Selected Texts
JACQUES DE BARONCELLI, “Pantomime, Music, Cinema”
From “Pantomime, musique, cinéma,” Ciné-Journal 329 (4 December 1915), 41–43.
AT FIRST the cinema was nothing more than a sort of divertissement .scarcely superior to the shadow play and the magic lantern. This unremarkable period was a time of . . . flickerings. There were cloudy, wet images, sometimes marked with forgotten fingerprints in the film glycerine alongside the sprocket holes, and uncertain “lunar” images, peopled with jerky, graceless figures who were often flattened out between a couple of unskillfully mounted lights. I exaggerate only a little. When they had perfected the filmstock, regulated the acting according to [the rules of] art, optics, and chemistry, and finally integrated the action with the lighting, a degree of harmony appeared on the screen. Life was projected in the semblance of movement. They had translated beings and objects into black, gray, and white (still a bit too abstract), but these marvels nonetheless enchanted us. So the public saluted cinematography as a power—I was going to write: an aesthetic dynamism—a craft that was coming into its own. We fell for it and were smitten. We watched passionately as groups of actors and scenes arranged themselves, as the action began. The seat was welcome, the price civil and modest, so we returned to the cinema spectacle.
In those days, however, an embarrassment spoiled our pleasure. The people who moved about in their revelings on the screen, despite their everyday concrete existence, seemed to drift in a dream or fantasy. They seemed a bit like fish in a clear stream (that is, on the best days). Sometimes we saw them stop, make a gesture or hold an expression, and look at the audience. A wordless romance. We guessed they had felt something, an emotion, and could not speak of it. A mouth opened. Would it emit that unfurling “balloon” which, in the psalm-books and stained-glass windows, exhaled from the lips of a golden legend with a mysterious scent of sanctity and radiant clarity? Nay. We saw an air bubble escape, the kind that sometimes rises from the mouth of a carp, and which passes for mere opinion. Nothing more. It was painful. In front of statues that looked too perfect, people once cried out: “But now speak!” And it was this cry that the cinema audience was tempted to take up once more. The explanatory intertitles posted between the tableaux did little to ease our impatience. Rising up in one unanimous effort, all the spectators begged for some verbal spark.
Then they gave us genuine cinema actors. Common sense is difficult to acquire. They understood—for the cinema did not lack for intelligent and well-cultured men—that a film role had to be studied, analyzed, fathomed, and rehearsed, just like any ordinary theater role. Even more closely. An actor did not just have to enter into the skin of a character, but into his thoughts and feelings. So they discovered wonderful actors. Only a few at first, but more and more are being converted, and inclination no longer is enough. The new actors have put their whole selves into their roles. They have sat down in front of a mirror, like the spectator before the screen, observed their image as something strange and possessed (lacking a definite script of responses and tirades), as a kind of psychological map, as a series of “moods” and “moments”; they have spoken in turn to their reflected body, face, mouth, gaze: “You are going to mean.” They have done mime. A feeling, the deepest of their being, has come to lodge in a fold of the lip, to realize itself in a contraction of the eyebrow, to take shape in a gesture, a pose. They have rediscovered a primitive source of “language,” rich, poignant, universal, and they have seen whole cinema audiences, as they say, eating out of their hands. It is pantomime (and its reflection), but how much more deliberate and severe. Pantomime is immediate; the cinema mediates. Before appearing on the screen, an expression must undergo a dosage of lights and shadows, the interplay of screen and mirror, like a sort of luminous distillation. In order to appear before the public, the actor’s mood or moment has to percolate through physics and chemistry; nevertheless, the operation robs it of none of its emotional value. . . .
If [theater] pantomime has attained such a high degree of representation and reality, however, why go further?
Why the cinema?
Why? Because the cinema is more truthful or, and this comes to the same thing in art, because it better provides the illusion of truth, which alone is beautiful, as they say, as well as pleasing. To our spectators’ eyes, the cinema is much more than the shadow of reality; it is the incandescent photograph of a reality that lives again. Before our eyes, a wave stirs matter into an image. Just as the rhythmic sequence of projection, which separates and combines the phases of the shadow images, gives a sense of continuity, so do the number of tableaux and scenes give a sensation of life. The actors are pure mimes. They have submitted to gravity and, rather awkwardly, to time and space—without mentioning any other form of bondage. They move, in a word, less quickly than the mind. They offer us less, according to Pascal (pardon me!), than the imagination can conceive. Finally—to exhaust our shafts—we see them play before us much as we accidentally notice the stage scenery quiver. Behind our perception, admittedly, our critical sense concedes ground. Sometimes there is even total abandonment, a voluntary blanking out. For, caught by the sensitive filmstock and projected on the screen, the same play performed by silent actors and arranged beforehand by all the devices of the filmmaker and the cameraman (who fixes, develops, and transforms the negative image to positive, and then lights the projector lamp), the same play with its tricks and effects, its make up and its “make believe,” assumes the character of a direct document, of life taken . . . from life.
Is this representation perfect, however? Does it envelope us as in a net all the way through to the very end of its cast? No. Despite its progress— which is remarkable—the cinema, like pure pantomime, has its limits.
The moment occurs that I spoke of earlier, when the actor comes into a close shot, lifts his eyes, makes a gesture, opens his mouth, and says nothing. Again, the shock; one cannot escape the discomfort. We have before us an incomplete creation. A feeling, whose formation and release we have followed like the chords of an ascending scale, suddenly stops, wanders, loses its way, and fails to reach its note of resolution. Here, we are asking not for a word to dislodge the emotion but for music to complete it. And we believe, as some seem to understand today, that the cinema will be fully realized only through music.
Some may think that we mean nothing by that but to confirm the error—the horror—of the poor orchestra which during the love scene warbles a popular love song or at a moment of pathos unlooses a street singer’s lamento. These choices are wrong and inappropriate. We insist on good performers and genuine music. Just as it is important to select authors who write directly for the cinema, so is it necessary to have musicians. The best should be brought in. Those of us who suffer on account of third-rate acting and the stifling of famous voices wish to instill the mime-drama, the librettos, and the written (not just sketched) cinematographic play with the resonant state of being and its physical complement that words are not going to provide. [Good musicians] would quickly realize that our art is superior to that of concert music. The best and the brightest of them have a thousand times felt the painful futility of the descriptive phrase. Such a phrase may have awakened ideas, emotions, feelings, surely; the pastoral oboe and the bucolic flute have recalled the alternate couplets of Virgil, perhaps the Arcadia of Poussin. But neither flute nor oboe has made a shepherd visible.1 And if you believe that music can only settle on things like sunlight on marble statues, without penetrating them, you will see its limits; if you assume that it has a greater hold on ideas or feelings, you will sense its powerlessness since it can only proceed through approximation, evocation, or suggestion. The moment it tries to be precise, to get close to its subject, it goes wrong and evaporates. There is nothing but confusion and chaos. Follow certain concerts with the text in hand, and you will see what dischord there is between the written word and the sound.
That which presently is lacking in the image, the music will provide. The cinema possesses the secret of movement and color. The eclogue will rediscover, before our eyes, the Arcadian vales, the shepherd’s hut; the reed pipe will make the spring water sing; the flute will echo the laughter of nymphs who glide through the willows along with the moonlight. In the [film] drama we will see the melody delineate a gesture, follow the contour and rhythm of a feeling, clarify and define it, and in its turns and motifs harmoniously enclose a human soul. With that, the cinema will create moments that are unique, pure, thrilling, ideal.
And that is the supreme reality.
JACQUES DE BARONCELLI (1881–1951) was a Paris jounalist who edited Eclairs news-reel from 1912 to 1914 and then began to make his own fiction films in 1915, shortly before writing this essay. He later became a reputable director of literary adaptations, especially those set in the provinces—for instance, Ramuntcho (1919), Nêne (1924), Pecheur d’Islande (1924).
COLETTE, “Cinema: The Cheat”
From Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays. Edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux. Translated by Sarah W. R. Smith. English translation © 1980 by the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Cinéma: Forfaiture,” in Excelsior (7 August 1916).
IN PARIS this week, a movie theater has become an art school. A film and two of its principal actors are showing us what surprising innovations, what emotion, what natural and well-designed lighting can add to cinematic fiction. Every evening, writers, painters, composers, and dramatists come and come again to sit, contemplate, and comment, in low voices, like pupils.
To the genius of an oriental actor is added that of a director probably without equal; the heroine of the piece—vital, luminous, intelligent—almost completely escapes any sins of theatrical brusqueness or excess.1 There is a beautiful luxuriating in lace, silk, furs—not to mention the expanses of skin and the tangle of limbs in the final melee, in which the principals hurl themselves unrestrainedly against each other. We cry “Miracle!”; not only do we have millionaires who don’t look as if they’ve rented their tuxedos by the week, but we also have characters on screen who are followed by their own shadows, their actual shadows, tragic or grotesque, of which until now the useless multiplicity of arc lamps has robbed us. A monochrome drapery, a sparkling bibelot, are enough to give us the impression of established and solid luxury. In an elegant interior there is no sign (is it possible?) of either a silk-quilted bed in the middle of the room or of a carved sideboard.
Since our French studios don’t hesitate to lay on special trains, hire crowds, dam rivers and interrupt railroad service, buy villas and dynamite ships, I wish their magnificence would extend to furniture, women’s dresses, men’s clothing, to accessories that are stylish, complete, and irreproachable, to everything that the assiduity of the public has given it the right to demand.
Is it only a combination of felicitous effects that brings us to this film and keeps us there? Or is it the more profound and less clear pleasure of seeing the crude cine groping toward perfection, the pleasure of divining what the future of the cinema must be when its makers will want that future, when its music will finally become its inevitable, irresistible collaborator, its interpreter; when the same slow waltz or the same comic-opera overture will no longer accompany, and impartially betray, a tragedy, a love duet, and an attempted murder?
COLETTE (1873–1954) was a novelist and essayist who had already gained some notoriety as the author of the Claudine novels and La Vagabonde (1910). She wrote film reviews for several months in Le Film (May-July 1917), and then her interest in the cinema shifted to composing scenarios—La Vagabonde (1918) and La Flamme cachee (1920)—for her close friend, Musidora, the star of Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–1916).
PAUL SOUDAY, “On the Cinema”
From “Au Cinema,” Le Temps (6 September 1916), 1.
NO DOUBT about it, the cinema doesn’t spare a thing. All the entrepreneurs have to do is ask, and society people of both sexes pose for cinematographic scenes; and these fashionable films are displayed before the public, one and all. For a couple of sous, anybody can be invited to ultra-aristocratic receptions, and the most restricted salons are open, at least to the eyes. M. Prudhomme took his son to watch their betters eat ice cream at Tortoni’s,1 and now cinema enthusiasts can watch others chat, flirt, and play bridge at the home of an engaging marquis or an opulent baron. This new fad has come to us from Italy, but people probably aren’t just dropping in out of the blue. In wartime, programs are usually a bit threadbare; but once peace arrives, society events undoubtedly will be back in full swing, and the Bovarys who dream of carriage horses and spring fashions can either rouse or stifle their desires before the screen.2 . . .
Actually, there are serious objections to the cinema. The short films of vaudeville clowning which make up the bottom of the program are painfully silly. When they borrow a subject from literature, the result is even worse. Several months ago in Paris, someone exhibited a film called Salammbô.3 It was as an abomination to end abominations. . . .
. . . the cinema’s experiences with drama are anything but happy. It doesn’t even have the advantage of avoiding the worst calamities by doing without words. If the characters are mute, during short entr’actes explanatory notices are posted, whose style and orthography make one long for the dialogue of the worst dramatists. Certainly the intellectual level of much of the theater is not very high, but the cinema is lower than even the café-concert. And since it beats the competition on ticket prices, it is going to kill off an art form that is already trying to navigate with just a single wing; only the subsidized theaters and an insignificant number of others in Paris and in several large cities in the provinces are still putting up a fight. This will be disastrous for both the public spirit and taste since what will have disappeared will have been replaced by something totally worthless.
The real interest of the cinema should be confined to accurate documentary views: the cataracts of Niagara, the sources of the Nile, tropical seas, Far Eastern ports, polar bear hunts near the North Pole or lion hunts in the center of Africa, etc. Moreover, there’s no need to exaggerate the value of this vast album of moving, flickering images. The cinema only has to have average visual acumen, and it can describe objects as well as voyagers do in their tales—and even better if the voyager is named Chateaubriand, Théophile Gautier, or Pierre Loti.4 What’s exciting is not so much the external and banal aspect of reality—whatever automatically strikes any retina or lens—but its atmosphere, its life, its soul, what is perceptible only through the direct and mediating presence of a somewhat refined sensibility. See what’s to be seen, if one can, and read good authors. As for me, the cinema and the photograph are the last resort, ultimately, of those who lack imagination or whose imagination only gets rolling with great effort. Rémy de Gourmont, who did not lack imagination, enjoyed the cinema as a means of avoiding fatigue: “One need not even bother to dream,” he said. In any case, this province used to be the cinema’s raison d’être, but now it is straying farther and farther afield and having “successes” which would have roused a Flaubert to furious indignation, even before the cruelty inflicted on Salammbô.
PAUL SOUDAY (1869–1929) directed the currents of literary opinion in Paris, circa 1915— 1925, from his position as literary critic at Le Temps and La Revue de Paris.
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “Before the Screen”
From “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (29 November 1916), 3.
HERE I TOUCH on one of the most marvelous technical possibilities of cinema art. This ability to juxtapose, within several seconds, on the same luminous screen, images which generally are isolated in time or space, this power (hitherto reserved to the human imagination) to leap from one end of the universe to the other, to draw together antipodes, to interweave thoughts far removed from one another, to compose, as one fancies, a ceaselessly changing mosaic out of millions of scattered facets of the tangible world . . . all this could permit a poet to realize his most ambitious dreams—if poets would become interested in the cinema, and the cinema would interest itself in poets!
This form of development of thought, with its thematic echoes, its conducive motifs, its allusions, its rapid insinuations or slow solicitations, it is exactly like a symphony! The cinema orchestrates images, scores our visions and memories according to a strictly musical process: it must choose its visual themes, render them expressive, meticulously regulate their exposition, their opportune return, their measure and rhythm, develop them, break them down into parts, reintroduce them in fragments, as the treatises on composition put it, through “augmentation” or “diminution.” More fortunate than painting and sculpture, the cinema, like music, possesses all the riches, all the inflections, and all the nuances of beauty in movement: cinema produces counterpoint and harmony . . . but it still awaits its Debussy!
Among the interesting accomplishments in Invasion des Etats-Unis1 should be noted certain details of the naval battle: the startling appearance of the artillery batteries, rising up from their hiding places with the supple movement of a living creature to stretch out their throbbing necks, fire, and return to the depths of their shelter; the charming lighting of certain interiors. Through the exactness of its rhythm, the precision of its movement, and the fluidity of its expression, the simple tableau of the family dinner after the meeting should be an example to directors who so annoyingly bungle and excessively banalize images of this kind. Here is first-rate advice to hold on to. In the midst of this involved “score,” it is an andante of simplicity and exquisite charm.
The acting avoids the easy excesses which we have too often had to suffer in those “expressive” grimaces which the camera lens seems to favor. The cinema could renew the powerful and nuanced art of pantomime: most of the time, it gives that little thought. Our actors, hard pressed by their tyrannical master—they never have a minute to lose as the camera turns— simplify their physical performance, displaying only the essential character traits, connecting two opposed expressions without bothering with the necessary transitions. American actors take more time, perform more simply and “reduce,” as suits them, their eyebrow wrinklings and smiles. Thus they achieve remarkable effects of reality.
One needs a volume to describe the microcosm that constitutes a film of two kilometers! The form of an article does not suffice. But no matter: the most modest notes have their usefulness in such a tangled domain, for an art which has never deigned to take pride in analysis! Besides, it will soon demonstrate that it has been perfectly worthy of respect, and we alone are guilty: people always get the spectacle they deserve! . . . The screen is there to prove it to us once again.
EMILE VUILLERMOZ (1878–1960) was a student of Gabriel Fauré and, as the foremost French music critic of the 1910s and 1920s, championed the works of Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Honegger, Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt (one of his classmates), and others. Later he would write biographies of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, as well as several histories of music.
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “Before the Screen: Les Frères corses”
From “Devant l’écran: Les Frères corses,” Le Temps (7 February 1917), 3.
SCAGL has persuaded Antoine to tackle the mise-en-scène of the screen: this week saw the premiere of his first film.
The event deserves to be emphasized. It’s both a confession and a promise. The cinema is committing itself officially to enter on the path of artistic experiment and serious work. It is accepting a rigorous discipline, giving itself over to an energetic, tenacious master who is quite capable of upsetting established rules and routines, getting rid of favorite performance tricks, and imposing on the cinema a sense of ambition and an undreamt of aesthetic. The experiment is at least courageous, and the cinema should be grateful to him.
Will it be fruitful and crucial for the evolution of style? . . . Only the future will tell. [Yet] Antoine’s choice of a title for his first film is particularly reassuring and opportune.
Still there’s no need to hide the fact that he will have to foment a second coup d’etat in order to really succeed. It’s not enough to transpose the decrees of his previous dictatorship into this new domain: a new art form requires a new set of techniques. The great shortcoming of current cinematographic techniques is that they are theatrically retarded. . . . And that’s why the glorious stage exploits of Antoine could very well handicap him rather than give him an advantage in the battle which he is undertaking on this new terrain.
