Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000 9781628928983, 9781441168696

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Preface By focusing on important theoretical writings about these two media, Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916–2000 is one of the first books in over four decades to examine the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between theater and film. As we move through the twenty-first century, almost all artists, students, and critics working in theater will have had earlier and greater exposure to film than to theater. In fact, film has become central to the way in which we perceive and formulate stories, images, ideas, and sounds. At the same time, film, video, and digital media occupy an increasingly significant place in theater study, both for the adaptation of plays and for the documentation or preservation of theatrical performances. Yet far too often young theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from one medium to the other without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. This book is intended to fill such a gap by providing a theoretical and practical foundation for understanding the effect that film and drama have had, and continue to have, on each other’s development. The introduction to Stage and Screen provides a history of the relationship between theater and film, starting with the pre-cinematic, late nineteenthcentury impulse toward capturing spectacular action on the stage and examining the artistic and commercial interaction between film and drama, both in popular and experimental work, throughout the twentieth century. By attempting to trace the cross-fertilization between theater and film—connecting the business practices of the evolving Hollywood system, for example, to the types of artistic appropriation in which Broadway has long engaged—the introduction provides an historical context for the essays to come, while arguing for the vital importance of an understanding of both theater and film to the contemporary practice of either. In this volume, a variety of writers, directors, and theorists, from the period of silent film to the late twentieth century (after the arrival of videotape, DVDs, and digital media), examines the differences between working in, and creating for, drama and film. A playwright such as Bernard Shaw looks at the ways in which the differences between the two industries, audiences, and writing processes affect the author’s artistic control. A theater director like Tyrone Guthrie confronts a large number of issues involved in directing for theater and film, including the differences in narrative strategies

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and the diverse relationship among image, sound, and language brought about by the inherent qualities of the two media. And film directors of the stature of Vsevolod Pudovkin and Josef von Sternberg examine how the working methods of the actor differ between theater and film; they also consider the effect of the camera versus a live audience on the actor’s performance, and the consequences on the actor’s preparation and process of shooting films out of narrative sequence. Finally, critic-theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Susan Sontag, as well as theater-and-film practitioners such as Peter Brook and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, consider the similarities and differences that arise from the intrinsic qualities of each medium, touching on structure, technique, and dialogue, as well as audience experience, the manipulation of time and space, and the nature of three- versus two-dimensional performance. These and the aforementioned essays in Stage and Screen are supplemented by biographies of all the contributors, a generous selection of movie stills, filmographies of plays adapted to the screen, a comprehensive bibliography, and a thoroughgoing index. Let me add that there are no single-authored performing-arts books in English currently in print that feature the comparative perspective of Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916–2000. As for Focus on Film and Theatre, edited by James Hurt (Prentice-Hall, 1974), an earlier book in this vein, it is solid but somewhat dated and has been out of print for many years; while James Naremore’s edited volume Film Adaptation (Rutgers, 2000) focuses almost exclusively on the adaptation of fiction (not drama) to film. Robert Knopf ’s Theater and Film, published by Yale University Press in 2005, is edited as well and contains some worthy selections (by Stanley Kauffmann, Nicholas Vardac, and Sergei Eisenstein, among others), but this book omits a number of classical texts included in my collection. Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916–2000, in the end, is aimed at the educated or cultivated moviegoer and theater patron, as well as at scholars, critics, and professors. In addition to the general or common reader, students of college-level courses in film-and-media studies, theater and drama, and comparative arts ought to find this book enlightening and helpful. Indeed, Stage and Screen may become an indispensable text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the comparative study of theater and film, and could also serve as a supplemental text for any theater course that incorporates film and video into the classroom. As colleges and universities increase their focus on the development of interdisciplinary instruction, courses on the relationship between drama and film are becoming more prevalent than at any time in the past. The widespread availability of theatrical productions and adaptations on film, video, and DVD may have brought the two media together in the college classroom, yet there are few books available to supply a context for such study

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of theater and film. By providing essays that explore the theoretical questions involved in the comparative study of drama and film—rather than ones focusing on the analysis of particular film adaptations—this book allows teachers to pair the essays with movies of their own choosing. Moreover, by concentrating on essays by major theater and film artists and including illustrative still photographs, Stage and Screen should also attract the theater patrons and moviegoers mentioned above: those who wish to broaden their understanding of how theater and film work apart from, or together with, each other. May Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916–2000 achieve its goals accessibly, engagingly, helpfully. Bert Cardullo Izmir University of Economics Turkey

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Contributors Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist who emigrated to the United States in 1940. André Bazin (1918–58) was a French film critic, founder of the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, and spiritual father of the French New Wave as well as creator of the auteur theory. Peter Brook (born 1925) is an innovative English theater and cinema director who directed a film of King Lear in 1971 and a television version of Hamlet in 2002. Bert Cardullo is an American film and drama critic who teaches at the Izmir University of Economics in Turkey. Thomas L. Erskine is the co-founder of Literature/Film Quarterly and for a number of years was a professor of English at Salisbury State University in Maryland. Carl Foreman (1914–84) was an American screenwriter and film producer. Tyrone Guthrie (1900–71) was an Anglo-Irish theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Archibald Henderson (1877–1963) was an American professor of mathematics who wrote on a variety of subjects, including drama and history. Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist who emigrated to the United States in 1941. Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) was an American poet. Roger Manvell (1909–87) was the first director of the British Film Academy and the author of a number of books on films and filmmaking. Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) was a German-American psychologist and film theorist.

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Allardyce Nicoll (1894–1976) was a British literary scholar and theater historian who taught in the United States as well as England. Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) was a German art historian who emigrated to the United States in 1934. Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) was a Russian and Soviet film director, screenwriter, actor, and theorist. Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, novelist, and polemicist. Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American literary critic and theorist who also wrote fiction and plays, in addition to making several films. Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) was an Austrian-American film director. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (born 1935) is a German filmmaker who lives in Munich. James M. Welsh is the co-founder of Literature/Film Quarterly and the author or editor of over twenty books dealing with adaptation studies, Shakespeare, drama, literature, and film.

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Theater versus Film: An Historical Introduction In 1918, the Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote to a friend: I have nothing new now ready for the screen but I have more than once thought of writing for it: I always feel, however, that this will have to find a new technique for itself. In my opinion cinema has nothing in common with theatre, is not attached to it, does not compete with it, nor can they destroy each other; those once fashionable discussions on “cinema and theatre” seem quite unreal to me. I have long loved the cinema just as it was.1

Why, almost a century later, are those “once fashionable discussions” of film and theater still going on so vigorously that it seems desirable, once again, to gather some of the best and most representative of them into a book? Over the 115 years or so that constitute the brief but spectacular history of the movies, every major film critic, scholar, or theorist—and a number from literature and drama as well—has considered the relationship between cinema and theater. And the subject is far from exhausted; indeed, over the months that this volume was in preparation, a number of new treatments of the subject appeared and had to be included in the comprehensive bibliography. This topic has proved to be so crucial and seemingly inexhaustible for a number of reasons. One is that, though it has often been treated in rather abstract terms, the relationship of film and theater is by no means of merely theoretical interest. Ever since the day when the stage actor and writer D. W. Griffith walked over to the Edison studios in the Bronx and took a “temporary” job performing in the movies, actors, directors, and writers have found it important to be able to move freely between the stage, the film set, and the television studio. No theater-trained actor can step before the camera for the first time without taking into serious question the relationship and the differences between film and theater. The question is similarly crucial for the dramatist commissioned to turn his stage play into a shooting script, for the television

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actor who has landed a job in summer stock, and for the theater director who is offered a chance to make his first movie. Another reason the subject of theater versus film is still alive is that, as Blok hoped, film “found a new technique for itself,” and, far from destroying each other, film and theater have continued to evolve and develop each in its own way—sometimes diverging, sometimes converging, but always exercising a powerful, mutual influence upon each other. As they have mutated and evolved at the sometimes dizzying rate that characterized twentieth-century art and continues to characterize the twenty-first—art’s “tradition of the new”—it has been continually necessary to reconsider and reformulate critical descriptions of the relationship between film and theater. A comparison of the two written in the 1920s, for example, when film was mute and when the chief dramatic model was (and still is) the well-made play, must have seemed quaintly irrelevant in an age in which the cinema was an auditory as well a visual experience, and in which the theatergoer was less likely to find himself a voyeur peeping into a drawing room than a participant in a ritual, a ceremony, or an encounter-group session—even the victim of a visual, aural, and sometimes personal assault. Historically, each stage in the development of the film has raised new questions and has brought about fresh resolutions in the relationship of cinema to theater. The history of primitive film, from the mid-1890s to about 1915, for instance, was marked by the gradual conquest of the theatrical audience and by the rapid development of a cinematic style clearly different from that of theatrical production. A. Nicholas Vardac, for one, has voluminously documented the theatrical situation at the time the movies were born and the way in which the theater created a “climate of acceptance” for them. The theater of the late nineteenth century, both in Europe and America, was in reality two theaters. On the one hand, there was the flourishing but tiny serious art theater, represented by the Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre in London, and the Moscow Art Theatre, producing the established “classic” drama of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Racine, and the works of the late nineteenth-century masters Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, as well as the new social drama of such playwrights as Shaw and Brieux. On the other hand, there was the vast theater of commodity entertainment that reached out from the cities to even the smallest villages with vaudeville, light (romantic) comedy, and melodrama. The popular drama of the period was marked by an extreme rejection of realism in content and by an equally extreme insistence upon it in presentation. A domestic drama might deal with stereotyped characters and platitudinous themes and come to a sentimental conclusion, but it was placed on stage with minutely detailed, “cup-and-saucer” realism. A melodrama, for its part, might consist of pure escapism or wish-fulfillment, but the details of its fantasizing were given the most literal, concrete reality on the stage. The masters of this “pictorial realism” were Henry Irving, Steele MacKaye, and David Belasco, in

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whose theaters ships could sink, locomotives could collide, and battles could be fought with breathtaking spectacle. As W. S. Gilbert wryly observed, Every play that contains a house on fire, a sinking steamer, a railway accident, and a dance in a casino, will (if it is liberally placed on the stage) succeed in spite of itself. In point of fact, nothing could wreck such a piece but careful written dialogue and strict attention to probability.2

The movies took over this popular realist aesthetic almost immediately, and it was soon clear that they could easily surpass the theater in spectacular, lifelike effects. One of the first productions for the Edison Kinetoscope, for example, was “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” an 1895 filmstrip by William Heiss inspired by a well-known stage treatment of the subject. Thanks to his ability to manipulate reality by stopping the camera, substituting a dummy, and starting to film again, Heiss was able to show the executioner’s axe actually falling on Mary’s neck and her head rolling off the block. The initial reaction of the theater to such cinematic feats was to try to mount even more extraordinary spectacles, such as those in the turn-of-the-century plays Ben Hur, The Light That Failed, and Judith of Bethulia. But the battle was lost before it was begun, and the theater had been forced to move in other directions even before D. W. Griffith’s epic films of 1915–16, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, signaled the cinema’s triumph in the field of spectacle-for-the-masses. As film succeeded the theater as the chief supplier of such commodity entertainment, it captured the vast popular audience that the theater had once commanded. In Europe, the shift was accelerated by the theater’s wartime difficulties (the shortage of male actors, for just one example) just as imported American movies were becoming popular. The years 1915 to 1920 were marked by the wholesale conversion of legitimate theaters to movie houses, as the cinema expanded into a multimillion-dollar industry. The result, for the theater, was a radical shift in the size and importance of the “two theaters.” After 1920, the popular theater went into decline, while the art theater began to increase, and sustain, its prestige and influence with a comparatively small elite audience. During the years that films were capturing the theater’s mass audience, they were developing a body of techniques more and more divergent from that of the theater. The earliest filmmakers, though, used film strictly as a medium, to record either “found” real events or staged events. In staged films, the camera remained fixed at what would have been third-row center, actors entered and exited from the sides or the rear of a continuously visible space, and the action was arranged horizontally at the same time as it was pointed at the camera-asaudience. Every film student recalls the excitement, in watching a well-selected survey of early cinema, of seeing the compressed development of a genuinely filmic idiom out of such static beginnings. From the filmed stage fantasies of Georges Méliès and the passive recordings of reality of the Lumière brothers

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through the innovations of Edwin S. Porter—shifts in the position of the camera, free manipulation of space and time, creation of a scene through the combination of a number of shots—to D. W. Griffith’s refinement and consolidation of a full vocabulary of types of shots and of editing, lighting, and acting techniques, the movies within a decade and a half became an autonomous art, not merely a novelty or a medium for the display of theatrical material. As the movies “liberated” themselves from the stage, however, the theater itself was rapidly evolving, often in ways influenced by the cinema. The presence of the movies was continually felt throughout the vigorous theatrical experimentation of the 1920s. On the one hand, the theater was seeking a new area of activity that the cinema—potentially, the most literally representational or documentally “real” of the arts—could not usurp; on the other hand, the theater frequently tried to explore ways of imitating and incorporating the fantastic or visionary capability of film form. Throughout Europe, the dramatic avant-garde repeatedly expressed admiration for the film’s dreamlike fluidity, its power to convey interior states of mind, as well as for its possibilities as a truly proletarian and anti-bourgeois art. Particularly in France, the surrealist theatrical experiments of such writers as André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, and Antonin Artaud were perhaps better suited to the screen than to the stage, assaulting as they did the theater’s traditional objectivity or exteriority and its bondage to continuous time and space. And a number of surrealists did indeed move from the theater to the cinema, most notably Jean Cocteau. In Germany, film was one element among many of the influences that led to the development of dramatic expressionism (or vice versa), as German cinema and theater freely borrowed from each other during the 1920s. The debt to the stage, as well as to painting, of such pictures as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has often been noted, and, to cite only one example, the characteristic roving spotlight of the expressionist stage was an obvious attempt to control audience attention in the manner of a movie director. The attempts of the Bauhaus group to create a nonrepresentational, manifestly manufactured “total theater” themselves involved the incorporation of film into the ultimate theatrical experience, as did the production experiments of F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Variety Theater” in Italy. The impact of film on the work of Bertolt Brecht, the most notable figure in the German theater of the 1920s, has never been fully explored, but it may have been a major influence on the cool, detached style, direct presentation of character, and episodic plotting of this playwright’s epic theater—itself an enormous influence on both theater directors and filmmakers to come. In Russia, where V. I. Lenin had declared in 1919 that “of all the arts, the cinema is the most important for us,” the 1920s were filled with vigorous experimentation in film and theater, both separately and in combination. The productions of the Moscow Art Theatre were filmed, and the director Vsevolod Meyerhold called for a new theater in which live and filmed scenes would be combined. The most famous product of this ferment, of course, is

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Sergei Eisenstein, whose entry into film was a logical step after his stage productions of 1923 had moved far in the direction of the realism and spatial as well as temporal flexibility of the screen. “The cart dropped to pieces and its driver dropped into the cinema,” as he wrote in the essay “Through Theatre to Cinema.”3 It is sometimes forgotten, however, that Eisenstein never abandoned his stage work, and his theater and film directing continued to influence each other throughout his life. The lively, worldwide exploration in the 1920s of new forms in both the cinema and the theater, together with their borrowings from each other, left a permanent mark on these two arts. Their relationship, however, was again abruptly changed in 1926–7 with the introduction of the sound film. The ultimate effect of this innovation was to complete the displacement of the theater as a major purveyor of popular entertainment and to make the movie the dominant mass performance art for the next twenty years. Ironically, the initial effect, though, was to cancel out much of the film’s hard-won stylistic autonomy and to bring about a marked “re-theatricalization” of the cinema. In 1928 and 1929, playwrights, stage directors, and stage actors were imported en masse to teach the movies how to talk. Their theatrical orientation, plus the new technical problems presented by fixed microphones and cameras, using cumbersome “blimps” or caged-in soundproof housing, resulted in a string of static, photographed stagelike musicals and revues, “all-talking and all-singing” though they may have been. The history of cinema in the 1930s was thus the history of the recovery of the technical mastery of the silent film, through the work of the best directors of this period: Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Rouben Mamoulian, John Ford, and many others, in the United States as well as abroad. The movies’ prosperous twenty years between 1930 and 1950 came to an end through two forces: the postwar court rulings that broke up the American corporate chains of studio-owned movie theaters, and the coming of television. The movies’ response to television’s challenge for the mass audience was remarkably similar to that of the popular theater of half a century before, when the movies had been the challenger: it first tried to retain its audience through spectacle and gimmickry—3-D, Cinerama, CinemaScope, new color processes—but it finally accepted defeat, collaborating with the new medium and, at the same time, beginning to build new, minority audiences of its own. The result of this revolution was to place film in yet another relationship to theater, both sociologically and artistically. The cinema was not “re-theatricalized” as it was after the sound revolution of the 1920s: on the contrary, it tended to guard its integrity as film even more jealously. But economic and technological developments forced it onto a path more parallel to that of the theater than ever before. Like the theater, film maintained its connections with popular entertainment, but like the theater of the 1920s, it saw a sudden expansion and increased importance in its minority audience. The result was a gain in some

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respects for the cinema, because, for the first time in its history, serious ideas and feelings were as likely to find artistic expression in film as in drama. The creators of drama beginning in 1950—Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genêt, John Osborne, and Harold Pinter—were simultaneously equaled in stature and achievement by the creators of film—Ingmar Bergmann, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Stanley Kubrick. The richness, complexity, and subtlety of the best films of this period probably resulted from the fact that serious filmmakers, like serious dramatists, no longer had to please everybody but could find an appropriate minority audience for their work. This might have continued to be the case, except that today almost nothing in the recent theater—which, under threat not only from film in its various formats but also the internet and cable-cum-satellite television, has become prohibitively expensive and, therefore, artistically unadventurous—is nearly so good as some of the films of the new Iranians; of the so-called Fifth and Sixth Generations in China; of the Europeans Aki Kaurismäki, Michael Haneke, Laurent Cantet, Nanni Moretti, Mike Leigh, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; of the Asians Jun Ichikawa, Kim Ki-duk, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hong Sang-soo; of the New Romanian Cinema; and of the following Americans: Neil LaBute, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Victor Nuñez, and Todd Solondz.

Of Mice and Men (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1939)

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Still, the theoretical interrelationships of film and theater continue to be as complex as their historical ones, and indeed the historical development of each art and their reciprocal influence have made theoretical comparisons difficult and short-lived. All the more so since we seem to be moving toward a reign of the mixed medium, or the adaptation, in which the notion of the unity of a work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed. In the case of the films made of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, for example, the interdisciplinary critic of the year 2050 would find not a novella out of which a play and at least two movies had been made, but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, as it were, all of them equal in the critic’s eyes. The “work” would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. And the chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical one. Even more so in the case of a work like Cabaret, which began as fiction by Christopher Isherwood in 1946, then was transformed into a “straight” play (titled, of all things, I Am a Camera), a musical one, and finally a film version; or in the case of August Stindberg’s Miss Julie, which was first a play, then a television movie and a wide-screen film, as well as finally a ballet, an opera, and a modern-dance piece.

Cabaret (dir. Bob Fosse, 1972)

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Here is something Wallace Stevens once wrote on a related subject: It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era. What happens is that it is always attaching itself to a new reality, and adhering to it. It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality.4

For drama and theater the task is to determine what that reality is, what has changed in it and what hasn’t; the imagination will take care of itself, on stage as well as on screen. For drama, all I can say is that such a reality does not consist of any one of these terms in isolation or combination: revival, musical, or reverse adaptation (from film); discrimination, patriarchy, or hegemony (collectively making up the Theater of Guilt, in Robert Brustein’s words). And for film, that reality consists of one word for the time being: technology. That is to say, when I look to the future and envision hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of homes with large, wide-screen televisions and surroundsound theaters, I wonder who will go to the multiplexes of today, which themselves made obsolete the movie palaces and drive-ins of yesteryear. I believe that in a short time most films will be viewed on DVD at home (with a movie title like Home Alone thereby taking on new meaning), or in their original format only in museums by solitary film scholars, and that the multiplex will become the nearly exclusive province of teenagers trying to get out of the house—not necessarily to see a movie—a trend, of course, that has already begun. If I am right, and films become an overwhelmingly private experience, shared by small groups in living rooms, what might then become of theater? Will the experimental theater groups of the future perform in our living rooms, or will the desire for human contact and communality, together with a concern for the social fabric, drive us back to more traditional theaters? Alternatively, will 3-D IMAX be replaced by holographic film, creating three-dimensional worlds into which we can walk, until we eventually “holographize” old movies (just as we colorize them now) and offer audience members a chance to sit down with Rick in Casablanca, have a drink, and then say, “Play it again, Sam”? Whatever the case, more critical attention has been devoted over the years to the differences between film and theater, even though the gross similarities between the two should be obvious. Both are performance arts that ordinarily (until the advent of “home-entertainment systems”) involve an audience gathering at a prescribed time in a theater to witness a scheduled event (like dance and live music, and unlike painting, sculpture, and novels). Both, traditionally at least, are narrative (they tell stories) and mimetic (they represent life). Furthermore, as we have seen, both are poised on a borderline between entertainment and art. Indeed, both suffer when they move too far from this line: the highest artistic achievement in either form seems to require deep roots in popular convention.

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Here now is a list of the differences between these two media, with a number of them naturally open to exception or qualification: Characteristics of Film 1. A two-dimensional, permanent visual record of a performance. 2. Discontinuous, “smaller” acting aimed at the camera lens; can employ amateur actors. 3. No immediate or physical interrelationship between the actors and the audience. 4. Has a narrator: the camera. 5. Relatively passive audience for whom the camera chooses what will be seen. 6. A visual art primarily, but also a dramatic art that enacts stories (with words once the sound era begins) and a narrative art that tells those stories through the mediation of the camera. 7. A collaborative art, with the director ultimately in control. 8. A total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk. 9. Reducible to DVD, videotape, television, and so on. 10. Can be a solitary experience, especially if you are watching a film alone at home. 11. The most popular art form of the twentieth century and beyond. 12. Can dispense with overt conflicts, climaxes, and even plots; indeed, can be almost completely nontheatrical or nondramatic. 13. The particle belonging to the cinema is “then” rather than “therefore”; in other words, the cinema gives primacy to succession more than it does to causality. 14. Deals with the relationship of people not only to other people, but also to things and places. 15. The camera can provide the viewer with multiple visual perspectives, through different shots. 16. Intermissions are rare, and scenes changes (as well as costume, make-up, and lighting changes) are accomplished swiftly and easily through cuts or editing. Space is, therefore, manipulable and time is flexible. 17. The film script is not an independent artwork and cannot be read by itself fruitfully, nor can its words be “performed” as a play’s words could be; a screenplay is a preparatory sketch for a future art work, a fully realized cinematic experience. 18. Usually concentrates on action per se, even when this action is “interior” or psychological; characters are often makers of their own destinies in the present. Characteristics of Theater 1. A three-dimensional, ephemeral performance of events. 2. Continuous, “big” acting aimed at a live audience; does not employ amateur actors.

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3. Immediate relationship between the actors and the audience, both of whom are physically present in the same space at the same time. 4. Except in rare cases, has no narrator. 5. Relatively active audience that must choose for itself where to look or what to see; what the audience sees is unmediated by a camera. 6. A verbal art primarily, but it also has a visual component (through costumes, sets, lights, choreography, and action itself). 7. A collaborative art, with the actor finally in control on the stage. 8. A total work of art or Gesamtkunstwerk, but not quite to the extent that film is. 9. Irreducible: to have theater, you must have living actors performing before a real audience in a more or less demarcated space. 10. A group experience, as it occurs in a theatrical auditorium of one kind or another. 11. The most popular art form of the nineteenth century and before. 12. Its essence consists of human beings in conflict with each other or themselves. 13. The conjunction belonging to the theater is “therefore” rather than “then”; in other words, the theater gives primacy to causality more than it does to succession. 14. Deals with the relationship between people. 15. There is only one “shot”: the full picture of the stage. 16. Intermissions are common, and scene changes (as well as costume, make-up, and lighting changes) can be slow and laborious. Space is, therefore, less manipulable and time is less flexible. 17. The dramatic text is an independent artwork that can be read or performed. 18. Usually dramatizes the consequences of action; characters are often victims of their pasts.

