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Page 26
If we disregard this pleasure or displeasure in the beauty of the
photoplay and reflect only on the processes of perception, attention,
interest, memory, imagination, suggestion, and emotion which we have
analyzed, we see that we everywhere come to the same result. One general
principle seemed to control the whole mental mechanism of the spectator,
or rather the relation between the mental mechanism and the pictures on
the screen. We recognized that in every case the objective world of
outer events had been shaped and molded until it became adjusted to the
subjective movements of the mind. The mind develops memory ideas and
imaginative ideas; in the moving pictures they become reality. The mind
concentrates itself on a special detail in its act of attention; and in
the close-up of the moving pictures this inner state is objectified. The
mind is filled with emotions; and by means of the camera the whole
scenery echoes them. Even in the most objective factor of the mind, the
perception, we find this peculiar oscillation. We perceive the movement;
and yet we perceive it as something which has not its independent
character as an outer world process, because our mind has built it up
from single pictures rapidly following one another. We perceive things
in their plastic depth; and yet again the depth is not that of the outer
world. We are aware of its unreality and of the pictorial flatness of
the impressions.
In every one of these features the contrast to the mental impressions
from the real stage is obvious. There in the theater we know at every
moment that we see real plastic men before us, that they are really in
motion when they walk and talk and that, on the other hand, it is our
own doing and not a part of the play when our attention turns to this or
that detail, when our memory brings back events of the past, when our
imagination surrounds them with fancies and emotions. And here, it
seems, we have a definite starting point for an esthetic comparison. If
we raise the unavoidable question--how does the photoplay compare with
the drama?--we seem to have sufficient material on hand to form an
esthetic judgment. The verdict, it appears, can hardly be doubtful. Must
we not say art is imitation of nature? The drama can show us on the
stage a true imitation of real life. The scenes proceed just as they
would happen anywhere in the outer world. Men of flesh and blood with
really plastic bodies stand before us. They move like any moving body in
our surroundings. Moreover those happenings on the stage, just like the
events in life, are independent of our subjective attention and memory
and imagination. They go their objective course. Thus the theater comes
so near to its purpose of imitating the world of men that the comparison
with the photoplay suggests almost a disastrous failure of the art of
the film. The color of the world has disappeared, the persons are dumb,
no sound reaches our ear. The depth of the scene appears unreal, the
motion has lost its natural character. Worst of all, the objective
course of events is falsified; our own attention and memory and
imagination have shifted and remodeled the events until they look as
nature could never show them. What we really see can hardly be called
any longer an imitation of the world, such as the theater gives us.
When the graphophone repeats a Beethoven symphony, the voluminousness of
the orchestra is reduced to a thin feeble surface sound, and no one
would accept this product of the disk and the diaphragm as a full
substitute for the performance of the real orchestra. But, after all,
every instrument is actually represented, and we can still discriminate
the violins and the celli and the flutes in exactly the same order and
tonal and rhythmic relation in which they appear in the original. The
graphophone music appears, therefore, much better fitted for replacing
the orchestra than the moving pictures are to be a substitute for the
theater. There all the essential elements seem conserved; here just the
essentials seem to be lost and the aim of the drama to imitate life with
the greatest possible reality seems hopelessly beyond the flat,
colorless pictures of the photoplay. Still more might we say that the
plaster of Paris cast is a fair substitute for the marble statue. It
shares with the beautiful marble work the same form and imitates the
body of the living man just as well as the marble statue. Moreover,
this product of the mechanical process has the same white color which
the original work of the sculptor possesses. Hence we must acknowledge
it as a fair approach to the plastic work of art. In the same way the
chromo print gives the essentials of the oil painting. Everywhere the
technical process has secured a reproduction of the work of art which
sounds or looks almost like the work of the great artist, and only the
technique of the moving pictures, which so clearly tries to reproduce
the theater performance, stands so utterly far behind the art of the
actor. Is not an esthetic judgment of rejection demanded by good taste
and sober criticism? We may tolerate the photoplay because, by the
inexpensive technical method which allows an unlimited multiplication of
the performances, it brings at least a shadow of the theater to the
masses who cannot afford to see real actors. But the cultivated mind
might better enjoy plaster of Paris casts and chromo prints and
graphophone music than the moving pictures with their complete failure
to give us the essentials of the real stage.
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