His first film is more a parade of arms than a real combat. He’s holding back, testing the metal of his adversary, studying his moves before plunging in.
He has taken for his theme Alexandre Dumas’s picturesque tale, Les Frères corses.1 The subject is excellently chosen. Only film could give a suitable plastic life to this dramatic story, in which the imagination must continually confront distant visions, distinct landscapes, two characters who are more Siamese than Corsican, mysteriously endowed with a unique sensibility and separated from one another by three hundred leagues. . . .The cinema’s miraculous gift of ubiquity, its power of immediate evocation, its wealth of interchangeable images are all needed to execute this tour de force. The thousands of tiny frames in a moving filmstrip act like the cells of the human brain: the same overwhelming rapidity of perception, the same multiplicity of many-faceted mirrors which effortlessly juxtapose the farthest horizons, suppress distances, abolish the bondage of time and space, embrace all the cardinal points [of the compass] simultaneously, and transport us in a fraction of a second from one extreme point of the universe to another! . . .
Antoine, of course, has done remarkable things with this visual prote-anism; he has been able to intensify his drama with quick glimpses, allusions, echoes, inferences, forebodings, memories, hallucinations, and dreams; to illuminate it with fugitive suggestions analogous to the flashes of mental associations which traverse our imagination and multiply its creative power tenfold. As soon as a situation gives birth to some remote thought, a mental impulse toward the past, or a flight of memory across space, the screen picks up its quick spark and offers us its image.
Moreover, the director of Frères corses has been able to indulge in a very curious “framing” superimposed on his action. He has first “inscribed” all the arabesque details of the author’s writing chamber, shown us Alexandre Dumas biting on his cigar, pursuing his dream in spirals of blue smoke, resolutely seizing a quill pen in his heavy, be jeweled hand, and rapidly covering a new notebook with his large handwriting: “Toward the beginning of March, in 1841, I was traveling in Corsica. . . .”
And the resurrection occurs before our very eyes: the words become images, things flock together at the call of their names, swirling visions rise to the surface of the screen, coming from distant ages and far horizons to beat their wings at the window pane of this mysterious prison of dreams! The story thus materializes naturally until the moment when, the last fantasy extinguished, we rediscover the writer rounding off his final phrase: “1 bent over him; he remained quiet and immobile . . . ,” blotting his fresh page, folding up his finished manuscript, and stretching with a sigh of relief.
Within this frame, a second framework of action develops. Dumas becomes an actor in the drama, watches himself perform, finds himself in the residence of Lucien de Franchi, enjoys the fine story of a vendetta which in turn becomes incarnate before his eyes, sees himself in the chamber of Louis de Franchi, at the Opéra, in the Café Anglais, at a duel, in the woods of Vincennes. . . . Here there are subtleties and ingenuities of editing that confirm the infinite suppleness of cinematographic technique and its astonishing attribute—which one could call “symphonic”—of combining chords of impressions and writing a kind of visual counterpoint for several instruments. It’s the plastic formula of simultanéism which torments Guillaume Apollinaire.2
Here is a virtual storehouse to mine. The composition of Frères corses is full of “stage” directions of this kind. When Lucien de Franchi enchants his host by telling him of the alternating revenges of his grandmother Sa-vilia and the savage Giudice-Jacops—softening them a bit, for the cinema, which assassinates and steals so willingly, is incredibly modest—the images of the story are not projected on the same plane of consciousness as are the images of the interlocutors: from time to time the evoked scene pales and evaporates so that the lamp can slowly brighten again to light the eloquent storyteller and attentive novelist. Thus do we glide from dream to reality with unusual fluidity.
Here we see the spirit in which the new “composer” of films is working. Admittedly, he will probably not be compensated for his discerning research by an immediate outburst of enthusiasm from the cinema regulars. Who will be grateful for his scrupulous lighting effects, his care in not giving the lighting of a salon (where a single veiled lamp keeps vigil) the same hue as that of the Opéra foyer, the interior of a curtained stage box, a restaurant, or house hallway? In the cinema, where they light hospital rooms exactly like costume balls, with formidable batteries of arc lamps, halflight always seems to be taken as a fault.
Will they equally appreciate at face value the successful researches into the atmosphere of 1840, so fascinating and refined, the costumes worn with such ease by the intelligent actors—Krauss3 has produced an unforgettable character there!—the Opéra ball, seen from the high angle of a box, with its quadrille of longshoremen, carnival revelers, and tramps who are virtual Gavarni creations?4 Will they sense the charm of tender intimacy in the room where the handsome, high-collared platonic lover admires his romantic “angel,” his “sensitive one,” seated by the fireside in the starched folds of her taffeta dress, chastely lowcut, her pure, ringlet-framed profile inclining over her embroidery while under the flickering lamp the hours slip away gently, rhythmically timed to the balance wheel of a little colonnette pendulum—affecting as a romance by Louisa Puget? . . .
Wish it well without expecting too much. A public that likes police serials [for instance, Judex] is rather badly prepared for interpretations of this kind and perhaps will not immediately perceive their nuances and limited ends. Antoine need not defend himself if the public does not divine this meticulous attention to detail; he need not be discouraged if they are incapable of distinguishing straight away this authentic collector’s item from the cheap imitations around it. Once more, this is only a trial run, and one that’s a bit confidential and deceptive in its modesty, but it justifies the most ambitious hopes.
The cinema means to spruce up its weapons and coats of arms; this nouveau riche has decided to take lessons in deportment: let’s congratulate it on having chosen a good professor. Monsieur Jourdain was astonished to be speaking prose without knowing it; soon the cinema will see that it can be making poetry as well.5
COLETTE, “Film Criticism: Mater Dolorosa”
From Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays. Edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux. Translated by Sarah W. R. Smith. English translation © 1980 by the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “La Critique des films,” in Le Film 66 (4 June 1917), 4–5.
LET us SEND beyond the sea and the mountains films like Mater Dolorosa. Here, the coordinated result of two efforts, the interpreters’ and the director’s, appears in its full beauty. It is thanks to that effort that we forget that Gemier,1 with his narrow mouth and his light, narrow eyes, is utterly unphotogenic. The screen, cruel to fading beauty, is also capable of betraying the best talents. Some hand has given Gemier help here, turning his face toward the most favorable light, using close-ups not as one would play with binoculars but to underline a paternal smile, a wrinkle of masculine sorrow. It is the same hand that groups, brings closer, disentangles the three actors of the intimate drama: the husband, the suspected wife (Emmy Lynn),2 and the child. Gemier—I should say the husband—has been reproached for the inflexible rigor with which he separates, in order to make her confess, a young mother from her child. The film gains, all the same, from Emmy Lynn’s lovely tears and from the child’s scenes, which one can hardly resist. And I applaud a new use of the “still life,” the touching use of props, as in the fall of the veil on the floor. We will eventually succeed in creating significant decor, sets full of undertones, an agreeable anxiety suggested, at the right moment, by a shot of a scene without actors. An empty chair at the bottom of the garden, a rose abandoned on a deserted table—did the great painter Le Sidaner need any more to hold us, dreaming, in front of a little table? I know very well that’s Le Sidaner. But have patience. The miracle of cinematography is in young hands, astonished hands, hands often inept, erring, paralyzed with routine. Patience!
While we’re waiting, let us praise Mater Dolorosa. Let us praise Emmy Lynn, exhausted young mother, who surpasses everything she promised us in the theater. Agree with me, since I take so much pleasure in it, that the action progresses in scenes lit with a rare richness—gilded whites, sooty and profound blacks.3 And my memory also retains certain somber close ups in which the speaking, suppliant head of Emmy Lynn floats like a decapitated flower.
LOUIS DELLUC, “Beauty in the Cinema”
From “La Beauté au cinéma,” Le Film 73 (6 August 1917), 4–5.
ACHANCE evening at a cinema on the Boulevards gave me such extraordinary artistic pleasure that it seemed to have nothing at all to do with art. For a long time, I have realized that the cinema was destined to provide us with impressions of evanescent eternal beauty, since it alone offers us the spectacle of nature and sometimes even the spectacle of real human activity. You know, those impressions of grandeur, simplicity, and clarity which suddenly cause you to consider art useless. Obviously, art would be utterly useless if each of us was capable of appreciating consciously the profound beauty of the passing moment. But the education of a responsive mass of people is going too slowly for us to deprive ourselves yet of the many centuries of artworks which ensure the exalted confidence of others’ spirits. The cinema is rightly moving toward the suppression of art, which reveals something beyond art, that is, life itself. Otherwise, it would merely be a median term between stylization and transient reality. And it has so much progress to make up for in order to reach perfection that we cannot say exactly when the screen will have trained us sufficiently— and this will be wonderful—to see into nature and the human heart.
Already much more than a reflection of this vibrant natural beauty has been revealed to us here and there. I would say much more about travelogues except that they are far too short. If the companies which lease them still do not comprehend that, it serves them right. Why do these views— I have seen some whose lighting and photography prove the cameraman’s skill—last no more than a hundred meters? The poster announces Japan, Peru, or the Himalayas, and it barely lifts the curtain. The success of certain documentary films, significant in subject matter and intelligently exhibited, however, has provided evidence of the public taste for these armchair voyages. And the public is ready to go farther than the North Pole. Advice to the cinema owner who would be the first to let us pass an entire evening in Italy, Spain, or Poland. Tourists would hasten there in droves.
This week everyone in Paris is praising a film which is, in fact, astonishing. Who has not yet seen the passage of that military convoy of ships in stormy weather. It is beautiful. I have had occasion to see this film three times, in three different cinemas, with three kinds of audiences. The enthusiasm has been the same in all three. As well as the heavy sigh at the end, which came all too soon. There, that’s beauty, real beauty—I would say the beauty of chance, but the cameraman must be given his due. He has learned how to see with such skill that we have exactly the same experience of the sea, sky, and wind as he himself had. It is not just a film. It is natural truth, and the thought that such views will be offered us in abundance for the next several years is a great consolation. After this, how can one indulge in the blunders of a totally new art which the French have shackled with all manner of embellishments? No matter, it will unshackle itself.
The same program included two masterpieces. . . . Yes, Ames d’étrangers [Alien Souls, 1916] and Chariot cambrioleur [Police, 1916], are they not masterpieces? Quickly, tell me why, even if you believe I am paid to admire them. Ha, if I were to make money, then I would admire them even more! But, no, I am not even speaking of the films; that would be criticism, and today I am not trying to pass for a critic, let alone a contented critic. I am satisfied, that’s all, for I have seen beautiful things.
So, now that I am off and running, let me assure you that Ames d’étrangers seems superior to most superior films. The mise-en-scène, the photography, the acting, even the scenario with its lovely, though unequal developments, but all at great cost. That said—for personal pleasure—let’s move on. . . . Of the Chariot film, there is no point in speaking of photography, mise-en-scène, or any other detail that is inevitably ready to be used by the theatrical genius of Charlie Chaplin. That said, too, let’s pass on to pure beauty. Pure beauty, which I now demand and always find in natural landscapes, is sometimes synthesized in a gesture, a face, a talent.
Sessue Hayakawa and Charlie Chaplin are, whatever film they appear in, two expressions of beauty. They are the two masterpieces I am talking about.
These two mimes do not act in the same way. Yet the rigorous renunciation of the word is as powerful in one as in the other. On that point we can compare them, if one wants comparisons; but, to tell the truth, a less visible and more poignant bond unites them—the absence of intellectuality. Hayakawa, through his race and virile style, and Chaplin, through his honest and mathematical naivete, achieve equally genuine performances, although equally exaggerated in the eyes of the crowd. Of Chaplin alone can one say he has talent; of Hayakawa, one can say nothing: he is a phenomenon. Explanations here are out of place. No explanations, then, but verifications—rather than the false differences and similarities which one accepts unconsciously—for there are other striking things, with unusual causes and effects, to discover.
Hayakawa dominates the crowd through his melancholy. Once more I am not speaking of talent. I consider a certain kind of actor, especially him, as a natural force and his face as a poetic work whose reason for being does not concern me when my avidity for beauty finds there the expected chord or reflection. So then, his melancholy, yes, of course. It is not his cat-like, implacable cruelty, his mysterious brutality, his hatred of anyone who resists, or his contempt for anyone who submits; that is not what impresses us, and yet that is all we can talk about. And his melancholy? His eyes are so cold in the face of suffering that, when open, they seem as if they had been closed forever. And especially his strangely drawn smile of childlike ferocity, not really the ferocity of a puma or jaguar, for then it would no longer be ferocity. The beauty of Sessue Hayakawa is painful. Few things in the cinema reveal to us, as the light and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings. I well believe that all lonely people, and they are numerous, will discover their own recourseless despair in the intimate melancholy of this savage Hayakawa.
And Chariot? Ah yes, he is something else. Something else? Not so fast! Yes, something else. I have said it because a phenomenal actor is not the same thing as a phenomenon. Yet, there also, charm triumphs. He goes beyond the actor’s art. Not for him the art of traditions, disguises, tricks, acrobatics, eccentricities, and clownings, but a prodigious truth, at bottom, the truth of what he does for himself rather than for the spectator. Charlie Chaplin enjoys himself at least as much as we do in his films, and that is not far from the most that is possible. He enjoys himself too much. Like all sad people. And don’t tell me any more that one cannot speak of Chariot’s melancholy. It is to melancholy that he clings so delicately when his baroque madnesses are not enough to save him: and that is his charm. Latin people submit to Chariot just as to Sessue Hayakawa. I have never seen a cinema audience resist the enterprises of these two men. Understand me, the spectacle of true beauty reveals us to ourselves. And to recognize, behind the tragic will of Hayakawa and the comic frenzy of Chaplin, an echo of suffering or dreaming, such is the secret of an infatuation.
The cinema will make us all comprehend the things of this world as well as force us to recognize ourselves.
LOUIS DELLUC (1890–1924) was best known as a drama critic for Comoedia Illustré when he took over the editorship of Le Film in June 1917. Through his reviews and essays in Le Film, Paris-Midi, and later his own film journals, Le Journal du Ciné-Club and Cinéa, Delluc became the most influential film critic of the war and postwar period.
LOUIS DELLUC, “Antoine at Work”
From “Antoine travaille,” Le Film 75 (20 August 1917), 5–7.
THE STRUGGLE goes on. Here’s Antoine in the cinema. I don’t know if he had been thinking about it for a long time, but we had. What would he do if he tried the cinema one day? Now we are going to find out.
His first attempt, Les Frères corses, can count as one of the best French films, and there aren’t very many. In it, Antoine has conveyed a sense of life, taste, color, and charm of great value. His error was to launch his first effort with a scenario that’s unwieldy in structure. That, I think, has been harmful—or could be harmful—to the film’s success. And then the nature of the story favored a romantic verve which encouraged him to indulge in all the material charms of the theater of which he is such a virtuoso master.
It’s not the least worry of this new struggle that Antoine has tougher obstacles to overcome than do the small fry of our film directors (and you know how small some are!). His theatrical genius—in mise-en-scène, performance, literary knowledge—has become his worst enemy.
The abyss that separates the theater from the cinema now seems unusually immense. Antoine doesn’t seem to realize that. He realizes it less than most, in fact. And he has undertaken his first cinematographic efforts using the same methods he applied to Julius Caesar, Ramuntcho, or La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.1 He considers decors in the theatrical sense of the term: to begin with, he chooses historical settings that are too obviously theatrical in character. He also chooses actors from among the most gifted; you can see they are gifted for they still remember their Conservatory training. In the tableaux which are totally reconstructed—the admirable Opéra ball, for instance—this method produces marvels and perfectly harmonizes the lighting, sets, and costumes. But as soon as we find ourselves outside in scenes of exterior life, we are embarrassed by the musty smell of the theater which is so out of place in the cinema. Only it’s not really Antoine’s fault.
It’s the fault of his habits, first of all. But that doesn’t much matter. In practice, he will quickly forget his former knowledge. A first attempt is only an attempt; the first films of Thomas Ince were mediocre, and I’m sure De Mille only realized The Cheat after the dullest endeavors, which are already forgotten. And if our Antoine had the curiosity (as he should) to see his Frères corses when they released it to the public, he would certainly have noticed what was excessive as well as lacking. An Antoine who has discovered wonders, in writers as well as in his throng of actors, is a man who will continue to discover things. He will not search long for historical chateaux which are hardly indispensable. He will see, he is already seeing, the need to work straight from nature: just wait, I bet, unlike some, he won’t make fun of the breezes which stir all the curtains in American interiors. And he won’t associate himself any more—you will see that one day—with actors who are too good as actors.
Peasants, soldiers, charwomen, milkmaids, and railway workers should, if and when they wish to, become cinema actors, not extras but actors. We should search among them for those with the least possible acting skill. A provincial girl from Alcazar is more interesting in front of the cameraman than the most well-known of our official, subsidized ingenues. The more reason to use those who know nothing and who till the earth or work with their faces pressed up against their sewing machines. And from among our actors and actresses, keep the two dozen or so who have “reduced” their talent to the most vivid sobriety, indeed to impassivity. And if Antoine hasn’t done this all at once, so what? He’s only asked to begin. Now he’s begun. And he will transform his copious theatrical skills without difficulty into surprising initiatives in the cinema.
If you have found him slow to do so, that’s not his fault. It’s the fault of capital. That’s a paltry catchword to whimper about the miserable conditions of the cinema. I shouldn’t insist on it, they tell me so obligingly, when I claim our directors should have the same conditions that are provided abroad. And they’ve laughed self-importantly; the film directors and their collaborators here believe they’re invincible. They aren’t even trying to find remedies. Two or three companies alone go on stubbornly trying to produce a maximum of art and intelligence with a minimum of capital. As for the others, they have no desire to be saved. Well, let them perish; no one will be sorry.