The many contrasts between film and theater listed above may be grouped along the old Aristotelian lines of creator, audience, and thing created. The question of who is the creator of a play or film has engaged a number of commentators: in drama it is the playwright, in film it is the director, we are told, at least by the once fashionable auteur film critics. And yet the proposition is far from conclusive. The supremacy of the playwright is an idea promulgated by literary critics, but if we regard drama in terms of performance, rather than text, the playwright assumes a role of primus inter pares with director and actors. On the other hand, the excesses of auteur criticism led to a sometimes absurd overvaluation of the director’s role in filmmaking: a director may occasionally make a good movie out of a bad script, but this is probably rarer than the more extreme auteur critics would have had us believe. In twentieth-century film and theater, the traditional authorial distinctions were further blurred by an increasing emphasis upon the screenplay as a literary form (as in the work of Pinter and Alain Robbe-Grillet), and by the rise of

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something like auteur directors in the theater (as exemplified by Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Joseph Chaikin). The latter tried not only to “author” their own texts through “concept” productions of other authors’ plays, but also tried to overcome the theater’s spatial limitations. These directors did this by using an existing environment that was as close to reality as possible, or by designing such an environment so that it enveloped the audience and thereby not only erased any distinction between viewing space and playing area, but also freed the spectators from static positioning or a single point of vision. The contrast between film and theater in audience and audience experience, as opposed to author and creative experience, is also a recurring subject in criticism. The idea that appears occasionally in early criticism—that the movie audience is a mass audience, while the theater audience is an elite, minority group—is, as we have seen, a function of particular social and economic conditions and has nothing to do with the inherent properties of the two arts. Marshall McLuhan’s judgment in the 1960s that live theater is a “cooler medium” than cinema—that is, that it requires more active participation from its audience—was anticipated many times in film criticism. The ordinary circumstances of theatergoing make it a comparatively public event and discourage the dreamlike passivity which has been described as the film experience. In the theater, the audience gathers in a group and waits for curtain time, the auditorium is more brightly lit during the performance than a movie house is, and absorption in the drama is periodically broken by intermissions and scene changes. During the performance itself, the audience member must willingly suspend disbelief, since even the most realistic production requires the acceptance of a number of obvious conventions, and he must actively participate in choosing what to look at, since the entire stage is ordinarily continuously in view. The traditional movie audience, by contrast, is atomized, entering the theater singly or in small groups and at any point during the film. Isolated in the darkness and staring at a screen much more commanding in size and brightness than the theater stage, the moviegoer is much more likely to surrender control of his consciousness. Moreover, it is comparatively easy to suspend disbelief, since he is in the presence of a relatively exact representation of reality and is asked to make a minimal number of choices as to where to look, for he can see only what the filmmaker shows him. The moviegoer is relieved of even the minimal tension that invariably accompanies performances by actors, with the continual possibility of human error—blown lines, missed entrances, and other misadventures. Indeed, the filmic medium has become so lifelike that (in a reversal of what purportedly occurred at the initial screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Arrival of the Paris Express), when the first footage of the attack on the World Trade Center was shown on television—captured from a myriad of angles by any number of personal video cameras, then aired by

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the news media again and again—it was virtually indistinguishable from what Hollywood studios could have manufactured digitally for any number of disaster movies. There is still a great deal of truth in the above, often-repeated observations, but perhaps less now than in an age when the movies were frankly escapist entertainment and the theater was dominated by the realistic style. The cinema no more than other serious art forms seeks merely to suck us up into mindless, wish-fulfilling fantasies. The Brechtian revolution reached the screen as well as the stage, and films are still full of the distancing devices, implicit along with explicit, that characterized motion pictures in the 1960s, from the openly metacinematic devices of Tom Jones or Persona to the cool, terse, anythingbut-fantasizing tone of Godard’s movies. At the same time, the 1960s, much theater—especially that ultimately derived from Artaud—sought to achieve the kind of visceral, irrational involvement sometimes associated with the moviegoer’s experience. The goal was hardly cool, detached observation in such productions as Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade and anything by the Living Theatre or the Polish Laboratory Theatre. More numerous than studies of creator or audience, however, have been those of the object itself: the film and the play. Some critics have made an initial contrast that even denies that they are comparable, since a film is literally an object and theater is an event. But surely the essential film is not the celluloid in the can (any more than a play is pages in a book), but rather the showing of the film—a performance event also. There are, of course, a number of sharp contrasts between theater and film as performance, as described earlier: theater is three-dimensional, while film is two-dimensional; in the theater we see a performance being created as we watch it, but in film we never quite forget that we are seeing a record of a performance that has taken place in the past; actors’ performances vary from night to night in the theater, whereas they are fixed in film; performance and role are generally distinct in the theater, unlike in film, where they are generally synonymous. This may be a paradox, but in the age of technical miracles, of the annihilation of time and space, of technologized existence, if you will, an existence in which immediacy no longer has the simple meaning it once had and in which the line between a thing or a being and its image or reproduction has been nearly obliterated—in such an age the theater’s very “live-ness” may be what so often makes it seem to be less fully alive. Moreover, although theater is inherently more lifelike because it occurs live and in three dimensions, the presence of three-dimensional actors in a theater—a non-real or artificial space—may actually undercut a production’s resemblance to life at the same time that the actors increase its live-ness. Of the many other contrasts between the cinema and the theater, we may concentrate now on the three areas that have stimulated most discussion—time,

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space, and structure—beginning with the temporal element. One of the most liberating insights in the early development of cinematic technique was that the film need not be bound to the theater’s use of continuous and sequential time. On the stage, an actor crossing a room has to cross it step by step; on the screen, he can come in at the door and immediately be at the other side of the room. The cinema thus has great flexibility in eliding time, presenting simultaneous action, leaping back and forth among past, present, and future, and repeating moments over and over. This flexibility is generally represented as a strength of film, which of course it is, but the theater’s ways of representing time are not, therefore, a weakness. The theater, in the first place, is not so inflexible in its representation of time as is sometimes implied: in Agamemnon, for instance, Aeschylus uses a temporal ellipsis in representing the time between the fall of Troy and the arrival of Agamemnon’s army; Shakespeare often uses a flexible “stage time” that compresses, lengthens, or otherwise distorts “real time”; and modern plays frequently use time as fluidly as film does. The second half of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, begins at the same point in time as the first half, and Jean-Claude van Itallie wrote a number of dramas that play games with instantaneous action, repetitions, time loops, and other temporal distortions. In the second place, the theater’s more characteristic representation of time as a steady, sequential unfolding is one of its great strengths, as the Greeks and Ibsen had shown us in the past, and as such twentieth-century plays as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Pinter’s Homecoming demonstrated once again. The contrast between the theatrical and cinematic representation of space is much like the contrast in the representation of time. Theater is confined to a continuous use of space (though the stage space may constitute a figurative treatment of real space, just as stage time may constitute a figurative treatment of real time). Film can treat space as flexibly and fluidly as it can treat time, moving freely back and forth over any spatial expanse. The sharpest contrast, however, is in the spatial relationship of the spectator to the action. In the theater, the spectator ordinarily is fixed in one position, viewing the action from a constant position and point of view. In the cinema, the viewer, though he remains physically in his seat, is perceptually constantly changing his perspective courtesy of the camera—moving in toward the action, moving back from it, seeing it from the position of one of the characters, or even from a position impossible in real experience (as in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, when we see the crew’s mutiny from high above the vessel). Again, however, the fact that the cinema’s use of space is a great strength does not mean that the theater’s use of it is a weakness. The surest sign of the clichéd mind in filmmaking is a feeling of obligation to “open up” plays spatially when they become films and a conviction that this process proves superiority,

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that a play really comes into its own when it is filmed. We can really go to Italy in Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet, so for some people this picture automatically supersedes stage-bound theatrical productions. We can dissolve and cross-fade more easily in the 1951 movie of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, therefore the theater proves yet again just a tryout place for later perfect consummation on screen—despite, in this case, the theater’s superior ability to suggest the childishness of Willy’s sons (by having the adult actors of Biff and Happy play their boyhood selves) and the momentousness of Willy’s adultery (by having it occur, not on location in Boston, but on the forestage— right in the Loman’s living room, as it were). And we can go outside in Mike Nichols’ film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so once more the theater is shown up as cribbed or confined, if not superficially realistic, even though the claustrophobic nature of George and Martha’s single-set living room on the stage is part of the point of this long night’s journey into day. Stage space is thus invariably metaphorical, even when it is most “realistic”—as in the case of Albee’s play—and one of the great strengths of drama is precisely its power to charge a confined space with deep emotional meaning.

Who’s Afaid of Virginia Woolf? (dir. Mike Nichols, 1966)

The trouble here is a confusion in aesthetic logic, an assumption that we are comparing apples and apples when we are really comparing apple and pears. Fundamentally, film takes the audience to the event, shifting the audience continually; theater takes the event to the audience, shifting it never. Just as the beauty of poetry often lies in tensions between the free flight of language and the molding capacity of form, so the beauty of drama often lies in tensions

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between imagination and theatrical exigency. To assume that the cinema’s extension of a play’s action is automatically an improvement is to change the subject: from the way in which theater builds upwards, folding one event upon another in almost perceptible vertical form, to the way in which film progresses horizontally. Figuratively speaking, theater works predominantly by building higher and higher in one place; film, despite the literally vertical progress of planes in the image, works predominantly in a lateral series of places. In this way, action in the cinema is more of a journey in the present than a confrontation based on the past (the usual form of tragedy in drama): the one is filled with possibility or promise, the other with suspense or foreboding. By its very form, it can then be said, film reflects for spectators in the twenty-first century the belief that the world is a place in which a person can leave the past behind and create his or her own future—hence one of the reasons the cinema took such a foothold, so early, in the history of the United States. “Opening up” a play may be desirable, but it must be part of a total rethinking of the way the space is to be used in the new medium. It can be successful when the filmmaker knows clearly what he is doing and treats his film as a new work from a common source, as Richard Lester did in his admirable film of Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack. But most adaptors seem to think that any banal set of film gimmicks constitutes a liberation for which the poor cramped play ought to be grateful. One film that respects its dramatic source almost completely and is nevertheless cinematic is The Little Foxes. Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play underwent nearly no adaptation in William Wyler’s film: for instance, there are no exterior scenes of dramatic action in the film—precisely the kind of scene that most directors would have deemed necessary in order to introduce a little “cinema” into this intractable theatrical mass. Film may offer greater visual possibilities, then, but they are not always necessary, and those possibilities do not prevent some of the most exciting and popular theater from itself being highly visual. From the late 1980s and the 1990s, consider Bill Irwin’s “new vaudeville” pieces Largely New York and Fool Moon, productions that were virtually silent. What of similarly nonverbal productions such as Blue Man Group’s Tubes and De La Guarda’s Villa Villa? And, as early as 1971, Robert Wilson was creating the three-hour speechless epic Deafman Glance, which combined a theater of silence with one of images not unlike that of silent experimental film. It is precisely by choosing to overcome the limitations of their chosen medium that these artists have achieved success, for what greater thrill can there be than to see an art form transcend the boundaries which we have become accustomed to assigning to it? Or to see an artist do so, for that matter. Think only of Julie Taymor’s predominantly visual theatrical productions, The Lion King and The Green Bird, and of her highly literate films Titus and Frida. And consider that Neil LaBute makes predominantly verbal films like In the Company of Men and Your

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Friends and Neighbors at the same time as he fills the stage with arresting, even aggressive physical images in such plays as Bash and The Shape of Things. The list of such artists could be extended as far back as Ingmar Bergman and forward to David Mamet, who continues to write and direct for the screen as well as the stage. And what should not be omitted are the “rehearsal” films, or “filmed theater,” made by people like Louis Malle (Vanya on 42nd Street), Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montreal), and Jacques Rivette (Paris Belongs to Us and L’Amour Fou).

Vanya on 42nd Street (dir. Louis Malle, 1994)

Closely related to the use of space and time is the question of structure in cinema and theater. The film’s freedom from the theatrical constraints of continuous time and space makes the shot the fundamental unit of cinematic structure. The shot is thus comparable, not to the theatrical scene, as is sometimes said, but to the theatrical “beat”—the introduction and resolution of a conflict of wills that constitutes the minimal unit of drama. Theatrical scenes are built up out of these minimal units, even as cinematic scenes are built up out of a series of shots. The comparison cannot be pushed further, though, since shots are defined by visual considerations—distance, point of view, movement— whereas beats are defined psychologically, as “units of conflict.” Hence at the most elementary level, film is “seeing” while drama is “interacting.” The intermediate structures of drama—the patterns that organize larger units such as scenes and acts—are generally public or private rituals: trials, weddings, funerals, arrivals, departures, confrontations, conversations, and

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the like. It is the nature of the rituals employed in these intermediate structures that largely defines dramatic style, from the pubic and ceremonial style of the Greeks to the closeted and domestic style of the modern realists. The intermediate structures of film are ordinarily much looser and less ritualistic than those of drama: they tend to organize material along perceptual lines, as the eye would perceive it, rather than along the lines of formal human interaction. When a film nonetheless has a theatrical flavor, like Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, this is because it makes heavy use of the kinds of intermediate structures found in drama. A similar contrast between the natural structures of film and drama appears to exist for the larger units, as well. Perhaps because of the cinema’s much closer ties to surface reality—the appearance of things—it often seems that a film begins in the concrete and moves toward an organizing idea, while a play begins with an idea and moves toward its concrete embodiment. Whether or not this is literally true, it does seem that the greatest drama tends in its largest patterns toward the mythic and the archetypal, whereas even the greatest films cannot move very far from the welter of immediate reality without appearing “stagy” or “literary.” Thus the essence of many fine, complex plays can often be suggested in a short summary of their basic action, but the essence of a good movie can rarely be captured so synoptically. As for the best material on the subject of cinema versus theater, a fair portion of it follows in its complete form. But the difficulty in selecting the contents of this collection has been in choosing from a vast amount, since, so closely have drama and film been intertwined, almost everything that has been written on the movies touches, at least implicitly, on the theatrical comparison. Perhaps the best indication that a collection of essays on the subject of film and theater is worthwhile at this point in time is the certainty that, before long, it will require updating. The subject is very much alive because film and theater are so much alive, and it is well to pause and survey the terrain behind as we prepare to try to understand the new forms and relationships of theater and film that seem certain to appear in the years to come.

NOTES 1. Blok quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 130. 2. Gilbert quoted in J. O. Bailey, ed., British Plays of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Odyssey, 1966), p. 7. 3. Eisenstein quoted on p. 121 of “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in James Hurt, ed., Focus on Film and Theatre (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 116–29. 4. Wallace Stevens, p. 656 of “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in his Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), pp. 643–65.

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Chapter 1

“Thirty Differences Between the Photoplays and the Stage” Vachel Lindsay

From The Art of the Moving Picture (1916) The stage is dependent upon three lines of tradition: first, that of Greece and Rome that came down through the French. Second, the English style, ripened from the miracle play and the Shakespearian stage. And third, the Ibsen precedent from Norway, now so firmly established it is classic. These methods are obscured by the commercialized dramas, but they are behind them all. Let us discuss for illustration the Ibsen tradition. Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant. He must be read aloud. He stands for the spoken word, for the iron power of life that may be concentrated in a phrase like the “All or nothing” of Brand. Though Peer Gynt has its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in through the ear alone. He can be acted in essentials from end to end with one table and four chairs in any parlor. The alleged punch with which the “movie” culminates has occurred three or ten years before the Ibsen curtain goes up. At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain “This is the magnificent moving picture cannot achieve.” Likewise after every successful film described in this book could be inscribed “This the trenchant Ibsen cannot do.” But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town. The humor of the prospect was the sort too deep for tears. My pastor and I reread the William Archer translation that we might be alert for every antithesis. Together we went to the services. Since then the film has been furiously denounced by the literati. Floyd Dell’s discriminating assault upon it is quoted in Current Opinion, October 1915, and Margaret Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent number of The Little Review. But it is not such a bad film in itself. It is not Ibsen. It should be advertised “The Iniquities of the Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a Palatial Setting.”

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Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his son, shows the men much as Ibsen outlines their characters. Of course the only way to be Ibsen is to be so precisely. In the new plot all is open as the day. The world is welcome, and generally present when the man or his son goes forth to see the elephant and hear the owl. Provincial hypocrisy is not implied. But Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere of secrecy for his human volcanoes to burst through in the end. Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her intelligent and sensitive countenance that she has a conception of that character. She does not always have the chance to act the woman written in her face, the tart, thinking, handsome creature that Ibsen prefers. Nigel Debrullier looks the buttoned-up Pastor Manders, even to caricature. But the crawling, bootlicking carpenter, Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a respectable, guileless man with an income. And his wife and daughter are helpless, conventional, upper-class rabbits. They do not remind one of the saucy originals. The original Ibsen drama is the result of mixing up five particular characters through three acts. There is not a situation but would go to pieces if one personality were altered. Here are two, sadly tampered with: Engstrand and his daughter. Here is the mother, who is only referred to in Ibsen. Here is the elder Alving, who disappears before the original play starts. So the twenty great Ibsen situations in the stage production are gone. One new crisis has an Ibsen irony and psychic tension. The boy is taken with the dreaded intermittent pains in the back of his head. He is painting the order that is to make him famous: the King’s portrait. While the room empties of people he writhes on the floor. If this were all, it would have been one more moving picture failure to put through a tragic scene. But the thing is reiterated in tableau-symbol. He is looking sideways in terror. A hairy arm with clutching demon claws comes thrusting in toward the back of his neck. He writhes in deadly fear. The audience is appalled for him. This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered for the whispered refrain: “Ghosts,” in the original masterpiece. This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain, three times at least, before this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening. It appears but the once, and has no chance to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics of the piece, as it should be, to realize its full power. The father’s previous sins have been acted out. The boy’s consequent struggle with the malady has been traced step by step, so the play should end here. It would then be a rough equivalent of the Ibsen irony in a contrary medium. Instead of that, it wanders on through paraphrases of scraps of the play, sometimes literal, then quite alien, on to the alleged motion picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from the machine. There is no doctor on the stage in the original Ghosts. But there is a physician in the Doll’s House, a scientific, quietly moving oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.

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A Doll’s House (dir. Patrick Garland, 1973)

Is this photoplay physician such a one? The boy and his half-sister are in their wedding-clothes in the big church. Pastor Manders is saying the ceremony. The audience and building are indeed showy. The doctor charges up the aisle at the moment people are told to speak or forever hold their peace. He has tact. He simply breaks up the marriage right there. He does not tell the guests why. But he takes the wedding party into the pastor’s study and there blazes at the bride and gloom the long-suppressed truth that they are brother and sister. Always an orotund man, he has the Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency. He brings to one’s mind the tearful book, much loved in childhood, Parted at the Altar, or Why Was It Thus? And our able actors have the task of telling the audience by facial expression only, that they have been struck by moral lightning. They stand in a row, facing the people, endeavoring to make the crisis of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing melodrama. The final death of young Alving is depicted with an approximation of Ibsen’s mood. But the only ways to suggest such feelings in silence, do not convey them in full to the audience, but merely narrate them. Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant work. Instead there are endless writhings and rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen. Up past the point of the clutching hand this film is the prime example for study for the person who would know once and for all the differences between the photoplays and the stage dramas. Along with it might be classed Mrs. Fiske’s

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décorative moving picture Tess, in which there is every determination to convey the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without her voice and breathing presence. To people who know her well it is a surprisingly good tintype of our beloved friend, for the family album. The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere to be found. There are two moments of dramatic life set among many of delicious pictorial quality: when Tess baptizes her child, and when she smooths its little grave with a wavering hand. But in the stage-version the dramatic poignancy begins with the going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends. The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt’s Camille. It is indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and taken at full length. Much space is occupied by the floor and the overhead portions of the stage setting. It lasts as long as would the spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said conversation if we can. It might be compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with one’s ears stopped with cotton. It would be well for the beginning student to find some way to see the first two of these three, or some other attempts to revamp the classic, for instance Mrs. Fiske’s painstaking reproduction of Vanity Fair, bearing in mind the list of differences which this chapter now furnishes. There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays are struggling with the Shakespearian, French, and Norwegian traditions in the new medium. Many of the moving pictures discussed in this book are rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith of Bethulia, is a pronounced success. But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down. The successful motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being evolved every hour. Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic. But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations. They try to have most things as before. Later they take on the moving picture technique in a superficial way, but they, and the host of talented actors in the prime of life and Broadway success, retain the dramatic state of mind. It is a principle of criticism, the world over, that the distinctions between the arts must be clearly marked, even by those who afterwards mix those arts. Take, for instance, the perpetual quarrel between the artists and the half-educated about literary painting. Whistler fought that battle in England. He tried to beat it into the head of John Bull that a painting is one thing, a mere illustration for a story another thing. But the novice is always stubborn. To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign languages, therefore just alike. The book illustration may be said to come in through the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagination. And the other is effective with no title at all. The scenario writer who will study to the bottom of the matter in Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies

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will be equipped to welcome the distinction between the old-fashioned stage, where the word rules, and the photoplay, where splendor and ritual are all. It is not the same distinction, but a kindred one. But let us consider the details of the matter. The stage has its exits and entrances at the side and back. The standard photoplays have their exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the most stirring mob and battle scenes. In Judith of Bethulia, though the people seem to be coming from everywhere and going everywhere, when we watch close, we see that the individuals enter at the near right-hand corner and exit at the near left-hand corner, or enter at the near left-hand corner and exit at the near right-hand corner. Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he goes out at the side and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides. With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out that way. In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads, disappearing when largest. There is an explosive power about the mildest motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse. The people left in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing cyclops. Likewise, when the actor enters again, his mechanical importance is overwhelming. Therefore, for his first entrance the motion picture star does not require the preparations that are made on the stage. The support does not need to warm the spectators to the problem, then talk them into surrender. When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one follows. He does not realize that his camera-born opportunity to magnify persons and things instantly, to interweave them as actors on one level, to alternate scenes at the slightest whim, are the big substitutes for dialogue. By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: cottage, field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation between three places rather than three persons. By alternating the picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy. When two people talk to each other, it is by lifting and lowering objects rather than their voices. The collector presents a bill: the adventurer shows him the door. The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it. Moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay. The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he is getting nowhere, but still helpless, puts the climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the screen. Sentences should be used to show changes of time and place and a few such elementary matters before the episode is fully started. The climax of a motion picture scene cannot be one word or fifty words. As in the case of Cabiria, the crisis must be an action sharper than any that has gone before in organic union with a tableau more beautiful than any that has preceded: the breaking of the tenth wave upon the sand. Such remnants of

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pantomimic dialogue as remain in the main chase of the photoplay film are but guide-posts in the race toward the goal. They should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be laboriously lifted and lowered while the horses stop, mid-career. The Venus of Milo, which comes directly to the soul through the silence, requires no quotation from Keats to explain her, though Keats is the equivalent in verse. Her setting in the great French Museum is enough. We do not know that her name is Venus. She is thought by many to be another statue of Victory. We may some day evolve scenarios that will require nothing more than a title thrown upon the screen at the beginning, they come to the eye so perfectly. This is not the only possible sort, but the self-imposed limitation in certain films might give them a charm akin to that of the Songs without Words. The stage audience is a unit of three hundred or a thousand. In the beginning of the first act there is much moving about and extra talk on the part of the actors, to hold the crowd while it is settling down, and enable the latecomer to be in his seat before the vital part of the story starts. If he appears later, he is glared at. In the motion picture art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of vision. The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling without breaking the spell. There is no spell, in the stage sense, to break. People can climb over each other’s knees to get in or out. If the picture is political, they murmur war-cries to one another. If the film suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each other with the richest sewing society report. The people in the motion picture audience total about two hundred, any time, but they come in groups of two or three at no specified hour. The newcomers do not, as in vaudeville, make themselves part of a jocular army. Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama. If they disapprove, there is grumbling under their breath, but no hissing. I have never heard an audience in a photoplay theatre clap its hands even when the house was bursting with people. Yet they often see the film through twice. When they have had enough, they stroll home. They manifest their favorable verdict by sending some other member of the family to “see the picture.” If the people so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may ask the man at the door if he is going to bring it back. That is the moving picture kind of cheering. It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned stage actor was rendered unimportant by his scenery. But the motion picture actor is but the mood of the mob or the landscape or the department store behind him, reduced to a single hieroglyphic. The stage-interior is large. The motion-picture interior is small. The stage out-of-door scene is at best artificial and little and is generally at rest, or its movement is tainted with artificiality. The waves dash, but not dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly The motion picture out-of-door scene is as big as the universe. And only pictures of the Sahara are without magnificent motion.

