Méliès’s original text was written during the summer of 1906 and published near the end of the year as “Les Vues cinématographiques” in the Annuaire général et international de la photographie (Paris: Pion, 1907), 362–92. This translation by Stuart Liebman is a slightly cut version of that original text, and considerably longer than the short version published in La Revue du cinéma (15 October 1929) as advance publicity for the Méliès gala organized by Paul Gilson and Jean-George Auriol at the Salle Pleyel on 6 December 1929. A translation of the short version by Stuart Liebman appeared in October 29 (Summer 1984), 23–31.
IN THIS talk, I propose to explain as best I possibly can the thousand and one difficulties that professionals must surmount in order to produce the artistic, amusing, strange, or simply the natural subjects that have made the cinematograph such a craze all over the world.
Many volumes would be needed for old hands like myself to write down everything they have learned by the seat of their pants during long years of constant labor, and the space I have at my disposal is unfortunately very limited.
My intention is also primarily to consider unknown aspects of the construction of cinematographic views, most notably the difficulties audiences are unaware of but which are encountered at every turn during the execution of works that seem wholly simple and natural.
In exhibition halls I have often heard the most absurd remarks unquestionably proving that a large number of spectators are miles away from imagining how much work goes into the views they were watching. Some of them, understanding nothing of the way in which “that can be done,” simply and naively say: It’s only a trick! Or else: They must have taken those in a theater! and, satisfied by their explanation, they conclude with: It doesn’t matter, it’s well made all the same.
Obviously, one can only have reflected for a minute to express such an opinion; the absence of daylight in theaters, the impossibility of properly illuminating the stage and sets in a regular and continuous manner; the very particular kind of mimicry in cinematographic views, so different from that in the theater, as you will see later on; the very limited length of the reels—these are some of the causes that make it impossible or almost so to make films under these conditions. When filmed, even the way in which the theatrical sets are painted makes a woefully bad impression, as I will explain in the chapter about decor. Many concern themselves very little with these matters and do not even attempt to take them into account.
But there is a group of spectators who will not be annoyed, but rather will be delighted to obtain some information to satisfy their curiosity, which, moreover, is very justifiable and natural in intelligent people who always seek to know the explanations behind what they are looking at.
It is this category of spectator, certainly the most numerous, that I will try to satisfy. . . .
THE DIFFERENT GENRES OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC VIEWS
There are four broad categories of cinematographic views, or at least, all such views may be linked to one of these categories. There are so-called natural views, scientific views, composed subjects, and the so-called transformation views. I have deliberately set up this classification in the very order in which cinematographic views have successively appeared since the first screenings. In the beginning, views were exclusively of natural subjects; later, the cinematograph was employed as a scientific machine before finally becoming a device used in the theater. From the beginning, its success was enormous; at first this success depended on people’s curiosity about animated photographs; but once the cinematograph was put in the service of theatrical art, its success was transformed into a triumph. Since then, this marvelous instrument’s popularity has only grown with every passing day until it has assumed prodigious proportions.
NATURAL VIEWS
Those who took up cinematography all began by making natural views; whatever particular area they devoted themselves to, all have also continued to make such films from time to time. These views consist of cinemat-ographically reproducing scenes, from ordinary life: views taken in the streets, in the squares, by the sea, on riverbanks, in boats, on trains; panoramic views, ceremonies, parades, funeral processions, etc. In short, they have replaced the documentary photographs that used to be taken by portable photographic cameras with animated documentary photographs. After at first taking very simple subjects, astonishing solely because of the novelty of movement in photographic prints which had always been frozen and immobile, cameramen today, by travelling throughout the entire world, present extremely interesting spectacles that we can watch without putting ourselves out. They show us countries that we probably have not seen, along with their costumes, animals, streets, inhabitants, and customs—all rendered with a photographic fidelity. The landscapes of India, Canada, Algeria, China, and Russia, the waterfalls, the snow-covered countries and their sports, the misty or sun-drenched regions, everything has been filmed for the pleasure of people who do not like to put themselves out. There are many cameramen who specialize in this kind of work because it is the easiest. To have an excellent instrument, to be a good photographic cameraman, to know how to choose a vantage point, to be unafraid of travelling, and to move heaven and earth to obtain the authorizations that are often necessary are the sole qualifications required in this branch of the industry. That is unquestionably a great deal, but we will see further on that all this is only the basis of the art form. Every photographer can take views from nature, but not everyone can compose scenes.
SCIENTIFIC VIEWS
Very soon after the appearance of animated photographs, several people had the idea of using the cinematograph to record anatomical studies of human and animal movement on film. Before the invention of the cinematograph properly speaking, M. Marey had already succeeded in photographing a bird in flight and a horse galloping with truly extraordinary results by decomposing the movement with the assistance of a photographic apparatus with many lenses.1 Today, thanks to the cinematograph, the automatic instrument par excellence, this is a mere game everyone can play. Others have attached microscopes to the cinematograph and presented us with enlargements of the workings of infinitely tiny creatures that are very curious to watch. Finally, others have availed themselves of the cinematograph to record and reproduce the surgical operations of a master for a specialized audience of students, or to provide them with practical lessons about glass blowing, steam or electric machine components in movement, pottery-making, and all sorts of diverse industries. Strictly speaking, this special branch of cinematography could be placed in the category of natural views, since the cameraman limits himself, as in the first case, to filming what is happening in front of him, except in those cases involving microscopic studies that require special instruments and know-how. But in any case, one must not silently ignore this cinematographic specialty.
COMPOSED SUBJECTS OR SCENIC GENRES
All subjects, of any sort, in which action is readied as it is in the theater and performed by the actors in front of the camera may be placed in a single category. The varieties within this category are innumerable; it includes comic skits, comic operas, burlesques and comedies, peasant stories, the so-called chase scenes, clown acts, acrobatic acts, graceful, artistic, or exotic dance turns, ballets, operas, stage plays, religious scenes, scabrous subjects, plastic tableaux, war scenes, newsreels, reproductions of news items, accident reports, catastrophes, crimes, assassinations, etc.—many more than I can list—as well as the most somber tragedies. The cinematographic realm knows no bounds; all subjects that the imagination can provide are suitable, and it seizes upon them. It is especially this category and the following one that have given immortality to the cinematograph because the subjects conceived by the imagination are infinitely varied and inexhaustible.
THE SO-CALLED TRANSFORMATION VIEWS
I now come to the category of cinematographic views exhibitors call transformation views. I find this trade name, however, unsuitable. Since I myself created this special area, I think I may say that the term fantastic views would be far more accurate. For if a certain number of these views in fact include scene changes, metamorphoses, or transformations, there are also a large number without transformations. They have instead many trick effects of theatrical machinery, mise-en-scène, optical illusions, and a wide range of processes that can only be called trick shots, hardly an academic term, but one that has no equivalent in refined discourse. Whatever the case may be, this category’s domain is by far the most extensive, for it encompasses everything from natural views (documentary [non-préparées] or contrived [truquées] although shot outdoors) to the most imposing theatrical performances. It includes all the illusions that can be produced by prestidigitation, optics, photographic tricks, set design and theatrical machinery, the play of light, dissolves (dissolving views2 as the English have called them), and the entire arsenal of fantastic, magical compositions that turn the most intrepid into madmen. With no intention of disparaging the first two categories, I am nevertheless going to speak solely about the latter two for the very simple reason that there I shall be entirely on home ground and able, consequently, to expound them with full knowledge of the facts. Since the day—and this goes back ten years—when countless producers of cinematographic views began to throw themselves into the making of outdoor views and comic scenes, whether good, bad, or excellent, I abandoned the simplest types and specialized in subjects whose interest lies in their difficulty of execution. To these I have exclusively devoted my efforts.
Cinematographic art offers such a variety of pursuits, it demands so much work of all kinds, and requires such sustained attention that I sincerely do not hesitate to proclaim it the most enticing and most interesting of the arts, for it makes use of almost all of them. Dramatic techniques, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanical skills, manual labor of all sorts—all are employed in equal measure in this extraordinary profession. The amazement of those who have happened to watch part of our work always affords me the utmost pleasure and amusement.
The same phrase invariably comes to their lips: “Really, its extraordinary! I never imagined that so much space and material were needed, that so much work was required to obtain these views! I didn’t have any idea at all of how they were made.”
Alas, afterwards they know little more, for one has to put, as they say, one’s nose to the grindstone, and for a long time, for a thorough knowledge of the innumerable difficulties to be surmounted in a profession in which everything, even the seemingly impossible, is realized, and the most fanciful dreams are given the semblance of reality. Finally, needless to say, one must absolutely realize the impossible, since one photographs it and renders it visible.
THE SHOOTING STUDIO
For the special kind of view that concerns us, a studio has to be contrived ad hoc. Briefly, it combines a photographic studio (in gigantic scale) with a theatrical stage. The structure is made of iron and glass. The cabin of the camera operator is located at one end, while at the other end, a stage is situated, constructed exactly like one in a theater and fitted with trapdoors, scenery slots, and uprights. Of course, on each side of the stage there are wings with storerooms for sets, and behind it there are dressing rooms for the artists and extras. The stage includes a lower section containing the workings for the trapdoors and buffers necessary for the appearances and disappearances of the diabolical gods in fairy plays (féeries), and slips in which flats can be collapsed during scene changes. Overhead, there is a grate with the rollers and winches needed for maneuvers requiring power (flying characters or vehicles, oblique flights of angels, fairies, or swimmers, etc., etc.). Special rollers help to move the canvas panoramas; electric projectors help to light and to intensify the ghosts. We have, in short, a quite faithful, small-scale likeness of a théâtre de féerie. The stage is about thirty-two feet wide with an additional nine feet of wings upstage and downstage. The length of the whole, from the forestage to the camera, is fifty-five feet. Outside, there are iron hangars for the construction of wooden props, sets, etc. . . . and a series of storerooms for the construction materials, props, and costumes.
LIGHTING WITH DAYLIGHT AND ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
The ceiling of the studio is glazed partly with frosted glass and partly with regular glass. In summer, when the sun strikes the sets through the windows, the results could be disastrous because the shadows of the roof’s iron beams can be conspicuous on the backdrops below. Moving shutters operated by wires which permit them simultaneously to be opened and closed in the wink of an eye protect against this problem. The frames of these shutters are trimmed with tracing paper (of the kind architects use for drawing their plans); when closed, these provide a softly filtered light similar to that of frosted glass. Even lighting is extremely difficult to obtain during the performance of a scene which sometimes lasts four consecutive hours and more for a subject that, when projected, lasts two to four minutes. When it is cloudy, and the accursed black cumulus clouds take pleasure in constantly crossing in front of the sun, the photographer’s friend, exasperation is quick to manifest itself in the one who directs the cameramen, assistants, mechanics, actors, and extras. One must have patience for every sort of ordeal; sometimes, it is better to wait for daylight to return; sometimes one ought rather to close the shutters if there is too much light or to open them if there is not enough, and one must do all this without losing sight of a thousand details inhering in the work in progress. If I am not crazy by now, I probably never will be, because overly bright, cloudy, and hazy skies have tried my patience severely . . . and during my career they have caused innumerable failures along with enormous costs; every tableau that must be started over or is impossible to perform because the bad weather disconcerts the actors, doubles, triples, or quadruples its price, depending on whether you try it two, three, or four more times. I have watched scenes, the ballet Faust among others, which have been performed over the course of eight straight days, but last only two-and-a-half minutes and cost 3,200 francs. There’s something to make you angry about.
After much groping, and even though it was often said to be impossible, I have recently succeeded in setting up artificial lighting by using special electric equipment consisting of battens, track lights, and props, similar to those in theaters. These completely create the effect of daylight and in the future will eventually protect me from the sore trials of the past. God be praised! I will not go mad . . . at least on account of the clouds. . . . Diffuse light is achieved with the help of a large number of arc lamps and mercury-vapor tubes combined. This artificial light is used at the same time as daylight, and its intensity varies according to need.
THE COMPOSITION AND PREPARATION OF SCENES
Composing a scene, a play, a drama, a fairy play, a comedy, or an artistic tableau naturally calls for the creation of a scenario drawn from the imagination and then a search for the effects that will bring it off for the audience; creating sketches and models of the sets and costumes; finding the chief attraction without which no view has a chance of success. As far as illusions or fairy plays are concerned, the invention, combination, and outlines of the tricks and the preliminary study of their construction requires special care. The mise-en-scene as well as the movements of the extras and the placement of the production crew are also arranged in advance. The work is absolutely analogous to readying a play in the theater, but with this difference: the author must know how to work out everything by himself on paper, and consequently he must be the author [scriptwriter], director, designer, and often an actor if he wants to obtain a unified whole. The person who devises the scene ought to direct, for it is absolutely impossible to make it succeed if ten different people get involved. Above all, one must know exactly what one wants and go over the roles that each will have to perform. One must not lose sight of the fact that one does not rehearse for three months as in the theater, but only for a quarter of an hour at most. If you lose time, the light goes down—and goodbye photography. Everything, especially the stumbling blocks to be avoided during the performance, must be anticipated. In the scenes requiring machines there are many.
THE SETS
The sets are produced by following a chosen model; they are constructed in wood and cloth in a workshop adjoining the shooting studio and painted in distemper like theatrical sets, except that the painting is executed exclusively in grisaille through all the intermediate gradations of gray between black and pure white.3 This gives them the look of funerary decorations, with a strange effect on those seeing them for the first time. Colored sets come out very badly. Blue becomes white, reds, greens, and yellows become black; a complete destruction of the effects ensues. It is therefore necessary that sets be painted like photographers’ backdrops. The painting, unlike that of theatrical sets, is very carefully done. The finish, the correctness of the perspective, the trompe l’oeil skillfully executed to tie the painting to real objects just as in panoramas4—all is needed to give an appearance of truth to the entirely artificial things that the camera will photograph with absolute precision. Anything poorly made will be faithfully reproduced by the camera and you must therefore keep your eyes peeled and produce the sets with meticulous care. I only know this: in material matters, the cinematograph must do better than the theater and it must not accept conventional practices.
THE PROPS
Props are made of wood, cardboard, flour, molded pasteboard, and dirt, or ordinary objects can simply be used. But if you want to get the best photographic results, the best thing to do, even for the sofas, chimneys, tables, furniture, candelabra, clocks, etc., is exclusively to use specially made objects that have been painted in carefully graduated shades of gray depending on the nature of the object. Important films are often colored by hand before they are projected, but if the objects are bronze, mahogany, red, yellow, or green, this would not be possible because they become deep black and consequently not transparent when photographed; therefore they cannot be made sufficiently translucent for projection. That’s something the public is generally unaware of, and they certainly do not suspect how much time and care it takes to make all these props which merely seem to be ordinary objects.
THE COSTUMES
For the same reason, most costumes must be specially made in tones that photograph well and that can later be colored. That is why it is necessary to have an enormous store of costumes of all sorts, from all periods and countries, and of different qualities, along with their accessories, not to mention the hats, wigs, weapons, and jewels belonging to the greatest lords or to the filthiest bums. The store of costumes, however large it may be, is always inadequate. Even with ten thousand costumes in our current repertoire, one is obliged from time to time to go to theatrical costumers to complete the set, for example, when many similar costumes are needed, primarily in parades or in processions with many performers. Naturally, costumers and workers who repair and maintain them are necessary; the same is true for the linens and the tights, the shoes and the equipment.
