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Page 32
We must take one step more. We need not only the complete separation
from reality by the changed forms of experience, but we must demand also
that this unreal thing or event shall be complete in itself. The artist,
therefore, must do whatever is needed to satisfy the demands which any
part awakens. If one line in the painting suggests a certain mood and
movement, the other lines must take it up and the colors must sympathize
with it and they all must agree with the pictured content. The tension
which one scene in the drama awakens must be relieved by another.
Nothing must remain unexplained and nothing unfinished. We do not want
to know what is going on behind the hills of the landscape painting or
what the couple in the comedy will do after the engagement in the last
act. On the other hand, if the artist adds elements which are in harmony
with the demands of the other parts, they are esthetically valuable,
however much they may differ from the actual happenings in the outer
world. In the painting the mermaid may have her tail and the sculptured
child may have his angel wings and fairies may appear on the stage. In
short, every demand which is made by the purpose of true art removes us
from reality and is contrary to the superficial claim that art ought to
rest on skillful imitation. The true victory of art lies in the
overcoming of the real appearance and every art is genuine which
fulfills this esthetic desire for history or for nature, in its own way.
The number of ways cannot be determined beforehand. By the study of
painting and etching and drawing merely, we could not foresee that there
is also possible an art like sculpture, and by studying epic and lyric
poetry we could not construct beforehand the forms of the drama. The
genius of mankind had to discover ever new forms in which the interest
in reality is conserved and yet the things and events are so completely
changed that they are separated from all possible reality, isolated from
all connections and made complete in themselves. We have not yet spoken
about the one art which gives us this perfect satisfaction in the
isolated material, satisfies every demand which it awakens, and yet
which is further removed from the reality we know than any other
artistic creation, music. Those tones with which the composer builds up
his melodies and harmonies are not parts of the world in which we live
at all. None of our actions in practical life is related to tones from
musical instruments, and yet the tones of a symphony may arouse in us
the deepest emotions, the most solemn feelings and the most joyful ones.
They are symbols of our world which bring with them its sadness and its
happiness. We feel the rhythm of the tones, fugitive, light and joyful,
or quiet, heavy and sustained, and they impress us as energies which
awaken our own impulses, our own tensions and relaxations.
We enter into the play of those tones which with their intervals and
their instrumental tone color appear like a wonderful mosaic of
agreements and disagreements. Yet each disagreement resolves itself into
a new agreement. Those tones seek one another. They have a life of their
own, complete in itself. We do not want to change it. Our mind simply
echoes their desires and their satisfaction. We feel with them and are
happy in their ultimate agreement without which no musical melody would
be beautiful. Bound by the inner law which is proclaimed by the first
tones every coming tone is prepared. The whole tone movement points
toward the next one. It is a world of inner self-agreement like that of
the colors in a painting, of the curves in a work of sculpture, like the
rhythms and rhymes in a stanza. But beyond the mere self-agreement of
the tones and rhythms as such, the musical piece as a whole unveils to
us a world of emotion. Music does not depict the physical nature which
fine arts bring to us, nor the social world which literature embraces,
but the inner world with its abundance of feelings and excitements. It
isolates our inner experience and within its limits brings it to that
perfect self-agreement which is the characteristic of every art.
We might easily trace further the various means by which each particular
art overcomes the chaos of the world and renders a part of it in a
perfectly isolated form in which all elements are in mutual agreement.
We might develop out of this fundamental demand of art all the special
forms which are characteristic in its various fields. We might also
turn to the applied arts, to architecture, to arts and crafts, and so on
and see how new rules must arise from the combination of purely artistic
demands and those of practical utility. But this would lead us too far
into esthetic theory, while our aim is to push forward toward the
problem of the photoplay. Of painting, of drama, and of music we had to
speak because with them the photoplay does share certain important
conditions and accordingly certain essential forms of rendering the
world. Each element of the photoplay is a picture, flat like that which
the painter creates, and the pictorial character is fundamental for the
art of the film. But surely the photoplay shares many conditions with
the drama on the stage. The presentation of conflicting action among men
in dramatic scenes is the content, on the stage as on the screen. Our
chief claim, however, was that we falsify the meaning of the photoplay
if we simply subordinate it to the esthetic conditions of the drama. It
is different from mere pictures and it is different from the drama, too,
however much relation it has to both. But we come nearer to the
understanding of its true position in the esthetic world, if we think
at the same time of that other art upon which we touched, the art of the
musical tones. They have overcome the outer world and the social world
entirely, they unfold our inner life, our mental play, with its feelings
and emotions, its memories and fancies, in a material which seems exempt
from the laws of the world of substance and material, tones which are
fluttering and fleeting like our own mental states. Of course, a
photoplay is not a piece of music. Its material is not sound but light.
But the photoplay is not music in the same sense in which it is not
drama and not pictures. It shares something with all of them. It stands
somewhere among and apart from them and just for this reason it is an
art of a particular type which must be understood through its own
conditions and for which its own esthetic rules must be traced instead
of drawing them simply from the rules of the theater.
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