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The photoplay is as far from the stage on the one hand as it is from the novel on the other. Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the short story, or the lyric poem. The key-words of the stage are passion and character; of the photoplay, splendor and speed. The stage in its greatest power deals with pity for someone especially unfortunate, with whom we grow well acquainted; with some private revenge against some particular despoiler; traces the beginning and culmination of joy based on the gratification of some preference, or love for some person whose charm is all his own. The drama is concerned with the slow, inevitable approaches to these intensities. On the other hand, the motion picture, though often appearing to deal with these things, as a matter of fact uses substitutes, many of which have been listed. But to review: its first substitute is the excitement of speed-mania stretched on the framework of an obvious plot. Or it deals with delicate informal anecdote as the short story does, or fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or great surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic outlooks, or miraculous beings made visible. And the further it gets from Euripides, Ibsen, Shakespeare, or Molière—the more it becomes like a mural painting from which flashes of lightning come—the more it realizes its genius. Men like Gordon Craig and Granville-Barker are almost wasting their genius on the theatre. The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet for their type of imagination. The typical stage performance is from two hours and a half upward. The movie show generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and forty minutes. And it should last but three reels, that is, an hour. Edgar Allan Poe said there was no such thing as a long poem. There is certainly no such thing as a long moving picture masterpiece. The stage-production depends most largely upon the power of the actors, the movie show upon the genius of the producer. The performers and the dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets. The star-system is bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit. It is bad for the motion pictures because it obscures the producer. While the leading actor is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should not overshadow the latest inspirations of the creator of the films. The display of the name of the corporation is no substitute for giving the glory to the producer. An artistic photoplay is not the result of a military efficiency system. It is not a factory-made staple article, but the product of the creative force of one soul, the flowering of a spirit that has the habit of perpetually renewing itself. Once I saw Mary Fuller in a classic. It was the life and death of Mary Queen of Scots. Not only was the tense, fidgety, over-American Mary Fuller transformed into a being who was a poppy and a tiger-lily and a snow-queen and a rose, but she and her company, including Marc Macdermott, radiated the

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old Scotch patriotism. They made the picture a memorial. It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett’s novel The Queen’s Quair. Evidently all the actors were fused by some noble managerial mood. There can be no doubt that so able a group have evolved many good films that have escaped me. But though I did go again and again, never did I see them act with the same deliberation and distinction, and I laid the difference to a change in the state of mind of the producer. Even baseball players must have managers. A team cannot pick itself, or it surely would. And this rule may apply to the stage. But by comparison to motion picture performers, stage-actors are their own managers, for they have an approximate notion of how they look in the eye of the audience, which is but the human eye. They can hear and gauge their own voices. They have the same ears as their listeners. But the picture producer holds to his eyes the seven-leagued demon spy-glass called the kinetoscope, as the audience will do later. The actors have not the least notion of their appearance. Also the words in the motion picture are not things whose force the actor can gauge. The book under the table is one word, the dog behind the chair is another, the window curtain flying in the breeze is another. This chapter has implied that the performers were but paint on the canvas. They are both paint and models. They are models in the sense that the young Ellen Terry was the inspiration for Watts’s Sir Galahad. They resemble the persons in private life who furnish the basis for novels. Dickens’ mother was the original of Mrs. Nickleby. His father entered into Wilkins Micawber. But these people are not perpetually thrust upon us as Mr. and Mrs. Dickens. We are glad to find them in the Dickens biographies. When the stories begin, it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we want, and the Charles Dickens atmosphere. The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the films. The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique. What is adapted to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression in another. The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it. Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should take hold of the super-photoplay. The good citizens who can most easily grasp the distinction should be there to perpetuate the higher welfare of these institutions side by side. This parallel development should come, if for no other reason, because the two arts are still roughly classed together by the public. The elect cannot teach the public what the drama is till they show them precisely what the photoplay is and is not. Just as the university has a department of both history and English teaching in amity, each one illuminating the work of the other, so these two forms should live in each other’s sight in fine and friendly contrast. At present they are in blind and jealous warfare.

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Chapter 2

“The Means of the Photoplay” Hugo Münsterberg

From The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) We have now reached the point at which we can knot together all our threads, the psychological and the aesthetic ones. If we do so, we come to the true thesis of this whole book. Our aesthetic discussion showed us that it is the aim of art to isolate a significant part of our experience in such a way that it is separate from our practical life and is in complete agreement within itself. Our aesthetic satisfaction results from this inner agreement and harmony, but in order that we may feel such agreement of the parts we must enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and color and form, every word and tone and note. Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooperation of the parts. The means of the various arts are the forms and methods by which this aim is fulfilled. They must be different for every material. Moreover, the same material may allow very different methods of isolation and elimination of the insignificant and reinforcement of that which contributes to the harmony. If we ask now what are the characteristic means by which the photoplay succeeds in overcoming reality, in isolating a significant dramatic story and in presenting it so that we enter into it and yet keep it away from our practical life and enjoy the harmony of the parts, we must remember all the results to which our psychological discussion has led us. We recognized there that the photoplay, incomparable in this respect with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind. To be sure, the events in the photoplay happen in the real space with its depth. But the spectator feels that they are not presented in the three dimensions of the outer world, that they are flat pictures which only the mind molds into plastic things. Again the events are seen in continuous movement; and yet the pictures break up the movement

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into a rapid succession of instantaneous impressions. We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind that binds the pictures together. But much stronger differences came to light when we turned to the processes of attention, of memory, of imagination, of suggestion, of division of interest, and of emotion. The attention turns to detailed points in the outer world and ignores everything else: the photoplay is doing exactly this when in the close-up a detail is enlarged and everything else disappears. Memory breaks into present events by bringing up pictures of the past: the photoplay is doing this by its frequent cutbacks, when pictures of events long past flit between those of the present. The imagination anticipates the future or overcomes reality by fancies and dreams; the photoplay is doing all this more richly than any chance imagination would succeed in doing. But chiefly, through our division of interest our mind is drawn hither and thither. We think of events that run parallel in different places. The photoplay can show in intertwined scenes everything that our mind embraces. Events in three or four or five regions of the world can be woven together into one complex action. Finally, we saw that every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectator’s mind can mold the scenes in the photoplay until they appear the embodiment of our feelings. In every one of these aspects the photoplay succeeds in doing what the drama of the theater does not attempt. If this is the outcome of aesthetic analysis on the one side, of psychological research on the other, we need only combine the results of both into a unified principle: the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion. We shall gain our orientation most directly if once more, under this point of view, we compare the photoplay with the performance on the theater stage. We shall not enter into a discussion of the character of the regular theater and its drama. We take this for granted. Everybody knows that highest art form which the Greeks created and which from Greece has spread over Asia, Europe, and America. In tragedy and in comedy from ancient times to Ibsen, Rostand, Hauptmann, and Shaw we recognize one common purpose and one common form for which no further commentary is needed. How does the photoplay differ from a theater performance? We insisted that every work of art must be somehow separated from our sphere of practical interests. The theater is no exception. The structure of the theater itself, the frame-like form of the stage, the difference of light between stage and house, the stage setting and costuming, all inhibit in the audience the possibility of taking the action on the stage to be real life. Stage managers have sometimes tried the experiment of reducing those differences, for instance, keeping the audience also in a fully lighted hall, and they always had to discover how much the dramatic

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effect was reduced because the feeling of distance from reality was weakened. The photoplay and the theater in this respect are evidently alike. The screen too suggests from the very start the complete unreality of the events. 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 role that 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 that 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—all three 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

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satisfied with that. He is expected to add something that 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 that 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 process that 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 that 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. But the photoplay sacrifices not only the space values of the real theater; it disregards no less its order of time. The theater presents its plot in the time order of reality. It may interrupt the continuous flow of time without neglecting

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the conditions of the dramatic art. There may be twenty years between the third and the fourth act, inasmuch as the dramatic writer must select those elements spread over space and time that are significant for the development of his story. But he is bound by the fundamental principle of real time, that it can move only forward and not backward. Whatever the theater shows us now must come later in the story than that which it showed us in any previous moment. The strict classical demand for complete unity of time does not fit every drama, but a drama would give up its mission if it told us in the third act something that happened before the second act. Of course, there may be a play within a play, and the players on the stage that is set on the stage may play events of old Roman history before the king of France. But this is an enclosure of the past in the present, which corresponds exactly to the actual order of events. The photoplay, on the other hand, does not and must not respect this temporal structure of the physical universe. At any point the photoplay interrupts the series and brings us back to the past. We studied this unique feature of the film art when we spoke of the psychology of memory and imagination. With the full freedom of our fancy, with the whole mobility of our association of ideas, pictures of the past flit through the scenes of the present. Time is left behind. Man becomes boy; today is interwoven with the day before yesterday. The freedom of the mind has triumphed over the unalterable law of the outer world. It is interesting to watch how playwrights nowadays try to steal the thunder of the photoplay and experiment with time reversals on the legitimate stage. We are aesthetically on the borderland when a grandfather tells his grandchild the story of his own youth as a warning, and instead of the spoken words the events of his early years come before our eyes. This is, after all, quite similar to a play within a play. A very different experiment is tried in Under Cover. The third act, which plays on the second floor of the house, ends with an explosion. The fourth act, which plays downstairs, begins a quarter of an hour before the explosion. Here we have a real denial of a fundamental condition of the theater. Or if we stick to recent products of the American stage, we may think of On Trial, a play which perhaps comes nearest to a dramatic usurpation of the rights of the photoplay. We see the court scene and as one witness after another begins to give his testimony, the courtroom is replaced by the scenes of the actions about which the witness is to report. Another clever play, Between the Lines, ends the first act with a postman bringing three letters from the three children of the house. The second, third, and fourth acts lead us to the three different homes from which the letters came and the action in the three places not only precedes the writing of the letters, but goes on at the same time. The last act, finally, begins with the arrival of the letters that tell the ending of those events in the three homes.

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Such experiments are very suggestive but they are not any longer pure dramatic art. It is always possible to mix arts. An Italian painter produces very striking effects by putting pieces of glass and stone and rope into his paintings, but they are no longer pure paintings. The drama in which the later event comes before the earlier is an aesthetic barbarism that is entertaining as a clever trick in a graceful, superficial play, but intolerable in ambitious dramatic art. It is not only tolerable but perfectly natural in any photoplay. The pictorial reflection of the world is not bound by the rigid mechanism of time. Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then to the past: the photoplay can equal it in its freedom from the bondage of the material world. But the theater is bound not only by space and time. Whatever it shows is controlled by the same laws of causality that govern nature. This involves a complete continuity of the physical events: no cause without following effect, no effect without preceding cause. This whole natural course is left behind in the play on the screen. The deviation from reality begins with that resolution of the continuous movement which we studied in our psychological discussions. We saw that the impression of movement results from an activity of the mind which binds the separate pictures together. What we actually see is a composite; it is like the movement of a fountain in which every jet is resolved into numberless drops. We feel the play of those drops in their sparkling haste as one continuous stream of water, and yet are conscious of the myriads of drops, each one separate from the others. This fountain-like spray of pictures has completely overcome the causal world. In an entirely different form this triumph over causality appears in the interruption of the events by pictures that belong to another series. We find this whenever the scene suddenly changes. The processes are not carried to their natural consequences. A movement is started, but before the cause brings its results another scene has taken its place. What this new scene brings may be an effect for which we saw no causes. But not only are the processes interrupted. The intertwining of the scenes that we have traced in detail is itself such a contrast to causality. It is as if different objects could fill the same space at the same time. It is as if the resistance of the material world had disappeared and the substances could penetrate one another. In the interlacing of our ideas we experience this superiority to all physical laws. The theater would not have even the technical means to give us such impressions, but if it had, it would have no right to make use of them, as it would destroy the basis on which the drama is built. We have only another case of the same type in those series of pictures that aim to force a suggestion on our mind. We have spoken of them. A certain effect is prepared by a chain of causes and yet when the causal result is to appear the film is cut off. We have the causes without the effect. The villain thrusts with his dagger—but a miracle has snatched away his victim.

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While the moving pictures are lifted above the world of space and time and causality and are freed from its bounds, they are certainly not without law. We said before that the freedom with which the pictures replace one another is to a large degree comparable to the sparkling and streaming of the musical tones. The yielding to the play of the mental energies, to the attention and emotion, which is felt in the film pictures, is still more complete in the musical melodies and harmonies in which the tones themselves are merely the expressions of the ideas and feelings and will impulses of the mind. Their harmonies and disharmonies, their fusing and blending, are not controlled by any outer necessity, but by the inner agreement and disagreement of our free impulses. And yet in this world of musical freedom, everything is completely controlled by aesthetic necessities. No sphere of practical life stands under such rigid rules as the realm of the composer. However bold the musical genius may be he cannot emancipate himself from the iron rule that his work must show complete unity in itself. All the separate prescriptions that the musical student has to learn are ultimately only the consequences of this central demand which music, the freest of the arts, shares with all the others. In the case of the film, too, the freedom from the physical forms of space, time, and causality does not mean any liberation from this aesthetic bondage, either. On the contrary, just as music is surrounded by more technical rules than literature, the photoplay must be held together by the aesthetic demands still more firmly than is the drama. The arts that are subordinated to the conditions of space, time, and causality find a certain firmness of structure in these material forms which contain an element of outer connectedness. But where these forms are given up and where the freedom of mental play replaces their outer necessity, everything would fall asunder if the aesthetic unity were disregarded. This unity is, first of all, the unity of action. The demand for it is the same that we know from the drama. The temptation to neglect it is nowhere greater than in the photoplay, where outside matter can so easily be introduced or independent interests developed. It is certainly true for the photoplay, as for every work of art, that nothing has the right to existence in its midst which is not internally needed for the unfolding of the unified action. Wherever two plots are given to us, we receive less by far than if we had only one plot. We leave the sphere of valuable art entirely when a unified action is ruined by mixing it with declamation, and propaganda that is not organically interwoven with the action itself. It may be still fresh in memory what an aesthetically intolerable helter-skelter performance was offered to the public in The Battlecry of Peace. Nothing can be more injurious to the aesthetic cultivation of the people than such performances that hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail and yet destroy their aesthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the

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fundamental principle of art, the demand for unity. But we recognized also that this unity involves complete isolation. We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested bystander. The scenic background of the play is not presented in order that we decide whether we want to spend our next vacation there. The interior decoration of the rooms is not exhibited as a display for a department store. The men and women who carry out the action of the plot must not be people whom we may meet tomorrow on the street. All the threads of the play must be knotted together in the play itself and none should be connected with our outside interests. A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody. It is not an advertisement for the newest fashions. This unity of action involves unity of characters. It has too often been maintained by those who theorize on the photoplay that the development of character is the special task of the drama, while the photoplay, which lacks words, must be satisfied with types. Probably this is only a reflection of the crude state that most photoplays of today have not outgrown. Internally, there is no reason why the means of the photoplay should not allow a rather subtle depicting of complex character. But the chief demand is that the characters remain consistent, that the action be developed according to inner necessity and that the characters themselves be in harmony with the central idea of the plot. However, as soon as we insist on unity we have no right to think only of the action that gives the content of the play. We cannot make light of the form. As in music the melody and rhythms belong together, as in painting not every color combination suits every subject, and as in poetry not every stanza would agree with every idea, so the photoplay must bring action and pictorial expression into perfect harmony. But this demand repeats itself in every single picture. We take it for granted that the painter balances perfectly the forms in his painting, groups them so that an internal symmetry can be felt and that the lines and curves and colors blend into a unity. Every single picture of the sixteen thousand that are shown to us in one reel ought to be treated with this respect of the pictorial artist for the unity of the forms. The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures that, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and that reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance.

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Chapter 3

“The Drama, the Theatre, and the Films” Bernard Shaw

From Table-Talk of G.B.S. (1925) The dining-room at 10 Adelphi Terrace, London. Time: late March, 1924, just after the production of Shaw’s latest play, Saint Joan, at the New Theatre, London. A room full of sunshine overlooking the narrow gorge of the Adelphi. The walls are sparsely decorated, the principal object in the room (besides the original) being a portrait of Bernard Shaw which startingly confronts you on entering the room—the impressionist, poster-like portrait by Augustus John, with flying locks and moustaches, rectangular head, and exaggeratedly flouting lower lip—done in bright colors: reds, yellows, blues. Its close analogue, a superior study and a better likeness, hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Bernard Shaw and Archibald Henderson discovered seated at opposite ends of the dinner-table, à deux. During the course of the meal the food is often sadly neglected for the sake of argument—the Irishman waving his long arms and tapering fingers, the American energetically hammering his closed right fist in his left, open palm. Henderson: . . . And now to come to the films. Has the enormous development of the cinema industry benefited the drama, or the reverse? Shaw: No: the huge polynational audience makes mediocrity compulsory. Films must aim at the average of an American millionaire and a Chinese coolie, a cathedral-town governess and a mining-village barmaid, because they have to go everywhere and please everybody. They spread the drama enormously; but as they must interest a hundred percent of the population of the globe, barring infants in arms, they cannot afford to meddle with the upperten-percent theatre of the highbrows or the lower-ten-percent theatre of the blackguards. The result is that the movie play has supplanted the old-fashioned tract and Sunday School prize: it is reeking with morality but dares not touch virtue. And virtue, which is defiant and contemptuous of morality even when it has no practical quarrel with it, is the life-blood of high drama.

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Saint Joan (dir. Otto Preminger, 1957)

Henderson: In spite of the fame of certain artistic directors—the Griffiths, De Milles, Lubitschs, and Dwans—perhaps it is true that the film industry is, for the most part, directed and controlled by people with imperfectly developed artistic instincts and ideals who have their eyes fixed primarily on financial rewards. Shaw: All industries are brought under the control of such people by capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art. Henderson: Would it not be better for film magnates to engage first-rate authors to write directly for the films, paying them handsomely for their work, rather than pay enormous prices to an author of novel, story, or play, and then engage a hack at an absurdly low price to prepare a scenario? Shaw: Certainly not first-rate authors: democracy always prefers secondbests. The magnates might pay for literate subtitles; but one of the joys of the cinema would be gone without such gems as “Christian: Allah didst make thee wondrous strong and fair.” Seriously, though, the ignorance which leads to the employment of uneducated people to do professional work in modern industry is a scandal. It is just as bad in journalism. In my youth all writing was done by men who, if they had little Latin and less Greek, had at any rate been in schools where there was a pretense of teaching them; and they had all read the Bible, however reluctantly. Nowadays that has all gone: literary work is entrusted to men and women so illiterate that the mystery is how they ever

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learned their alphabet. They know next to nothing else, apparently. I agree with you as to the scenarios founded on existing plays and novels. Movie plays should be invented expressly for the screen by original imaginative visualizers. But you must remember that just as all our music consists of permutations and combinations of twelve notes, all our fiction consists of variations on a few plots; and it is in the words that the widest power of variation lies. Take that away and you will soon be so hard up for a new variation that you will snatch at anything—even at a Dickens plot—to enable you to carry on. Henderson: American newspapers and magazines teem with articles, interviews, counsels, and admonitions regarding the films and measures for their improvement. Have you in mind any definite suggestions for the further artistic development of films? Shaw (explosively): Write better films, if you can: there is no other way. Development must come from the center, not from the periphery. The limits of external encouragement have been reached long ago. Take a highbrow play to a Little Theatre and ask the management to spend two or three thousand dollars on the production, and they will tell you that they cannot afford it. Take an opium eater’s dream to Los Angeles and they will realize it for you: the more it costs the more they will believe in it. You can have a real Polar expedition, a real volcano, a reconstruction of the Roman Forum on the spot: anything you please, provided it is enormously costly. Wasted money, mostly. If the United States government put a limit of twenty-five thousand dollars to the expenditure on any single non-educational film, the result would probably be an enormous improvement in the interest of the film drama, because film magnates would be forced to rely on dramatic imagination instead of on mere spectacle. Oh, those scenes of oriental voluptuousness as imagined by a whaler’s cabin boy! They would make a monk of Don Juan. Can you do nothing to stop them? Henderson: The only way to stop them is with ridicule. That is why I am making you talk. Already such scenes are greeted with ribald laughter and shouts of unholy glee in many American communities. But our happiest effects are achieved by having English duchesses impersonated by former cloak models, Italian counts by former restaurant waiters. In spite of all this the triumph of the American film is spectacular. The invasion of England and Europe is a smashing success. London, Paris, Berlin are placarded with announcements of American films: they are literally everywhere. The Covered Wagon, Scaramouche, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Ten Commandments, Mother, Nanook: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, etc., etc. Yet I am told that the Italians make the best films; and the best European picture I saw in Europe was a Swedish film at the Gaumont “Picture Palace” in Paris. The triumph, almost the monopoly of the American film is uncontested. But are American films superior to all others?