THE ACTORS AND EXTRAS
Contrary to general belief, it is very difficult to find good performers for the cinematograph. An actor of excellence in the theater, even a star, is worth absolutely nothing in a cinematographic scene. Often professional mimes are bad because they perform in pantomime according to conventional principles, just like mimes in a ballet who have a special, immediately recognizable performance style. Though very superior in their specialty, these artists are disconcerted as soon as they come into contact with the cinematograph. This is because cinematographic miming requires training and special qualities. No longer is there an audience for the actor to address, either verbally or with gestures. The camera alone is spectator, and nothing is worse than to look at it and to concern oneself with it while performing, which is what invariably happens at first to actors accustomed to the stage but not to the cinematograph. The actor must realize that, while remaining completely silent, he must make himself understood by the deaf spectators who watch him. His performance must be unostentatious and very expressive, with few gestures, but ones that are very distinct and clear. Perfection of facial expression and great accuracy of pose are indispensable. I have seen numerous scenes performed by well-known actors; they were not good because the principal element of their success, the word, was not available in the cinematograph. Accustomed to speaking well in the theater, they used gestures only as an accessory to speech, while in the cinematograph, the word is nothing and the gesture is everything. Nevertheless, some, Galipaux among others,5 have made some good scenes. Why? Because he is accustomed to using solo pantomime during his monologues, and he is endowed with a very expressive face. He knows how to make himself understood without speaking, and his movements, even if deliberately exaggerated—which is necessary in pantomime and especially in photographed pantomime—are always appropriate. When accompanying his speech, an actor’s gesture is very telling, but it is no longer comprehensible when he mimes. If you say, “I am thirsty,” in the theater, you do not close your hand and bring your thumb to your mouth to simulate a bottle. It’s completely useless since everyone understood that you are thirsty; but in pantomime, you are obviously obliged to make this gesture.
That’s all quite simple, isn’t it? And yet, nine times out of ten, this does not work for anyone not accustomed to miming. Nothing can be improvised; everything must be learned. It is also advisable to consider how the camera will render a gesture. In a photograph, the characters overlap each other, and the greatest care must always be taken to make the principal characters stand out and to moderate the fervor of the supporting characters who are always inclined to gesticulate at the wrong time. This produces a jumble of bustling people in the photograph. The audience no longer knows whom to look at and no longer understands any of the action. The phases of action must be successive, not simultaneous. The actors must consequently pay attention and perform only in turn, at the precise moment when their participation becomes necessary. There is one more thing that I have very often had difficulty in making clear to performers who are always inclined to show off and get themselves noticed to the great detriment of the action and the whole; generally speaking, they are too spontaneous. How much tact is needed to moderate their excessive spontaneity without offending them! Strange as it may seem, each performer in the rather numerous troupe that I employ has been chosen from twenty or thirty I have tested in succession before obtaining what was needed, even though all were very fine artists in the Parisian theaters in which they worked.
Not everyone has the necessary qualities, and good will, unfortunately, does not replace those qualities. Those who have them take quickly to the task; others never do. Female performers who are good at mime are rare. Many are fine, intelligent, beautiful women, but when they must mime a somewhat difficult scene, woe is me! A thousand times woe! Those who have never witnessed the tribulations of a director have never seen anything. I hasten to add that there are, very fortunately, exceptional cases of women who perform very gracefully and intelligently. Conclusion: forming a good cinematographic troupe is a long and difficult business. Only those with no concern for art satisfy themselves with first comers playing a confusing and uninteresting scene.
TRICK EFFECTS
It is impossible in this already long talk to explain in detail the execution of cinematographic tricks. That would require a special study; moreover, practice alone clarifies the details of the processes used, some involving unheard of difficulties. I can say without bragging, since all those in the profession are well aware of this, that it was I myself who successively discovered all the so-called “mysterious” processes of the cinematograph. The producers of composed scenes have all more or less followed the beaten path, and one of them, the head of the world’s largest cinematographic company (considered from the viewpoint of its huge, low-cost production), told me himself: “It is thanks to you that the cinematograph has managed to sustain itself and to become an unprecedented success. By joining animated photographs with the theater, that is, with an infinite variety of subjects, you prevented its decline, which would otherwise have rapidly occurred with outdoor scenes whose inevitable uniformity would have quickly bored the audience.”
Without false modesty, I confess that this glory—if glory it is—pleases me most. Do you want to know how the idea of applying trick effects in cinematography first came to me? Very simply, upon my word. One day, when I was photographing as usual at the Place de l’Opéra, the camera I used at the beginning (a primitive one in which the film tore or frequently caught and refused to advance) jammed and produced an unexpected result; a minute was needed to disengage the film and to make the camera work again. During this minute, the passersby, a horse trolley, and the vehicles had, of course, changed positions. In projecting the strip, rejoined at the point of the break, I suddenly saw a Madeleine-Bastille trolley change into a hearse and men changed into women.
The substitution trick, called the stop-motion trick, had been discovered and, two days later, I produced the first metamorphoses of men into women and the first sudden disappearances which at first had such great success. It was thanks to this very simple trick that I made the first fairy plays, The Devil’s Manor, The Devil in the Convent, Cinderella, etc. . . . One trick led to another. Even before this new type was successful, I used my ingenuity to find new techniques and I conceived in turn of the fade (obtained by a special device in the photographic camera), appearances, disappearances, metamorphoses obtained by superimpositions on black grounds or on sections set aside in the sets; then came superimpositions on white grounds that had already been exposed (something everyone declared to be impossible before they saw it), realized with the help of a stratagem I cannot discuss because imitators have not yet entirely discovered its secret. Then came the tricks with cut-off heads, the doubling of characters, of scenes performed by a single character who through doubling ends by portraying all by himself up to ten similar characters performing a comedy with each other. Finally, using my special knowledge of illusions acquired through twenty-five years of practice at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, I introduced mechanical, optical, and prestidigitation tricks, etc., to the cinematograph. With all these methods combined and competently used, I do not hesitate to say that in cinematography it is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things.
I will conclude by saying that much to my chagrin the simplest tricks are those that make the greatest impact, while those achieved through superimposition, which are much more difficult, are hardly appreciated except by those who understand the problems involved. Among others, the views performed by a single actor in which the film is successively exposed up to ten consecutive times in the camera, are so difficult that they become a veritable Chinese water torture. The actor, playing different scenes ten times, must remember precisely to the second, while the film is running, what he was doing at the same instant in earlier takes and the exact location where he was in the scene. On the one hand, this condition alone allows performances by ten actors (who are really one and the same) to be attuned with each other; and, on the other hand, if during one of the takes an actor makes an untoward gesture, if his arm moves in front of a character photographed in the preceding take, it will be transparent and out of focus, which wrecks the trick. You can see from this just how difficult it is and how angry you get when, after three or four hours of work and sustained attention, a tear rips through the film after the seventh or eighth superimposition, forcing you to abandon the film and do everything over again since it is impossible to repair a film containing a break in which the image is still latent and which cannot be developed until the tenth and last superimposition is recorded.
This is perhaps all “Greek” to the uninitiated, but I repeat that more detailed explanations would lead us too far astray.
In any case, it is the trick, used in the most intelligent manner, that allows the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible to be rendered visually and produces truly artistic tableaux that provide a veritable pleasure for those who understand that all branches of art contribute to their realization.
TAKING THE VIEWS: THE CAMERAMAN
Needless to say, the cameraman for this special genre of views must be highly trained and very much au courant with a host of little tricks of the trade. A difficult sort of view such as an execution cannot be taken by a beginner. He would invariably ruin the most easily achieved tricks if he forgets even the smallest thing while turning the crank. A mistake in cranking, forgetting a number while counting out loud during a take, a second’s distraction can make everything go wrong. A calm, attentive, thoughtful man capable of withstanding all annoyances and tensions is what is needed because annoyances and tensions are practically inevitable while taking views with the almost continual problems and innumerable unpleasant surprises. These observations will make you understand why the taking of fantastic views is so problematic, whether caused by the director, the mechanics, the actors, or the cameraman taking the shot. It is hardly an easy thing to be in perfect agreement, to get everyone’s attention, and to cooperate precisely all the while necessarily fighting against material problems of all sorts.
This will suffice to explain why after having thrown themselves into the new genre the majority of photographers have given it up. One needs someone more than a simple cameraman for all this; and, if there are innumerable cinematographers, those who have succeeded in doing something different than the others are far less numerous. No more than one per country, even less, since every country in the world is dependent on French producers for artistic views. . . .
The cinematograph has today become a colossal industry employing more than 80,000 people in different parts of the world. That’s hard to believe but a fact nonetheless, and its success only grows stronger every day. Why? Because an interesting spectacle is an irresistible attraction in every country, and because the cinematograph has provided superb spectacles of this kind in all those countries lacking theaters and other distractions at an affordable price, since the impresario, once he has paid for the piece, doesn’t have to pay the performers every day.
Oh, if it could only be like this for theater directors!!! But that’s the way it is. Only the artists who have performed coolly and flawlessly in cinematographic views are as happy. Their performances cannot be uneven, good one day and bad the next; if they perform well at the premiere, they will be excellent in perpetuity. What an advantage!!!
GEORGES MÉLIÈS (1861–1938) was director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the foremost magic theater in Paris, from 1888 to 1914. In December, 1895, he attended the first film screening of the Lumière brothers, and over the next eighteen years his company, Star Films, produced more than one thousand short films, first at his theater (where they were also screened) and then at a film studio that he built at Montreuil-sous-bois.
1 Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) was a celebrated physiologist and professor at the College de France, who experimented with such precinematographic recording devices as the photographic gun and chronophotography in his studies of human and animal movement.
2 English in the original—TRANS.
3 Orthochromatic filmstock was sensitive to the purple-to-green portion of the spectrum, so that objects in these colors showed up as white or light gray on film. It was not sensitive, however, to yellow and red, and objects in these colors showed up as dark gray or even black.
4 For a description of the historical precedents for such panoramas and of the ways in which real objects were linked with large-scale projected images, see L.J.M. Daguerre, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama (New York: Winter House, 1971); see, also, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre (New York: Dover, 1968).—TRANS.
5 Félix Galipaux was a popular music hall actor who, with Coquelin Cadet, created a vogue for monologue performances in the 1880s. According to Jacques Deslandes, Galipaux first performed for the camera in 1896–1897 when Emile Reynaud produced a film of Le Premier Cigare, one of Galipaux’s well-known music hall routines—see Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinema, vol. i (Paris: Casterman, 1966), 297–98. Galipaux later appeared in films by Zecca and in a number of Méliès’s films, including An Adventurous Automobile Trip (1905). According to Georges Sadoul, Galipaux also starred in some of the first sound films produced in France by Pathé, including La Lettre and Au Telephone (1905)—see Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Denoël, 1948), 459.—TRANS.
From “Epilogues: Cinématographe,” Mercure de France (1 September 1907), 124–27.
DOES THE CINEMA pose a threat to the theater, at least the kind that is principally a spectacle which appeals to the eyes? Probably so. Cinematographic photography has all the splendid charm of static photography. The one has almost eliminated engraving; the other has almost taken the place of the spectacles performed directly by human figures. The cinema does not merely provide a more than adequate and inexpensive reproduction of such organized spectacles; it reproduces (that is, in the best conditions) panoramic spectacles, whether natural (such as landscapes) or contrived (such as a hippopotamus hunt—posed certainly, but posed on the very banks of the Upper Nile with the local people and animals performing in their own environment).1 The best theater machinery would cost hundreds of thousands of francs just to produce the caricature of such a hunt. The cinema renders landscapes marvelously. Yesterday it showed me the Rocky Mountains and the Zambezi Falls: the wind bent the fir trees on the mountains; the water sprang up at the bottom of the falls. I saw life stirring. At the Zambezi, a small bush, partially caught in a whirlpool, wavered constantly on the brink of the abyss; and its trembling, come from such a distance away, inspired in me a strange emotion. I became entranced by this battle; when they give us a new view of this spectacular foaming falls, I will be looking for that bush which is courageously resisting the force of the water: perhaps it will have been vanquished, or perhaps it will have become a tree.
I love the cinema. It satisfies my curiosity. It allows me to tour the world and stop, to my liking, in Tokyo and Singapore. I follow the craziest itineraries. I go to New York, which is far from beautiful, by way of the Suez, which is hardly more so; and during the same hour I travel through the Canadian forests and the Scottish highlands; I ascend the Nile as far as Khartoum and, a moment later, from the bridge of a transatlantic liner I contemplate the bleak expanse of the ocean.
Is this portion of the cinema program the most enjoyable? I do not know for sure, but I do not think so. Public taste, it seems to me, runs to whimsical, comic, or dramatic sketches mimed before the camera. There are fairylands, ballets, apparitions, metamorphoses, and sudden changes done by means of camera tricks, whose secret I cannot fathom: this is a feature that belongs exclusively to the cinema. The fairy tales of live characters are the least supple of all; the transformations lack the nuances that one might expect to get through a kind of fusion of images, through a shimmering rainbow of colors. The cinema renders colors perfectly; and, since they are transparent, it gives them a brilliance which one does not often find in the ordinary theatrical spectacle.2 There is, however, one fault which has to be corrected: flesh tones appear a uniformly pale white, which is very disagreeable. From shoulders to hands, human figures must appear in their natural colors; once that is accomplished, the cinema will have reached perfection.
The scenes of domestic life staged for the cinema, whether comic or tragic, consume the public with a passion. Their principal merit is their clarity. They are always simple with the most elementary intrigue. What saves them from utter banality is the context in which they develop as well as the rapid changes in setting. A mimed story that lasts ten minutes unfolds in twenty different settings. If a chase is enacted, as it often is, a variety of landscapes unrolls. I have seen a film from this genre which took me all over Spain. The rapidity of these changes adds to the sense of liveliness. The feeling is very intense, and one forgets the story’s vulgarity and savors such details. I was curious to hear that, in Rouen, a Saturday afternoon crowd applauded the chimerical figures on the screen, lavished encouragement or disapproval, shouted at the innocent hero to follow prudent counsel and spurned the wrongdoer. A bit more, and they would have tossed sugar cubes to the faithful dogs which often play a sympathetic role in these innocent games. Such is the power of the illusion that a series of photographs projected on the screen can stimulate our passions just as reality can.
The cinema has a purpose. It is intensely moral. The Pathe company, which supplies a great many of the films, does not joke about good principles. In their films, one is certain that virtue will always be rewarded, crimes punished, lovers reunited and married, unfaithful husbands carefully beaten by outraged wives. The cinema is popular and family oriented. It has a tendency to want to educate. When that finally does happen in films, at least relative to those which are now so caught up in the current morality, we will have something a little more elevated. For instance, the stories of Mérimée and Maupassant make mimed spectacles of a fine intensity. Most of the dramas of Shakespeare offer very captivating scenes. I recommend such transpositions without compunction for they have not retouched the work; they have respected the word.
Speech is what the theater respects least. That is also one of the charms of the cinema, that it does not pretend to speak. One’s ears are not offended. The characters keep their customary nonsense to themselves. It’s a great relief. The silent theater is the ideal distraction, the best place to repose: the images pass borne aloft by light music. One need not even bother to dream.
