Selected Texts
LOUIS FEUILL’ADE, “Introduction”
These two texts are excerpted from the introductions that Feuillade wrote for the publicity brochures that preceded the release of Barrabas (1920) and Les Deux Gamines (1921). They are reprinted in Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade (Paris: Seghers, 1964), 108, 113–14, 116–17.
BARRABAS
A FILM is NOT a sermon, nor even a lecture, much less a puzzle, but a divertissement for the eyes and mind. The quality of this divertissement is measured according to the interest of the public for which it was made. To think otherwise would mean that the cinema is not what it is: the popular art of our time. . . .
The current trend in film production is obvious: the desire to astonish the public seems to outweigh the desire to attract and hold its attention. The result is that people are no longer astonished by anything. Innumerable processions, ostentatious sets, spectacular catastrophes, athletic performances, everyday places disguised as symbols—all that is becoming banal. We have seen so much of it! But there is one thing that the public has not grown tired of, nor will it ever—whether in the theater, in books, or in the cinema—and that is romantic adventure fiction. The taste for such fiction comes from a natural disposition of the human spirit. “Through some kind of independence, which Bacon took as evidence of the strength and dignity of our existence, we love to escape the ordinary course of life, to create an imaginary world of more diverse and exciting events, where chance has less sway and where our faculties find freer exercise. This is the involuntary inclination of all intelligent people. . . .”
These lines by a writer of the last century clearly locate the source of the [universal] charm which is produced by romantic adventure fiction. . . . It is this charm which, each morning, saved Scheherazade’s life, suspended as it was by the thread of her story. It is this charm that made La Fontaine write
If I were told the Tale of the Ass Skin,
I would be absolutely delighted.
It is this charm which has made so many works of the imagination famous, in so many different genres, ever since there have been men to dream them.
Barrabas is a romantic adventure fiction. The author makes no pretense of reforming morals, revealing some age-old truths from the summit of a smoking Sinai, or revolutionizing the world as it is. He has made every effort to create a number of character types and, by putting them in conflict, generate an intrigue that can captivate the spectator’s attention for twelve weeks through the sheer variety of its situations and the keen anticipation of its denouement.
LES DEUX GAMINES
. . . The only thing that counts [when the public judges a film] is to know if, in its twenty-six inert reels, there lies a sleeping princess whom a magician eventually will awaken with the beam of his marvelous lamp—I mean a good story. That is the sole point: the story, the tale, the fiction, the dream; and the rest is only matter. Thus the oldest thing in the world, the fable, subjugates the most modern inventions with its immortal whims; instead of replacing the story, the most prodigious discoveries merely serve to rejuvenate it in the mind of man.
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “Before the Screen: Aesthetic”
From “Devant l’écran: Esthétique,” Le Temps (27 March 1920), 3.
THE FRENCH CINEMA is about to perish. Its demise is no more than a matter of months. . . . French filmmakers then either will have to become Americanized under the guidance of the American film companies [harbingers of a regularized aesthetic] or else disappear.
That is distressing. All hope of raising the intellectual level of the cinema seems more and more chimerical. American technique has reached an unmistakable state where its commercial quality enjoys a level of competence we can only envy. But the artistic value of their production is no longer improving. In fact, story interest, psychological truthfulness, ingenuity, and inventiveness are diminishing markedly instead of increasing. With us, however, in the midst of clearly embarrassing productions, glimmers of light have appeared. We have sighted a new horizon, sensed the portent of a dawn. A cinegraphic language has been created slowly, confusedly, stammered out by a few extraordinary artists, and understood by spectators even fewer in number. All this is still indistinct and incomplete, but in the general state of regression it is at least a distant promise. Must we see this miniscule star extinguished?
. . . So let’s plead our case. Superficial observers deny the intervention of a creative element, whether that be an idea or artistic intention, in the unreeling of a light-sensitive filmstrip that automatically photographs anything which passes in front of the camera lens. For them, it is merely a copying machine, a passive mechanical instrument of light, analogous to the phonograph disk in the autolithography of its production. For many of our contemporaries, the ciné and the phono are lumped in the category of hand-crank instruments, mechanical pianos, music boxes, barrel organs, street corner instruments, anything which gobbles up perforated music rolls and spits out waltzes and polkas. Here, the projector devours a roll of celluloid and discharges flickering images, but, at bottom, it works on the same principle; and there is no more art in this hand-crank contraption than in the others.
The painter and the musician can select and compose, they tell us, while the cinematographist is content to copy. How wrong! The cinematographist selects and composes twice. There are two creative acts, two distinct artistic enterprises in the process of making a film. The first real creation comes in the conception of the scenario, in its decoupage, in its mise-en-scéne, in the choice of lighting and atmosphere, in the choice of this or that expressive detail in the landscape or face, etc. Unless one denies the existence of dramatic art, one can hardly refuse artistic quality to these preliminary labors, which exceed the fullest and most audacious theatrical construction in subtlety, variety, and power. The great artist of the stage and screen, [Andre] Antoine, will not contradict me on that.
But there is a second, even subtler and more decisive artistic intervention, which owes nothing to other techniques and which is the very life of cin’egraphie. The film has been written and “shot.” Hundreds of little fragments of exposed film are there in front of the author. There are scenes recorded in the open air, dialogues, “close-ups,” glades and glens, bright or crepuscular skies, moonlit landscapes, lakes, clouds, snowscapes, flowers. . . . And it is now that the real “construction” begins. This is the moment of inspiration, of personal interpretation, of life “perceived through a temperament.” This is the moment of “style.”
Given the same elements, a hack and an artist will come up with two absolutely dissimilar films. The first will splice all these fragments end to end, passively following the action; and we will have one of those insipid and interminable stories which our merchants of printed ribbons and bows unreel day and night. The second will take on a task of a completely different nature. He will work patiently at juxtaposing, interposing, overlapping, paralleling, and opposing all these living cells; he will calculate the rhythm of these images, their intercutting and their superimposition; he will ration out the visual impressions and psychological emotions, creating a powerful dramatic “progression,” a decrescendo, a surge, a diversion, an escape into dream or a harsh reawakening to reality. He will make eloquent contrasts emerge, develop the inverse of a vision, free the spirit of things; he will cut a scene at the exact moment when its trajectory ought to prolong itself and reach completion in our unconscious, interpolate the lesson of a landscape, give voice to nature, make the “dialogue of the wind and sea” or “murmur of the forest” audible, then retrieve the interrupted scene at the exact moment when its “harmonics” are about to expire in our consciousness, inspire it with a new élan, and continue to interweave the themes of his plastic symphony until the final synthesis. If that does not produce the work of an artist, if that does not add something to the model, one must exclude painting, music, sculpture, and literature from the realm of art, for their techniques are exactly the same.
At the base of every art there is a stereotypical element, inert material to bring to life, dead cells to resurrect. The muse of the cinema is no less handicapped by this charge than are her elder sisters. There is “something of the machine” in music. An organ is an assemblage of “inexpressive” pipes which automatically produce their cry at the command of a keyboard. The virtuoso achieves a note no more pure than the untutored. However, in connecting these obedient sounds, an inspired musician can give them a divine eloquence! In harmonizing moving images, in running through his keyboard of visions, is it not possible for the cinegraphic organist to compose a masterpiece?
The more easily to condemn the cinema, they have sometimes opposed it to the omnipotence of speech, which is superior to all the other arts because words are signs which address both the ear and the eye to reach the mind. And is it otherwise with cinegraphic art? Doesn’t it use plastic “signs” to speak to the mind as well as to suggest feelings through the representation of the real? Aren’t its dissolve-linked images a supple and extensive language?
Besides, let’s not exaggerate the limitless power of speech. Aren’t certain arts committed to “coming to the rescue of powerless words”? Music and the plastic arts inhabit a domain of the personal which sometimes begins on the frontiers of language. The cinema equally. It ought to be a form of ideographic writing. Its characters, its words, are drawn from nature and life. Out of the thousand tiny details of daily observation, the thousand facets of the universe which it fragments, it creates a lexicon for itself. A film is a sentence that one writes with living words.
Does the literary writer do something other than put words end to end, words that he draws out of a box called a dictionary? He hasn’t even the right to alter them, mould them, cut them up according to his fancy. He must “copy” them faithfully, “record” them passively with all their grammatical conventions, their etymological oddities, and their orthographical deformities. This is the mechanical part of the literary composition. But a writer of talent knows how to juxtapose words with such dexterity that they often find themselves rejuvenated and renewed in the process, they are illuminated by their mutual reflection, and their jingling yields an unexpected and delicious sound. And this little game is worth a Gaboriau or a Verlaine, a Mallarmé or a Dubout de Laforest!1
The same goes for the screen where one can compose inept serials or visual poems rich in subjective evocations and infinite resonances. Let me hasten to add that, in this domain, serial writers far outnumber the poets, but the future perhaps will alter the distribution of these numbers. In any case, one has no right to bring an unjust suit against this mode of expression on the grounds of a trend. The cinema possesses the specific virtues of art and writing. It only needs to learn how to make this new string on the eternal lyre sing.
Several of our virtuosos are beginning to produce rather delectable sonorous performances. But their resonances are lost in the general tumult. Have you noticed, for instance, that the last film of Marcel L’Herbier, which Léon Gaumont is about to release, carries the stamp of a personal style in a remarkable manner. Certainly, the scenario of Le Carnaval des vérités is an unpleasantly common melodrama, full of psychological flaws and constructed out of very poor dramatic material. But what lovely cine-graphic writingl What a delicious repast for the eye, what suppleness in the lap dissolves, what taste in the selection and development of plastic themes! Disagreeable music, but delightful orchestration. This is already worthy of note. All this mastery of elocution is necessary so that we do not notice the poverty of the drama and its unjustified length. Alas, why spoil such resources on such miserable materials?
Despite everything, this effort has to be praised highly. . . .
1 Vuillermoz is comparing Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), major poets of the French Symbolist movement, with two popular adventure novelists, one of whom, Emile Gaboriau (1835–1873), created one of the first French detective heroes in Inspector Lecoq.
LOUIS DELLUC, “Cadence”
From “La Cadence,” Photogénie (Paris: Brunoff, 1920), 71–72.
IHAVE ALSO seen an admirable technical phenomenon in C. B. De Mille’s Joan the Woman (1917).1
In the scene where Joan evokes the English army trampling the courtesans of the French king—through the poignant effect of a photographic superimposition—and in the scene where the royal cortege enters the cathedral at Rheims, cadence seems tangible. Everything lives, and breathes according to a deliberate rhythm. As in a symphony where the measured élan of each note is consecrated to the overall flow of music, all the figures march off, fade away, and are reconstituted according to a powerful orchestration. This is the most perfect example there is of an equilibrium of photogenic elements.
It is still unusually rare for the external rhythm of a film to be fully realized. How many scenarios have been scored with all the precision that they could have achieved? We often find excellent details in the mise-en-scène, but almost never find the impulse, the movement, the visual cadence originally envisaged and established by the figures and words. What can the cameraman and director do without them?
And after the film is shot, who knows how to edit the scenes? Only a small number have the requisite skill for cutting the kilometers of film correctly and recognizing the algebraic music which governs the proportioning of the recorded vignettes. A film company should give as much importance to the editor as to the director and assess their respective work equally. Then we would more often have genuine films.
However, there still remains the question of speaking to the artisans charged with projecting the film on the screen. Each film has a different cadence. Paderewski2 does not give the same performance as a Pianola. While awaiting Paderewskis to accompany film screenings, let’s at least have mechanical pianos that won’t betray the cadence of the created work simply because their cadence is out of sync with the film.
LÉON MOUSSINAC, “Cinema: Broken Blossoms”
From “Cinématographic: Le Lys brisé,” Mercure de France (1 February 1921), 797–804.
AFTER HAVING provoked unanimous acclaim in America and England .and then roused one sector of the Parisian public to stunned admiration from the moment of its premier, D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms [1919], it seems, has been booed in several of our cinemas and, from all the evidence so far, has even disappointed many of our sympathizers. That is due, undoubtedly, to the public’s lack of experience in general but also to the tactless strategy of our idiotic merchants who have emphasized the brutality of a bitterly despairing and lengthily developed subject by cutting it to ribbons. The work is singularly emaciated, and D. W. Griffith’s rich, profuse style comes off rather impoverished. No matter, I believe enough still remains of the film to justify admiration. In the history of the silent art, the premiere of Broken Blossoms will be a date as important as that of The Cheat, whose revelation actually initiated the greater French public’s education about the cinema. Without claiming to be definitive, of course, Broken Blossoms offers a breakthrough in technical originality, thanks to the new elements with which it abounds, and reveals a new stage in the advance of cinematic art toward its ultimate perfection, something already strongly marked in the past by films such as Pour sauver sa race, La Conquete del’or, Intolerance, Une Avent urea New York, Mater Dolorosa, Les Proscrits, La Fete espagnole, Le Tresor d’Arne, L’Homme du large.1 In the future, we should not listen to someone talk about the screen if he doesn’t know such films. Knowing them is as essential as knowing certain ancient, imperfect works, such as the uneven and profuse poetry of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century troubadours, is to poetic education. No intellectual who is encouraging the cinema to become an art form capable of completely inverting the order of knowledge as well as renewing poetry and drama should be allowed to shirk off the obligation of studying them.
Without a doubt, D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is the masterpiece of dramatic cinema. Yet, when you have been closed up in a dark room for a long time, even the feeblest light is more dazzling than the sun at high noon. So I understand the enthusiasm here. I understand that those who have been attracted to the screen and who know something of its present difficulties can be stunned by so much skill, and be stupified by the expression of a genius as self-willed as Griffith’s. However, the public doesn’t know how to share the same responses, and I believe that it falls to the critic to try to evaluate works and situate them in time. It is less important for the common people, for example, to know that a certain ceramic work represents a marvelous technical advance (by reason of the material, the glaze, the color, the methods employed) than to discover a new pleasure in gazing at it. The crowd craves enjoyment first of all. That’s logical enough. Craft should fade away before feeling. The value of a film such as Broken Blossoms thus remains a completely relative one.
It has always been so in the great periods of a new art’s formation. What do we admire in the naive paintings of Duccio [1260–1319] and Cimabue [1240–1302] other than all the latent art of Giotto [1266–1337], and in Giotto all the latent art of Raphael [1483–1520]?
The cinema, which also has its catacombs in the cellar of the Grand Cafe,2 will achieve the plenitude of great works. But nothing is more poignant than to see it gradually being formed, and our excitement is justified when one of its manifestations gives us the occasion to admire its progress.
Intolerance [1916] and then Hearts of the World [1918] revealed D. W. Griffith to us. His is the first great name in the cinema.
Since, in the present state of film art’s development, nothing can be intended as complete or definitive (without being presumptuous and dangerous), it is a delight to recognize in Griffith a master who has limited his ambition to a consistently deliberate effort, to a tenaciously creative quest. This artist creates. Each of his achievements, planned and thought out patiently at length, reveals some noble truth. Thus does his genius assert his concern for genuine emotion. Too many problems are posed at once, of course, for his endeavors not to betray a certain disorder; but it is enough that someone gives us a work which already carries in itself—through the quality of its quest, the technical skill, the richness of ideas—all the great works of the future.
Previously I cited Duccio and Cimabue. The art of D. W. Griffith readily offers analogies to the art of all the primitives. The same qualities and faults are found there: discipline is the dominant characteristic; the quest for precision often produces coldness; the concern for exactness sometimes becomes overly meticulous; the passion for truth becomes brutal; finally, lyricism—that élan, that breath by which every great work lives and reigns—is conspicuously absent. In his films, Griffith rarely rises to his potential (except at the end of Intolerance), and his choice of expressive means often evidences a certain tiresome puerility. The subject he chooses also displays the same characteristics, but then he is an American. If the primitives only painted naive madonnas by heart, it is because they had everything to discover about the renewal of their art and because they thus prepared for the coming of the great masters in whom the Renaissance became a certainty.
D. W. Griffith’s art draws its power from his sobriety. Griffith concentrates all the spectator’s attention on the subject he has chosen, on the emotion he is depicting. Consequently, in Broken Blossoms, the poignant martyrdom of the heroine is communicated with the maximum of intensity. A news item is elevated to the level of tragedy. Griffith seizes hold of his characters, scrutinizes them, enters into them—and illuminates them. If to us, nevertheless, their psychology seems somewhat summary, that is because, in reality, it is. Griffith isn’t afraid of certain excesses. He clearly means for no possible equivocation. He remembers the public he is addressing, and that public is his own countrymen above all. Therefore, the mimicry of the boxer sometimes results in grimaces, yet such a magnification seems to occur only when the character is too violently set off against the Chinese idealist, whose passionate and mystical meekness is violated only at the moment when the drama reaches its point of culmination. Poor Lucy, alternately tossed between two extremes, is the victim of this terrible game, of motivated violence against the beautiful dream of peace. Here in this battle we discover the simple and eternal opposition between the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, which every art at its beginnings uses to inspire the crowd.
Broken Blossoms also reveals a consciously thought out and wonderfully expressive sense of composition. No one in our cinema, except Abel Gance sometimes in J’Accuse [1919], has ever approached the virtuosity of D. W. Griffith in the handling of lighting.3 He works in black and white with extraordinary skill. In the scene of the brothel in White Chapel, where so many races are intermingled and bathed in smoke, this reaches the point of giving us a powerful impression of three-dimensional space. The “transitions” from shadow to light are remarkably realized. Such modeling reminds one of a sculptor as much as a painter.
The different tableaux give evidence of an acute sense of observation and great care in composition. If D. W. Griffith sometimes demonstrates poor taste, nevertheless, we admire his concern for detail, which comes close to perfection—sometimes, as I have already said, to the point of being overly meticulous—but which never disrupts the unity of the whole. That is because the means employed are carefully selected and efficacious. Through this, Griffith achieves style, and this style has never been more personal than in Broken Blossoms.
The atmosphere of the scenes is always just right. A small number of simple sets suffice, yet how conscientiously are they constructed! There is no ostentation, no pompous showing off of useless learning: the artist simply transposes life. With an incomparably quiet faith in himself and his desires, he encloses his vision of things within an ideal set decor, which for us is all that much truer than reality itself.
The sets in which the action of Broken Blossoms unfolds are all remarkable. The street in White Chapel, where the yellow man has opened a shop speaks to us at every hour of its sad and mysterious charm, its nostalgia; there life begins again incessantly, especially in the pallid dawn when one feels maddened by the breeze which sways the paper lantern above Evil Eye’s shop; the fog rising like a shifting and pervasive smoke which makes the old building framework quiver in the quarter where Battling Burrows, the boxer, has his den; even this den, with its squalor, its bleak hearth, its bare walls, its pallet, its narrow, rickety table, and the single master’s chair; and the Chinaman’s room where all the Orient seems to coalesce, with its tiny window which encloses in its square of light all the infinite purity of the sky. It is incomparable in its artistry. So self-evident is this penetrating and almost obstinate sense of observation that it allows Griffith to achieve scenes as realistic and beautiful as the boxing match, the martyrdom of Lucy, and the death of the boxer.
The discipline which D. W. Griffith imposes on himself is imposed equally on the performers. From which comes his concern for composition, his stylization of the characters, the studied poses which convey the necessary feeling with a maximum of intensity. In that way, Griffith often compels an emotion that artists such as Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp, and [Richard] Barthelmass, left to themselves, even with all their talent, could scarcely achieve with as much veracity and power.4 And as proof of this discipline and art, I offer only the ease with which Griffith makes us forget that his Chinaman is an American. The wonderful expressive power of his poses, better than the most clever grimaces, and sometimes a certain lighting effect on the forehead or the eyes are all that is needed for this miracle. Everything is genuine in such an art, and no one with impunity could introduce a trick effect into this cold silence without the risk of making it seem crude and intolerable.
What is missing in Broken Blossoms was already missing in the previous films of D. W. Griffith—lyricism. The overly acute sense of observation absorbs and suppresses its élan. The penetrating poetry of certain parts of Pour sauver sa race or La Conquête de l’or by [Thomas] Ince, his student, appears not at all in his works.51 say this with keen regret, for I am convinced that, contrary to general opinion, poetry will find one of its most prodigious means of expression precisely in the cinema. The infinite world of ideal images someday will be revealed on the screen with an unequaled intensity and a marvelous power of radiance. Griffith transposes life in its essentials, adding to it (to the point of overindulgence) the feeling and personal vision through which a work impresses itself on us. That is enough for now. Others, inspired by his thinking and by his sweeping manner, will transpose the dazzling and magnificent dreams of their imagination, and thus will a still incomplete form of art reach its perfection.
Poor taste is scarcely absent from D. W. Griffith’s works. In Broken Blossoms, for example, at the beginning and at the end, I dislike those images of the harbor and temple bells, which are worthy of the worst collection of “artistic” postcards. I dislike—no matter what you may think—Lucy’s gesture which forces her sad face into a smile. I dislike the character of Evil Eye who is burdened with so much that is conventional and arbitrary. I dislike certain childish things, just as I dislike anything childish in poetry and American art. Yet, the story, undoubtedly, is what makes the public so uneasy. And we ought to criticize that melodramatic scenario because the only thing that saves it from ridicule is the great feeling of humanity which it seems to inspire in us.
Rodin [the sculptor] said that we should not attribute too much importance to the themes that the artist interprets. That is certainly true of an art which has already attained its summits and achieved definitive works, but not for the cinema where everything, so to speak, remains to be discovered. Sometimes we have a tendency to concern ourselves solely with the means of expression. We are wrong in that. Since all the problems in cinematic art are being posed at once, authors ought to have quite a lot to say. We should encourage them to “speak about” many things.
All” the films of D. W. Griffith, however, exhibit philosophical pretensions. Mme Germaine Dulac, the director of La Cigarette [1919], La Fete espagnole [1920], Malencontre [1920], etc., recalled recently the occasion of a conversation she had with Griffith and which she reported to us: “A single philosophical idea seems to obsess him—that of the progress of human evolution, forever retarded by the brutal forces of production. It is a theme of Intolerance as well as, in a variant form, of Broken Blossoms. The Chinaman and the poor little girl of London’s lower depths are brethren, although from different races, through the equality of their spiritual evolution. But all the forces of obscurantism, roughly represented by the traditional rights of the boxer, rise up to oppose their union and annihilate it, just as Cyrus the Barbarian destroyed Babylon the Civilized in Intolerance.”6
If the philosophical ideas of D. W. Griffith are debatable, the technique with which he glorifies them is clearly the most perfect we have seen on the screen. Such skill has yet to be equaled. Mme Germaine Dulac recalls in particular what we owe to this magnificent craftsman of the cinema’s first hours: the discovery of close shots to isolate expression (this interior performance which visualizes the innermost soul through pose and counter-pose [or shot/reverse shot]; the study of soft-focus images which blur and shade certain features; the study of the irised or masked images, sometimes tinted to match, which frame the screen; the attempts at color tonings of the black areas of the image . . .7
If the example of such a creative oeuvre provokes a fruitful emulation, that is enough to justify our admiration. The results demonstrate the power of the means employed and suggest the potential of the future. And so Broken Blossoms has cracked open the door of initiation even more and revealed the ever-broadening range of expression of a unique art—an incomparable teacher of the masses—the art of the next worldwide renaissance. I am awaiting the day when a poet finally seizes hold of the simple grandeur and radiant power which can be achieved on the screen, and impels the truth of our new times to emerge out of the marvelous world of images, in a breath of irresistible lyricism. There is no other means remotely capable of impressing beauty on the hearts of all men, at one blow, and thus inspiring the human race to a shared and fertile idealism.
LEON MOUSSINAC (1890–1964) was the managing editor of Comoedia ilustré, a senior editor for the publishing firms of Editions Albert-Levy and then La Lampe merveilleuse, and a minor playwright and poet. He and Delluc had been boyhood friends at the lycée Charlemagne in Paris, and Delluc had his first articles on the cinema published in Le Film, in late 1919.
1 These French titles refer, respectively, to the following films: Barker’s The Aryan (1916), A Sister of Six (1917), Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Dwan’s Manhattan Madness (1916), Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917), Sjöstrom’s The Outlaw and his Wife (1918), Dulac’s La Fête espagnole (1920), Stiller’s Arne’s Treasure (1919), and L’Herbier’s L’Homme du large (1920).
2 The one-hundred-seat basement hall of the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines was the site of the Lumière brothers first public cinema screening, on 28 December 1895.
3 G. W. (Billy) Bitzer was Griffith’s principal cameraman on Broken Blossoms, as he had been for the previous ten years or more; but Hendrik Sartov contributed most of the soft-focus close-ups in the film. L.-H. Burel, of course, was Gance’s principal cameraman on J’Accuse.
4 Lillian Gish (1896-) was best known for her roles in previous Griffith films, including The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913), Home, Sweet Home (1914), Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), and True Heart Susie (1919). Donald Crisp (1880–1974) was also best known as an actor in such films as Home, Sweet Home and Birth of a Nation as well as a director of films such as His Sweetheart (1916). Richard Barthelmess (1895–1963) became an important silent film star with his performance in Broken Blossoms.
5 During this period, the French generally thought of Ince and Griffith as the two master filmmakers of the American cinema, the one (mistakenly) being considered the student of the other. However, Ince was the producer and not the director of many of the films the French associated with his name. Strangely, too, while most of Ince’s films were shown in France during the war, the films Griffith made between 1914 and 1918 were not shown publicly there until after the war.
6 The source of this quote is uncertain. Cf. Germaine Dulac, “Chez D. W. Griffith,” Cinéa 7 (17 June 1921), 11–12.
7 That the French were accepting Griffith’s own self-aggrandizing testimony about how he discovered and perfected most of the techniques crucial to the cinema can also be seen in “La Réalisation—les moyens d’expression,” Ciné-pour-tous 55 (17 December 1920), 16.
JEAN EPSTEIN, “Magnification”
Reprinted, with changes, from a translation by Stuart Liebman in October 3 (Spring 1977), 9–15, from “Grossissement,” Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921), 93–108.
I WILL NEVER find the way to say how much I love American close-ups. Point blank. A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is anatomical. The decor of the fifth act is this corner of a cheek torn by a smile. Waiting for the moment when i ,000 meters of intrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies me more than the rest of the film. Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips.
