ABOUT movies, playwright Elmer Rice, in the magazine Soviet Russia Today, says “It seems highly improbable that the motion picture, synthetic in its construction, and heavily dependent upon technological paraphernalia for its production, will ever make manifest that human breath and those human thumbprints which characterize all great works of art.”
Like all chestnuts which art-lovers fall back upon when they go witch-hunting into the fields of esthetics, this one diverts attention from the real villain, which in the case of the movies, is Censorship. That, Mr. Rice, is what keeps the movies in the “protracted infancy” you mention, not any disease of technology within the medium itself. Every art is defined by the nature of its mechanics: painting has to do without time and sound, writing without color and line. But such limitations aren’t the weaknesses Mr. Rice makes them out to be. The very boundaries of an art produce its most basic advantages. In the movies the basic advantage is the movement of visual images, which the cameras, players and technicians make possible—the technological paraphernalia that worries Mr. Rice.
In the peculiar quality of each image, and the movement created by their succession, exists the particular expression of each artist, the human breath and thumbprint Mr. Rice says isn’t there. Compare the camera images of Tisse (“Alexander Nevsky”), Bissert (“Intolerance”) and Ivens (“Zuyder Zee”), and see the human breath of these men, the cool nobility of Tisse, the sentiment of Bissert, the expressionistic violence of Ivens. Behind every shot in an Eisenstein movie is the cold, exacting sensibility of that artist with a compulsiveness like Cezanne’s that will plan every last piece of metal in a bit-player’s costume so that it will be within the expression of Eisenstein’s idea. Even when Chaplin is not on the screen in his movies, his thumbprint is: the innocent man killed by the greedy “Black Larson,” the trek of miners across snow, both scenes carrying the unrewarded search and isolation that are Chaplin’s expression.
Elmer Rice seems to think that art is incapable of happening when two or more people take part in its creation, but no one is complaining that it takes Koussevitsky and a hundred others to complete what Mozart wrote. In “Young Mr. Lincoln” there is an equal grasp of the idea in the direction of John Ford and the acting of Henry Fonda. The same unity occurs in “Alexander Nevsky,” with Prokofieff’s music, Tisse’s photography and Eisenstein’s conception. Nor can one discern who is more responsible for “The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc,” cameraman Rudolph Maté or director Carl Dreyer. Obviously the terrible, prying realism of this picture can only be the result of their collaboration.
The tendency in talking about art is always to pigeonhole rather than to judge a thing for what it tries to do. Cezanne lovers cannot stand Velasquez; it is easy to see why, if you choose to judge Velasquez by the standards of Cezanne. I have listened to esthetes roar with laughter at a Chaplin movie, and come out criticizing it for its lack of movement or its sentimentality, forgetting that they have seen Chaplin, not Eisenstein. Mr. Rice is looking at one art through the eyes of another, or he would not be blind to a real spontaneity peculiar to movies, the lack of which he insists on. There is no step I can think of in the process of making a movie where a signature is not cut into the film. Directors like Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Sturges impose themselves everywhere; players like Cagney and W. C. Fields overcome any director. And so on, too obviously. Can Mr. Rice discern the thumbprint of Frank Lloyd Wright, in a house designed by him, unsmudged by those of the intervening plasterers?
October 26, 1942