But the public does not go to the cinema to dream; they go to enjoy themselves and they do, since the biggest theaters have now opened their doors. The Chatelet, the Variétés, and the Gymnase all now include cinema programs, and one can queue up at the small boulevard cinemas that specialize in them.3 The price is still reasonable everywhere. For two francs you can have an orchestra seat, and for a franc you can still get a seat which in the theater would cost five or six times more. So the cinema has solved the problem of the cheaper theaters; it is an advantage that the public has clearly appreciated, especially that segment which only goes to a spectacle to pass the time and for whom the particular program is a matter of indifference, as long as it offers a certain picturesqueness. There is a great future for the cinema in this, and more than one theater this winter will be forced to accept the mode and replace actors with their shadows. A cinema spectacle is shown once to everyone, and it could well run day and night for a century. It is a huge magic lantern that needs only one screen, an electrical source, and an operator. With that, at the Variétés, a beautiful pantomime [L’Enfantprodigue] unreels that is little different from the actual spectacle of which it is the living image. The actors perform once only, and that once is for years; their gestures are fixed; they could all perish in a catastrophe while the cinema spectacle would continue on forever the same.
From the scientific point of view, the cinema is one of the strangest and most splendid inventions of our time. Some improvements will make it a perfect and truly magical instrument. I do not doubt that one day it will offer us landscapes with all of their colors, and their nuances of sky and forest.4 Then we will really come to know the vast world, including its most inaccessible pockets, and the diverse customs of men will come alive before us like a troop of charming dancers. Let’s take advantage of that. Only the churlish and uncurious scorn these spectacles. For intelligent people, they are a singular and sometimes stunning achievement. The past year, the cinema taught me more about Morocco than did all the confused tales of travellers. I saw the army on the march and the artillery of the sultan; and I understood the stupidity of those politicians who took the power of that puppet so seriously.5 It was a lesson for the eyes. That is all that counts.
RÉMY DE GOURMONT (1858–1915) was an initial supporter of the French Symbolist movement who wrote poetry, short stories, novels, philosophical and scientific essays, and literary criticism. It was as an essayist and critic that he gained most recognition, and his “Epilogues” column in Mercure de France perhaps best articulated the slightly left-of-center political opinions and advanced aesthetic standards of the Belle Epoque period.
1 Here Gourmont clearly places certain kinds of films within the context of popular nineteenth-century panoramas, dioramas, and circus and theatrical spectacles. For a history of those spectacles, see Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma, vol. 1, De la cinématique au cinématographe, 1826–1896 (Paris: Casterman, 1966).
2 Gourmont is probably referring to the hand-tinted color process characteristic of Méliès’s films or the stencil-color process introduced by Pathé.
3 For a guide to the theaters, vaudeville houses, music halls, and cinemas that offered film programs at the time when Gourmont was writing, see Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinema à l’epoque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Cerf, 1963), 73–97.
4 The first step was taken with color photographs by MM. Lumière. Projected on the screen, they were just like the natural world, with perhaps a bit too much brightness.— Au.
5 In 1905, France had been on the verge of annexing Morocco as a colony, but was stymied, first, by German diplomatic pressure and, then, by certain factions of resistance in Morocco itself. The crisis toppled Théophile Delcassé, who had been the French foreign minister for an unprecedented seven years, and fueled the beginnings of the Nationalist Revival movement.
From “Chronique théâtral: L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise,” Le Temps (22 November 1908), 3–4.
FILM D’ART invited us to attend its initial spectacle performance at the Salle Charras. You know the origins of this ingenious enterprise. It can scarcely be considered ordinary because Henri Lavedan has given it, along with his name, his unstinting personal cooperation. . . . M. H. Lavedan has surrounded himself with able collaborators. He is being assisted by the great talent of the actor and director, M. Le Bargy, as well as by the practical experience of M. Pathé.1
Other dramatic authors will hasten to answer his call, curious to experiment with a new form of theater, and, if possible, to codify its aesthetic. What is a cinematographic play? What should it become? What are its essential features as well as the rules to which it must adapt? What are its conditions, its limits? How can these be made clear? Let’s see.
First, whatever speech alone is able to express—thought, abstract ideas, intense passion—is excluded. We are in the world of the concrete. The actors must perform and they must perform clearly; their movements must be unified, coherent, according to the laws of cause and effect. In some way, their movements must be refined, freed of all superfluity, and reduced to the essential.
Now, this work of refinement is a work of art. Ever since Nature was simplified by human effort, there has been style. The actor who poses for the cinema and tries to do exactly what is expected of him stylizes the actions of the character he must embody by means of a sober balance of gestures and proper facial expressions.
In the theater, the details of dialogue and the varieties of intonation, to a degree, take the place of an exactness of gesture. Here, gesture is unadorned and obliged to be true. It cannot be otherwise without producing an intolerable sense of unease. In such a school, if they chose to enroll, Conservatory students would learn to be careful.
But can this form of art, from which the word has been excluded, be confused with pantomime? . . . Not at all. Pantomime has a language or grammar of immutable signs whose sense never varies. One of them means “avarice,” another “pride,” another “conquettishness,” and so on. The cinema abstains from using this alphabet. Its province is life itself.
To observe, select, fix, and stylize living figures and momentary phenomena—that is the task it has set for itself. It aspires not only to reproduce current affairs but to animate the past, to reconstruct the great events of History, through the performance of the actor and the evocation of atmosphere and milieu.
L’ASSASSINAT DU DUC DE GUISE BY HENRI L’AVEDAN
This drama, factual it turns out, can be recounted in outline in all of its tragic horror.2 The Duke of Guise tears himself from the arms of Marguerite of Noirmoutiers to rush into an ambush where a coldly plotted death awaits him. The King arms the assassins, stations them along the route of the victim, goes from one to another—“Ferret, Mouse, Fidget”—touches their swords, asks to see them, and assures himself they are ready by testing the rapier points with his fingertips. And the Duke arrives, fearless, determined, haughty, confident of his courage.
As he steps over the threshold of the royal chamber, eight arms are raised to strike and slash him. He takes several steps, dragging this pack at his heels. We follow him through the palace corridors; we witness his agony. He falls. His body is stretched out, lacerated, soiled with blood, his clothes in tatters. On the ground are the King’s cushions (emblazoned with a crowned H) which Guise by chance was able to seize in order briefly to defend himself and ward off the blows.
The task completed, the murderers whisper, “See, it is done.” And Henri approaches, pleased yet apprehensive. He frisks the body. A note discovered there revives his unsatiated hatred. “Fie on the villain! Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it.”
And the six murderers, with great difficulty, haul the great body of the Duke down the spiral staircase which leads to the ground floor. They conceal it in sheaths of straw, throw the lot on the glowing andirons of the hearth, and fan the fire.
The “visual story” that Lavedan has reconstructed, with a passionate concern for detail, engraves itself in the memory with unforgettable strokes. It never drags. In fact, the images succeed one another a little too quickly and too feverishly sometimes; they are perhaps too dense, too compact, yet they are strangely evocative. It is a most impressive history lesson. Nothing is as good as this visual instruction.
In M. Albert Lambert as the Duke and M. Le Bargy as the King, [Lavedan] has found remarkable actors. In the future this kind of role should become a specialty for Le Bargy. No more lover’s roles, but those of venomous traitors, of cunning villains. He will be an incomparable Iago or Sallust. . . .
. . . One further word. M. Camille Saint-Saëns has written a masterpiece of symphonic music to accompany L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise.3 This was one of the most enjoyable parts of this slightly hesitant, imperfect, yet fascinating performance, which shows real promise.
ADOLPHE BRISSON (1860–1925) was a Parisian journalist and editor of the popular intellectual review, Les Annales politiques et littéraires. In 1903, he became the drama critic for Le Temps, and, for the next ten or fifteen years, his theater reviews were probably the most widely respected in Paris.
1 Film d’Art was financed initially by Pierre Lafitte, the wealthy publisher of several illustrated magazines such as La Vie au grand air, Femina, Je Sais Tout, and Fermes et chateaux. Henri Lavedan was a celebrated fifty-year-old dramatist and had been a member of the Académie Française for nearly ten years. Le Bargy was a famous actor-director at the Comédie Française who persuaded his fellow actors from the theater to work in this production. Charles Pathé provided equipment and studio space, and Pathé-Frères helped distribute the film.
2 The historical basis of this film and its ideological ramifications for 1908 should not be ignored. The Duc de Guise had been a leader of the Catholic Sainte Ligue and an instigator of the Saint-Barthélemy massacre against the French Protestants in 1572; he rose to such prominence that he threatened the crown of Henri III, who had him assassinated in 1588. The film represents the Duc de Guise as an “innocent” Catholic martyr in contrast to a devious, cowardly, “appeasing” King.
3 Saint-Saens’s score for L’Assassinat du Due de Guise was perhaps the earliest original music written for the cinema.
From “La Foule au cinématographe,” Les Puissances de Paris (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1911), 118–20.
THE LIGHTS go down. A cry escapes from the crowd and immediately is taken back. It begins much like the great clamour which dying throngs have wailed into the night down through the centuries. These people are creatures who love the daylight. Their kind emerged from the compressing and transforming power of light. But the night of the cinema is far from long. They scarcely have time to suspect their death and the happiness of imperishable feeling; they are like swimmers who plunge their heads underwater and then keep their eyelids and lips and teeth tightly clenched, in order to experience a discomfort, an oppression, a suffocation, and then suddenly burst back through the surface into life.
A bright circle abruptly illuminates the far wall. The whole room seems to sigh, “Ah!” And through the surprise simulated by this cry, they welcome the resurrection they were certain would come.
The group dream now begins. They sleep; their eyes no longer see. They are no longer conscious of their bodies. Instead there are only passing images, a gliding and rustling of dreams. They no longer realize they are in a large square chamber, immobile, in parallel rows as in a ploughed field. A haze of visions which resemble life hovers before them. Things have a different appearance than they do outside. They have changed color, outline, and gesture. Creatures seem gigantic and move as if in a hurry. What controls their rhythm is not ordinary time, which occupies most people when they are not dreaming. Here they are quick, capricious, drunken, constantly skipping about; sometimes they attempt enormous leaps when least expected. Their actions have no logical order. Causes produce strange effects like golden eggs.
The crowd is a being that remembers and imagines, a group that evokes other groups much like itself—audiences, processions, parades, mobs in the street, armies. They imagine that it is they who are experiencing all these adventures, all these catastrophes, all these celebrations. And while their bodies slumber and their muscles relax and slacken in the depths of their seats, they pursue burglars across the rooftops, cheer the passing of a king from the East, or march into a wide plain with bayonets or bugles.
JULES ROMAINS (1885–1972) was a major French poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist, whose advocacy of a Unanimist theory of literature—an intuitive depiction of the new collective consciousness of modern life, set forth in La Vie unanime (L’Abbaye de Creteil, 1908)—established his early reputation.
From “Les Scenes de la vie telle qu’elle est,” Ciné-Journal 139 (22 April 1911), 19.
IN OFFERING for public approval a new series of films, to be called Scènes de la vie telle qu’elle est, the Gaumont Company expects that the release of these films will mark a noteworthy date in the history of the Cinematography of Art.
The scenes of La Vie telle qu’elle est are like nothing that has been achieved so far by film producers anywhere. They represent, for the first time, an attempt to project a realism onto the screen, just as was done some years ago in literature, theater, and art.
It falls to the Gaumont Company to be the first to attempt this; the public will tell us if the effort is successful.
These scenes are intended to be slices of life. If they are interesting and compelling, it is because of the quality of virtue which emerges from and inspires them. They eschew all fantasy, and represent people and things as they are and not as they should be. And by treating only subjects which can be viewed by anyone, they prove more elevated and more significant as moral expression than do those falsely tragic or stupidly sentimental, heartrending little tales which leave no more trace in the memory than on the projection screen.
Lately public taste has favored “films” in which one can see excellently trained actors perform naturally, simply, with neither bombast nor ridiculous pantomime.1 The public has been much infatuated with talented actors who more often than not mask the poverty of a scenario and its total lack of ideas and who offer a touch of piquancy to those eternally insipid idylls in which we see the young woman marry the young man of her dreams, despite all odds. We have a higher ambition—to serve up another entree. Much as in the Film esthétique series, where we tried to produce an impression of pure beauty, which encompassed the exhibitions of grand spectacle as well as the processions of mid-Lent—and which some cinema owners presented to their clientele as the last word in great art—so here, in the scenes from La Vie telle qu’elle est, we have tried to give an impression of previously unrecognized truth.
The innovative plan that we have conceived is intended to divert the French cinema from the influence of Rocambole2 in order to raise it toward a higher destiny; and if this plan could not have been accomplished completely, we would have waited patiently for a more propitious moment. Today, however, we are persuaded that the execution of these scenes from La Vie telle qu’elle est is worthy of their conception; and we offer them confidently to the public, to judge for itself.
The first film of the series is called Les Vipères. Here the vipers are “scandalmongers.” This film is so realistic, so closely observed, so true to life that it has the power, clarity, and concise eloquence of a document. Besides the fact that no one has filmed this subject before, at least to our knowledge, we have never tried harder to create the right atmosphere, strike the right note, and achieve the maximum effect without abandoning the simplicity that gives the work its most unambiguous significance.
And our cameramen have toned down all the magic of their photography in Les Vipères.3 To control the light according to the necessities of the hour and the space of composition is child’s play to them; their reputations were made long ago. But, in this circumstance, they have surpassed themselves. So that here is a film which truly merits being called an honest and sincere work of art and which the public will not fail to welcome with open arms.
Louis FEUILL’ADE (1874–1925) was a journalist and scriptwriter who, in 1907, took over from Alice Guy (1873–1968) the position of chief producer-director at Gaumont. Feuillade directed all of the films in the Films esthétiques series as well as those in the Scenes de la vie telle quelle est series. This text was a written advertisement for Gaumont.
1 Feuillade is probably referring to the Vitagraph films that, as Victorin Jasset noted some six months later, were having a great impact on French audiences.
2 Rocambole evolved from arch criminal to fearless detective as the hero of some thirty adventure novels written by Ponson du Terrail in the middle of the nineteenth century. Here he is used to stand in for all of the adventure heroes of the French séries films (criminal, detective, western), which were so popular from 1907 to 1914.
3 The cameraman for Les Vipères may well have been Guérin, who is known to have worked with Feuillade on Fantômas (1913–1914) and Les Vampires (1915–1916).
From “Etude sur le mise-en-scène en cinematographic,” Ciné-Journal 165 (21 October 1911), 51; 166 (28 October 1911), 33, 35–37; 167 (4 November 1911), 31, 33, 35; 168 (11 November 1911), 38–39; 170 (25 November 1911), 25–27.
WHEN IT WAS announced that M. Le Bargy was going to rehearse actors from the Comédie Française and make cinematographic plays, people anxiously talked about what these theater people who knew nothing of the Ciné’s rules would produce; they spoke of huge amounts of film footage and appalling costs.
Production went slowly. Film d’Art ran into casting, equipment, and staging difficulties; but, finally, the films were finished. They were certainly astonishing. The mass public may have reacted coldly, uncompre hendingly. But people in the film industry understood that all the rules they had observed until then were passe. Well-known artists acted by standing still instead of running around; they achieved an increasing intensity of effect. It was amazing. Admittedly, the first film produced by Film d’Art was marvelously executed. Even if one criticized the technical flaws, which could be excused on the grounds that the actors had gone to great lengths to overcome difficulties they had never faced before, La Mort du Due de Guise was still a masterpiece.1
Le Bargy had portrayed his character with care; he had performed with a wealth of detail that was a revolution to attentive eyes. What the most experienced filmmakers had not dared to do, fearing to break with old conventions, a novice had pulled off.