The close-up is the soul of the cinema. It can be brief because the value of the photogenic is measured in seconds. If it is too long, I don’t find continuous pleasure in it. Intermittent paroxysms affect me the way needles do. Until now, I have never seen an entire minute of pure photogénie. Therefore, one must admit that the photogenic is like a spark that appears in fits and starts. It imposes a decoupage a thousand times more detailed than that of most films, even American ones. Mincemeat. Even more beautiful than a laugh is the face preparing for it. I must interrupt. I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesitates between right and left, the recoil before the leap, and the moment before landing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taut spring, the prelude, and even more than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture. The photogenic is conjugated in the future and in the imperative. It does not allow for stasis.
I have never understood motionless close-ups. They sacrifice their essence, which is movement. Like the hands of a watch, one of which is on the hour and the other on the half hour, the legs of St. John the Baptist create a temporal dissonance. Rodin or someone else explained it: in order to create the impression of movement. A divine illusion? No, the gimmick for a toy presented at the concours Lépine,1 and patented so that it can’t be used to make lead soldiers. It seemed to Rodin that Watteau’s Cythera could be animated by the movement of the eye from left to right over it. The motorbike posters race uphill by means of symbols; hatching, hyphens, blank spaces. Right or wrong, they thereby endeavor to conceal their ankylosis. The painter and the sculptor maul life, but this bitch has beautiful, real legs and escapes from under the nose of the artist crippled by intertia. Sculpture and painting, paralyzed in marble or tied to canvas, are reduced to pretence in order to capture the indispensable movement. The ruses of reading. You must not maintain that art is created out of obstacles and limits. You, who are lame, have made a cult of your crutch. The cinema demonstrates your error. Cinema is all movement without any need for stability or equilibrium. Of all the sensory logarithms of reality, the photogenic is based on movement. Derived from time, it is acceleration. It opposes the event to stasis, relationship to dimension. Gearing up and gearing down. This new beauty is as sinuous as the curve of the stock market index. It is no longer the function of a variable but a variable itself.
The close-up, the keystone of the cinema, is the maximum expression of this photogenie of movement. When static, it verges on contradiction. The face alone doesn’t unravel its expressions but the head and lens moving together or apart, to the left and right of each other. Sharp focus is avoided.
The landscape may represent a state of mind. It is above all a state. A state of rest. Even those landscapes most often shown in documentaries of picturesque Brittany or of a trip to Japan are seriously flawed. But “the landscape’s dance” is photogenic. Through the window of a train or a ship’s porthole, the world acquires a new, specifically cinematic vivacity. A road is a road but the ground which flees under the four beating hearts of an automobile’s belly transports me. The Oberland and Semmering tunnels swallow me up, and my head, bursting through the roof, hits against their vaults. Seasickness is decidedly pleasant. I’m on board the plummeting airplane. My knees bend. This area remains to be exploited. I yearn for a drama aboard a merry-go-round, or more modern still, on airplanes. The fair below and its surroundings would be progressively confounded. Cen-trifuged in this way, and adding vertigo and rotation to it, the tragedy would increase its photogenic quality ten-fold. I would like to see a dance shot successively from the four cardinal directions. Then, with strokes of a pan shot or of a turning foot, the room as it is seen by the dancing couple. An intelligent decoupage will reconstitute the double life of the dance by linking together the viewpoints of the spectator and the dancer, objective and subjective, if I may say so. When a character is going to meet another, I want to go along with him, not behind or in front of him or by his side, but in him. I would like to look through his eyes and see his hand reach out from under me as if it were my own; interruptions of opaque film would imitate the blinking of our eyelids.
One need not exclude the landscape but adapt it. Such is the case with a film I’ve seen, Souvenir d’été à Stockholm. Stockholm didn’t appear at all. Rather, male and female swimmers who had probably not even been asked for their permission to be filmed. People diving. There were kids and old people, men and women. No one gave a damn about the camera and had a great time. And so did I! A boat loaded with strollers and animation. Elsewhere people fished. A crowd watched. I don’t remember what show the crowd was waiting for; it was difficult to move through these groups. There were café terraces. Swings. Races on the grass and through the reeds. Everywhere, men, life, swarms, truth.
That’s what must replace the Pathécolor newsreel where I always look for the words “Bonne Fête” written in golden letters at the corner of the screen.2
But the closeup must be introduced, or else one deliberately handicaps the style. Just as a stroller leans down to get a better look at a plant, an insect, or a pebble, in a sequence describing a field the lens must include close-ups of a flower, a fruit, or an animal: living nature. I never travel as solemnly as these cameramen. I look, I sniff at things, I touch. Close-up, close-up, close-up. Not the recommended points of view, the horizons of the Touring Club, but natural, indigenous, and photogenic details. Shop windows, cafes, quite wretched urchins, a cashier, ordinary gestures made with their full capacity for realization, a fair, the dust of automobiles, an atmosphere.
The landscape film is, for the moment, a big zero. People look for the picturesque in them. The picturesque in cinema is zero, nothing, negation. About the same as speaking of colors to a blind man. The film is susceptible only to photogénie, Picturesque and photogenic coincide only by chance. All the worthless films shot near the Promenade des Anglais [in Nice] proceed from this confusion. Their sunsets are further proof of this.
Possibilities are already appearing for the drama of the microscope, a hystophysiology of the passions, a classification of the amorous sentiments into those which do and those which do not need Gram’s solution.3 Young girls will consult them instead of the fortune teller. While we are waiting, we have an initial sketch in the close-up. It is nearly overlooked, not because it errs, but because it presents a ready-made style, a minute dramaturgy, flayed and vulnerable. The amplifying close-up demands underplaying. It’s opposed to the theater where everything is loudly declaimed. A hurricane of murmurs. An interior conviction lifts the mask. It’s not about interpreting a role; what’s important is the actor’s belief in his character, right up to the point where a character’s absent-mindedness becomes that of the actor himself. The director suggests, then persuades, then hypnotizes. The film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance. That is why the gestures which work best on screen are nervous gestures.
It is paradoxical, or rather extraordinary, that the nervousness which often exaggerates reactions should be photogenic when the screen deals mercilessly with the least forced gestures. Chaplin has created the overwrought hero. His entire performance consists of the reflex actions of a nervous, tired person. A bell or an automobile horn makes him jump, forces him to stand anxiously, his hand on his chest, because of the nervous palpitations of his heart. This isn’t so much an example, but rather a synopsis of his photogenic neurasthenia. The first time that I saw Nazimova agitated and exothermic, living through an intense childhood, I guessed that she was Russian, that she came from one of the most nervous peoples on earth. And the little, short, rapid, spare, one might say involuntary, gestures of Lillian Gish who runs like the hand of a chronometer! The hands of Louise Glaum unceasingly drum a tune of anxiety. Mae Murray, Buster Keaton. Etc.4
The close-up is drama in high gear. A man says, “I love the faraway princess.” Here the verbal gearing down is suppressed. I can see love. It half lowers its eyelids, raises the arc of the eyebrows laterally, inscribes itself on the taut forehead, swells the masseters, hardens the tuft of the chin, flickers on the mouth and at the edge of the nostrils. Good lighting; how distant the faraway princess is. We’re not so delicate that we must be presented with the sacrifice of Iphigenia recounted in alexandrines. We are different. We have replaced the fan by the ventilator and everything else accordingly. We demand to see because of our experimental mentality, because of our desire for a more exact poetry, because of our analytic propensity, because we need to make new mistakes.
The close-up is an intensifying agent because of its size alone. If the tenderness expressed by a face ten times as large is doubtlessly not ten times more moving, it is because in this case, ten, a thousand, or a hundred thousand would—erroneously—have a similar meaning. Merely being able to establish twice as much emotion would still have enormous consequences. But whatever its numerical value, this magnification acts on one’s feelings more to transform than to confirm them, and personally, it makes me uneasy. Increasing or decreasing successions of events in the right proportions would obtain effects of an exceptional and fortunate elegance. The close-up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. It’s not even true that there is air between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament. Maximum visual acuity.
The close-up limits and directs the attention. As an emotional indicator, it overwhelms me. I have neither the right nor the ability to be distracted. It speaks the present imperative of the verb to understand. Just as petroleum potentially exists in the landscape that the engineer gropingly probes, the photogenic and a whole new rhetoric are similarly concealed in the close-up. I haven’t the right to think of anything but this telephone. It is a monster, a tower, and a character. The power and scope of its whispering. Destinies wheel about, enter, and leave from this pylon as if from an acoustical pigeon house. Through this nexus flows the illusion of my will, a laugh that I like or a number, an expectation or a silence. It is a sensory limit, a solid nucleus, a relay, a mysterious transformer from which everything good or bad may issue. It has the air of an idea.
One can’t evade an iris. Round about, blackness; nothing to attract one’s attention.
This is cyclopean art, a unisensual art, an iconoscopic retina. All life and attention are in the eye. The eye sees nothing but a face like a great sun. Hayakawa aims his incandescent mask like a revolver. Wrapped in darkness, ranged in the cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid. Even the music to which one is accustomed is nothing but additional anesthesia for whatever is not visual. It takes away our ears the way a Valda lozenge takes away our sense of taste. A cinema orchestra need not simulate sound effects. Let it supply a rhythm, preferably a monotonous one. One cannot listen and look at the same time. If there is a dispute, sight, as the most developed, the most specialized, and the most generally popular sense, always wins. Music which attracts attention or the imitation of noises is simply disturbing.
Although sight is already recognized by everyone as the most developed sense, and even though the viewpoint of our intellect and our mores is visual, there has nevertheless never been an emotive process so homogeneously, so exclusively optical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense. And after one has grown accustomed to using this new and extremely pleasant intellectual state, it becomes a sort of need, like tobacco or coffee. I have my dose or I don’t. Hunger for a hypnosis far more intense than reading offers, because reading modifies the functioning of the nervous system much less.
The cinematic feeling is therefore particularly intense. More than anything else, the close-up releases it. Although we are not dandies, all of us are or are becoming blasé. Art takes to the warpath. To attract customers, the circus showman must improve his acts and speed up his carousel from fair to fair. Being an artist means to astonish and excite. The habit of strong sensations, which the cinema is above all capable of producing, blunts theatrical sensations which are, moreover, of a lesser order. Theater, watch out!
If the cinema magnifies feeling, it magnifies it in every way. Its pleasure is more pleasurable, but its defects are more glaring.
JEAN EPSTEIN (1897–1953) came to France from Poland in 1908 and became a student of medicine and philosophy in Lyon, where he worked initially as a laboratory assistant to the Lumière brothers. Through Blaise Cendrars, he went to Paris to become an editor at Editions de la sirène and begin writing on the cinema. He worked briefly as an assistant for Louis Delluc and Marcel L’Herbier and then directed his first film for Jean Benoît-Lévy, a feature-length fictionalized documentary, Pasteur (1922).
1 The concours Lépine: an exhibition fair for inventors held annually in Paris—TRANS.
2 Georges Sadoul has suggested that Epstein is here referring to film images stylized in the manner of picture postcards—Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 5 (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 135. Epstein may also be referring to the practice of early film companies who inscribed their trademark emblem on the theatrical sets or inserted placards bearing such emblems into shots taken outdoors to prevent pirating of their prints.—TRANS.
3 Gram’s solution: a solution used in the differential staining of bacteria.—TRANS.
4 Louise Glaum (1894-?) was best known for starring in the William S. Hart westerns, The Aryan (1916) and Hell’s Hinges (1916), both directed by Reginald Barker. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, she starred in a popular series of “vamp” films. Mae Murray (1889–1966) starred in such films as James Young’s Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1917), Robert Leonard’s Dolly (1917) and Her Body in Bond (1918). Epstein was one of the first French writers to take notice of Buster Keaton.
JEAN EPSTEIN, “The Senses 1 (b)”
Translated by Tom Milne in Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), 9–16. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Le Sens 1 bis,” Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921), 27–44.
I DO NOT WANT to do it the disservice of overestimating it. But what can I say that would be adequate? The passion exists, independently, like that of the painter or sculptor. People are only barely beginning to realise that an unforeseen art has come into being. One that is absolutely new. We must understand what this means. Drawing was on hand to see the mammoths die. Olympus heard the Muses numbered. Since then man has added to their official tally, which is actually a fraud in that it could be reduced to half a dozen, only styles, interpretations, and subdivisions. Small minds sank without trace after running into pyroengraving. Books, railways, and automobiles were all amazing, of course, but they had precursors. They were varieties, but now a new species has mysteriously been born.
Once the cinema ceased to be a hermaphrodite, with art rather than science proving to be its sex, we were baffled. Hitherto it had mainly been a matter of reinterpreting the prescribed rules to weary ends. This needed to be understood. It was something else again. For a long time we understood nothing, not a thing, nothing at all.
A time when the cinema was a holiday diversion for schoolboys, a darkish place of assignation, or a somewhat somnambulistic scientific trick. There’s a dreadful danger in not knowing chalk from cheese. And duped the sages were in not realizing sooner that those popular, foolish (that goes without saying), novelettish, blood-and-thunderish, serialized Exploits of Elaine1 characterize a period, a style, a civilization. No longer, thank goodness, in vogue. Good yarns that go on endlessly and then start all over again. Les Trois Mousquetaires, Fantômas, Du côté de chez Swann, and this one with the extra-dry American flavor. The most assassinated woman in the world, as Armand Rio says.
Serious gentlemen, rather too lacking in culture, applauded the lives of the ants, the metamorphoses of larvae. Exclusively. As educational for younger minds.
Then the schism of filmed theater.
Filmed theater is just what it was not. In fact it was the reverse. Even today this art, then so new that it existed only as a presentiment, lacks words because they were overexposed in images that remain, alas, unforgotten. A new poetry and philosophy. We need an eraser to efface styles, and then start constructing afresh. But are we capable of so much amputation? Neither wit, nor plot, nor theater. The Exploits of Elaine—it is easier today to admit that one did see a few episodes—is not simply a farrago of cliff-hanging semidenouements, or Monsieur Decourcelle would happily have buried it. Generally speaking, the cinema does not render stories well. And “dramatic action” is a mistake here. Drama that acts is already half resolved and on the healing slope to crisis. True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in the curtain at the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of ink can make it bloom on the tip of the fountain pen. In the glass of water it dissolves. The whole room is saturated with every kind of drama. The cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray’s throat. The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques and the arms of the chair tremble. Now the suspense is at freezing point. Waiting. One sees nothing as yet, but the tragic crystal which will create the nucleus of the drama has begun to form somewhere. Its ripples spread. Concentric circles. It advances stage by stage. Seconds.
The telephone rings. All is lost.
Well now, do you really want so much to know if they get married in the end? Because NO FILMS end unhappily, and bliss descends at the appointed hour in the program.
The cinema is true; a story is false. One could argue this with a semblance of conviction. But I prefer to say that their truths are different. On the screen, conventions are despicable. Stage effects are absurd, and if Chaplin puts so much tragic expression into them, it is a risible tragedy. Eloquence expires. Presentation of the characters is pointless; life is extraordinary. I like uneasiness in encounters. Exposition is illogical. What happens snares us like a wolftrap. The denouement, the unraveling of the plot, can be nothing more than a transition from knot to knot. So that there are no great changes in emotional heights. The drama is as continuous as life. It is reflected, but neither advanced nor retarded, by the gestures and movements. So why tell stories, narratives which always assume a chronology, sequential events, a gradation in facts and feelings? Perspectives are merely optical illusions. Life is not systematized like those nests of Chinese tea tables each begetting the next. There are no stories. There have never been stories. There are only situations, having neither head nor tail; without beginning, middle, or end, no right side or wrong side; they can be looked at from all directions; right becomes left; without limits in past or future, they are the present.
The cinema is ill-suited to the rational framework of the novelette and indifferent to it; barely sustained by the air of circumstance, it offers moments of a wholly distinctive flavor. The Honor of His House [1918] is an improbable yarn: adultery and surgery. Hayakawa, the tranced tragedian, sweeps the scenario aside. A few instants offer the magnificent sight of his harmony in movement. He crosses a room quite naturally, his torso held at a slight angle. He hands his gloves to a servant. Opens a door. Then, having gone out, closes it. Photogénie, pure photogénie, cadenced movement.
I want films in which not so much nothing as nothing very much happens. Have no fear, misunderstandings will not arise. The humblest detail sounds the note of drama that is latent. This chronometer is Destiny. This bronze statue, dusted off with more tenderness than the Parthenon will ever earn from him, is the whole of a poor man’s mind. Emotion is timorous. The thunder of an express train jumping the rails on a viaduct does not always leave it undisturbed in its familiar habitat. A casual handshake is more likely to persuade it to show its lovely tear-fringed face. What sadness can be found in rain! How this farmyard echoes the innocence when the lovers in their room look back amazed on the sweetness. Doors close like the lock-gates of destiny. The keyhole eyes are impassive. Twenty years of life fetch up against a wall, a real wall of stone, and everything must begin again if the courage can be summoned. Hayakawa’s back is as tense as an obdurate face. His shoulders refuse, reject, renounce. The crossroads is a nucleus from which roads radiate elsewhere. Charlie the Tramp stirs up the dust with his huge boots. He has turned his back. On his shoulder is a bundle which probably contains nothing but a brick as a defense against unwelcome encounters. He sets off. Departure.
Do not say: Symbols and Naturalism. The words have not been discovered yet, and these ones jar. I hope there may be none. Images without metaphor. The screen generalizes and defines. We are not dealing with an evening but evening, yours included. The face a phantom made of memories in which I see all those I have known. Life fragments itself into new individualities. Instead of a mouth, the mouth, larva of kisses, essence of touch. Everything quivers with bewitchment. I am uneasy. In a new nature, another world. The close-up transfigures man. For ten seconds, my whole mind gravitates round a smile. In silent and stealthy majesty, it also thinks and lives. Expectancy and threat. Maturity in this tenuous reptile. The words are lacking. The words have not been found. What would Paracelsus2 have said?
The philosophy of cinema remains to be formulated. Art remains unaware of the eruption which threatens its foundations. Photogénie is not simply a fashionably devalued word. A new leavening; dividend, divisor, and quotient. One runs into a brick wall trying to define it. The face of beauty, it is the taste of things. I recognize it as I would a musical phrase from the very specific intimations of emotion that accompany it. Elusive, it is often trampled underfoot like the promise of riches with which an undiscovered coal seam emblazons the earth. The human eye cannot discover it directly, unless after long practice. A lens zeroes in on it, drains it, distilling photogénie between its focal planes. Like the human eye, this one has its own perspective.
The senses, of course, present us only with symbols of reality: uniform, proportionate, elective metaphors. And symbols not of matter, which therefore does not exist, but of energy; that is, of something which in itself seems not to be, except in its effects as they affect us. We say “red,” “soprano,” “sweet,” “cypress,” when there are only velocities, movements, vibrations. But we also say “nothing” when the tuning fork, diaphragm, and reagent all record evidence of existence.
Here the machine aesthetic—which modified music by introducing freedom of modulation, painting by introducing descriptive geometry, and all the art forms, as well as all of life, by introducing velocity, another light, other intellects—has created its masterpiece. The click of a shutter produces a photogenie which was previously unknown. People talked of nature seen through a temperament, or of temperament seen through nature. But now there is a lens, a diaphragm, a dark room, an optical system. The artist is reduced to pressing a button. And his intentions come to grief on the hazards. The harmony of interlocking mechanisms: that is the temperament. And nature is different too. This eye, remember, sees waves invisible to us, and the screen’s creative passion contains what no other has ever had before: its proper share of ultraviolet.
To see is to idealize, abstract and extract, read and select, transform. On the screen we are seeing what the cinema has already seen once: a double transformation, or rather raised to the power of two, since it is multiplied in this way. A choice within a choice, reflection of a reflection. Beauty is polarized here like light, a second generation beauty, the daughter— though prematurely delivered and slightly monstrous—of a mother whom we loved with our naked eyes.
This is why the cinema is psychic. It offers us a quintessence, a product twice distilled. My eye presents me with an idea of a form; the film stock also contains an idea of a form, an idea established independently of my awareness, an idea without awareness, a latent, secret but marvelous idea; and from the screen I get an idea of an idea, my eye’s idea extracted from the camera’s; in other words, so flexible is this algebra, an idea that is the square root of an idea.
The Bell and Howell is a metal brain, standardized, manufactured, marketed in thousands of copies, which transforms the world outside it into art. The Bell and Howell is an artist, and only behind it are there other artists: director and cameraman. A sensibility can at last be bought, available commercially and subject to import duties like coffee or Oriental carpets. From this point of view the gramophone is a failure, or yet to be explored. One would have to find out what it distorts, where it selects. Has anyone made recordings of street noises, engines, railway concourses? One might well discover that the gramophone is just as much made for music as the cinema is for theater—not at all, in other words—and that it has its own road. Because this unexpected discovery of a subject that is an object without conscience—without hesitation or scruples, that is, devoid of venality, indulgence, or possible error, an entirely honest artist, exclusively an artist, the model artist—must be put to use.
Another example, Mr. Walter Moore Coleman’s detailed observations3 demonstrate that at certain times, without being in any way synchronous, all movements (locomotor, respiratory, masticatory, etc.) in a motley group of individuals, even including both men and animals, yield a certain rhythm, a certain frequency that may either be uniform or bear a simple musical relationship. One day, for instance, while the lions, tigers, bears, and antelopes at Regent’s Park Zoo were walking or eating their food at 88 movements a minute, soldiers were walking on the lawns at 88 paces a minute, the leopards and pumas were walking at 132, 3/2 rhythm, do-so, in other words, and children were running at 116, in ¾ rhythm, do-fa. What we have here is therefore a sort of euphony, an orchestration, a consonance whose causes are obscure to say the least. It is known that crowd scenes in the cinema produce a rhythmic, poetic, photogenic effect when there is a real, actively thinking crowd involved. The reason is that the cinema can pick this cadence up better than the human eye and by other means; it can record this fundamental rhythm and its harmonics. Think of how Griffith kept his characters constantly on the move for many scenes in True Heart Susie [1919], even having them shift virtually from one foot to the other in strict time. Here is where the cinema will one day find its own prosody.
The true poet—despite what Apollinaire says—is not assassinated by this. I do not understand. Some turn aside when offered this new splendor. They complain of impurities. But is the cutting of diamonds so new a thing? I redouble my love. A sense of expectancy grows. Sources of vitality spring up in corners one had thought exhausted and sterile. The epidermis reveals a tender luminosity. The cadence of crowd scenes is a ballad. Just take a look. A man walking, any man, a passerby: today’s reality preserved for eternity by art. Embalmed in motion.
Yes, there are impurities: literature, plot and wit, incompatible accessories. Wit, in particular, is the meaner aspect of the matter. The cinema aims high. Compare what the cinema makes of Adventure, Adventure with a capital A, and what a witty man like M. Pierre Mac Orlan4 does with it. On the one hand, a complex, ruthless, simple, true tragedy. Episodes of atrocity as pitiful as a suffering animal. The foundering of lost paradises. On the other, a slyly genial little book—published by the Editions de la sirène—which smooths away the asperities that make for a masterpiece. True passion always entails bad taste because it is intent, urgent, violent, devoid of breeding and decorum. M. Mac Orlan dolls it up, painting its face with wit; instead of a beautiful sorceress, there remains only an old lady who doesn’t mind being made fun of.
No painting. The danger of tableaux vivants in contrasting black and white. Images for a magic lantern. Impressionistic corpses.
No texts. The true film does without. Broken Blossoms could have.
But the supernatural, yes. The cinema is essentially supernatural. Everything is transformed through the four photogénies. Raymond Lulle never knew a finer powder for projection and emotion. All volumes are displaced and reach flashpoint. Life recruits atoms, molecular movement is as sensual as the hips of a woman or young man. The hills harden like muscles. The universe is on edge. The philosopher’s light. The atmosphere is heavy with love.
I am looking.
1 The reference is to the 22-reel serial, Les Mystères de New York (starring Pearl White), which Pathé compiled from the three serials of Exploits of Elaine (1915), The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), and The Romance of Elaine (1915) and then released in Paris between December 1915 and April 1916. Pierre Decourcelle wrote a ciné-roman based on Les Mystères de New York, which was serialized in Le Matin one week in advance of each episode and thus acted as publicity for the film.
2 The reference is to Paracelsus (1493–1541), the famous medieval Swiss alchemist and doctor.
3 Walter Moore Coleman, Mental Biology (London: Woodbridge and Co., [n.d.]).
4 Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) was one of the few “serious” French writers interested in working in the film industry in the early 1920s. He wrote the scenario, for instance, for L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924). Epstein is probably referring to Mac Orlan’s A bord de l’étoile matutine (1921).
LIONEL L’ANDRY, “El Dorado”
From “El Dorado,” Cinea 12–13 (22 July 1921), 7–8.
ONCE THE L’ANGUAGE of the Cinema has stabilized and people are searching retrospectively for those who most contributed to that stabilization, no one will be able to deny the illustrious part played by M. Marcel L’Herbier in the formulation of its vocabulary.
The task of an inventor of a language is double. First of all, he has to experiment with signs, create them if need be, give them shading, and distinguish them one from another; then he has to assign each of them to the precise and exclusive representation of an idea, a feeling, a situation.
For the first part of this task, M. L’Herbier—in El Dorado even more than in his earlier works—has proved to be unequaled. He knows how to see and how to make us look on man and nature from the most varied, the most unexpected, the most appropriate perspectives that are possible to imagine. When he wants to indicate that Hedwick is a painter, he shows us an Alhambra that distorts under his gaze, columns twist in spirals, terraces buckle, porticos flatten out—when the dance hall regulars, drunk with wine and lust, appear disfigured and bestial—when the blazing landscape of white light reels around Sibilla as she staggers toward her moment of vengeance—the significance of each image is direct and immediately perceptible.
The second stage of the task calls for some degree of sacrifice. In attaching an exclusive meaning to a sign, one enriches it with all the associations of ideas which that meaning encompasses; but, at the same time, one is excluded from using it in another sense. For example, suppose that the cinéaste positions his characters all in the same plane and shows several of them in soft focus and the others in sharp focus. M. Marcel L’Herbier uses this effect, at a given moment, to indicate that Sibilla’s thoughts are far away; her image becomes clear when she is recalled to reality. But some other cinéaste, even M. L’Herbier, could give to this symbol another significance: for example, an actor in the drama might not notice the character in soft focus and then suddenly perceive her. If there is any doubt, if the image has to be explained by text [an intertitle], its effect is destroyed; but if the significance excludes all other uses, that meaning is imposed and sustained everywhere and, consequently, becomes something banal. The first person who thought of naming a swollen muscle “a little mouse,” through an analogy with an animal hidden under the skin, created an original image; then musculus became common language and today no one thinks of the earlier sense of the word. That is the price paid for any artistic invention which involves the means of expression: music would provide me with innumerable examples. The fact that grade-school Debussy artists have become commonplace should not make us forget the profound and charming impression they made on us at first.