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Shaw (decisively): No. Many of them are full of the stupidest errors of judgment. Overdone and foolishly repeated strokes of expression, hideous makeup, close-ups that an angel’s face would not bear, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on spoiling effects that I or any competent producer could secure quickly and certainly at a cost of ten cents, featureless over-exposed faces against under-exposed backgrounds, vulgar and silly subtitles, impertinent lists of everybody employed in the film from the star actress to the press agent’s office boy: these are only a few of the gaffes American film factories are privileged to make. Conceit is rampant among your filmmakers; and good sense is about non-existent. That is where Mr. Chaplin scores; but Mr. Harold Lloyd seems so far to be the only rival intelligent enough to follow his example. We shall soon have to sit for ten minutes at the beginning of every reel to be told who developed it, who fixed it, who dried it, who provided the celluloid, who sold the chemicals, and who cut the author’s hair. Your film people simply don’t know how to behave themselves: they take liberties with the public at every step on the strength of their reckless enterprise and expenditure. Every American aspirant to film work should be sent to Denmark or Sweden for five years to civilize him before being allowed to enter a Los Angeles studio. Henderson: Well! that’s that! And how surprised and pained some American producers will be to read your cruel words! But too much success is not good for anyone—not even for you. And speaking of comets, can plays of conversation—“dialectic dramas”—like yours be successfully filmed? Shaw: Barrie says that the film play of the future will have no pictures and will consist exclusively of subtitles. Henderson: I wonder if conversation dramas are not on the wane—since the public in countless numbers patronizes, revels in the silent drama. Shaw: If you come to that, the public in overwhelming numbers is perfectly satisfied with no drama at all. But the silent drama is producing such a glut of spectacle that people are actually listening to invisible plays by wireless. The silent drama is exhausting the resources of silence. Charlie Chaplin and his very clever colleague Edna Purviance, Bill Hart and Alia Nazimova, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, have done everything that can be done in dramatic dumb show and athletic stunting, and played all the possible variations on it. The man who will play them off the screen will not be their superior at their own game but an Oscar Wilde of the movies who will flash epigram after epigram at the spectators and thus realize Barrie’s anticipation of more subtitles than pictures. Henderson: If that is true, then why—since wit and epigram are your familiar weapons—why have none of your plays been filmed? Shaw (deadly resolute): Because I wouldn’t let them. I repeat that a play with the words left out is a play spoiled; and all those filmings of plays written to be spoken as well as seen are boresome blunders except when the dialogue is

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so worthless that it is a hindrance instead of a help. Of course that is a very large exception in point of bulk; but the moment you come to classic drama, the omission of the words and the presentation of the mere scenario is very much as if you offered as a statue the wire skeleton which supports a sculptor’s modeling clay. Besides, consider the reaction at the box office. People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don’t want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

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Chapter 4

“Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” Erwin Panofsky

From Bulletin of the Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology (1934; revised 1947) Film art is the only art the development of which men now living have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art. From this we understand two fundamental facts. First, that the primordial basis of the enjoyment of moving pictures was not an objective interest in a specific subject matter, much less an aesthetic interest in the formal presentation of subject matter, but the sheer delight in the fact that things seemed to move, no matter what things they were. Second, that films—first exhibited in “kinetoscopes,” viz., cinematographic peep shows, but projectable to a screen since as early as 1894—are, originally, a product of genuine folk art (whereas, as a rule, folk art derives from what is known as “higher art”). At the very beginning of things we find the simple recording of movements: galloping horses, railroad trains, fire engines, sporting events, street scenes. And when it had come to the making of narrative films these were produced by photographers who were anything but “producers” or “directors,” performed by people who were anything but actors, and enjoyed by people who would have been much offended had anyone called them “art lovers.” The casts of these archaic films were usually collected in a “café” where unemployed supers or ordinary citizens possessed of a suitable exterior were wont to assemble at a given hour. An enterprising photographer would walk in, hire four or five convenient characters and make the picture while carefully instructing them what to do: “Now, you pretend to hit this lady over the head”; and (to the lady): “And you pretend to fall down in a heap.” Productions like

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these were shown, together with those purely factual recordings of “movement for movement’s sake,” in a few small and dingy cinemas mostly frequented by the “lower classes” and a sprinkling of youngsters in quest of adventure (about 1905, I happen to remember, there was only one obscure and faintly disreputable kino in the whole city of Berlin, bearing, for some unfathomable reason, the English name of “The Meeting Room”). Small wonder that the “better classes,” when they slowly began to venture into these early picture theaters, did so, not by way of seeking normal and possibly serious entertainment, but with that characteristic sensation of self-conscious condescension with which we may plunge, in gay company, into the folkloristic depths of Coney Island or a European kermis; even a few years ago it was the regulation attitude of the socially or intellectually prominent that one could confess to enjoying such austerely educational films as The Sex Life of the Starfish or films with “beautiful scenery,” but never to a serious liking for narratives. Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning, and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive. The “movies” have reestablished that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption which, for reasons too complex to be considered here, is sorely attenuated, if not entirely interrupted, in many other fields of artistic endeavor. Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters, and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic. In the beginning, then, there were the straight recordings of movement no matter what moved, viz., the prehistoric ancestors of our “documentaries”; and, soon after, the early narratives, viz., the prehistoric ancestors of our “feature films.” The craving for a narrative element could be satisfied only by borrowing from older arts, and one should expect that the natural thing would have been to borrow from the theater, a theater play being apparently the genus proximum to a narrative film in that it consists of a narrative enacted by persons that move. But in reality the imitation of stage performances was a comparatively late and thoroughly frustrated development. What happened at the start was a very different thing. Instead of imitating a theatrical performance already endowed with a certain amount of motion, the earliest films added movement to works of art originally stationary, so that the dazzling technical invention might achieve a triumph of its own without intruding upon the sphere of higher culture. The living language, which is always right,

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has endorsed this sensible choice when it still speaks of a “moving picture” or, simply, a “picture,” instead of accepting the pretentious and fundamentally erroneous “screenplay.” The stationary works enlivened in the earliest movies were indeed pictures: bad nineteenth-century paintings and postcards (or waxworks à la Madame Tussaud’s), supplemented by the comic strips—a most important root of cinematic art—and the subject matter of popular songs, pulp magazines, and dime novels; and the films descending from this ancestry appealed directly and very intensely to a folk art mentality. They gratified—often simultaneously— first, a primitive sense of justice and decorum when virtue and industry were rewarded while vice and laziness were punished; second, plain sentimentality when “the thin trickle of a fictive love interest” took its course “through somewhat serpentine channels,” or when Father, dear Father returned from the saloon to find his child dying of diphtheria; third, a primordial instinct for bloodshed and cruelty when Andreas Hofer faced the firing squad, or when (in a film of 1893–94) the head of Mary Queen of Scots actually came off; fourth, a taste for mild pornography (I remember with great pleasure a French film of ca. 1900 wherein a seemingly but not really well-rounded lady as well as a seemingly but not really slender one were shown changing to bathing suits—an honest, straightforward porcheria much less objectionable than the now extinct Betty Boop films and, I am sorry to say, some of the more recent Walt Disney productions); and, finally, that crude sense of humor, graphically described as “slapstick,” which feeds upon the sadistic and the pornographic instinct, either singly or in combination. Not until as late as ca. 1905 was a film adaptation of Faust ventured upon (cast still “unknown,” characteristically enough), and not until 1911 did Sarah Bernhardt lend her prestige to an unbelievably funny film tragedy, Queen Elizabeth of England. These films represent the first conscious attempt at transplanting the movies from the folk art level to that of “real art”; but they also bear witness to the fact that this commendable goal could not be reached in so simple a manner. It was soon realized that the imitation of a theater performance with a set stage, fixed entries and exits, and distinctly literary ambitions is the one thing the film must avoid. The legitimate paths of evolution were opened, not by running away from the folk art character of the primitive film but by developing it within the limits of its own possibilities. Those primordial archetypes of film productions on the folk art level—success or retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor—could blossom forth into genuine history, tragedy and romance, crime and adventure, and comedy, as soon as it was realized that they could be transfigured—not by an artificial injection of literary values but by the exploitation of the unique and specific possibilities of the new medium. Significantly, the beginnings of this legitimate development antedate

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the attempts at endowing the film with higher values of a foreign order (the crucial period being the years from 1902 to ca. 1905), and the decisive steps were taken by people who were laymen or outsiders from the viewpoint of the serious stage. These unique and specific possibilities can be defined as dynamization of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time. This statement is self-evident to the point of triviality but it belongs to those kinds of truths which, just because of their triviality, are easily forgotten or neglected. In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed. The spectator cannot leave his seat, and the setting of the stage cannot change, during one act (except for such incidentals as rising moons or gathering clouds and such illegitimate reborrowings from the film as turning wings or gliding backdrops). But, in return for this restriction, the theater has the advantage that time, the medium of emotion and thought conveyable by speech, is free and independent of anything that may happen in visible space. Hamlet may deliver his famous monologue lying on a couch in the middle distance, doing nothing and only dimly discernible to the spectator and listener, and yet by his mere words enthrall us with a feeling of intensest emotional action. With the movies the situation is reversed. Here, too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction. And as movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself does, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving, and recrystallizing as it appears through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and through the cutting and editing of the various shots—not to mention such special effects as visions, transformations, disappearances, slow-motion and fast-motion shots, reversals, and trick films. This opens up a world of possibilities of which the stage can never dream. Quite apart from such photographic tricks as the participation of disembodied spirits in the action of the Topper series, or the more effective wonders wrought by Roland Young in The Man Who Could Work Miracles, there is, on the purely factual level, an untold wealth of themes as inaccessible to the “legitimate” stage as a fog or a snowstorm is to the sculptor; all sorts of violent elemental phenomena and, conversely, events too microscopic to be visible under normal conditions (such as the life-saving injection with the serum flown in at the very last moment, or the fatal bite of the yellow-fever mosquito); full-scale battle scenes; all kinds of operations, not only in the surgical sense but also in the sense of any actual construction, destruction, or experimentation, as in Louis Pasteur or Madame Curie; a really grand party,

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moving through many rooms of a mansion or a palace. Features like these, even the mere shifting of the scene from one place to another by means of a car perilously negotiating heavy traffic or a motor-boat steered through a nocturnal harbor, will not only always retain their primitive cinematic appeal but also remain enormously effective as a means of stirring the emotions and creating suspense. In addition, the movies have the power, entirely denied to the theater, to convey psychological experiences by directly projecting their content to the screen, substituting, as it were, the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character (as when the imaginings and hallucinations of the drunkard in the otherwise overrated Lost Weekend appear as stark realities instead of being described by mere words). But any attempt to convey thought and feelings exclusively, or even primarily, by speech leaves us with a feeling of embarrassment, boredom, or both. What I mean by thoughts and feelings “conveyed exclusively, or even primarily, by speech” is simply this: Contrary to naïve expectation, the invention of the sound track in 1928 has been unable to change the basic fact that a moving picture, even when it has learned to talk, remains a picture that moves and does not convert itself into a piece of writing that is enacted. Its substance remains a series of visual sequences held together by an uninterrupted flow of movement in space (except, of course, for such checks and pauses as have the same compositional value as a rest in music), and not a sustained study in human character and destiny transmitted by effective, let alone “beautiful,” diction. I cannot remember a more misleading statement about the movies than Mr. Eric Russell Bentley’s in the spring number of the Kenyon Review, 1945: “The potentialities of the talking screen differ from those of the silent screen in adding the dimension of dialogue—which could be poetry.” I would suggest: “The potentialities of the talking screen differ from those of the silent screen in integrating visible movement with dialogue which, therefore, had better not be poetry.” All of us, if we are old enough to remember the period prior to 1928, recall the old-time pianist who, with his eyes glued on the screen, would accompany the events with music adapted to their mood and rhythm; and we also recall the weird and spectral feeling overtaking us when this pianist left his post for a few minutes and the film was allowed to run by itself, the darkness haunted by the monotonous rattle of the machinery. Even the silent film, then, was never mute. The visible spectacle always required, and received, an audible accompaniment which, from the very beginning, distinguished the film from simple pantomime and rather classed it—mutatis mutandis—with the ballet. The advent of the talkie meant not so much an “addition” as a transformation: the transformation of musical sound into articulate speech and, therefore, of quasi pantomime into an entirely new species of spectacle which differs from the ballet, and agrees with the stage play, in that its acoustic component

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consists of intelligible words, but differs from the stage play and agrees with the ballet in that this acoustic component is not detachable from the visual. In a film, that which we hear remains, for good or worse, inextricably fused with that which we see; the sound, articulate or not, cannot express any more than is expressed, at the same time, by visible movement; and in a good film it does not even attempt to do so. To put it briefly, the play—or, as it is very properly called, the “script”—of a moving picture is subject to what might be termed the principle of coexpressibility. Empirical proof of this principle is furnished by the fact that, wherever the dialogical or monological element gains temporary prominence, there appears, with the inevitability of a natural law, the “close-up.” What does the close-up achieve? In showing us, in magnification, either the face of the speaker or the face of the listeners or both in alternation, the camera transforms the human physiognomy into a huge field of action where—given the qualification of the performers—every subtle movement of the features, almost imperceptible from a natural distance, becomes an expressive event in visible space and thereby completely integrates itself with the expressive content of the spoken word; whereas, on the stage, the spoken word makes a stronger rather than a weaker impression if we are not permitted to count the hairs in Romeo’s mustache. This does not mean that the scenario is a negligible factor in the making of a moving picture. It only means that its artistic intention differs in kind from that of a stage play, and much more from that of a novel or a piece of poetry. As the success of a Gothic jamb figure depends not only upon its quality as a piece of sculpture but also, or even more so, upon its integrability with the architecture of the portal, so does the success of a movie script—not unlike that of an opera libretto—depend, not only upon its quality as a piece of literature but also, or even more so, upon its integrability with the events on the screen. As a result—another empirical proof of the coexpressibility principle— good movie scripts are unlikely to make good reading and have seldom been published in book form; whereas, conversely, good stage plays have to be severely altered, cut, and, on the other hand, enriched by interpolations to make good movie scripts. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, for instance, the actual process of Eliza’s phonetic education and, still more important, her final triumph at the grand party, are wisely omitted; we see—or, rather, hear—some samples of her gradual linguistic improvement and finally encounter her, upon her return from the reception, victorious and splendidly arrayed but deeply hurt for want of recognition and sympathy. In the film adaptation, precisely these two scenes are not only supplied but also strongly emphasized; we witness the fascinating activities in the laboratory with its array of spinning disks and mirrors, organ pipes, and dancing flames, and we participate in the ambassadorial party, with many moments of impending catastrophe and a little counterintrigue thrown

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in for suspense. Unquestionably these two scenes, entirely absent from the play, and indeed unachievable upon the stage, were the highlights of the film; whereas the Shavian dialogue, however severely cut, turned out to fall a little flat in certain moments.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Max Reinhardt, 1935)

And wherever, as in so many other films, a poetic emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit (even, I am grieved to say, some of the wisecracks of Groucho Marx) entirely loses contact with visible movement, they strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place. It is certainly terrible when a soft-boiled he-man, after the suicide of his mistress, casts a twelve-foot glance upon her photograph and says something less-than-coexpressible to the effect that he will never forget her. But when he recites, instead, a piece of poetry as sublimely more-than-coexpressible as Romeo’s monologue at the bier of Juliet, it is still worse. Reinhardt’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably the most unfortunate major film ever produced; and Olivier’s Henry V owes its comparative success, apart from the all but providential adaptability of this particular play, to so many tours de force that it will, God willing, remain an exception rather than set a pattern. It combines “judicious pruning” with the interpolation of pageantry, nonverbal comedy, and melodrama; it uses a device perhaps best designated as “oblique close-up” (Mr. Olivier’s beautiful face inwardly listening to but not pronouncing the great soliloquy); and, most notably, it shifts between three levels of archaeological reality: a reconstruction of Elizabethan

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London, a reconstruction of the events of 1415 as laid down in Shakespeare’s play, and the reconstruction of a performance of this play on Shakespeare’s own stage. All this is perfectly legitimate; but, even so, the highest praise of the film will always come from those who, like the critic of the New Yorker, are not quite in sympathy with either the movies au naturel or Shakespeare au naturel. As the writings of Conan Doyle potentially contain all modern mystery stories (except for the tough specimens of the Dashiell-Hammett school), so do the films produced between 1900 and 1910 pre-establish the subject matter and methods of the moving picture as we know it. This period produced the incunabula of the Western and the crime film (Edwin S. Porter’s amazing Great Train Robbery of 1903) from which developed the modern gangster, adventure, and mystery pictures (the latter, if well done, is still one of the most honest and genuine forms of film entertainment, space being doubly charged with time as the beholder asks himself not only “What is going to happen?” but also “What has happened before?”). The same period saw the emergence of the fantastically imaginative film (Méliès) which was to lead to the expressionist and surrealist experiments (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Sang d’un Poète, etc.), on the one hand, and to the more superficial and spectacular fairy tales à la Arabian Nights, on the other. Comedy, later to triumph in Charlie Chaplin, the still insufficiently appreciated Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and the preHollywood creations of René Clair, reached a respectable level in Max Linder and others. In historical and melodramatic films the foundations were laid for movie iconography and movie symbolism, and in the early work of D. W. Griffith we find, not only remarkable attempts at psychological analysis (Edgar Allan Poe) and social criticism (A Corner in Wheat) but also such basic technical innovations as the long shot, the flashback, and the close-up. And modest trick films and cartoons paved the way to Felix the Cat, Popeye the Sailor, and Felix’s prodigious offspring, Mickey Mouse. Within their self-imposed limitations the earlier Disney films, and certain sequences in the later ones, represent, as it were, a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities. They retain the most important folkloristic elements—sadism, pornography, the humor engendered by both, and moral justice—almost without dilution and often fuse these elements into a variation on the primitive and inexhaustible David-and-Goliath motif, the triumph of the seemingly weak over the seemingly strong; and their fantastic independence of the natural laws gives them the power to integrate space with time to such perfection that the spatial and temporal experiences of sight and hearing come to be almost interconvertible. A series of soap bubbles, successively punctured, emits a series of sounds exactly corresponding in pitch and volume to the size of the bubbles; the three uvulae of Willie the Whale—small, large, and medium—vibrate in consonance with tenor, bass, and baritone notes; and

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the very concept of stationary existence is completely abolished. No object in creation, whether it be a house, a piano, a tree, or an alarm clock, lacks the faculties of organic, in fact anthropomorphic, movement, facial expression, and phonetic articulation. Incidentally, even in normal, “realistic” films the inanimate object, provided that it is dynamizable, can play the role of a leading character as do the ancient railroad engines in Buster Keaton’s General and Niagara Falls. How the earlier Russian films exploited the possibility of heroizing all sorts of machinery lives in everybody’s memory; and it is perhaps more than an accident that the two films which will go down in history as the great comical and the great serious masterpiece of the silent period bear the names and immortalize the personalities of two big ships: Keaton’s Navigator (1924) and Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925). The evolution from the jerky beginnings to this grand climax offers the fascinating spectacle of a new artistic medium gradually becoming conscious of its legitimate, that is, exclusive, possibilities and limitations—a spectacle not unlike the development of the mosaic, which started out with transposing illusionistic genre pictures into a more durable material and culminated in the hieratic supernaturalism of Ravenna; or the development of line engraving, which started out as a cheap and handy substitute for book illumination and culminated in the purely “graphic” style of Dürer. Just so the silent movies developed a definite style of their own, adapted to the specific conditions of the medium. A hitherto unknown language was forced upon a public not yet capable of reading it, and the more proficient the public became the more refinement could develop in the language. For a Saxon peasant of around 800 it was not easy to understand the meaning of a picture showing a man as he pours water over the head of another man, and even later many people found it difficult to grasp the significance of two ladies standing behind the throne of an emperor. For the public of around 1910 it was no less difficult to understand the meaning of the speechless action in a moving picture, and the producers employed means of clarification similar to those we find in medieval art. One of these was printed titles or letters, striking equivalents of the medieval tituli and scrolls (at a still earlier date there even used to be explainers who would say, viva voce, “Now he thinks his wife is dead but she isn’t” or “I don’t wish to offend the ladies in the audience but I doubt that any of them would have done that much for her child”). Another, less obtrusive method of explanation was the introduction of a fixed iconography which from the outset informed the spectator about the basic facts and characters, much as the two ladies behind the emperor, when carrying a sword and a cross respectively, were uniquely determined as Fortitude and Faith. There arose, identifiable by standardized appearance, behavior, and

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attributes, the well-remembered types of the Vamp and the Straight Girl (perhaps the most convincing modern equivalents of the medieval personifications of the Vices and Virtues), the Family Man, and the Villain, the latter marked by a black mustache and walking stick. Nocturnal scenes were printed on blue or green film. A checkered tablecloth meant, once for all, a “poor but honest” milieu; a happy marriage, soon to be endangered by the shadows from the past, was symbolized by the young wife’s pouring the breakfast coffee for her husband; the first kiss was invariably announced by the lady’s gently playing with her partner’s necktie and was invariably accompanied by her kicking out with her left foot. The conduct of the characters was predetermined accordingly. The poor but honest laborer who, after leaving his little house with the checkered tablecloth, came upon an abandoned baby could not but take it to his home and bring it up as best he could; the Family Man could not but yield, however temporarily, to the temptations of the Vamp. As a result these early melodramas had a highly gratifying and soothing quality in that events took shape, without the complications of individual psychology, according to a pure Aristotelian logic so badly missed in real life. Devices like these became gradually less necessary as the public grew accustomed to interpret the action by itself and were virtually abolished by the invention of the talking film. But even now there survive—quite legitimately, I think—the remnants of a “fixed attitude and attribute” principle and, more basic, a primitive or folkloristic concept of plot construction. Even today we take it for granted that the diphtheria of a baby tends to occur when the parents are out and, having occurred, solves all their matrimonial problems. Even today we demand of a decent mystery film that the butler, though he may be anything from an agent of the British Secret Service to the real father of the daughter of the house, must not turn out to be the murderer. Even today we love to see Pasteur, Zola, or Ehrlich win out against stupidity and wickedness, with their respective wives trusting and trusting all the time. Even today we much prefer a happy finale to a gloomy one and insist, at the very least, on the observance of the Aristotelian rule that the story have a beginning, a middle, and an ending—a rule the abrogation of which has done so much to estrange the general public from the more elevated spheres of modern writing. Primitive symbolism, too, survives in such amusing details as the last sequence of Casablanca where the delightfully crooked and right-minded préfet de police casts an empty bottle of Vichy water into the wastepaper basket; and in such telling symbols of the supernatural as Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s Death in the guise of a “gentleman in a dustcoat trying” (On Borrowed Time) or Claude Rains’s Hermes Psychopompos in the striped trousers of an airline manager (Here Comes Mister Jordan). The most conspicuous advances were made in directing, lighting, camera work, cutting, and acting proper. But while in most of these fields the

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evolution proceeded continuously—though, of course, not without detours, breakdowns, and archaic relapses—the development of acting suffered a sudden interruption by the invention of the talking film; so that the style of acting in the silents can already be evaluated in retrospect, as a lost art not unlike the painting technique of Jan van Eyck or, to take up our previous simile, the burin technique of Dürer. It was soon realized that acting in a silent film neither meant a pantomimic exaggeration of stage acting (as was generally and erroneously assumed by professional stage actors who more and more frequently condescended to perform in the movies), nor could dispense with stylization altogether; a man photographed while walking down a gangway in ordinary, everyday-life fashion looked like anything but a man walking down a gangway when the result appeared on the screen. If the picture was to look both natural and meaningful the acting had to be done in a manner equally different from the style of the stage and the reality of ordinary life; speech had to be made dispensable by establishing an organic relation between the acting and the technical procedure of cinephotography—much as in Dürer’s prints color had been made dispensable by establishing an organic relation between the design and the technical procedure of line engraving. This was precisely what the great actors of the silent period accomplished, and it is a significant fact that the best of them did not come from the stage, whose crystallized tradition prevented Duse’s only film, Cenere, from being more than a priceless record of Duse. They came instead from the circus or the variety, as was the case of Chaplin, Keaton, and Will Rogers; from nothing in particular, as was the case of Theda Bara, of her greater European parallel, the Danish actress Asta Nielsen, and of Garbo; or from everything under the sun, as was the case of Douglas Fairbanks. The style of these “old masters” was indeed comparable to the style of line engraving in that it was, and had to be, exaggerated in comparison with stage acting (just as the sharply incised and vigorously curved tailles of the burin are exaggerated in comparison with pencil strokes or brushwork), but richer, subtler, and infinitely more precise. The advent of the talkies, reducing if not abolishing this difference between screen acting and stage acting, thus confronted the actors and actresses of the silent screen with a serious problem. Buster Keaton yielded to temptation and fell. Chaplin first tried to stand his ground and to remain an exquisite archaist but finally gave in, with only moderate success (The Great Dictator). Only the glorious Harpo has thus far successfully refused to utter a single articulate sound; and only Greta Garbo succeeded, in a measure, in transforming her style in principle. But even in her case one cannot help feeling that her first talking picture, Anna Christie, where she could ensconce herself, most of the time, in mute or monosyllabic sullenness, was better than her later performances;

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and in the second, talking version of Anna Karenina, the weakest moment is certainly when she delivers a big Ibsenian speech to her husband, and the strongest when she silently moves along the platform of the railroad station while her despair takes shape in the consonance of her movement (and expression) with the movement of the nocturnal space around her, filled with the real noises of the trains and the imaginary sound of the “little men with the iron hammers” that drives her, relentlessly and almost without her realizing it, under the wheels. Small wonder that there is sometimes felt a kind of nostalgia for the silent period and that devices have been worked out to combine the virtues of sound and speech with those of silent acting, such as the “oblique close-up” already mentioned in connection with Henry V; the dance behind glass doors in Sous les Toits de Paris; or, in the Histoire d’un Tricheur, Sacha Guitry’s recital of the events of his youth while the events themselves are “silently” enacted on the screen. However, this nostalgic feeling is no argument against the talkies as such. Their evolution has shown that, in art, every gain entails a certain loss on the other side of the ledger; but that the gain remains a gain, provided that the basic nature of the medium is realized and respected. One can imagine that, when the cavemen of Altamira began to paint their buffaloes in natural colors instead of merely incising the contours, the more conservative cavemen foretold the end of paleolithic art. But paleolithic art went on, and so will the movies. New technical inventions always tend to dwarf the values already attained, especially in a medium that owes its very existence to technical experimentation. The earliest talkies were infinitely inferior to the then mature silents, and most of the present Technicolor films are still inferior to the now mature talkies in black and white. But even if Aldous Huxley’s nightmare should come true and the experiences of taste, smell, and touch should be added to those of sight and hearing, even then we may say with the Apostle, as we have said when first confronted with the soundtrack and the Technicolor film, “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” From the law of time-charged space and space-bound time, there follows the fact that the screenplay, in contrast to the theater play, has no aesthetic existence independent of its performance, and that its characters have no aesthetic existence outside the actors. The playwright writes in the fond hope that his work will be an imperishable jewel in the treasure house of civilization and will be presented in hundreds of performances that are but transient variations on a “work” that is constant. The scriptwriter, on the other hand, writes for one producer, one director, and one cast. Their work achieves the same degree of permanence as does his; and should the same or a similar scenario ever be filmed by a different director and a different cast, there will result an altogether different “play.”