He brought in new principles and took no account of the experience of his predecessors, and his strategy was exactly right. Except for some technical rules, nothing remained of what the old school had so slowly built up. It was the end of the old ways.
What exactly was the influence of Film d’Art on the cinematographic schools? Almost nothing at first, but then enormous in its consequences. It opened the eyes of the American school, transformed it, and made that school what it is today.
The case of Film d’Art in itself was not a big deal from the commercial point of view. The hopes that it had created were not realized.
This sudden, misunderstood transformation was received coldly by the public. The chosen subjects were often boring. For every one film that was a success, another miscarried. The costs became too high. In brief, the artists grew weary. Le Bargy, who was its heart, abandoned the company, which remained Film d’Art in name only; and he joined an ordinary commercial enterprise with a familiar trademark.2
But the principles remained. And little by little the French school began to wise up. From every side, the artists who had seen what the Cine could produce provided support and cooperation.
That the first period of transformation had its ridiculous side there can be no doubt. One does not break with tradition in a single blow. But the blow had been struck; the exhibitors began to understand and admit that the public could be interested in things artistic. And everywhere arose series of films that bore the labels, “art,” “gold,” “diamond,” “first edition,” “aesthetic.” The Italians merely added two hundred or so extras to their films and for them that was Film d’Art.
About the same time, an organization of French writers and men of letters founded another school. Its purpose was the regeneration of the cinematographic scenario.3 . . .
Around 1909–1910, the first Vitagraph comedies appeared in France. Before that, their production had been awful, at best banal. Then suddenly, masterpieces emerged. A new school was born and gained recognition in the marketplace everywhere, not only among artists but also among the mass public who welcomed it with enthusiasm.
The American school differed from our own on three principal points:
1. camera framing
2. actor performance
3. scenario construction
Theirs was an absolutely new method that clearly distinguished the Americans from the European school.
The Americans had noticed the effect of physical expression and gesture in close shots, and they made use of the overall [long] shot only when they needed to include characters who remained slightly more immobile.
Rapid movement alarmed them, so the acting was absolutely calm, to the point of exaggeration. Moreover, the actual scenario called for dramatic, theatrical, even pathetic situations; they made films as simple and as naive as possible, avoiding stage tricks and spectacular effects, trying as best they could to approximate real life, and often constructing an action in a straight line that ended in a bright, happy denouement. As it was, their method was greatly superior to anything we had done previously, and the public’s infatuation was the best proof of that. Their acting company, though numerous, actually included several performers that the public noticed immediately, became familiar with, and claimed as their own. The periodic return of these same performers was awaited and cheered. The public wanted nothing but Vitagraph films. From then on, the French companies sought to imitate them.
What exactly was the strategy behind the Vitagraph films?
For the overeager public, the opinion could be summed up this way. The American films had talented actors who performed deliberately for the camera. So it was very simple and easy to do the same with French actors.
But that opinion was gravely mistaken. The American strategy represented, on the contrary, patient and methodical effort, special exercises by the actors, and lengthy observations by the filmmaker. It was not the work of a single person. Instead, it represented the subjugation of everyone to rules from which there had to be no deviation for fear of falling back into old ways.
When we saw one of their films on the screen, the [visual] harmony and the calm, poised performance of the actors gave us the real illusion of life. But for the filmmaker who watched closely, this apparent simplicity depended on [new] tricks and effects, and on a form of acting that was absolutely false. However, all that was only necessary [behind the scenes] in order to provide the public with the complete illusion of reality.4
VICTORIN JASSET (1862–1913) was a prodigious stage manager (particularly at the Hippodrome), set designer, costumer, and writer who worked for Gaumont between 1905 and 1907 and then was hired as head producer-director at Eclair, where he became best known for his detective and criminal séries films—for example, Nick Carter, Zigomar, and Protéa.
1 Sometime between 1908 and 1911, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise became La Mort du Duc de Guise. When Pathé re-released the film before and then again during the war, it carried the latter title.
2 Within a year after the release of L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise, Film d’Art was in trouble financially, and dramatist Paul Gavault took control of its film production. By late 1911, Film d’Art was still heavily in debt and was taken over by Charles Delac, the owner of Monofilm, a small film distribution company. See Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 3 (Paris: Denoël, 1951), 33–34.
3 This was the Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL), founded by the popular novelist, Pierre Decourcelle (1856–1926), and his financial collaborator, Eugène Gugenheim. SCAGL operated as a subsidiary of Pathé-Frères, and Albert Capellani was its artistic director and chief filmmaker.
4 Jasset was one of the first French writers to give some attention to a specifically filmic system of representation and narrative continuity. That he focused on an American system then in vogue acknowledged a dominance that would be well established by the end of the decade.
Translated by Ben Gibson, Don Ranvaud, Sergio Sokota, and Deborah Young from “Naissance d’un sixième art,” Les Entretiens idéalistes (25 October 1911), reprinted as “L’Esthétique du septième art,” in Canudo, L’Usine aux images (Paris: Etienne Chiron, 1926), 13— 26. The translation first appeared in Framework 13 (Autumn 1980), 3–7. Reprinted, with minor changes, by permission of the publisher.
I.
IT is SURPRISING to find how everyone has, either by fate or some universal telepathy, the same aesthetic conception of the natural environment. From the most ancient people of the east to those more recently discovered by our geographical heroes, we can find in all peoples the same manifestations of the aesthetic sense; Music, with its complimentary [sic] art, Poetry; and Agriculture, with its own two compliments [sic], Sculpture and Painting. The whole aesthetic life of the world developed itself in these five expressions of Art. Assuredly, a sixth artistic manifestation seems to us now absurd and even unthinkable; for thousands of years, in fact, no people have been capable of conceiving it. But we are witnessing the birth of such a sixth art. This statement, made in a twilight hour such as this, still ill-defined and uncertain like all eras of transition, is repugnant to our scientific mentality. We are living between two twilights: the eve of one world, and the dawn of another. Twilight is vague, all outlines are confused; only eyes sharpened by a will to discover the primal and invisible signs of things and beings can find a bearing through the misty vision of the anima mundi. However, the sixth art imposes itself on the unquiet and scrutinous spirit. It will be a superb conciliation of the Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry).
II.
The theater has so far best realized such a conciliation, but in an ephemeral manner because the plastic characteristics of the theater are identified with those of the actors, and consequently are always different. The new manifestation of Art should really be more precisely a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, as in music and poetry, which realise themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.
The cinematograph, so vulgar in name, points the way. A man of genius, who by definition is a miracle just as beauty is an unexpected surprise, will perform this task of mediation which at present seems to us barely imaginable. He will find the ways, hitherto inconceivable, of an art which will appear for yet a long time marvelous and grotesque. He is the unknown individual who tomorrow will induce the powerful current of a new aesthetic function, whence, in a most astonishing apotheosis, the Plastic Art in Motion will arise.
III.
The cinematograph is composed of significant elements “representative” in the sense used by Emerson rather than the theatrical sense of the term, which are already classifiable.
There are two aspects of it: the symbolic and the real, both absolutely modern; that is to say only possible in our era, composed of certain essential elements of modern spirit and energy.
The symbolic aspect is that of velocity. Velocity possesses the potential for a great series of combinations, of interlocking activities, combining to create a spectacle that is a series of visions and images tied together in a vibrant agglomeration, similar to a living organism. This spectacle is produced exactly by the excess of movement to be found in film, those mysterious reels impressed by life itself. The reels of the engraved celluloid unroll in front of and within the beam of light so rapidly that the presentation lasts for the shortest possible time. No theater could offer half the changes of set and location provided by the cinematograph with such vertiginous rapidity, even if equipped with the most extraordinarily modern machinery.
Yet more than the motion of images and the speed of representation, what is truly symbolic in relation to velocity are the actions of the characters. We see the most tumultuous, the most inverisimilitudinous scenes unfolding with a speed that appears impossible in real life. This precipitation of movement is regulated with such mathematical and mechanical precision that it would satisfy the most fanatical runner. Our age has destroyed most earnestly, with a thousand extremely complex means, the love of restfulness, symbolized by the smoking of a patriarchal pipe at the domestic hearth. Who is still able to enjoy a pipe by the fire in peace these days, without listening to the jarring noise of cars, animating outside, day and night, in every way, an irresistible desire for spaces to conquer? The cinematograph can satisfy the most impatient racer. The motorist who has just finished the craziest of races and becomes a spectator at one of these shows will certainly not feel a sense of slowness; images of life will flicker in front of him with the speed of the distances covered. The cinematograph, moreover, will present to him the farthest countries, the most unknown people, the least known of human customs, moving, shaking, throbbing before the spectator transported by the extreme rapidity of the representation. Here is the second symbol of modern life constituted by the cinematograph, an “instructive” symbol found in its rudimentary state in the display of “freaks” at the old fairgrounds. It is the symbolic destruction of distances by the immediate connaissance of the most diverse countries, similar to the real destruction of distances performed for a hundred years now by monsters of steel.
The real aspect of the cinematograph is made up of elements which arouse the interest and wonder of the modern audience. It is increasingly evident that present day humanity actively seeks its own show, the most meaningful representation of its self. The theater of perennial adultery, the sole theme of the bourgeois stage, is at last being disdained, and there is a movement towards a theater of new, profoundly modern Poets; the rebirth of Tragedy is heralded in numerous confused open-air spectacles representing disordered, incoherent, but intensely willed effort. Suddenly, the cinematograph has become popular, summing up at once all the values of a still eminently scientific age, entrusted to Calculus rather than to the operations of Fantasy (Fantasia), and has imposed itself in a peculiar way as a new kind of theater, a scientific theater built with precise calculations, a mechanical mode of expression. Restless humanity has welcomed it with joy. It is precisely this theater of plastic Art in motion which seems to have brought us the rich promise of the Festival which has been longed for unconsciously, the ultimate evolution of the ancient Festival taking place in the temples, the theaters, the fairgrounds of each generation.1 The thesis of a plastic Art in motion has recreated the Festival. It has created it scientifically rather than aesthetically, and for this reason it is succeeding in this age, although fatally and irresistibly moving towards the attainment of Aesthetics. . . .
I move on now to a great aesthetic problem, which must be emphasized.
Art has always been essentially a stylization of life into stillness; the better an artist has been able to express the greater number of “typical” conditions, that is, the synthetic and immutable states of souls and forms, the greater the recognition he has attained. The cinematograph, on the contrary, achieves the greatest mobility in the representation of life. The thought that it might open the unsuspected horizon of a new art different from all pre-existing manifestations cannot fail to appeal to an emancipated mind, free from all traditions and constraints. The ancient painters and engravers of prehistoric caves who reproduced on reindeer bones the contracted movements of a galloping horse, of the artists who sculpted cavalcades on the Parthenon friezes, also developed the device of stylizing certain aspects of life in clear, incisive movements. But the cinematograph does not merely reproduce one aspect; it represents the whole of life in action, and in such action that, even when the succession of its characteristic events unravel slowly, in life, it is developed with as much speed as possible.
In this way cinematography heightens the basic psychic condition of western life which manifests itself in action, just as eastern life manifests itself in contemplation. The whole history of western life reaches to people in the dynamism characteristic of our age, while the whole of humanity rejoices, having found again its childhood in this new Festival. We could not imagine a more complex or more precise movement. Scientific thought with all its energy, synthesizing a thousand discoveries and inventions, has created out of and for itself this sublime spectacle. The cinematographic visions pass before its eyes with all the electrical vibrations of light, and in all the external manifestations if its inner life.
The cinematograph is thus the theater of a new Pantomime, consecrated Painting in motion. It constitutes the complete manifestation of a unique creation by modern man. As the modern Pantomime, it is the new dance of manifestations.
Now, it is necessary to ask of the cinematograph, is it to be accepted within the confines of the arts?
It is not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom of choice peculiar to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it is to being the copy of a subject, the condition that prevents photography from becoming an art. In executing the design of a tree on a canvas, the painter expresses without any doubt, unconsciously and in a particular and clear configuration, his global interpretation of the vegetative soul, that is of all the conceptual elements deposited deep in his creative spirit by an examination of all the trees he has seen in his life; as Poe said, with the “eyes of dream.” With that particular form he synthesizes corresponding souls and his art, I repeat, will gain in intensity in proportion to the artist’s skill in immobilizing the essence of things and their universal meanings in a particular and clear configuration. Whoever contented himself with copying the outlines, with imitating the colors of a subject, would be a poor painter; the great artist extends a fragment of his cosmic soul in the representation of a plastic form.
Arts are the greater the less they imitate and the more they evoke by means of a synthesis. A photographer, on the other hand, does not have the faculty of choice and elaboration fundamental to Aesthetics; he can only put together the forms he wishes to reproduce, which he really is not reproducing, limiting himself to cutting out images with the aid of the luminous mechanism of a lens and a chemical composition. The cinematograph, therefore, cannot today be an art. But for several reasons, the cinematographic theater is the first abode of the new art—an art which we can just barely conceive. Can this abode become a “temple” for aesthetics?
A desire for an aesthetic organization drives entrepreneurs towards certain kinds of research. In an age lacking in imagination, such as ours, when an excess of documentation is everywhere, weakening artistic creativity, and patience games are triumphing over expressions of creative talent, the cinematograph offers the paroxysm of the spectacle: objective life represented in a wholly exterior manner, on the one hand with rapid miming, on the other with documentaries. The great fables of the past are retold, mimed by ad hoc actors chosen from the most important stars. What is shown above all is the appearance rather than the essence of contemporary life, from sardine fishing in the Mediterranean to the marvel of flying steel and the indomitable human courage of the races at Dieppe or the aviation week at Rheims.
But the entertainment makers are already experimenting with other things. It is their aim that this new mimetic representation of “total life” take ever deeper root, and Gabrielle D’Annunzio has dreamed up a great Italian heroic pantomime for the cinematograph.2 It is well known that there exist in Paris societies which organize a kind of “trust” for cinematographic spectacles among writers. Hitherto the theater has offered writers the best chance of becoming rich quickly; but the cinematograph requires less work and offers better returns. At this moment hundreds of talented people, attracted by the promise of immediate and universal success, are concentrating their energies towards the creation of the modern Pantomime. And it will come out of their strenuous efforts and from the probable genius of one of them. The day such work is given to the world will mark the birthday of a wholly new art.
The cinematograph is not only the perfect outcome of the achievements of modern science, which it summarizes wonderfully. It also represents, in a disconcerting but important way, the most recent product of contemporary theater. It is not the exaggeration of a principle, but its most logical and ultimate development. The “bourgeois” dramatics, like all of our playwrights, should spontaneously acknowledge the cinematograph as their most discreet representative, and should in consequence ready themselves for its support by making use of it, because the so-called psychological, social drama, etc., is nothing but a degeneration of the original comic theater, counterposed with the tragic theater of fantasy and spiritual ennoblement, the theater of Aristophanes and Plautus. Vitruvius, describing as an architect the many different sets used in ancient performances, talks about the solemnity of columns and temples of the tragic theater, about the wood of the satyric theater, and about sylvan adventures and the houses of the middle classes where the commedias took place. The latter were but the representation of daily life in its psychological and social aspects, that is, of customs and characteristics. . . .
VII.