Besides, who knows what will happen in five or ten or twenty years? Let’s enjoy this sensation of novelty and originality, which is so refreshing in the midst of the cinema’s weekly banality, without an afterthought. Let’s gaze at the lovely landscapes.
Garden of Alhambra and Generalife, marble basins in the Lion’s Court, fountains of russet-brown porphyry, rustling foliage; let’s become intoxicated with the wild dances of El Dorado; let’s blend in with the teeming crowd of a procession; let’s admire a prestigious photography of unequaled virtuosity which honors the cameraman, M. Lucas,1 as much as the cinéaste. I cited several effects a while ago; there are others, by the dozens or hundreds: the course Iliana [Sibilla] follows in the avenue which leads to the Alhambra—the silhouettes of the young couple in the floral garden—the huge door which closes on the vengeful hands of Sibilla—finally, the shadow of the clown dancing and grimacing ironically on the backdrop as the dancer is dying . . .
Now, if one admits that a film has to follow the same exigencies of logic and probability as a play does, one can raise some timorous objections. Actually, by acting as if threatened, by a woman he knows is in desparate straits, and sending her an unnecessarily brutal letter, Estira does everything he can to provoke the scandal which he dreads so much. Unnecessarily brutal also is the sentence from Hedwick which leads to the denouement: “Besides, my mother is going away.” If that is so, it’s a poorly timed moment to conduct Iliana to her house. Who would he have believe that a woman generous enough to take in the sick son of the dancer would not allow the mother to come see him? And, finally, if this dutiful son is ashamed to bring Sibilla into his mother’s house, he could not escape noticing that it is much more improper to bring her there in her absence!
These words of a gratuitous and shocking cruelty serve to bring about a denouement which perhaps does not conform to the truth of life. Indeed, Sibilla would not die; she would mount the stage again; she would begin to sell her wares once more—or return to the grind—without feeling the frightful anguish that her child may be dying for lack of care, without having to provide the moral support that her presence would give him. And thus the circle would close, the drama would culminate in the eternal return to the beginning. But if M. Marcel L’Herbier had adopted this course, we would not have had the excruciating and agonizing pleasure of seeing Sibilla kill herself. This then is the occasion to apply the old adage—“the best of two solutions is the one that succeeds”—and to certify that this one has succeeded. . . .
So, at the end of this season, the French cinema asserts its authority in three works of some notoriety. We will be speaking next of L’Atlantide, which is valuable because of its subject matter rather than its interpretation; if one considers the two other works together, Fièvre and El Dorado, it is surprising to find that two works conceived within the same artistic milieu, set in similar locations, and performed by some of the same actors reveal such divergent tendencies. And that is excellent, for the god of the cinema has to be pleased to know that there are many rooms in his mansion.
LIONEL LANDRY (1875–1935) was part of Charles Péguy’s literary circle and a contributor to his Cahiers de la quinzième before the war. Like Vuillermoz, Landry had some advanced training in music.
1 George Lucas was L’Herbier’s principal cameraman during the early 1920s—for example, L’Homme du large (1920) and Don Juan et Faust (1922)—but he also helped shoot Delluc’s Fièvre (1921) and La Femme de nulle part (1922) as well as Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928).
LÉON MOUSSINAC, “Cinema: Fièvre, L’Atlantide, El Dorado”
From “Cinématographic,” Mercure de France (1 November 1921), 784–91.
ORDINARILY we criticize the scenarios of most French films rather sharply and are astonished that, in a country where novelists, poets, and dramatists are conspicuously brilliant, we have not yet discovered a scenarist. I want to examine the different aspects of this question, on which even those who have already long reflected on the screen’s possibilities hardly have been in agreement. Perhaps we too easily perpetrate confusion. We do not distinguish the cinegraphic argument from the scenario proper. They are, however, two different things: the argument is the exposition of the generative visual idea of the film; the scenario or script is the practically realized development of this idea, and as such it is virtually the realized film.1
If we believe—as we must—that all kinds of films will be made in the future, from the ciné-roman through the ciné-lyrical drama to the cine-graphic poem, we have to note that, in the context of current productions which lack any particular artistic value—and I was tempted to say serials— the scenario can be written by anyone who, with no training as a metteur-en-scène, has just enough knowledge of technique to be able to foresee the utilization of its resources and expressive possibilities.
In this case, the scenario is developed—through details and in successive, satisfactorily rhythmic images—around a subject in which the common people will find reason to be moved and rejoice. The task of the metteur-en-scène then is roughly parallel to that of the scenario writer. This is what happens in most ordinary American films. The metteur-en-scène, an excellent technician and no more, directs the original vision by using all the expected resources and practical innovations of his craft. In no case is it his task to dominate the film; he is to the film what a perfect craftsman is to a piece of furniture conceived and designed by the decorative artist.
For films which more precisely claim the title of works of art, on the other hand, there is no question of separating the realization from the conception—here the exceptional case, possible in any creative domain, cannot but confirm the rule. The metteur-en-scène becomes his own scenarist. He is truly the original creator, for out of his imagination and his practical skills there arises an absolute insight. And it is in the necessary unity of the work of art that his originality, his creative individuality, emerges. This is not to say that he must always discover in himself the original vision which his particular genius will transfigure. It is possible for him to borrow the argument of his film from another’s work or for a collaborator to provide him with an argument, but this is only a pretext for which he alone will discover the multiple forms of cinegraphic development, a general or particular image that he can recreate completely and from which he will make a purely personal work, the same way a painter or sculptor finds in a poem the pretext for a painting or sculpture. This is the reason—if we aim for such artistic research, and in this instance only—the current scenario competitions are useless.2 They are of no use to any real creator. They will compel so many changes in order to be adapted perfectly to the thinking of the metteur-en-scène that they will only produce bastard works.
Each individual creates for himself a world of perfectly defined images, and the more perfectly and sharply defined are those of the person whose particular bent or intelligence extends to the expressive arrangement of images—the metteur-en-scène, or more precisely, since we expect better, the ècranist according to Canudo or the cinéaste according to Delluc. A true scenario is incomprehensible to almost anyone; its author alone can understand it. This is not a new literary formula, as some have said.3 Nothing could be further from literature. Rather it is a series of personal notations and technical directions, where words are sometimes saddled with veritable hieroglyphs, signs which, much like those in music, gradually are becoming stable and, once universalized but only then, will render the scenario completely legible to the initiated. The sole reproach we might actually address to the scenarios of our most original cinegraphists is that they are still too encumbered with literature. The cinema is no more literature than it is painting, sculpture, architecture, or music; it is a profoundly original art which can borrow from the other arts certain elements of its definitive form but whose [governing] laws remain to be precisely discovered.
We dream then of some marvelous creator who will be the metteur-en-scène of the great works of tomorrow, and of the original qualities that he will have to epitomize and combine. The synthetic power of the screen is reaching a tremendous emotional level. For this magnificent task there must be workers more resourceful than any we have yet seen in any branch of the creative activity of art. As both poet and scholar-scientist, the metteur-en-scène will have to demand of his intelligence, imagination, and technical skill more discoveries than we have ever seen before. And this is the reason for our excitement in the presence of a new art that is still stammering in its endeavors, whose gaucheries are all the more touching since we realize that out of them will emerge the marvelous synthesis of all the arts and the most complete expression of the mind and spirit of the twentieth century.
THESE PAST few months, three films, all quite different in conception and even opposite in their tendencies, have provided us with novelty, originality, and great expectations. These three films will be the honor guard of our production this season. It is especially appropriate to extol their merits rather than insist on their faults, some of which are rather serious, for it is thanks to such films that the cinema is becoming more elevated and ennobled each day, freeing itself of the prejudices which still oppress it, and asserting its beauty.
First there is La Boue by Louis Delluc, which, mutilated by the censors with a stupidity that surprises no one, has become Fièvre.4 This film establishes, almost definitively, a formula which achieves full cinegraphic veracity. Delluc is one of that rare breed who are “seekers” and who consequently happen to make mistakes.5 Yet even in this instance, his errors reveal an originality or define a possibility, and they will become the point of departure for new ventures. Thus Delluc creates incessantly, with an energy which never slackens because of difficulties; he is one of the most inquiring artisans of the Seventh Art. Fièvre, which occurs in an unusual decor—the image: a sailors’ bistro in Marseille, in which several quick glimpses of the harbor accentuate its nature, like a bass pedal supporting the melody—demonstrates that in order to “make cinema” by no means is it necessary to carry a camera to the most extraordinary sites and that from the emotion of faces and gestures in a decor which encompassed them all together one can derive effects of real power through the simple play of light and shadow, of black and white. The Rare is not perforce Beauty. It can be only itself. Either nature is the living element of the drama, and it must be employed judiciously, or it justly serves as the base of the drama, and to suggest it is enough. Too often we forget this essential truth. Delluc does not. What is the landscape in La Fête espagnole [1920] and Le Chemin D’Ernoa [1921]? Everything. What is the decor in Le Silence [1920] and Fièvre] A fiction, but a fiction truer than life. A banal news item serves as the framework in Fièvre, and the bistro comes intensely alive, not through its walls, countertop, and tables, but rather through the darkness in which they are submerged and particularly through the characters that animate it. It is from the drama that the decor draws all of its expressive substance. The realism of the character types and the action does not exclude a kind of solemn poetry, heavy with an oriental nostalgia, an ennui of drunkenness and debauchery, and a violent disgust with sensual pleasure. We can argue with this work, whose first part is marked by an admirable unity, but it will provoke enthusiasm. As for the intelligence of certain images which possess a rare intensity and are perfectly sufficient unto themselves, that will escape no one’s notice.
L’Atlantide, directed by M. J. Feyder from the Pierre Benoit6 novel, has a certain value because of its rich photogenic subject much more than because of the manner in which this subject has been deployed. It is a beautiful film which is cluttered with many superfluous and pointless things and which could easily endure much cutting. M. J. Feyder has restricted himself too often to the plot developments of the novel. Those developments have a logic which is hardly cinegraphic. Thus the film is an illustration of the adventures of Saint-Vit, a sometimes magnificent illustration, but one which could have been consistently beautiful. As an excuse, M.J. Feyder undoubtedly knows nothing of the Swedish films. I’m certain that if he had seen Arne’s Treasure [1919] or The Outlaw and His Wife [1918] before guiding his valiant caravan into the vast sands of the Sahara, his work would have been different and more complete. Each time that he makes the desert participate in the drama, the work strangely soars. While the opening is remarkable, the end, in my opinion, is the best part. The desert becomes an unforgettable actor; it assumes prior position with an incomparable authority. A power of suggestion emerges from those oppressive and deadly solitudes. We are seized by the throat, we become thirsty and hungry, our eyes burn, we suffer . . . You don’t find unnecessary new plot developments at the end of the drama, for example, and you see that the vicissitudes of Tanit-Zergase’s agony suffice unto themselves and that the mere outline of Saint-Vit’s flight achieves a savage beauty— there is nothing more, in the simple play of black and white, than two actors face to face: man and the desert. And between them is revealed the most implacable and poignant struggle that can exist. And it emerges from a simplicity more full of genuine richness than that part of the film where we are smothered under false riches: the palace of Antinea! Apart from the death of Morhenge, soberly beautiful and very photogenic, there is nothing there to retain. The abundance and realism of the decoration leaves nothing to the imagination. That is the error of all realism. L’Atlantide cost a lot. It cost its artisans much deprivation and suffering as well, so it is fitting to compliment M. Feyder and his collaborators, [Jean] Angelo, [Georges] Melchior, Mme Napierkowska (so badly used), and Mile Iribe.7 For I imagine the shareholders will hardly do so. Still, such as it is, the film astonishes us through the richness of a subject never before deployed so grandly on the screen, and it moves us through the sober beauty of two or three remarkable scenes. That is already more than enough to merit our close attention.
Shortly after the preview of Marcel L’Herbier’s El Dorado, I wrote:8
“Some will be too cowardly to speak of their complete enthusiasm or admit their excitement. They will exhaust themselves trying to uncover things to criticize. They will find some—that’s all right. But I only want to tell them that they have never experienced a more passionate hour in front of the screen since the great revelations of Griffith, Ince, Gance, and Sjostrom, that they have never been more fascinated by the intelligence of certain images since La Fête espagnole and especially Fièvre by Louis Delluc. El Dorado is a very lovely film and the most complete work yet by Marcel L’Herbier. It asserts itself as the logical and powerful culmination of all his efforts. After Le Carnaval des vérités [1920], L’Homme du large [1920] gave us a great expectation of beauty, and confidence in a “form” which, disencumbered of certain mannerisms of an overly willful and seemingly technical virtuosity, could quickly become a “style.” Here, thanks to a greater simplicity in the development of images, that form is now realized with a soberness of expression and a force of strangely intense rhythm (in the second part especially), in which we often recognize clearly the cinegraphic veracity which had already enchanted us in certain passages of Villa Destin [1921].
“Thus, in the story of the dancer Sibilla, who suffers and sacrifices herself to save her child, do we not recognize precisely, thanks to Marcel L’Herbier, no more than the glorification of the eternal human truth, grievous and magnificent, which is to be enchanted by and to suffer from love. And if we think, nevertheless, that El Dorado does not correspond to the ideal formula of cinegraphic art, we do not have the right to distort any of its beauty through petty criticisms. We ought to speak of all the originality and audacity in a work which is equal, in technique, to the most accomplished productions of the screen. We ought to say that this film will reconcile most of those who are disgusted with the cinema and procure the sympathy of the sceptics. We ought to say that the public will be shaken by the pathetic power of the drama and be carried away by its rhythm, that artists will discover in it the subtle expression of a composition in which sensibility finally is substituted for reality and which evokes and suggests with a rare perfection. For certain images of this film, which the director has imbued with his own feeling and animated with an unusual sense of tonal values, rightly evoke, in their different ways, Goya [1747–1821], Velasquez [1599–1660], and Ribera [1588–1652]. One has to feel the extreme emotion provoked by the apparition of the hazy, oblique, high white wall of the Alhambra, for example, along which Sibilla, a somnambulent figure, walks to meet her destiny; and the great pure beauty of the scene in which the two lovers bathe their foreheads ever higher in the sunlight, so high that it seems at one moment their brows begin to absorb the light and even begin to radiate; and again the tragic death of Sibilla, which is one of the most prodigious setpieces of photogénie that we have ever admired.
“I am not talking about certain details of technique, or the attention that is being drawn to the deliberate plastic deformations done with such audacity by Marcel L’Herbier and which, realized for the first time on the screen, cause us to enter into the very sensibility of the images, or to the soft-focus shots already used by Griffith and which singularly accentuate the expression of the image by substituting interior for exterior emotion. And I am not speaking of the photography, which gives prodigious evidence of a remarkable virtuosity, either.
“The performances are of a perfect homogeneity. We have warmly acclaimed Eve Francis.9 Her creation of the character of Sibilla is unforgettable. It is more complete and alive in artistry, more troubling in veracity, than her performances in La Fête espagnole, Le Silence, and Fièvre; she has an artistry that equals in perfection and power those of the greatest screen performers we know. We have seen nothing comparable in pathos to the scene of her death where, baring her soul and heart with a tragic simplicity, she makes us participate in her anguish, in the torment of her memories, in the surge of her tenderness, and then jolts us in the death rattle of her agony. We have advanced no further than this in cinegraphic veracity. Eve Francis creates the atmosphere, establishes the spectrum of a truly unfortunate life, poignant, intense, and radiant, with a richness of unforgettable expressions.
“At her side we find all the intelligent, sensitive, and sober expressive quality of Jaque Catelain as well as the pure, touching, simple grace of Marcelle Pradot, both already so remarkable in L’Homme du large; and we should not forget the right feeling for veracity with which Mme Edith Real and Claire Prelia and M. Paulias and Philippe Hériat have created their characters.”10
Now that I have seen El Dorado again, I have nothing to take back of what I wrote in the enthusiasm of that first hour. I would rather add that several alterations carried out by Marcel L’Herbier for its public premiere produce an even more powerful rhythm and that the beauty of the film’s best parts has now become impassioned. I would stress only the novelty and originality of the plastic deformations realized with such mastery by Marcel L’Herbier and which are completely different from the experiments of certain German films, which we have much talked about lately and whose sole peculiarity, as in Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari [1919], is to substitute for nature the fiction of a decor of Cubist extraction.
Fièvre, L’Atlantide, El Dorado. Here are three beautiful stages in the progress of French cinematography or simply cinematography; here equally are unerring reasons to make us ever more confident of a new art which is attempting gradually to discover itself—and will soon dazzle us.
1 The first part of this essay was reprinted as a section of Moussinac’s “Le Scenario,” Le CrapoutIlot (16 March 1922), 11–12.
2 This may well be a reference to the scenario competitions sponsored by Cinéa and Bonsoir in 1921 and 1922—see Delluc’s “Prologue” later in this section.
3 Between 1919 and 1921, a number of scenarios and filmscripts were published as literary or quasi-literary works—for example, Blaise Cendrars, La Fin du monde filmé par l’ange N.-D. (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1919); Pierre Albert-Birot, “2 x 2 = 1.” SIC 49–50 (15–30 October 1919), 389–92; Jules Romains, “Donogoo-Tonka ou les miracles de la science,” Nouvelle Revue française 74 (November 1919), 821–69, and 75 (December 1919), 1016–63; Ivan Goll, Die Chapliniade, eine kinodichtung (Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer Verlag, 1920), translated into French in La Vie des lettres et des arts (July 1921); Blaise Cendrars, “La Perle fiévreuse,” Signaux de France et la Belgique 7 (1 November 1921), 345–52, 9 (1 January 1922), 481–91, 10 (1 February 1922), 530–44, 11–12 (March-June 1922), 606–66.
4 See Louis Delluc, “Huit jours de fièvre,” Cinéa 20 (23 September 1921), 9–12.
5 In describing the milieux of French intellectuals at the beginning of this century, Ory and Sirinelli write that “the notion . . . of seeker [checheur] was still foreign to French society,” and that, when used, it referred to artists more often than to scientists or university scholars—Pascal Ory and Jean François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), 27.
6 Pierre Benoît (1896–1962) was one of the most popular French adventure novelists of the 1920s. Feyder’s L’Atlantide was extremely successful commercially, as was another adaptation of a Benoît novel, Perret’s Koenigsmark (1923).
7 Jean Angelo (1888–1933) was an important French actor who debuted in L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908). His major films in the 1920s included Tourjansky’s Le Chant de l’amour triomphant (1923), Epstein’s Robert Macaire (1925–1926), Renoir’s Nana (1926), and Fescourt’s Monte-Cristo (1929). Georges Melchior was a minor French actor whose most important role probably came in this film. Stacia de Napierkowska (1896–1939) was a famous dancer who had already starred in several films—for example, Capellani’s Notre Dame de Paris (1911), Dulac’s Venus Victrix (1917), and Etiévant’s La Fille de la camargue (1921). Marie-Louise Iribe (1900–1930) acted in several films, including Fescourt’s Un Fils d’Amérique (1925) and Renoir’s Marquitta (1927); she also directed and starred in Hara-Kiri (1928).
8 Léon Moussinac, “El Dorado,” Le Crapouillot (16 July 1921).
9 Eve Francis (1896–1981) was a celebrated stage actress and the wife of Louis Delluc. She starred in nearly all of Delluc’s films as well as Dullac’s Ames de fous (1918), La Fête espagnole (1920), and A ntoinette Sabrier (1927).
10 Jaque Catelain (1897–1965) starred in most of L’Herbier’s films of the 1920s as well as in Perret’s Koenigsmark (1923), Tourjansky’s Le Prince charmant (1925), and Fescourt’s L’Occident (1928).
Marcelle Pradot starred in several of L’Herbier’s early films and then retired from acting when she married the filmmaker in 1924.
Philippe Hériat (1898–1971) performed in several of L’Herbier’s early films as well as in Delluc’s L’Inondation (1924), Bernard’s Le Miracle des loups (1924), Gance’s Napoléon (1927), Cavalcanti’s En Rade (1927), and Gastyne’s La Vie merveilleuse de Jeanne d’Arc (1929).
LOUIS DELLUC, “From Orestes to Rio Jim”
From “D’Oreste a Rio Jim,” Cinea 31 (9 December 1921), 14–15.
THE TRUE dramatic film was born one day when someone realized that the translation of theater actors and their telegraphic gestures to the screen had to give way to nature. When I say nature, I mean nature morte. Vegetation or everyday objects, exteriors or interiors, physical details, anything material, in the end, offers a new dimension to the dramatic theme. Already modeled or shaped, this lifeless or silent nature can be animated according to where and how the composer of the film chooses to use it. This prior dimension of things diminishes the character of the actor, the human element. He himself is no more than a detail, a fragment of the material that is the world. He is a note in the great composition of visual music. Things which play a large part in life and in art rediscover their true role and their prophetic eloquence. When that first step was taken toward the synthesis of cinematic orchestration, the cinema began really to exist as an art of expression. And on that day we all came away, deeply moved, in awe and joy.
It is to the Americans that we owe this miracle. In their Far West films—which they have manufactured in series ever since, for we are not the only cinema merchants—in films of which The Aryan certainly is the most typical, they got us interested as much in the cowboy’s horse as in the cowboy himself. A dog becomes an important character. Hamming takes a hard knock, the atmosphere changes, no longer is there a star and a lot of extras. Instead, there are men and things, even footsteps, a vast symphonic mixture stirred by a rhythm which may be no more than unanimism now, but which presages the great cadence of visual symphonies in the future.
The significance of these expressive details is astonishing. So astonishing that it now seems natural—and necessary. It constitutes the harmony of true style. Are you shocked by the bucket from which Rio Jim drinks, the dice that he throws on the bar, the meaningful cards of the drunken card-players? The scale of these images overwhelms the head of the hero and condenses the whole drama into a miniscule object enlarged a hundred times. We are familiar with these props from the adventure films; we may even dream of abandoning them or putting them to more audacious use. But let’s not disown them. Let’s not forget Pour sauver sa race, Grand Frere, L’Auberge du signe du loup, La Conquete de l’or, L’Homme aux yeux clairs, Le Serment de Rio Jim1—those marvelous hours that nourished our eyes and our love of life. The gold-laden belt, the casino table, the stone jug into which a strong brandy is poured that will inflame the mind, and those incredible pistols which suddenly spring from the belt to paralyze dozens of brutes or characters who have disturbed and threatened us. Think of those two heavy leather cuffs, studded with copper and laced with savage stylishness, which one sees on William Hart’s wrists. In close-ups, they sum up his power, anger, or sadness; even the fists of Rio Jim, his bronzed fists, are often worth a fine portrait.
There is something more. I think that Rio Jim is the first character produced by the cinema; he is the first film type and his life is the first genuinely cinegraphic theme. Already a classic—the tale of an adventurer who seeks his fortune in Nevada or the Rocky Mountains, who stops the stagecoach, loots the strongbox, disrupts the dancing in the saloon, burns down the pastor’s house, and marries the sheriff’s daughter—here is an established theme, so established you might henceforth think it banal. Yet you cannot find another as clearcut or as fascinating. All that photogénie is so satisfying. Gray plains devoid of obstacles, high mountains shining like white screens, horses and men full of the animal vitality and the ready intensity of a simple life that affords rhythm, dimension, beauty, and provides a burst of incomparable humanity to the simplest feelings—love, duty, vengeance—which loom there.
You won’t think me ridiculous if I tell you that never before since the Greek theater have we had a medium of expression as powerful as the cinema. The Greek semicircles of stone encompassed an entire people. Spectacles performed there had to satisfy all classes of society. That did not prevent the production of masterpieces. Yet these masterpieces (uneven, yes?) made simple themes come alive, straightforward characters deprived of civilized complications. The Trojan War, the life of Oedipus, the renunciation of Dionysus, poetry and religion combined in a drama of free lines, and is it not still our best repertory? Orestes, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Electra have crossed twenty-five centuries of different customs, literatures, horrors, and yet remain intact. They have the solidity of statues.
The semicircle in which the cinema spectators are brought together encompasses the whole world. The most separated and diverse human beings attend the same film at the same time throughout the hemispheres. Isn’t that magnificent? A hero can move many millions of people who neither know nor understand one another, who may even be attacking and slaughtering one another. Rio Jim is the first figure to sustain this paradox. Where is he not known? As simple as Orestes, he moves through an eternal tragedy free of psychological snares. I spoke of Pour sauver sa race a moment ago. Doesn’t the terrible bitch played by Louise Glaum possess the fatal splendor of Clytemnestra? Doesn’t Bessie Love2 evoke the chaste, savage energy of Electra? This film speaks to all hearts. In France, I have seen it impress the most diverse audiences—in Marseille before startled fishermen, in a small provincial village before timid and numbed peasants, enraptured. At the Belleville,3 they cried; at the Colisee, I saw ironists cease laughing and intellectuals, once completely refractory toward the cinema, now converted enthusiasts.
Certainly, what the cinema will become within the next several years will rudely obliterate these hours which we proclaim now to be of the highest order. But the future of cinematic drama lies in themes of simple humanity. It often wastes its time on the usual clever vaudevilles, just as our insipid theater does. That will not last. The irresistible pressure of creative minds is turning over the silent art to blood that is difficult to poison. Believe me, it will allow great figures to emerge out of creators yet to come, just as Aeschylus created Prometheus, as Shakespeare created Macbeth and Hamlet, as Wagner created Parsifal. It is so simple that even the cinegraphists don’t believe it. Ah well, let them disbelieve. Aeschylus did not create Prometheus on purpose. It was forced on him. Rio Jim is the advance guard of the coming great film figures.
1 These were the French titles, respectively, for The Aryan (1916), The Cold Deck (1917), Her Fighting Chance (1917), A Sister of Six (1917), Blue Blazes Rawden (1918), and The Passing of Two-Gun Hicks (1914).
2 Bessie Love (1898–1986) starred in several Hart westerns—for instance, The Aryan (1916) and A Sister of Six (1917)—as well as Herbert and Alice Guy Blache’s Her Great Adventure (1918).
3 A popular cinema in the center of the working-class districts of east Paris, the Belleville cinema was owned and managed by the French Communist Party, from the early 1920s on.
ELIE FAURE, “The Art of Cineplastics”
Translated by Walter Pach in The Art of Cineplastics (Boston: Four Seas, 1923) and reprinted in Film: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Talbot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 3–14, from “De la cinéplastique,” L’Arbre d’Eden (Paris: G. Crès, 1922), 277–304.