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Othello (dir. Stuart Burge, 1965)

Othello and Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the playwright. They can be played well or badly, and they can be “interpreted” in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not the entity “Othello” interpreted by Robeson or the entity “Nora” interpreted by Duse; it is the entity “Greta Garbo” incarnate in a figure called Anna Christie or the entity “Robert Montgomery” incarnate in a murderer who, for all we know or care to know, may forever remain anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories. Even when the names of the characters happen to be Henry VIII or Anna Karenina, the king who ruled England from 1509 to 1547 and the woman created by Tolstoy, they do not exist outside the being of Garbo and Laughton. They are but empty and incorporeal outlines like the shadows in Homer’s Hades, assuming the character of reality only when filled with the lifeblood of an actor. Conversely, if a movie role is badly played there remains literally nothing of it, no matter how interesting the character’s psychology or how elaborate the words. What applies to the actor applies, mutatis mutandis, to most of the other artists, or artisans, who contribute to the making of a film: the director, the sound man, the enormously important cameraman, even the make-up man. A stage production is rehearsed until everything is ready, and then it is repeatedly

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performed in three consecutive hours. At each performance everybody has to be on hand and does his work; and afterward he goes home and to bed. The work of the stage actor may thus be likened to that of a musician, and that of the stage director to that of a conductor. Like these, they have a certain repertoire that they have studied and present in a number of complete but transitory performances, be it Hamlet today and Ghosts tomorrow, or Life with Father per saecula saeculorum. The activities of the film actor and the film director, however, are comparable, respectively, to those of the plastic artist and the architect, rather than to those of the musician and the conductor. Stage work is continuous but transitory; film work is discontinuous but permanent. Individual sequences are done piecemeal and out of order according to the most efficient use of sets and personnel. Each bit is done over and over again until it stands; and when the whole has been cut and composed everyone is through with it forever. Needless to say that this very procedure cannot but emphasize the curious consubstantiality that exists between the person of the movie actor and his role. Coming into existence piece by piece, regardless of the natural sequence of events, the “character” can grow into a unified whole only if the actor manages to be, not merely to play, Henry VIII or Anna Karenina throughout the entire wearisome period of shooting. I have it on the best of authorities that Laughton was really difficult to live with in the particular six or eight weeks during which he was doing—or rather being—Captain Bligh. It might be said that a film, called into being by a co-operative effort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence, is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral; the role of the producer corresponding, more or less, to that of the bishop or archbishop; that of the director to that of the architect in chief; that of the scenario writers to that of the scholastic advisors establishing the iconographical program; and that of the actors, cameramen, cutters, sound men, make-up men, and the diverse technicians to that of those whose work provided the physical entity of the finished product, from the sculptors, glass painters, bronze casters, carpenters, and skilled masons down to the quarry men and woodsmen. And if you speak to any one of these collaborators he will tell you, with perfect bona fides, that his is really the most important job—which is quite true to the extent that it is indispensable. The comparison may seem sacrilegious, not only because there are, proportionally, fewer good films than there are good cathedrals, but also because the movies are commercial. However, if commercial art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify the creative urge of its maker but primarily intended to meet the requirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that noncommercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly recent and not always felicitous exception at that. While it is

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true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Noncommercial art has given us Seurat’s Grande Jatte and Shakespeare’s sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness, but also Dürer’s prints and Shakespeare’s plays. For, we must not forget that Dürer’s prints were partly made on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market; and that Shakespeare’s plays—in contrast to the earlier masques and intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who described them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp their intended significance—were meant to appeal, and did appeal, not only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay a shilling for admission. It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much more effective for better or for worse. The commercial producer can both educate and pervert the general public, and can allow the general public—or rather his idea of the general public—both to educate and to pervert itself. As is demonstrated by a number of excellent films that proved to be great box office successes, the public does not refuse to accept good products if it gets them. That it does not get them very often is caused not so much by commercialism as such as by too little discernment and, paradoxical though it may seem, too much timidity in its application. Hollywood believes that it must produce “what the public wants” while the public would take whatever Hollywood produces. If Hollywood were to decide for itself what it wants it would get away with it—even if it should decide to “depart from evil and do good.” For, to revert to whence we started, in modern life the movies are what most other forms of art have ceased to be, not an adornment but a necessity. That this should be so is understandable, not only from a sociological but also from an art-historical point of view. The processes of all the earlier representational arts conform, in a higher or lesser degree, to an idealistic conception of the world. These arts operate from top to bottom, so to speak, and not from bottom to top; they start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter and not with the objects that constitute the physical world. The painter works on a blank wall or canvas which he organizes into a likeness of things and persons according to his idea (however much this idea may have been nourished by reality); he does not work with the things and persons themselves even if he works “from the model.” The same is true of the sculptor with his shapeless mass of clay or his untooled block of stone or wood; of the writer with his sheet of paper or his dictaphone; and even of the stage designer with his empty and sorely limited section of space.

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It is the movies, and only the movies, which do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe that, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization. Excepting the very special case of the animated cartoon, the movies organize material things and persons, not a neutral medium, into a composition that receives its style, and may even become fantastic or pretervoluntarily symbolic, not so much by an interpretation in the artist’s mind as by the actual manipulation of physical objects and recording machinery. The medium of the movies is physical reality as such: the physical reality of eighteenth-century Versailles—no matter whether it be the original or a Hollywood facsimile indistinguishable therefrom for all aesthetic intents and purposes—or of a suburban home in Westchester; the physical reality of the Rue de Lappe in Paris or of the Gobi Desert, of Paul Ehrlich’s apartment in Frankfurt or of the streets of New York in the rain; the physical reality of engines and animals, of Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney. All these objects and persons must be organized into a work of art. They can be arranged in all sorts of ways (“arrangement” comprising, of course, such things as make-up, lighting, and camera work); but there is no running away from them. From this point of view it becomes evident that an attempt at subjecting the world to artistic prestylization, as in the expressionist settings of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), could be no more than an exciting experiment that could exert but little influence upon the general course of events. To prestylize reality prior to tackling it amounts to dodging the problem. The problem is to manipulate and shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style. This is a proposition no less legitimate and no less difficult than any proposition in the older arts.

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Chapter 5

“A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film” Rudolf Arnheim

From Bianco e Nero (1938) The following inquiry was suggested by a feeling of uneasiness that every talking film arouses in the author and that is not appeased by increased acquaintance with the new medium. It is a feeling that something is not right there: that we are dealing with productions which because of intrinsic contradictions of principle are incapable of true existence. Apparently the uneasiness is due to the spectator’s attention being torn in two directions. In their attempts to attract the audience, two media are fighting each other instead of capturing it by united effort. Since the two media are striving to express the same matter in a twofold way, a disconcerting coincidence of two voices results, each of which is prevented by the other from telling more than half of what it would like to tell. This practical situation called for a theoretical study of the aesthetic laws whose violation made the talking film so unsatisfactory. Such an undertaking seemed all the more urgent since I had come to suspect that the principles commonly used in discussions of the subject were wrong or at least wrongly applied. The point had been reached at which the persons concerned, at best, endeavored to interpret the nature of the new medium but had stopped asking the more basic question of whether its very existence was admissible or not. In fact, to bring up this question was considered by now offensive, defeatist, reactionary. All the more pressing seemed to me the need of trying to finally clear up the problem. For this purpose I set out to investigate the conditions under which, quite in general, works of art can be based upon more than one medium—such as the spoken word, the image in motion, the musical sound—and what the range,

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nature, and value of such works might be. The result of this necessarily sketchy exploration was then applied to the talking film. The theater successfully combines image and speech.—The two elements whose rivalry the motion picture cannot reconcile are, of course, image and speech. It is a surprising rivalry, if we remember that in daily life talk rarely keeps us from seeing, or seeing from listening. But as soon as we sit in front of the movie screen we notice such disturbances. Probably we react differently because we are not used to finding in the image of the real world the kind of formal precision that in the work of art presents—by means of the sensory data—the subject and its qualities in a clear-cut, expressive way. Normally we gather from the world that surrounds us little more than vague hints, sufficient for practical orientation. Physical reality shapes and assembles things and events only in approximation of the pure, authentic “ideas” that are at the bottom of the empirical world. The imprecision of a color, the discord in a composition of lines do not necessarily interfere with our perception when we are observing for practical purposes only; and the literary impurity of a sentence may not prevent us from understanding its meaning. Therefore, when in everyday life an unbalanced combination of visual and auditory elements fails to produce discomfort, we need not be surprised either. In the realm of art, on the contrary, the unsure expression of an object, the inconsistency of a movement, a badly put phrase will impair at once the effect, the meaning, the beauty conveyed by the work. This is why a combination of media that has no unity will appear intolerable. It seems unlikely that the union of the image in motion and the spoken word as such is the cause of the discomfort created by the “talkies”; for such compounding of the two media seems sanctioned by the theater, surely an ancient and most fruitful art. Perhaps the mistake lies in the particular way the talking film employs the time-honored combination. As a matter of fact, even the theater has been accused now and then of being basically a hybrid. Some critics have pointed out that throughout its history the theater has oscillated between two extreme procedures, which would entrust the entire production either to the visible action on the stage or to the dialogue. It may be, therefore, that the theater is trying constantly to solve an insoluble inner conflict by leaning toward one of the two purer forms of expression of which it is a mixture: the mere image in motion—as we have it in the dance—or the mere spoken word, recently used to perfection in certain radio plays. To be sure, such leaning of the theater toward the pure and extreme forms would not necessarily prove that their mixture is inadmissible. One of the most basic artistic impulses derives from man’s yearning to escape the disturbing multiplicity of nature and seeks, therefore, to depict this bewildering reality with the simplest means. For this reason a medium of expression that is capable of producing complete works by its own resources will forever keep

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up its resistance against any combination with another medium. In the theater, then, such a tendency toward a more unified and thereby simpler medium is manifest—a tendency to attain more elementary and in a certain sense more immediately striking effects through pure visual action or pure dialogue. However, the stage director realizes also that by combining the more concrete and relatively simpler visual medium with the more abstract and complex medium of speech richer works can be produced, which may render human life more completely. For this reason he sacrifices himself to some extent—a sacrifice that often will be hard precisely on the kind of man who has the true theater blood: he imposes upon his theatrical instinct his will to function as a mere servant of the playwright’s work, which he agrees to interpret, to enrich, to make more tangible. In order to succeed he must conquer his lively inclination toward the “absolute” theater, that is, the kind of performance that is sheer stage action. Such pantomime, by the way, has remained sterile whenever it was attempted and must remain so unless it be stylized to the point of becoming dance or so enriched visually as to become film. Parallelism of complete and segregated representations.—The enrichment and unity that may result in art from the cooperation of several media are not identical with the fusion of all sorts of sense perception that is typical for our way of experiencing the “real” world. Because in art the diversity of the various perceptual media requires separations among them—separations that only a higher unity can overcome. Obviously it would be senseless and inconceivable to try to fuse visual and auditory elements artistically in the same way in which one sentence is tied to the next, one motion to the other. For instance, the unity that exists in real life between the body and the voice of a person would be valid in a work of art only if there existed between the two components a kinship much more intrinsic than their belonging together biologically. The artist conceives and forms his image of the world through directly perceivable sensory qualities, such as colors, shapes, sounds, movements. The expressive features of these percepts serve to interpret the meaning and character of the subject. The essence of the subject must be manifest in what can be observed directly. On this (lower) level of the sensory phenomena, however, an artistic connection of visual and auditory phenomena is not possible. (One cannot put a sound in a painting!) Such a connection can be made only at a second, higher level, namely, at the level of the so-called expressive qualities. A dark red wine can have the same expression as the dark sound of a violoncello, but no formal connection can be established between the red and the sound as purely perceptual phenomena. At the second level, then, a compounding of elements that derive from disparate sensory realms becomes possible artistically. Such compounding, however, must respect the segregations established at the lower level. It presupposes, in fact, that in each of the sensory areas

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concerned a closed and complete structure has been formed on that lower plane—a structure that in its own way and by itself must present the total subject of the work of art. When at the second level the purely material barrier disappears, the elements deriving from the different areas (for instance, the visual and the auditory) must nevertheless preserve the groupings and segregations established at the primary level. On the other hand, they may take advantage of the way they resemble each other or contrast with each other as far as expression is concerned and thus create interrelationships. For instance, all the movements of a group of dancers remain unified among one another and, together, segregated from the accompanying music. Within the musical structure also all sounds are interconnected. But the similarity of the expression conveyed by the patterns of the two sensory areas makes it possible to combine them in one unitary work of art. For example, a certain gesture of one of the dancers may resemble a corresponding musical phrase with regard to expression and meaning . . . just as the gesture of an actor may correspond to the meaning of the sentence he is uttering. The combination of several means of expression in a work of art provides us with a formal device whose particular virtue lies in that at the second structural level a relationship is established among patterns that are complete, closed, and strictly segregated at the lower or primary level. In addition to the two levels I have mentioned there may be others, higher ones—in fact, there almost always are—but they are less important. One of them concerns the characteristics of the objects represented in the work of art inasmuch as they belong to our real physical world, for example, the practical, material connections between the human body and the human voice. This level is closer to everyday life and the relations created at it are, therefore, more obvious to our common sense. But the kind of connection established at this level between patterns from different perceptual areas is not sufficient to make them homogeneous, fusable, or exchangeable. Their disparity at the primary level is in the way. For what happens at the primary level is binding for the entire work. (It will be understood that the relationships between elements of the physical world can go beyond mere coincidence in time and space. The body and the voice of a person, for example, are not just accidental neighbors who otherwise have nothing in common. Rather, since they belong to the same organism, they are intimately related also as far as their expression goes—a similarity that makes the physical connection of that body and that voice more meaningful. But neither in art nor in reality is such empirical kinship always accompanied by a kinship of expression; nor is similarity of expression found only in things that belong together empirically.) The objection may be raised that literature uses all the senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste—liberally mixed and just as inseparably fused as we experience them in everyday life. This objection, however, can be made validly

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only by someone who believes that the words of the writer are nothing but a means of arousing, in the mind of the reader, memory images supposed to replace the direct perceptual sensations, which the writer cannot provide. (Thus Schopenhauer: “The simplest and correctest definition of poetry seems to me to be that poetry is the art of stimulating the power of imagination by means of words.”) But is it true that literary language is nothing better than the kind of expedient to which, for instance, the writer of film scripts must resort when he wants to describe the scenes of a film to be made? Is the word only transitional or is it rather the final form of the literary creation? Does not the particular nature of literature consist precisely in the abstractness of language, which calls every object by the collective name of its species and therefore defines it only in a generic way, without reaching the object itself in its individual concreteness? It is from this particularity that literature draws its most characteristic and strongest effects. The poetical word refers directly to the meaning, the character, the structure of things; hence the spiritual quality of its vision, the acuteness and succinctness of its descriptions. The writer is not tied to the physical concreteness of a given setting; therefore, he is free to connect one object with another even though in actuality the two may not be neighbors either in time or in space. And since he uses as his material not the actual percept but its conceptual name, he can compose his images of elements that are taken from disparate sensory sources. He does not have to worry whether the combinations he creates are possible or even imaginable in the physical world. When Goethe, in one of his poems, calls the oak tree a towering giant dressed in a garment of fog, he uses of “tower” only the tallness, of “giant” only the massiveness, of “garment” only the function of covering—something no painter could do. The writer operates on what I called the second or higher level, at which the visual and auditory arts also discover their kinship. We understand now why the writer can fuse the rustling of the wind, the sailing of the clouds, the odor of rotting leaves, and the touch of raindrops on the skin into one genuine unity. It is true that, in a different sense, the writer also reaches the level of immediate concreteness so that he, too, can profit from its animating virtues. He cannot make us see, hear, smell, or touch the things he evokes, but the words he uses to name them are sounds, that is, auditory material. The expression conveyed by the sequences of vowels and consonants, the rhythm of stresses, the legatos, and the caesuras make it possible for him to say in the different and more concrete medium of sound what at the same time he is also saying through concepts. In this sense, any literary work is in itself a composite, and thus subject to the rules we are exploring. The conditions for the combination of artistic media.—Artistic media combine, I asserted before, as separate and complete structural forms. The theme

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to be expressed by a song, for instance, is given in the words of the text and again, in another manner, in the sounds of the music. Both elements conform to each other in such a way as to create the unity of the whole, but their separateness remains evident, nevertheless. Their combination resembles a successful marriage, where similarity and adaptation make for unity but where the personality of the two partners remains intact, nevertheless. It does not resemble the child that springs from such a marriage, in whom both components are inseparably mixed. Similarly, in a theatrical performance the visible action and the dialogue must each present the total subject. If there is a gap in one of the two components it cannot be made up by the other. It is the duty of the director to interpret the content of the dialogue for the eyes of the audience through color, shape, and motion, through the appearance and gestures of the actors, through the spatial organization of the setting and the way the bodies move within this space. The visual performance cannot be interrupted, except if the gap serves as a delimiting interval, that is, a caesura, which does not break up the action but is a part of it. The visible action must never be permitted to become inexpressive or empty for the benefit of the dialogue because even the most substantial lines of speech could not make up for such a deficiency: they could not mend a visual gap. In the same way, an interruption of the dialogue can only take the form of an interval; it cannot be justified as a temporary shift from audible to visible action. There can be, of course, a contrapuntal opposition of a rest in the pantomime against a simultaneous exchange of heated retorts in the dialogue, or of a moment of silence against a significant piece of pantomimic action—but only in the sense in which the harmonic play of a piece of music is enriched by the frequent exits and entrances of the various voices or instruments. The dialogue must be complete.—Enough has been said to make it clear that there is little justification for a current fad on the part of some “highbrow” film directors who have the action carried almost entirely by the visual performance on the screen and only here and there add a touch of dialogue to the dramatic development. Such a procedure evidently does not create a parallelism between two complete components, namely, a very dense visual part and a very “porous” auditory one: instead the dialogue is fragmentary; it consists of pieces that are separated by unbridgeable interruptions. The expressed intention of these directors is to have speech emerge, in certain highspots, as a kind of condensation of the visual image. The distinction of the media is entirely neglected, and as a result scraps of speech pop up with a ludicrous surprise effect, out of empty auditory space, in which they float without anchor. The defect cannot be eliminated by filling the stretches of silence with appropriate noises or music; for the example of the song has taught us already that even within the realm of auditory art, music and speech can be combined

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only when a parallelism between two complete and segregated components—a poem and a melody—is provided. If the dialogue were not dispersed in pieces but collected in large complexes, each of which were a closed and continuous structure, one could at least refer to the great example of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the later similar attempt by Mahler, in which at the climax of the composition the instrumental music is completed by human voices so that from that moment on the work proceeds on a broader, more monumental base. However, in the talking film even that device would not help because there still would remain the obstacle of the difference in visual style between the silent scenes and those completed with dialogue. The practical experience of what goes on in the movie theater would demonstrate to everybody that a true fusion of word and image is impossible if the image on the screen were ever shut off so that the dialogue could try to “take over.” The visual action is always complete—at least technically, although not artistically. The complete visual action accompanied by occasional dialogue represents a partial parallelism, not a fusion. The fragmentary nature of the dialogue is the fundamental defect. (To be sure, an interruption of the dialogue does not produce the same kind of psychological shock that would result from a sudden disappearance of the image from the screen. The reason is that, psychologically, a stop of the dialogue is not perceived as an interruption of the auditory action, the way the disappearance of the image from the screen would interrupt the visual performance. Silence is not necessarily experienced as the removal of the world of sound but rather as a neutral foil—empty but “positive,” as the plain background of a portrait is a part of the picture. However, a phenomenon may not disturb us in a purely psychological sense and still be objectionable artistically.) Those patches of speech are of little theoretical importance as long as they represent merely the minimum concession of a film director who has to meet the demands for dialogue on the part of producers and distributors. For in that case the film maker thinks of his work as a silent film, that is, as a film in the true meaning of the term, adulterated by a hostile principle (that imposes the talking upon the artist). If, however, he believes that simply by reducing the amount of speech and thus moving away from the style of the theater he approaches a new and autonomous art form, namely, the “talking film,” he demonstrates his lack of professional sensibility. The fewer words are used and the more definitely the burden of the action is carried by the image on the screen, the more disturbing, alien, and ridiculous will the speech fragments appear; it will be all the more evident that what is being used is the traditional style of the silent film—but in an impure fashion. In comparison, the approach of the more modest craftsmen who work in the studios at the service of the film industry is artistically saner. By their daily contact with their medium they have attained some intuitive understanding

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of its intrinsic requirements, and for that reason—at least partly—they tend toward the “100 percent dialogue” film. In these productions, speech accompanies the film throughout its length, more or less without gaps, and in that way fulfills one of the elementary conditions for the compounding of media, namely, parallelism. In the average film of that kind one notices, in addition, an ever more radical curtailment of the means of visual expression as they were developed during the period of the silent movies. This tendency also derives, as I am going to show, from the aesthetic conditions created by the talking film. Even so, the disequilibrium between image and speech is not avoided by this procedure nor does it create artistically valid sound films. Instead, the studio practice moves toward the traditional style of the theater without being ready to renounce the novel charms of the moving picture. In any case, complete dialogue would be the basic premise for any use of speech in film—an artistically complete and closed word pattern. We need to inquire now whether or not this condition can be met by a technique that would be different in principle from that of the theater. Can image and word be combined in a manner different from that of the theater?—The specialty of such a new art form might be based on some fundamental difference between theater action and film action, as far as the visual part of the performance is concerned. Commonly it is taken for granted that such a difference does exist and is demonstrated by actual practice. And yet there is no fundamental reason why the distinguishing traits of the film image should be denied to the theater. Unquestionably, the theater as an art form would remain essentially what it is if the flesh-and-blood actor were replaced with his photographic image: the theater performances on television prove it. The theater also could substitute black-and-white for natural color—and, of course, monochrome is no essential characteristic of the movies anyway. The displacement of the entire picture, as produced by traveling shots in film, has recently been obtained also in the theater through rotating stages and similar devices—more modestly, to be sure, but matters of degree count little for distinctions in principle. The modern theater has also used actual film projections, for instance, as backdrops. Granted that in its present form the theater cannot change the distance, or the angle of view, nor can it leap from place to place as the film does by means of montage. But here again we merely need to think of television in order to realize that what is technically impossible for the theater as we know it today may be familiar tomorrow. In this connection we might as well realize that film is art, yes, but not an entirely new and isolated art. The art of the moving image is distinct from that of the static image, as we have it in painting or sculpture. However, it comprises not only the film but also dance and pantomime; and the question is at least debatable whether or not the properties that film derives from the technique of mechanical registration are weightier than the others it shares with dance,

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pantomime, and therefore also with the theater. One thing seems certain: if one tries to ignore the properties that the film shares with other media—as has been done ad majorem gloriam of the movies—one cannot hope correctly to evaluate the art of the film. The art of the moving image is as old as the other arts, it is as old as humanity itself, and the motion picture is but its most recent manifestation. What is more, I would venture to predict that the film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man, namely, as animated cartoon or painting. There is, then, no difference in principle between the visual action of the theater and the moving image of the film. Therefore, the experiences made with the “enriched image” in the theater can be directly applied to the talking film. What are these experiences? They show that attempts at “enrichment” have quickly turned out to be deviations from serious stage art. When the designer indulges in dazzling contrivances and the director crowds the stage with action, the visual performance distracts from the words of the playwright rather than interprets them. Of course, this contention presupposes that the stage performance has the purpose of providing the dialogue with its due position in the foreground while leaving to the image only a secondary, supporting function. We need now to explore the possibility of other artistic forms that might do without this presupposition. The simpler the wording of the dialogue, the less likely the audience will be kept from following the dramatic conversation attentively. Now a work of dramatic literature, just as any other work of art, can assume any degree of density—from the intricate and heavy thought of a Shakespeare, who presents our receptive powers with almost insoluble tasks even when there is nothing visual at all to distract us from the recital (as, for example, in radio performances), to the loosest lines of plainest concreteness. The simpler forms of dialogue—which might not be less valuable literarily—could receive a richer visual presentation without suffering from it. Perhaps the history of literature offers few examples of such simple dialogue, but conceivably this could change if the playwright got used to the idea of seeing his works completed by a richer stage action. In fact, perhaps the writer himself might undertake the task of working in both media, that is, of creating by himself the twofold total work. Let us assume this happened and the scales tipped gradually in favor of the visual action: we should then arrive first at works in which the audible and the visible were in balance, and finally at others in which the picture predominated whereas the dialogue would accept a secondary function, similar to that reserved nowadays for the pantomimic action on the theater stage. Would productions of this latter kind belong to a new and autochthonous species of art? Could a mere quantitative shift of the components give birth to