The case of Antoine is most alarming. Here’s a great man who can do great things. How come millions aren’t flowing out of all those pockets? Art is a business, dammit, and one makes money in the cinema, especially if the film happens to be signed by Antoine. I’d like them to decide to put their money into something other than tinned crabmeat or houses of prostitution.
Imagine Antoine with some capital. It’s never going to happen, I know full well; just look at the theater. In order to mount a production of Tolstoy, Ibsen, d’Annunzio, or some other madman, you can find enough money to pay for the decors but not a sou more (and even that’s not certain), so you have to produce vaudeville revues! But in the cinema, there’s gold. Are you deaf and dumb or idiots, gentlemen? There’s a mine to exploit, a formidable mine which you scarcely dare cut into and which may well be inexhaustible.
Antoine has vast projects. He would already have realized them if the French cinema were not subject to our disastrous traditions of economy and prudence. Abroad, it’s said, volleys of laughter greet our interiors—those cheap drawing rooms and bedrooms, gaudy tapestries, scraggly and unseasonable green plants—but here they don’t realize it. They economize more and more, and they earn even less. Don’t you think that, if Antoine had gone to America, for instance, Triangle2 would already have put at his disposal all the marvelous materials that he needed? And what credit would they have extended to him? Okay, over there, they can do that; we can’t. But why can’t we?
You know what Antoine has in preparation. I intend to speak a lot, and in detail, about the Roche aux mouettes, Quatre-Vingt Treize, and Travailleurs de la mer.3 This could be extraordinary. But, here’s the rub, what a struggle! Antoine always wants unheard-of things, and so many ambitions and strong wills have run aground in the cinema, until now at least.
Here’s hoping Antoine is victorious. If he succeeds completely, I am going to say so; if he doesn’t limit himself to making good films and persists in trying to achieve the splendors he so desires, that will be a sacred victory. And not only for Antoine, but for all of us. For if an artist as brave and all-embracing as he is can attain his aim, that means anything is possible. We will finally reach the threshold of a national art, an art which is more national than international and which has not yet—or scarcely—recognized how to be really French.
PHILIPPE SOUPAULT, “Note i on the Cinema”
From “Note 1 sur le cinéma,” SIC 25 (January 1918), reprinted in Ecrits de cinema, 1918–1931 (Pion, 1979), 23–24.
ONE DAY on an empty lot in Vincennes, before an assembled crowd of idlers, an individual named Pathé presented a cinematograph invented by the Lumière brothers: man was endowed with a new eye.
After that, those who worked busily with this extraordinary invention deceived themselves terribly; they made the cinema the colorless mirror and mute echo of the theater. No one yet has stopped making this mistake.
However, since the means that the cinema makes available to the artist are quite different from those of the theater, it’s important to establish a difference between the screen and the stage, to separate cinematographic art from theatrical art. That’s the significant point of this first note.
Already, the richness of this new art is apparent to those who know how to see. Its power is tremendous since it reverses all natural laws: it ignores space and time; it upsets gravity, ballistics, biology, etc. . . . Its eye is more patient, more penetrating, more precise. Thus the future belongs to the creator, the poet, who makes use of this hitherto neglected power and richness; for a new servant is available to his imagination.
Now, however, without wishing to exceed the limits of this note, I propose to those who have the material means that they realize this first scenario effort.
INDIFFERENCE
I am climbing a vertical road. At the top extends a plain where a violent wind is blowing. In front of me rocks puff out and become enormous. I bow my head and I pass between them. I arrive at a garden with monstrously high flowers and weeds. I sit down on a bench. There suddenly appears beside me a man who changes into a woman, and then into an old man. At this moment another old man appears who changes into a child and then a woman. Then soon, and little by little, a mixed crowd of men and women, etc., gesticulate, while I remain immobile. I get up and all disappear, I take a seat on the terrace of a café, but all the objects, the chairs, the tables, the spindle trees in the barrels, gather around and worry me, while a waiter circles around the group with ever-increasing speed; the trees lower their branches, the tramway and the cars pass at top speed, I take off and leap over the houses. I am on the roof facing a clock which grows and grows while its hands revolve faster and faster. I throw myself down from the roof and onto the sidewalk where I light a cigarette.
PHILIPPE SOUPAULT (1897–) was the first of the young Dada-Surrealists to become interested in the cinema. Besides writing several scenarios and cinematic poems, he contributed film reviews to Littérature and L’Europe nouvelle, both of which he also helped to edit.
LOUIS DELLUC, “Notes to Myself: La Dixième Symphonie”
From “Notes pour moi,” Le Film 99 (4 February 1918), 3–4.
LA DIXIÈME SYMPHONIE by Abel Gance. Circumstances are giving JLvGance a special significance and position which will double his artistic importance as well as his personal authority. We know that, over the past ten years, the French cinema has not advanced one step. Let them boo me if they wish, but let them prove me wrong. I swear that the films produced during this lapse of time are in no way superior to the first attempts—naive and intelligent—which were called Les Misérables, Le Bossu, and Les Trois Mousquetaires.1
They asked us to indulge in wishful thinking by baldly adopting first Italian and then American ways, which naturally were only secondary to the original authors’ intentions. Hence for six months now we have been drowning in chiaroscuro and “modern passion.” Yet they aren’t making any more of the ciné than before; they are only indulging in lighting effects. And the scenarios are as silly as they are poorly devised, or—worse—they are adopted from rickety plays, melodramtic novels, and childishly acrobatic sketches. And, worst of all, the acting is still behind the times in its “theatrical” manner. Their heavy masks come manufactured in bulk by the French Theater.
Yet . . . A quietly assured labor is gnawing away at the old shanty sheltering this childish play. Is it all going to collapse? That will be easy. One crack will be enough. For the general level of incomprehension, which has hampered any progress and forced everyone to carry on with insignificant things, has all been due to the company managers. Outside of two or three of them, they have persisted in mediocrity under the pretext that the public wants this or that—and the public really wants nothing but something new. These servile figures of power have imposed on us miserable stars (the rejects of stage crowd scenes or understudies of a dangerous notoriety), pitiful authors overwhelmed by the weight of their non-existence, and directors who perpetuate their weaknesses as stage managers on the screen and who would like to mount masterpieces like one mounts a cattle drive.
Do you really think they are going to realize and acknowledge that after reading this? Not if they can help it. Or not if all’s said and done! Their conviction has only made them blind! Like Panurge’s sheep,2 they have produced, by imitation, historical films, then grand guignolisms, then a kind of modern romanticism à l’italienne, then photo-reliefs in the manner of The Cheat. Well, now, it will be enough to press on them three or four true films, which repudiate all their imitations, and they will madly imitate those, in spite of themselves. . . .
La Dixième Symphonie magnifies and synthesizes all the revolutionary developments which we have noticed these past months, but in such detail that no one has taken any interest. A small number of films recently have failed to achieve what this film has. You can enumerate them better than I. Each has had the misfortune to carry within it a flaw—or defect—which was too heavy not to drag it down: a role badly miscast, a director in disagreement with the author, an author ignorant of the technical means necessary for his ideas, a disorganized scenario. All this has occurred, singly or en masse, in the latest good films.
La Dixième Symphonie happily avoids these shortcomings. Undoubtedly, this is owing partially to chance. And it may also possess a flaw.
I recognize this flaw, but I know that it will diminish or rather that it could become a fine attribute, perhaps even the primordial attribute of Gance. This man is far from simple. In fact, he is too close to bombast, not in words, but in thinking: he wraps the plainest ideas in the richest clothing. The enthralling talent of d’Annunzio predates the cinema. And however radiant it may be, it’s out of date. It’s unnecessary for Gance to conceive of an idea as he would a character in Feu or Forse che si.3 The cinematic craft pushes one toward an excess of externalization which renders such a style dangerous.
I’m being brash on purpose. What am I risking? That Gance will become the complete master of himself and rebel against the temptations of his nature? That’s not impossible. He just might be able to discipline his personality, without repudiating it. That would take the greatest will power.
He tends to repeat himself in the same scene. I’d like to talk about the third part of the film. It’s the climactic scene of a melancholy musician’s performance of his new symphony: this provokes a series of simultaneous inner dramas, as the story explains itself to us. There is Séverin-Mars4 at the piano, the piano itself, the hands of the composer, the score, the guests who are listening, the women dreaming and the men reflecting—all this is wonderful. If I’m not crazy, the public is going to respond to this with a surge of intense feeling.
Yet, at the same time, Emmy Lynn is also listening. She is even listening intently. During the first part of the scene, her inner immobility is affecting. Then the daemon of plasticity breathes over her, or rather over Gance, and she opens her wings: in the movement of arms and veils, Gance has had a great vision—a great white bird, a peplos in the wind, or something else. But I saw nothing of all that. Because the appearance of this poetic apparition, so slightly artificial or at least transposed from literature, embarrassed me in a moment that is otherwise true to life.
Perhaps this will please spectators. Indeed it’s quite pretty to look at. But it’s no good; it overlays something fine with something pretty but unnecessary. It’s simply a mistake. Don’t tell me, Gance, that the execution hasn’t measured up to the intention. No, you were thinking of the Victory at Samothrace. I wasn’t. The Victory at Samothrace suffices unto itself. Leave it where it is, unless you are devoting an essay, a poem, or a play to it. In a film, visibly present like that, it’s extraneous. For three-quarters of an hour, you alone kept us interested. Would you have us believe that you aren’t sufficient unto yourself? It’s too late. We have only come for La Dixième Symphonie.
Consider also, Gance, that we suffer terribly from the quotations of Heine, Charles Guérin, or Rostand which you toss in our path.5
La Dixième Symphonie is a finished work. It has character, a central idea, a sense of life. This is a film by someone which could not have been executed by someone else because its author is manifest here everywhere, in every way.
It would take a closely written catalogue to enumerate all the alluring, vivid details that Gance has lavished on this film. Each has its place and thrives. The birds, the flowers, the dog, the musical instruments, the fabrics—how meticulous they all are and how graceful. We have the sense of living intimately with all of these people.
And the people are not so bad either.
Séverin-Mars dresses like Paul Mounet and acts like Guitry.6 Yet he is completely himself. And he is ‘‘Gance” above all in the bargain. Jean Toulout is destined naturally for the ciné, yet he has been badly used in general, which could do a great disservice to his reputation.7 Let him continue to work with artists, and he will realize characters as subtle as Fred Ryce. He’s very good.
It’s the same with Mile. Emmy Lynn. A special form of tact is needed to put her in the best light. And there are dream roles for her in Gance’s films, where she is both docile and audacious, just as Gance is both delicate and despotic.
The imagination of M. Lefaur, the gracefulness of Mlle. Nizan, a dozen anonymous actors enlisted in a cast who have done wonders—these are some of the elements which Gance has fashioned into something successful and artistic.
We will speak further of La Dixième Symphonie. Soon they will be releasing new films just as satisfying. La Dixième Symphonie, however, has the honor of being the most complete and accomplished work in this period of cinematographic renewal.
MARCEL L’HERBIER, “Hermes and Silence”
From “Hermès et le silence,” Le Film 110–11 (29 April 1918), 7–12.
Hermes, god of Speech and the felicitous lie.—O.W.1
. . . the harmonious Silence of Truth.—St. A.2
EVER SINCE an invention of a miraculous kind, whose importance seems commensurate only with that of printing, undertook the task of seeming to destroy speech (as the book once did), to the point, some believe, of destroying the very structure of society—ever since [that invention] incorporated movement and aimed at a silent, popular, faithful translation of the daily drama of life or of natural landscapes—[ever since] the cinema, that subtle machine-which-transmits-life, appeared as a pragmatic source of power promising the most fantastic future, foreign nations have employed it with a methodicalness, an ingenuity, and a perseverance with which the French mind has not always been able to keep pace.
And while, for example, according to the statistics of American productivity, film will soon figure as the fifth most important source of wealth, here instead we are content to produce the “fifth art,” which is either probably not enough or else too much. In any case, however, this argues, with an indubitable urgency, that the French mind, whose heritage it has been to innovate and perfect, must now assume, on clear directives and without delay, the obligation that it prove once more that nothing of its original inspiration has been lost and that, moreover—tomorrow as yesterday—in the league of world opinion, it can claim a victory that is definitive rather than merely an accepted cliche.
Nevertheless, some would have us swoon immediately in amazement.
Following speech, the arts of drawing, music, and dance, all of which apparently commenced to exist when man began to suffer and fashioned his first God out of his first tears and, dissatisfied with the latter’s inertia, then prayed, sang, danced, or constructed holy places for the propitiation of the promised joy.
. . . Following these eternal works which were raised up out of the ephemeral nature of things, all of them forged with a fecund nostalgia, and which together functioned through the course of centuries, as God’s judgment through the genius of man; following what we will name in admiration by chance of memory: the Temple of Angkor, the Venus of Cnidus, the extraordinary pantomimes which made Herodotus tremble on the sacred lake of Sais, the dark Rembrandts in which shadows encroach like a storm of intelligence, or Beethoven’s “silver key that opens the fountain of tears,” or finally Speech, whose divinity when it is manifest makes of each “paradise lost” a paradise regained—following these memorable miracles, testimony to the immemorial arts, I say, to then establish the cinema straight off as the “fifth art” and as an Art equal to the other Arts, even though it is without origin, being the only one that cannot trace its stock back to the same source of human sadness, shouldn’t that indeed be enough to disconcert us?3
However, as soon as we enter the debate and evoke the line of argument accepted up till now—I don’t mean by certain hack writers whose mission, here below, seems to be to speak loudly about what the really ignorant think is little known, but by a good number of people who certainly are capable of understanding aesthetic theorems—we find ourselves assailed again by fresh surprises.
For, truth to tell, if we thought—in retort to a summary sentence by which our dear Laurent Tailhade,4 a short time ago, condemned the cinema in toto because of some abject films—that M. Vuillermoz, sitting on the tribunal of Le Temps, would appeal the said sentence and take the floor in the name of the “silent art” (which we have condemned, he would whisper, without meaning to), at least we would not expect him to defend the con-creteness of the image with the same fire of apodictic conviction as he has devoted to the subtle divisions of musical abstraction.
How astonished we are that, instead of limiting himself to defining the authority of cinegraphie as the “fifth art,” he would go to the extent of judging it worthy of becoming “the most powerful of the plastic arts”—and, then again, after having glanced through Bergson in the hope of grafting his new faith onto some old metaphysical plantstock, that he would end by discovering in all this speculative orchard only the fruit of a text that was fruitless for all his gloss.
But our slackening surprise suddenly swells into full sail with the kind of analysis which, in another paper, M. Paul Souday exhales in a blast that would extinguish the glowing beliefs of his colleagues.5
Indeed, this eminent critic, hoping to prove the contrary of M. Vuillermoz’s allegations that “Bergsonism does not accord with the cinema,” constructs a line of argument exactly in the same manner as his (the just appreciation of which, I think, we can leave to someone else): namely, that if, for the convenience of propaedeutics, some psychologist amuses himself by comparing, for example, the impression of facts in the memory to the mechanical impression of printing, and if, later on, the same psychologist comes to examine his own memory and condemns it in the name, I suppose, of a more evolutionary power, we could logically conclude that the psychologist condemns printing, even more, that he condemns books! . . .
As reckless as such a line of argument seems, however, it is exactly what M. Paul Souday is pleased to accept as directing the critical faculty of the French mind, wandering in the cinegraphic wasteland.
As a double result that, since Bergson indeed compares conceptual thought to the mechanism of the cinema and, then again, pronounces himself against “the philosophy of ideas,” [Souday] hastens unperturbed to the induction that “Bergson doesn’t like the cinema.”
Amusing logic, don’t you agree? . . .
Let’s look ahead further and speak clearly. If it’s true that in its fundamental aspiration, Bergsonism can be summarized as a desire to merge with the “flux,” as a desire to elevate the soul over the mind, as a desire to satisfy the soul “in its deepest, most genuine, and purely emotional region” (a region that’s anti-verbal and anti-fictive), and finally as a tendency to descend toward the zone of deep-seated instinct, is not Bergsonism, I say, in all its propensity if not its essence, precisely analogous to current cinegraphie?
In this way, on the whole, at least in his conclusion that cinegraphie is by and large Bergsonian, M. Vuillermoz sees admirably well.
But doesn’t such “correctness” still involve a begging of questions; for can we assert, as he does, without contradiction, that cinegraphie is similar to Bergsonism, which implies the substitution of the vital truth of movement for the falsehood of artistic crystallization, and at the same time that is is similar to the ancient arts, whose aim is always just the opposite?
Briefly, can we insist on a “fifth art” when the cinema’s goal is clearly contrary to the goal of the other arts?
YET, IF we question the aestheticians on the abstract end of the four major arts, despite the differences in their discussion, it should be evident that those arts all share the same character in common, which is produced by revolutionary idealism. For there what leaps distinctly into the artist’s mind directs him toward those concrete expressions which are works of art.