The cinematograph, on the other hand, adds to this type of theater the element of absolutely accurate speed, in this way inducing a new kind of pleasure that the spectator discovers in the extreme precision of the spectacle. In fact, none of the actors moving on the illusory stage will betray his part, nor would the mathematical development of the action lag for a fraction of a second. All movement is regulated with clockwork precision. The scenic illusion is therefore less engaging, in a sense less physical, but terribly absorbing. And this life, regulated as if by clockwork, makes one think of the triumph of modern scientific principle as a new Alviman, master of the mechanics of the world in Manichean doctrine.
The rapid communion of vital energies between the two opposite poles of the very touching and the very comical produces in the spectator a sense of relaxation. Everything which in real life presents itself as an obstacle, the inevitable slowness of movements and actions in space, is as if suppressed in the cinematograph. Moreover, the very comical soothes the mind, lightening existence of the weight of the somber social cape, imposed by the thousand conventions of the community and representing all kinds of hierarchies. The comic can suppress hierarchies, it can join together the most different beings, give an extraordinary impression of the mixture of the most separate universes, which in real life are irreducibly distinct from one another. Since the comic is essentially irreverent, it gives a deep sense of relief to individuals oppressed in every moment of their real lives by social discriminations, so emphatically present. This sense of relief is one of the factors of that nervous motion of contraction and expansion called laughter. Life is simplified by the grotesque which is nothing other than a deformation per excessum or per defectum of the established forms. The grotesque, at least in this sense, relieves life of its inescapable grimness and releases it into laughter.
Caricature is based on the display and masterful combination of the most miminal facets of the human soul, its weak spots, which gush forth from the irony of social life, which is itself, after all, somewhat ironical and insane. With irony, in the convulsive motion of laughter, caricature provokes in man this feeling of extreme lightness, because irony throws over its raised shoulders Zarathustra’s “dancing and laughing” cape of many colors.3
The ancients were able to perceive in irony the roots of Tragedy. They crowned their tragic spectacles in laughter, in the farce. Conversely, we precede rather than follow the dramatic spectacle with Farce, immediately upon the raising of the curtain, because we have forgotten the significance of some of the truths discovered by our forebears. Yet the need for an ironic spectacle persists. And the Farce of the Orestes Tetrology of Aeschylus, the Farce which could not be found, must have been originally immensely rich in humor to have been able to lighten the spirit of the elegant Athenian women oppressed by the sacred terror of Cassandra. Now I do not know of anything more superbly grotesque than the antics of film comics. People appear in such an extravagant manner that no magician could pull anything like them out of a hat; movements and vision change so rapidly that no man of flesh and blood could present so many to his fellows, without the help of that stunning mixture of chemistry and mechanics, that extraordinary creator of emotions that is the cinematograph. A new comic type is thus created. He is the man of blunders and metamorphoses who can be squashed under a wardrobe of mirrors, or fall head-first breaking through all four floors of a four-story building, only to climb up out of the chimney to reappear on the roof in the guise of a genuine snake.
The complexity of this new kind of spectacle is surprising. The whole of human activity throughout the centuries had contributed to its composition. When artists of genius bestow rhythms of Thought and Art on this spectacle, the new Aesthetics will show the cinematographic theater some of its most significant aspects.
In fact the cinematographic theater is the first new theater, the first authentic and fundamental theater of our time. When it becomes truly aesthetic, complemented with a worthy musical score played by a good orchestra, even if only representing life, real life, momentarily fixed by the photographic lens, we shall be able to feel then our first sacred emotion, we shall have a glimpse of the spirits, moving towards a vision of the temple, where Theater and Museum will once more be restored for a new religious communion of the spectacle and Aesthetics. The cinematograph as it is today will evoke for the historians of the future the image of the first extremely rudimentary wooden theaters, where goats have their throats slashed and the primitive “goat song” and “tragedy” were danced, before the stone apotheosis consecrated by Lycurgus, even before Aeschylus’ birth, to the Dionysian theater.
The modern public possess an admirable power of “abstraction” since it can enjoy some of the most absolute abstractions in life. In the Olympia, for instance, it was possible to see the spectators fanatically applauding a phonograph placed on the stage and adorned with flowers whose shining copper trumpet had just finished playing a love duet. . . . The machine was triumphant, the public applauded the ghostly sound of far away or even dead actors. It is with such an attitude that the public go to the cinematographic theater. Moreover, the cinematograph brings, in the midst of even the smallest human settlement, the spectacle of distant, enjoyable, moving or instructive things: it spreads culture and stimulates everywhere the eternal desire for the representation of life in its totality.
On the walls of the cinematographic theater at times one can see inscriptions commemorating the latest achievements of this prodigious invention which accelerates our knowledge of universal events and reproduces everywhere life and the experience of life since 1830 to the present day. Among the latest heroes are Renault, Edison, Lumière, the Pathé brothers. . . . But what is striking, characteristic, and significant, even more than the spectacle itself, is the uniform will of the spectators, who belong to all social classes, from the lowest and least educated to the most intellectual.
It is desire for a new Festival, for a new joyous unanimity, realized at a show, in a place where together, all men can forget in greater or lesser measure, their isolated individuality. This forgetting, soul of any religion and spirit of any aesthetic, will one day be superbly triumphant. And the Theater, which still holds the vague promise of something never dreamt of in previous ages: the creation of a sixth art, the plastic Art in motion, having already achieved the rudimentary form of the modern pantomime.
Present day life lends itself to such victory. . . .
RICCIOTTO CANUDO (1879–1923) was an Italian expatriate who settled in Paris in 1902 as a scholar, writer, and literary entrepreneur. A friend of Apollinaire and D’Annunzio, he established a movement called Cérébrism, edited a “French imperialist” art journal called Montjoie! (1913–1914), and hosted a circle of intellectuals and artists interested in the cinema who met regularly at the Cafe Napolitain.
1 Canudo’s concept of the Festival seems to come out of ancient Greek culture rather than out of the European Medieval period or Renaissance. It is a mark of Canudo’s contradictory interests or his ambition to synthesize widely divergent ways of thinking that, on the same page, he can bring together ancient Greek theater and Italian Futurism or a classical literary tradition and a potential new art form, the cinema.
2 Gabriel D’Annunzio (1863–1938) never wrote any scenarios for the cinema during this period. Some of his works were adapted by others, including his son, Gabriellino D’Annunzio, before the war; and his name was attached to Pastrone’s Cabiria (1913), but only for publicity reasons.
3 The reference to Zarathustra as well as the “birth of tragedy” suggests how fashionable Nietzsche had become in France after the first translations of his work in 1900.
From “Un sixième art,” Ciné-Journal 185 (9 March 1912), 10.
THE CINEMA? No, as my friend Canudo says, it is a sixth art that has yet to advance beyond its first stammerings.
A sixth art which, at this moment, just like French tragedy in the time of [Alexandre] Hardy [1540–1632], awaits its Corneille, its classic in a word, in order to lay down its true foundations.
A sixth art, glittering with movement, diverse objects, and peaceful landscapes. Here we can take each of the tableaux of the best theaters, make the characters descend from their frames, live as their creators imagined them, then return them to their immortal poses—now known to everyone.
A sixth art where the wings of the Victory of Samothrace actually quiver and the huntress Diana can escape through the thicket imagined by [Jean] Goujon [1514–1569]. . . .
A sixth art where we can evoke in minutes all the great disasters of history and extract from them an immediate objective lesson.
A sixth art which, with one and the same sadness, will bring tears to the eyes of the Arab and the Eskimo, simultaneously, and which, at the same time, will offer them the same lesson in courage and health.
A sixth art which, one day when some inspired artist will consider it more than a simple amusement, will spread its faith throughout the world more fully than the theater or the book.
At the cinema, the knitted brow, the tears, the laughter are so close to the spectator that it is impossible not to be moved; on the face of Juliet dying can we not read there several of great Will’s lines, and in Dante’s dream several stanzas from The Divine Comedy?
Let the cinema be naturally grandiose and human instead of what the popular novels of the past fifty years have been to literature. Let it be innovative instead of following either a maudlin sentimentality or the mechanical comic film which seems in fashion, because the true way has yet to be mapped out. Let it not be theatrical especially, but allegorical, symbolic. To plumb the depths of each civilization and construct the glorious scenario that sums it up, embracing all the cycles of all the epochs, finally to have, I repeat, the cinematographic classic that will guide us into a new era—that is one of my highest dreams.
Does it help to say now that to reach this briefly glimpsed prodigious end, I will be obliged to be commercial as have others before me (did not Wagner and Molière enrich their producers during their lifetimes?)? Yet the day will soon come, I trust, when my ravings become tangible, and they will demonstrate what can be hoped for from this wonderful synthesis of the movement of space and time.
ABEL GANCE (1889–1981) was a young dramatist and actor (and friend of Ricciotto Canudo) who wrote scenarios for Gaumont and Pathé from 1908 to 1911 and then formed his own small film company, Le Film Français, to direct several short films between 1911 and 1914. Gance only began to make a name for himself during the war when he joined Film d’Art and became the company’s second major filmmaker after Henri Pouctal.
From “La Cinematographic,” Ciné-Journal 191 (20 April 1912), 36–37, 39, 41; 192 (27 April 1912), 25, 27, 29, 31, 33; 193 (4 May 1912), 16–17; 194 (11 May 1912), 9, 11, 14–15, 16; 195 (18 May 1912), 19, 21, 23–24.
IN THE BEGINNING, cinematography constituted no more than a scientific curiosity, a sort of photographic “Praxinoscope”; but it rapidly set out on a double path of evolution.
On the one hand, men of science had a presentiment of its importance for kinetic studies and scientific documentation; on the other, the showmen for children foresaw the possibility of widespread commercial exploitation and remuneration.
We have to remember that it was the fair vendors who launched the cinema as an amusement speciality; it’s on the fairgrounds that the mass public began to take a fancy to this delight for the eyes, which suddenly took off on such an extraordinary development.
The masses flocked to and appreciated the cinema-theater well before society people and the artistic and intellectual elite; still, it’s fair to say that, because of technical imperfections, the first films were rather disheartening.
It was only later, after the strenuous labor of inventors and design engineers, that we could catch a glimpse of the artistic future of cinematography.
Leaving aside the technical aspect of cinematography as much as possible, we are going to pursue the study of films from several different points of view.
At the outset, we will establish a general classification system, set up as a base from which to derive the desiderata we need.
First class—the cinema considered from the theatrical point of view.
A. For children
B. For adolescents and their parents
C. For adults only
D. For artistic and intellectual study
Second class—the cinema considered as an instrument of intellectual development.
A. Preschool
B. Primary school studies
C. Secondary school studies
D. University studies
E. Scientific documentation
Third class—the cinema as employed for the propagation of feelings and ideas.
A. Moral sentiments
B. Religious sentiments
C. Political ideas
D. Patriotic sentiments
Fourth class—the cinema considered as a mode of information and publicity.
A. The newsreel
B. Advertising film . . .
First principle: the cinema program must correlate with the public to which it is addressed.
. . . The cinema spectacle can achieve an extraordinary artistic development, but it seems that only its adversaries have really understood this.
The recent commission report of the third Congress on Cinematography [12 May 1911] would restrict the cinema’s role and future by counseling authors to write scenarios for children to the exclusion of all others.
The cinema-theater is perfectly capable of interesting and captivating adults as well as children; we must disabuse the public of the idea that the cinema is only a spectacle for children, a sort of perfected puppet show.
The cinema-theaters should be divided into two perfectly distinct kinds: on the one hand, spectacles for children, written especially for them and offering all the guarantees of requisite morality; on the other, spectacles for adults, spectacles in which the author retains his freedom completely and takes on the theater itself as a rival.
Actually, a good number of scenarios are neither fish nor fowl; they almost always go beyond the intelligence of children but without reaching a point which would interest adults.
To summarize, films should be categorized into three series:
First series—for children and adolescents
Second series—a “mixed” series capable of interesting adults while containing nothing which might tarnish the purity of children
Third series—for adults, where children and adolescents cannot be admitted
The first months of 1912 have seen the apogee of the cinema-theater, 1 believe; now we are going to witness a period of decline, because scenarios have not advanced and merely repeat themselves with all their faults. The mass public is growing bored, and the halls little by little will become empty. To maintain its position and augment its public, the cinema-theater has to evolve; and the managers of theaters and cafe-concerts are making their performers go all out in an effort to curb that evolution.
The cinema spectacle is not a pale imitation of the theater; it is a separate spectacle which corresponds to a new and very real Art, a special art which should be left to its own devices, with its own special authors and actors.
Something as astonishing as this new art could appear, for the cinema spectacle can create impressions infinitely more vivid than the theater can, even though the characters are no more than mute shadows; and this is because the system of conventional gestures disappears to be replaced by an improbable realism.
The dimness of the hall constitutes an important factor which, through the state of contemplation it produces, contributes much more than one might think to the impression created; the spectator’s attention is caught and concentrated on the luminous projection, without any possible distraction.
The effect produced by the characters’ silence is one of the most fascinating aspects of the cinema-theater. The spectator does not perceive that the character is mute for, through a particular form of psychism, through an auditory allusion, he senses the sentence that he himself puts in the mouth of the character. The spectator in some way hears himself speak, and the impression is all the stronger because he himself imagines the sentences of silent dialogue.
There is no popular spectacle in which the imagination of the spectator plays a greater role than in the cinema-theater.
Art in the cinema-theater is an art of suggesting dreams; so nothing must startle the spectator or else the dream disappears.
However, the noises of life are necessary, for the spectator cannot supply them through imagination, as he can for the dialogue.
When a gunshot goes off without a propman reproducing the noise, the dream ceases abruptly, for the spectator is awakened by the improbability of a silent gunshot; it’s the same with a plate which falls and breaks in a deep silence.
Each of us has paid attention to the suggestive influence of murmuring waves in films of the seashore; in sum, the “noises of life” are necessary to the perfection of the spectacle.
As for musical accompaniment, while we await specialized scores, its only possible condition is to be neutral. That is extremely valuable—one could even say indispensable—for it prevents us from realizing that the characters are mute. When, by contrast, instead of being neutral, it asserts itself blatantly in a way opposite the subject of the film, it’s abominable.
I have seen a young girl lull her dying mother to sleep by playing a harp (silently, of course), while the orchestra played “Sword of My Father” from the Grande Duchesse [Offenbach] with a diabolical brio.
The orchestra should drop the potpourri of operettas and operas, quadrilles, boisterous marches, and cafe-concert refrains in order to take up the neutral symphonic genre, which is to the advantage of the manager, besides, since nearly all of this music long ago fell into the public domain.
“Come to Me, Darling!” doesn’t suit the death of Isolde any more than a funeral march suits the amusing fantasies of Prince Rigadin.
II. ON THE SCENARIO AND CINEMA ARTISTS
Here is the current method of concocting cinema scenarios.
The production company receives ideas for scenarios from any number of people.
A reading committee (?) examines these ideas and selects a certain number of them; the selected ideas are turned over to the directors.
The director constructs a scenario from the selected idea, and has full discretion to modify the selected idea to his liking, even changing it completely.
The director then explains the scenario to his actors and proceeds immediately to the shooting.
The author of the selected idea receives several francs in payment for it.
In short, there is only one author, properly speaking, and that author is the director.
In such conditions, it is hardly astonishing that the scenario is usually so feeble.
From the beginning, the film production companies have been terrified of authors or, more precisely, of authors’ rights.