WITH DRAMATIC STYLE lost, the present is just the moment for the theater to choose for its attempt to monopolize an art, or at least the instrument of an art, that is absolutely new; one that is so rich in resources that, after having transformed the spectacle, it can act on the aesthetic and social transformation of man himself with a power which I consider to exceed the most extravagant predictions made for it. I see such power in the art of the moving picture that I do not hesitate to regard it as the nucleus of the common spectacle which everyone demands, as being perfectly susceptible of assuming a grave, splendid, moving character, a religious character even, in the universal, majestic sense of the word. It can do so quite as well as music, which began with some sort of string stretched between two sticks, struck by the finger of some poor devil, black or yellow, blind perhaps, to an even and monotonous rhythm; it can do so quite as well as the dance, which began with some little girl skipping from one foot to the other, while around her other children clapped their hands; quite as well as the theater, which began with the mimicking recital of some adventure of war or the chase amid a circle of auditors; quite as well as architecture, which began with the arranging of a cave, in front of which, after a fire had been lighted, someone stretched the hide of an aurochs; quite as well as the frescoes, the statues and the perspectives of the temple, which began with the silhouette of a horse or a deer, dug out with a flint on a bit of bone or ivory.
The needs and desires of man, fortunately, are stronger than his habits. There will some day be an end of the cinema considered as an offshoot of the theater, an end of the sentimental monkey tricks and gesticulations of gentlemen with blue chins and rickety legs, made up as Neapolitan boatmen or Icelandic fishermen, and ladies really too mature for ingenue parts who, with their eyes turned heavenward and their hands clasped, ask the benediction of heaven and the protection of the crowd for the orphan persecuted by the wicked rich man. It is impossible that these things should not disappear along with the theater of which they are the counterpart. Otherwise, we must look to America and Asia, the new peoples or those renewed by death, to bring in—with the fresh air of the oceans and the prairies—brutality, health, youth, danger, and freedom of action.
The cinema has nothing in common with the theater save this, which is only a matter of appearances, and the most external and banal appearances at that: it is, as the theater is, but also as are the dance, the games of the stadium, and the procession, a collective spectacle having as its intermediary an actor. It is even less near to the theater than to the dance, the games, or the procession, in which I see only one kind of intermediary between the author and the public. Actually the cinema presents between the author and the public, three intermediaries: the actor—let us call him the cinemimic—the camera, and the photographer. (I do not speak of the screen, which is a material accessory, forming a part of the hall, like the setting in the theater.) This already establishes the cinema as further away from the theater than from music, in which there also exist two intermediaries between the composer and the public—i.e., the player and the instrument. Finally, and especially, there is no speaking in the cinema, which is certainly not an essential characteristic of the theater. Chariot (Charlie Chaplin), the greatest of cinemimics, never opens his mouth; and observe that the best films almost completely do without those intolerable explanations of which the screen is so prodigal.
In the cinema the whole drama unrolls in absolute silence, from which not only words, but the noise of feet, the sound of the wind and the crowds, all the murmurs, all the tones of nature are absent. The pantomime? The relationship is scarcely closer there. In the pantomime, as in the theater, the composition and the realization of the role change, more or less, every evening, which confers on both a sentimental, even impulsive, character. The composition of the film, on the other hand, is fixed once for all, and once fixed it does not change again, which gives it a character that the plastic arts are the only ones to possess. Besides, pantomime represents, by stylized gestures, the feeling and the passions brought to their essential attitudes; it is a psychological art before being a plastic art. The cinema is plastic first; it represents a sort of moving architecture which is in constant accord—in the state of equilibrium dynamically pursued—with the surroundings and the landscapes where it is erected and falls to the earth again. The feelings and the passions are hardly more than a pretext, serving to give a certain sequence, a certain probability to the action.
Let us not misunderstand the meaning of the word “plastic.” Too often it evokes the motionless, colorless forms called sculptural—which lead all too quickly to the academic canon, to helmeted heroism, to allegories in sugar, zinc, papier-mâché, or lard. Plastics is the art of expressing form in repose or in movement by all the means that man commands: full-round, bas-relief, engraving on the wall or on copper, wood, or stone, drawing in any medium, painting, fresco, the dance; and it seems to me in no wise overbold to affirm that the rhythmic movements of a group of gymnasts or of a processional or military column touch the spirit of plastic art far more nearly than do the pictures of the school of David.1 Like painting, moreover—and more completely than painting, since a living rhythm and its repetition in time are what characterize cineplastics—the later art tends and will tend more every day to approach music and the dance as well. The interpénétration, the crossing, and the association of movements and cadences already give us the impression that even the most mediocre films unroll in musical space.
I remember the unexpected emotions I received, seven or eight years before the war, from certain films the scenarios of which, as it happens, were of an incredible silliness. The revelation of what the cinema of the future can be came to me one day; I retain an exact memory of it, of the commotion that I experienced when I observed, in a flash, the magnificence there was in the relationship of a piece of black clothing to the gray wall of an inn. From that moment I paid no more attention to the martyrdom of the poor woman who was condemned, in order to save her husband from dishonor, to give herself to the lascivious banker who had previously murdered her mother and debauched her child. I discovered, with increasing astonishment, that, thanks to the tone relations that were transforming the film for me in a system of colors scaling from white to black and ceaselessly commingled, moving, changing on the surface and in the depth of the screen, I was witnessing a sudden coming to life, a descent into that host of personages whom I had already seen—motionless—on the canvases of El Greco, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer, Courbet, Manet.2 I do not set down those names at random, the last two especially. They are those the cinema suggested to me from the first.
Later, as the medium of the screen was perfected from day to day, as my eye became accustomed to these strange works, other memories associated themselves with the earlier ones, till I no longer needed to appeal to my memory and invoke familiar paintings in order to justify the new plastic impressions that I got at the cinema. Their elements, their complexity which varies and winds in a continuous movement, the constantly unexpected things imposed on the work by its mobile composition, ceaselessly renewed, ceaselessly broken and remade, fading away and reviving and breaking down, monumental for one flashing instant, impressionistic the second following—all this constitutes a phenomenon too radically new for us even to dream of classing it with painting or with sculpture or with the dance, least of all with the modern theater. It is an unknown art that is beginning, one that today is as far perhaps from what it will be a century hence as the Negro orchestra,3 composed of tom-tom, a bugle, a string across a calabash, and a whistle, is from a symphony composed and conducted by Beethoven.
I would point out the immense resources which, independent of the acting of the cinemimics, are beginning to be drawn from their multiple and incessantly modified relationships with the surroundings, the landscape, the calm, the fury, and the caprice of the elements, from natural or artificial lighting, from the prodigiously complex and shaded play of values, from precipitate or retarded movements, such as the slow movements of those galloping horses which seem to me made of living bronze, of those running dogs whose muscular contractions recall the undulations of reptiles. I would point out, too, the profound universe of the microscopic infinite, and perhaps—tomorrow—of the telescopic infinite, the undreamed-of dance of atoms and stars, the shadows under the sea as they begin to be shot with light. I would point out the majestic unity of masses in movement that all this accentuates without insistence, as if it were playing with the grandiose problem that Masaccio,4 Leonardo, Rembrandt were never quite able to solve. . . . I could never come to the end of it. Shakespeare was once a formless embryo in the narrow shadows of the womb of a good dame of Stratford.
THAT THE starting point of the art of the moving picture is in plastics seems to be beyond all doubt. To whatever form of expression, as yet scarcely suspected, it may lead us, it is by volumes, arabesques, gestures, attitudes, relationships, associations, contrasts, and passages of tones—the whole animated and insensibly modified from one fraction of a second to another—that it will impress our sensibility and act on our intelligence by the intermediation of our eyes. Art, I have called it, not science. It is doubly, even trebly art, for there is conception, composition, creation, and transcription to the screen on the part of three persons, the author, the producer, the photographer, and of a group of persons, the cinemimics, as the actors may properly be called. It would be desirable, and possible, for the author to make his own film pictures, and better still if one of the cinemimics, since he cannot be his own photographer, were to be the composer and producer of the work to which he gives life and which he often transfigures by his genius. This is, of course, just what certain American cinemimics are doing, notably the admirable Charlie Chaplin. It is a moot question whether the author of the cinematographic scenario—I hesitate to create the word cineplast—should be a writer or a painter, whether the cinemimic should be a mimic or an actor. Charlie Chaplin solves all these questions; a new art presupposes a new artist.
A certain literary critic has recently deplored the sacrificing of the theater to the cinema and has bracketed Charlie Chaplin and Rigadin (an actor who was formerly known in the French theater under the name of Dranem) in the same terms of reprobation. This does not mean at all that the critic in question is unequal to his task when he sticks to the field of literature; it means simply that he does not realize the artistic significance of the cinema, nor the difference of quality that necessarily exists between the cinema and the theater and between one film and another. For, with all due respect to this critic, there is a greater distance between Charlie Chaplin and Rigadin than between William Shakespeare and Edmond Rostand. I do not write the name of Shakespeare at random. It answers perfectly to the impression of divine intoxication that Charlie Chaplin gives me, for example, in his film Sunnyside; it befits that marvelous art of his, with its mingling of deep melancholy and fantasy, an art that races, increases, decreases and then starts off like a flame again, carrying to each sinuous mountain ridge over which it winds the very essence of the spiritual life of the world, that mysterious light through which we half perceive that our laughter is a triumph over our pitiless insight, that our joy is the feeling of a sure eternity imposed by ourselves upon nothingness, that an elf, a goblin, a gnome dancing in a landscape of Corot, into which the privilege of reverie precipitates him who suffers, bears God himself in his heart.
We must, I think, take our stand on this. Chaplin comes from America, he is the authentic genius of a school that is looming up more and more as the first in importance in cineplastics. I have heard that the Americans greatly enjoy our French films, with their representation of French customs—a fine thing, to be sure, but without the least relation to the effects of motion which are the essential foundation of cinematographic art. The French film, as we know it, is resolutely idealistic. It stands for something like the painting of Ary Scheffer at the time when Delacroix was struggling.5 The French film is only a bastard form of a degenerate theater and seems for that reason to be destined to poverty and death if it does not take a new turn.
The American film, on the other hand, is a new art, full of immense perspectives, full of the promise of a great future. I imagine that the taste of the Americans for the “damaged goods” that we export to them is to be explained by the well-known attraction that forms of art in a state of decomposition exercise on all primitive peoples. For the Americans are primitive and at the same time barbarous, which accounts for the strength and vitality which they infuse into the cinema. It is among them that the cinema will, I believe, assume its full significance as plastic drama in action, occupying time through its own movement and carrying with it its own space, of a kind that places it, balances it, and gives it the social and psychological value it has for us. It is natural that when a new art appears in the world it should choose a new people which has had hitherto no really personal art. Especially when this new art is bound up, through the medium of human gesture, with the power, definiteness and firmness of action. Especially, too, when this new people is accustomed to introduce into every department of life an increasingly complicated mechanical system, one that more and more hastens to produce, associate, and precipitate movements; and especially when this art cannot exist without the most accurate scientific apparatus of a kind that has behind it no traditions and is organized, as it were, physiologically, with the race that employs it.
Cineplastics, in fact, presents a curious characteristic which music alone, to a far less marked degree, has exhibited hitherto. In cineplastics it is far from being true, as it is in the case of the other arts, that the feeling of the artist creates the art; in cineplastics it is the art that is creating its artists. We know that the great thing we call the symphony was engendered little by little by the number and the increasing complexity of musical instruments; but before even the instrument with one string, man already sang, clapping his hands and stamping his feet; here we had a science first, and nothing but a science. There was required the grandiose imagination of man to introduce into it, at first by a timid infiltration and later by a progressive invasion breaking down all barriers, his power of organizing facts according to his own ideas, so that the scattered objects that surround him are transformed into a coherent edifice, wherein he seeks the fecund and always renewed illusion that his destiny develops in conformity with his will.
Hence come these new plastic poems which transport us in three seconds from the wooded banks of a river that elephants cross, leaving a long track of foam, to the heart of wild mountains where distant horsemen pursue one another through the smoke of their rifle shots, and from evil taverns where powerful shadows bend over a deathbed in mysterious lights to the weird half light of submarine waters where fish wind through grottoes of coral. Indeed—and this comes at unexpected moments, and in comic films as well as in the others—animals may take part in these dramas, and newborn children too, and they participate by their play, their joys, their disappointments, their obscure dramas of instinct, all of which the theater, as it seems to me, is quite incapable of showing us. Landscapes, too, beautiful or tragic or marvelous, enter the moving symphony in order to add to its human meaning, or to introduce into it, after the fashion of a stormy sky by Delacroix or a silver sea by Veronese, the sense of the supernatural.
I have already explained why the Americans have understood, as by instinct, the direction they should give to their visual imagination, letting themselves be guided by their love for space, movement, and action. As for the Italians, they might be reborn to the life of conquest and lose the memory of their classic works, were they to find in their genius for gesture and attitude and for setting (thanks in part to the aid of the wonderful sunshine, which is like the sunshine of California) the elements of another original school, less violent and also less sober, but presenting better qualities of composition than that of the Americans. In the cinema the Italians give us marvelously the crowd, and the historical drama in the motionless setting of palaces, gardens, ruins, where the ardent life that characterizes the Italian people goes on, with the quality which is theirs of never appearing out of time or out of place. A gesticulating drama it may be, but the gestures are true. The Italian gesture has been called theatrical; but it is not that, for it is sincere. Giotto’s personages are not acting. If that is the impression we get from Bolognese painting, it is because the Bolognese no longer represented the real genius of Italy. Rembrandt, up to the age of forty-five, and Rubens are far more theatrical than all the Italian masters down to the painters of Bologna. Italian energy alone will render the Italian school of cineplastics capable of maintaining, in this new art in which the Americans already excel, the plastic genius of Europe—and that by creating a form that is destined to have a great future.
In any case, the chief triumph in the American conception of cineplastics—a triumph which the Italians approach most nearly and the French approach, alas, most remotely—seems to me to consist in this: that the subject is nothing but a pretext. The web of feeling should be nothing but the skeleton of the autonomous organism represented by the film. In time this web must be woven into the plastic drama. It is evident that this drama will be the more moving in proportion as the moral and psychological pattern that it covers is strongly, soberly and logically conducted. But that is all. The expression and the effects of that drama remain in the domain of plastics; and the web of feeling is there only to reveal and increase their value.
SHALL I dare to dream of a future for the art of the moving picture, a future distant no doubt, when the actor, or, as I would prefer to call him, the cine-mimic, shall disappear or at least be specialized, and when the cineplast shall dominate the drama of form that is precipitated in time? Observe, in the first place, one vital point that hitherto has not been sufficiently noted, I think, or at least the poetic consequences of which have not been made sufficiently clear. The cinema incorporates time in space. More than this, through the cinema time really becomes a dimension of space. We shall be able to see dust rising, spreading, dissipating, a thousand years after it has spurted up from the road under the hoofs of a horse; we shall be able to see for a thousand years the smoke of a cigarette condensing and then entering the ether—and this in a frame of space under our very eyes. We shall be able to understand how it may be that the inhabitants of a distant star, if they can see things on earth with powerful telescopes, are really contemporaries of Jesus, since at the moment when I write these lines they may be witnessing his crucifixion, and perhaps making a photographic or even cinematographic record of the scene, for we know that the light that illumines us takes nineteen or twenty centuries to reach them. We can even imagine, and this may modify still more our idea of the duration of time, that we may one day see this film, taken on that distant star, either through the inhabitants sending it to us in some sort of projectile or perhaps transmitting it to our screens by some system of interplanetary projection. This, which is not scientifically impossible, would actually make us the contemporaries of events which took place a hundred centuries before us, and in the very place wherein we live.
In the cinema we have indeed already made of time an instrument that plays its role in the whole spatial organism, unfurling under our eyes its successive masses which are ceaselessly brought before us in dimensions that permit us to grasp their extent in surface area and in depth. Already we find in these masses pleasures of an intensity unknown hitherto. Stop the most beautiful film you know, make of it at any moment an inert photograph, and you will not obtain even a memory of the emotion that it gave you as a moving picture.
Thus, in the cinema, time clearly becomes necessary for us. Increasingly it forms a part of the always more dynamic idea that we are receiving about the object upon which we are gazing. We play with it at our ease. We can speed it up. We can slow it down. We can suppress it. Indeed I feel it as being part of myself, as enclosed alive, with the very space which it measures and which measures it, within the walls of my brain. Homer becomes my contemporary, as my lamp upon my table before me is my contemporary, since Homer had his share in the elaboration of the image under which my lamp appears to me. Since the idea of duration enters the idea of space as a constituent element, we may easily imagine an expanded cine-plastic art which shall be no more than an architecture of the idea, and from which the cinemimic will, as I have said, disappear, because only a great artist will be able to build edifices that are made and broken down and remade ceaselessly—by imperceptible passages of tone and modeling that are in themselves architecture at every moment—without our being able to seize the thousandth part of a second in which the transition takes place.
I remember witnessing something analogous to this in nature itself. At Naples, in 1906, I saw the great eruption of Vesuvius. The plume of smoke, two thousand meters high, that rose above the mouth of the volcano was spherical, outlined against the sky and sharply separated from it. Inside this cloud, enormous masses of ashes assumed form and became formless unceasingly, all sharing in the modeling of the great sphere and producing an undulation on its surface, moving and varying, but sustained, as if by an attraction at the center, in the general mass, the form and dimension of which nothing appeared to alter. In a flash it seemed to me, as I looked upon the phenomenon, that I had grasped the law of the birth of planets, held by gravitation around the solar nucleus. It seemed to me that I was looking at a symbolic form of that grandiose art of which in the cinema we now perceive the germ, the development of which the future doubtless holds in store for us, namely a great moving construction ceaselessly reborn of itself under our eyes by virtue of its inner forces alone. Human, animal, vegetable, and inert forms, in all their immense variety, have their share in the building of it, whether a multitude is employed on the work or whether only one man is able to realize it in its totality.
Perhaps I may explain myself further on this last point. We all know those animated drawings, very dry and thin and stiff, which are sometimes projected on the screen and are, when compared with the forms that I have been imagining, what the outlines in chalk traced on a blackboard by a child are to the frescoes of Tintoretto and the canvases of Rembrandt. Now let us suppose three or four generations devoted to the problem of giving depth to these images, not by surfaces and lines but by thickness and volumes; three or four generations devoted to modeling, by values and halftones, a series of successive movements which after a long training would gradually enter into our habits, even into our unconscious actions, till the artist was enabled to use them at will, for drama or idyll, comedy or epic, in the light or in the shadow, in the forest, the city, or the desert. Suppose that an artist thus armed has the heart of a Delacroix, the power of realization of a Rubens, the passion of a Goya, and the strength of a Michelangelo; he will throw on the screen a cineplastic tragedy that has come out of his whole nature, a sort of visual symphony as rich and as complex as the sonorous symphonies of the great musicians and revealing, by its precipitation in time, perspectives of infinitude and of the absolute as exalting by reason of their mystery and more moving, because of their reality for the senses, than the symphonies of the greatest of the musicians.
There is the distant future in which I believe, but of which the full realization is beyond my power of imagining. While we await the coming of the cineplast, who is as yet in the shadows of the background, there are today some admirable cinemimics and at least one cinemimic of genius, who are showing us the promise of that collective spectacle which will take the place of the religious dance that is dead and of the philosophic tragedy that is dead and of the mystery play that is dead—indeed of all the great dead things around which the multitude once assembled in order to commune together in the joy that has been brought to birth in the hearts of the people by the mastery over pessimism achieved by the poets and the dancers.
I am not a prophet, I cannot tell what will have become in a hundred years of the admirable creations of the imagination of a being, a cinemimic, who, alone among living things, has the privilege of knowing that though his destiny is without hope, he is yet the only being to live and think as if he had the power to take to himself eternity. Yet it seems to me that I already see what the art of that cinemimic may presume to become if, instead of permitting itself to be dragged by theatrical processes through a desolating sentimental fiction, it is able to concentrate itself on plastic processes, around a sensuous and passionate action in which we can all recognize our own personal virtues.
In every land, mankind is attempting to escape from a form of civilization which, through an excess of individualism, has become impulsive and anarchic, and we are seeking to enter a form of plastic civilization that is, undoubtedly, destined to substitute for analytic studies of states and crises of the soul, synthetic poems of masses and great ensembles in action. I imagine that architecture will be the principal expression of this civilization, an architecture whose appearance may be difficult to define; perhaps it will be the industrial construction of our means of travel—ships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes—for which ports, docks, pontoons, and giant cupolas will be the places of rest and relay. Cineplastics will doubtless be the spiritual ornament sought for in this period—the play that this new society will find most useful in developing in the crowd the sense of confidence, of harmony, of cohesion.
ELIE FAURE (1873–1937) was trained as a medical doctor but became well known as an art historian, biographer, and critic. His celebrated Histoire d’art was published originally in four volumes between 1909 and 1921, and then released in a revised edition of four volumes in 1924.
1 Louis David (1748–1825) was the leader of the French Neo-Classical school of painting under Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.
2 May I be permitted in passing to form a wish? It is that smoking be forbiddden in cinema halls, as talking is forbidden in concert halls. At the end of an hour, the atmosphere is saturated with smoke. The finest films are clouded, lose their transparency and their quality, in both tone and overtone.—Au.
3 The reference is to the black American jazz bands and orchestras that became very popular in Paris after the war.
4 Masaccio was an Italian painter of considerable influence in Florence in the fifteenth century.
5 Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) became a celebrated French academic painter while Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) struggled as a leader of the French Romantic school.
LIONEL L’ANDRY, “Caligarism or the Theater’s Revenge”
Translated by Stuart Liebman from “Caligarisme ou la revanche du théâtre,” Cinéa 51 (28 April 1922), 12.
EVEN AS Robert Wiene’s very remarkable film was being shown to us, I already guessed that the madman through whose eyes we were supposed to see the world was only a pretext. In an article—much discussed— in Cinémagazine, M. Emile Vuillermoz1 and, more recently, the director himself have let the cat out of the bag and proclaimed the sole import of the method. “The contrivance of a lunatic’s tale,” M. Vuillermoz declares, “is only a limited and discreet subterfuge to develop a new aesthetic while minimizing the risks.”
At first, one is shocked. Because if, in the final analysis, the decisions made by Robert Wiene seem so successfully to convey an idea of the world a madman is capable of conceiving, it seems illogical that it [Wiene’s approach] can be used to present a rational person’s conception of the world.
I know very well that I am no longer up to date and there are no more sane people. Freud and M. Lenormand have covered all this; we are all madmen in one way or another; novels, plays, and films constitute little more than phases of someone’s morbid psychology.2 Still, one must admit that our madness assumes diverse forms. Some are intellectual, some are auditory, and others are fictive. All are not necessarily Cubist (Caligari, moreover, does not belong to the Cubist realm, but rather to some universe conceived according to the geometry of Riemann,3 and characterized by the impossibility of drawing two parallel lines. In passing, it is remarkable to note the influence that the popularization of the new geometric and mechanical theories has had on the arts. Anyone who appeals to the fourth dimension is no Dadaist, and the bewildering vertiginousness of hyperspace is a new hashish that overturns all aesthetic principles).
Whatever the case may be, enthusiasm [for Caligari] is intense. M. Vuillermoz speaks about Caligari the way Théophile Gautier did about Hernani,4 and the most talked-about filmmakers demonstrate their approval by imitating it—a more discreet but no less sincere kind of praise.
Everybody [does]—or nearly everybody (the exception is Louis Delluc, and considering the date, it is remarkable that his Femme de nulle part should be free of Caligarism when Griffith and L’Herbier have succumbed to the temptation. To include the latter is perhaps wrong, for the optical distortions he experimented with in El Dorado seem to me more consistent with the genius of cinema and more fruitful because they allow for transitions to the undistorted views). This is simply because such a method more readily provides the artist with the illusion that he can control nature.
Nature, alive and authentic, imposes itself upon man. Man tries to attach himself to it; he still needs to believe that in its vastness he counts for something. The most heart-rending scene does not benefit at all by being shot in front of Niagara Falls. A Sjöstrom, a Griffith can evoke mighty landscapes such as those in The Outlaw and His Wife or the breaking up of the ice in Way Down East; an ordinary filmmaker would do well to be more modest. (What remains of L’Atlantide aside from the desert?)
If, on the other hand, nature is done away with and replaced by an image that can be distorted to suit one’s taste, the filmmaker will rediscover the means to reaffirm his personality. And it is so economical! Gone are the costly trips, the caravans in search of a site, the waiting for a favorable sunlight! As M. Vuillermoz indicates, “. . . canvas, cardboard, brushes, and creative imagination are all that are needed to construct an ideal world far richer than the real world, an interpreted world, transformed, intelligent and sentient, a world that thinks, dreams, and suffers like the men who inhabit it, a nature that reflects, prolongs, and magnifies the character’s feelings . . .”
Unfortunately for such creations the creative imagination—that is, genius—is also as indispensable as canvas and brushes.
Unfortunately, it [genius] is much more rare. And genius needs no new recipe to manifest itself. If imagination proceeds not by using plastic distortion but by basing composition on psychology it may arrive at results every bit as striking. And with this latter approach, if genius is lacking, one is free to watch the landscapes which in themselves are inoffensive to the degree that expressionism is absent. I know very well that when, tomorrow or the day after, all products begin to be Caligarized, M. Vuillermoz will not go to screenings to see the results. But I will go, and I’ve already begun to suffer.
And meanwhile, while awaiting all this, the theater laughs into its white (because it is very old) beard . . .
“You are coming back to sets, to struts, and to painted canvases. What was the use of making a tour of the world to conjure the magic of Tokyo and Vancouver, the North Pole, and Cape Horn on screen to end up here! Now, you have grown wiser and you ask for my advice . . . You need only abandon all pretense and once again assume your rightful place. You, a seventh art! Sixth and a half is more like it. When it [the cinema] was based on photography, when it utilized the natural sets that I could not, when it had the whole world at its disposal, the cinema constituted an autonomous art. When all this is replaced by a set, and it is reduced to showing—without color and voices—what takes place on stage in front of an essentially realistic or symbolic painting inspired by Reinhardt, Pitoeff, Gordon Craig—or Jusseaume—what element does it possess that is its own? It is only an economical method for reproducing a pantomime . . .