As for us, let’s emphasize that in these teleological currents our opinion is firm. It accords with those famous sentences which are scarcely paralogical digressions but rather, like all paradoxes, vertiginous approaches to the brink of truth—those famous sentences which Wilde had to improvise for Intentions in front of the great bronze Hermes enthroned at the center of his dwelling, as the signifiant obedient to the artificial kingdom of speech, to the kingdom of that logos which, following Saint John, is God and, following Spinoza, is Untruth:
Namely, that “art is essentially a form of exaggeration, of emphasis”— a transcendent game “whose object is the Lie, that is, the expression of beautiful falsehoods”—thus “Art begins with abstract ornamentation, with a task that is purely Active and applies only to the unreal, to the nonexistent,” and, consequently, “art destroys what ceases to be strictly imaginative.”
. . . isn’t the contrast sufficiently marked between the end of those immemorial Arts and the end of what, from its infancy, has been called the fifth [art]?
For does it not seem clear to everyone that the end of cinegraphie, the art of the real, is completely opposite: to transcribe as faithfully and truthfully as possible, with neither transposition nor stylization, and by methods of accuracy which are uniquely its own, a certain phenomenal truth?
And, in fact, separated from the music which inevitably accompanies its images, and from the words which inevitably are provided by the inter-titles to be read (music and literature, from which it has no right to profit if it insists that we accept it as an art unto itself, because they are borrowings from the other arts and are external to it)—in other words, reduced to its essence, [cinegraphie] strives to present, even obsequiously, as we see it, exactly the opposite of what the consoling arts of unreality attempt to make manifest in their desire for the absolute.
Thus, for example, at the antipodes of pure poetry, for which the only reality is the artificial flower of a word in the branches of language—for which dawns, landscapes, lovers, and life itself are no more than words and inflections of the soul—[cinegraphie] represents a life, by contrast, naturally in accord with universal matter, a life of bare fact in which drama is confined to gestures—where the landscape is as little stylized as in photography—where love lacks the absolute as much as it does tears—a life that can seem a mere printing press of images.
So then, let them try to keep us from detailing other differences between artistic and cinegraphic practice.
It is enough for us to single out the one as esoteric—that is, it is executed with means and results that are aristocratic, Aryan, hermetic, and virile; the other, exoteric—obeying a different sort of superiority, which has to do with its need to satisfy all the crowds, at the same time in every country, it is democratized, popularized, and leveled down to be nearer the mass of men.
The one, with its traditional laws, its strict conventions of unity, its artificial and chivalrous rules, reflecting a society strongly hierarchical and highly cultured; the other, without order, constraint, or control, reflecting a worldwide condition of culturelessness and helter-skelter irresponsibility.
The one, ultimately, personal, as in religious Salvation, and opposed to all collaboration (for to collaborate is to recognize an equivalence in the world and, therefore, to condemn in the eyes of art anything that makes an exception for genius); the other, by contrast, can only be practiced through the meanderings of an incessant, close, and multiple collaboration which involves scriptwriter, director, actors, and cameraman, as well as the capricious light of the sun and even that singular mechanism (which means to create all by itself and according to its own rules), that is, the film camera.
In short, after acceding to these arguments, all of which seem considerable and the first decisive, henceforth, if we really want to give some provincial magazines the satisfaction of maintaining that cinegraphie is the fifth art, at least at the top of their columns, we must still reach a consensus on the quality and quantity of artistic potential which cinegraphie allows.
It’s a simple question, it seems, ever since it was posed, on condition that we really want to distinguish the arts from Art.
For if the Arts, the major Arts about which we have written, constitute a world uniquely promised to genius—art, on the other hand (that is, this kind of personal or professional ingenuity that we call art or craft), can occur anywhere, with anyone, with the weaver as with the lace-maker or fashion designer, with the doctor or lawyer, with specialists, and sometimes even with the serial writer . . . all the more so with the artisans of cinégraphie.
In the final analysis, to anyone who refuses to relent before these arguments (and who wishes to hold on to the visible effects streaming by on the screen), who, in this dispute, proposes that beauty can be projected in certain figures or certain gardens or certain reflections of moonlight on the sea, which he qualifies as purely artistic, to him, I say, his satisfaction is quickly discredited once we compare such beauty forthwith to that other sort of beauty which he must surely admire: that of chromo color-prints or even prettily illustrated postcards. . . .
The opposite of an art—and scarcely susceptible of art—for it only glows, when it glows at all, with a beauty borrowed from the other arts— that is how, in our opinion, one must judge the current cinema, according to the way one examines it in the context of the wellsprings of the past and considers it according to a view steeped in the weighty hypotheses of centuries of untruth—as we have seen some do who, retrospectively, summon it to raise itself up into an ode or some tenth symphony, patronized by the tenth muse.6
But let us, by contrast, judge cinegraphie from a pragmatic point of view, let us consider it from the horizon of the future, and things suddenly change. Cinégraphie is reestablished, as if miraculously, to the point of seeming, on the one hand, a force that’s more efficacious, powerful, dynamic, and protean than the daily press or the telegraph, and, on the other hand, a force for the “masses” who are rid of a noble but empty superterres-trial nostalgia and who have repudiated the deceptive infinity of art, in which their sovereignty is unsatisfied, through the habitual lack of spiritual play, and who have finally become conscious of this full pleasure in living that Walt Whitman sings of7—for the “masses,” where everything tends toward this contemplation of the factual, which Guyau holds up as the irreligion of the future.8 In the organization of worldwide exchanges, above all, the cinema must be this medium of a visual press that, after the completion of his compulsive daily task, his sociability become universal, man may willingly read, for a small sum in a democratic community, yielding to his propensity for such established trifles of entertainment for which William James has sketched out the earthly gospel.
However, the cinema also must, sometimes in its fiction films, but especially in its documentaries, be something completely different from the theater of discourse, the novel of analysis, or the scholarly report expressed in writing. And the newsreel’s views of the war already go further than the realist drama since it alone, to our minds, is capable of showing things with such sharpness, such precision, and especially such peculiar sublimation, all of which it carries out mechanically.
Furthermore, we have to point out the kind of film, and its miraculous means, which is produced by our own originality: that is, by French talent.
For let’s admit something: since, in the future, the cinema is going to become an incessant weapon which “will pursue a ferocious bombardment of images and ideas across the fields of battle and peace,” and since, even now, its aesthetic consists of popularizing, repeating with a scientific ubiquity, and profiting commercially from the unique works of the earlier museums of art, are we not all drafted, down to the least artist, in strict modesty, to attempt to achieve this task, imposed by the epoch, of fragmenting indefinitely, by means of evocations, suggestions, recollections, or precise images, through the fugitive miscellanies of film, the stock of these famous testimonies in which man was crystallized beneath the presence of a god?
So, in order to gain the right advantage, henceforth, let it be understood that the silent art draws itself up as an ineluctable threat to the Latin art of speech, to the traditional law of this superior god, respectively Hermes in Greece, Mercury in Rome, and Ogmios in Gaul, who once held the greatest peoples as well as the grandest centuries of our ascendance under his dominion which, in its effigies, is symbolized in the chains that fall from his mouth to envelope his proselytes in golden threads.
Indeed, compared to Hermes, who wishes to embalm generations with the elixir of bountiful untruth, Silence here looms up in our eyes and encloses in cinegraphic precision another untruth . . . a new untruth . . . the simple fact.
A secular oscillation that the French mind cannot hope to hold back. Just as it cannot hope, through its irrepressible elan, to rediscover, face to face, in this adverse era, all the love that fate now tosses away as fodder in time and space, to these eternal gawkers of the hereafter.
But at least let us remain steadfast at the center of French continuity; and strengthened by our clearsightedness and fortified by our example, let’s demonstrate that, in this grand destiny which is concluding because another grand destiny is commencing, and for the survival of its glory, we are going to learn how to assert ourselves as the eager accessories of fate, that we are going to aid nature in spreading the mysterious waters of its innovation, and that, with a firm heart, we will wink at the new politics of human expression.
Thus, without renouncing the tottering secrets of old, which our blood has placed in us as our essential conscience, let us not turn away from the prodigious potential that cinegraphie encompasses; rather, let us soon take charge of its faltering existence with our intelligence and trust.
“That which is natural in things comprises the greater part of one’s eternal soul.”
Ah! Let’s follow Baruch’s universal and thus become, as sons of Sophocles and Racine, attuned to this new kind of symphony which is constructed out of leitmotifs of landscapes, counterpoints of gestures, fugues of shadows. . . .
So that our seal will be stamped on its destiny, let us lead it out of the thick naturalism in which it still wallows and toward an initially elementary symbolism which will, through more and more suggestive means, yet achieve the inherited grace of art and, what is especially significant, the tragic intention of things.
. . . And won’t this be a way of putting our own preference to use more skillfully by serving with all our effort this nascent art of the image? For as we hasten its blossoming and sanction its vogue, as a consequence, the superior art of Speech and the male spirit of speculation, thus abandoned, will become, as we foresaw with Renan,9 more and more the exclusive prerogative of a smaller and smaller elite.
Thus, even before the art of photography blossomed, the art of painting cleverly took refuge in subjective expressions and abstractions.
So Glory be to the art of the image, the universal language of the common people! Let’s help this new source of power extend the boundaries of its empire to the limits of the earth so that its victory proves that this world is not dead—its virility seeming dead, who knows, it may still be fulfilled with the nourishment of this feminine form of play—and, from its surfeit, the intransigent lovers of speech will regain the freedom to employ, according to their own pleasure and not the demands of worldly appetite, the spirituality of that language which they say is what God employs “when he wants to explain himself to the Angels.”
For it would be unworthy of our past if we wept indefinitely over the extinction of that age in which we would be recognized as the incomparable successors of Philo, Menander, Cerinthe, and those who in Alexandrian times would proclaim, with the Trismegistus, the divine Hermes, the son of a Pleiade, and descendent of the stars, lucid words which, with a dialectic of diamonds, would overlay the infinite palimpsest of the sky.10
Let’s bend away from Hermes toward the protean figure of Silence.
. . . Above all, let’s not for a moment be discouraged by the fact that in this basically communal and scientific enterprise, improvisation counts for little compared to patience, discipline, and the minutiae which, all told, are nothing here but qualities.
And if two nations actually still outdistance us in the nascent cine-graphic art, let that not be cause for dissuading us from our efforts.11
But let’s recall now that once before, invaded by the auto-sacramental as well as the Comedia dell’Arte, if we at first retreated, we soon organized out of our sense of spirituality a systematic resistance and double offensive which was rewarded with a double victory, the one named Corneille, the other Molière.
Invaded anew by the activity of two friendly nations, and being at first, admittedly, retrograde, let’s organize a similar resistance which likewise will be crowned soon with a victory.
Thus a cinematic means of expression will be born, worthy of us who no longer believe, and worthy of Silence, this new god, in whom we are coming to believe.
MARCEL L’HERBIER (1890–1980) was a minor poet and aesthete who discovered the cinema first through seeing The Cheat, in 1916, and then through service in the French Army Film Unit. He wrote several scenarios for Eclipse—for instance, Mercanton and Hervil’s Le Torrent (1917) and Bouclette (1918)—before gaining financial support for his first film, Rose-France (1919).
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “Before the Screen: Hermes and Silence”
From “Devant l’écran: Hermès et le silence,” Le Temps (9 March 1918), 3.
UNDER THIS TITLE, M. Marcel L’Herbier has drawn up an indictment against the cinema, of which we offered a detailed resume two weeks ago and the complete text of which Mercure de France will publish soon.1 You will recall the singular case of this young poet who composes symbolic dramas for the screen, helps shoot and edit them, signs them, and exhibits them for the masses, all the while nonchalantly declaring that “the cinema, even in its very design and purpose, is the opposite of art.”
The attitude is cavalier. It will overjoy all the enemies of the ciné who have been waiting for just this sort of fugue from an unusually refined bookish type who has come into the land of light, into the coarse company of camera operators! Ultimately, from this condemnation, we conclude that the subtle aesthete has been captivated by a sport from which, in passing, we might well agree to free him, just to kill time, yet we refuse to take him seriously and treat his attitude with disdain once we find ourselves in good company.
This ingratitude will grieve the cinema enthusiasts who had greeted this chosen neophyte with the most open sympathy and entrusted him with a good deal of credit while waiting for him to plumb the mysteries of this new religion.
The impatient novitiate has not engaged in such sage caution. With no more than a glance, he has passed judgment on the situation and produced a definitive opinion on the future of a gospel of which he has read only the first page. Allow us to be astonished at the fickleness of his renunciation.
M. Marcel L’Herbier wishes to grant every quality and virtue to cinégraphie on the sole condition that it renounce forever its ambition to become an art. When he composes a film, he does not produce an artistic work, he says, but the work of a craftsman. He brings to his task merely a kind of dexterity, a professional ingenuity which is nothing more than the intelligence, imagination, or sensibility of a good typist or a skillful mechanic. Shall we defend his first works against himself? . . . No . . . Let his own cruelty declare him to be correct, for the moment.
But by what right does he take on the future? None of his subtle arguments should discourage honest seekers who divine in the cinégraphie a new, unexploited mode of expression, whose marvelous possibilities at this point it is highhanded to deny.
His objections, moreover, are not all that peremptory. It is difficult, for instance, to refuse the cinema the right to be accepted among the arts, under the silly pretext that it is not old enough and that it has nothing in common with the venerable arts which man discovered on his arrival on the planet.
In principle, we see no theoretical impossibility in the idea that a new art, completely unforeseen, may emerge tomorrow out of a discovery in physics or chemistry which will modify our perceptions and yield pleasures absolutely undreamt of today. But even while maintaining a prejudice against this “birth,” which seems to impress our poet, it is not impossible to have some regard for the commoners’ sport which he excludes from the temple of the Muses. Cinégraphie has an undeniable ancestry; it is a plastic art whose modes of execution have been transformed by science. The distance which separates it from sculpture and mime and drawing is no greater than that which separates a canvas by Claude Monet from the carved stones of the Ice Age or an orchestral score by Ravel from a melodic outpouring of Pithecanthropus.
Has science not completely recreated, over several centuries, what we designate under the immutable name of painting or music? Can one deny that such a prosaic intervention as placing in the hands of our Impressionists tubes of color which were lacking to the reindeer painters in the caves of the Madeleine2 or that placing beneath the fingers of our virtuosos a good grand piano instead of dried gourds has had an influence on our artistic sensibility? The application of light-sensitive celluloid and animated projection as well as the realization of “plastic harmonies” is but a stage in visual orchestration. Cinégraphie comes from an excellent family, and a poet can frequent it without losing face.
The following anathema seems, at first, more thoughtful and formidable. It’s developed with a charm and lyricism which render it especially dangerous. Art is, by definition, “beautiful lies”: with its absurd honesty, the screen is the negation of this for it is content to trace, photograph, and thus copy reality.
After such a statement, we would be quite disturbed about M. L’Herbier’s technical education if we didn’t give ideology its due in an indictment of this kind; and we couldn’t make much of a case for his future as a director. Well, what about it, does he actually think that the cinematographist is a copier? Does he really believe in the faithfulness of the camera? That would be a very unusual artlessness! But the screen thrives on “beautiful lies”; it creates nostalgic moonlit scenes out of bright, sunny Marseillean scenes skillfully tinted and toned by unscrupulous cameramen! The most sublime deceptions dominate this supple and wily art which, more than any other, excels in trickery and mystification. Everything is permitted, and reality poses no obstacle at all.
When the author of Le Torrent3 baptizes the cinema as “the machine that imprints life,” he did not provide himself with a worthy ideal. The formula is nice and catchy, but it is limiting to the point of perfidy. If M. Marcel L’Herbier adopts it for his works, we would have nothing more to expect from him. The film documentary, the faithful witness of our daily existence, can render us appreciable services by mechanically printing life; but cinegraphie is unworthy of our interest if it doesn’t become, by contrast, “the machine with which to imprint dreams.”
It has done so already. Intentionally or not, the cinematographist interprets his vision and incorporates into it a little of his feeling and thought. A landscape allows him to recognize himself. He transforms, recreates, and transfigures nature, according to his emotional state. Just as spontaneously as other artists, he knows how “to revisualize a sunset with the light and shadow of his soul.”
Place ten directors before the same landscape and give them the task of treating the same film scenario, with the same cast of actors, and you will obtain ten absolutely different results. Each of them will experience the character of the landscape in his own personal fashion and will choose an hour, a kind of lighting, a pattern of movement, according to his temperament. “Corot,” said Rodin, “saw goodness scattered over the crowns of trees, over the fields of grass, and over the surface of lakes; Millet saw suffering and resignation there.” Cinégraphie has its Corots and Millets!4
In order to impose his personal vision of beings and things on thousands of spectators, as he does each day, does not the painter of the screen remain faithful to the cult of Hermes and fill humanity with a generous outpouring of “beautiful lies”?
To concentrate all the force of feeling or thought on an inanimate object, to crystallize around an inert accessory scattered feelings, fleeting memories, passing dreams, is that the work of a craftsman or an artist? With a brioche and a flagon of wine, Chardin draws us far away from the subject of his canvas: these two talismans open up a world, invite us into a distinctive atmosphere, and reveal to us “the soul of a bourgeois, peaceful, honest, modest, and comfortable.”5
Cinégraphie can, in its own way, make inanimate objects speak and give laughter and tears to things. It knows, equally, how to draw an affecting harmony from a human face, effects of an extremely subtle power and charm. It lays out the whole gamut of expressions of trees, clouds, mountains, and seas. No element of beauty or passion is shielded from its penetrating glance. It can suggest, evoke, cast a spell; it can effect audacious associations of ideas through the rapprochement of images. It can mix up visual counterpoints with an irresistible force, impose harsh dissonances, or hold major chords. It can develop a feeling broadly or let it be read with a discreteness or lightness of touch that is almost imperceptible. It knows how to let a scherzo or andante soar with incredible suppleness, how to plunder the juice of every flower, like a bee, and distill it in the cells honeycombing a film. It recognizes no impossibilities of any kind, in neither space nor time.
