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Page 40
It may be more open to discussion whether this same negative attitude
ought to be taken toward color in the photoplay. It is well-known what
wonderful technical progress has been secured by those who wanted to
catch the color hues and tints of nature in their moving pictures. To be
sure, many of the prettiest effects in color are even today produced by
artificial stencil methods. Photographs are simply printed in three
colors like any ordinary color print. The task of cutting those many
stencils for the thousands of pictures on a reel is tremendous, and yet
these difficulties have been overcome. Any desired color effect can be
obtained by this method and the beauty of the best specimens is
unsurpassed. But the difficulty is so great that it can hardly become a
popular method. The direct photographing of the colors themselves will
be much simpler as soon as the method is completely perfected. It can
hardly be said that this ideal has been reached today. The successive
photographing through three red, green, and violet screens and the later
projection of the pictures through screens of these colors seemed
scientifically the best approach. Yet it needed a multiplication of
pictures per second which offered extreme difficulty, besides an
extraordinary increase of expense. The practical advance seems more
secure along the line of the so-called "kinemacolor." Its effects are
secured by the use of two screens only, not quite satisfactory, as true
blue impressions have to suffer and the reddish and greenish ones are
emphasized. Moreover the eye is sometimes disturbed by big flashes of
red or green light. Yet the beginnings are so excellent that the perfect
solution of the technical problem may be expected in the near future.
Would it be at the same time a solution of the esthetic problem?
It has been claimed by friends of color photography that at the present
stage of development natural color photography is unsatisfactory for a
rendering of outer events because any scientific or historical happening
which is reproduced demands exactly the same colors which reality shows.
But on the other hand the process seems perfectly sufficient for the
photoplay because there no objective colors are expected and it makes no
difference whether the gowns of the women or the rugs on the floor show
the red and green too vividly and the blue too faintly. From an esthetic
point of view we ought to come to exactly the opposite verdict. For the
historical events even the present technical methods are on the whole
satisfactory. The famous British coronation pictures were superb and
they gained immensely by the rich color effects. They gave much more
than a mere photograph in black and white, and the splendor and glory of
those radiant colors suffered little from the suppression of the bluish
tones. They were not shown in order to match the colors in a ribbon
store. For the news pictures of the day the "kinemacolor" and similar
schemes are excellent. But when we come to photoplays the question is no
longer one of technique; first of all we stand before the problem: how
far does the coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the photoplay? No
doubt the effect of the individual picture would be heightened by the
beauty of the colors. But would it heighten the beauty of the photoplay?
Would not this color be again an addition which oversteps the essential
limits of this particular art? We do not want to paint the cheeks of the
Venus of Milo: neither do we want to see the coloring of Mary Pickford
or Anita Stewart. We became aware that the unique task of the photoplay
art can be fulfilled only by a far-reaching disregard of reality. The
real human persons and the real landscapes must be left behind and, as
we saw, must be transformed into pictorial suggestions only. We must be
strongly conscious of their pictorial unreality in order that that
wonderful play of our inner experiences may be realized on the screen.
This consciousness of unreality must seriously suffer from the addition
of color. We are once more brought too near to the world which really
surrounds us with the richness of its colors, and the more we approach
it the less we gain that inner freedom, that victory of the mind over
nature, which remains the ideal of the photoplay. The colors are almost
as detrimental as the voices.
On the other hand the producer must be careful to keep sufficiently in
contact with reality, as otherwise the emotional interests upon which
the whole play depends would be destroyed. We must not take the people
to be real, but we must link with them all the feelings and associations
which we would connect with real men. This is possible only if in their
flat, colorless, pictorial setting they share the real features of men.
For this reason it is important to suggest to the spectator the
impression of natural size. The demand of the imagination for the normal
size of the persons and things in the picture is so strong that it
easily and constantly overcomes great enlargements or reductions. We see
at first a man in his normal size and then by a close-up an excessive
enlargement of his head. Yet we do not feel it as if the person himself
were enlarged. By a characteristic psychical substitution we feel rather
that we have come nearer to him and that the size of the visual image
was increased by the decreasing of the distance. If the whole picture is
so much enlarged that the persons are continually given much above
normal size, by a psychical inhibition we deceive ourselves about the
distance and believe that we are much nearer to the screen than we
actually are. Thus we instinctively remain under the impression of
normal appearances. But this spell can easily be broken and the esthetic
effect is then greatly diminished. In the large picture houses in which
the projecting camera is often very far from the screen, the dimensions
of the persons in the pictures may be three or four times larger than
human beings. The illusion is nevertheless perfect, because the
spectator misjudges the distances as long as he does not see anything in
the neighborhood of the screen. But if the eye falls upon a woman
playing the piano directly below the picture, the illusion is destroyed.
He sees on the screen enormous giants whose hands are as large as half
the piano player, and the normal reactions which are the spring for the
enjoyment of the play are suppressed.
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