of all these achievements with the demands of realism, that categorical condition for vital, worthy, and fruitful art—for Socialist art.
Thus, in respect to all these features the cinema is a step ahead of all related fields, while remaining a contemporary of theater, painting, sculpture, and music. There was a time when, with youthful presumption, I considered that it was time for all the other arts to retire, now that an art had appeared more advanced than any of them in their own potentialities and functions. Fifteen years ago, when I was just “contemplating” film work, I called theater and cinema “the two skulls of Alexander the Great.”8 Recalling the anecdote of the museum show-booth, among whose displays were the skull of Alexander at the age of twenty-five and, alongside it, his skull at the age of forty, I held that the existence of the theater alongside the cinema was equally absurd, for the cinema was actually the grown-up age of the theater. . . .
Of course, this was rather a fact from my own biography, for it was I that was growing up, out of the theater into cinema. It cannot be denied that the theater has staunchly withstood my attacks, and is still consorting peaceably with its more advanced form, which is cinema.
Perhaps this advance is not quite obvious to somebody? Is there any need to pile instance on instance to prove this self-evident fact over and over again?
Let us confine the case at this time to one theatrical element, to the most theatrical element in the theater—the actor. Has not the cinema made demands on the actor that surpass in refinement all that he needs for survival on the stage?
Look at the film work of even the best actors, especially in their first steps in this medium. Isn’t it true that what seemed the height of truth and emotional fidelity on the stage howls from the screen as the most extraordinary overacting and epileptic grimaces?
How much effort had to be made by even the finest masters of the stage before they were able to rebuild a craft developed in the wide frame of the theater—in the “narrow gate” of the screen! How much more exquisite and subtle their acting becomes from scene to scene, and even from film to film! Under the very eyes of the spectator “theatricality” is transformed into genuine vitality on the screen. How astonishing and illuminating in this respect was the development of the late Boris Shchukin not only from rôle to rôle, but from film to film, playing the same role! Watch him in Lenin in October, and then in Lenin in 1918!
Self-control exerted to the millimeter of movement. A degree of fidelity of feeling that permits no refuge in theatrical conventions abolished by cinema. Super-concentration and instantaneous assumption of rôle, both incomparably more difficult in films than in the theater where the actor does not have to burn under the lights of the studio or create his role in the midst of a city street, or in the ocean surf, or in the cockpit of a supposedly looping plane—or to first play death and then two months later, to play the cold that led to it!
As we can see, the indices are the same, but the demands have grown enormously, and a retrospective enrichment of previous stages of development, proceeding alongside, is obvious and undeniable.
And conversely.
To discriminate and, having discriminated, to develop one or another element of cinema is possible only through a thorough study of the basic phenomena of cinema. And the origin of each of these elements lies in other arts.
No one, without learning all the secrets of mise-en-scène completely, can learn montage.
An actor who has not mastered the entire arsenal of theater craft can never fully develop his screen potentialities.
Only after mastering the whole culture of the graphic arts can a cameraman realize the compositional basis of the shot.
And only on a foundation of the entire experience of dramaturgy, epos, and lyricism, can a writer create a finished work in that unprecedented literary phenomenon—film-writing, which includes in itself just such a synthesis of literary forms as the cinema as a whole comprises a synthesis of all forms of art.
The inexhaustible potential of all art, having achieved its highest level of development in the form of cinema, is offered not only to masters, artists, craftsmen. Just as priceless is what this furthest development of art as a whole offers to those who meditate on the general laws of artistic creation—and to those who endeavor theoretically to grasp the phenomena of art generally as a social phenomenon with its original and inimitable methods of reflecting the world and actuality.
For this purpose our cinema is an inexhaustible quarry for the definition of general laws and conditions of art as one of the most characteristic reflections of man’s spiritual activity.
Having at our disposal so perfect a stage of development of all the arts, fused into one—in cinematography, we may already make infinite deductions from it as to the entire system and method of art, exhaustive for all arts, yet peculiar and individual for each of them.
For here—in cinema—for the first time we have achieved a genuinely synthetic art—an art of organic synthesis in its very essence, not a “concert” of co-existent, contiguous, “linked,” but actually independent arts.
At last we have had placed in our hands a means of learning the fundamental laws of art—laws which hitherto we could snatch at only piecemeal, here a bit from the experience of painting, there a bit from theater practice, somewhere else from musical theory. So, the method of cinema, when fully comprehended, will enable us to reveal an understanding of the method of art in general.
We indeed have something to be proud of on this twentieth anniversary of ou
r cinema. Within our country. And beyond its borders. Within the art of cinema itself—and far beyond its borders, throughout the whole system of art.
Yes, we have something to be proud of—and to work towards.
[1939]
Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today
People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW1
“THE KETTLE began it . . .”
Thus Dickens opens his Cricket on the Hearth.
“The kettle began it. . . .”
What could be further from films! Trains, cowboys, chases . . . And The Cricket on the Hearth? “The kettle began it!” But, strange as it may seem, movies also were boiling in that kettle. From here, from Dickens, from the Victorian novel, stem the first shoots of American film esthetic, forever linked with the name of David Wark Griffith.
Although at first glance this may not seem surprising, it does appear incompatible with our traditional concepts of cinematography, in particular with those associated in our minds with the American cinema. Factually, however, this relationship is organic, and the “genetic” line of descent is quite consistent.
Let us first look at that land where, although not perhaps its birthplace, the cinema certainly found the soil in which to grow to unprecedented and unimagined dimensions.