|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 34
But each further step leads us to remarkable differences between the
stage play and the film play. In every respect the film play is further
away from the physical reality than the drama and in every respect this
greater distance from the physical world brings it nearer to the mental
world. The stage shows us living men. It is not the real Romeo and not
the real Juliet; and yet the actor and the actress have the ringing
voices of true people, breathe like them, have living colors like them,
and fill physical space like them. What is left in the photoplay? The
voice has been stilled: the photoplay is a dumb show. Yet we must not
forget that this alone is a step away from reality which has often been
taken in the midst of the dramatic world. Whoever knows the history of
the theater is aware of the tremendous r�le which the pantomime has
played in the development of mankind. From the old half-religious
pantomimic and suggestive dances out of which the beginnings of the real
drama grew to the fully religious pantomimes of medieval ages and,
further on, to many silent mimic elements in modern performances, we
find a continuity of conventions which make the pantomime almost the
real background of all dramatic development. We know how popular the
pantomimes were among the Greeks, and how they stood in the foreground
in the imperial period of Rome. Old Rome cherished the mimic clowns, but
still more the tragic pantomimics. "Their very nod speaks, their hands
talk and their fingers have a voice." After the fall of the Roman empire
the church used the pantomime for the portrayal of sacred history, and
later centuries enjoyed very unsacred histories in the pantomimes of
their ballets. Even complex artistic tragedies without words have
triumphed on our present-day stage. "L'Enfant Prodigue" which came from
Paris, "Sumurun" which came from Berlin, "Petroushka" which came from
Petrograd, conquered the American stage; and surely the loss of speech,
while it increased the remoteness from reality, by no means destroyed
the continuous consciousness of the bodily existence of the actors.
Moreover the student of a modern pantomime cannot overlook a
characteristic difference between the speechless performance on the
stage and that of the actors of a photoplay. The expression of the inner
states, the whole system of gestures, is decidedly different: and here
we might say that the photoplay stands nearer to life than the
pantomime. Of course, the photoplayer must somewhat exaggerate the
natural expression. The whole rhythm and intensity of his gestures must
be more marked than it would be with actors who accompany their
movements by spoken words and who express the meaning of their thoughts
and feelings by the content of what they say. Nevertheless the
photoplayer uses the regular channels of mental discharge. He acts
simply as a very emotional person might act. But the actor who plays in
a pantomime cannot be satisfied with that. He is expected to add
something which is entirely unnatural, namely a kind of artificial
demonstration of his emotions. He must not only behave like an angry
man, but he must behave like a man who is consciously interested in his
anger and wants to demonstrate it to others. He exhibits his emotions
for the spectators. He really acts theatrically for the benefit of the
bystanders. If he did not try to do so, his means of conveying a rich
story and a real conflict of human passions would be too meager. The
photoplayer, with the rapid changes of scenes, has other possibilities
of conveying his intentions. He must not yield to the temptation to play
a pantomime on the screen, or he will seriously injure the artistic
quality of the reel.
The really decisive distance from bodily reality, however, is created by
the substitution of the actor's picture for the actor himself. Lights
and shades replace the manifoldness of color effects and mere
perspective must furnish the suggestion of depth. We traced it when we
discussed the psychology of kinematoscopic perception. But we must not
put the emphasis on the wrong point. The natural tendency might be to
lay the chief stress on the fact that those people in the photoplay do
not stand before us in flesh and blood. The essential point is rather
that we are conscious of the flatness of the picture. If we were to see
the actors of the stage in a mirror, it would also be a reflected image
which we perceive. We should not really have the actors themselves in
our straight line of vision; and yet this image would appear to us
equivalent to the actors themselves, because it would contain all the
depth of the real stage. The film picture is such a reflected rendering
of the actors. The process which leads from the living men to the screen
is more complex than a mere reflection in a mirror, but in spite of the
complexity in the transmission we do, after all, see the real actor in
the picture. The photograph is absolutely different from those pictures
which a clever draughtsman has sketched. In the photoplay we see the
actors themselves and the decisive factor which makes the impression
different from seeing real men is not that we see the living persons
through the medium of photographic reproduction but that this
reproduction shows them in a flat form. The bodily space has been
eliminated. We said once before that stereoscopic arrangements could
reproduce somewhat this plastic form also. Yet this would seriously
interfere with the character of the photoplay. We need there this
overcoming of the depth, we want to have it as a picture only and yet as
a picture which strongly suggests to us the actual depth of the real
world. We want to keep the interest in the plastic world and want to be
aware of the depth in which the persons move, but our direct object of
perception must be without the depth. That idea of space which forces
on us most strongly the idea of heaviness, solidity and substantiality
must be replaced by the light flitting immateriality.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|