“You think you are justified in denouncing the error that Antoine committed when he attempted to create realist staging in the theater. How much you have remained men of the theater! To prohibit a practice to the cinema because it is opposed to the aesthetics of the stage, is to demonstrate that you do not understand the differences between the two art forms. Precisely because the Americans were not men of the theater and lived very close to nature, they endowed the cinema with a new aesthetic. It is interesting to observe that the reaction against this aesthetic comes from Germany, ever theatrical and affected, and from France whose art, however rich or profound it may be, always seems cloistered, a salon art, and art deriving from the cabaret or the wings.
“Let those who are in truth my little children return unto me! Here are some sets to paint, some scenes to compose in the studio—just like on stage. When the audience tires of seeing the same thing on both sides of the street, someone will remember that the cinema, as opposed to the theater, can show us real trees, real waterfalls, and real flowers, and they will present a film conceived according to these new ideas, and their resounding success will create imitators . . .”
Like all old people, the theater has a tendency to speak at great length. I did not listen any further . . .
1 Emile Vuillermoz, “Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari,” Cinèmagazine 2 (24 March 1922), 353–54
2 The reference is probably to the minor French playwright, Henri René Lenormand (1882–1951).
3 The reference is to the German mathematician, Georg Friederich Bernhard Riemann (182 5–1866), some of whose geometry problems became textbook classics.
4 The reference is to Théophile Gautier’s detailed description of the opening night performance of Victor Hugo’s famous drama, Hernani (1830), which he wrote and published just before he died in 1872. It was reprinted in Gautier’s Histoire du romanticisme (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, Flammarion, 1929), 85–92.
BL’AISE CENDRARS, “On The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari”
Translated by Stuart Liebman from “Sur Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari,” Cinéa, 56 (2 June 1922), 11. An earlier translation of Cendrars’s essay appeared in Broom, 2 (July 1922), 351.
I DO NOT LIKE this film. Why?
Because it is a film based on a misunderstanding.
Because it is a film which does a disservice to all modern art.
Because it is a hybrid film, hysterical and pernicious.
Because it is not cinematic.
A film based on a misunderstanding because it is a sham produced in bad faith.
It heaps discredit on all modern art because the subject of modern painters (Cubism) is not the hypersensibility of a madman, but rather equilibrium, tension, and mental geometry.
Hybrid, hysterical, pernicious because it is hybrid, hysterical, and pernicious. (Long live cowboys!)
It is not cinema because:
1. The pictorial distortions are only gimmicks (a new modern convention);
2. Real characters are in an unreal set (meaningless);
3. The distortions are not optical and do not depend either on the camera angle or the lens or the diaphragm or the focus;
4. There is never any unity;
5. It is theatrical;
6. There is movement but no rhythm;
7. There is not a single refinement of the director’s craft; all the effects are
obtained with the help of means belonging to painting, music, literature, etc. Nowhere does one see [the contribution of] the camera;
8. It is sentimental and not visual;
9. It has nice pictures, good lighting effects, superb actors;
10. It does excellent business.
FERNAND LEGER, “La Roue: Its Plastic Quality”
Translated by Alexandra Anderson as “A Critical Essay on the Plastic Quality of Abel Gance’s Film, The Wheel,” in Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry (New York: Viking, 1973), 20–23. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “La Roue: Sa valeur plastique,” in Comoedia (16 December 1922), 5.
A BEL GANCE’S film involves three states of interest that continually alternate: a dramatic state, an emotional state, and a plastic state. It is this entirely new plastic contribution whose real value and implications for our time I shall struggle to define precisely.
The first two states are developed throughout the whole drama with mounting interest. The third, the one that concerns me, occurs almost exclusively in the first three sections, where the mechanical element plays a major role, and where the machine becomes the leading character, the leading actor. It will be to Abel Gance’s honor that he has successfully presented an actor object to the public. This is a cinematographic event of considerable importance, which I am going to examine carefully.
This new element is presented to us through an infinite variety of methods, from every aspect: close-ups, fixed or moving mechanical fragments, projected at a heightened speed that approaches the state of simultaneity and that crushes and eliminates the human object, reduces its interest, pulverizes it. This mechanical element that you reluctantly watch disappear, that you wait for impatiently, is unobtrusive; it appears like flashes of a spotlight throughout a vast, long heartrending tragedy whose realism admits no concessions. The plastic event is no less there because of it, it’s nowhere else; it is planned, fitted in with care, appropriate, and seems to me to be laden with implications in itself and for the the future.
The advent of this film is additionally interesting in that is is going to determine a place in the plastic order for an art that has until now remained almost completely descriptive, sentimental, and documentary. The fragmentation of the object, the intrinsic plastic value of the object, its pictorial equivalence, have long been the domain of the modern arts. With The Wheel [La Roue] Abel Gance has elevated the art of film to the plane of the plastic arts.
Before The Wheel the cinematographic art developed almost constantly on a mistaken path: that of resemblance to the theater, the same means, the same actors, the same dramatic methods. It seems to want to turn into theater. This is the most serious error the cinematographic art could commit; it is the facile viewpoint, the art of imitation, the imitator’s viewpoint.
The justification for film, its only one, is the projected image. This image that, colored, but unmoving, captures children and adults alike—and now it moves. The moving image was created, and the whole world is on its knees before that marvelous image that moves. But observe that this stupendous invention does not consist in imitating the movements of nature; it’s a matter of something entirely different; it’s a matter of making images seen, and the cinema must not look elsewhere for its reason for being. Project your beautiful image, choose it well, define it, put it under the microscope, do everything to make it yield up its maximum, and you will have no need for text, description, perspective, sentimentality, or actors. Whether it be the infinite realism of the close-up, or pure inventive fantasy (Simultaneous poetry through the moving image), the new event is there with all its implications.
Until now America has been able to create a picturesque cinematographic fact: film intensity, cowboy plays, Douglas [Fairbanks], Chaplin’s comic genius, but there we are still beside the point. It is still the theatrical concept, that is, the actor dominating and the whole production dependent on him. The cinema cannot fight the theater; the dramatic effect of a living person, speaking with emotion, cannot be equaled by its direct, silent projection in black and white on a screen. The film is beaten in advance; it will always be bad theater. Now let us consider only the visual point of view. Where is it in all of this?
Here it is: 80 percent of the clients and objects that help us to live are only noticed by us in our everyday lives, while 20 percent are seen. From this, I deduce the cinematographic revolution is to make us see everything that has been merely noticed. Project those brand-new elements, and you have your tragedies, your comedies, on a plane that is uniquely visual and cinematographic. The dog that goes by in the street is only noticed. Projected on the screen, it is seen, so much so that the whole audience reacts as if it discovered the dog.
The mere fact of projection of the image already defines the object, which becomes spectacle. A judiciously composed image already has value through this fact. Don’t abandon this point of view. Here is the pivot, the basis of this new art. Abel Gance has sensed it perfectly. He has achieved it, he is the first to have presented it to the public. You will see moving images presented like a picture, centered on the screen with a judicious range in the balance of still and moving parts (the contrast of effects); a still figure on a machine that is moving, a modulated hand in contrast to a geometric mass, circular forms, abstract forms, the interplay of curves and straight lines (contrasts of lines), dazzling, wonderful, a moving geometry that astonishes you.
Gance goes further, since his marvelous machine is able to produce the fragment of the object. He gives it to you in place of that actor whom you have noticed somewhere and who moved you by his delivery and his gestures. He is going to make you see and move you in turn with the face of this phantom whom you have no more than noticed before. You will see his eye, his hand, his finger, his fingernail. Gance will make you see all this with his prodigious blazing lantern. You will see all those fragments magnified a hundred times, making up an absolute whole, tragic, comic, plastic, more moving, more captivating than the character in the theater next door. The locomotive will appear with all its parts: its wheels, its rods, its signal plates, its geometric pleasures, vertical and horizontal, and the for midable faces of the men who live on it. A nut bent out of shape next to a rose will evoke for you the tragedy of The Wheel (contrasts).
In rare moments scattered among various films, one has been able to have the confused feeling that there must be the truth. With The Wheel Gance has completely achieved cinematographic fact. Visual fragments collaborate closely with the actor and the drama, reinforce them, sustain them, instead of dissipating their effect, thanks to its masterful composition. Gance is a precursor and a fulfillment at the same time. His drama is going to mark an epoch in the history of cinema. His relationship is first of all a technical one. He absorbs objects and actors; he never submits to means that ought not to be confused with the desired end. In that above all his superiority over the American contribution resides. The latter, picturesque and theatrical in quality, in bondage to some talented stars, will fade as the actors fade. The art of The Wheel will remain, armed with its new technique, and it will dominate cinematographic art in the present and in the future.
FERNAND LÉGER (1881–1955) was a French painter initially aligned with the Cubists, whose work came under the influence of the “Purist” movement after the war. But Léger also became involved in attempts to produce a synthesis of the arts as a popular spectacle— for example, the ballet dramas Parade (1917) and Skating Rink (1922), L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine (1924), and his own Ballet mécanique (1924).
EMILE VUILLERMOZ, “La Roue”
From “La Roue,” Cinémagazine 3 (23 February 1923), 329–31, and (2 March 1923), 363–65.
ABEL GANCE’s latest film establishes once again that even though the xinema is silent, filmmakers are not chary with words. La Roue has provoked numerous discussions and debates, and the hubbub shows no sign of abating. The release of this majestic work does not, however, raise complex problems, rather it highlights—and in huge close-ups even—several elementary questions on which, it seems, everyone can easily agree.
In La Roue, Abel Gance has spun out an incalculable number of symbols, some of which are magnificently beautiful and poetic. One can also spin out another: La Roue is the very image of cinema, that is, a machine that is steadily revolving and yet seems to be revolving in place. The film industry is a prisoner of this gyrating motion which forces it to follow the same circle forever, to commit the same mistakes, and to fall into the same errors. Never has this elementary truth been demonstrated so obviously as in this splendid work which I intend to examine.
La Roue proves several things. First, that the current commercial formula of cinema exhibition is absurd and dangerous, and, second, that its usual dramatic formula is no less so. Now, producers, distributors, and authors should not protest such a peremptory assertion; it constitutes a defense and not an attack. In treating the current state of affairs so harshly, I mean to serve their interests.
La Roue contains all the elements of a masterpiece, but the “iron law of supply and demand” which governs the relations between producer and consumer in the cinema is so overwhelming that it can destroy the most splendid efforts.
There is no doubt that Abel Gance possesses cinematic genius. He was born to speak the silent language of moving images. He is one of the coming generation that thinks spontaneously in lifelike visions. As a young and essentially modern art, the cinema can only find its true creators among the younger generation. Up to now, older filmmakers were content to adapt their theatrical or fictional techniques to the screen, but rarely did they stumble upon the true eloquence of images. It’s the current generation alone, trained in the schools of the Tenth Muse ever since childhood, that can discover the new techniques which are essential to this new art.
Several men have an inkling of that art: Griffith in America and Gance here. Yet they are faced with a commercial and industrial set of regulations poorly suited to this new ideal. Besides, both are still entangled in the manifold traditions of print fiction and stage plays.
Let me repeat what I have said before. Gance is a genius who is lacking in talent. The scenario of La Roue calls for the harshest criticism. Here again, we have witnessed the triumph of the most lamentable presumptions. Abel Gance—this inspired poet and powerful visionary—has conceived a romantic adventure story of the most mediocre kind, undoubtedly in obedience to the old filmmakers’ catechism of perseverance.
Evidently because they told him the mass public insisted on it, he introduced several ridiculous puppets into his story, music hall characters whose buffoonery is in such bad taste. Likewise, in order ultimately to please an American clientele, he was forced to bring his melodrama to a climax with an unlikely fist fight between the son of a mechanic and the chief engineer of the PLM company. According to the same rules of prudent international distribution, he conferred the role of a young working-class woman, French by education, to an English actress who, although charming, distorted the character by performing in a resolutely American manner.
Most of Abel Gance’s errors have a commercial or industrial rationale. Separately, any one detail may be absurd, which even the company men recognize; but they argue that it was necessary at the time for one or another better reasons. An art which has so many better reasons to be absurd finds itself in a dangerous situation.
In the cinema, they screen rushes incessantly; everything is solved by arithmetic formulas. The arena of the calculator, however, could use some dancers. By cutting everything according to the supreme wisdom of numbers, they produce deplorable results.
The other arts don’t operate under a regime of patronage. A publisher of music or literature, a gallery owner of painting or sculpture is no more disinterested than a producer of films; he obviously intends to make money from the works of art which have been given over to his care. In order to achieve this goal, however, he doesn’t believe that authors are required to submit to such servile rules, to such rigid formulas of exhibition. He knows that a masterpiece needs a certain degree of freedom in order to establish and extend its power effectively. He also knows that the public will follow.
The film producer adopts an opposite point of view. He claims to guide the masses and to determine in advance what will please them and what will not. He believes in his infallible receipts and indisputable axioms. He is unaware that in the other arts technique is constantly being renewed and that what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Because he lacks the courage and wisdom to escape routines like this, Abel Gance’s triumph is a tattered triumph. The first-rate moments of beauty which abound in this film are too often drowned in a torrent of dramatic, theatrical, and commercial preconceptions that continue to run rampant through studios everywhere.
They say that Abel Gance’s film has cost three million francs. They could only recuperate this sum, it seems, by transforming an excellent production of 2,000 meters into a vast expanse measuring 10,000 meters. For it’s a fact that cinematic beauty is sold by the pound and that in the cinema the genius of an author can only be measured with the aid of a surveyor’s chain. That’s where we are led by the obstinacy of our film distributors who refuse to abandon their demagogic ideas.
All these reflections, which the ardent devotees of La Roue will perhaps read with impatience, have been dictated by the most sincere admiration for an artist whose best effort I am saddened to see go to waste, falling as it does between two stools. In the cinema, as elsewhere, one has to choose. It’s childish to want to please everyone. Yet Abel Gance is becoming used to doing that. The weakness and banality of his dramaturgy is discouraging to artists and literate people. And his artistic discoveries deeply shock the ignorant, who have been raised in the school of serial novels. An excess of prudence has led to a fatal dose of doubled imprudence.
One has to choose: the wheel is revolving, and two paths are open before it. For the switchman there is a decision to make. One movement of the lever will determine the destiny of the work.
On the right is an assured, mathematical, popular success—in a prologue and six episodes—with the crass melodrama of the engine driver Sisif who loves his adopted daughter and is a rival to his son and the chief engineer, with its theatrical effects, its catastrophes, its melodramatic villains, its derailments, its fist fights, its circus interludes, and its themes of romance.
On the left is the conquest of the elite—a difficult, uncertain, heroic quest, requiring arduous battles, for the adversaries of the cinema are still numerous and stubborn. But who can resist the eloquence of those wonderful notes which capture all the secret beauty of daily life, of a trembling and vibrant life that we know not how to see and whose innumerable facets a “seer” of genius illuminates and highlights for us.
In the first case, one has to excise several hundred meters of film in which glimmers a poetry that is inaccessible for the time being to the serial customers. One has to remove from the action what is the personal contribution of Abel Gance, what an authoritative spokesman for this special public has so characteristically called “the appearance of diverse mechanical instruments,” whose tactless intervention slows the exciting story. We are all agreed, it seems, that a locomotive possesses wheels, rods, and a smokestack and that it obeys signals. In order for us to understand that we are going to live in a railway environment, it is enough that a smart express train pass before our eyes and the question will be answered once and for all. Everything else is merely padding and lost time.
ON THE OTHER hand, if one wants to amaze the artists, one has to eliminate the fictional elements which take up so much space, get rid of the clowns, and preserve only the two essential themes of this symphony of black and white, which begins in the tragic gloom of charcoal dust and smoke and ends in the purity and assuaging calm of eternal snows. One has to preserve only a slim plot thread from one end to the other in order to connect the splendid tableaux in which the beauty of things is revealed. Here this beauty takes on an unfamiliar, extraordinary stirring quality.
Abel Gance knows how to see and make others see. Daily, unquestioningly, a blind humanity traverses a fairyland whose astonishing exhilaration it does not even suspect. We are too accustomed to the appearance of things. With our naive arrogance as the kings of creation, we have become habituated to imposing an anthropocentric view on the whole universe. Currently, we practice the naive finalism of Bernard de Saint-Pierre; we will end by seeing in things only the artificial and often arbitrary function that our own egotism claims to see there.
One of the first cinematic discoveries consisted of bringing this soul of things to light, something the theater could not begin to externalize. The screen showed us that things were capable of seeing, thinking, suffering. It was a first step. It was the basis of the technique ironically called “expressive natures mortes.”
Naturally, they soon abused the technique: the least flower, the least trinket on a shelf, the simplest chair was used to convey something about psychology. In madly praising Abel Gance for having learned how to unveil the soul of things, one is merely paying him a rather banal compliment. His principal merit does not consist of showing us a disc plate equipped with a human face, a semaphore that makes a commanding arm gesture, or a locomotive whose whistles express articulate cries. Every filmmaker now recognizes these recipes, this elementary symbolism, for whatever kind of dish is needed. The discoveries of Abel Gance are of a more subtle and profound kind. He teaches us to see not just the soul but the true face of things, he forces us to reeducate our eyes; he unmasks the scattered beauty all around us, by emphasizing and exalting it without distortion.
Certainly, the most beautiful, moving, and original parts of his film are the experimental study of a mechanical fairyland, from drive-rod traction to hissing steam, and the description of the supernatural magic of snowy landscapes. He has learned how to analyze the hallucinatory beauty of speed, the drunken frenzy of the wheels’ intelligent labor, the steel rods and gear wheels, the great stirring voice of organisms made of sheet iron, copper, and steel. His “Song of the Wheel” and “Song of the Rails” are visual scores of unforgettable power and beauty. The man who has learned how to gather up such thrilling songs out of mere matter is indeed a great poet.
Like all poets, sometimes he lets himself be drawn into certain imbalances of composition.
Living in the midst of elevated symbols and magnificent allegories, he too easily lets himself be drawn into translating his characters into tones and chords. In the same exalted spirit, one can reproach his mechanic Sisif for being a superman, when he would have touched us even more had he consented simply to be a man.
The talent of Severin-Mars, which does not always avoid a melodramatic accent or a theatrical exaggeration, only accentuates this tendency. There is a bit of overindulgence in the creator’s conception and realization. Confronted with a nature and atmosphere which are so true and genuine, Abel Gance’s characters appear slightly conventional.
But these reservations must not make us forget that, with La Roue, we find ourselves in the presence of a work of exceptional quality. This work is actually being pulled apart in four different directions, by exhibitors, publicity agents, tactless friends, and genuine artists. It is suffering the fate of Orpheus, who was torn apart by the bacchantes; but, like Orpheus, it will survive the punishment.
We must have a reshaped and tightened version of La Roue, relieved of the slight imperfections which have been imposed on it by circumstances.1 All the elements of a masterpiece exist in this composition. It’s perhaps the first time that a cinegraphic production has contained such pleasing and persuasive treasures. All those who love the cinema and have confidence in its future must lay claim to this “artistic model” in the work of Abel Gance.
For, if there have been more refined, more delicate, more ingenious works before this, I cannot remember ever having contemplated a production as clearsighted as it is powerful, in an exclusively cinegraphic style. La Roue will make those who are still unsuspecting now understand the prodigious future of this art form of moving images. Later they will come to see that La Roue was a prophecy. Why are we not immediately attempting to comprehend the broad range of its advance?
1 A reedited 4,200 meter version of La Roue did premiere at the Colisée cinema in February 1924.
RENE CL’AIR, “La Roue”
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum in Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. R. C. Dale (New York: Dover, 1972), 97–98. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Les Films du mois: La Roue,” Théâtre et Comoedia illustré (March 1923).
La Roue is the archetype of the film that is Romantic in spirit. Just as in x_-/a Romantic drama, you will find in M. Abel Gance’s film improbable situations, a superficial psychology, a constant attempt to achieve visual effects—and verbal effects as well—and you will find extraordinary lyrical passages and inspired moments of movement, one could even say, the sublime and the grotesque.1
Given a drama so obviously “thought out,” so carefully stuffed with literary ideas and ambitions, it is tempting to debate these with the author. No need to bother. If a screenplay ought to be merely a pretext, here it is a cumbersome pretext, sometimes annoying, rarely necessary, but in any case not deserving of lengthy consideration. It is hardly unusual that, like most filmmakers, M. Gance has made a mistake as a screenplay writer, even if the mistake is more serious at times than we are accustomed to. If we were asked to judge M. Gance by the psychological intentions he expresses on the screen and by the titles he writes, I have to admit that my judgment would not be in his favor. But right now we are concerned with cinema.
As I see it, the real subject of the film is not its odd story, but a train, tracks, signals, puffs of steam, a mountain, snow, clouds. From these great visual themes that dominate his film, M. Gance has drawn splendid sequences. We had, of course, seen trains before moving along tracks at a velocity heightened by the obliging movie camera; but we had not been completely absorbed—orchestra, seats, auditorium, and everything around us—by the screen as if by a whirlpool. “That’s only a feeling,” you will tell me. Maybe. But we had not gone there to think. To see and feel is enough. Fifty years from now you can talk to me again about the cinema of ideas. This unforgettable passage is not the only one that testifies to M. Gance’s talents. The catastrophe at the beginning of the film, the first accident Sisif tries to cause, the ascent of the cable car into the mountains, the death of Elie, the bringing down of his body, the circular dance of the mountaineers, and that grandoise ending amidst veils of cloud: those are sublime lyrical compositions that owe nothing to the other arts. Seeing them, we forget the quotations from Kipling, Aeschylus, and Abel Gance throughout the film, which tend to discourage us. And we start to hope.
Oh, if M. Abel Gance would only give up making locomotives say yes and no, lending a railroad engineer the thoughts of a hero of antiquity, and quoting his favorite authors! If he were willing to create a pure documentary, since he knows how to give life to a machine part, a hand, a branch, a wisp of smoke! If only he were willing to contribute in that way to the creation of the Film that can barely be glimpsed today!
Oh, if he were willing to give up literature and place his trust in the cinema! . . .
RENÉ CL’AIR (1898–1981) was a young journalist and actor—for instance, in Feuillade’s L’Orpheline (1921) and Parisene (1922). In 1922, he worked as an assistant director to Jacques de Baroncelli; a year later he was making his first film, Paris qui dort (1924).
1 Victor Hugo’s theory of the sublime and the grotesque, enunciated in his dramatic manifesto, The Preface to Cromwell (1827), became one of the French Romantics’ main themes. Clair here uses the term ironically to describe Gance’s ups and downs, rather than in an accurate historical way. [Note by R. C. Dale]
LEON MOUSSINAC, “On Cinegraphic Rhythm”
From “Du rythme cinégraphique,” Le Crapouillot (March 1923), 9–11.
IF, IN A FILM, the images have to possess a particular beauty and value in and of themselves, beyond their significance in relation to the whole, this beauty and value can be singularly diminished or increased according to the role those images are given in time, that is, the order in which they succeed one another.
For example, it’s evident that if they projected, all by itself, the image in El Dorado where Marcel L’Herbier shows his heroine walking along the high, angled wall of the Alhambra, even if we were told of its emotional significance within the whole, we would only be struck by the quality of its “lay out” and photographic deformation; by no means would we be jolted by the realization which makes its beauty so profound when we discover its placement in the film.
Rhythm exists, therefore, not only within the image itself but in the succession of images. In fact, cinegraphic rhythm owes the greater part of its power to such external rhythm, and its sensation is so strong that certain cinegraphists—those who have scarcely studied it, however—search for it in ignorance. To edit a film is nothing more than to give it rhythm. For when you know in general how the montage is executed, it is hardly astonishing to realize that the images in certain films can lose 50 percent to 75 percent of their specific value.
Few have understood that giving rhythm to a film is as important as giving rhythm to the image, that the decoupage and the montage, otherwise called the idea and its visualization, are as essential as the mise-en-scène. It is no less curious that no one yet has tried to encompass this rhythm in certain mathematical relations, in a kind of measure, for practical use at the time of the scenario’s construction—after all, these relations seem easy to determine since the value of the image and that of the film can be represented in time or space through figures or numbers.
If the cinema, as a plastic art of space, derives part of its beauty from the arrangement and form of the individual images, one must not forget that, as an art of time (since the parts of the whole are successive), it derives the complement of its beauty from the expression of the images. In that, it shares in the characteristics of all the other arts and, as the last arrival, seems called to assume first place. Yet even this expression, as we are coming to see, must depend for the greater part of its power on the placement and duration of the image within the context of the whole. Thus the cinema must be a veritable orchestration of images and rhythm.
In summary, the elements which determine the proper value of the movement of each image ought to be found in the meaning or feeling provided by the subject or theme of the scenario, which is itself expressed through representation, and in which the acting, lighting, and decors combine into what is rightly called, in one word, mise-en-scène. But the particular quality which finally determines the value of the film is rhythm.
IF WE ATTEMPT to study cinegraphic rhythm, we notice that it has a close analogy to musical rhythm; and here we can transpose many ideas expressed notably by René Dumesnil in his essay on “Musical Rhythm.”1 We should hardly be astonished at this rapprochement between cinema and music. After all, M. Vuillermoz has already noted how the cinegraphic composition obeys the secret laws of musical composition: “a film is written and scored like a symphony.”2 Luminous phrases also “have their rhythm.” Similarly, that is why the cinegraphic poem—such as I conceive it and which tomorrow should represent the highest form of expression in the cinema—will be so close to the symphonic poem, the images being to the eye in the former what sounds are to the ear in the latter.
It will be richer, however, since the poet will find in the cinema a means of reshaping his thought in a plastic form which is itself expressive. The rhythmic combinations, resulting from the selection and order of images, will stimulate in the spectator an emotion complementary to the emotion determined by the subject or naked idea of the film, a complementary emotion which may not only replace the original emotion but whose ultimate expression has to surpass it—the subject no longer being the essential matter in the work but the pretext or, better yet, the visual theme.
Moreover, I can easily imagine that the cinema, although descriptive above all else—that is, commenting on actions and gestures—could, in the cinegraphic poem, display and comment solely on states of mind. In that especially, it will form a bond with music, whose indefinite nature allows it to produce different correspondences in different imaginations. We could say, in effect, that no one really knows what the Ninth Symphony means, but its phonic rapture so stimulates the mind, without confining it to a definite theme, to the point where the excitement thus generated inspires us to dream and recall our own memories.
Thus, in the presence of a harmonious series of images—as a corollary to the tendency we have of closing our eyes while listening to music—will we be tempted eventually to close our ears the more completely to submit to the visual suggestions and transfigurations of feeling? . . .