The situation in which salaried authors handle their own mise-en-scene is something the companies have found comfortable and advantageous. On the one hand, it’s only fair to point out that, given a poor set of ideas, certain directors have done wonders and produced remarkable results. Yet the average film has remained quite trifling, and the crisis undermining the cinema-theater has no other cause than the company executive’s misconceptions regarding exactly how to organize the composition of scenarios.
On the other hand, the authors of plays, novels, and short stories have come forward to claim authors’ rights for the films in which the scenario idea was taken from their works. Concluding that the companies did not want to bargain with them, they have taken to composing adaptations of their works themselves.
The results have not been promising, nor can they be.
First of all, the best theatrical plays never make anything but bad films; one shouldn’t ask for something other than what the cinema can provide.
For instance, as a result of its connections, SCAGL found itself appealing to stars, famous actors and actresses, which seduced it into paying enormous fees for unremarkable results—for the conventional performance of actors come off badly in the cinema. With the exception of actors such as Prince, Polaire, or Mistinguett, it’s far better to appeal to artists who are making a career for themselves from cinema performances.
The cinema and the theater are two different things. On the one hand, the libretti for the cinema must be specially composed all of a piece and in a fashion very different from those destined for the theater. On the other— and I know I am repeating myself—the conventional performance of theater actors becomes perfectly ridiculous when reproduced by the cinema.
The cinema-theater ought to have special authors, special directors, and special troupes of cinema actors.
The cinema-theater has to assert itself as a new Art, with its own original methods, and it should be furious at being considered as a simple reproducer of what is properly called the theater.
Author’s rights should be based on the number of meters of positive prints produced because, under the current conditions of cinema-theaters, an advance against receipts would be unthinkable. Under this recommended system, the author’s rightful shares would comprise a proportion of the price of the positive print; he would be paid by the distribution company after the sale of the film. . . .
III. THE CLOSE SHOT
Pantomime and cine-theater have the muteness of actors in common; but in pantomime the actors’ performance is conventional and exaggerated, while in the cine-theater it has to be natural and understated.
To fulfill its destiny, the cine-theater should represent life as it is lived, while pantomime has never sought to represent more than an artificial, imitative life.
The troupe of actors at Vitagraph was the first to recognize and apply this principle, and the undeniable and undisputed success of this famous company owes largely to that.
In order to produce the maximum effect, while practicing a restraint which thwarts broad gestures, the Vitagraph actors have had to work especially on the play of facial features; and in order that their facial expressions could be seen clearly by the spectators (in all corners of the hall), the director has had to project the actors in close shots as often as possible.
This method, which gives good results, has quickly degenerated into an excessive practice, as the enthusiasts who have followed the Vitagraph films for the past two years will easily recognize.
Naturally, little by little, this misuse has been pursued conscientiously by the directors of other companies.
Now we have reached what could be called the age of the legless cripple. For three-quarters of the time, the actors in a scene are projected in close shot, cut off at the knees; from the artistic point of view, the effect produced is highly disagreeable and shocking.
In the theater, the play of facial features can be seen only through opera glasses; in the cinema, the use of opera glasses has the flaw of emphasizing the cinematic imperfections of the image. Therefore, we must find a way to replace the magnification produced by a projection in close shot.
Here the directors find themselves faced with an almost insurmountable dilemma—on the one hand, the play of the actors’ facial features is not perceived satisfactorily; on the other, as a result of magnification, the legs of the actor vanish from the screen.
These past few days, I have seen a film where an actor and a horse, placed side by side, were both partially cut off at the knees; then when the man mounted the horse, he found himself suddenly decapitated. To pass instantaneously from being legless to being headless is really pushing things a bit far.
The second inconvenience resulting from the misuse of the close shot is, in the eye of the spectator, to produce the impression of characters of an unnatural grandeur. And when the aggrandizement diminishes and they return to normal, the same characters seem too small; the eye takes a certain time to get used to this.
Turning to another matter, certainly from an economic point of view there is an interest in renting films principally to the large cinemas which can hold a great number of spectators because, except for rental costs, the general expenses remain appreciably the same for a small or large cinema, so the receipts can be doubled.
In the final analysis, given the continual increase in cinema enthusiasts, the screen has become much too small; it no longer corresponds to the grandeur of the new cinemas. Screen size no longer correlates with the actual needs of the cine-theater industry. Fortunately, an increase in the dimensions of the film negative does not offer insurmountable difficulties. I believe that the future of the cine-theater is in no way compromised, on the contrary. When the screen reaches huge dimensions, for example, 24 x 18 meters, the spectacle offered will become so beautiful and produce such powerful effects that there will be a new upsurge in attendance. And the big cinemas of the future will again become too small for the increased number of enthusiasts. . . .
In documentary films, the director should always begin by projecting the subject with a clear reference point, for example, a dog with a man.
If, later, he wants to increase the size of one or the other, in order to better capture details, he should announce to the audience that the subject is being projected in an enlargement of two, three, or four times.
It is the same for flowers, plants, small animals, and, ultimately, all the subjects of natural history and anatomy.
On big screens, the characters should be projected with an average magnification so that the play of facial features is clearly perceived by those farthest back in the hall—for we should take into account the fact that, in the cinema, the seats farthest back are the most expensive.
Exaggerated magnifications should be used only in special cases and with the greatest discretion.
In order for the ciné-theater to assume the place which is its due within Art, the director should attach great importance to the composition of the tableaux. It is more than likely that sooner or later the collaboration of a painter will become indispensable, especially when the three-color film process will have achieved the requisite improvements, which cannot be delayed much longer.
From the point of view of composition, what is most striking is the lack of air or space which results from the accumulation of a mass of overly large characters on an overly small screen.
The actors cannot circulate; they obscure one another. When the scene represents a room, we never see more than a part of it. When it is a question of representing a person in a bed, the bed often occupies a grotesque position and takes up all of the room.
When it is a question of a salon or reception rooms, the director is obliged to project in depth; and the spectator sees no more than a corridor whose width in close shot corresponds at most to the space necessary for three or four characters.
Given the actual dimensions of the screen and the requirements for magnification, directors find themselves, I repeat, faced with insurmountable difficulties; and the results they do achieve, in such poor conditions, deserve all our praise. . . .
IV. SCRIPTS AND SCENARIOS, GENERAL CONDITIONS
At the present time, a film is exhibited in the same cinema for seven days at the most, and often only for three. Then it is shelved, and we don’t see it any more—its life is finished; it is permanently buried and forgotten.
This ephemeral life of film is discouraging for authors. Why seek to achieve a work of art, why endeavor to create what might be considered a masterpiece in this form if, after seven days of exhibition, the work has to disappear?
It is safe to say that the scenarios which inundate us, with a few exceptions, are not worth even seven days of exhibition. But doesn’t the low value of the films result precisely from the fact that they are not made to last and that they have, I repeat, only an ephemeral life?
Why could not the very best films, those which possess a genuine, intrinsic value, come to form a repertory, a repertory which would stay [in distribution] and could be rerun?
Why could not those scripts which are in a class by themselves be published with their mise-en-scene, exactly like theater playscripts, and come to constitute a library of cinema-theater?
Until now, the press has disdained to publish criticism of exhibited films, yet in Brussels, for example, there are many more people who go to the cinema than go to the theater.
On Sundays, a hundred thousand people pass into the cinemas while ten thousand go to the theater.
Why this disdain on the part of the press?
Almost everywhere the press works against the cinemas. It agrees to accept some advertising on a quarter page because that is a commercial enterprise; but in the body of the paper there is either scornful silence or virulent and undeserving attack. . . .
The cine-theater is in fashion as a topic of conversation. This being indisputable, it follows that the first newspaper which establishes a “Cinema” column, in order to give its readers all kinds of information on their favorite subject, won’t fail to see its printing run jump dramatically.
It is a little ridiculous to see the newspapers, which often carry stories and serials that would make a policeman blush, pretending to be “prudish,” taxing the cinema-theaters for immorality and preaching abstention.
But despite the vain efforts of a press which is far too self-satisfied for its friends, the “cinématophobes,” the cinema has become one of our customs, the habit has caught on, and the press campaigns are devoted to a lost cause.
IN THE composition of scripts for the cinema, first of all, the author finds himself faced with a very tough problem for, if his characters can act, they cannot reason; and it is only through their manner of acting that they can convey what is going on in their minds.
The author does have the resource of projecting explanations [expository intertitles], but these explanations break up the spectacle and produce a bad effect—they are anti-artistic. The best thing would be to reach the point of being able to compose a completely intelligible film without any need for expository texts.
We could envision a method which would constitute a theatrical art that is both original and interesting; this would involve projecting the characters and, simultaneously, their states of mind.
This method would be strongly analogous to the ultramodern painting of the Futurists who sought to paint not only a character but also what is happening in his mind. If the initiative attempted by the Futurists only ended in ridicule, an effort of this kind initiated in the cinema, on the contrary, would give results altogether more interesting.
In the cine-theater, this method is currently practiced when there is a dream or hallucination. In order to achieve a moral effect as “the final word” in his film, L’Auto Grise [1912], [Victorin Jasset] projects the hallucination of one of the bandits who sees his own head fall under the blade of the guillotine. This method could be generalized by applying it to the waking state.
The Wagnerian opera employs the same tendency when the orchestra endeavors to reproduce musically the feelings which are stirring the character on stage.
In sum, theatrical art has always sought to dissect the psychic states of its characters and, in some fashion, make them manifest for the spectators.
For example, “La Tempête sous un crâne,” that marvelous chapter in the famous Victor Hugo novel, [Les Misérables], is perfectly possible to render cinematically, by the following method.
Jean Valjean, in the guise of M. Madeleine, would appear alone on the screen, in the foreground or middle ground, while all the thoughts succeeding one another in his mind would be projected in the background— that is, made material by means of the cinematic image. Naturally, the gestures and facial expressions of the actors would remain in perfect synchronization with the projected image.
The author could vary the intensity of the thinking through the focus— the clarity of the image corresponding to the clarity of the thought, and vague thoughts corresponding to soft images produced by a lack of focus. He could vary the intensity of the light and leave the images of dark thoughts in shadow.
This example may raise the possibility of a new theatrical art in the future which can only be achieved through the cinema. . . .
The major dramatic authors, accustomed to and spoiled by the great success of their plays, have been stunned at how little effect the same plays produce in the cinema, so they have taken the cinema as a holy terror.
It is precisely because they know their craft so marvelously well that dramatic authors achieve such miserable results in the cinema.
First of all, the dramatic author is subject to a limited number of acts and scenes in the theater, while the cinema triumphs through the boundless multiplicity of different images.
Furthermore, in the theater the first act always serves to establish the play and uncover the basis of the plot; in the cinema this exposition is utterly impossible.
In the theater, the character can tell us that he has just completed a voyage during which a series of incidents happened to him of capital importance to the plot.
In the cinema, this kind of storytelling is impossible. The character must complete the voyage before the eyes of the spectator, and all the events which occur have to be seen by the spectator.
In the theater, the monologue is the current rage; in the cinema, a silent monologue would be the height of ridicule.
The cinema spectators must see a sequence of actions which constitute the drama, nothing should remain unclear. Also, the methods of construction in the cinema are completely different from those appropriate to the theater.
Before tackling the cinema script, the dramatic author ought to undergo a new apprenticeship; but having reached the age of celebrity, that is something he rejects out of hand.
In the cinema, there are no “[verbal] effects for the public.” These effects are replaced by tableaux; and to execute them in good form, one has to know the rules of composition, which are precisely those of good painting.
A good author of cinema scripts is far from being a “somebody.” If it is true that it’s useless for him to speak beautifully, he nevertheless has to conquer enormous difficulties to put on a purely cinematic drama.
But, and herein lies his power, the scriptwriter of the cinema solves the problem of the diversity of languages. For him there is no need of either Volapuc or Esperanto. His drama is understood everywhere and by everyone, by the Chinese as well as the Parisians, by the Spanish as well as the English, by the Russians as well as the Arabs. His field of action has no boundaries; he writes for the universality of peoples. And we must be audacious enough to say that the dramatic art of the cinema is the greatest of the arts and that it has a great future as long as it gradually escapes the languages in which it is still enmeshed.
IN ITS 27 April issue, Cine-Journal offered an extract from the fascinating inquiry run by Les Marges on the increasing aesthetic interest in the cinema. Yet, as a result of a natural prejudice, the editor addressed himself only to authors in order to resolve a question which is purely sociological. Consequently, all the responses were beside the point.
A sociologist would have begun by answering that it was not aesthetic interest in the theater but the average level of wealth which had increased.
In our era, people go to spectacles more often because they have more money to spend on their leisure. This is not an evolution of taste but an evolution of wealth.
Statistics show us that, in all periods and countries, the taste for spectacles varies solely according to the level of wealth and the price of tickets. If the cinema-theater has suddenly achieved such a considerable development, it is solely due to the lowering of ticket prices.
The cinema has allowed a huge number of people to satisfy their taste for the theater, a taste which they already had, but which the meagerness of their means did not allow them to satisfy.
Specifically, a person who could only go to the theater once on five francs can frequent the cinema five times, for the price of tickets is about five times less expensive. Such is the reason, perhaps the sole reason, why the theaters are being abandoned in favor of the cinema.
Before going to a spectacle, a man looks in his wallet; the size or weight of its contents then determines the choice of spectacles.
Offer anyone the choice of a free ticket to the Opéra, the Comédie Française, the café-concert, or the cinema, and that person will choose the Opéra or the Comédie Française every time, because then taste alone determines the choice. If the same person has to pay for his ticket, the question of how much money he has becomes uppermost.
EXACTLY who wrote these articles under the pseudonym of Yhcam is still unknown.
From “L’ ‘Esthétique’ du cinématographe,” Le Correspondant (25 May 1913), 762–71.
THE CINEMA has become not only a national institution in every country but a “worldwide” phenomenon. It attracts the Parisian masses as well as the natives of the least civilized countries on earth. In several years, its development has been prodigious; six years ago there were only two cinemas in Paris, and today there are 160. Day and night, the screenings follow fast on one another, and the cinemas are anything but empty.
In every quarter of the big cities, we see a “cinema-theatre,” a “cinema-concert,” or a “cinema-brasserie”—which at least are better than the “magic-cinemas” and “folies-cinemas.” The “publishing houses” [production firms] have acquired a good deal of fame, and different enterprises associated with this new kind of entertainment are taking in the most remarkable profits. Fortunes are growing, and an unexpected source of revenue is now available to dramatic authors, whether experienced or inexperienced, as well as actors, whether unemployed or illustrious. It’s a new branch of business, important and very modern, which requires an enormous amount of publicity. Color posters catch the passerby’s eye, like those for soup or a dry goods shop, a serial novel or a music hall program. This development, which is so extraordinary in its rapidity and extent, this profusion or “invasion” of the cinema is a phenomenon which deserves the attention of the casual observer who loves to contemplate things. While omitting all that is commercial and financial in this business, allow me to meditate a little on the value of the movies, on their role, on their consequences; and allow me to discuss, since it would be useless to resist it, the good that could be derived from this phenomenon, which is as immense as it is disquieting.