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a new art form? The performance of a large group of dancers may be accompanied by nothing but one flute or, conversely, the solo of one dancer may be accompanied by a whole symphony orchestra . . . are we dealing with different art forms? There would be no particular hurry in deciding whether we were faced with a mere variety of theater art or rather with a special form all of its own—if only the indicated shift of elements would give us new ways of representing our life, new ways of saying things for which so far there is no tongue. All depends now on deciding whether or not the procedure that we have drawn up in theory is capable of life in practice. Specific characteristics of various artistic media.—Earlier I explained that the compounding of different media—for example, moving picture and speech— cannot be justified simply by the fact that in the experience of everyday life visual and auditory elements are intimately connected and, in fact, inseparably fused. There must be artistic reasons for such a combination: it must serve to express something that could not be said by one of the media alone. We found that a composite work of art is possible only if complete structures, produced by the media, are integrated in the form of parallelism. Naturally, such a “double track” will make sense only if the components do not simply convey the same thing. They must complete each other in the sense of dealing differently with the same subject. Each medium must treat the subject in its own way, and the resulting differences must be in accordance with those that exist between the media. That the various media are different in character has been shown in Lessing’s Laocoön by the example of the visual arts and literature. In distinguishing, for example, between representational and nonrepresentational media one understands easily that painting or the dance—as contrasted with music—may convey underlying themes in a more indirect and hidden manner. The representation is tied to tangible objects but precisely for this reason more in keeping with practical experience. Music transmits such ideas more directly, more purely and forcefully, but its interpretation, which can do without depicting objects, is also more abstract and generic since it excludes the multitude of concrete things and happenings. This is why music completes the dance and the silent film so perfectly: it vigorously transmits the feelings and moods and also the inherent rhythm of movements that the visual performance would wish to describe but which are accessible to it only through the inevitable diffraction and turbidity deriving from the use of concrete objects. There is no point in comparing the relative value of the various media. Personal preferences exist, but each medium reaches the heights in its own way. If we call literature the most complete medium of all, we have to remember, nevertheless, that this universality makes also for weaknesses, where other media show particular strength. But as far as content goes, the word has the range of all the other media together: it can describe the things of this world

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as immobile or as constantly changing; with inimitable ease it can leap from one place to the other, from one moment to the next; it presents not only the world of our outer senses but also the entire realm of the soul, the imagination, the emotion, the will. And not only does the word capture these external and internal facts in themselves—it also includes the logical and the intuitive connections that the human mind establishes between them. It can present objects at almost any degree of abstractness: from individual concreteness to rarefied generality. It can swing back and forth between percept and concept and thereby satisfy the most earthly as well as the most spiritual demands. And particularly it is at home on the attractive meeting ground of phenomenon and idea, where the poet operates. Visual action as a useful complement of the dramatic dialogue.—Even so, at the one extreme of the scale that leads from percept to concept, language cannot go beyond a certain degree of approximation. It cannot materialize things to the point of presenting us with their material nature itself. It can say “color” but cannot show us color. Hence the practice of completing the spoken dialogue with stage action and stories with illustrations. At the same time we understand that such a completion is not necessary. The writer can describe to us any object with the degree of precision required for his artistic purpose. A play, therefore, does not require staging—it merely permits it. Accordingly, the sets as well as the motions of the actors should humbly yield the limelight to the dramatic work, which is complete in itself. The production comes into being only after the poet has finished his work, freely and without much consideration. The stage action gives body to the indirect vision conveyed by the poet. Colors, shapes, and noises serve the simpler and more elementary experience of the senses, which is welcome to the audience and to which the poet himself pays tribute with the sound and rhythm of his words. Sound and image are primordial art, closer to nature than the rendering by concepts. Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and film appeal to the more primitive side of the human mind. Although enlightened by speech, man nevertheless cherishes these ancient resources and their vigorously simple interpretation of what he has to say. Being more concrete and biologically older, the image can produce the more massive effects, so that the word is threatened when the picture, and particularly the moving picture, presents itself. A good stage production endeavors to tone down the natural dominance of the visible performance by keeping it at a certain distance from the audience and by restricting the amount of action on the stage. Could not the visual action become an integral part of the play?—In the theater, the visual action is, then, a servant of the dialogue. On the other hand, it does not simply repeat what the playwright says or could say. By presenting the subject in a particular way, which is not accessible to literature, the visual

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action satisfies one of the conditions for the combination of media. This being so, is it not conceivable that in certain cases language might seem an insufficient instrument for the artist who creates for the theater? Are there not things he could not express in words but only through stage action? So that he might find it necessary to use both media? Playwrights include in their plays references to the external stage action to varying degrees. There is, on the one hand, the kind of poet who concentrates entirely on internal action. All he wishes to present is the clash of psychical forces, expressed in the words of the dialogue. Probably there are few actual examples of this extreme case, although the radio play tends to develop in this direction. At the opposite pole we find a kind of play that might consist of nothing but external action—which would change the playwright into a narrator of pantomime. There are, of course, two ways by which the writer may put in his play necessary references to external action. The classical procedure of the great dramatists is that of including them in the dialogue itself. In addition, we find, generally, also stage directions, which describe the setting and what is going on in it. Directions may be rare and short, as in the classics, or—as in some modern plays—they may grow into lengthy descriptions of the type found in novels. However, they do not necessarily have to be considered as a second medium. We are not dealing here with an invasion of visual action into playwriting but rather with the adoption of techniques of fiction. There is a recognizable difference between the literary description of visual action and attempts to describe in words something to be produced visually. In the latter case, as we know from the technique of the film scriptwriter, words are used as a mere expedient. When a poet describes a painting, the result is not a painting, and is not intended to be one. On the other hand, an attempt to fixate with words a piece of visual action, simply because no other means of recording is available, will easily turn out to be absurd literarily and to make excessive demands on the visual imagination of the reader, even though the description may come from a gifted writer. As an example I will translate a piece by the eighteenth-century writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who tried to preserve in words the great Garrick’s interpretation of the scene in which Hamlet sees the ghost of his father. “Garrick turns suddenly around and at the same moment falls two or three steps backward with his knees apart; his hat drops to the floor; both of his arms, and particularly the left, are raised, the left hand is at the height of the head, the right arm is more bent, the right hand lower, the fingers are spread out and the mouth is open; thus he stops, as though paralyzed, in the midst of a large but not excessive step, supported by his friends, who are more familiar with the apparition and fear he may collapse; in his face, horror is expressed in such a way that it made me shiver even before he began to speak.”

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If, then, there is a genuine difference between the literary description of visual matter and the recording in words of things belonging in a nonliterary, visual medium, is it not possible that a writer may find it necessary to have his dramatic dialogue completed by—not just accompanied with—a specific kind of visual staging? This indeed would be a basically new type of art, as shown also by the fact that the author himself would have to take care in detail of the visual production since it would represent “the other half ” of his work itself rather than simply a subsequent “performance” of it. So far, artists have preferred the singular medium.—The great artists, whose activity represents, as it were, the practical manifestation of the aesthetic laws, have shown little inclination thus far to make use of such a possibility. Shakespeare lived in daily contact with the world of the theater, but Goethe could say of him, nevertheless, that he was not a theater writer and did not think of the theater when he wrote. There is, in fact, no more radical way than his of anticipating every possible stage effect and, therefore, to make an adequate stage performance in our sense impossible. Similarly, the plays of Molière, Goethe, Schiller, Goldoni—all theater people—are complete even on paper, and the same is true for the Greek classics. Certain plays, in which the descriptions of the setting, the characters, and the action make up a considerable part of the text—for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Kleist’s Penthesilea—seem practically unstageable because the poet’s words create images so powerful and phantastic that it may be considered ridiculous to try to match them or even improve on them in the production. In the entire recorded history of art we find only one example of some weight that involves not just the secondary addition of one medium to the other but, to some extent, the collective effort of two media, namely, the opera. If we examine it, however, we find that in practice one of the components, the musical, dominates decisively. In fact, the libretto is a mere vehicle for the purposes of the music. Often it is put together strictly according to the needs of the composer, and its literary value tends to be slight. It is not essential for the true substance of the opera and serves mainly to explain the plot and to make a stage production possible. (The work of Richard Wagner approaches an equilibrium of music and libretto, but this work is so debatable and so strongly influenced by theory that by itself it does not represent a valid counterargument.) In fact, historically, the coming about of the opera probably represents not so much a union of music and literature but the conquest of the dramatic element on the part of music, which is otherwise limited to the lyrical style. Generated by the attempts of the fifteenth century to enhance, through music, the dramatic and spectacular qualities of the tragedies in the Greek manner, it actually satisfies the wish to express musically the strivings and emotions of man in action and the situations of conflict or harmony that arise from social intercourse. Dialogue is used as a technical and secondary means to make the

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human actor audible in the most natural way and to develop the plot beyond those elementary themes that can be made comprehensible by the moving image of pantomime plus music alone. In other words, the opera is an almost entirely musical form, and the dialogue is limited more or less to the task of the printed “titles” in silent movies. It is worth remembering here also that great actors often prefer mediocre plays that allow them to work almost by improvisation and thus to reserve the performance essentially to the expression of body and voice; whereas, on the other hand, their genius often spells danger to the great works of dramatic literature. Similarly, good dancers and the makers of silent films have a preference for simple, clear-cut music, which may not be first-rate. All these facts taken together suggest that up to now artists have shown little capacity or inclination to produce works genuinely based on more than one medium. To be sure, in all the examples cited more than one medium is actually used, but as a rule a different person takes care of each medium, and one of them assumes the lead: the dominant medium develops a rich structure from the theme sustained more simply by the secondary medium. Not that the secondary medium should ever be neglected to the point of being cheap, or smothered to the extent of being unable to make its point. Art admits a hierarchy of function but does not tolerate the qualitative or quantitative atrophy of any component, once it is included. The hierarchy of media in the work of art.—In composite works, the various media—as well as the artists who take care of them—seem to form hierarchies. The dramatic productions of antiquity illustrate this best. In them the word of the poet dominates, but it is complemented by stage action, which broadly outlines the dramatic events, and also by music. Another example may be found in the medieval cathedral, where the architectonic structure is enriched by painting and sculpture. Add to this the presence and participation of the theater audience and the religious congregation, and you have art as an all-embracing ritual rather than as the isolated object it becomes at a late stage of civilization. These hierarchic productions tend to be, as we pointed out, the work not of one but of several persons, and in order truly to succeed such a collaboration is likely to presuppose a spiritual community, that is, in the more general sense: the existence of a cult. The individual artist, on the other hand, tends to conceive the world in one medium only. The cooperation of several artists helps to overcome the discrepancy of the different perceptual media. Each artist can limit himself to one sensory universe. The total product may turn out to be incoherent, of course, particularly when no medium takes the lead decisively and instead there is an approximate equilibrium of two or more of them. This happens, for instance, in certain songs. Like the opera, the song is an essentially musical form. But when the poem that has been set to music succeeds in attracting considerable attention

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in its own right, the balance between music and poetry seems unstable. Such a rivalry among the media may keep the listener from making real contact with the work: he may not get beyond enjoying the rather formalistic fascination deriving from the consonance of similar yet heterogeneous components. Possible advantages of the film dialogue.—We have now worked out some fundamental concepts, which can be useful in judging the talking film. From what I have said it follows that, first of all, there should be a dominant medium. This part would fall to the moving image since predominance of the word would lead to the theater. The question is, then, whether the art of the animated image, which has been developed as the silent film, could use the kind of libretto through which the opera provides a skeleton of the dramatic action. First of all, we must repeat here that by means of the opera libretto (as well as its predecessors in church music, etc.) music conquered a vast new realm, namely, that of dramatic music or the musical drama. In the case of the film, the dialogue does not give access to a new type of work. At best, it enlarges what exists. We have to remember that in silent film the dialogue, as given in the titles, was not at all the foundation and starting point of the work, from which the pictures were developed. They were a mere expedient added secondarily and for the purpose of explanation to works conceived and realized in images. Perhaps the spoken dialogue may not be able to fulfill even this humble function. What is useful for the opera, may be harmful for the film. Will an artist, that is, a person guided by a sure sensitivity for the medium he employs, ever feel impelled to “set” a dialogue “to pictures” instead of creating in pictures? Since pictures are what attract him, he might be tempted by speech as a technical device that would sharpen the meaning of his scenes, save him the tortuous detours necessary to explain the plot, and open up a larger field of subjects. Now, in fact, dialogue makes possible an extensive development of the external action, and particularly also the internal action. No fairly complicated event or state of mind can be conveyed by pictures alone. Therefore, the addition of spoken dialogue has made storytelling easier. In this sense, film dialogue has been defined by some critics as a device for saving time, space, and ingenuity—a saving that would reserve the available limited length of the film and the creative energy of the maker for the truly relevant content of the work. It remains to be seen, however, whether there is, in the movies, any justification for the kind of involved plot that we find in the novel and the play. We can easily understand why the large movie audience has applauded the introduction of the spoken word. What the audience wants is to take part in exciting events as fully as possible. The best way of achieving this is, in a certain sense, the mixture of visual action and dialogue: external events are shown concretely to the eye, and at the same time the thoughts, intentions, and emotions of the characters are communicated through words in the directest and most natural way. Moreover the felt presence of the events is enormously

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enhanced by the sound of voices and other noises. The audience will object only when the dialogue is cut down so much that it does not explain the action or when, on the contrary, there is too little outer action, and all the talking becomes tiresome. In a crude way, these objections to the talking film are the same as those of the connoisseur. Dialogue narrows the world of the film.—The example of the opera seemed to justify and recommend the use of dialogue. But not without caution can we compare the art of sound and the art of pictures in their relation to the spoken word. One of the main characteristics of dramatic dialogue is that it limits the action to the human performer. This suits music perfectly since, as we said, the opera was created precisely in order to represent human beings in dramatic action musically. The image, of course, does not need dialogue to present man, but in the visual world the human kind does not enjoy the leading role it has on the stage. Granted that in certain paintings human figures hold the foreground gigantically; but just as often painting shows man as a part of his environment, which gives meaning to him and to which he gives meaning. Man appears as a part of the Creation, from which he can be isolated only artificially. The moving picture was from the beginning more concerned with the world animated by man than with man set off against his world. Therefore, to be limited by dialogue to the performances of the human figure was bound to seem intolerable. The presentation of man’s natural setting had been one of the achievements that justified the existence of the movies next to the theater. Naturally, the silent film also had often shown the actor in close-ups. But more importantly, it had created a union of silent man and silent things as well as of the (audible) person close-by and the (inaudible) one at a far distance. In the universal silence of the image, the fragments of a broken vase could “talk” exactly the way a character talked to his neighbor, and a person approaching on a road and visible on the horizon as a mere dot “talked” as someone acting in close-up. This homogeneity, which is completely foreign to the theater but familiar to painting, is destroyed by the talking film: it endows the actor with speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background. Now there is a limit to the visual expression that can be drawn from the human figure, particularly if the picture has to accompany dialogue. Pure pantomime knows of three ways to overcome this limitation. It can give up the portraying of plots and instead present the “absolute” movement of the body, that is, dance. Here the human body becomes an instrument for melodic and harmonic forms, which are superior to mere pantomime, as music is superior to a (hypothetical) art of natural noises. Secondly, pantomime can adopt the solution of the silent film, namely, become a part of the richer universe in motion. And finally, it can become subservient to dramatic speech—as it does in the theater. But to the pantomime of the talking film all three of these

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solutions are inaccessible: it cannot become dance because dance does not need speech and perhaps does not even tolerate it; it cannot submerge in the huge orbis pictus of the silent film because of its tie to the human figure; and it cannot become the servant of speech without giving up its own self. The dialogue paralyzes visual action.—Not only does speech limit the motion picture to an art of dramatic portraiture, it also interferes with the expression of the image. The better the silent film, the more strictly it used to avoid showing people in the act of talking, important though talking is in real life. The actors expressed themselves by posture and facial expression. Additional meaning came from the way the figure was shown within the framework of the picture, by lighting, and particularly by the total context of sequence and plot. The visual counterpart of speech, that is, the monotonous motions of the mouth, yields little and, in fact, can only hamper the expressive movement of the body. The motions of the mouth convincingly demonstrate that the activity of talking compels the actor into visually monotonous, meaningless, and often ludicrous behavior. It is obvious that speech cannot be attached to the immobile image (painting, photography); but it is equally ill-suited for the silent film, whose means of expression resemble those of painting. It was precisely the absence of speech that made the silent film develop a style of its own, capable of condensing the dramatic situation. To separate or to find each other, to win or to give in, to be friends or enemies—all such themes were neatly presented by a few simple attitudes, such as a raising of the head or of an arm, or the bowing of one person to another. This had led to a most cinegenic species of tale, which was full of simple happenings and which, with the coming of the talking film, was replaced by a theater-type play, poor in external action but well developed psychologically. This meant replacing the visually fruitful image of man in action with the sterile one of the man who talks. As far as the opera is concerned, there is no objection to the dialogue centering the action around the human character; nor is there any to the visual paralysis of the actor. What the opera wants is, we said, the musical expression of man in action. It has little use for the expressive virtues of the animated image on the stage, which remains secondary, complementary, explicatory. The opera director does not hesitate to stop the stage action in favor of long arias. This gives the dialogue plenty of time, and in fact too much time: phrases have to be stretched and repeated to comply with the music. So that what hurts the film does not hurt the opera. If after discussing the theoretical difficulties that lie in the way of the talking film we look around to see whether in practice the motion-picture production has worked out satisfactory solutions, we find our diagnosis confirmed. The average talking film today endeavors to combine visually poor scenes full of dialogue with the completely different traditional style of rich,

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silent action. In comparison with the epoch of the silent film there is also an impressive decline of artistic excellence, in the average films as well as in the peak productions—a bend that cannot be due entirely to the ever increasing industrialization. It may seem surprising that mankind should produce in large number works based on a principle that represents such a radical artistic impoverishment if compared with the available purer forms. But is such a contradiction really surprising at a time at which in other respects, too, so many people live a life of unreality and fail to attain the true nature of man and its fitting manifestations? If the opposite happened in the movies, would not such a pleasant inconsistency be even more surprising? There is comfort, however, in the fact that hybrid forms are quite unstable. They tend to change from their own unreality into purer forms, even though this may mean a return to the past. Beyond our blundering there are inherent forces that, in the long run, overcome error and incompleteness and direct human action toward the purity of goodness and truth.

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Chapter 6

“Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theatre” Allardyce Nicoll

From Film and Theatre (1936) One question of fundamental importance remains for consideration. When we witness a film, do we anticipate something we should not expect from a stage performance, and, if so, what effect has this upon our appreciation of film acting? At first, we might be tempted to dismiss such a query or to answer it easily and glibly. There is no essential difference, we might say, save in so far as we expect greater variety and movement on the screen than we do on the stage; and for acting, that, we might reply, is obviously the same as stage acting although perhaps more stabilized in type form. Do we not see Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, Elizabeth Bergner now in the theatre, now in the cinema? To consider further, we might say, were simply to indulge in useless and uncalled-for speculation. Nevertheless, the question does demand just a trifle more of investigation. Some few years ago a British producing company made a film of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. This film, after a few exciting shots depicting the dark streets of a Balkan town, the frenzied flight of the miserable fugitives and the clambering of Bluntschli onto Raina’s window terrace, settled down to provide what was fundamentally a screen-picture of the written drama. The dialogue was shortened, no doubt, but the shots proceeded more or less along the dramatic lines established by Shaw and nothing was introduced which he had not originally conceived in preparing his material for the stage. The result was that no more dismal film has ever been shown to the public. On the stage Arms and the Man is witty, provocative, incisively stimulating; its characters have a breath of genuine theatrical life; it moves, it breathes, it has vital energy. In the screen version all that life has fled, and, strangest thing of all, those characters—Bluntschli, Raina, Sergius—who are so exciting on the boards, looked to the audience like a set of wooden dummies, hopelessly patterned. Performed by a third-rate amateur cast their lifeblood does not so ebb

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from them, yet here, interpreted by a group of distinguished professionals, they wilted and died—died, too, in such forms that we could never have credited them with ever having had a spark of reality. Was there any basic reason for this failure?

The Camera’s Truth The basic reason seems to be simply this—that practically all effectively drawn stage characters are types and that in the cinema we demand individualization, or else that we recognize stage figures as types and impute greater power of independent life to the figures we see on the screen. This judgment, running so absolutely counter to what would have been our first answer to the original question posited, may seem grossly distorted, but perhaps some further consideration will demonstrate its plausibility. When we go to the theatre, we expect theatre and nothing else. We know that the building we enter is a playhouse; that behind the lowered curtain actors are making ready, dressing themselves in strange garments and transforming their natural features; that the figures we later see on the boards are never living persons of king and bishop and clown, but merely men pretending for a brief space of time to be like these figures. Dramatic illusion is never (or so rarely as to be negligible) the illusion of reality: it is always imaginative illusion, the illusion of a period of make-believe. All the time we watch Hamlet’s throes of agony we know that the character Hamlet is being impersonated by a man who presently will walk out of the stage-door in ordinary clothes and an autograph-signing smile on his face. True, volumes have been written on famous dramatic characters—Greek, Elizabethan English, and modern Norwegian—and these volumes might well seem to give the lie to such assumptions. Have not Shakespeare’s characters seemed so real to a few observers that we have on our shelves books specifically concerned with the girlhood of his heroines—a girlhood the dramas themselves denied us? These studies, however, should not distract us from the essential truth that the greatest playwrights have always aimed at presenting human personality in bold theatric terms. Hamlet seizes on us, not because he is an individual, not because in him Shakespeare has delineated a particular prince of Denmark, but because in Hamlet there are bits of all men; he is a composite character whose lineaments are determined by dramatic necessity, and through that he lives. Fundamentally, the truly vital theatre deals in stock figures. Like a child’s box of bricks, the stage’s material is limited; it is the possibilities in arrangement that are well-nigh inexhaustible. Audiences thrill to see new situations born of fresh sociological conditions, but the figures set before them in significant plays are conventionally fixed and familiar. Of Romeos there are many, and of Othellos legion. Character on the stage is restricted and stereotyped and the persons who play upon the boards are governed, not by the strangely perplexing processes of life but by the established terms of stage practice. Bluntschli

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represents half a hundred similar rationalists; the idealism of thousands is incorporated in Sergius; and Raina is an eternal stage type of the perplexing feminine. The theatre is populated, not by real individuals whose boyhood or girlhood may legitimately be traced, but by heroes and villains sprung fullbodied from Jove’s brain, by clowns and pantaloons whose youth is unknown and whose future matters not after the curtain’s fall. In the cinema we demand something different. Probably we carry into the picture-house prejudices deeply ingrained in our beings. The statement that “the camera cannot lie” has been disproved by millions of flattering portraits and by dozens of spiritualistic pictures which purport to depict fairies but which mostly turn out to be faintly disguised pictures of ballet dancers or replicas of figures in advertisements of night lights. Yet in our heart of hearts we credit the truth of that statement. A picture, a piece of sculpture, a stage-play—these we know were created by man; we have watched the scenery being carried in back stage and we know we shall see the actors, turned into themselves again, bowing at the conclusion of the performance. In every way the “falsity” of a theatrical production is borne in upon us so that we are prepared to demand nothing save a theatrical truth. For the films, however, our orientation is vastly different. Several periodicals, it is true, have endeavored to let us into the secrets of the moving-picture industry and a few favored spectators have been permitted to make the rounds of the studios; but for ninety per cent of the audience the actual methods employed in the preparation of a film remain far off and dimly realized. “New York,” we are told, struts when it constructs a Rockefeller Center. A small town chirps when it finishes a block of fine cottages. The government gets into the newspapers for projects like Boulder Dam. It takes Hollywood approximately three days to build Rome and a morning to effect its fall, but there is very little hurrah about it. The details are guarded like Victorian virtue. There is sound reticence on the part of a community that is usually articulate about its successes. Hollywood is in the business of building illusion, not sets. . . . The public likes to feel that the stork brought The Birth of a Nation. It likes to feel that a cameraman hung in the clouds—mid-Pacific— the day that Barrymore fought the whale.