The importance of the rhythmic element once more comes from the following fact: contrary to the arts of space where generally the whole is perceived before the specific detail, in order to assimilate a film the mind passes from the particular to the general. From which it follows that the original visual idea has to be perceptible from the beginning, in such a way that we can follow it “through all its developments up to its final flowering.” For rhythm has the power to make the memory engage in this progressive labor of assimilation, since it is memory that, reviving the principal idea each time it reappears under its different representations, leads us gradually through the perception of specific details to the synthetic impression of the whole.
This return of the general theme or of the particular expression through which the general theme extends its emotional power is so necessary that it culminates sometimes in a leitmotif. We have had some striking examples in D. W. Griffith’s Dream Street [1921], with the images symbolizing “the Voice of Evil” (a masterpiece) and “the Voice of Good,” and with the theme of Despair (Suzanne Desprès) in Léon Poirier’s L’Ombre déchirée [1921].3
Finally, if measure is the soul of musical rhythm, the effect of force and intensity is similarly the soul of cinegraphic rhythm. This effect is achieved through the expressive value of the image with respect to the images that precede and follow it. In this case, the power of suggestion in rhythm can be singularly expanded. In a dramatic moment—we know many examples of this—the rhythm can become jarring and correspond perfectly to a gasping and irregular breathing, establishing once more the firm relation which exists between the intensity of organic rhythm and that of artistic rhythm.
1 René Dumensil (1879–1967) was a historian of music and literature, and particularly expert on Flaubert. The essay Moussinac refers to supposedly appeared in Mercure de France, but I have not been able to locate it.
2 See Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (4 June 1919), 3.
3 Léon Poirier (1884–1968) was a Paris theater director whom Gaumont hired as the artistic director of his Séries Pax (1919–1923) and whose films included Ames d’orient (1919), Narayana (1920), Le Penseur (1920), L’Ombre déchirée (1921), Jocelyn (1922), Geneviève (1923), La Brière (1925), La Croisière noire (1926), and Verdun, visions histoire (1928). Suzanne Desprès also appeared in L’Herbier’s Carnaval des vérités (1920).
ROBERT DESNOS, “Dream and Cinema”
From “Le Rêve et le cinéma,” Paris-Journal (27 April 1923), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris, Gallimard, 1966), 104–5. © Editions Gallimard 1966.
IT’S A CINEMA more marvelous than any other. Those who have a gift for dreaming know full well that no film can equal, in either unforeseen contingencies or tragedy, that indelible life to which their sleep is consecrated. From the desire to dream comes the thirst for and love of the cinema. For lack of the spontaneous adventure which our eyelids let escape on wakening, we go into the dark cinemas to find artificial dreams and perhaps the stimulus capable of peopling our empty nights. I would like a filmmaker to fall in love with this idea. On the morning after a nightmare, he notes down exactly everything that he remembers and reconstructs it in detail. It’s not a question here of logic and classical construction, nor of remarks to flatter public incomprehension, but of things seen, of a superior realism, since this opens onto a new domain of poetry and dream. Who has not recognized the exclusively personal interest of the dream? The sleeper alone has experienced his wanderings, and his description will always be sufficient to make his listeners appreciate the terrible or comic interest of the dream. Poetry has expected everything from film; let’s acknowledge that is hasn’t always been disappointed. Often the scenario has been magnificent and the actors wonderful. We’ve been indebted to them for profound emotions. Yet, while poetry has freed itself from all rules and fetters, the cinema still remains bound by a rigid and strictly common logic. Despite a number of endeavors, the screen still has not given us a chance to see a scenario unfold emancipated from human laws. Dreams there especially are perverted; none operate with the incomparable magic that is their charm. None, that is, when the filmmaker is served only by his memories.
Is the public which is thirsting for such manifestations so restricted? That should not be so. Here an educational effort might prove interesting. In any case, it is discouraging to see foolish sums of money swallowed up for imbecillc popularizations like La Roue and not to have any money at all available to tempt the desire of those whose freedom of mind is great enough to allow full license to the filmmaker. The cinema has nothing yet equivalent in audacity to the Ballets russes, nothing naturally as free as Couleurs du temps and Les Mamelles de Tirésias in the theater.1
I have already said how I deplore the fact that eroticism is prohibited.2 Imagine then the remarkable effects that we could derive from nudity and what wonderful works the Marquis de Sade could achieve in the cinema.
Couldn’t we therefore establish a private cinema where films that were too bold for the ordinary public would be screened?3 In every age, innovators have been hounded by their contemporaries. The painter and the writer are able to consecrate themselves in obscurity to superior tasks. Can the cinegraphist ever escape the prison of antiquated ideas? Will the cinema perish for lack of these eccentricities in which I continue to see only genius?
One of my friends once imagined the existence of someone who would dedicate his fortune to the maintenance of an experimental laboratory of this kind.4 Will we one day encounter this millionaire, in the showy title of a bacon or steel king, who would favor such a laboratory, all the more enviable in my opinion, over “free men”?
ROBERT DESNOS (1900–1945) was a young poet who had just joined the Surrealist group organized around André Breton. His ability to produce poems while actually in or just after coming out of a dream state was legendary, and his interest in the cinema surpassed even that of Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon. Desnos died of typhus at Buchenwald.
1 The references are to Henri de Regnier’s short story collection, Couleurs du temps (1909), and Guillaume Apollinaire’s play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, first performed in 1917.
2 Robert Desnos, “L’Eroticisme,” Paris-Journal (20 April 1923), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 101–3.
3 Desnos apparently is not referring to the pornographic film programs and cinemas which seem to have cropped up in Paris within a few years of the Lumière’s first public film screenings. The idea of a specialized cinema was finally realized by Jean Tedesco when he opened the Vieux-Colombier, in November 1924.
4 Desnos probably has another Thomas Edison in mind. Marcel L’Herbier’s Cinégraphic company, set up in 1922, perhaps came close to fulfilling this idea of an experimental laboratory, for it both operated as a “school” in scenario writing and film production and actually financed several independent films—for example, Catelain’s Le Marchand des plaisir (1923), Delluc’s L’Inondation (1924), and Autant-Lara’s short Fait-Divers (1924).
LOUIS DELLUC, “Prologue”
From “Prologue,” Drames du cinéma (Paris: Editions du monde nouveau, 1923), i–xiv.
THEY SAY there are no cinegraphic works. Say rather that you don’t see any, because film producers don’t want them to be seen at any price. I have seen some that are remarkable. The scenario competitions sponsored by Cinéa and Bonsoir, among others, have allowed me to discover several excellent ones. Yet no one has wanted to assure their realization. A dozen times have strangers done me the honor of sending me their manuscripts; they had material there for fine French films. I submitted these ready-to-shoot subjects to nearly all the film companies: they were original, vivid, lively, interesting, and reading them was a delight; they were even commercial, as the saying goes; but time is passing and these interesting works, inexplicably, always cause alarm. I would submit them again just to see that reaction.
ACTUALLY, the only possible way for you to see your ideas realized is to have a sizable fortune or bankers intelligent enough to cover your costs. Neither is impossible, and writers for the movies would be wrong to become discouraged. Let them dream of being composers whose youthful works are still being performed when they are fifty. In the cinema, old-timers don’t have the authority that they do in the theater and opera. The cinema is for young minds. Anything that’s not youthful is out of place there.
A work written for the cinema has no resemblance, gentlemen, to the libretto that a composer enlivens or messes up. Nor to the scenario that the ballet master or pantomimist embroiders. The cinema drama exists in and of itself. Let its image-maker cut a line or illustrate it imprecisely, he will prove himself as foolish as the tragic actors who mutilate the text of their roles.
In truth, someone who writes a drama for the cinema must direct it himself. His intended conception, intelligent and exact, means little in the hands of imbeciles: I mean the majority of filmmakers. If it comes into the hands of one of his peers, the latter will adapt himself badly to the rigorous execution of a work that’s not his own: the newcomer will find himself off target, out in the cold, not measuring up. The result will be unfortunate.
Most authors of cinegraphic dramas hesitate to film their own work. A brief but bitter experience allows me to declare they are wrong. First, because there is little chance that their translators understand them. Next, because the fact of having thought through and experienced a visual composition is the best assurance that they will know how to execute it.
In all the manuscripts which have been willingly entrusted to me, I have noticed with amazement that the best of these new writers have had no other technical education about the cinema except what they have derived from their simple understanding as spectators.
READERS of the four little dramas collected in this volume will be surprised, even disappointed perhaps, to see them drafted in a jargon different from what they might expect. They will find them devoid of all technical annotation. Some believe it indispensable to write out the images in scenarios,1 for example, like this:
Antoinette remembered her happy childhood with bitterness and regret (American shot).
The apparition of Antoinette, as a child, playing with her doll under an almond tree in flower (Distant shot, dissolve in with a shaded oval mask).
Large close up of Antoinette dreaming (End of dissolve in, iris out).
There, that’s impressive. But to what end? The director of the scenario must be capable of understanding how he should realize what the writer intends. When you put a letter in the mailbox, you write on the outside: M. Dupont, 18, rue Georges-Clemenceau, in Aubagne; and you don’t tell the carrier what rooftop he must look for to find number 18 on the rue Georges-Clemenceau in Aubagne. He knows how to read and conduct himself.
It seems to me that after reading this
201. Militis explains that she is his wife.
202. He bought her one day in the Far East from a respectable old couple . . .
203. A Buddhist priest covered with jewels has blessed the marriage, in a temple of paper and bamboo, where there was a giant idol of solid gold . . .
204. . . . whose left eye the woman kissed . . .
205A. . . . before embarking on the large freighter with her husband.
205B. Sarah makes a gesture.
the reader will see the unfolding of shots and their equilibrium well enough. His imagination, aided by his intelligence, will evoke the images at the desired distance, in the desired length, according to the desired rhythm.
And the director, likewise, will employ the procedures of his craft al- most automatically, just as the writer puts his thought into the form of words without recourse to a dictionary.
Even the apprentice, ignorant of any professional tricks, will learn them intuitively if he follows his reason.
Thus in the lines I have just cited, 201 will be a very clear close shot of the sailor Militis engaged in speaking to a stranger.
202 shows us what Militis is speaking about, something from the past: the change in rhythm calls for a fade or dissolve; the change in framing means a different angle of shooting, therefore, a shifting of the camera; the change in time and the transition to a distant country allows for a slight soft focus or luminous superimposition and different tinting; finally, since the interest of this image comes from the decor and the ensemble of actors, it should have the largest possible field of vision. The same with 203, which, still wider and more distant, means to enchant us with the charms of the temple and the idol.
204 brings us near to the Oriental woman but with a certain vagueness, aided by soft focus, and from the same angle.
These images of the story will achieve a blending of one into another so that, in 205A, the exterior long shot, the characters seem nearly insignificant beside the freighter they are going to board. The story is finished: here a fade or an iris out is indispensable.
Finally, 205B brings us back to a more proximate reality. Sarah makes a gesture. Yes, this woman who has listened to the storyteller suggests either her interest or her impatience with a gesture. Her face matters to us. Will this be a large close shot? No, for the indicated gesture may carry the actress outside the frame of the screen. It’s best to adopt the American shot, that is, the view of the actress from the top of the head to the knees.
Is that complicated?
Just understand that the technique of directing a film is quite simple, even for an apprentice. He needs only two things: (1) to know what he is seeing or what he should see and (2) to work in a studio with perfectly adequate equipment. The latter is perhaps more rare than the former.
Try it.
IT’S CURIOUS that the country where cinema is really taken seriously produces so few dramas conceived cinematographically.
The initial American scenarios were rather mediocre, save those of Chaplin, but his were only monologues born of a strong and supple personality, and conceived according to the dimensions of his talent.
In Sweden, the adaptation of novels reigns almost supreme. Their productions have provided an amazing education for the French adapters. Mauritz Stiller and Sjostrom have discovered the means to achieve something truly cinematic while preserving the novel, so that the whole work remains whole. Thus the entire world has been able to read the best works of Selma Lâgeröff on the screen in images.2
In France, despite the marvelous dramatic inventions of Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier, Léon Poirier, and several others, distributors more and more gravely mistrust anything which is not an adaptation. They are mistaken in this. Their ambition and their commerce have spread French culture throughout the world—without which this special branch of business would already have succumbed—thanks to works like La Roue, El Dorado, L’Ombre déchirée much more than to the transfilmation (if I dare say so) of Roger la honte, La Dame de Monsoreau, or Les Mystères de Paris.3
Distributors don’t realize that. They believe it is enough to announce: “This is adapted from something” in order to attract the crowds. An error which they’ll be sorry about and which will spare us posters of this sort:4
It’s not a question of renouncing adaptations. But it’s unthinkable for this country, which blithely disowns the creation of young talents, to accept mediocre productions in which neither the flavor of the novel nor the personality of its people can be recognized. It’s all well and good to adapt, but to begin to learn how is very difficult. L’Atlantide, Jocelyn, Le Crime de Lord Arthur Savilie, Mathias Sandorf, Le Père Goriot have been adequately illustrated.5 But how many others are as good? How many times has the life of a novel withered away through a translation which doesn’t even come to life or achieve a semblance of photogenic life. Generally, our directors begin working without having a sense of the book they are to film—besides not having a sense of this subtle and imperious cinema in whose names they are working.
The Americans, who chiefly film novels, take only their essence. I have seen Frenchmen shocked by the screening of films drawn from famous works because they scarcely recognize them. They were wrong. The American cinéaste instinctively takes all that is cinematic in a novel. He jettisons the rest. What should he do? He is to be condemned only when he attacks a work in which there is nothing cinematic—example: Thaïs6—and wants to “photogenize” it anyway. In that, he imitates the French and Italian who would make a film out of any old book as long as it was known. This error is rather rare for, despite their faults and weaknesses of taste, the American cinéastes up to now have shown more flair in choosing a theme to film than have the European novelists’ fellow countrymen.
Thus Les Trois Mousquetaires [1921–1922] filmed by Henri Diamant-Berger, despite its qualities, has not had the worldwide success of The Three Musketeers [1921] filmed by Douglas Fairbanks. That is not, as some seem to believe, because of Douglas’s violent charm and publicity. It’s because the French version, concerned about detail, about historical minutiae, about the patient touching up of each and every individual and milieu, has almost completely sacrificed the rhythm of the novel. The American version is only rhythm: Fairbanks admits freely that there are few characters as devoid of interest in themselves as d’Artagnan. He lives only though his reactions to events, through his outbursts and caprices, through his rhythm finally, since Dumas—a murky storyteller, a summary psychologist, a historian of shoddy details—is a master of rhythm. The adapter is right to see only that to film in the novel.
The French public is rather badly situated, I recognize, to judge a foreign film categorically. Nine times out of ten they give one to us mutilated, deformed, and aggravated by those deadly intertitles which too often combine the useless and the inept.
The text, let’s say it again, should not appear when the image can replace it. The use of intertitles is abused. They drag on the rhythm—and the spectator.
Thus in a recent film, in the middle of a scene where a young soldier says goodbye to his parents, we read this “intertitle”:
And several weeks later, one beautiful morning, Léon had to bid a fond farewell to his family just as one of those giant sea monsters in the harbor was preparing to carry him to the land of France, in the salvation of liberty.
That replaced the ships, the volunteers, and the battlefield which they could not or would not show us. And to fill a gap in the images, the cinéaste seemed unaware that he was forcing the spectator to imagine so many new images: the steamship, the American soldiers, the trenches, and to superimpose them over the young man’s farewells—one beautiful morning!
I cite here only a sincere and serious text which goes wrong by interrupting the trajectory of our own visual emotion. It is one of the worst, the stupidest, the most scandalous. Such snares are characteristic of the powerlessness of our distributors—however excited they are by adaptation—to release a majority of good adaptations.
HOWEVER, I will not be surprised soon to see an important revelation of French cinegraphic dramas. The disparate eagerness of several dozen young men to compose film projects will have its recompense. The stubbornness of four or five among them to direct what they consider interesting and what they feel necessary has already achieved victories. It’s not over yet. The most diverse cultured minds are more and more drawn to the animated image. They closely examine the suggestions there, on the chance of making a discovery. They know that we can, we must seek to say, in global black and white, in this unique medium of expression, what other languages—the book, the painting, the voice, the dance—cannot and dare not say.
We ourselves have already made an attempt. A clumsy and incomplete effort, but something promising is more precious than a brilliant and useless success.
We will continue then.
THROUGH the possibility of rapidly alternating diverse images, the cinema permits the evocation of simultaneous scenes; it allows us to witness interior scenes paralleled to exterior scenes. And it creates an extraordinary field for antithesis: the opposition of drawing room and hovel, of prison cell and sea, of war and fireside . . .
Griffith once employed this technique with the most paradoxical and prodigious mastery. Intolerance evoked the fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, Saint Bartholomew’s [massacre] and the life of an American worker all at the same time. The rather unsporting spirit of spectators kept this experiment from achieving all the success it deserved, for to many eyes this vertiginous four-part drama quickly turned into an inexplicable chaos in which Catherine de Medici visited the poor of New York just as Jesus was baptizing the courtesans of Balthazar and Darius’ armies were beginning to assualt the Chicago elevated. But the bold rhythm, the verve, the brilliance, the sumptuous ingenuity of this vast film merit our admiration and make it the most magnificent document of cinegraphic simultaneity.
This confrontation between present and past, between reality and memory, through the image, is one of the most seductive plots of photogenic art. Several cinéastes have employed it so far. It is delicate and sometimes disappointing work. It requires the collaboration of not only intelligent but especially intuitive actors and very special technical attention. With such carefully selected elements one can achieve the psychological precision of nuances that poetry and music guard so jealously. I know nothing more enticing than to transcribe in moving pictures the obsessions of memory or the profound returns of the past.7 A woman leaves a comfortable life to see how the poor live and is revived by a violent situation and the confused atmosphere of a popular festival (relived once more). Alone one evening, a man discovers through a series of simple signs the real course of a drama in which not long ago he believed he had acted as a judge but where he had actually submitted to a criminal influence. Separation and exhaustion disjoin two lovers; they think they have forgotten one another, but then they meet again—calmly—and the drunkenness of a disorderly evening revives their former love while kindling all the appetites, dreams, and resentments of their opponents. An aged, worn-out woman makes a final pilgrimage to the house which she left out of unhappiness thirty years before; she discovers a young woman in the same situation and particularly the image of her past hours of joy, and she doesn’t regret having paid so harshly for a fleeting happiness. These themes torment and haunt me. They can also enchant. These evocations should find in the spectator a deep resonance. Each of us has something inside, a story, which he believes dead and gone and that the phantoms of the screen have suddenly restored to consciousness. . . .
1 A reference perhaps to Henri Diamant-Berger’s model decoupage in Le Cinema (1919), or Abel Gance’s decoupage of J’Accuse in Filma (May 1920), or even Blaise Cendrars’s “La Perle fiévreuse,” Signaux de France et Belgique (November 1921—June 1922).
2 See, for instance, Stiller’s Arne’s Treasure (1919) as well as Sjöstrom’s Karin Ingsmarsdotter (1920) and The Phantom Chariot (1921).
3 Baroncelli’s Roger la honte (1922) was adapted from the novel of Jules Mary. René Le Somptier’s La Dame de Monsoreau (1923) was adapted from the Alexandre Dumas novel. Charles Burguet’s Les Mystères de Paris (1922) was adapted from the famous Eugène Sue novel.
4 Both were André Antoine films. L’Arlésienne (1922) was adapted from the story by Alphonse Daudet. Mademoiselle de la Seiglière (1921) was adapted from the Jules Sandeau novel.
5 Feyder’s L’Atlantide (1921), Pierre Benoît novel; Poirier’s Jocelyn (1922), Lamartine poem; Hervil’s Le Crime de Lord Arthur Savilie (1922), Oscar Wilde novel; Fescourt’s Mathias Sandorf [1921), Jules Verne novel; Baroncelli’s Le Père Goriot (1921), Balzac novel.
6 Thai’s was an Anatole France novel which Massenet had turned into an opera.
7 The following sentences summarize the story lines of Delluc’s own La Fête espagnole (Dulac, 1920), Le Silence (1920), Fièvre (1921), and La Femme de nulle part (1922).
RICCIOTTO CANUDO, “Reflections on the Seventh Art”
Translated by Claudia Gorbman from “Réflexions sur le septième art” [1923], L’Usine aux images (Pâtis: Etienne Chiron, 1926), 29–47.
I. ANOTHER CHARACTER
I HAVE SAID that the expressive domains of cinema remain basically unexplored. At least in France. A most painful qualification, given that France has unleashed all the fire of modern poetry for the last fifty years. In France the visual arts have sought new alchemies of color and form; in France music has been exploring the new harmonic magic of sounds. In France the cinema first took flight, hatched from scientific and industrial research.
There is less awareness in France than anywhere else that the cinema is an art which must not resemble any other. For it is unlike any other: totally unlike the theater in its muteness, unlike pantomime which from Augustan Rome to our era seeks merely to represent a few elementary emotional states (greed, gratification, spite), unlike the dance, since its rhythm arises from everyday life and not from life as transposed into visual harmony and musical stylization.
The Swedes brought to cinema’s evocation of the human drama, with incomparable mastery, an element of ideal counterpoint, inaccessible to theater: the ambience of nature (a character as important as Destiny). Painting, too, had tried its hand at this but only within its limitation of immobility. The Americans, with their great westerns, have also cast nature in a major role. Though it is used to delineate the tone of the cowboy’s horseback chases and gunfire more than to motivate human actions, the cowpunching characters are nevertheless true products “of the land,” thanks to nature. This mathematical fatality of nature’s role, that is, an indispensable cog in the clockwork mechanism that moves our emotions, is something we find rarely in Italy, where the landscape is hardly more than a beautiful natural setting. And in France.
And yet, nature as character is another absolute domain of the cinema. For example, the Lorraine landscape of Barrès’s La Colline inspirée so influences the dramatis personae, that we could never mistake them for natives of the Massif Central or Chamonix.1 Nature must not be a pretext for sightseeing, travel memoirs, or post card collections. What is perfect in Feyder’s L’Atlantide is precisely the rendering of action in which human beings appear intimately bound to the specific milieu’s own states of madness. Especially in the third part of the film: the real protagonist here is the desert, with its gaping soul and its unfathomable ferocity. Sometimes, as in Delluc’s Fièvre, the evocation of human atmosphere—the cabaret of drunken sailors and decadent pleasure seekers—is taken to such a point that the plot seems reduced to mere incident. It is no longer nature but ambiance, milieu, that dominates and directs the acts of men.
But this is not the case in L’Herbier’s l’Homme du large where the father, a deplorable murderer—quite contrary to Balzac’s treatment—feels and acts as he would irrespective of milieu; seascapes here are merely excuses for beautiful photography. The same strategy is found in L’Herbier’s other works as well, all creaking under an antiquated aestheticism. In cinema, the setting’s mood, natural like the Swedes’, or powerfully artificial as in some German films (Dr. Caligari comes to mind, of course), must determine the course of events. Action in—only in—the cinema should be nothing more than a corporeal detail, a material consequence, a visual expression of a collective psychology. The theater, on the other hand, can only focus on the individual and will always remain more oriented toward the specifically psychological.
Cinema will thereby prove to be the supreme artistic means of representation and expression of milieus and peoples. It will cease being “individual,” copying the theater, which in turn copies life. Further, cinema must cease adapting old novels, a mockery of good taste and an insult to intelligence. It’s an assassination of literary heroes: think of Baroncelli’s job on the powerful Rastignac in Le Père Goriot—a crime more heinous than the one perpetrated against his latest heroes from Jules Mary!2—and also Diamant-Berger’s murder of those poor plumed puppets of Les Trois Mousquetazres, of four swaggering petty officers, in the middle of drunken binges, reveling, unruly horsecharges, and of that incredible naval battle off La Rochelle shot in the pools at the Luxembourg Gardens!
II. THE CINEMA’S DOMAINS
The cinema’s domains are so numerous that at present we cannot even imagine what they might be. They will multiply like magic before artists’ eyes. For generations to come, the marvels of this seventh art will bring into being all that the world’s imagination glimpsed in the magical tales of our youth. Science, as well as Art, will increasingly take possession of the Screen’s Enchanted Castle where—in the blink of an eye—dream is represented by a most corporeal reality. And already, scientific films, whose limits and possibilities Javorski has described, are finding admirable applications in Pathé’s Doin series and elsewhere.
In the strictly practical and technical sense, the recent Cinema Exhibition at the Arts and Metiers school, under the aegis of the Society for Art in the Schools (headed by Gaston Vidal, Undersecretary of State, and Leon Riotor, of the City Council), has served to broaden the scope of education, particularly the crucial influence that the older generation exercises on the younger: the orientation of the child’s mind, directly via images, toward particular professions or arts.3
But most of all, we anxiously anticipate the future of artistic works. Art’s sole mission is to fix life’s elusiveness and synthesize its harmonies. Its true charm—in the magical sense—is to possess the secret of the philter of oblivion, of spiritual elevation, of deepest joy.
Film will increasingly serve as Art’s powerful coadjutor. When the painter and the musician truly wed the poet’s dream, and when their triple expression of a single subject is achieved in living light by the écraniste4— at least while we wait for the screen’s Wagner to embody all three at once— films will reach us with a supreme clarity of ideas and visual emotions. We will recognize cinema as the synthesis of all the arts and of the profound impulse underlying them. It will be our immaterial Temple, Parthenon, and Cathedral. It will be a lucid and vast expression of our internal life, infinitely more vibrant than all previous forms of expression. Cinema will be able to construct the synthesis-temple of our intense inner life, in the heavens that its new strength will illumine and “illustrate” by means of the incomparable findings of Science.
The cinema’s domains can extend in all directions. The Italian assemble great numbers of people in front of the cameras and compose immense, alive, moving historical frescoes—and it “works.” In Germany, for the first time, painters and écranistes have collaborated to attain the living atmosphere of dream. Admittedly in the admirable Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, “exceptional” characters sometimes appear glued to the decor, whose style their reality seems to contradict at times. But in the German film, From Morning to Midnight,5 a pure masterpiece of human emotion and artistic synthesis, the landscapes and their moods are so unified with the characters, that all of the distortion and unreality of this vision melts into the simplest, broadest, and most poignant truth. The écraniste had the set designer take advantage of black and white, inscribing in its limitless range all the psychological nuances of the poor thieving cashier. (The protagonist wants a happy life, but at the end of his day of debauchery he is seized by the most intolerable loathing of life and embraces the ultimate solution of suicide.)