Is it to create the work of an artist or an artisan that [cinégraphie] intelligently arranges all these magical forces so as to recreate a world as if seen “through a temperament”? Is it to create the work of an artisan that it adroitly cuts up and welds together the thousand tiny fragments of reality which are snatched from the forces of nature to constitute a deceptive “superreality,” more intense than the truth? Is it to create the work of an artisan that it brings together a hundred disparate “moments” of a woman’s suffering or love, fixed in motion, at the fleeting instant of their expressive paroxysm, and “adds them up” on the screen in order to achieve a movement, a gradual build up, a crescendo whose power the theater cannot encompass? . . .
But why multiply the examples? Does M. Marcel L’Herbier really need to be convinced of this blasphemy by a voice other than his own, since he isn’t afraid to exclaim: “Let us not turn away from the prodigious potential that cinégraphie encompasses, rather let us soon take charge of its faltering existence with our intelligence and trust. . . . Let us [direct it] toward an initially elementary symbolism which will, through more and more suggestive means, yet achieve the inherited grace of art and, what is especially significant, the tragic intention of things . . . ?”
For a simple artisan, this is an awfully noble task! If M. Marcel L’Herbier has decided to undertake it, we will no longer think of haggling over the title he attributes to himself. And we will not rank ourselves among the aestheticians who naively apply to cinegraphic interpretations the stupefying judgment of Pascal: “How vain is the painter who for his likenesses of things gains the respect of others, when he himself fails to respect the originals! . . .”
LOUIS DELLUC, “The Crowd”
From “La Foule,” Paris-Midi (24 August 1918), 2. Delluc’s essay was included (and expanded) in his second book on the cinema as “La Foule devant l’écran,” Photogénie (Paris: de Brunoff, 1920), 104–18.
AND THE CINEMA? Why can’t the “faithful and elegant clientele” of .the most typical cinemas of west Paris get by without watching [the most wretched] popular films? Likeable idlers, artists, prostitutes, industrialists, and a vast majority of the high bourgeoisie—all this satisfied and comfortable public, pared down by years of dazzling Parisian living— would seem compelled to suffer nothing less than what is beautiful or at least novel. The remarkable American films are celebrated there, and everything modern is truly a la mode in these select sanctuaries where the chairs, the usherettes, the bar, the orchestra, and the lighting testify to the most desirable breeding.
However, the worst serials are regularly posted on the marquees and, of course, provoke a great deal of laughter. From Pardaillan or Le Courrier de Lyon up to the recent Judexes,1 few weeks have gone by without a distinguished audience having spent an hour in joking, chuckling, and engaging in other ferocious convulsions. An admirable comic film, a Charlie Chaplin perhaps, disappoints their need for devastating mockery. And that is why we will see so-called popular films in such pleasant cinemas a long time from now, for they permit refined creatures to parade their superiority in public.
When [the French comic] Mascamor and his tragic cello note, whose effect was so amusing, were in vogue, the wealthy spectators were ruthlessly critical to their heart’s content. Have you noticed how this ruthlessness is irrelevant? Obviously prejudiced, this sort of public gets angry irritably, just as in farce, when it ought to do so spontaneously.
ANOTHER audience. Barkeepers, charcoal sellers, cinema proprietors from Paris and its suburbs flocked together for the preview of Pathé’s La Dixième Symphonie.
La Dixième Symphonie was the most publicized and awaited film by the young director, Abel Gance, whose first efforts-—Mater Dolorosa and La Zone de la mort—combined a dazzling audacity of technique and performance into an interesting, imaginative exaltation. Mater Dolorosa, which was no more than a rough sketch, has a genuine significance in the artistic history of our cinema.
Here and there, with flashes of power, La Dixième Symphonie asserts the same qualities of visual conception. Perhaps it would have been better if its obvious literary flavor were the result of passing glances rather than being the essential motor [of the film], yet nothing prevents us from thinking that some day Gance will be able to reestablish a proper equilibrium of relations. Even the force of the film’s qualities assures us of their future collusion.
That same authorial willfulness also insists on those errors which already appeared grave [in the earlier films]: a calculated disorder, a tendency to substitute for the basic detail, an overabundance of deflecting sensibility which sometimes stands in for sincere human or lyrical intensity.
Need I add that the cinema managers present at the Pathé preview the other day preferred these errors. One of them spoke to me enthusiastically about the chorus of maids that sobbed at the symphony’s audition. And another exclaimed about the symbolic dance inserted into the drama. He had understood nothing and would just as easily admire a gaudily colored calendar with the traditional figures of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. The epigraphs which served as intertitles and were signed—Chopin, Rostand, Charles Guérin, etc.—equally caused much weeping. I am not talking about the ray of sunlight on the Buddha, the white statue under the lamp, nor particularly about the sentimental or cynical complications of the characters who undoubtedly wasted away their personalities by frequenting [Oscar] Wilde or [Claude] Lorrain or a retrospective Baudelaire who never existed.2
Myself, I prefer Séverin-Mars’s hands on the piano and Séverin-Mars himself and his pensive and passionate sobriety; and the shudderings of Emmy Lynn, in all those moments when she is not thinking of the Victory at Samothrace or Sarah Bernhardt; yes, Emmy Lynn and her dazzling photogenic substance; and the old man who listens in a corner of the room, and the animals and flowers and “all that is passing away,” and . . . and . . . many other things.
But what I like is not what they like. And the mass public perhaps will agree with the cinema managers and applaud all that is willful and overwritten in the generous ensemble. Have not the best plays of Henry Bataille triumphed because of the morbid trickery and tortuous psychology of those fragments which, in fact, have tarnished their overall vivid, pathetic beauty?3
The important thing is that the author of La Dixième Symphonie not think exactly like this public. And that La Dixième Symphonie have a healthy following—and that they follow it.
ANOTHER audience. At the Saturday evening screening of the only cinema palace of the town, the Tout-Aurillac,4 a first-run and second-run house. Convalescents, billeted soldiers, respectable families, respectable young girls, the smoke from pipes, the ritornellos of an untuned piano, all in a deep, dark, cold cinema with Le Courrier de Washington, on the marquee.5
They also screened La Lumière qui s’éteint,6 an English film previewed in Paris last winter. Despite its almost unanimous lack of culture, the audience was deeply moved by the inner adventure of Masie, Dick, and Torp. And you know what became of the great Kipling’s work on film. An ordinary anecdote, badly decorated and photographed, with a sad, heavy actor playing Dick—when will we see Douglas Fairbanks in the part?—a fop as Torp, a fool as Masie, and unbelievable Arab battles in, let’s be blunt, a cardboard Sudanese Khartoum. There is a film to do over again.
Why was this rough peasant audience affected in front of this artless and unauthorized gaucherie? Will it understand even more when the same drama becomes a quite beautiful film?
IN A FRIGHTFULLY little cinema in Clermont-Fernand,7 I have seen what is called the popular sensibility. The screen’s charm has expanded the taste of the masses who have been so resistant to letting themselves be cultivated by any of the other arts. Several hundred workers and simple women were wrapped up in the delicacy of a little Japanese film, without action, comprised of gestures, flowers, and decorated papers. After which there was an episode from Coeur d’heroine with Irene Vernon Castle.8 You might think this audience was affected particularly by the drama or by the serial-like changes in fortune. They scarcely took any notice of that. For any hour of happiness, they lived only for the clothes of Irene Castle, the harmony of the settings, and the remarkable grace of the furniture.
Moreover, in another town and in another cinema, but in front of a very similar audience, Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor from The Cheat who was appearing in Ames d’étrangers, was followed, understood, and appreciated completely. The same film which I had seen in an elegant cinema in Paris had caused people to smile. And it is the elegant cinema that got it wrong.
Here is one of the most miraculous things about the fifth art. It touches the unanimity of the masses without demanding the cerebral preparation of a book or music. And that is why the French intellectual elite is protecting itself from admiring the cinema and especially from admitting its love for the cinema. What a revelation, right? To suddenly declare to the most cultured Latin types that they can admire something which has nothing to do with classical studies. The war has upset everything and perhaps will facilitate their quick and delighted accommodation, yet more than one cultured writer has whimpered to himself that it is rape or sacrilege or treason. Why not dream of entering the Polytechnique without examination?9 Why not do away with nine-tenths of the bureaucrats of our government?
Added to that is the anxiety of social tradition, so rigid and so blithely blind when it is a question of progress. Mirbeau10 fulminated against the misoneism of the gentlemen of his age. What would he say if he had spent his spare time away from pamphleteering at the cinema? At least he would have discovered with an exquisite astonishment the striking acuteness of the people, from the moment the screen comes alive.
This acuteness gains enormously from the fact that the people are timid. As long as he is not at a café-concert, the worker is reserved. Thus a performance at the Comédie-Française especially is only tolerable on Sunday evening, on condition that one is seated in the top gallery. Not being well brought up, the masses do not readily allow themselves to behave badly. There is no doubt, for instance, that if Mme Ida Rubenstein11 had reserved 3,000 seats for Parisian factory workers at the Châtelet during its performances of Verhaeren and D’Annuzio, she would have received interesting impressions and a proper homage. But those Parisians of the boulevards, invited yet unprepared according to the usual rules, simply gave vent to their freedom of mind by howling like animals. Such an attitude has the principal disadvantage of preventing them from hearing.
The popular public hears because it listens. It listens because it is silent. Silence genuinely helps in looking and seeing. To chatter away in front of a film is as imprudent for its comprehension as to chatter during Pelleas or Parsifal.12 The Opera subscribers who dash to the Colisee13 every Friday evening should be prevented from telling you whether a film is anything but a film. Their evening is spent in animated conversations, broken by sharp laughter, distinguished coughs, and sometimes ferocious yelpings when one or two loges have deigned to signal that the spectacle was especially ingenious. I would be desolate if they changed what is now a Friday ritual at the Colisee.
But I prefer quieter spectators. The best, to my amusement, I have found in the faubourgs. I say this without malice for they please me not only because of their silence and attention but also because of their acuteness, taste, and insight. Perhaps if others regarded the screen with attention and silence, they too would see this mysterious beauty which until now has exhibited such partiality in choosing its devotees. But I am not certain of that. Ah, how awkward it is to have to read so many books, especially when those who have stuffed their lives with literature embarrass themselves before the screen!
For a long time I have been going each week to the rue de la Fidelite, near the Gare de l’Est,14 into a little cinema frequented pell-mell by mechanics, pimps, laborers, and women warehouse packers. The appearance of the first Triangle films provoked a strange enthusiasm there. Yet these films are full of elegant subtleties. Those who remember Molly, La Lys et la rose, Peggy, Illusion, L’Autel de I’honneur16 know that their luxury was conceived so audaciously that it could have no relation to the people. Yet the people were delighted. At the most, they made fun of religious questions: The Christian, an English film drawn from the fine novel by Hall Caine, provoked much laughter; and Le Redemption de Panamint was only pardoned its orthodoxy thanks to the smile of Dustin Farnum.16
In the distant Olympic-Palace, at the bottom of the rue de Vanves, Ince’s complex, inspired film, La Mauvais Etoile, was received with such respect that I imagined the audience to be an apostolate which would salute it with a grand ovation.17 In the audience were men “in peaked caps” and women “without hats.”
On densely crowded Saturdays, in the Barbes-Palace,18 Douglas Fairbanks and his ingenious, sportive poetry have awakened a childlike happiness in spectators, as if those normally indifferent to art were discovering a new spark. Truly it is far from discouraging to be a spectator of such spectators.
Wild surges of passion? At the Lecourbe cinema, at the Grenelle, near the Mirabeau bridge, even at La Chapelle.19 And if we had the time—at the Place d’Italie, Levallois, Menilmontant, the avenue de Saint-Ouen . . .
LOUIS ARAGON, “On Decor”
Translated by Paul Hammond in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed., Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 28–31. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Du Décor,” in Le Film 131 (16 September 1918), 8–10.
ONTHE SCREEN the great demon with white teeth, bare arms, speaks an extraordinary language, the language of love. Men of all nations hear it and are more moved by the drama enacted before a wall decorated poetically with posters than by the tragedy we bid the subtlest actor perform before the showiest set. Here trompe l’oeil fails: naked sentiment triumphs, and the setting must equal it in poetic power to touch our heart.
The door of a bar that swings and on the window the capital letters of unreadable and marvelous words, or the vertiginous, thousand-eyed façade of the thirty-story house, or this rapturous display of tinned goods (what great painter has composed this?), or this counter with the row of bottles that makes you drunk just to look at it: resources so new that despite being repeated a hundred times they create a novel poetry for minds able to respond to it, and for which the ten or twelve stories told man since the discovery of fire and love will henceforth unfold without ever tiring the sensibilities of this time which twilights, gothic castles, and tales of peasant life have worn out.
For a long time we have followed our elder brothers on the corpses of other civilizations. Here is the time of life to come. No more do we go to Bayreuth or Ravenna with Barrés1 to be moved. The names of Toronto and Minneapolis seem more beautiful to us. Someone mentioned modern magic. How better to explain this superhuman, despotic power such elements exercise even on those who recognized them, elements till now decried by people of taste, and which are the most powerful on souls least sensitive to the enchantment of film-going?
Before the appearance of the cinematograph hardly any artist dared use the false harmony of machines and the obsessive beauty of commercial inscriptions, posters, evocative lettering, really common objects, everything that celebrates life, not some artificial convention that excludes corned beef and tins of polish. Today these courageous precursors, painters or poets, witness their own triumph, they who knew how to be moved by a newspaper or a packet of cigarettes, when the public thrills and communes with them before the kind of decor whose beauty they had predicted. They knew the fascination of hieroglyphs on walls which an angel scribbled at the end of the feast, or that ironic obsession imposed by destiny on the unfortunate hero’s travels. Those letters advertising a make of soap are the equivalent of characters on an obelisk or the inscription in a book of spells: they describe the fate of an era. We had already seen them as elements in the art of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris.2 Before them, Baudelaire knew the import you could draw from a sign. Alfred Jarry, the immortal author of Ubu roi, had used scraps of this modern poetry. But only the cinema which directly addresses the people could impose these new sources of human splendor on a rebellious humanity searching for its soul.
We must open our eyes in front of the screen, we must analyze the feeling that transports us, reason it out to discover the cause of that sublimation of ourselves. What new attraction do we, surfeited with theater, find in this black and white symphony, the poorest of means deprived of verbal giddiness and the stage’s perspective? It isn’t the sight of eternally similar passions, nor—as one would have liked to believe—the faithful reproduction of a nature the Thomas Cook Agency3 puts within our reach, but the magnification of the kinds of objects that, without artifice, our feeble mind can raise up to the superior life of poetry. The proof of this lies in the pitiful boredom of films that draw the elements of their lyricism from the shabby arsenal of old poetic ideas, already known and patented: historical films, films in which lovers die of moonlight, mountain, and ocean, exotic films, films born of all the old conventions. All our emotion exists for those dear old American adventure films that speak of daily life and manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that’s the horizon of a desk, the terrible unfolding telegraphic tape with magic ciphers that enrich or ruin bankers. Oh! that grid of a wall in The Wolves4 which the shirt-sleeved stockbroker wrote the latest prices on! And that contraption Charlie Chaplin struggled with in The Firemanl
Poets without being artists, children sometimes fix their attention on an object to the point where their concentration makes it grow larger, grow so much it completely occupies their visual field, assumes a mysterious aspect and loses all relation to its purpose. Or they repeat a word endlessly, so often it divests itself of meaning and becomes a poignant and pointless sound that makes them cry. Likewise on the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings. The theater is powerless where such emotive concentration is concerned.
To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to willfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two properties that help make cinematic decor the adequate setting of modern beauty.
If today the cinema does not always show itself to be the powerful evocator it might be, even in the best of those American films that enable a screen poetry to be redeemed from the farrago of theatrical adaptations, it is because the metteurs en scène, though sometimes possessed of a keen sense of its beauty, do not recognise its philosophic qualities. I would hope a filmmaker were a poet and a philosopher, and a spectator who judges his own work as well. Fully to appreciate, say, Chaplin’s The Vagabond, I think it is indispensable to know and love Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” paintings, in which slim-hipped Harlequins watch too-upright women comb their hair, to have read Kant and Nietzsche, and to believe one’s soul is loftier than other men’s. You’re wasting your time watching Mon gentilhomme batailleur if you haven’t first read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Philosophy of Furniture,” and if you don’t know The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym what pleasure can you take in the Naufrage de l’Alden-Bess?5 Watch a thousand imperfect films with this aesthetic in mind, then, and only then, seek to extract beauty from them, these synthetic elements for a better mise en scène. Films are the only film school, remember that. It’s there you’ll find useful material, providing that you can pick it out. This innovation isn’t so presumptuous: Charlie Chaplin fulfills the conditions I’d like to see insisted on. If you need a model, look to him. He alone has sought the intimate sense of cinema and, endlessly persevering in his endeavours, he has drawn comedy towards the absurd and the tragic with equal inspiration. The elements of the decor which surround Charlie’s persona participate intimately in the action: nothing is useless there and nothing indispensable. The decor is Charlie’s very vision of the world which, together with the discovery of the mechanical and its laws, haunts the hero to such an extent that by an inversion of values each inanimate object becomes a living thing for him, each human person a dummy whose starting-handle must be found. Drama or comedy, depending on the spectator, the action is restricted to the struggle between the external world and man. The latter seeks to go beyond appearances, or let himself be duped by them in turn, and by this fact unleashes a thousand social cataclysms, the outcomes of some changes or other of decor. I insist you study the composition of the decor in a Chaplin film.