That audience, accordingly, carries its prejudices with it intact. “The camera cannot lie”—and therefore, even when we are looking at Marlene Dietrich or Robert Montgomery, we unconsciously lose sight of fictional surroundings and interpret their impersonations as “real” things. Rudolph Valentino became a man who had had innumerable Sheikish adventures, and into each part she took the personality of Greta Garbo was incorporated. The most impossible

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actions may be shown us in a film, yet Laurel and Hardy are, at their best, seen as individuals experiencing many strange adventures, not as virtuoso comedians in a vaudeville act. How true this is was demonstrated by a film, Once in a Blue Moon, which has been shown only in a few theatres. The general tone of Once in a Blue Moon was burlesque. In it was a “take-off ” of certain Russian films, incidental jibes at a few popular American examples, and occasional skits directed at prominent players; Jimmy Savo took the role of Gabbo the Great while one of the actresses made up to look like Katharine Hepburn. The result was dismal. In Charlie Chaplin’s free fantasy there is life and interest; throughout the course of Once in a Blue Moon vitality was entirely lacking. Nor was the reason far to seek. We cannot appreciate burlesque in the cinema because of the fact that in serious films actor and role are indistinguishable; on the stage we appreciate it since there, in serious plays, we can never escape from separating the fictional character and its creator. Stage burlesque is directed at an artistic method, generally the method employed by an individual player in the treatment of his parts. To caricature Irving was easy; hardly would a cinematic travesty of Arliss succeed. The presentation of this single film proved clearly the difference in approach on the part of cinema and theatre public respectively. These, so generally considered identical, are seen to be controlled by quite distinct psychological elements. Charlie Chaplin’s free fantasy has been referred to above. This, associated with, say, the methods of René Clair, might well serve to demonstrate the true resources of the film; comparison with the erring tendencies of Once in a Blue Moon brings out clearly the genuine frontiers of the cinematic sphere. In The Ghost Goes West there was much of satire, but this satire was directed at life and not at art and, moreover, was kept well within “realistic” terms. Everything introduced there was possible in the sense that, although we might rationally decide that these events could not actually have taken place, we recognized that, granted the conditions which might make them achievable, they would have assumed just such forms as were cast on the screen. The ghost was thus a “realistic” one, shown now in the guise of a figure solid and opaque and now in that of a transparent wraith, capable of defying the laws of physics. In a precisely similar way is the fantasy of a Chaplin film bound up with reality. We know that the things which Charlie does and the situations in which he appears are impossible but again, given the conditions which would make them possible, these are the shapes, we know, they would assume. Neither René Clair nor Charlie Chaplin steps into the field occupied by the artistic burlesque; neither is “theatrical.” The former works in an independent world conceived out of the terms of the actual, and the latter, like George Arliss in a different sphere, stands forth as an individual experiencing a myriad of strange and fantastic adventures.

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The individualizing process in film appreciation manifestly demands that other standards than those of the stage be applied to the screenplay. In the theatre we are commonly presented with characters relatively simple in their psychological make-up. A sympathetically conceived hero or heroine is devoted in his or her love affairs to one object; at the most some Romeo will abandon a visionary Rosaline for a flesh and blood Juliet. For the cinema, on the other hand, greater complexity may be permitted without loss of sympathy. The heroine in So Red the Rose is first shown coquetting with her cousin, suggestion is provided that she has not been averse to the attentions of a young family friend, she sets her cap at a visiting Texan and grieves bitterly on receiving news of his death, and finally she discovers or rediscovers the true love she bears to the cousin. All this is done without any hint that she is a mere flirt; her affections are such as might have been those of an ordinary girl in real life and we easily accept the filmic presentation in this light. On the stage the character could not have been viewed in a similar way; there we should have demanded a much simpler and less emotionally complicated pattern if our sympathies were firmly to be held. The strange paradox, then, results: that, although the cinema introduces improbabilities and things beyond nature at which any theatrical director would blench and murmur soft nothings to the air, the filmic material is treated by the audience with far greater respect (in its relation to life) than the material of the stage. Our conceptions of life in Chicago gangsterdom and in distant China are all colored by films we have seen. What we have witnessed on the screen becomes the “real” for us. In moments of sanity, maybe, we confess that of course we do not believe this or that, but, under the spell again, we credit the truth of these pictures even as, for all our professed superiority, we credit the truth of newspaper paragraphs.

Type-Casting This judgment gives argument for Pudovkin’s views concerning the human material to be used in a film—but that argument essentially differs from the method of support which he utilized. His views may be briefly summarized thus: types are more desirable in film work because of the comparative restrictions there upon make-up; the director alone knows the complete script and therefore there is little opportunity for an individual actor to build up a part intelligently and by slow gradations; an immediate, vital and powerful impression, too, is demanded on the actor’s first entrance; since the essential basis of cinematic art is montage of individual shots and not the histrionic abilities of the players, logic demands the use of untrained human material, images of which are wrought into a harmony by the director. Several of the apparent fallacies in Pudovkin’s reasoning have been discussed above. There is, thus, no

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valid objection to the employment of trained and gifted actors, provided that these actors are not permitted to overrule other elements in the cinematic art and provided the director fully understands their essential position. That casting by type is desirable in the film seems, however, certain. Misled by theatrical ways, we may complain that George Arliss is the same in every screenplay he appears in; but that is exactly what the cinema demands. On the stage we rejoice, or should rejoice, in a performer’s versatility; in the cinema unconsciously we want to feel that we are witnessing a true reproduction of real events, and consequently we are not so much interested in discerning a player’s skill in diversity of character building. Arliss and Rothschild and Disraeli and Wellington are one. That the desire on the part of a producing company to make use of a particular “star” may easily lead to the deliberate manufacturing of a character to fit that star is true; but, after all, such a process is by no means unknown to the theatre, now or in the past. Shakespeare and Molière both wrote to suit their actors, and Sheridan gave short sentimental scenes to Charles and Maria in The School for Scandal because, according to his own statement, “Smith can’t make love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins.” To exemplify the truth of these observations no more is demanded than a comparison of the stage and screen versions of The Petrified Forest. As a theatrical production this play was effective, moving and essentially harmonized with the conventions applying to its method of expression; lifeless and uninteresting seemed the filming of fundamentally the same material. The reasons for this were many. First was the fact that the film attempted to defy the basic law which governs the two forms; the theatre rejoices in artistic limitation in space while the film demands movement and change in location. We admire Sherwood’s skill in confining the whole of his action to the Black Mesa but we condemn the same confining process when we turn to see the same events enacted on the screen. Secondly, since a film can rarely bear to admit anything in the way of theatricality in its settings, those obviously painted sets of desert and mountain confused and detracted from our appreciation of the narrative. A third reason may be sought for in the dialogue given to the characters. This dialogue, following the lines provided for the stage play, showed itself as far too rich and cumbersome for cinematic purposes; not only was there too much of it, but that which sounded exactly right when delivered on the boards of the theatre (because essentially in tune with theatrical conventions) seemed ridiculous, false and absurd when associated with the screen pictures. Intimately bound up with this, there has to be taken into account both the nature and the number of the dramatis personae. Sherwood’s stage characters were frankly drawn as types—an old pioneer, a killer, an unsuccessful littérateur, an ambitious girl, a veteran, a businessman, a businessman’s wife—each one representative of a class or of an ideal. Not for a moment did we believe

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that these persons were real, living human beings; they were typical figures outlining forces in present-day society. This being so, we had no difficulty in keeping them all boldly in our minds even when the whole group of them filled the stage.

The Petrified Forest (dir. Archie Mayo, 1936)

When transferred to the screen, however, an immediate feeling of dissatisfaction assailed us; these persons who had possessed theatrical reality could have no reality in the film; their vitality was fled; they seemed false, absurd, untrue. Still further, their number became confusing. The group of representative types which dominated the stage proved merely a jumbled mass on the screen, for the screen, although it may make use of massed effects of a kind which would be impossible in the theatre, generally finds its purposes best served by concentration on a very limited number of major figures. The impression of dissatisfaction thus received was increased by the interpretation of these persons. Partly because of the words given to them, all the characters save Duke Mantee seemed to be actors and nothing else. There was exhibited a histrionic skill which might win our admiration but which at the same time

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was alien to the medium through which it came to us. A Leslie Howard whose stage performance was right just became an artificial figure when, before the camera, he had to deliver the same lines he had so effectively spoken on the stage. From the lack of individualization in the characters resulted a feeling of confusion and falsity; because of the employment of conventions suited to one art and not to another vitality, strength and emotional power were lost.

Psychological Penetration The full implications of such individualization of film types must be appreciated, together with the distinct approach made by a cinema audience to the persons seen by them on the screen. Because of these things, allied to its possession of several technical devices, the cinema is given the opportunity of coming into closer accord with recent tendencies in other arts than the stage. Unquestionably, that which separates the literature of today from yesterday’s literature is the former’s power of penetrating, psychoanalytically, into human thought and feeling. The discovery of the subconscious has opened up an entirely fresh field of investigation into human behavior, so that whereas a Walter Scott spread the action of a novel over many years and painted merely the outsides of his characters, their easily appreciated mental reactions and their most obvious passions, James Joyce has devoted an extraordinarily lengthy novel to twenty-four hours in the life of one individual. By this means the art of narrative fiction has been revolutionized and portraiture of individuals completely altered in its approach. Already it has been shown that normally the film does not find restrictions in the scope of its material advantageous; so that the typical film approaches outwardly the extended breadth of a Scott novel. In dealing with that material, however, it is given the opportunity of delving more deeply into the human consciousness. By its subjective method it can display life from the point of view of its protagonists. Madness on the stage, in spite of Ophelia’s pathetic efforts, has always appeared rather absurd, and Sheridan was perfectly within his rights when he caricatured the convention in his Tilburina and her address to all the finches of the grove. On the screen, however, madness may be made arresting, terrifying, awful. The mania of the lunatic in the German film M held the attention precisely because we were enabled to look within his distracted brain. Seeing for moments the world distorted in eccentric imaginings, we are moved as no objective presentation of a stage Ophelia can move us. Regarded in this way, the cinema, a form of expression born of our own age, is seen to bear a distinct relationship to recent developments within the sphere of general artistic endeavor. While making no profession to examine this subject, one of the most recent writers on This Modern Poetry, Babette Deutsch,

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has expressed, obiter dicta, judgments which illustrate clearly the arguments presented above. “The symbolists,” she says, “had telescoped images to convey the rapid passage of sensations and emotions. The metaphysicals had played in a like fashion with ideas. Both delighted in paradox. The cinema, and ultimately the radio, made such telescopy congenial to the modern poet, as the grotesqueness of his environment made paradox inevitable for him.” And again: The cinema studio creates a looking-glass universe where, without bottles labeled “Drink me” or cakes labeled “Eat me” or keys to impossible gardens, creatures are elongated or telescoped, movements accelerated or slowed up, in a fashion suggesting that the world is made of india-rubber or collapsible tin. The ghost of the future glimmers through the immediate scene, the present dissolves into the past.

Akin to these marvels is the poetry of such a man as Horace Gregory. In his No Retreat: New York, Cassandra, “the fluent images, the sudden close-ups, the shifting angle of vision, suggest the technique of the cinema.” The method of the film is apparent in such lines as these: Give Cerberus a non-employment wage, the dog is hungry. This head served in the war, Cassandra, it lost an eye; That head spits fire, for it lost its tongue licking the paws of lions caged in Wall Street and their claws were merciless. Follow, O follow him, loam-limbed Apollo, crumbling before Tiffany’s window: he must buy himself earrings for he meets his love tonight, (Blossoming Juliet emptied her love into her true love’s lap) dies in his arms.

If the cinema has thus influenced the poets, we realize that inherently it becomes a form of art through which may be expressed many of the most characteristic tendencies in present-day creative endeavor. (That most of the films so far produced have not made use of the peculiar methods inherent in the cinematic approach need not blind us to the fact that here is an instrument capable of expressing through combined visual and vocal means something of that analytical searching of the spirit which has formed the pursuit of modern poets and novelists.) Not, of course, that in this analytic and realistic

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method are to be enclosed the entire boundaries of the cinema. The film has the power of giving an impression of actuality and it can thrill us by its penetrating truth to life: but it may, if we desire, call into existence the strangest of visionary worlds and make these too seem real. The enchanted forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will always on the stage prove a thing of lath and canvas and paint; an enchanted forest in the film might truly seem haunted by a thousand fears and supernatural imaginings. This imaginary world, indeed, is one that our public has cried for and demanded, and our only regret may be that the producers, lacking vision, have compromised and in compromising have descended to banalities. Taking their sets of characters, they thrust these, willy-nilly, into scenes of ornate splendor, exercising their inventiveness, not to create the truly fanciful but to fashion the exaggeratedly and hyperbolically absurd. Hotels more sumptuous than the Waldorf-Astoria or the Ritz; liners outvying the pretensions of the Normandie; speed that sets Malcolm Campbell to shame; melodies inappropriately rich—these have crowded in on us again and yet again. Many spectators are becoming irritated and bored with scenes of this sort, for mere exaggeration of life’s luxuries is not creative artistically. That the cinema has ample opportunities in this direction has been proved by Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which, if unsatisfactory as a whole and if in many scenes tentative in its approach, demonstrated what may be done with imaginative forms on the screen. Apart from the opportunity offered by Shakespeare’s theme for the presentation of the supernatural fairy world, two things were specially to be noted in this film. The first was that certain passages which, spoken in our vast modern theatres with their sharp separation of audience and actors, become mere pieces of rhetoric devoid of true meaning and significance were invested in the film with an intimacy and directness they lacked on the stage. The power of the cinema to draw us near to an action or to a speaker served here an important function, and we could at will watch a group of players from afar or approach to overhear the secrets of a soliloquy. The second feature of interest lay in the ease with which the cinema can present visual symbols to accompany language. At first, we might be prepared to condemn the film on this ground, declaring that the imaginative appeal of Shakespeare’s language would thereby be lost. Again, however, second thoughts convince us that much is to be said in its defense; reference once more must be made to a subject already briefly discussed. Shakespeare’s dialogue was written for an audience, not only sympathetic to his particular way of thought and feeling, but gifted with certain faculties which today we have lost. Owing to the universal development of reading, certain faculties possessed by men of earlier ages have vanished from us. In the sixteenth century, men’s minds were more acutely perceptive of values in words heard, partly because their language was a growing thing with constantly occurring new forms and strange applications

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of familiar words, but largely because they had to maintain a constant alertness to spoken speech. Newspapers did not exist then; all men’s knowledge of the larger world beyond their immediate ken had to come from hearing words uttered by their companions. As a result, the significance of words was more keenly appreciated and certainly was more concrete than it is today. When Macbeth, in four lines, likened life to a brief candle, to a walking shadow, and to a poor player, one may believe that the ordinary spectator in the Globe theatre saw in his mind’s eye these three objects referred to. The candle, the shadow, and the player became for him mental realities. The same speech uttered on the stage today can hardly hope for such interpretation. Many in the audience will be lulled mentally insensible to its values by the unaccustomed movement of the lines, and others will grasp its import, not by emotional imaginative understanding, but by a painful, rational process of thought. A modern audience, therefore, listening to earlier verse drama, will normally require a direct stimulus to its visual imagination—a thing entirely unnecessary in former times. Thus, for example, on the bare Elizabethan platform stage the words concerning dawn or sunlight or leafy woods were amply sufficient to conjure up an image of these things; latter-day experiments in the production of these dramas in reconstructed “Shakespearean” theatres, interesting as these may be and refreshing in their novelty, must largely fail to achieve the end, so easily and with such little effort reached among sixteenth century audiences. We need, now, all the appurtenances of a decorated stage to approach, even faintly, the dramatist’s purpose. This is the justification for the presentation of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies not in a reconstructed Globe theatre, but according to the current standards of Broadway or of Shaftesbury Avenue. The theatre, however, can only do so much. It may visually create the setting, but it cannot create the stimulus necessary for a keener appreciation of the imagic value of Shakespeare’s lines. No method of stage representation could achieve that end. On the screen, on the other hand, something at least in this direction may be accomplished. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oberon’s appearance behind dark bespangled gauze, even although too much dwelt on and emphasized, gave force to lines commonly read or heard uncomprehendingly—“King of Shadows,” he is called; but the phrase means little or nothing to us unless our minds are given such a stimulus as was here provided. Critics have complained that in the film nothing is left to the imagination, but we must remember that in the Shakespearean verse is a quality which, because of changed conditions, we may find difficulty in appreciating. Its strangeness to us demands that an attempt be made to render it more intelligible and directly appealing. Such an attempt, through the means of expression granted to the cinema, may merely be supplying something which will bring us nearer to the conditions of the original spectators for whom Shakespeare wrote.

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Normally, however, verse forms will be alien to the film. Verse in itself presupposes a certain remoteness from the terms of ordinary life and the cinema, as we have seen, usually finds its most characteristic expression in the world that immediately surrounds us. The close connection, noted by Babette Deutsch, between cinematic expression and tendencies in present-day poetry will declare itself, not in a utilization of rhythmic speech but in a psychological penetration rendered manifest through a realistic method.

The Way of the Theatre If these arguments have any validity, then clearly a determined revision is necessary of our attitude towards the stage of today. That the theatre ought not servilely to follow cinematic methods seems unnecessary of proof, even although we may admit that certain devices of the film may profitably be called into service by playwright and director. She Loves Me Not with ample justification utilized for the purpose of stage comedy a technique which manifestly was inspired by the technique strictly proper to the cinema, and various experiments in the adapting of the filmic flashback to theatrical requirements have not been without significance and value. But this way real success does not lie; the stage cannot hope to maintain its position simply by seizing on novelties exploited first in the cinema, and in general we must agree that the cinema can, because of its peculiar opportunities, wield this technique so much more effectively that its application to the stage seems thin, forced and artificial. This, however, is not the most serious thing. Far more important is the fundamental approach which the theatre during recent years has been making towards its material. When the history of the stage since the beginning of the nineteenth century comes to be written with that impartiality which only the viewpoint of distant time can provide, it will most certainly be deemed that the characteristic development of these hundred odd years is the growth of realism and the attempted substitution of naturalistic illusion in place of a conventional and imaginative illusion. In the course of this development stands forth Ibsen as the outstanding pioneer and master. At the same time, this impartial survey may also decide that within the realistic method lie the seeds of disruption. It may be recognized that, while Ibsen was a genius of profound significance, for the drama Ibsenism proved a curse upon the stage. The whole realistic movement, which strove to impose the conditions of real life upon the theatre, may have served a salutary purpose for a time, but its vitality was but short-lived and, after the first excitement which attended the witnessing on the stage of things no one had hitherto dreamt of putting there had waned, its force and inspiring power were dissipated. Even if we leave the cinema out of account, we must observe that the realistic theatre in our own days has lost its strength. No doubt, through familiarity and tradition, plays in

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this style still prove popular and, popular success being the first requirement demanded of dramatic art, we must be careful to avoid wholesale condemnation; Tobacco Road and Dead End are things worthy of our esteem, definite contributions to the theatre of our day. But the continued appearance and success of naturalistic plays should not confuse the main issue, which is the question whether such naturalistic plays are likely in the immediate future to maintain the stage in that position we should all wish it to occupy.

Dead End (dir. William Wyler, 1937)

Facing this question fairly, we observe immediately that plays written in these terms are less likely to hold the attention of audiences over a period of years than are others written in a different style; because bound to particular conditions in time and place, they seem inevitably destined to be forgotten, or, if not forgotten, to lose their only valuable connotations. Even the dramas of Ibsen, instinct with a greater imaginative power than many works by his contemporaries and successors, do not possess, after the brief passing of forty years, the same vital significance they held for audiences of the eighties and nineties. If we seek for and desire a theatre which shall possess qualities likely to live over generations, unquestionably we must decide that the naturalistic play, made popular towards the close of the nineteenth century and still remaining in our midst, is not calculated to fulfill our highest wishes. Of much greater importance, even, is the question of the position this naturalistic play occupies in its relations to the cinema. At the moment it still retains its popularity, but, we may ask, because of cinematic competition, is it not likely to fail gradually in its immediate appeal? The film has such a hold over the world of reality, can achieve expression so vitally in terms of ordinary life, that the realistic play must surely come to seem trivial, false, and

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inconsequential. The truth is, of course, that naturalism on the stage must always be limited and insincere. Thousands have gone to The Children’s Hour and come away fondly believing that what they have seen is life; they have not realized that here too the familiar stock figures, the type characterizations, of the theatre have been presented before them in modified forms. From this the drama cannot escape; little possibility is there of its delving deeply into the recesses of the individual spirit. That is a realm reserved for cinematic exploitation, and, as the film more and more explores this territory, does it not seem probable that theatre audiences will become weary of watching shows which, although professing to be “lifelike,” actually are inexorably bound by the restrictions of the stage? Pursuing this path, the theatre truly seems doomed to inevitable destruction. Whether in its attempt to reproduce reality and give the illusion of actual events or whether in its pretence towards depth and subtlety in character-drawing, the stage is aiming at things alien to its spirit, things which so much more easily may be accomplished in the film that their exploitation on the stage gives only an impression of vain effort.

The Children’s Hour (dir. William Wyler, 1961)

Is, then, the theatre, as some have opined, truly dying? Must it succumb to the rivalry of the cinema? The answer to that question depends on what the

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theatre does within the next ten or twenty years. If it pursues naturalism further, unquestionably little hope will remain; but if it recognizes to the full the conditions of its own being and utilizes those qualities which it, and it alone, possesses, the very thought of rivalry may disappear. Quite clearly, the true hope of the theatre lies in a rediscovery of convention, in a deliberate throwing over of all thoughts concerning naturalistic illusion and in an embracing of that universalizing power which so closely belongs to the dramatic form when rightly exercised. By doing these things, the theatre has achieved greatness and distinction in the past. We admire the playhouses of Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England; in both a basis was found in frank acceptance of the stage spectacle as a thing of pretence, with no attempt made to reproduce the outer forms of everyday life. Conventionalism ruled in both, and consequently out of both could spring a vital expression, with manifestations capable of appealing not merely to the age in which they originated but to future generations also. Precisely because Aeschylus and Shakespeare did not try to copy life, because they presented their themes in highly conventional forms, their works have the quality of being independent of time and place. Their characters were more than photographic copies of known originals; their plots took no account of the terms of actuality; and their language soared on poetic wings. To this again must we come if our theatre is to be a vitally arresting force. So long as the stage is bound by the fetters of realism, so long as we judge theatrical characters by reference to individuals with whom we are acquainted, there is no possibility of preparing dialogue which shall rise above the terms of common existence. From our playwrights, therefore, we must seek for a new foundation. No doubt many journeymen will continue to pen for the day and the hour alone, but of these there have always been legion; what we may desire is that the dramatists of higher effort and broader ideal do not follow the journeyman’s way. Boldly must they turn from efforts to delineate in subtle and intimate manner the psychological states of individual men and women, recognizing that in the wider sphere the drama has its genuine home. The cheap and ugly simian chatter of familiar conversation must give way to the ringing tones of a poetic utterance, not removed far off from our comprehension, but bearing a manifest relationship to our current speech. To attract men’s ears once more to imaginative speech we may take the method of T. S. Eliot, whose violent contrasts in Murder in the Cathedral are intended to awaken appreciation and interest, or else the method of Maxwell Anderson, whose Winterset aims at building a dramatic poetry out of common expression. What procedure is selected matters little; indeed, if an imaginative theatre does take shape in our years, its strength will largely depend upon its variety of approach. That there is hope that such a theatre truly may come into being is testified by the recent experiments of many poets, by the critical thought which

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has been devoted to its consummation and by the increasing popular acclaim which has greeted individual efforts. The poetic play may still lag behind the naturalistic or seemingly naturalistic drama in general esteem, but the attention paid in New York to Sean O’Casey’s Within the Gates and Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset augurs the beginning of a new appreciation, while in London T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral has awakened an interest of a similar kind. Nor should we forget plays not in verse but aiming at a kindred approach; Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest and S. N. Behrman’s Rain from Heaven, familiar and apparently realistic in form, deliberately and frankly aim at doing something more than present figures of individuals; in them the universalizing power of the theatre is being utilized no less than in other plays which, by the employment of verse dialogue, deliberately remove the action from the commonplaces of daily existence. Established on these terms native to its very existence and consequently far removed from the ways of the film, the theatre need have no fear that its hold over men’s minds will diminish and fail. It will maintain a position essentially its own to which other arts may not aspire.