THE PREPARATION of the cinematographic mechanism, if I can call it that, demands a series of indispensable elements: a natural or artificial decor, a limitless set of tools for trick effects and trompe-l’oeil, the activities of the producer, creator or director, companies of actors, armies of extras, as well as voyagers, explorers, and globe-trotters. Each of these elements requires a staff and a distinct yet cohesive and harmonious organization. Think what has to be set in motion—individuals and props, ingenuity and time—in order to come up with these two films: Onésime se réfugie dans le tube aux enveloppes pheumatiques and Un Episode de Waterloo,1 the last of which requires a diplomatic ball, a nicely orchestrated simulacrum of combat, the multiple comings and goings of the protagonists, and even “the field covered with dead over which night falls.”
The companies of actors, of which the best known are French, American, and Italian, function as in the theater. All of these people rehearse and perform conscientiously before the camera, which reproduces their silhouettes and physiognomies in boundless multiplicity, with an ubiquity which is no more than a chimera. Some actors have become specialized in the craft and have created “types.” I will cite only Max Linder . . . , André Deed . . . , and especially M. Prince of the Variétés and his Rigadin. . . .2
They even say that—for performing in the films of childhood which are named after him—the boy who plays “Bébé” receives a salary equal to that of the assistant manager of an office.3
And they work on every sort of subject, whatever the place or time. History, legend, fantasy, anything from current events and daily life, from the seas to the different continents; there is nothing that cannot be used, with honesty or artifice, in the confection of a film, whether wildly improvised or documented with relish.
FOR FILM, whether hybrid or homogeneous, assumes all sorts of forms: the fantastic film, the sentimental film, the comic or dramatic film, buffoonery and acrobatics, the “artistic” film and the serial, the scientific film, the police film, the “historical” film, the moralizing film, everything from the real to the imaginary, and sometimes “enhanced by natural colors.”. . .
And when it is “the biggest hit of the Hippodrome”4 and the poster adds “1,000 meters long, an hour of intense emotion,” can the casual observer resist the appeal? 1,000 meters long! An hour of intense emotion! Here indeed is the repast which awaits the modern man who is curious about life’s violence and pungency.
Moreover, it’s a question of gauging the ingredients to the different quarters and their publics, in order to compose a program capable of interesting every category of spectator and their different tastes: to combine, for example, a Western, a “drawing room comedy in colors,” a “social document” in two or three or even four parts, a comic chase, and “The Fall of Troy” [Giovanni Pastrone, 1910]—a picturesque promenade with views of the celebrated monuments and some inevitable buffoonery. . . .
INDEED, the movie public is not uniform. Many different “milieux” can be found there, and all kinds of minds. I know an artist who sits before the screen to study the movements of animals in their elusive spontaneity, which is difficult if not impossible to observe in reality. Nevertheless, it is the people especially—in the broadest sense of the term—who frequent the cinema halls. For them, such halls are a substitute for theaters and solve the problem of a “costly theater seat.” Here the ticket prices suit the most modern budgets; and, better yet, you don’t have to dress up to enter a fully lighted hall and sit before a simulacrum of the stage and sometimes even a curtain, which draws back to reveal the mysterious white rectangle on which marvels unfold. Just as the newspaper killed off books for many people, so the cinema is replacing the theater. It’s not only less expensive, but it demands only a minimal intellectual effort. The mental strain required is minor; if there is any fatigue at the end of the cinema program, it will be purely nervous and wholly passive. The program explains in advance the details of the “plays” when there is no “barker” who comments concurrently on the action—much like the old “moving spirit” or plaintive singer in the provincial fairs long ago, who, with a long wand in his hand, marked each stage of the story on a huge canvas where episodes were juxtaposed in shocking or pathetic colors.5
Thus any mental work is already prepared in advance in order to minimize the active effort of the spectator.
A SHORT TIME ago it still happened that on autumn and winter evenings one read at home; today in the general disintegration of natural communities, and particularly the family, the cinema constitutes a means of family restitution, when it is not serving only to facilitate all sorts of rendezvous. Yes, indeed, the cinema provides its mass public with something more and better than the theater. A theater generally offers no more than one kind of play and one quality of emotion. Here, every genre is represented, and every category of emotion; and the “stories” which unfold, ceaselessly active and infinitely rapid, are well crafted to please a very modern crowd. To the worker who regularly visits the cinema in his quarter, they constitute a well-stocked weekly gazette containing a little information, a melodramatic serial or cloak-and-dagger novel considerably pruned, sickly sweet or laughable “variety acts,” sometimes a bit of literature much adulterated, and that’s not counting the interludes—a “unique demonstration of muscular tension” or “Olympic” acrobats, the performances of two dogs (Rita and Dora, “the best trained tricksters of the century”), or a M. Bergeret who isn’t whom you think, but the “celebrated imitator of La Scala.”6
The “masses” are like grown-up children who demand a picture album to leaf through in order to forget their miseries; and here vivid images are given to them in profusion: conjured up historical facts, elegant and worldly dramas which initiate them into milieux they otherwise could not enter (just as many unfortunate creatures cannot know the “world” of the theater), exotic landscapes reproduced in all their luminous and trembling photographic truth. Everything has been achieved except for the most perfect illusion, when the ear itself will perceive a great number of sounds cunningly imitated—a speeding automobile and a galloping horse, the breaking sea waves and the torrential river, falls and blows. In sum, we really have an “armchair spectacle.”
What good is voyaging or travelling no matter where, when we have before us this cinematographic “newspaper” which is a “vivid universal newspaper” and “beats the record for information”? At the movies, people get away from their miserable and monotonous lives, from which they love to escape; they have their favorites among the film actors, who they recognize at each new screening and who they welcome into the intimacy of their hearts. For here everything passes in the domain of silence, and it’s useless for the spectator—though he does anyway—to manifest his admiration or sympathy for the performer, except to communicate his feeling to his neighbor, which perhaps explains this coming together in a “vast enclosure.” Much like the bourgeois whose taste for a play in the theater depends on its distance from his own milieu and his customary preoccupations, I have observed that the mass public accords only mild favor to plays which refer to the material of its own life, for example, the representation of diverse crafts. Although the cinema is no more than a “circus” for adults, to the popular imagination and sensibility, which is so deprived and weary, it offers a “pleasant journey.”
LET THEM display for my gaze several seconds of a fire “taken on the run,” of a moment in a duel at the carnival in Nice, or Bielovuccie’s crossing of the Alps, a downhill race of skiers, or a shipwreck pounded by the waves of a storm, I’m delighted but also educated. It even happens when they show me scenes of a private nature, when they let me penetrate behind the scenes of political or social life: I can then note how an official act is fabricated, how a “reality” is elaborated, all of which no longer appear veiled and hazy but are directly “seen.” Through this perhaps I can lose some biases and get rid of certain mistaken notions.
The movies would have all that much more utility if they assumed an educational or didactic manner. We no longer ignore the fact that science has used and will continue to use cinematography to its advantage, as an instrument of control and experimentation. Instantaneous photography has allowed scientists to verify the accuracy of certain equestrian poses on the frieze of the Parthenon. The chronophotographs of M. Marey concerning the flight of birds have revealed precious pieces of information for the warping of airplane wings. M. Marage has filmed the movements of the lips and mouth in speech pronunciation and, from that, reproduced artificially the utterance of vowels and consonants. The study of the development of a plant or the blossoming of a flower, of phagocytosis or Brownian movement have been aided by cinematography, as have operations such as those of Dr. Doyen; and recently Amundsen has allowed us sedentary and flabby spectators to participate in his heroic adventures.
In the movies, an artist could use the properties of perspective, draw on all the material of nature, snare the elusive moment, for the cinema transposes both time and space. I am thinking of the animals observed freely in their wild state—with difficulty, but the cinema should have its heroes and even martyrs.
In such domains, the cinema succeeds perfectly for the spectator who accepts the results: instructing by entertaining. Yet if the field of scientific application is boundless, that of its social applications is no less so. The cinema allows us to determine emotions and feelings at will. It’s likely that views of military maneuvers and stately reviews can function to keep up the patriotic will of a nation. Through film, the political biography will become commonplace. Every country will soon know how to use the cinema as an incomparable means of preaching for the general edification of its people. In Romania, didn’t they revise the history of their independence by means of films? The army was mobilized, half of the soldiers dressed like Turks (who were sent into battle unwillingly)—they demolished some things and reconstructed others, in order to simulate the great battles of the past. The actors who played the major roles were decorated; and that provided a stirring lesson in history for school children.
In the United States, in honor of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the landing of Columbus, they resorted to caravels reconstructed in 1892. Finally, we know that the city of Paris possesses a library of films commemorating the principal Parisian public ceremonies, and not long ago we were able to see a rough sketch of the septennial of [former prime minister] M. Fallieres and several moments of the life of the new president, just as in an album of “true” images. All that, of course, is excellent; but. . . .
JUST AS photography, in the eyes of many artists, would have been fatal for art if it had not restricted itself to fixing a brief image or establishing a record, so, too, the cinema will be an agent of artifice and falsification if it doesn’t limit itself to the reproduction of natural reality. If, instead, it remains the realm of fraud, counterfeiting, and trickery, how will a naive public be able to sort out differences and make crucial distinctions, without risking inevitable misunderstanding and multiple errors? It would seem, however, that the cinema willingly puts up with chastisements about “make up”: “staged” scenes are inferior to “natural” scenes in the completeness of their reproduction. The jerky brusqueness of human gestures, the overall exaggeration in physiological expression—prescribed, it seems, to make up for the absence of speech—exaggeration which quickly degenerates into grimace, is unsatisfactory and displeasing as long as natural movement, “continuous” movement—that of water, animals, trees— is so harmonious and perfectly satisfying. Here, as ever, nature remains the best and most beautiful model. Yet, will the taste for movement perhaps reach the point of preventing the masses from being interested in fixed, immobile scenes, such as in painting and sculpture? That would be a terrible consequence of “cinema.”
There’s no need to discourse at length on the infinitely dangerous power it possesses and which touches everything: the novel, the theater, the noblest poetry, in order to popularize them, that is, distort them; history, in order to “fictionalize” or falsify it, so as to provide a biased and incomplete education; current events, in order to feed all sorts of vanities and trigger imitations, for the image is enticing to naive minds.
Moreover, if the reporting of immoral, licentious, or sensual spectacles, of the deeds of criminals, as well as of capital offense executions has been forbidden, imagined scenes relating to such police matters positively abound; and those which are real have reached the point of subtle ingenuity in quantity. Thus they show us the automobile in which the deliveryman was assaulted, even down to the mark of the bullet on the wheel, then the judge interrogating the policemen.7 Imagine the influence on the minds of children, for instance, of such burglary scenes and the ingenious methods used to throw pursuers off the track. In Berlin, the chief of police thought it appropriate to forbid children under the age of fifteen from entering cinema halls.
WHY DOES an evening at the movies, however crammed with all sorts of films, despite everything, leave one with an impression of emptiness, of nothingness? Why is the pleasure one experiences there no more than a “ghostly pleasure,” without any lasting effects in the memory? Scarcely is the spectacle over and it is forgotten.
It is because only facts are photographed. All the rest is sacrificed, all that which is intellectual and interior life; and in the human order, only intelligence and soul really count! This exclusive capacity to reproduce only the factual entails its consequences. Action, only action, which is rapid and brutal. From this comes the almost total suppression of any psychology. Cinematography is a form of notation by image, as arithmetic and algebra are notations by figures and letters; here, it is convenient, in the statement [intertitle] or the exposition, to limit as much as possible everything which has nothing to do with the sign itself. It is the triumph of simplification.
At the movies, lots of letters, usually in good basic English (whatever the milieu or period), fill up gaps in the inner life of the characters; and they occur as frequently as possible.8 So it’s necessary to translate, to transpose. Consequently, every theatrical play adapted for the cinema, despite the added multiplicity of scenes, runs the risk of becoming obscure; the prescribed exaggeration of gestures, separated from language, is transformed into pantomime: and pantomime, when it is not an amusement of the refined and blase, is no more than an art for primitives.
Cinema action only allows us to ascertain the conventional value of certain gestures, something not found in the theater, because there the accompanying words keep us from giving them our full attention or even dispense with gesture altogether, since it, too, is a translation.
Because of all this, it’s obvious that Racine would be a poor author for “cinema.” Britannicus has been rudely transformed [Camille de Morlhon, 1912] into a romantic drama. The result is painful. Narcissus passed a writing implement—a fountain pen, no doubt—to Nero; and since the banquet guests were seated on chairs, one had to pity the divine poet, despite the most modern infusions of capital to dress up the drama.
For such historical evocations to succeed in avoiding vulgar errors and the most laughable anachronisms, or at least make us pardon them, what’s needed is nothing short of a vast erudition, a superior sense of tact and, ultimately, culture, none of which is to be found in the usual tradesman or tutor.
I imagine that a man of taste, with a skepticism that’s sometimes morose and sometimes indulgent, would say something like this:
“Since the cinema uses every available real or imaginary resource and takes a thousand forms, like Proteus, I would guess that some of its forms are tolerable and even endowed with a certain charm. I myself take delight in films that spread ‘selected landscapes’ before me, mountains or plains, and the vast sea over which a powerful steamer glides or a delicate sailing ship dances, and films that transport me to unknown lands which I could never visit. I would remember the delicious legends which intelligent films could illustrate using authentic landscapes of grace and truth; I would remember fairy tales suggested by brief tableaux, since the cinema can actualize any dream. What good are Hoffmann, Andersen, and the creators of fantasy? What good are poets who invent, when the cinema is there to record scientifically, for the incredulous masses, the wildest phantasmagorias of ancestral myths? . . .”
Yet there still is the crude vaudeville, which is execrable, and the dark melodrama, and the farce—all, alas, irresistible. . . .
Despite these frightful forms, one gleans a few lovely moments.
The cinema resurrects reality, prolongs it, and gives to the ephemeral an unlimited posthumous life.
No more written archives, only films. Memorable events, diligently catalogued and classified, will be deposited in stores of human motion. There we will find the “pressings” of public life, the “preserves” of the past, though scarcely exempt from falsification.
You know that recently one of the most important film production companies [Pathé] received the Czar’s authorization to commemorate the three-hundred-year anniversary of the rise of the Romanoffs, with the assistance of historical costumes and four thousand extras. Should we deplore that or rejoice?
Alas, in the future, notorious personalities will instinctively “pose” for cinema popularity, and historical events will tend to be concocted for the film company cameraman.
Then getting excited over ephemeral events, after the fact, will become an ethnic custom. But aren’t we already engaged in something like it when we read a history book or even the current events of a newspaper? Our emotions, coming long after the event which prompts them, are artificial and vain. . . .
Unfortunately, many deconsecrated chapels are becoming cinema halls; and that is symbolic, if one realizes that, for an important segment of the working class, the cinema is already a “religion of the people” or, rather, “the irreligion of the future”! At the movies, bewitched crowds will learn not to think anymore, to resist all desire to reason and construe, faculties which will atrophy little by little; they will know only how to open their large and empty eyes, just to look, look, look. . . . And this will be an indubitable sign of decadence, a remarkable symbol of the end of the race. The cinema will be the “amphitheater” of enfeebled civilizations, “circenses” for peaceful peoples, the sole means of action for neurasthenics. Will it then perhaps comprise the elegant solution to the social question, as the modern cry would have it: “Bread and ‘cinemas’?”
And we shall progressively draw near to those menacing days when universal illusion will reign in universal mummery. . . .
Louis HAUGMARD was a moraliste writer and journalist who contributed this and other articles on cultural phenomena—for example, the 1900 Paris International Exposition—to the Catholic weekly newspaper, Le Correspondant. In 191 o, he published a small book on Edmond Rostand.