Let the cinema take care: it is fine to be deprived of everything verbal, but art must take the place of speech and that entails something more than the exact representation of life. It is its transposition following a superior sensibility. Cinema, master of all its distortions, has already timidly tried this method, which seduced all our great painters after Ingres. An independent spirit has become its defender in audacious projects, as yet unrealizable. But the cinema tends to remain a succession of photographs. The essential “cinegraphic” is not the beautiful shot: hence I would violently condemn those Italian films which have had their day and whose poetic nonvalue and exultant nullity is obvious to us now. To seek out filmmakers possessed of an aesthetic and a sense of beauty is not enough: this would get us nowhere, we would soon be left out in the cold. We need a new, audacious aesthetic, a sense of modern beauty. On this understanding the cinema will rid itself of all the old, impure, poisonous alloy that links it to a theater whose indomitable enemy it is.
It is vital that cinema has a place in the artistic avant garde’s preoccupations. They have designers, painters, sculptors. Appeal must be made to them if one wants to bring some purity to the art of movement and light. One wants to leave it to academicians, to johnny-come-lately actors, and that’s madness, anachronistic. This art is too deeply of this time to leave its future to the men of yesterday. Look ahead for support. And don’t be afraid to offend the public who have indulged you up to now. I know those to whom this task falls must expect incomprehension, scorn, hatred. But that should not put them off. What a beautiful thing a film barracked by the crowd is! I have only ever heard the public laugh at the cinema. It is time someone slapped the public’s face to see if it has blood under its skin. The consecration of catcalls that will gain cinema the respect of people of feeling is still missing. Get it, and the purity that attracts spittle emerges at last! When, before the naked screen lit by the projector’s solitary beam, will we have that sense of formidable virginity,
The white awareness of our canvas?6
O purity, purity!
Louis ARAGON (1897–1982) was a young writer whose first published essay and poem appeared in Le Film. After the war, he gained some notoriety as a novelist, poet, and editor, first as a leader of the Surrealist movement and then as a member of the French Communist Party.
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “Before the Screen: La Dixième Symphonie”
From “Devant l’écran: La Dixième Symphonie,” Le Temps (6 November 1918), 3.
THIS FILM CRITIC has been invited to give his opinion of a new French film which represents, so we are told, the best artistic effort of the season: La Dixième Symphonie directed by Abel Gance and enacted by Emmy Lynn, Séverin-Mars, Toulout, Lefaur, and other actors and actresses of genuine talent. Because of its fine qualities as well as its numerous faults, this film is essentially representative enough to allow me to confirm, with the aid of specific examples, certain objections against the current direction of the silent art which have been growing in number.
Abel Gance is both the “baby in the family” and the “ace in the hole” of French filmmaking. He’s a young actor who once briefly crossed the stage and then found his way into the cinema studios. He’s an aesthete, a seeker, a man of discerning mind, full of fine visions, with a keen eye for ingenious details and rich lighting effects. He loves his art with a passion; he dreams of ennobling it with his discoveries—in collaboration with a young virtuoso, the cameraman Burel, his valued companion in combat; and he has already made films which mark a distinctive advance in our current production.
Yet for reasons which are hardly mysterious, the producers among us are not accustomed to supplying their embroiderers with the costly materials on which to design their arabesques. Instead, the embroiderer must manufacture the material himself. Abel Gance, who is a subtle embroidery craftsman, has not yet found on his loom enough sumptuous brocade worthy of being accentuated with filigrees of gold, glass beads, satin, and twisted silver thread. Thus he himself has been forced to weave his own canvas, in order to be able to execute his work.
Could he dispense with doing that? I don’t know. But it is obvious— and I believe he is intelligent enough to agree with this graciously—that this never has been his forte. Here I touch on the fundamental problem in the current conditions of our cinema. The film producers have never understood that an illuminator of manuscripts is never a dramatic author, that a delicately skillful typesetter can never be taken for a poet, that a prestigious pianist is hardly ever a composer of genius. In the cinema, the pianist must compose his own score, the typesetter must write his own verse, the decorator must construct his own novels and dramas. We are in the land of “imitation”!
Abel Gance’s dramaturgy is moving in its candor and contrivance. Once again, I don’t doubt that he would be the first to smile. Impatient to display his virtuosity as a performer, he has improvised, as he went along, a theme which allowed him to execute his variations and round off his arpeggios. But I cannot call this “musical.” And I believe it is my duty to say so very clearly, not only because it is distressing to see a young artist of merit go astray, but because the confusion which is emerging between the music of the pianist and the music of the composer tends to be detrimental to the latter. Our producers are satisfied too easily with the former. Just look at how, after Mater Dolorosa, La Zone de la mort, and La Dixième Symphonie, they have been determined to make Abel Gance the champion of the French scenario by staking a critical amount [of money and prestige] on his “J’Accuse!” and on his “serial social drama” [Ecco Homo], and you will realize the peril is serious enough to be denounced.
I have to say this, and even insist on it, at the moment when La Dixième Symphonie is about to appear on our screens, and as I invite artists, novelists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, and musicians to carefully study this distinctive work. The film is of genuine interest and may attract some very valuable collaborators to cinégraphie if it is understood in advance that there is no need to dwell on its scenario, which is an ordinary melodrama of the kind most current, with its drawing room brigand, a bully and blackmailer, its revolver shots, its letters of exposure, its summary and incoherent psychology, and its improbable conventions.
The scenario of La Dixième Symphonie cannot withstand the test of narrative analysis. . . . It is hardly an acceptable formula for the French scenario. However, the film is a magesterial lesson m cinégraphie. It provides us with an extremely rich and subtle French formula of expression and “photo-mimic” language. To the screen’s detractors it will clearly demonstrate how supple, flexible, and profound the keyboard of this great organ of vision can be under the fingers of a fine organist of light.
Abel Gance has asserted himself as a consummate virtuoso in the execution of this work. His technical skill is excellent and allows for the subtlest interpretations. It will reconcile more than one of its adversaries to animated photography. It will prove to the writers and poets who most disdain the screen that cinégraphie can express almost anything, and with eloquence and lyricism. It would be good to be able to underline each expressive discovery, each experiment in nuance, each luminous harmonization. To show that this young translator, who is still being held up at the crossroads of aestheticism, is en route toward beauty. This stopping point is decisive. Go see the ingenious visual and emotional transpositions of the andante and scherzo of the symphony revealed in the composer’s study; go see those tiny dream landscapes, those glades where the fairies dance in robes of moonlight, airy and immaterial as will-o-the-wisps. Here even now is an exploration of the subconscious; here is an attempt at a “correspondence” which opens onto fruitful paths. One senses that some day one might photograph the music of the soul and fix its changing visage on the screen in rhythmic images. The frontiers of the silent art are being extended, the glimmers of light are growing, the windows are opening.
Despite the flaws in its scenario, this film addresses and answers most of the objections made by the enemies of the French cinema. It demonstrates that we have a technical skill as supple as that of the Americans, but more subtle and psychological in its suggestions. It attests to the fact that we also have actors worthy of the greatest missions. . . .
We have in hand now all the weapons that will permit us to defend the French cinema against its foreign competition. . . .
LOUIS DELLUC, “Cinema: The Cold Deck”
From “Cinéma: Grand Frère” Paris-Midi (14 and 17 February 1919), 2.
The Cold Deck, an American film with Rio Jim (Pathé).1 William Hart, the popular Rio Jim, is the tragedian of the cinema. He mounts a horse much like Mounet-Sully descends a staircase. . . .
In his domain, William Hart has the same godlike serenity and the same violent ways. He is no ordinary cowboy of the circus or of a thousand and one dashed-off films. He is the synthesis of that plastic beauty which marks the schematic and almost stylized Far West. Transcending the specific details of his characters, William Hart reveals a profoundness of spirit. They used to call him “the man from nowhere.”2 What a lovely title! We never know where Rio Jim comes from. He just passes through. He crosses the West—and the West is so huge. He arrives on horseback. He leaps down onto the ground where other men live. Generally, the time that he remains there is devoted to suffering, that is, to loving. When his forehead has been ravaged enough, his fingers tortured, and all his cigarettes crushed out, he refuses to continue to suffer on earth or in an enclosed room—he mounts his horse again and, that done, disappears. His departure can last through an entire film. And so his equestrian prowess lives on. The paradox of his mad rides, his responsibilities as a bandit or apostle, his constant clearing out, all give us a tremendous lift. It seems we breathe better when Rio Jim makes off on his horse across the valley.
Go see The Cold Deck, this beautiful American film—dazzling, vivid, strange—where there are amusing costumes, reconstructed buildings done with a sense of taste and feeling, endless vistas with better horses than can be found anywhere else (my compliments)—and William Hart.
NEVER HAS William Hart been so nobly tragic and so simply grandiose. He emerges in the milieu of the usual crowds and decors of this stylized Far West of the cinema, where the splendid fatalism of Sophocles comes alive for us—but it is still too early to say whether the cinema will have as intense a presence as the great Greek spectacles which whole peoples attended. The gold miners, the improvised town, the ranch and mountain, the saloon, the dancing couples, the card tables, the alcohol, the horses— the mystery of Hart looms over all this and makes everything as mysterious as he is.
The stagecoach runs like a great insect over partially drifted roads. Trees serve for bridges. Ravines gobble up horses. People dance back to back and drink eyeball to eyeball. The sheriff, a thin, nervous bird of prey turned civil servant, is encamped there where his silhouette can be impressive. The little sister, clothed in old-fashioned flowery dresses, alights from a distant bourgeois country. The croupiers—tall dandies in damask waistcoats, huge cuffs, embroidered shirtfronts, and ironic bow ties—coldly watch the gold change pockets and cheat when necessary. Brutes fling glasses across the room, which spill in rainbow showers over the bystanders.
The dancing girl, the enigmatic lover of the hero, wraps her handsome brown body in a beautiful black shawl. But it’s a blonde that he will fall in love with. Jealousy ravages the camp. Sickness takes the little sister. Hart passes through indifference, love, pity, arrogance, and ruin. He invokes a God in whom he doesn’t believe, with the face of a martyr and the arms of Christ—and he races off to attack the stagecoach. He kills and plunders, the little sister is dead, the father of the blonde is assassinated, the assassin will be hung, the beautiful dancing girl will leave the country, and Hart will remain on the mountain with his memories and his future—since the little blonde will marry him. But his horse is dead.
I believe that the cinema exists.
JEAN COCTEAU, “Carte Blanche”
From “Carte blanche,” Paris-Midi (28 April and 12 May 1919), 2.
FROM THE TIME of its discovery, the cinema was made to serve old ideas and was put in the hands of merchants who held it back. They photographed theater. But America made films in which theater and photography slowly gave way to a new form because they were better equipped than we were and they acted like engineeers who instead of stripping the airplane completely of its wings simply reduced them slightly.
Events occur in succession—interlocked, superimposed—and overrun the text. Simultaneous action transports us from one end of the earth to the other; restores a detail, as in a magnifying glass, to its proper place in the scenario; makes a hand or foot intervene like a character; takes us under the table where they are playing tricks on a giant figure whose mind can be read in its eyes like a schoolbook alphabet.
For, if the theater is the art of memorable lines, where gesture and voice take the place of anything the public would have to ascertain in the actor’s eyes, the cinema, by contrast, is the art of nuances where the actor is released from the text and finds a freedom and responsibility previously unknown.
Certain photographs foreshadowed the seductive modeling of actual films. Gaugin’s soft, pale paintings, photographed by M. Druet, took on the impact of bas-reliefs. Thanks to skillful lighting, the actors of the cinema are veritable statues in motion. At the end of a cinema program, figures in the crowd outside seem small and lackluster. We remember an alabaster race of beings as if glowing from within. On the screen, enormous objects become superb. A sort of moonlight sculpts a telephone, a revolver, a hand of cards, an automobile. We believe we are seeing them for the first time.
I want disinterested artists to exploit perspective, slow motion, fast motion, reverse motion, an unknown world onto which chance often opens the door. As a new means of expression, the cinema will serve a new art and impose new conventions, for art is a play of conventions which are transformed to the point where the players grow tired. We will see the architecture of forms, volumes, shadows, and planes come alive, evoking life far better than any essentially inexact performance of reality can.
While awaiting this spectacle, be content with what is offered and seek out the best. The best, uncontestably, is Charlie Chaplin. His films have no rivals—neither the theater film where the spectator has the impression of being deaf, nor the Far West film where the landscape blends in with the drama, nor the serial where mysterious men, sons of Eugène Sue, Dumas, and Edison, do good and evil under the cape of Rodolphe and with the fortune of Monte-Cristo.1
Chaplin is the modern Punch. He addresses all of us, everywhere. Esperanto laughter. Each of us gets his kicks for different reasons. With Chaplin’s help, I’m sure, we could raise the tower of Babel. While he never underlines any of the effects, such as those quick-witted feats which he ceaselessly comes up with, the others have to be satisfied with pratfalls.
His most recent film, Sous les armes [1918], would be a masterpiece if they had not diminished his comic performance by enclosing it within a dream.2
There’s no way to describe this film which moves along like a drum roll, where the decors and extras fit in with nary a false note. But I salute, in passing, this one fable of the war: Chariot does reconnaissance, camouflaged as a tree. They discover him. He escapes with a formidable enemy close on his heels. The canter of a little tree that hops about in the forest and plays hide and seek with a huge Wotan, it’s a hoot!
“The light spirit,” we see, vanquishes “the gross one.”
HAVE YOU seen the American film, Carmen du Klondyke, directed by M. Ince?31 offer it not as an example of plotting, but because it contains a masterly scene: the struggle between two men at night, in a torrential rain, in the light of arc lamps.
In the middle of a drenched, blinded, terrified crowd, the two men roll about in the deep mud and water. To follow them, the camera recoils, approaches, and slides away. We watch as if through the very eyes of the tug of war. Two madmen splash down and rise up again, as if coated in nickel, and reach out grasping to kill one another. Are they kingfishers, seals, lunar men, or Jacob and the Angel?
Is this a Buddha, this great naked body that staggers to its knees and dies like a whole school of fish in a slurry of mercury?
M. Ince can be proud, for such a spectacle is as memorable as the most beautiful books in the world.
JEAN COCTEAU (1889–1963) was a rising young poet, lyricist, playwright, and literary entrepreneur who retreated after the “scandal” of the Diaghiliev-Cocteau-Picasso-Satie Parade (1917) to the more conventional and patriotic Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918). His interest in the cinema, evidenced here and in several earlier poems, remained dormant throughout the 1920s, as he concentrated on his work in the theater.
MARCEL GROMAIRE, “A Painter’s Ideas about the Cinema”
Translated by Stuart Liebman in Motion Picture 1.2 (Fall 1986), 4–5. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Idées d’un peinture sur le cinéma,” Le Cra-pouillot 1–6 (1 April-26 June 1919), reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, éd., Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Corréa, 1946), 239–49.
I. TRANSPOSITION
WHILE OBSERVING any scene, a painter’s emotions will be different than a sculptor’s and sometimes contrary to those of a poet. Each will transpose his perceptions of this ordinary scene either into smooth plastic forms, into modeled spatial forms, or into lyrical verse. The cinematic composer, of course, should respond to the changing plastic forms of this same spectacle; whereas the painter synthesizes the continuous movement into stable form, the cinema enables one to organize this movement until the desired expressive effect is achieved, and all this in front of the spectator’s very eyes. Because the cinema is primarily visual. What will be the lyric plastic form of cinema, in short, its own proper language? In what way does it share characteristics of painting, of the theater, of dance, and in what way will it be absolutely new? That is our question.
What method should be chosen to transpose commonplace sights into cinema? Up till now, the tendency has been to proceed by way of a scenario to the film. What I mean is that the author of the scenario is in general unfamiliar with the director and the actors, or even misunderstands their purpose. Now, the three essential factors of a film, its “living material,” are the director, the actors, and the landscape. One must proceed by using them as the basis of the imagined form; the film must be conceived expressly for them! One does not merely adapt a literary work for the cinema. If one wishes to make a film of Don Quixote, then in order not to betray Cervantes’ intentions, one must disregard the letter and compose according to the spirit of the book, recasting it entirely, just as Molière did with the classics. The only thing that matters is what is created; what excites us is the creation. Here’s another object lesson: Charlie Chaplin, who up till now has been the only one with genius enough to really come alive on screen, often performs in a desert; he has not been well served by his surroundings because the landscape is not selected expressly for him.
The landscape must be transposed. One must choose! On screen, a detail suffices to suggest the whole or to be the leitmotif of a film. Light is a first-class actor, but our film profiteers only imagine colored picture-postcards for tourists. Look at a Rembrandt, or just throw the windows wide open!
One must transpose the characters, strip what is merely adventitious from them, and create types (this has been done in burlesque comedy). Greek actors carried a mask and their physical appearance confirmed their moral identity; we must study the art of the English clown who performs without speaking; let’s study the so-called deformations of modern painters that are really powerful affirmations; on screen we must organize the characters’ entrances, time them, and place them correctly within the set and the surroundings. The cinema was a skeleton; let’s put some muscle on it!
