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Page 23
Of course, the photoartist profits from one advantage. He is not obliged
to find the most expressive gesture in one decisive moment of the stage
performance. He can not only rehearse, but he can repeat the scene
before the camera until exactly the right inspiration comes, and the
manager who takes the close-up visage may discard many a poor pose
before he strikes that one expression in which the whole content of the
feeling of the scene is concentrated. In one other respect the producer
of the photoplay has a technical advantage. More easily than the stage
manager of the real theater he can choose actors whose natural build and
physiognomy fit the r�le and predispose them for the desired expression.
The drama depends upon professional actors; the photoplay can pick
players among any group of people for specific r�les. They need no art
of speaking and no training in delivery. The artificial make-up of the
stage actors in order to give them special character is therefore less
needed for the screen. The expression of the faces and the gestures must
gain through such natural fitness of the man for the particular r�le. If
the photoplay needs a brutal boxer in a mining camp, the producer will
not, like the stage manager, try to transform a clean, neat,
professional actor into a vulgar brute, but he will sift the Bowery
until he has found some creature who looks as if he came from that
mining camp and who has at least the prizefighter's cauliflower ear
which results from the smashing of the ear cartilage. If he needs the
fat bartender with his smug smile, or the humble Jewish peddler, or the
Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on wigs and paint; he finds them
all ready-made on the East Side. With the right body and countenance the
emotion is distinctly more credible. The emotional expression in the
photoplays is therefore often more natural in the small r�les which the
outsiders play than in the chief parts of the professionals who feel
that they must outdo nature.
But our whole consideration so far has been onesided and narrow. We have
asked only about the means by which the photoactor expresses his
emotion, and we were naturally confined to the analysis of his bodily
reactions. But while the human individual in our surroundings has hardly
any other means than the bodily expressions to show his emotions and
moods, the photoplaywright is certainly not bound by these limits. Yet
even in life the emotional tone may radiate beyond the body. A person
expresses his mourning by his black clothes and his joy by gay attire,
or he may make the piano or violin ring forth in happiness or moan in
sadness. Even his whole room or house may be penetrated by his spirit of
welcoming cordiality or his emotional setting of forbidding harshness.
The feeling of the soul emanates into the surroundings and the
impression which we get of our neighbor's emotional attitude may be
derived from this external frame of the personality as much as from the
gestures and the face.
This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much heightened in
the artistic theater play. All the stage settings of the scene ought to
be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the play, and many an act
owes its success to the unity of emotional impression which results from
the perfect painting of the background; it reverberates to the passions
of the mind. From the highest artistic color and form effects of the
stage in the Reinhardt style down to the cheapest melodrama with soft
blue lights and tender music for the closing scene, the stage
arrangements tell the story of the intimate emotion. But just this
additional expression of the feeling through the medium of the
surrounding scene, through background and setting, through lines and
forms and movements, is very much more at the disposal of the
photoartist. He alone can change the background and all the surroundings
of the acting person from instant to instant. He is not bound to one
setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with
every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater can give us
changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go on at the slow
pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in nature pass. The
photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more than one sixteenth of
a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the
other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard
of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature.
There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads it.
There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with the
male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her hand. We
see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated arms and
hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us about the storm
of emotions in her soul. The walls of her little room fade away.
Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose bushes in
wonderful glory arise and the whole ground is alive with exotic flowers.
Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin; we see the bow
moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the player does not
change with his music. Under the spell of his tones his features are
immovable as if they were staring at a vision. They do not speak of the
changing emotions which his melodies awake. We cannot hear those tones.
And yet we do hear them: a lovely spring landscape widens behind his
head, we see the valleys of May and the bubbling brooks and the young
wild beeches. And slowly it changes into the sadness of the autumn, the
sere leaves are falling around the player, heavy clouds hang low over
his head. Suddenly at a sharp accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are
carried to the wildness of rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again
comes tranquillity over the world, the little country village of his
youth fills the background, the harvest is brought from the fields, the
sun sets upon a scene of happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the
walls and ceiling of his attic close in again. No shade, no tint, no hue
of his emotions has escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the
rejoicing and the sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious
tones. Such imaginative settings can be only the extreme; they would not
be fit for the routine play. But, however much weaker and fainter the
echo of the surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the
standard photoplay, the chances are abundant everywhere and no skillful
playwright will ever disregard them entirely. Not the portrait of the
man but the picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional
exuberance.
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