Abel Gance, our Walt Whitman of the screen, has ventured into another domain of emotion in La Roue, by means of the life of the machine. He has also created a mood of unreality, in accordance with his vision. Rather than rely on a set designer, he appealed to the odd world that man created to amplify his power. This world of monsters of hard and fiery matter which drones and rumbles through human life, multiplying its strength a hundredfold, is the Machine.
Between the mood of unreality synthesized by the German film’s designers, and the mood of equally synthetic unreality “engineered” in Gance’s French film, there is absolute reality: the artist’s dream, Poetry. As Novalis says, Poetry is the absolute Real. It mobilizes the chimerical operation of artistic genius when it tears from the fabric of “real life” elements or details too numerous to count. From these details, genius composes a meaningful and moving work—not a mere photograph of beings and things in movement, but a synthesis of life.
III. ON CINEMATOGRAPHIC L’ANGUAGE
I do not believe that true intellectual milieus, and their epigones—the gossipy salons called art and literary circles; newspapers (those mills of daily opinion); the business organizations of artistic and literary news; the cafés where young art students, if indeed any are left, absorb the latest aesthetic trivia over imported beers—quite realize the immense toil that goes on in the world of cinema. Nor do I even know, for that matter, if the brain realizes the considerable work of the stomach in digesting a complicated meal. All humanity, after having swallowed cinema, is in the process of digesting it, and the going is not smooth.
The immense toil does not reside only in what is referred to as production. We know that the cinematograph—totally conceived in industrial terms, and the child of scientific experiment—has not yet truly embraced the world of artists, those natural organizers of aesthetic pleasures, those age-old “rhythm men”,of universal sensibility; but the screen wishes to tap in on the universal sensibility, and it succeeds. Film production is growing with an intensity both wild and calculated. Reels of film, these celluloid railroad tracks, will soon wrap around the world by the thousandfold. Production is at full capacity, and is every increasing with the animal fecundity of the lower species. But the work of intellectual digestion has hardly begun—in spite of all the artistic attention which admirable écranistes have been devoting to such an industrialized form.
The philologist Max Muller said that thoughts are merely speech rolled around in the mouth. Indeed, the more words one knows in a language, the more thoughts one can produce with grace and flexibility. Likewise, the more a sculptor has studied painting, the more forms, designs, shapes his hands possess, and the more supple and rich his visual thinking. For this reason cinematographic language is trying to formulate (if not yet amplify) its vocabulary. The problems demanding solutions are many. The rhythm already established by the interactions of shot scale, from shot to shot, has produced an elementary graded nomenclature of close-ups, American shots, and so on. But “tone,” that is, the relations of expressive tonalities among images of a single scene, are of growing interest to écranistes. Few of them really care. Many are still content to treat the camera as a moving deus ex machina, and they expect it to illustrate a text purely and simply, often in an impure and complicated way. But the best écranistes, those most sensitive to the aesthetic demands of our present moment, are working doggedly to transform the screen into the most marvelous and direct man-made instrument for arresting life and pinning down its meanings.
Thus, cinematographic language, even outside the story that it is to animate, is feverishly seeking its speech, articulating its syllables, striving toward an optical pronunciation. So far it generally lacks elegance, or pleasing spontaneity.
CINEMA is reinaugurating the entire experience of writing—it is renewing writing. Essentially it is a universal language, and not just by virtue of its visual and immediate expression of all human feelings. What are the letters of the alphabet? A stylization or schematization, via progressive simplification, of ordinary images which had struck the first men. From the paleolithic era to the consolidation of the copper age, man strove also to arrest the fleeting aspects of life—external or emotional—images and thoughts, so others could know them, so as to transmit to others a felt impression. Man chose the means most certain to last, he carved images in stone. He divested them of all superfluity by retaining only their most essential cursive elements for signification.
The large linguistic families were born from this centuries-long work which determined the real, only incontestable superiority of man over the animals—his ability to arrest life, the triumph over the ephemeral and over death.
Ideographic languages like Chinese, or hieroglyphic systems like the Egyptian, still visibly manifest their origins in images. The newer alphabetical languages, although based more on sound than image, might also hark back to these origins in images.
Cinema, for its part, draws upon and multiplies the possibilities of expression in images which heretofore was the province of painting and sculpture. It shall build a truly universal language with characteristics entirely yet undreamed of. In order to do so, it must bring art—the representation of life—back to the sources of all emotion, seeking life in itself via movement. Static visual art forms, and rhythmic musical art forms, have as their sole purpose to arrest and crystallize the moving currents of internal life. The arrival of cinema heralds the renovation of all modes of artistic creation, of all means of “arresting the fleeting,” conquering the ephemeral. What it can already show us—for example, in slow-motion studies of plant growth—is an affirmation of its stupendous capacity to renew the representation of life itself, fixing the instant-by-instant movement of beings and things. Cinema gives us a visual analysis of such precise evidence that it cannot but vastly enrich the poetic and painterly imagination. In addition, through its “horizontal” dimension—its capacity to show events occurring simultaneously—it will increase the sum total of our sensations.
In its groping infancy, the cinema seeks its voices and words. It is bringing us with all our acquired psychological complexity back to the great, true, primordial, synthetic language, visual language, prior even to the confining literalness of sound. The moving image does not replace words, but rather becomes a new and powerful entity of its own. The screen, this single-paged book as unique and infinite as life itself, permits the world— both internal and external—to be imprinted on its surface.
Thus far, confusion reigns over the definition of some concepts relating to cinema. The cinema is not only working out its various modes of production, but also the terms to describe them. Investigations are in progress: Gaston Tournier’s work in L’Echo de Paris6 regarding the root “kinema” (movement) has been quite instructive. Cinegraphy, cineology, cinemania, cinephilia and cinephobia, cinepoetry and cinoedia, cinematurgy, cinechromism—the list goes on. Only time and chance will tell what terminology will stay with us. For the time being, I shall stick with “screen art,” and for its practitioner, “écraniste”
IV. ON “CINEMATIC TRUTH’’
The following remarks are inspired neither by Marcel L’Herbier’s La Carnaval des vérités nor by Henri Roussell’s Vérité [1922] (two beautiful films with very different styles). All the “truths” that cinema can show us will eventually force us to confront and define this new and complex cinematic truth, of which most écranistes are totally unaware. It alone can interest artists in all the arts.
The undeniable and—alas—increasing inferiority of French films when compared to other countries’ production resides primarily in their ignorance of cinematic truth. Such ignorance ranges from indiscriminately snatching actors from the theater to other choices in subject matter, sets, landscape, even lighting. Energy is poured into industrial management rather than aesthetic vision. Dignity and the aim of conceiving something of human value are being sacrificed to stupidly commercial goals. The cinematograph’s ruling class came from all spheres of general business, with the traditional cupidity of merchants of the Temple. For publishers and booksellers a book still is a work of art, but for them a film is not. Film is measured and sold as a commodity; it’s bought up by the meter or foot. Then why all the surprise that the state treats it as nothing other than an industrial product on the market? The cultivated man’s aversion to cinema will surely grow as the industry itself grows, because money enters into every phase (including artistic intelligence and initiative) as a motive.
However: there is a “truth” of the cinema, which film-producing nations perceive and practice already. If the multitudes are like dense foliage, the flowers that bloom as the synthesis of their minds and as ideals of beauty are artists and intellectuals. In France, the very multitude which invented cinema has so far yielded very few flowers. We’re still so astonished at the new discovery that we try to believe at all costs that it is part of our old heritage, that cinema is nothing more than an offshoot of theater. So we pluck our film actors from the theater—actors who keep talking even though cinema wants them silent. Also from theater we derive a kind of staging, in balanced masses of figures, instead of giving free play to the infinite intensities of light itself, to masses of black and white and their innumerable gradations. Light must not be enslaved to the representation of human figures. Instead, characters should appear solely as light humanized into dramatic symbols.
As for “dramatic truth” itself—that is, the impact of feelings and individual sensations that can elicit pathos and emotion—it seems nobody could care less about exploring what would be a really photogenic impact. People are content with the photogenie of faces although any face, lit with expertise and subtlety, is photogenic. They dredge up the most belabored, simplistic, lesser literary works, as long as the work doesn’t trumpet a concern for psychology, and as long as it provides plenty of the vulgar collisions of passion and greed which comprise, for everyone in the melodrama business, action.
Here is the big mistake of most ecranistes and their financial bosses. They think that all a film needs (more than a play) is what they call an action. Indeed, in the theater, speech can explain things, while in cinema, the plot requires the visual portrayal of a limited range of gestures. But no one even conceives of a cinematographic truth for which screen characters—far from simply coming across as photographed actors—would represent luminous entities. If cinema is more than just photographed theater, or an illustrated realist novel, all the actors must be articulated in the play of light, just as painters expressed the phantoms of their dreams via the play of color. The film, the work, will then appear in its own right, independent of the other arts, not needing overexplicit intertitles or mimed speeches, free from the conventional fetters of the theater.
HERE is one of the essential characteristics of the cinematograph. The way to transpose “truth” into art does not merely depend on what a camera can capture of reality. This truth lies fundamentally in the artist’s mind, it is his partipris, just like his own style. To be content with pointing the camera at some characters or landscape arranged more or less artfully is not doing the work of an artist, but is a vulgar and mediocre act. The cinema, far from being a stage in photography, is an altogether new art. The écraniste’s mission is to transform objective reality into his own personal vision. Acquiring a style means not just photographing something as an objective document, but working with the light it captures to evoke the states of the soul.
Rather than the spectacle of objective reality, art consists in evoking feelings associated with that reality. It is intolerable vulgarity, for instance, when in a film we see the setting and objects representing a character’s thought when he is supposedly remembering something. A title tells you, “He remembered reaching the forest,” and you’re shown a long shot of the character approaching the forest. But that does not show his memory. In one’s memories one does not see oneself. The film can only portray his memory of reaching the forest by suggesting the thoughts and feelings accompanying the moment. We could provide numerous examples of how the photographer’s banal choices ruin the portrayal of evocative impressions.
By and large, the ecraniste has been accepting, not creating, what he photographs. He does not create psychological atmosphere, the equivalent of description in the novel or color balance in painting. Instead of planning each shot in the way a painter conceives each detail of a composition, so that the spectator will be left with a single image distilled from the entire film, the ecraniste is pleased if his shots are remembered at all, and if people say, “it’s beautifully photographed.” This brings to mind the inferiority of melodic opera—composed and remembered in separate melodies—to the truly symphonic musical drama.
Several authors, though, have understood that cinematographic truth has nothing to do with the truth of visible reality. They see that unless the ecraniste has succeeded in imposing his personal emotion on his images, a single scene can produce very different emotive effects according to the spectator’s mood. If a dagger piercing flesh is shown to me, my emotional reaction will depend on my feeling about the hand doing the thrusting, or the flesh being stabbed. But if the ecraniste has succeeded in situating his action in the greater psychological context, if he has successfully prepared me for the emotion he feels, than I will respond in the manner he desires.
In the cinema, as in the pursuits of the mind, art consists in suggesting emotions, and not in recounting facts. It is very tempting to show everything in “true” images; this is why people think the screen shows much “truth” even when they barely feel any profound or truly aesthetic emotion. The word “truth” (which in this sense should be replaced by “gross and superficial reality”) should belong to no category of art. What painter painted “truth” as writers on cinema mean it? Leonardo, with his androgynes always in the same pose? All the painters of the Nativity, with their idealized arrangements of human and animal figures around the manger? Michelangelo, with his predilection for grandeur, or Watteau, with his penchant for the graceful ornamentation so popular in his era?
Only a few ecranistes have understood that cinematographic truth must correspond to literary truth, to pictoral truth, even to the truth of love. None of these is objective “reality.” A traveling businessman once blamed Anatole France for inventing a Florence he couldn’t recognize when, along the banks of the Arno, he tried to use Le Lys rouge as his guide instead of a Baedeker. And yet, Anatole France expressed the soul of Florence with details reflecting his visionary precision, if not documentary truth.
We see it in German expressionist films such as Caligari, From Urick to Niscurit, and Torgus;7 in the Swedes, whose vision acquires emotional profundity embodied in their snowscapes; and in France, with Louis Delluc, especially Marcel L’Herbier, sometimes Abel Gance. The discoveries in these films touch on cinematographic truth, with a stylistic fluency capable of establishing the cinematograph on equal footing with the other arts. More film artists are drawing near as well.
Still others, of whom Leonce Perret and Diamant-Berger are typical, glut themselves on their albums of picture postcards, where you can find everything but truth and aesthetic nobility.
V. IMMATERIALITY IN CINEMA
Camille Flammarion, having witnessed a screening of a film illustrating a soul’s survival after death, has once again expressed his old faith in spiritism, adding his new enthusiasm for cinema. He was happily surprised to see the cinema confront the evocation (if no longer the representation) of immateriality. Mr. Flammarion’s remarks confirm that the cinema, when understood and conceived as an art by artists, must develop in specific areas that are impossible in other arts.8
Cinema has exclusive domains. It is difficult to see or even conceive of them in the current confusion surrounding this infant art. The cinema, understood as an art—and I insist on this necessary understanding, separating us distinctly from almost all “men of cinema”—gives the impression today of something sacred, a temple for example, inadvertently open to the merchants who are most bitterly determined to deny entry to the secular and natural priesthood of artists.
This is why many intellectuals aren’t aware that like all arts this one paves new avenues for the soul’s expression. Understandably, they are still considering cinema as a new commodity in the mercenary global stock market, and they disdain it as something irrelevant to their concerns. In this context no one has dreamed of recognizing and defining the cinema’s arenas of expression. And owing to the usual commercial haste to produce quickly, minimize risk, and make big profits, all the other genres—novel, theater—have been plundered. Producers have sunk to the lowest level in order to have the widest clientele. They have resuscitated the serial and the “chromo” to bring the melodrama’s spirit and views to the screen, and they have pilfered any music they can find to envelope it all in the appropriate atmosphere.
In other words, it suffices to put any old subject onto the screen—just as musicians (talented ones included) used to put any old text to music. And finally came Wagner and Debussy . . . I have already pointed out that the “beautiful melodies” of operas correspond, for the mass audience’s pleasure, to the “beautiful photography” of most of our ecranistes.
ONE OF cinema’s exclusive domains will be the immaterial, or more precisely, the unconscious. The image of a character’s memory or thought had already tempted many an ecraniste. It rounded out the drama, replaced speech (or the excess of dialogue and explanation) on the screen. The means were primitive, with those superimpositions reminiscent of popular icons that have saints prostrated before the madonnas in their mandalas. Now we can do better. We can already alter the visual register by means of stylistic devices such as distortions, superimpositions, and scrims and masking effects. Theater is confined to concrete speech, and when an unconscious image is desired, it can play with light: it can throw a white mantle around Hamlet’s father. But it will always remain within the exact proportions of everyday reality.
Cinema permits, and must further develop, the extraordinary and striking faculty of representing immateriality. Both America and Sweden have just shown us: in, for example, Svenska Film’s admirable Phantom Carriage, based on Selma Lagerlof’s novel, and the astonishing and perfect drama Earthbound, by Basil King at Goldwyn.
With these films we are bordering on the perfection of a genre at its very outset. The Phantom Carriage is the vision of a drunkard. In Earthbound, we actually witness the anguishing problem of a dead man’s soul. Killed in his prime by his mistress’s husband, he must linger on earth until everyone he had made unhappy forgives him, and until his wife recognizes the ghost and his agony. Only love can free him from the earth where his body is already decaying. Where during his life he had created disharmony and suffering, he must regain harmony, which means repentance and love. “The dead inhabit our lives, but they are separate,” an intertitle bitterly comments, as we see a shot showing the poor young murdered man take his impassive wife in his arms; she does not see or feel him, since he can no longer embrace a living being.
Certain shots in this film, combining the real and the immaterial, the living and the dead, are often powerful and very troubling. We are reminded of the promise that man might photograph the total life of the unconscious, whose unknown rhythm might rule over our own! . . .
VII. A FIRST STEP
The present artistic movement in cinema will result in affecting the commercial establishment, whose strength threatens to submerge the screen in a tidal wave of business interests. We must claim the film as a work of art, and marshal the energies and sensibilities of artists. Only by doing so will we know whether the human imagination has really enriched the world with a new mode of expressing our deepest life, or whether a new industry is merely in the process of creating—in place of cafes, which are disappearing before an onslaught of banks—modern shelters from boredom, or pleasant oases where couples may conveniently grope in the darkness.
The Salon d’Automne has hastened to open its doors to modern artists who believe in cinema as an art, who are prepared to devote their dreams and energies to it but who find themselves discouraged by the implacable domination of the hoi polloi and by an incompetent, insensitive, often biased corporate press. The “Seventh Art” screenings in our newest Salon have as their purpose to present the “state of the art” of this new force bestowed upon man to communicate across great distances via image and emotion. It’s a simple overview, in the form of short talks on the aesthetic values of cinematic works, interspersed with selections from among the best films made thus far. The program ought to demonstrate to the cultural world that these innumerable light-engravings in the measure of man, moving and animated by the breath of life, this triumphant “living black and white” that can prolong man’s existence beyond the limits of space, time, and death—this is a brand-new force that can make life manifest and comfort us in living.
But the excerpts chosen for screening at the Salon fall short of what the modern artist can expect from contemporary genius. Although they stand among the best and the most representative, we will no doubt one day be able to see the primitive awkwardness through their veiled grace. The kraniste paints, sculpts, composes with light, and never was a painter’s palette at the same time so rich and so ineffable! All the same, he knows about lines, and the play of lines one calls forms, and the play of forms one calls movement. He knows about them via the magic of the lens and the power which cinema’s mechanical precision grants him to arrest the fleeting aspects of life. The new power is so great, and man has possessed it for so little time, that the imperfections, the groping, and the visual mistakes coexist right along with lightning flashes of beauty. This unevenness might irritate us now: but tomorrow the cinema’s images will appear as moving as the simple and divine frescoes, fashioned by the bare hands of Christian painters in the Roman catacombs, where for nine centuries they hid their faith and kept watch over the inextinguishable aesthetic fire.
The Salon d’Automne will have had the certain glory of proclaiming to the world of artists that the cinema is an art, synthesizing science and the arts all at once. Artists—creative minds whose mission is to grasp the aspects and rhythms of life—will learn that rather than contemptuously avoiding the cinema, or treating it as inconsequential entertainment, they ought to devote their talents to it. Elie Faure has already expressed his hope for “visual symphonies” in film. Who can create them, whom shall we ask? Certainly not those blind businessmen currently in charge of its destiny: they’re stunned not by luminous miracles but by their impressive cash boxes. We must go to artists themselves, to the people of taste, to the indispensable “snobs” who organize exchange, dialogue, and work. We must appeal to the writers and critics who, with the aid of courageous and clearsighted publishers, must replace the hacks whose scribblings are not so much critical reviews as business reports.
The Seventh Art is for artists. This is the lesson that the Salon d’Automne is bringing to the cultural world. The lesson will be heeded—for nothing can long resist art, the impulse of the universal soul.
1 Maurice Barrés (1862–1923) was a French writer who initially celebrated the rigorous, solitary individualism of la culte du moi and then took up the cause of a French nationalism based on close relations with the land and on race or ethnic origins. La Colline inspirée (1913) was a late collection of lyrical, philosophical essays.
2 The reference is to Baroncelli’s adaptation of Roger la honte (1922), by Jules Mary.
3 This exhibition was part of the first Congress on Cinema and Education, which gathered together 700 educators, businessmen, and politicians in Paris, 20–24 April 1922. See G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe (Paris: Cinéopse, 1925), 578–79.
4 Canudo’s term for the film director. Literally “screenist,” it implies “screen artist.”— TRANS.
5 Karl-Heinz Martin’s Von Morgen bis Mitternachts (1920), adapted from the George Kaiser play.
6 Gaston Tournier was the regular film critic for L’Echo de Paris, a rightist Paris newspaper with literary interests, which briefly challenged the “big four” dailies during the war, largely because of the patriotic articles of Barrés, and then declined in circulation and influence.
7 Hans Kobe’s Torgus (1920), scripted by Carl Mayer and photographed by Karl Freund. The reference to From Urick to Niscurit is uncertain.
8 Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) established and directed an important publishing house in Paris.
RENÉ CL’AIR, “Coeur fidèle”
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum in Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. R. C. Dale (New York: Dover, 1972), 97–98. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Les Films du mois: Coeur fidèle” in Théâtre et Comoedia illustré (1 February 1924).
IT IS NOT too late to talk about Coeur fidèle, which was shown in a few theaters last month. This film does not date from just yesterday, but because of the ineptitude of our methods of distributions, it has not yet been seen by a wide audience. But it dates from tomorrow. We shall see it again.
Before formulating our criticism, let us say that you must see Coeur fidèle if you wish to be acquainted with the resources of the cinema today. Its plot is banal, a sort of Broken Blossoms seen through French eyes. But you know what importance should be attached to the subject of a film: the same, more or less, that is attached to the subject of a symphony. All we ask of a plot is to supply us with subjects for visual emotion, and to hold our attention.
The factor which distinguishes Coeur fidèle from so many other films is its having been composed for the screen, for the joy of “intelligent” eyes, so to speak. From the appearance of the very first images, the film sense is in evidence—no doubt more rational than instinctive, but undeniably there. The lens turns in every direction, moves around objects and people, seeks the expressive image, the surprising camera angle. This exploration of the perspectives of the world is thrilling: it is inconceivable that so many directors have persisted in multiplying matte shots and the tricks of still photography when they could have awakened so much curiosity with a slight tilt of their camera.
The study of the proper camera angle, the only angle right for a given image or scene, is far from having been exhausted. The Americans, who took the first steps in that direction, seem to have stopped short in fear of what still remained to be discovered. Coeur fidèle, among other films—and among other French films, I must add—points us once again in the direction of that study, progress in which is inseparable from progress in cinematic expression.
M. Jean Epstein, the director of Coeur fidèle, is obviously concerned with the question of rhythm. People talk a lot about cinematic rhythm, and the question seems to be the most important one the cinema has to answer at present. It must be said that up to now no complete answer has been proposed. It appears that rhythm sometimes crops up spontaneously in a film—especially in American films—but too often it remains sketchy and disappoints us. When it is intentional—and it is in Coeur fidèle—it is created by means of the reappearance of earlier images; at first this is very effective, but it soon becomes a burden to the overall movement and quite justly annoys the majority of the audience, who cannot make out what the author is driving at, and get impatient. Periodic repetition of earlier images—like assonance or rhyme in prosody—seems to be the only effective rhythmic element the film now has at its disposal. But rhyme and assonance do not bring back the same word in the sentence, whereas the repetition of images summons up more or less the same vision. Something else, which can only be guessed at now, must be found. The absolute mathematical solution has the drawback of not taking into account the sentimental value of the recalled image. No doubt it is necessary to combine harmoniously the sentimental rhythm of the action and the mathematical rhythm of the number of images. . . . But forgive me for letting myself be carried away by this question, which will perhaps seem to be of interest to only a very few readers. I advise these readers once again to go and see Coeur fidèle and its carnival, a beautiful scene of visual intoxication, an emotional dance in the dimension of space, in which the visage of Dionysiac poetry is reborn.
Coeur fidèle can be criticized for lacking unity of action. The film too often goes astray into technical experiments which the action does not demand. That is the difference between the advanced technique of our school and American technique, which is completely at the service of the progress of the story. That is also the explanation of the difference in the audience’s attitude toward American films, in which the expressions are immediately accessible, and ours, which require an effort of the intelligence alone. That is the cause of many a mass dissatisfaction. . . . But let us not dwell on this. A quality director will be able to find the means to reconcile both schools for the greater good of the cinema. If a film is worthy of the cinema, that is already a most agreeable miracle! Coeur fidèle is worthy of it in more than one respect. Those who compare the young and still barbarous cinema with all of literature and all the arts, will not understand this. But let them subject our contemporary old drama to this comparison! The cinema will seem to them in contrast to be an inexhaustible source of poetry.
Apropos of Coeur fidèle, certain details in it have led some people to speak of an unpleasant return to realism. I think that the cinema need fear nothing of the sort. The suppleness of cinematic expression, which passes in a flash from objective to subjective, simultaneously evoking the abstract and the concrete, will not permit film to confine itself to an aesthetic as narrow as that of realism. No matter if the view of a gloomy cabaret or a poverty-stricken room is photographically exact. The screen gives a soul to the cabaret, the room, a bottle, a wall. It is this soul alone that counts in our eyes. We move from the object to its soul as easily as our being passed from a sight to a thought. The screen opens onto a new world, one vibrant with even more synesthetic responses than our own. There is no detail of reality which is not immediately extended here into the domain of the wondrous.
GERMAINE DUL’AC, “The Expressive Techniques of the Cinema”
Translated by Stuart Liebman from ‘Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Ciné-magazine 4 (4 July 1924), 15–18, (11 July 1924), 66–68, (18 July 1924), 89–92. This lecture was given at the Musée Galliera on 17 June 1924.
THE CINEMA is a silent art. Silent expression is its categorical rule and this sentence from L’Ecriture could be applied to those who are its servants: Their throats will not utter a sound. We, the authors of films, must assume the difficult task of describing without words, without phrases. . . .
Since I am a filmmaker, you will understand how helpless I am here in front of you.
And nevertheless, I must talk with you about a subject that is especially dear to me: the expressive techniques of cinema, about the role of different shots and shooting angles, the fade, the dissolve, superimposition, soft focus, and distortions. In short, the whole syntax of film. But just as much as this syntax must appear foreign to you, to me it seems easy, simple, and flexible to use in comparison with the syntax regulating writing and speech. How much I would prefer to introduce you to it by creating a live demonstration. How much more at ease I would be if, instead of all these sheets of paper, I had my cameraman and camera with me and I could, with your consent, request that you be the performers in a scene that would have as its subject a lecture at the Musee Galliera, thereby allowing me to stick to facts instead of words. In any case, I will bypass any difficulties by continually appealing to projected examples.
The Seventh Art, like most other arts, has been assigned the goal of bringing matter under control and to fix in it the summum of humanity. Until now, this material was called clay, colors, sounds, or words; for several years, it has also been called film stock. The Seventh Art does not stop at the stylization of an impression as sculpture and painting do. It augments a fact by grafting a feeling onto it by means of a technique that is proper to it, just like literature, the theater, and music. If the cinematic work in its evolution and its progress is related to the theater, the novel, and the musical symphony, it exists [as an art] only by virtue of its visual form. The image, faithful guardian of a gesture or a fugitive expression, attains all of its eloquence in the silence that rules over it. The composition of the image is our rhetoric; the contrasts and the sequences that it sets up are our means of silently affecting [spectators].