Before us, an unexplored artistic province is opening up, a strange province inhabited by machines, where life moves continually and hurries toward unbounded horizons. It [the cinema] is an essentially modern art because it is mobile and restless and as multifaceted as a democracy. A film is a poem developing in provisional phrases, in measured waves; it ends and starts anew without suffering any loss of unity. Thanks to the cinema, I saw a rose blossom. It was an extremely beautiful sight that our film producers ought to think deeply about.
II. COLOR
Here, even more than in painting, color means light. Color in cinema is closely related to color in engraving; before putting a film together, it would be a good idea to leaf through the etchings of Rembrandt or Claude Lorrain. No one would dispute how manifold—from gay to tragic—the expressions of light are. In addition, one must emphasize that these expressions can be intensified to such a degree that the other means would be little more than a muted accompaniment: light explodes like a powerful song; it constitutes the whole film; all of the drama depends on it. I remember a mediocre film, Le Coupable, adapted from Coppee.1 The scene of the assassination, even though it was extremely brief, derived all its tragic overtones from the fall of a lamp (looming dark shots crossed by vibrating lights) followed by diffuse light. This very successful scene overwhelmed the others.
Impressionism, highly questionable in painting,’ is here logical since cinema proceeds by a process of decomposition. We can follow the sun’s course across the “Haystacks” of Claude Monet, and the sunlight will be the whole show. Outdoors, light is brutal and shimmering. The chiaroscuro in which we spend three quarters of our lives is infinitely rich. Woefully inadequate photographers instinctively attempt to imitate chiaroscuro by shooting out of focus. They uncomprehendingly intuit how alive the atmosphere is. There are dense atmospheres, as milky or as metallic as an evening sky. We must conjure up the very air in which the characters move; we must really bathe them in it; let them appear to emerge from narrow, luminous curtains or from rich draperies of shadow. Let the interiors be intentionally furnished with blacks and shades of gray; reflected light can eliminate long speeches; different materials can make tones into closely related, equivalent, or contrasting luminous forms.
And light reflected off water and underwater visions, these so to speak subconscious dramas, what has been done with them up till now? What “Extraordinary Tales” Edgar Poe would have conceived! And artificial light, and the sudden luminous explosions with fantastic shadows, where light seems to escape from the darkness and do battle with it!
On screen, a boundless depth is at our disposal. In successive shots, light surges toward the horizon. The moving shots surmount each other and fancifully change colors; one could say it is like the successive panels of an imaginary silken umbrella speaking a luminous language.
More than any sentimental libretto, color is the soul of cinema. Imagine a film: some exceptional characters, a few actions, a unity of place. The drama of light would be everything. How classical!
III. FORM, MOVEMENT
If color is the soul of film, moving form is its essential logic, the implacable intellectual basis constitutive of its nature as a work of art. Here everything is new. With the exception of the dance, no other art form affects us through moving plastic forms. Here, the entire spectacle moves; the forms must be orchestrated. The most ingenious librettos are of little value if they are not conceived as moving structures. Let us replace the poor written explanations and the outmoded romanticism of current performance styles with the drama of these unknown forces and the search for new relationships.
The aesthetic emotion is constituted above all by surprise; here, the spectacle unfolds in fleeting phrases; they must continually be “nourished” with unexpected discoveries. Now, to modify the structures, one must continually find new ones. What an unlimited wealth of combinations there are! The shots combine, are superimposed, or are contrasted with each other in ways varying in meter and color, and each meter follows a special path, be it of length or depth through foreshortening. In the primitive cinema of today, confusion reigns; the eye loses itself in a mad jumble uncontrolled by any idea. One must simplify and select. On screen, everything matters just as much as it does on a painted surface. A gesture that is sketched and then broken off or one that is too hurried ruins the rest. Stressing the way a gesture develops, or highlighting the expressive motif of a landscape shows it in a clear and convincing way. Slow motion will become a standard strategy. Because of this, an author must adopt a different manner than he does for the theater, and he must also create a new sign language in conformity with the plasticity proper to cinema. One may start with a slow movement as a theme for an entire section or arrive at it as a conclusion. A single movement will become reason enough for a scene. And let’s not forget the role of color! I do not want in any way to diminish the importance of the story for a moment, but it must be translated into vibrant plastic form. I recognize very clearly the danger of a deadly conventionality if the performers and the director are people of meager talents. But academicism is only a danger for those who accede to it. Our investigations are too many and too varied to become bogged down in a system. Who, therefore, will try to interpret our ordinary gestures? They are as complex as words and as rich in nuances. Marvelous animated plastic forms surround us. And the modern world so abounds in sets possessing such simple grandeur that it will be enough to have them appear, ready for all kinds of syntheses.
Just as the dispositions of gestures, shots and their meters are inexhaustible, we must imagine how much a subject’s scale can lend a great variety of expressiveness to the forms. When magnified or reduced in scale, the same object offers tremendous contrasts, and imagining an unusual film in the spirit of Rabelais, one conceived in terms large- and small-scale images, gives me great pleasure.
IV. DRAMA
Moving plastic forms, the language of cinema, require the symbolism of a libretto to reenforce the eloquence of the images. I do not use “imagistic language” in a metaphorical sense. New relationships between the story and the image must be found. These relationships will constitute expressive symbols. In the cinema, one will not succeed in expressing abstract ideas such as Love or Will by means of scenes modeled after those in the theater; they must be translated into clear symbols specially conceived for moving plastic forms.
The cinema, like music, is an autonomous art. To imagine a film based on a literary work is truly to compose an opera for the eyes, as different in nature from the work originally inspiring it as a musical opera drawn from the same work. Since visual music, composed of colors and forms, has an infinite number of combinations at its disposal, the feelings to be translated must be presented in terms of qualitatively very varied symbols. Ibsen calls for symbols translatable into color. Racine insists upon majestic symbols translatable into noble forms.
If one wishes to conjure up the powerful figure of King Lear in the cinema and, in order not to be unfaithful to Shakespeare, to lose as little of his expressive intensity as possible, one must choose the symbols best conveying the essence of his character. If necessary, they must be created. A secondary character who cannot be translated into cinematic terms, but who represents a feeling, will be profitably replaced by an equivalent symbol. For example, the character of Gloucester, who to some degree parallels the character of Lear and reenforces his actions, may be evoked by some symbolic episodes that simplify the story and thereby translate Shakespeare’s conception more faithfully. King Lear would be the dominant character, moving and multifaceted, while his three daughters, distant and synthetic characters, would appear as the causes of the actions, symbolic motives of the king’s deeds. Lear’s companions, Kent and the Fool, the first honesty and courage, the other irony and madness, would afford a perpetual commentary on him. At the end of the play, Cordelia’s death is an image of tragic despair, a perfect evocation of the phrase: “The weight of this sad time . . .” Lear’s curses, the Fool’s rejoinders, are immediately translatable into images, and numerous symbols of this sort will permit written captions to be reduced to a minimum. The image must be self-explanatory. “Every inch-inch [sic] a king. . .”—it is pointless to write this phrase on screen. The forms alone must convey the meaning. And what is more, don’t forget the effects that can be achieved by using slow motion.
Remember that in the cinema, the sets are more important than in the theater, and that elevated to the role of an actor, they may replace secondary human characters. The savage heath and the relentless storm are integral parts of Lear’s madness. In the same way, the costumes are first and foremost bits of black and white color that ought to reflect his tragic madness or the serenity of destiny. Finally, objects have a definite role to play. In the first act, the map of the kingdom is the symbol of the partition. And the crown is broken in two.
VI. COMEDY
Here the clarity of symbols must permit the total elimination of written captions. They break up the action and add nothing to it. In cinematic comedy or farce, the “words” must be translated into images full of wit. In this regard, Charlie Chaplin is the inspired precursor of the new cinema. Psychologically, he seems very human, but the performance of this malicious and adroit little fellow who triumphs over brute force is very skillful. Chariot performs for the cinema. Conceived for the screen, his movements fluctuate humorously according to the rhythm of successive images, and they are broken down into simple elements. Chariot performs with his whole body. His impassive face intermittently assumes a more pronounced expression; a grimace may underscore [the feeling], but his body expresses the nuances. One must regret that an actor of such power is not better supported; each of his co-actors ought to devise characters as simple and as stylized as possible.
In a film lacking a dominant actor, it is even more necessary to compose in this manner so that each character, by being subordinated to the ensemble, will reenforce the unity of the whole and will not destroy the desired effect.
Up till now, have any comic landscapes or interiors ever been chosen? The mediocre Rigadin performs amid furnishings lacking any character or in impersonal landscapes; and yet, there are certain gardens in the Parisian suburbs that Bouvard and Pecuchet would be proud of.2 We must create sets for every play! In today’s cinema, lyricism and humor are non-existent.
On screen, the costumes are a judicious assemblage of whites and blacks, and must lend themselves to every possible plastic arrangement. Costumes will be specially conceived for a specific film and will play a role. Depending on the role to be performed, some will use costumes made of painted paper decorated with comic camouflage that will integrate the actor with the landscape; fantastic armor made of heavy or extremely flowing materials will be used. Depending on the film, masks, which have recently reappeared in the theater, will be similar to those used in Aunt Sally games, to those in Guignol, or to those on the comic sculptures of our ancient stonecutters. There will be hieratic characters—objects in the role of characters—and whirling characters, all used to emphasize some major types drawn from contemporary life and then stylized.
This alliance between reality and fantasy, the anxiety-less breaking of the state of equilibrium that provokes laughter, can also be found in objects. In contemporary cinema, objects don’t count. Now, isn’t it obvious that secondary scenes can be performed by “still-life” images? Props must be specially created for them by transforming objects from everyday life. Couldn’t delicious grotesque effects be developed from a Henry the Second style buffet in the Saint Antoine quarter whose inadequacies could be magnified?3 If they were made conspicuous, the trashy ornaments and furnishings would be jarring to the extent that they highlight a contemporary vice. Certain beautiful objects, also transformed and appearing in separate scenes, would be terrific witnesses for the prosecution.
VI. IMAGES
I said before that a certain sort of impressionism was legitimate in cinema; needless to say, this applies only to the analytic procedures by which the mind organizes successive images. But each image, taken by itself, must be a powerful synthesis. Aside from the work of several masters, Impressionism is merely a hoarding of bric-a-brac. Now, on screen as on canvas, a lofty idea needs a grand and restrained expression. One must eliminate everything that adds nothing, and move away from drab realism. Progress will require a great deal of method and logic.
If they are well conceived, films lacking a comic or tragic story will delight spectators. The pure image, the beautiful image, will originate in contemporary documentary films, but it will be enriched by imaginative and formal elements. There can be no art without transposition. Once transposed, any scene from life possesses an extraordinary richness, and in this respect cinema has no limits; it can examine everything, organize the whole and evoke everything from microscopic visions to intimate or colossal landscapes in color and plastic form. One can discover original relationships between the multifarious manifestations of life. What contemporary cinema lacks most is the masterful intelligence of a creator of images.
Even though the value of cartoons depends on the cartoonist, from now on we can, thanks to them, discern a new aesthetic. Cartoons will no longer necessarily be caricatures; henceforth, cartoonists will contrive moving arabesques, either purely ornamental or syntheses of human or animal movements. Only here will color be possible because coloring photographic images only leads to incorrect tonalities without any meaning. In my opinion, color cartoons can become as remarkable and impressive as stained glass, as quaint as colored magic lantern slides or “Images d’Epinal.” But it is important not to confuse photographic color, black and white, with colors that express something else; it is pointless once more to repeat the pitiful attempt at coloring etchings in another domain.
It might be amusing to combine photography and drawing in the same film, and if necessary in the same image, in order to highlight the organization of imaginative and documentary elements. Moreover, this would be an exceptional way to avoid conventionality. Curiosity will also lead us to color images in a single tint with harmonies, dissonances, and nuanced shades accompanying the images for the entire length of the film.
Finally, were it not for the puritanical hypocrisy of our times, disconcerting enough because of the various forms it assumes, it may be desirable to extract many different harmonious effects from the nude. The slow-motion camera has already produced images of athletic exercises that present the gracefulness of antiquity vainly sought in M. Duncan’s pastiches.4
VII. CONCLUSION
Impressionism in the form of Neo-Cubism continues to exist and hinders the realization of any great pictorial achievements. Will the cinema liberate painting by attracting all those formal innovators for whom painting is not right? Many investigations, that inevitably remain mere investigations in painting, can be brought to fruition in cinema. The art of animated plastic forms ought to tempt the more or less avowed adepts of Futurism, provided, however, that their Futurism remains a means, and that they really want to wake up and contemplate the present, to become aware of the real beauty of forms, and to recognize the legitimacy of the idea of perfection.
From the simple fact of a new form of plastic expression, new values will be created. The new cinema will satisfy our need for an art more strictly allied with modern dynamism, an art possessing the elegantly cerebral character of a mathematical proof. The Futurists will no longer be able to rest content with childishly indicating the givens of a problem on canvas: they will have to express their ideas with help of mechanical movement. And maybe then they will take into account that, if an art is to be born, animated sculpture, like static sculpture, requires beautiful forms, that is, forms profoundly satisfying the rational mind as well as forms that are expressive, that is, forms that logically satisfy one’s feelings. The taste for the bizarre is already falling out of fashion. The world needs to be reassured; it has known too much anguish not to desire peace, and the serenity of Titian is far more contemporary in spirit than the pedantry of some aesthete who likes facile advertisements. Whether some want it or not, we are proceeding towards a classical art (though one far, far from the Institute [de Beaux Arts]). The new cinema will be classical or will not be.
The cinema can transport ideas from one end of the world to the other. It has the gift of ubiquity and the power to speak directly to the masses. In this respect, its discovery can be compared to that of printing; with this difference, however, and it is important, that printing came along at a time when literary works already existed while the cinema still awaits its poet.
May art no longer be a privilege. The common folk are marvelously responsive. For everyone’s health, art must be experienced by everyone. That beauty is not a dream, that the richness of life is a common experience, must be shown to the masses. Art is useful.
Will the new cimena be the spokesman for a new faith?
MARCEL GROMAIRE (1892–197I) was a young painter without formal training who came under the influence of Fernand Léger after the war and whose first exhibition came at the Salon d’Automne in 1921.
BL’AISE CENDRARS, “The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema”
From “Modernités—Un nouveau art: le cinéma,” La Rose rouge 7 (12 June 1919), 108.
VORTEXES of movement in space. Everything is falling. The sun is falling. We are falling in pursuit. Like a chameleon, the human mind disguises itself by camouflaging the globe. The cardinal hypotheses of science taper to a point, and the four gods of the winds are moonlighting. Fusion. Everything bursts open, collapses, makes a promise today, grows hollow, stands erect, blossoms. Honor and money. Everything changes. Customs and political economy. New civilization. New Humanity. Figures have created an abstract, mathematical organism, of useful devices, of machine parts. And it’s the machine that recreates and shifts our bearings. There is a new direction. From this point of view, arbitrarily, the cinema has given man an eye more marvelous than the multifaceted eye of the fly. A hundred worlds, a thousand movements, a million dramas occur simultaneously within the field of this eye. Emotion: they don’t know where it is anymore. The tragic unities are out of place.
We understand that the real has no other meaning. Since everything is rhythm, word, life. Focus the lens on a hand, an eye, an ear, and the drama is outlined, expands on a ground of unexpected mystery. We already have no further need of conversation: soon character will be judged useless. In fast motion, the life of the flowers is Shakespearean; in slow motion, everything classical is there in the flexing of a biceps. On the screen, the least effort becomes painful, musical, enlarged a thousand times. We attribute to it a significance that it has never before known. All theatrical drama, its situations and stage tricks, become useless. Attention is fixed on the sinister scowl. On the hand covered with criminal callouses. On the piece of fabric that continually drips blood. On the watch chain that tightens and expands, like the vein on a man’s temple. What is going to happen? And why is the material so tragically impregnated with humanity? Chemistries become untangled and come undone. Hindu poem. The least throb germinates and bears fruit. Crystallizations come to life. Ecstasy. Animals, plants, minerals represent ideas, sensations, ciphers, numbers. As in the Middle Ages, the rhinoceros is Christ; the bear, the devil; jasper, vivaciousness; chrysoprase, pure humility, six and nine. We see the wind our brother, and the sea is an abyss of men. All this is no more than an abstract symbolism, obscure and complicated, but part of a living organism that we surprise, dislodge, and track, and which has never been seen before. Evidence. Depths sensitized in a drama of Dumas, in a police novel, or in a banal film made in Los Angeles.
Above the spectators’ heads, the bright cone of light wriggles like a dolphin. Characters stretch out from the screen to the lantern lens. They plunge, turn, pursue one another, crisscross, with a luminous, mathematical precision. Clustered beams. Rays. Prodigious spirals into which everything is falling. Projection of the sky falling. Life from the deep.
BL’AISE CENDRARS (1887–1961) was a devoted traveler, writer, and editor (Editions de la sirène), whose poetry was second only to Apollinaire’s in importance during the 1910s. In 1918–1919, Cendrars assisted Abel Gance in scripting, directing, and editing J’Accuse (1919), and then went on to do the same on La Roue (1922–192 3).
HENRI DIAMANT-BERGER, “The Scenario”
From “Le Scénario,” Le Cinema (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1919), 35–53.