1 The Onésime film was part of a comedy series directed by Jean Durand (1882–1946) and starring Ernest Bourbon, between 1912 and 1914.
2 Max Linder, André Deed, and Prince Rigadin were the three most popular French film comics of the prewar period.
3 Louis Feuillade’s Bébé comic series (1910–1913) at Gaumont preceded his more famous Bout-de-Zan series (1912–1916), starring René Poyen.
4 The Hippodrome or Gaumont-Palace was remodeled into a cinema in 1911, and it quickly became the most profitable Paris cinema of the prewar period.
5 The reference to a “barker” or commentator who explained the scenes in a film as it unreeled suggests that this exhibition practice may have persisted in some cinemas in France, as it did in Germany, up to the war.
6 The reference is probably to Emile Bergeret (1845–1925), a dramatist and polemical critic who wrote for Eclair just before the war.
7 The reference may well be to the Bandits en automobile series (Eclair, 1912), which Jasset had based on the Bonnot gang’s exploits.
8 Haugmard’s remark indicates that American films were becoming increasingly prominent, and perhaps even dominant, in Paris by early 1913.
From “Revue dramatique: L’Age du cinéma,” Revue des deux mondes 133 (15 August 1913), 919–30.
THE CINEMA program is very ingeniously composed so that there is something for everyone. First comes the serious part, instructive or, as they say, “documentary.” It is an object lesson. Don’t forget that we are in primary school. They give lectures; they write tracts on this subject: the education of the people by means of the cinema. . . . All this is fragmentary, with few linking transitions, even close to incoherent. But it must be said, once and for all, that incoherence is essential to cinema programs. Education by means of the cinema is encyclopedic and incoherent, and that makes it eminently modern.
Another part includes the “actualités” or newsreels. We already have a press illustrated with photographs; but how preferable to the immobile photographs of these magazines and newspapers are the photographs that move! Everything that merits the public’s attention each week unreels on the screen. First place is given rightly to sports. . . . Then come the leaders and personalities, both foreign and Parisian. . . .
The cinema is also a theatrical enterprise, and, from my point of view, that is its most important characteristic. They write plays specially for the cinema. Some writers do that exclusively. Actors have made their reputations in them. A number of dramatic authors who have been acclaimed for their stage plays also have not disdained this new manner of “writing” for the theater. And some of our actors, both men and women, who are celebrated in the theater for their speech, willingly perform in this theater where silence rules. . . .
In all these cinema-dramas, however different they may be, you can easily note one common trait. They make much of going places and travelling through many countries. They move about here, there, and everywhere. The craft of the cinema-drama consists in placing the characters in circumstances where, whether they are running away or meeting, they make the greatest number of exits and entrances. The perfect cinema-drama, if they give us one someday, will achieve perpetual motion.
A genre or art form has value according to its limitations. Its end is determined by its means. If the cinema kept to those limitations, I would have little to say. But it ought to restrict its ambitions to what is its proper domain; with success has come all manner of pretensions. Before an enthusiastic crowd, for instance, they recently showed Quo Vadis? [Enrico Guazzoni, 1912], a mammoth cinematic reconstruction adapted from the famous novel by Sienkiwicz. Everything trooped through it: Nero, Petronius (that master of style), the imperial box, Christians and wild beasts, vestal virgins, etc. Between every two cinematic tableaux on the luminous screen, you know, there appeared an explanatory inscription, usually copiously written. This interminable succession of tableaux and placards, in which the complete novel was cut up into wordless images—images which, moreover, seemed to me more than mediocre in their grouping of actors, their decors, and costumes—was the most stupefying film that I have ever seen. . . .
Let’s enumerate, if you will allow me, some of the advantages which arm the cinema in the battle in which, by force of circumstance, it is engaged with the theater. First of all, it is cheaper. You know how the ticket prices are rising, steadily and stupidly, in all of our theaters, whether for music or oratory, for classical plays or melodramas. The latest invention of the managers is to make the public pay, above and beyond the ticket price, a poor tax which was already included in that price. It’s a brilliant invention, I realize, but disaster for our pocketbooks. The pleasure of going to the theater in Paris has become a costly pleasure, reserved more and more for foreigners who need not worry about costs; whereas, the shopkeepers and very many of the Paris bourgeoisie hesitate, if only because they have a family and are trying desperately to advance themselves through work. The cinema offers them pleasure for a modest sum. In the popular cinemas, a couple of sous for a ticket even buys a drink and a barley sugar for the children. In the theater, we have to suffer through interminable entr’actes, with the result that the show is more often than not composed of entr’actes with a few short acts between them. In the cinema, you have just one or two entr’actes among the different parts of the program. They give you all that for your money, and it costs almost nothing at all. You can arrive when you want to, for you are always on time: the show is broken up into pieces, and you don’t need to see what has gone before. You can leave when you want, when you begin to get bored; you don’t have to know how everything ends. And nothing tires your intelligence. What an attraction! One understands immediately. And when one doesn’t, one can console oneself, knowing that one hasn’t missed a thing. For we are becoming less capable of the slightest effort everyday. To make an effort to do something, how terrible!
Let’s continue to review what makes the cinema “superior,” because we have not yet come to the end. No matter how much the theater would, if it could, follow the latest fashion and style, it will remain the same “old hat.” It is contemporary with the old civilizations: it is ancient, medieval, and even ecclesiastical. The Greeks celebrated the exploits of Bacchus, and the French commemorated the Passion of Christ. The cinema is scientific. I say that with respect. It’s scientific in and of itself, being the result of scientific discoveries. It’s scientific in its present and future, considering that it will successively take up new processes and will be steadily improving, as have motoring and aeronautics. Just as it is scientific through the means it employs, it is likewise so through a good portion of the programs to which it invites us, which are fragments of reality rather than fictions invented by artists and poets. It is scientific to see Alphonse XIII and the Queen of Spain stopping in Paris: it is not, to listen to the dialogue of Rodrigue and Chimène.1 It is scientific to see the friends of M. Cochon besieged in the stronghold of the Boulevard Lannes: it is not, to follow the cadets of Gascoigne to the siege of Arras.2 The theater is national and even regional, as in all the different countries there are languages that have not been supplanted by Esperanto. A French or English or German play, in order to be understood outside its country of origin, must be translated and lose something in the process. The cinematic film can be understood in all languages. The cinema is international.
And that is not all. . . . Nevertheless, we are not in a hurry to conclude that the game is lost. Competition can have its good effects, as long as one knows how to defend oneself: and that’s my hope for the theater. Let it defend itself, for it is threatened. The threat is greater than one might think. I know of twelve philosophers who are deserting the theater for the cinema because they adore its curious lack of consciousness. There they see new proof of the vanity of all things. And it amuses their dilettantism. All of contemporary life—like so many stakes in the game, so many aroused passions—all the pain that we induce in ourselves, all that ends up in flickering shadows on a cinema screen! Let the theater defend itself energetically and without delay if it does not want to fulfill that terrible prophecy: the one will destroy the other. First of all, dramatic authors who are concerned about their art must be scrupulous in collaborating with the rival industry. Some time ago, an established firm asked the most famous writers of the theater to construct some films.3 I do not know what happened with this project, but it is easy to see that it was disagreeable, even offensive. I would say the same of actors who are not above playing simple clowns. That the same actor can appear at the Comédie Française and the Cinéma-Montparnasse or the Sebasto-Cinéma should not be tolerated. At this point, especially, the theater must indulge in some serious reflection and try to reform itself. It is annoying and devoid of imagination and fantasy: while the cinema entertains. It is often absurd and devoid of psychological observation: while the cinema gives the illusion of reality. It is monotonous, usually turning on the fatal triangle of adultery. It is scandalous and risqué: the cinema—since the exhibition of crime is forbidden—is relatively moral. Today the theater’s worst error is that it is losing its uniquely literary qualities. That is what is leading to its ruin. It is now coming up against an unusually powerful rival: on the other’s terms, it will never do as well as the opposition. If it wants to survive, there is only one way: that is to distinguish itself, in its essential features, from the cinema, which is a theater for illiterates.
RENÉ DOUMIC (1860–1937) was a noted scholar of rhetoric, literary historian, and drama critic. He served as editor-in-chief of the prestigious and conservative La Revue des deux mondes (after Brunetière) and was elected to the Académie Française in 1910.
1 Rodrigue and Chimène are the famous hero and heroine of Corneille’s Cid (1636).
2 The reference is probably to Louis XIII’s victory over the Spanish at Arras in 1640.
3 Doumic is probably referring to Henri Lavedan and Le Bargy’s early efforts at Film d’Art.
From “Chronique cinématographique,” Les Soirées de Paris 26–27 (July-August 1914), 363–64.
AND NOW, dare I or don’t I? Well, take courage and trust in the grace .of God! Now . . . Fantômas!1
What nobility! What beauty! It’s one of those things that stuns you; its serene majesty, like inimitable brilliance, leaves you breathless, dazed, and mute. If only I had in my hand the pen of Brunetière!2 But I must launch a similar enterprise with nothing but feeble rhetoric, and my enthusiasm and youth. Fantômas, forgive me! But you, Armand Silvestre and Marcel Olin, lucky authors, what have you accomplished here? Others, M. Romain Rolland perhaps,3 will no doubt later ransack the life of your hero; but you will always have the inestimable glory of having discovered, recognized, understood, and (should I say?) loved him, and thus provided us with so many excellent pretexts to shore up faltering conversations.
There is nothing in this involved, compact, and concentrated film but explosive genius. Take the gas fire scene, for example. An indisposed marquis goes to sleep after having lit his gas fire. What does Fantômas do? He runs to the gas meter, turns it off, and the flame dies out. That’s not all. Very deliberately, he turns on the meter again: the gas seeps out to fill the room, and the aristocrat is asphyxiated. How simple, how great! And that young man who is hiding stolen jewels in the huge bell of a church tower, nonchalantly, without expecting the slightest difficulty. Fantômas sends him back to fetch them, hoists him up inside the bell, and, for a mischievous prank, amuses himself by withdrawing the ladder to leave him high up, suspended from the clapper, over the abyss! So when they ring the bell and the unfortunate young man, now a human clapper, is smashed against the bronze casing, both him and the jewels, there is this sublime spectacle of a rain of blood, pearls, and gold down on the church faithful. Further on, notice with what delicacy the hero “borrows” 500,000 francs from the marquis. As you say, M. Fantomas—for I dare not write Fantomas for short—as you say, monsieur, in order to excuse yourself: “Fantomas is sometimes hungry!” It is like the best of Hugo, and more beautiful in fact! Myself, I think Fantomas is a roman a clef; but who is going to provide us with the key? Who will live long enough to see that. Several well informed people, however, tell me that Fantomas will be recognized as the brother of Juve, the police inspector. My God, is that possible? I myself would swear that they were one and the same person!
MAURICE RAYNAL (1884–1954) was a young writer who became attached to Apollinaire’s circle before the war. Later he would become a noted, if more conventional, art critic and art historian.
1 The occasion for Raynal’s review was the fifth and final film of Feuillade’s Fantomas series, Le Faux Magistrate, which was released by Gaumont in April 1914.
2 Fernand Brunetiere (1849–1906) was a celebrated essayist and editor of the prestigious La Revue des deux mondes in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Raynal’s reference is typically tongue-in-cheek, for Brunetiere’s rightist, Catholic principles would have been much offended by Fantomas.
3 Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a prominent novelist and passionate essayist whose idealistic principles made him the spiritual leader of many Europeans who refused to fight in World War 1.
From “Le Rythme colore,” Les Soirees de Paris 26–27 (July-August 1914), 426–27.
COLORED RHYTHM is in no way an illustration or an interpretation of a musical work. It is an art unto itself, even if it is based on the same psychological phenomena as music.
ON ITS ANALOGY WITH MUSIC
It is the mode of succession in time which establishes the analogy between sound rhythm in music and colored rhythm—the fulfillment of which I advocate by cinematographic means. Sound is the element of prime importance in music. . . . Music is always a mode of succession in time. A musical work is a sort of subtle language by means of which an author expresses his state of mind, his inner dynamic being. The performance of a musical work evokes in us something of an analogy to this inner state of the author. The more sensitive the listener—just as with an instrument of amplification—the greater the intimacy established between listener and author.
The fundamental element of my dynamic art is colored visual form, which plays a part analogous to that of sound in music.
This element is determined by three factors:
1. Visual form—which is abstract, to give its proper label
2. Rhythm—that is, movement and the changes which visual form undergoes
3. Color
FORM,RHYTHM
By abstract visual form I mean the complete abstraction or geometrization of a shape, an object, within our surroundings. Ultimately, the form of such objects, however simple or familiar—say, a tree, a chair, a man— is complicated. To the degree that we study the details of these objects, they become more and more resistant to a simple representation. To represent the irregular shape of a real body abstractly means to reduce it to a geometric form, whether simple or complex, and these transformed representations or forms will be to the actual world as musical sounds are to noises. But that alone does not suffice to represent a state of mind or to channel an emotion. Immobile, an abstract form still does not express very much. Round or pointed, oblong or square, simple or complex, it only produces an extremely confused sensation; it is no more than a simple graphic notation. Only by putting it in motion, transforming it and combining it with other forms, does it become capable of evoking a feeling. . . . Such a transformation in time erases space; one form converges with others in the midst of change; and they merge together, now advancing in parallel, now sparring with one another or dancing to the measure of the cadence which propels them; and that is the author’s mood, his sense of gaiety, his sadness, or the deepest depths of his reflection. At this point there may come an equilibrium. But no! It is unstable, and the transformations begin anew; and through this the visual rhythm becomes analogous to the rhythm of music. In both domains, rhythm plays a similar role. Consequently, in the graphic realm, the visual form of any body is of value only as a means to express or evoke our inner state, and not at all as the representation of the significance or importance which such a body actually has in our daily life. From the point of view of such a dynamic art, visual form becomes both the expression and the effect of a manifestation of form-energy, within our environment. In this, form and rhythm are bound up together inseparably.
COLOR
Whether produced by dyes, by rays, or by projection, color is, at one and the same time, the cosmos, the material world, and the energy-field of our light-sensitive apparatus—the eye. And since what influences us psychologically is not sound or color, in isolation, but the alternating series of sounds and colors, so the art of colored rhythm, thanks to its principle of mobility, augments the alternating layers already present in ordinary painting. But there a group of colors is fixed simultaneously on an immobile surface and exists unchanging in its interrelations. Only through movement does the character of color acquire a power superior to that of the static harmony [of painting].
Through this, color in turn is bound up with rhythm. Once it ceases to be an accessory to objects, it becomes the content, or even the spirit, of abstract form.
Technical difficulties still exist, however, in the realization of cinematographic films for the projection of colored rhythm.
In order to produce a work lasting just three minutes, one has to unreel 1,000 to 2,000 images through a projector.
That’s a lot! But I won’t pretend to execute them all myself. I need only provide the crucial stages. Animators, with a little common sense, would know how to deduce the intermediate images from indicated numbers or figures.
Once the sheets of images were finished, they would be placed in succession in front of a three-colored camera lens.
LEOPOLD SURVAGE (1879–1968) was a Russian-born painter who came to Paris in 1908. His first important exhibition was with the Cubists at the Salon des Independents in 1913 and 1914, which included some of the canvases from the Colored Rhythm series.