In order to have a common basis for our discussion, I am immediately going to project for you a fragment of an able piece of work by one of my colleagues, Marcel Silver. After seeing it, you will understand the feeling that a logical sequence of images can provoke. This film contains none of those texts that are called intertitles in the language of the profession. The image alone is king. The work therefore affects you through a purely cinematic technique, of contrasts and parallelisms [of images], and you will be able to appreciate how, despite the excellent performances in this scene, the shock of what is seen and the principal source of its emotional impact depends on the judicious choice of isolated expressions developing a theme or a thought. Thanks to the image, the sensibility of the film’s author is emitted, just like an artist’s is in his work. Photography, performers, landscapes obey his will. He is the only creator since he organizes according to a logic he chooses, opposes, juxtaposes, and makes rhythmical. Before going any further, let us understand each other very well. I do not consider a cinematic work to be a successor of the theater with the actor’s performance as the basis of interest. When it allies itself with the theater in its techniques, the cinema demeans itself. It is no longer itself. And we ought not to consider this deplorable compromise here. We will speak about the cinematic work from the perspective of its unique resources and possibilities. . . .
(A section of [Marcel Silver’s] L’Horloge [1924] is screened.)
Ladies and gentlemen, you have no doubt followed the two lovers’ state of mind step by step. Calm . . . Long images, the young people look at each other; they are filled with boundless bliss. The spectators understand their state of mind through the juxtaposition of vast horizons which induce a reverie composed of grandeur, space, the unknown, and the mountain tops. In this majestic nature, their lips draw near. A bell tower lies in the distance.
The excitement begins once the thought of the clock suddenly shatters their happy musing. From then on, the images succeed each other in a mad rhythm. The throbbing vision of the pendulum contrasted with the two lovers rushing toward one another creates the drama. Did you notice the technique of this scene? Short images . . . the sensation of the long road the two lovers must traverse, and the obsessiveness punctuating the action. Interminable paths, a still imperceptible village. The pendulum is emphasized insofar as the author wants to give us the sense of distance in the other shots. By the choice of images, their length, and their contrasts, rhythm becomes the sole source of emotion. The distance to be covered and the pendulum’s movement alone captivates our attention. And when we close in on the unredeemable, once again silence, calm.
You have been interested and moved by a technique proper to cinema, the contrast of images, their rhythm, and their duration. This is the first and a principal method of expression. . . .
I have given you two examples1 in which contrasts of images create the action: a thrilling drama and a state of mind. I am now going to show you another and bring this first section to a close. [It concerns] the conflict of two people who love each other.
The example is drawn from Kean [1924], performed by Mosjoukine and directed by Volkoff.
Kean, the celebrated English actor is in love with a lady of high estate. Kean despairs about not being able to conquer this lady . . . In a bar, disguised as a sailor in order to escape the creditors who are pursuing him, he drinks and he dances. The ferocity of his wantonness increases his desire to forget his impossible love. For two minutes you watch a wild, madly rhythmical dance. You can see the wantonness in his eyes, in his gestures and his mouth. Pleasure at all costs! Once the exaltation has passed—sadness, emptiness, a long, static pose. Kean is despondent. Another image is skillfully contrasted. The location changes and we see the ambassador’s wife in bed, dreaming of the handsome actor, but she is dreaming about him in his Romeo costume. She loves the artist . . . She dreams about him.
We have stepped into the action. Once more the rhythm and the contrasts have sufficed to move us, to present the drama.
(Screening of a section of Kean. A drunken party ends with the apparition of Kean as Romeo in the room of the ambassador’s wife.)
I must still explain to you how the clash of images creates a sense of the atmosphere. You have just seen Kean in his drunken state plunge into a wild dance. His expressions and gestures have allowed us to understand his thoughts . . . But the more ferocious his desire, the greater, no doubt, is his inner pain. How can you show the intensity of Kean’s wantonness? The actor’s expression must be true and not exaggerated. In order to preserve his simplicity, another image underlines it. We are going to feel the floor move under the jumping feet of the dancers; we will see animals gripped by fear. Contrasted with the drinkers’ round dance, the bottles on the bar totter on the shelves. A cat will look at them, but soon become frightened, it will seek out a corner in which to take cover. These juxtapositions of images are not hors d’oeuvres. They are placed there mathematically to create a sense of the atmosphere, the feeling of noise in and through the silence. They have a reason for being there just as a well-placed word is necessary for the brilliance of a phrase.
(Screening of a section of Kean.)
The examples I have commented upon have clarified the basis of our technique—the juxtaposition of images—for you.
On this basis, you will acknowledge the primordial importance that the image’s quasi-mathematical compositional structure has. Every image must single out an expression or underline an intention. And that is where the work of the camera begins.
The machine is based on the effects of lenses that come closer to or move away from [an object] to frame the picture required for our dialectic. Every lens records the vision we have intellectually conceived in order to transmit it to the film.
In the sections you have just seen, the camera’s placement has played a considerable role: by situating, by underlining, and by isolating. In L’Horloge, for example, if Marcel Silver had cropped out the mountain peaks instead of presenting them from a perspective in which sky, snow, and clouds blend together, we would not have had the sensation of the infinite. When the young people are in anguish as they rush [back to the village], we would not have sympathized with them if the small village at their feet and the very long road in front of them had not made the length of the route they had to travel evident to us.
Now, in each of these images, this combination of peaks, road, and variously proportioned shots of the village is obtained by shifts in the camera’s placement.
In the same way, isn’t the camera’s placement isolating the wheels and crank arms perfect? If we looked over the wheels and crank arms, we would not have the impression that it was these wheels and crank arms whose din recalls for Morin the noise of the jazz band.
If the juxtaposition of images must be precise, the placement of the camera can be no less so.
The latter provokes and accentuates an impression. . . .
I move now to another technical consideration: the shot which proceeds directly from the juxtaposition of images and the camera placement. The shot is the image in its most isolated expressive form, underscored by the lens’s framing . . . The shot simultaneously defines the place, an action, and a thought. Each different image that is juxtaposed is called a shot. The shot is a small piece of the drama; it is a small touch that unites in a conclusion. It is the piano on which we play. It is the only means that we have to create a bit of the inner life in the midst of the action.
I am going to project a film, La Souriante Madame Beudet [1923], which I directed based on a scenario by André Obey which was based on the play this author wrote in collaboration with Denys Amiel. After the screening, we will speak about shots.
(Screening of the first part of La Souriante Madame Beudet.)
You have undoubtedly grasped the importance of the shots in this drama. In the beginning: long shots. Indications of sadness in the empty streets, the small quaint figures. The provinces . . .
Then another unifying shot: two hands playing a piano and two hands weighing a handful of money. Two characters. Opposed ideals . . . different dreams. We already know this, and all without any actors.
Now we see the actors . . . a piano . . . behind it the head of a woman . . . a scrap of music. A vague reverie. The sun playing off the water among the reeds.
A store. Cloth is measured. An account book. A man gives orders. Up till now, everything is distant. People have only moved among things. We see them move around and position themselves . . . Movement.
One senses that poetry and reality will clash.
In a very bourgeois room, a woman reads. Very worthy, a book . . . Intellectualism. A man enters: M. Beudet . . . He is conceited. He holds a book of fabric samples . . . Materialism.
Shot: Mme Beudet doesn’t even raise her head.
Shot: M. Beudet seats himself at a desk without speaking.
Shot: M. Beudet’s hands count the threads of a fabric sample.
The characters are posed in shots that contrast with each other and that isolate different gestures, thereby making them stand out in relief.
All of a sudden, a long shot reunites these two people. Suddenly, all the jarring incongruities of a marriage appear. It is a coup de théâtre.
This is approximately the effect of the shots, their actions, and above all their psychological import. When something is shown from far away or near, the shot’s value changes; when it isolates or reunites, its degree of intensity is not the same; its meaning changes.
Taken in long shots, Mme Beudet shrugging her shoulders would not have the same meaning if she shrugged her shoulders in a closer shot. When M. Beudet laughs, a laugh that sets his wife’s nerves on edge, this laugh must fill the entire screen, the entire auditorium, so that the spectators feel the same antipathy as Mme Beudet does toward this vulgar husband. We need this to pardon the idea of crime that crops up later. The scale of the shots is graduated; the importance of M. Beudet’s laugh is underscored in order to make an impression on the spectator and to make his flesh creep. Some people have blamed me for d’Arquillières’s performance. I maintain that the character of M. Beudet would have been less three-dimensional if each of his tics had not been highlighted, or sampled, if I dare to put it this way.
Just as we work with the juxtapositions of images and with the camera placement, we also work with the shots. The psychological shot, the large close-up as we call it, is the very thought of the character projected onto the screen. It is his soul, his desire. . . . The large close-up is also an impressionistic note marking the fleeting influence of the things that surround us. Thus, in Madame Beudet, the large close-up of Mme Lebas’s ear summarizes all that is provincial, all the gossips and narrow minds on the lookout for disputes and disagreements.
The close-up demands to be handled discretely. It is too important to be used without considering whether or not it is absolutely necessary.
As much as the long shots, the American shots—to use professional jargon—that cut the characters off at the knee, are used in shots where two or more characters are brought together. The large close-up is used above all to isolate a striking expression in a scene. It belongs to the intimate life of people or things.
The inner life made perceptible by images is, with movement, the entire art of cinema . . . Movement, inner life. These two terms, moreover, are not at all incompatible. What is more mobile than our psychological life with its reactions, its manifold impressions, its sudden movements, its dreams, its memories. The cinema is marvelously equipped to express these manifestations of our thinking, our emotions, our memories. And this leads me to speak about another technique: superimposition.
You have already seen examples of superimposition in Kean, when the beautiful ambassador’s wife recalls her favorite actor, and in Madame Beudet, when the poor woman, overwhelmed by her noisy husband, dreams of a strong, powerful man who will deliver her from the one responsible [for her misery], the husband. The man summoned forth is only glimpsed in a dream. He is impalpable and unstable. It is a phantom that enters to do battle with the pusillanimous soul of M. Beudet. A transparent scene is grafted onto the more distinct one, one which portrays Mme Beudet as seen through her own imagination.
Superimposition is thinking, the inner life . . . It is achieved by combining two photographs. . . .
I still must talk about dissolves, soft focus, and distortions.
The dissolve is a means of moving from one image to the next in such a way that the end of the first is superimposed on the beginning of the next. It is also a technique with a psychological meaning. The images that are linked are related to each other so that the movement from one to the other is not jarring. The dissolve brings people and things together into a brief or lengthy whole. In one of my films, La Mort du soleil [1922], I wanted to depict the painful awakening of a great scientist who had been stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage. His paralyzed hand unleashes a whole realm of unhappy realities in his brain. He understands his condition . . . His eyes move towards his female colleague, then to a large painting of a corvette moving along under full sails. He looks at his hand . . . The great voyages of the mind, alas, are no longer for him. He then looks at his student who is combined in his vision with the large painting (a clear indication of his feelings) and, despairing, he turns back to the window where the leaves of the tree stand out against the shadows. Cut up in successive shots, this cinematic phrase would have lost its intellectual weight. The scientist’s thought must be developed like a deduction. The dissolve assists this development. You are going to be the judges.
(Screening of La Mort du soleil: The sick man’s room.)
Once cured, the scientist holds his student in a kind of bondage because she represents to him his power, his ideas—a complement to his brain that has been weakened by the illness. The two characters who you are going to see act independently, but nevertheless they are tied to one another . . . The dissolve highlights the ascendancy of one mind over another, an act of domination, a union that nothing can break.
(Screening of La Mort du soleil: The doctor dictates his book.)
Once the work is accomplished, the master becomes less harsh and domineering. These are the last pages of their collaborative work . . . A bit of tenderness comes with them. The dissolve imposes some tranquility on these two minds straining stubbornly towards a goal. We see two heads tilting symmetrically, happy in the fusion that softens the rigors of work. The scientist’s head rests on that of the woman; the woman’s rests once again on the scientist’s, and their two profiles once more appear peaceful and studious. The dissolve doesn’t play a passive role like the superimposition: it unifies.
(Screening of La Mort du soleil: The final dictation.)
I will give you two more examples of dissolves. One is psychological, the other is poetic.
The first, taken from La Belle Dame sans merci [1921], a film I directed several years ago, brings together a married woman and her husband’s mistress. The legitimate spouse would like to be indignant, but the seductress’s charm and her bearing sways the spirit of the deceived spouse who cannot fight against the refinements of the courtesan whose ascendancy she senses at the very moment she wants to be defiant. Strange flowers and penetrating perfumes put her spirit to sleep. These flowers and this incense are linked once again in the artist’s head and enable her to understand what has happened.
(Screening of La Belle Dame sans merci: Perfume scene.)
The dissolve is unity in diversity. It is also a way of introducing a shot without any abruptness or to underscore a relationship between ideas.
The dissolve enables a poetic impression to be created. . . .
I will say very little to you about the fade, a process thanks to which a scene, once it is over, loses its luminosity and fades to black. It is the dot on the line, or sometimes a capital letter, depending on whether it comes at the end or at the beginning of a scene. It may also be a parenthesis when in the middle of a scene, an incident is quietly inserted. The fade is only a punctuation mark. . . .
Distortion and soft focus bring a whole visual philosophy to cinema.
In France, we have a great director, M. Jacques Feyder. In an admirable film, Crainquebille [1923], he has used the methods of soft focus and distortions with genius.
Soft focus . . . Crainquebille wants to persuade his lawyer of his innocence. Crainquebille is not an interesting client; he is a poor fellow without a penny. What good is it to listen to him! And in order to indicate how distracted the lawyer is, you will see all the notes that he takes on Crainquebille’s case become unfocused and wavering. A visual explanation.
We are going to screen this tableau.
(Crainquebille: Scene with the lawyer.)
This shift from soft focus to distortion has somewhat disturbed audiences who poorly comprehend the real goal of cinema: to visualize the events or the joys of the inner life. One could make a film with a single character in conflict with his impressions.
It is almost this tour de force that Feyder has superbly realized in Crain-quebille: Crainquebille and his feelings of fear and hope.
When considered from the standpoint of Crainquebille’s mind, the soft focus, superimpositions, and distortions work magisterially. This poor Crainquebille, innocent of the offence he is accused of, no longer possesses the proper view of things . . . The policeman accusing him appears to be a giant. The defense witness seems tiny, and his testimony loses itself in a blank space next to him: the policeman’s sleeve. Why is this policeman’s sleeve so close to him? He didn’t do anything!
A section of Crainquebille, one of the most powerful and most perfect French films, is going to be shown: Crainquebille at court!
(Screening of Crainquebille.)
This film has proved to you, I hope, the usefulness of distortions and soft focus. The ingenuous spirit of Crainquebille seemed all important to you, now that a skillful director knows how to dissect visual impressions.
What other art can achieve psychological effects such as this better than the cinema?
Isn’t it remarkable that audiences corrupted by the antics in dramas rooted in exterior facts have been so uncomprehending as to necessitate an outrage, a written forward, at the beginning of Crainquebille? I deliberately left it there so that you could imagine the fights that we are obliged to wage to free the cinema from the routines in which even its friends sometimes imprison it.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, our palette is rich. The angle at which we shoot, pans, fades, dissolves, soft focus, distortions, superimpositions are so many touches to express ourselves without recourse to literature, without theatrical means, without excessive stage effects.
Cinema is an art that must remain itself and develop proudly next to the six others since it can, if it wishes, borrow nothing from them. What bothers us about cinema are the prejudices of the audience and the reflections of the other arts that want to help us at all costs.
The other arts can only do cinema a disservice to the extent that they express the pretension of imposing on it their rules and visions, which, moreover, they will not try to fuse with those of cinema when they are called upon to collaborate. But we who struggle, who fight in order to free our art from unfortunate intrusions and mistaken principles, have hope of victory. Just yesterday, weren’t we still likened to fairground showmen? Yet today, the Musée Galliera opens its doors to us. It is now up to the general public to help us by seeking to understand our innovations and discoveries. The cinema will evolve, and will rid itself of everything that demeans it. What we have achieved up till now are merely experiments. Tomorrow we are certain that the cinema will produce pure masterpieces and will deserve even more to be called the Seventh Art, since that is how it has been baptized by those who have faith in its future.
GERMAINE DUL’AC (1882–1942) was a writer for the feminist magazines, La Française and La Fronde, before the war. She began directing films in 1916—for instance, Ames de fous (1918), La Cigarette (1919), La Fête espagnole (1920), La Mort du soleil (1922), La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923). At the time of this lecture, Dulac was becoming increasingly involved in the French ciné-club movement.
1 The other example was an excerpt from Tourjansky’s Ce Cochon de Morin (1924). I have deleted other sequences excerpted from Fescourt’s La Poupée du Milliardaire (Italy, 1922) and Les Grands (1924).
JEAN EPSTEIN, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie”
Translated by Tom Milne in Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), 20–23. Reprinted by permission. Epstein delivered versions of this essay at the Salon d’Automne in November 1923, to the Paris-Nancy Group at Nancy on 1 December 1923, at the Pathé-Palace in Montpelier on 7 January 1924, and to the Philosophical and Scientific Studies Group at the Sorbonne on 15 June 1924. The original French text first appeared as “De quelques conditions de la photogenie” in Cinéa-Cine-pour-tous 19 (15 August 1924), 6–8.
THE CINEMA seems to me like two Siamese twins joined together at the stomach, in other words by the base necessities of life, but sundered at the heart, or by the higher necessities of emotion. The first of these brothers is the art of cinema, the second is the film industry. A surgeon is called for, capable of separating these two fraternal foes without killing them, or a psychologist able to resolve the incompatibilities between these two hearts.
I shall venture to speak to you only of the art of cinema. The art of cinema has been called “photogénie” by Louis Delluc. The word is apt, and should be preserved. What is photogénie? I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. And any aspect not enhanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenic, plays no part in the art of cinema.
For every art builds its forbidden city, its own exclusive domain, autonomous, specific, and hostile to anything that does not belong. Astonishing to relate, literature must first and foremost be literary; the theater, theatrical; painting, pictorial; and the cinema, cinematic. Painting today is freeing itself from many of its representational and narrative concerns. Historical and anecdotal canvases, pictures which narrate rather than paint, are rarely seen nowadays outside the furnishing departments of the big stores—where, I must confess, they sell very well. But what one might call the high art of painting seeks to be no more than painting, in other words color taking on life. And any literature worthy of the name turns its back on those twists and turns of plot which lead to the detective’s discovery of the lost treasure. Literature seeks only to be literary, which is seen as a justification for taking it to task by people alarmed at the idea that it might resemble neither a charade nor a game of cards and be put to better use than killing time, which there is no point in killing since it returns, hanging equally heavy, with each new dawn.
Similarly, the cinema should avoid dealings, which can only be unfortunate, with historical, educational, novelistic, moral or immoral, geographical or documentary subjects. The cinema must seek to become, gradually and in the end uniquely, cinematic; to employ, in other words, only photogenic elements. Photogenie is the purest expression of cinema.
What aspects of the world are photogenic, then, these aspects to which the cinema must limit itself? I fear the only response I have to offer to so important a question is a premature one. We must not forget that where the theater trails some tens of centuries of existence behind it, the cinema is a mere twenty-five years old. It is a new enigma. Is it an art? Or less than that? A pictorial language, like the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, whose secrets we have scarcely penetrated yet, about which we do not know all that we do not know? Or an unexpected extension to our sense of sight, a sort of telepathy of the eye? Or a challenge to the logic of the universe, since the mechanism of cinema constructs movement by multiplying successive stoppages of celluloid exposed to a ray of light, thus creating mobility through immobility, decisively demonstrating how right was the false reasoning of Zeno of Elea?
Do we know what radio will be like in ten years time? An eighth art, no doubt, as much at odds with music as cinema currently is with the theater. We are just as much in the dark as to what cinema will be like in ten years time.
At present, we have discovered the cinematic property of things, a new and exciting sort of potential: photogenie. We are beginning to recognize certain circumstances in which this photogenie appears. I suggest a preliminary specification in determining these photogenic aspects. A moment ago I described as photogenic any aspect whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. I now specify: only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls, may see their moral value increased by filmic reproduction.
This mobility should be understood only in the widest sense, implying all directions perceptible to the mind. By general agreement it is said that the dimensions deriving from our sense of direction are three in number: the three spatial dimensions. I have never really understood why the notion of a fourth dimension has been enveloped in such mystery. It very obviously exists; it is time. The mind travels in time, just as it does in space. But whereas in space we imagine three directions at right angles to each other, in time we can conceive only one: the past-future vector. We can conceive a space-time system in which the past-future direction also passes through the point of intersection of the three acknowledged spatial directions, at the precise moment when it is between past and future: the present, a point in time, an instant without duration, as points in geometrical space are without dimension. Photogenic mobility is a mobility in this space-time system, a mobility in both space and time. We can therefore say that the photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time.
This definition, an important one, is not simply a mental intuition. A number of films have already offered concrete examples. First, certain American films, demonstrating an unconscious and highly precocious feeling for cinema, sketched the spatiotemporal cinegrams in rough outline. Later Griffith, that giant of the primitive cinema, gave classical expression to these jostling, intersecting denouements that describe arabesques virtually simultaneously in space and time. More consciously and more lucidly, Gance—today our master, one and all—then composed his astonishing vision of trains swept along on the rails of the drama. We must be clear why these racing wheels in La Roue comprise the most classic sentences yet written in the language of cinema. It is because in these images the most clearly defined role is played by variations, if not simultaneous at least approximately so, in the spatiotemporal dimensions.
For in the end it all comes down to a question of perspective, a question of design. Perspective in drawing is a three-dimensional perspective, and when a pupil executes a drawing which takes no account of the third dimension, the effect of depth or relief in objects, it is said that he has done a bad drawing, that he cannot draw. To the elements of perspective employed in drawing, the cinema adds a new perspective in time. In addition to relief in space the cinema offers relief in time. Astonishing abridgments in this temporal perspective are permitted by the cinema—notably in those amazing glimpses into the life of plants and crystals—but these have never yet been used to dramatic purpose. If, as I said earlier, a drawing which ignores the third spatial dimension in its perspective is a bad drawing, I must now add that cinema composed without taking the temporal perspective into account is not cinematic.
Moreover, cinema is a language, and like all languages it is animistic; it attributes, in other words, a semblance of life to the objects it defines. The more primitive a language, the more marked this animistic tendency. There is no need to stress the extent to which the language of cinema remains primitive in its terms and ideas; so it is hardly surprising that it should endow the objects it is called upon to depict with such intense life. The almost godlike importance assumed in close-ups by parts of the human body, or by the most frigid elements in nature, has often been noted. Through the cinema, a revolver in a drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye isolated by an iris, are elevated to the status of characters in the drama. Being dramatic, they seem alive, as though involved in the evolution of an emotion.
I would even go so far as to say that the cinema is polytheistic and théogonie. Those lives it creates, by summoning objects out of the shadows of indifference into the light of dramatic concern, have little in common with human life. These lives are like the life in charms and amulets, the ominous, tabooed objects of certain primitive religions. If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone can inspire respect, fear, or horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I think we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious, silent lives, alien to the human sensibility.
To things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the greatest gift unto death: life. And it confers this life in its highest guise: personality.
Personality goes beyond intelligence. Personality is the spirit visible in things and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their future already present. Every aspect of the world, elected to life by the cinema, is so elected only on condition that it has a personality of its own. This is the second specification which we can now add to the rules of photogénie. I therefore suggest that we say: only mobile and personal aspects of things, beings, and souls may be photogenic; that is, acquire a higher moral value through filmic reproduction.
An eye in close-up is no longer the eye, it is AN eye: in other words, the mimetic decor in which the look suddenly appears as a character . . . I was greatly interested by a competition recently organized by one of the film magazines. The point was to identify some forty more or less famous screen actors whose portraits reproduced in the magazine had been cropped to leave only their eyes. So what one had to do was to recognize the personality in each of forty looks. Here we have a curious unconscious attempt to get spectators into the habit of seeking and recognizing the distinctive personality of the eye segment.
And a close-up of a revolver is no longer a revolver, it is the revolver-character, in other words the impulse toward or remorse for crime, failure, suicide. It is as dark as the temptations of the night, bright as the gleam of gold lusted after, taciturn as passion, squat, brutal, heavy, cold, wary, menacing. It has a temperament, habits, memories, a will, a soul.
Mechanically speaking, the lens alone can sometimes succeed in revealing the inner nature of things in this way. This is how, by chance in the first instance, the photogénie of character was discovered. But the proper sensibility, by which I mean a personal one, can direct the lens towards increasingly valuable discoveries. This is the role of an author of film, commonly called a film director. Of course a landscape filmed by one of the forty or four hundred directors devoid of personality whom God sent to plague the cinema as He once sent the locusts into Egypt looks exactly like this same landscape filmed by any other of these locust filmmakers. But this landscape or this fragment of drama staged by someone like Gance will look nothing like what would be seen through the eyes and heart of a Griffith or a L’Herbier. And so the personality, the soul, the poetry of certain men invaded the cinema.
I remember still La Roue. As Sisif died, we all saw his unhappy soul leave him and slip away over the snows, a shadow borne away in angels’ flight.
Now we are approaching the promised land, a place of great wonders. Here matter is molded and set into relief by personality; all nature, all things appear as a man has dreamed them; the world is created as you think it is; pleasant if you think it so, harsh if you believe it so. Time hurries on or retreats, or stops and waits for you. A new reality is revealed, a reality for a special occasion, which is untrue to everyday reality just as everyday reality is untrue to the heightened awareness of poetry. The face of the world may seem changed since we, the fifteen hundred million who inhabit it, can see through eyes equally intoxicated by alcohol, love, joy, and woe, through lenses of all tempers, hate and tenderness; since we can see the clear thread of thoughts and dreams, what might or should have been, what was, what never was or could have been, feelings in their secret guise, the startling face of love and beauty, in a word, the soul. “So poetry is thus true, and exists as truly as the eye.”
Here poetry, which one might have thought but verbal artifice, a figure of style, a play of antithesis and metaphor—in short, something next to nothing—achieves a dazzling incarnation. “So poetry is thus true, and exists as truly as the eye.”
The cinema is poetry’s most powerful medium, the truest medium for the untrue, the unreal, the “surreal” as Apollinaire would have said.
This is why some of us have entrusted to it our highest hopes.