THE SCENARIO is the film itself. As written, it is the film as it will be recorded on the filmstock. It’s wrong to believe that the film is a development of the scenario, that the scenario contains only the rough substance of the film and that it is left to the director to release that substance and refine it, according to his own personality. The author of the scenario must bear responsibility for the film. There are directors who act as collaborators with the author. That is legitimate, of course; but in that case their collaboration must occur prior to the shooting and must be discussed with the author. The author should be obeyed; accordingly, he should follow the execution of his scenario in order to make sure its production respects his intentions. . . .
As for writing a scenario, it requires a subject that is complete and encompasses a central idea, that has characters and scenes, and that includes an exposition, a development, and a denouement. That takes a dramatic framework, situations, and a detailed psychology. A film must, however, meet the demand for expressing some new feeling or narrating an original action. One has to consider each scenario as a separate product, as a specific edifice, each of which requires special study and preparation proportionate to its significance. . . .
It is useful to preface the detailed work of the scenario with a commentary which sums up the progress of ideas, indicating the predominant ones, and acts as a psychological guide across the decoupage of shots. It is also useful, after that, to provide the list of roles with a quite complete physical and moral description of the principal characters. Such outlines should be developed only at the moment of the character’s first appearance. Anything which can help in the selection of actors and in their acting should be explained in the most meticulous fashion. To provide this help, one could write out an initial sketch in a form that is close to that of a novel, and then go back over it to cut it up exactly into timed scenes. The action should be broken down precisely into tableaux. By tableau I mean each shot which unfolds without interruption in a single place, without any modification of the camera’s field of vision.
Each set decor should be carefully described, down to the smallest details, for the interiors as well as those in the open air. The trapezoid of the playing area should be indicated with all its perspectives. . .1
A film is not succession of shots and photographs. It is a mode of expression of thought. A film overloaded with photographic effects gives the same impression as a sentence overloaded with images, allegorical references, redundancies, hypallages, and epithets—all means which taken separately can converge into a genuine impression but whose pretentious accumulation fatigues and repulses. . . .
For each shot, the scenario should anticipate as much as possible the mode of its cutting—fade, oval iris, circular iris—and the length of its running time. It is appropriate to indicate the approximate length of each shot, knowing that the film unreels at the speed of about twenty meters per minute.
Of course, the scenario should include all the intertitles written out in full, as well as letters and printed material of any sort. . . .
HENRI DIAMANT-BERGER (1895–1972) was the young publisher of Le Film from 1914 to 1919. In 1916, he became involved in producing several documentaries on the war, and by 1919, he had set himself up as a semi-independent film producer for Raymond Bernard’s Le Petit Café (1919) and Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920) as well as his own Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921–1922).
HENRI DIAMANT-BERGER, “The Decoupage”
From “Le Filmage,” Le Cinema (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1919), 145–68.
THE DECOUPAGE, which is the definitive form of the scenario, should indicate in advance, of course, all the shots in their actual order; and it should anticipate their exact length. The film should be written exactly as it will be shot. Changes at the last moment are an exception and often flawed. Currently, we do our shooting of close shots and unplanned landscape shots at random; later they are brought into line [with the other shots] when everything else is finished. Such a lack of order is nonsense. . . .
The Americans have an extremely rapid, nervous, tumultuous decoupage which is usually quite successful yet sometimes enervating. Their essential trick or knack is to conduct several actions at once and to cut them off one by one at the moment of climax.1 Another of their methods is to show us enormous heads, with or without expression, or animate objects, suddenly inanimate, in order to arouse an unexpected feeling. Either can provide exquisite dramatic results, on condition they are used in moderation.
Most films give an impression of dragging on gratuitously because they are badly cut. A bad decoupage can be recognized by the exaggerated length of its shots, which exhaust each of a series of feelings without ever leaving us in doubt about anything.
These drawn out shots have the same effect as does a theater play which is nothing more than a succession of long monologues or a book which never begins a new paragraph. These two comparisons, which it would be amusing to detail, demonstrate, however, that it is not a question of making a film which is all chopped up into shots of two meters or even less, but that certainly the cinema should give us only one impression per shot and that the shot should end as soon as that impression is perceived. . . .
The cinema should show only what is of interest to us at the opportune moment. The close-up is the simplest and most aggressive method to use for this end. But it has a drawback: that’s the enormous magnification of heads and objects. This magnification is useful much of the time, but can be wearying, especially when it does not meet the requirements of expressing something. It would be well to gauge this magnification more precisely than has been done up to now. For it gives the objector or enlarged facial expression an unusual importance. Everything which is presented to us in a detached manner need not be put on the same plane and emphasized in the same way. . . .
Let’s not forget that one principle determines all these methods and any others yet to be created: for every idea there should be a single shot and, conversely, there should be no shot without an idea. . . . Let’s take a simple example: one evening a woman enters her room; she turns on the light and, while removing her jewelry, catches sight of a burglar in the mirror. She calls for help, and before it arrives the burglar escapes. This is a scene which has a beginning, a critical moment, and an end. It, of course, joins past action to subsequent action and even allows for the interpolation of different decors. . . .
Here, without an over-indulgence in details, is the scene that I am taking as an example, cut up as it should be in order to be filmed.
1. The iris opens on an empty room (this set would al ready have been shown before so we know who lives in it). The burglar comes in cautiously, holding a flashlight. 5 meter
2. A closer shot of his entrance. 2 meters
3. A full shot of the room. He crosses the room slowly and walks toward a desk. 2 meters
4. An auto stops before the front door, Mme A. gets out and enters the house. 4 meters
5. The burglar is about to break into the desk (lighting effect). 2 meters
6. The vestibule. Mme A. takes off her coat, dismisses her maid with a gesture, and walks toward her room. 6 meters
5A. The burglar hears a noise and extinguishes his flash-light, 2 meters
7. then hides behind a curtain. 2 meters
1A. Mme A. enters and crosses the room, after she has 5 meters
2A. flipped on the light switch and
3A. made her way to her dressing table.
7A. The burglar parts the curtain and looks out. 1.5 meters
8. Mme A., seen from behind, sits before her dressing table and takes off her string of pearls. 2 meters
7B. The burglar comes out from behind the curtain and moves forward. 1.5 meters
9. Shot of the mirror. She lifts her eyes and sees the burglar advancing from behind her. 2 meters
10. She turns quickly and faces him. 1.5 meters
11. He stops, menacingly. 1 meter
12. She stretches out her arm. 1 meter
13. Close-up. She presses on a button. 1 meter
14. Close-up. A bell is struck. .5 meters 11 A. He has heard and is about to leap at her. 1 meter
15. Two servants run past in the hallway. 1.5 meters
12A. She defies him with a look. 1 meter
11B. He makes up his mind to flee. 1.5 meters
16. Longer shot. He opens the window. 2 meters
IB. Full shot of the room. He leaps through the window just as the servants push open the door. 3 meters
This scene, as cut up into twenty-six pieces in the scenario, calls for fifteen camera setups and measures fifty meters in length. You will notice, of course, that a scene thus exhibited out of context carries a completely arbitrary significance and that, according to its placement in a film, it should be treated in a manner that is either more or less synthesized or balanced.
I have not indicated this manner precisely in order to give an idea of a logical decoupage, one which, in projection, will provide a completed scene.
You will note that naturally the length of the pieces is inversely proportionate to the rapidity of the shots; moreover, it is useful to offer a lengthier view whenever one comes to a new setup. One must consider that a shot of at least 1.2 meters is required to convey the simplest impression. A piece of information less than that is too slight [to register]. Pieces of several centimeters in length are usable only in extremely special decoupages.2 The median length of shots is from two to five meters. . . .
The decoupage is as indispensable to the cinema as dialogue is to the theater or punctuation is to writing. Obviously, the length of neither shots nor scenes has been codified. That remains a question of synthesis or balance as well as of individual personality, which doesn’t have to be dissected here further. . . .
LOUIS DELLUC, “Cinema: The Outlaw and His Wife”
From “Cinema: Les Proscrits,” Paris-Midi (10 November 1919), 2.
I HAVEN’T SEEN this title yet on any of this week’s posters. I trust the film is going into distribution and that next week we will see it everywhere. It’s a marvelous work. It would be scandalous—but aren’t the ways of our cinema scandalous enough already—for a film of this quality not to be seen. . . .
We know what the factory of American beauty has produced. Charlie Chaplin sums up six years of creative activity with his genius. But are the Americans alone? Soon you will get to see how carefully and attentively the Russians, Norwegians, and Germans have been working. Here is one instance of this worldwide effort, in which France still comes in last: The Outlaw and His Wife [1918].
The powerfully convincing actor [Victor] Sjostrom and his remarkable partner, who plays the role of Halla, create an astonishing couple.1 This is the story of the entire life of an island people. The visual beauty of the images is doubled by their psychological harmony. The sober, discreet development of the narrative reminds me of the impressive measured pace we associate—O Prometheus!—with the best Greek theater. And the public is swept away with emotion. For the public is awestruck by the barren landscapes, the mountains, the rustic costumes, both the austere ugliness and the acute lyricism of such closely observed feelings, the truthfulness of the long scenes which focus exclusively on the couple, the violent struggles, the high tragic end of the two aged lovers who escape life through a final embrace in a desert-like snowscape—all things which ought to horrify them (as any cinematographist will tell you). I have seen French spectators applaud at the end of a Scandinavian film.
ANDRE ANTOINE, “A Proposal on the Cinema”
From “Propos sur le cinématographe,” Le Film 166 (December 1919).
IT is CUSTOMARY to repeat that the cinema differs totally from the theater, without taking the trouble to examine, in the slightest detail, why and how. I have attempted to tease this out with as much clarity and conciseness as possible.
According to an amusing definition by the good Febvre, who like most actors initially professed some disdain toward the screen, the Theater of the Deaf obviously has the same goal as the cinema: simply to gain the attention of the assembled listeners. But just as on stage the principal means of expression is the spoken word, here, by contrast, another absolute convention imposes itself: the suppression of the word. This is the first crucial difference which entails the need for a particular technique to convey the feelings of the characters and the vicissitudes of the action. And immediately from this follow particular rules regulating the construction of the film scenario, which are contrary to those which determine that of a theatrical play.
Therefore, if the dramatic work remains inexorably subject to the limitation, arrangement, and synthesis of scenes, by contrast, suggestions in the cinema depend on a multiplicity of images and a profusion of details, which are unrestricted by any material obstacle of execution. Let’s not conclude too quickly, however, that the cinema’s means of expression are superior to those of the theater just because the one permits the realization of what the other can only suggest through verbal stories. Since the screen is still deprived of depth and color, but will inevitably grow richer with photographic improvements which are barely glimpsed now, it is only in the future that we may be able to determine with complete certainty whether its production can rise unreservedly to the level of works of art.
While awaiting these developments, its seems that the work of a film author, who must be above all an inventor of images, remains purely plastic and exactly opposite that of the dramatic author, who is turned toward the physiological or psychological study of human beings. Thus, the more an author asserts himself as a great dramatist, the more his art, if truly great, will be refractory to the screen. That is why, at this moment, despite their justifiable notoriety, the authors who have ventured into the cinema have produced nothing of significance, while similarly no scenario writer has yet successfully resolved the quest for the formulas of a new art, at least with any formulas really free of our stage baggage. From this, we conclude that the kingdom of tomorrow will be reserved for plastic artists rather than literary ones.
It is simply wrongheaded, from the start, to adopt theatrical instructions and methods for an art which is not at all like what has been proposed to us up to now and to lay claim to means of expression which are quite unsuited for it.
The problems posed by the confection of a scenario increase when you examine the requirements of shooting and acting. There, too, with rare exceptions, on the screen we have only seen those actors who depend on the ancient formulas of the theater, for it is always those actors we have had recourse to—a practice which has been based, from the beginning, on the lack of any special troupe in a profession which is as new as it is uncharted. Our best actors arrive on the screen with the experience and talent which has established their reputation, and so they are not at all willing to adapt themselves to a new art, to suppress their customary and principal instrument: the spoken word. We go on hoping, a little ingenuously, that a great actor will remain inspired after falling silent on the screen, since it is usual to cut the hooves of a champion race horse, even when banking on his victory. This grave inconsistency at first passed almost unnoticed because our actors initially performed only in works already saturated with the current theater; but it will become more evident from now on, to the degree that our scenarios, finally enlightened by experience, produce genuine cinematic works. To our surprise, we have finally discovered that respected actors become much inferior on the screen, and the distinction between the cinema actor and the stage artist is becoming explicit. This calls, henceforth, for the formation of an acting troupe which is in no way bound to the stage. These new subjects will be exclusively plastic; their selection will be very special for they will be required to act solely by means of their intrinsic nature and external appearance. Their education will focus on their “envelope” of expression, which will let them translate a drama as easily as the spoken intonations and artifices of diction do now, which constitute the keyboard of the speaking actor. The usual conventions regulating the performance of an actor gone astray in the cinema, that is, his powers of expression through gesture, possess an intolerable falseness and inflexibility. Just as the dramatic author remains limited, so does his usual actor merely display gestures created to complement the expression of speech. Deprived of this supporting language, he becomes worthless and unsuited for silent acting.
You see the immense transformation that is required in the cinema actor’s education. Yet no one has even begun to undertake this; instead, we are satisfied in this land of silence to use artists whose gestures, if I dare say so, simply make noise.
As FOR THE mise-en-scene—that is, the choice of sets, the movements of the characters, the arrangement of groups—it seems that the experience of a perfect director in the theater, who is used to handling actors and extras and is skillful in the placement of furniture and props, has been altogether sufficient. Until now, the drawbacks have not been too evident because the conception of the work remained identical (that is, purely theatrical) to that of the scenarists and actors. And it would seem, indeed, that the conditions of arranging and presenting objects and people do seem similar to the theater, until one considers that the stage image remains fixed while in the cinema it is perpetually in motion. Our photographic technicians or cameramen, once they discovered themselves to be stand-ins for the spectators, have never failed to set the camera in this or that accustomed place during the creation of a film. All the elements of the spectacle have been reduced, as on stage, to a fixed point; the entire set has been composed to be seen straight on, that is, from the prompter’s box. Thus, along with the unconscious complicity of actors who, through this contrivance, have regained the use of all the routines of their customary craft, the presentation of a film hardly differs from a theatrical spectacle. For a duet or a crucial dialogue, the protagonists group themselves instinctively at the [front] edge of the screen. By contrast, one of the inestimable contributions of the cinema is to multiply the aspects of a character a hundredfold, to break up his movement, expressions, and poses ad infinitum, according to distances and scales which endlessly change, through the multiplication of settings and the incessant shifting of the spectator. Our methods of shooting, therefore, must become supple and ceaselessly renewed. Already, the camera is being handled with more independence and freedom; it is ceasing to be the fixed and immutable point around which everything is organized. Just as in the theater it was necessary to get all the actors to consent to accept the fourth wall as real and to live in the ensemble of decors instead of constantly turning toward the listener, so it ought to become necessary for the actors in the cinema to make a strict rule of ignoring the cameraman. Instead, it is he who should follow them step by step and catch all their aspects unawares, from whichever side they are presented.
As for the sets, the furniture, and the props, we always work in ways that are badly outdated. Before the camera lens, which agrees to work only in certain conditions of lighting and perspective, we display objects perfectly refractory to photography. We continue to fabricate theater sets, to rent theater costumes and furniture, objects whose line, cut, and dimensions are hardly designed for a maximum effect in front of the camera. This or that set and furniture which look satisfactory under stage lighting become unacceptable in the cinema studio—another profound difference which necessitates a completely new technical skill.
I will go beyond the endpoint I set for myself here by dealing with another question crucial to the improvement which is becoming imperative—the necessary suppression, especially for interior scenes, of all work in our studios, which then would be used exclusively for trick shots, experiments, etc. In order to budge as little as possible, they now construct and paint, at great cost and with an enormous waste of time, interior sets which are inherently defective. It would be more logical to go find them where they already exist. The eternal objection of insufficient light and room or space for shooting, so often repeated, is becoming invalid since our improved electrical equipment now permits all sorts of innovations. Here, we can finally conclude, is the essential difference between the cinema, which is a creation enacted in the open air, and the theater, whose principal aim, by contrast, is the imitation of nature.
MANY perceptive minds have already said or thought such things, and some of them are well on their way to realization. America, to whom we presented the cinema once having invented it, has largely repaid us through an exemplary development and initiative that is beginning to free the new art from the inarticulate barbarism which has gripped it for far too long. The absence of cumbersome and pernicious theatrical traditions has allowed our rivals to outdistance us. Nothing is lost, however, if we determine to work with more boldness, for we can discern in the production of our competition, after a period of superb flowering, a sort of regression. Already their films no longer astonish us, and they are starting to weary the once enthusiastic listeners.
Can it be that the Americans, who once had the advantage of being born free of the routines and traditions which suffocated us, are beginning to return to the old formulas? After the naive and spontaneous scenarios of their debut, now they are buying up our plays, cutting up our novels, and importing their own theatrical actors and stars.
I like to think that our formidable competitors seem to be contracting these formulas—as if, after instinctively catching sight of the goal, they have stopped to look back—so that some among us can make an effort to forge ahead.
ANDRE ANTOINE (1858–1943) was an influential theater director—Théâtre Libre (1887–1896), Théâtre Antoine (1896–1906), and Théâtre de l’Odèon (1906–1914)— whose conceptions of theatrical production derived from nineteenth-century Realism and Naturalism in fiction and particularly from the famous eighteenth-century French theorist and critic, Denis Diderot. Antoine directed a series of important realist films during and just after the war, including Les Frères corses (1917), Le Coupable (1917), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918) and La Terre (1919/1921).