LIKE many words used in talking about movies, the word “theatrical” is vaguely and loosely applied, usually as a term of disparagement. Since I use it often myself and since I think it is an important term in movie criticism, I would like to give my definition of it.
The use of “theatrical” as a movie description depends essentially on the way the events of the film are related to the camera eye. If the events are arranged to progress as though there were no camera present, if the camera merely watches and records what those events look like, the movie is to my mind the true nature of a movie: that is, it is non-theatrical and by way of being an anomaly in these days. In this case the acting and procedure of the event will be seen propelled solely by factors within the event itself, irrespective of the camera. Therefore, if the events are not treated as spontaneous, unalterable happenings witnessed by an impersonal camera, but are arranged before it as though it were the eye of the audience and the events developed in order that they may be seen by the camera in the role of an audience, the process is essentially a theatrical one. Then it is a reënactment toward an audience—the process is no longer that of watching an action but of acting it toward those who watch it. The difference between a theatrical and non-theatrical film is most closely felt when, in seeing a true movie, one senses that it has been watched by the camera in such a way as to have left it with a life of its own, which takes place without reference to an audience—clearly not the attitude of the stage. The whole complexity of relationships (actor to actor, actor to environment, etc.) is consistently interwoven, proceeding as though unaware of director, writer or cameraman. The best pictures of Clair, Hitchcock’s English work, von Stroheim’s “Greed,” the best Russian work, Griffith’s films, the French “Crime and Punishment” are examples of movies that proceed unmolested by the idea of the audience.
When a movie is called theatrical it is conventionally inferred to be either static in regard to its locale, or talky, or both. Yet Donat’s extemporaneous speech to the political society in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” is both, and is still essentially cinematic because the attitude in filming it was that of watching impersonally, with the strictest adherence to the inviolable course of a train of events, of finding from moment to moment the most significant thing to watch: that is, the relationships within the event were never sacrificed for a relationship between the scene and the audience. On the other hand, Hitchcock’s latest movie, “Lifeboat,” is eminently theatrical, but not because it is dialogue-heavy and confined to a single set. Its theatricality lies in the fact that it is entirely an arrangement in which the audience does not, as it should, seem outside of the event, but is the main person in the boat, the person everyone speaks to and for whom everything is happening. The event that is supposed to be taking place falls away from conviction at every point for this reason—it simply is not taking place in a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean but right in front of you on a stage. The characters are constantly stepping past the boundaries of the scene into an oration that is divided from the scene by the fact that their words are no longer driven and provoked by the situation but by the audience. That is why this movie, and most Hollywood movies, are visually enormously inadequate to the content of the plot.
The fact that a movie is least theatrical when the attitude in constructing its action is “What does the event look like?” is dependent on the initial factor in the movie process, the camera, which in simplest terms is a machine for recording the visual diary of an event. The movie that disrupts and designs events to make a play of them before the camera immediately destroys the felicity of the camera: there is no event left, only representations of it, and the preservation of the purity of the event is the reason for being of the camera. Equally, the movie which is seen topsy-turvy, through a complexity of spectacular camera angles, is no less theatrical for, again, destroying the main function of the camera in order to make it the chief entertainer in the movie process—besides being vulgar.
Most scenarios are written today with so little regard for displaying the events sufficiently that the amount of story and character considerably outweights the final visual product; after you have heard this kind of movie’s sound track once you will never again be influenced by its ideas because those ideas are so little equaled, proved or synthesized with the picture’s visual record. There is actually an abnormal Hollywood confidence in how well they can project any emotion or event in visual terms: so that in movies like “Lifeboat” or “Casablanca”—the two most theatrical popular movies I can think of at the moment—you find the directors and writers attempting a visual realization of everything from jazz to pronouncements on the history of the last decade, throwing in on the way several counter-plots of love, intrigue and the nature of war, and actually giving only an inaccurate, flashy hint of these things and never meanwhile coming anywhere near a movie truth. It is my opinion that the fascination of these two films lies in a visual fact, that of watching vital, invigorating-looking people, but not in anything they are doing or saying.
February 14, 1944