The Way of the Film For the film are reserved things essentially distinct. Possibility of confusion between the two has entered in only because the playhouse has not been true to itself. To the cinema is given a sphere, where the subjective and objective approaches are combined, where individualization takes the place of type characterization, where reality may faithfully be imitated and where the utterly fantastic equally is granted a home, where Walt Disney’s animated flowers and flames exist alongside the figures of men and women who may seem more real than the figures of the stage, where a visual imagery in moving forms may thrill and awaken an age whose ears, while still alert to listen to poetic speech based on or in tune with the common language of the day, has forgotten to be moved by the tones of an earlier dramatic verse. Within this field lies the possibility of an artistic expression equally powerful as that of the stage, though essentially distinct from that. The distinction is determined by the audience reactions to the one and to the other. In the theatre the spectators are confronted by characters which, if successfully delineated, always possess a quality which renders them greater than separate individuals. When Clifford Odets declares that by the time he came to write his first play, Awake and Sing!, he understood clearly that his interest was not in the presentation of an individual’s problems, but in those of a whole class; in other words, the task was to find a theatrical form with which to express the mass as hero,

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he is doing no more than indicate that he has the mind and approach of a dramatist. All the well-known figures created in tragedy and comedy since the days of Aristophanes and Aeschylus have presented in this way the lineaments of universal humanity. If the theatre stands thus for mankind, the cinema, because of the willingness on the part of spectators to accept as the image of truth the moving forms cast on the screen, stands for the individual. It is related to the modern novel in the same respect that the older novel was related to the stage. Impressionistic and expressionistic settings may serve for the theatre—even may we occasionally fall back on plain curtains without completely losing the interest of our audiences; the cinema can take no such road, for, unless in frankly artificially created films (such as the Walt Disney cartoon), we cling to our preconceived beliefs and clamor for the three-dimensional, the exact and the authentic. In a stage play such as Yellow Jack we are prepared to accept a frankly formal background, because we know that the actors are actors merely; but for the treatment of similar material in The Prisoner of Shark’s Island and The Story of Pasteur cinematic authenticity is demanded. At first glance, we might aver that, because of this, the film has fewer opportunities for artistic expression than the stage; but further consideration will demonstrate that the restrictions are amply compensated for by an added scope. Our illusion in the picture-house is certainly less “imaginative” than the illusion that attends us in the theatre, but it has the advantage of giving increased appreciation of things which are outside nature. Through this the purely visionary becomes almost tangible and the impossible assumes shapes easy of comprehension and belief. The sense of reality lies as the foundation of the film, yet real time and real space are banished; the world we move in may be far removed from the world ordinarily about us; and symbols may find a place alongside common objects of little or no importance. If we apply the theory of “psychological distance” to theatre and film we realize the force of each. For any kind of aesthetic appreciation this distance is always demanded; before we can hope to feel the artistic qualities of any form we must be able to set ourselves away from it, to experience the stimulus its contemplation creates and at the same time have no call to put the reactions to that stimulus into play. This distance obviously may be of varying degrees; sometimes it is reduced, sometimes it provides a vast gulf between the observer and the art object. Furthermore the variation may be of two kinds—variation between one art and another, and variation between forms within the sphere of a single art. Music is further removed from reality than sculpture, but in music there may be an approach towards commonly heard sounds and in sculpture abstract shapes may take the place of familiar forms realistically delineated. Determination of the proper and legitimate approach will come from a consideration of the sense of distance between the observer and the object; the masterpieces in any

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art will necessarily be based on an adaptation to the particular requirements of their own peculiar medium of expression. Applying this principle to theatre and cinema, we will recognize that whereas there is a strong sense of reality in audience reactions to the film, yet always there is the fact that the pictures on the screen are two-dimensional images and hence removed a stage from actual contact with the spectators. What may happen if successful three-dimensional projection is introduced we cannot tell; at present we are concerned with a flat screen picture. This gulf between the audience and the events presented to them will permit a much greater use of realism than the stage may legitimately employ. The presence of flesh-and-blood actors in the theatre means that it is comparatively easy to break the illusion proper to the theatre and in doing so to shatter the mood at which any performance ought to aim. This statement may appear to run counter to others made above, but there is no essential contradiction involved. The fact remains that, when living person is set before living person—actor before spectator—a certain deliberate conventionalizing is demanded of the former if the aesthetic impression is not to be lost, whereas in the film, in which immediately a measure of distance is imposed between image and spectator, greater approaches to real forms may be permitted, even although these have to exist alongside impossibilities and fantastic symbols far removed from the world around us. This is the paradox of cinematic art. Herein lies the true filmic realm and to these things the cinema, if it also is to be true to itself, must tend, just as towards the universalizing and towards conventionalism must tend the theatre if it is to find a secure place among us. Fortunately the signs of the age are propitious; experiments in poetic drama and production of films utilizing at least a few of the significant methods basically associated with cinematic art give us authority for believing that within the next decade each will discover firmer and surer foothold and therefore more arresting control over their material. Both stage and cinema have their particular and peculiar functions; their houses may stand side by side, not in rivaling enmity, but in that friendly rivalry which is one of the compelling forces in the wider realm of artistic achievement.

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Chapter 7

“Theater and Cinema” André Bazin

From Esprit (July–Aug. 1951) The leitmotiv of those who despise filmed theater, their final and apparently insuperable argument, continues to be the unparalleled pleasure that accompanies the presence of the actor. “What is specific to theater,” writes Henri Gouhier, in The Essence of Theater, “is the impossibility of separating off action and actor.” Elsewhere he says “the stage welcomes every illusion except that of presence; the actor is there in disguise, with the soul and voice of another, but he is nevertheless there and by the same token space calls out for him and for the solidity of his presence. On the other hand and inversely, the cinema accommodates every form of reality save one—the physical presence of the actor.” If it is here that the essence of theater lies, then undoubtedly the cinema can in no way pretend to any parallel with it. If the writing, the style, and the dramatic structure are, as they should be, rigorously conceived as the receptacle for the soul and being of the fleshand-blood actor, any attempt to substitute the shadow and reflection of a man on the screen for the man himself is a completely vain enterprise. There is no answer to this argument. The successes of Laurence Olivier, of Orson Welles, or of Jean Cocteau can only be challenged—here you need to be in bad faith—or considered inexplicable. They are a challenge both to critics and philosophers. Alternatively one can only explain them by casting doubts on that commonplace of theatrical criticism “the irreplaceable presence of the actor.”

The Concept of Presence At this point comments seem called for concerning the concept of “presence,” since it would appear that it is this concept, as understood prior to the appearance of photography, which the cinema challenges.

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Can the photographic image, especially the cinematographic image, be likened to other images and in common with them be regarded as having an existence distinct from the object? Presence, naturally, is defined in terms of time and space. “To be in the presence of someone” is to recognize him as existing contemporaneously with us and to note that he comes within the actual range of our senses—in the case of cinema, of our sight and in radio of our hearing. Before the arrival of photography and later of cinema, the plastic arts (especially portraiture) were the only intermediaries between actual physical presence and absence. Their justification was their resemblance, which stirs the imagination and helps the memory. But photography is something else again. In no sense is it the image of an object or person; more correctly it is its tracing. Its automatic genesis distinguishes it radically from the other techniques of reproduction. The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in light—to a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere resemblance, namely a kind of identity—the card we call by that name being only conceivable in an age of photography. But photography is a feeble technique in the sense that its instantaneity compels it to capture time only piecemeal. The cinema does something strangely paradoxical. It makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object. The nineteenth century with its objective techniques of visual and sound reproduction gave birth to a new category of images, the relation of which to the reality from which they proceed requires very strict definition. Even apart from the fact that the resulting aesthetic problems cannot be satisfactorily raised without this introductory philosophical inquiry, it would not be sound to treat the old aesthetic questions as if the categories with which they deal had in no way been modified by the appearance of completely new phenomena. Common sense—perhaps the best philosophical guide in this case—has clearly understood this and has invented an expression for the presence of an actor, by adding to the placards announcing his appearance the phrase “in flesh and blood.” This means that for the man in the street the word “presence,” today, can be ambiguous, and thus an apparent redundancy is not out of place in this age of cinema. Hence it is no longer as certain as it was that there is no middle stage between presence and absence. It is likewise at the ontological level that the effectiveness of the cinema has its source. It is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us “in the presence of ” the actor. It does so in the same way as a mirror—one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of the person reflected in it—but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image. It is true that in the theater Molière can die on the stage and that we have the privilege of living in the biographical time of the actor. In the 1950 film about the bullfighter Manolete, however, we are present at the actual death of the famous matador

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and, while our emotion may not be as deep as if we were actually present in the arena at that historic moment, its nature is the same. What we lose by way of direct witness do we not recapture thanks to the artificial proximity provided by photographic enlargement? Everything takes place as if in the time-space perimeter that is the definition of presence. The cinema offers us effectively only a measure of duration, reduced but not to zero, while the increase in the space factor reestablishes the equilibrium of the psychological equation.

Opposition and Identification An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction that follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is “Corneillian.” From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension that is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier’s film adaptations. There is nothing banal about this observation and the survival of the theater after fifty years of cinema, and the prophecies of Marcel Pagnol, is practical proof enough. At the source of the disenchantment that follows the film one could doubtless detect a process of depersonalization of the spectator. As Rosenkrantz wrote in 1937, in Esprit, in an article profoundly original for its period, “The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene actively, that is to say, to will to transform their physical reality into an abstraction. This abstraction is the result of a process of the intelligence that we can only ask of a person who is fully conscious.” A member of a film audience tends to identify himself with the film’s hero by a psychological process, the result of which is to turn the audience into a “mass” and to render emotion uniform. Just as in algebra if two numbers equal a third, they are equal to one another, so here we can say, if two individuals identify themselves with a third, they identify themselves with one another. Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them, he

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satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy. In other words, Tarzan is only possible on the screen. The cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites him. Even when it appeals to the lowest instincts, the theater up to a certain point stands in the way of the creation of a mass mentality. It stands in the way of any collective representation in the psychological sense, since theater calls for an active individual consciousness while the film requires only a passive adhesion. These views shed a new light on the problem of the actor. They transfer him from the ontological to the psychological level. It is to the extent to which the cinema encourages identification with the hero that it conflicts with the theater. Put this way the problem is no longer basically insoluble, for it is a fact that the cinema has at its disposal means that favor a passive position or, on the other hand, means that to a greater or lesser degree stimulate the consciousness of the spectator. Inversely the theater can find ways of lessening the psychological tension between spectator and actor. Thus theater and cinema will no longer be separated off by an unbridgeable aesthetic moat; they would simply tend to give rise to two attitudes of mind over which the director maintains a wide control. Examined at close quarters, the pleasure derived from the theater not only differs from that of the cinema but also from that of the novel. The reader of a novel, physically alone like the man in the dark movie house, identifies himself with the character. That is why after reading for a long while he also feels the same intoxication of an illusory intimacy with the hero. Incontestably, there is in the pleasure derived from the cinema and novel a self-satisfaction, a concession to solitude, a sort of betrayal of action by a refusal of social responsibility. The analysis of this phenomenon might indeed be undertaken from a psychoanalytic point of view. Is it not significant that the psychiatrists took the term catharsis from Aristotle? Modern pedagogical research on psychodrama seems to have provided fruitful insights into the cathartic process of theater. The ambiguity existing in the child’s mind between play and reality is used to get him to free himself by way of improvised theater from the repressions from which he suffers. This technique amounts to creating a kind of vague theater in which the play is of a serious nature and the actor is his own audience. The action that develops on these occasions is not one that is divided off by footlights, which are undoubtedly the architectural symbol of the censor that separates us from the stage. We delegate Oedipus to act in our guise and place him on the other side of a wall of fire—that fiery frontier between fantasy and reality that gives rein to Dionysian monsters while protecting us from them. These sacred beasts will not cross this barrier of light beyond which they seem out

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of place and even sacrilegious—witness the disturbing atmosphere of awe that surrounds an actor still made up, like a phosphorescent light, when we visit him in his dressing room. There is no point to the argument that the theater did not always have footlights. These are only a symbol and there were others before them from the cothurnus-and-mask onwards. In the seventeenth century the fact that young nobles sat up on the stage is no denial of the role of the footlights; on the contrary, it confirms it, by way of a privileged violation so to speak, just as when today Orson Welles scatters actors around the auditorium to fire on the audience with revolvers. He does not do away with the footlights, he just crosses them. The rules of the game are also made to be broken. One expects some players to cheat. With regard to the objection based on presence and on that alone, the theater and the cinema are not basically in conflict. What is really in dispute are two psychological modalities of a performance. The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness of the presence of audience and actor, but only as related to a performance. The theater acts on us by virtue of our participation in a theatrical action across the footlights and as it were under the protection of their censorship. The opposite is true in the cinema. Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and that is part of the universe. There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. It is no longer on the phenomenon of the actor as a person physically present that we should concentrate our analysis, but rather on the ensemble of conditions that constitute the theatrical play and deprive the spectator of active participation. We shall see that it is much less a question of actor and presence than of man and his relation to the décor.

Behind the Décor The human being is all-important in the theater. The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramatic effect. Some film masterpieces use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character. Even when, as in Nanook of the North and Man of Aran, the subject is man’s struggle with nature, it cannot be compared to a theatrical action. The mainspring of the action is not in man but nature. As Jean-Paul Sartre, I think it was, said, in the theater the drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from the décor to man. This reversal of the dramatic flow is of decisive importance. It is bound up with the very essence of the mise-en-scène. One must see here one of the consequences of photographic realism. Obviously, if the cinema makes use of nature, that is because it is able to. The

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camera puts at the disposal of the director all the resources of the telescope and the microscope. The last strand of a rope about to snap or an entire army making an assault on a hill is within our reach. Dramatic causes and effects have no longer any material limits to the eye of the camera. Drama is freed by the camera from all contingencies of time and space. But this freeing of tangible dramatic powers is still only a secondary aesthetic cause, and does not basically explain the reversal of value between the actor and the décor. For sometimes it actually happens that the cinema deliberately deprives itself of the use of setting and of exterior nature—we have already seen a perfect instance of this in Les Parents terribles—while the theater in contrast uses a complex machinery to give a feeling of ubiquity to the audience. Is La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc by Carl Dreyer, shot entirely in close-up, in the virtually invisible and in fact theatrical settings by Jean Hugo, less cinematic than Stagecoach? It seems to me that quantity has nothing to do with the matter, nor does the resemblance to certain theater techniques. The ideas of an art director for a room in Les Dames aux camélias would not noticeably differ whether for a film or a play. It’s true that on the screen you would doubtless have some closeups of the bloodstained handkerchief, but a skillful stage production would also know how to make some play with the cough and the handkerchief. All the close-ups in Les Parents terribles are taken directly from the theater, where our attention would spontaneously isolate them. If film direction only differed from theater direction because it allows us a closer view of the scenery and makes a more reasonable use of it, there would really be no reason to continue with the theater and Marcel Pagnol would be a true prophet. For it is obvious that the few square yards of the décor of Jean Vilar’s La Dame de la mort contributed as much to the drama as the island on which Marcel Cravenne shot his excellent film. The fact is that the problem lies not in the décor itself but in its nature and function. We must therefore throw some light on an essentially theatrical notion, that of the dramatic place. There can be no theater without architecture, whether it be the cathedral square, the arena of Nîmes, the palace of the Popes, the trestle stage on a fairground, the semicircle of the theater of Vicenza that looks as if it were decorated by the painter-become-set-designer Christian Bérard in a delirium, or the rococo amphitheaters of the boulevard houses. Whether as a performance or a celebration, theater of its very essence must not be confused with nature under penalty of being absorbed by her and ceasing to be. Founded on the reciprocal awareness of those taking part and present to one another, it must be in contrast to the rest of the world in the same way that play and reality are opposed, or concern and indifference, or liturgy and the common use of things. Costume, mask, or make-up, the style of the language, the footlights, all contribute to this distinction, but the clearest sign of all is the stage, the architecture of which has varied from time to

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time without ever ceasing to mark out a privileged spot actually or virtually distinct from nature. It is precisely in virtue of this locus dramaticus that décor exists. It serves to a greater or lesser degree to set the place apart, to specify. Whatever it is, the décor constitutes the walls of this three-sided box opening onto the auditorium, which we call the stage. These false perspectives, these façades, these arbors, have another side that is cloth and nails and wood. Everyone knows that when the actor “retires to his apartment” from the yard or from the garden, he is actually going to his dressing room to take off his make-up. These few square feet of light and illusion are surrounded by machinery and flanked by wings, the hidden labyrinths of which do not interfere one bit with the pleasure of the spectator who is playing the game of theater. Because it is only part of the architecture of the stage, the décor of the theater is thus an area materially enclosed, limited, circumscribed, the only discoveries of which are those of our collusive imagination. Its appearances are turned inward, facing the public and the footlights. It exists by virtue of its reverse side and of anything beyond, as the painting exists by virtue of its frame. Just as the picture is not to be confounded with the scene it represents and is not a window in a wall. The stage and the décor where the action unfolds constitute an aesthetic microcosm inserted perforce into the universe but essentially distinct from the nature that surrounds it. It is not the same with cinema, the basic principle of which is a denial of any frontiers to action. The idea of a locus dramaticus is not only alien to, it is essentially a contradiction of, the concept of the screen. The screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask that allows only a part of the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the décor that is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. There could not be without destroying its specific illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a face the very center of the universe. In contrast to the stage, the space of the screen is centrifugal. It is because that infinity which the theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none other than the human soul. Enclosed in this space the actor is at the focus of a two-fold concave mirror. From the auditorium and from the décor there converge on him the dim lights of conscious human beings and of the footlights themselves. But the fire with which he burns is at once that of his inner passion and of that focal point at which he stands. He lights up in each member of his audience an accomplice flame. Like the ocean in a seashell, the dramatic infinities of the human heart moan and beat between the enclosing walls of the theatrical sphere. This is why this dramaturgy is in its essence human. Man is at once its cause and its subject. On the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama, but will become eventually the center of the universe. The impact of his action may there set

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in motion an infinitude of waves. The décor that surrounds him is part of the solidity of the world. For this reason the actor as such can be absent from it, because man in the world enjoys no a priori privilege over animals and things. However, there is no reason why he should not be the mainspring of the drama, as in Carl Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc, and in this respect the cinema may very well impose itself upon the theater. As actions Phèdre and King Lear are no less cinematographic than theatrical, and the visible death of a rabbit in La Règle du jeu affects us just as deeply as that of Agnes’s little cat, about which we are merely told. But if Racine or Shakespeare (or the comedian Molière) cannot be brought to the cinema by just placing them before the camera and the microphone, it is because the handling of the action and the style of the dialogue were conceived as echoing through the architecture of the auditorium. What is specifically theatrical about these tragedies is not their action so much as the human, that is to say the verbal, priority given to their dramatic structure. The problem of filmed theater, at least where the classics are concerned, does not consist so much in transposing an action from the stage to the screen as in transposing a text written for one dramaturgical system into another while at the same time retaining its effectiveness. It is not therefore essentially the action of a play that resists film adaptation, but above and beyond the phases of the intrigue (which it would be easy enough to adapt to the realism of the screen) it is the verbal form that aesthetic contingencies or cultural prejudices oblige us to respect. It is this that refuses to let itself be captured in the window of the screen. “The theater,” says Baudelaire, “is a crystal chandelier.” If one were called upon to offer in comparison a symbol other than this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intricate, and circular, which refracts the light that plays around its center and holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen. The story of the failures and recent successes of theater on film will be found to be that of the ability of directors to retain the dramatic force of the play in a medium that reflects it, or, at least, the ability to give this dramatic force enough resonance to permit a film audience to perceive it. In other words, it is a matter of an aesthetic that is not concerned with the actor but with décor and editing. Henceforth it is clear that filmed theater is basically destined to fail whenever it tends in any manner to become simply the photographing of scenic representation even, and perhaps most of all, when the camera is used to try to make us forget the footlights and the backstage area. The dramatic force of the text, instead of being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the cinematic ether. This is why a filmed play can show due respect to the text, be well-acted in likely settings, and yet be completely worthless.

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This is what happened, to take a convenient example, to Jean Anouilh’s film of his Le Voyageur sans baggages [The Traveler without Luggage, 1944]. The play [1937] lies there before us apparently true to itself yet drained of every ounce of energy, like a battery dead from an unknown short. But over and beyond the aesthetic of the décor we see clearly both on the screen and on the stage that in the last analysis the problem before us is that of realism. This is the problem we always end up with when we are dealing with cinema.

The Screen and the Realism of Space The realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic nature. Not only does some marvel or some fantastic thing on the screen not undermine the reality of the image, on the contrary it is its most valid justification. Illusion in the cinema is not based, as it is in the theater, on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism of that which is shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material respects on the screen. The “invisible man” must wear pajamas and smoke a cigarette. Must we conclude from this that the cinema is dedicated entirely to the representation, if not of natural reality, at least of a plausible reality of which the spectator admits the identity with nature as he knows it? The comparative failure of German expressionism would seem to confirm this hypothesis, since it is evident that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari attempted to depart from realistic décor under the influence of the theater and painting. But this would be to offer an oversimplified explanation for a problem that calls for more subtle answers. We are prepared to admit that the screen opens upon an artificial world provided there exists a common denominator between the cinematographic image and the world we live in. Our experience of space is the structural basis for our concept of the universe. We may say, in fact, adapting the philosopher Henri Gouhier’s formula, “the stage welcomes every illusion except the illusion of presence,” that “the cinematographic image can be emptied of all reality save one—the reality of space.” It is perhaps an overstatement to say “all reality” because it is difficult to imagine a reconstruction of space devoid of all reference to nature. The world of the screen and our world cannot be juxtaposed. The screen of necessity substitutes for it since the very concept of universe is spatially exclusive. For a time, a film is the universe, the world, or, if you like, nature. We will see how the films that have attempted to substitute a fabricated nature and an artificial world for the world of experience have not all equally succeeded. Admitting the failure of Caligari and Die Nibelungen, we then ask ourselves how we explain the undoubted success of Nosferatu and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the criterion of success being that these films have never aged. Yet it would seem at first sight that the methods of direction belong to the same aesthetic family,

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and that viewing the varieties of temperament and period, one could group these four films together as expressionist as distinct from realist. However, if we examine them more closely we see that there are certain basic differences between them. This is clear in the case of Robert Wiene and F. W. Murnau. Nosferatu plays, for the greater part of the time, against natural settings, whereas the fantastic qualities of Caligari are derived from deformities of lighting and décor. The case of Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc is a little more subtle since at first sight nature plays a nonexistent role. To put it more directly, the décor by Jean Hugo is no whit less artificial and theatrical than the settings of Caligari; the systematic use of close-ups and unusual angles is well calculated to destroy any sense of space. Regular cinéclub goers know that the film is unfailingly introduced with the famous story of how the hair of Falconetti was actually cut in the interests of the film and likewise, the actors, we are told, wore no make-up. These references to history ordinarily have no more than gossip value. In this case, they seem to me to hold the aesthetic secret of the film, the very thing to which it owes its continued survival. It is precisely because of them that the work of Dreyer ceases to have anything in common with the theater, and indeed one might say, with man. The greater recourse Dreyer has exclusively to the human “expression,” the more he has to reconvert it again into nature. Let there be no mistake, that prodigious fresco of heads is the very opposite of an actor’s film. It is a documentary of faces. It is not important how well the actors play, whereas the pockmarks on Bishop Cauchon’s face and the red patches of Jean d’Yd are an integral part of the action. In this drama-throughthe-microscope the whole of nature palpitates beneath every pore. The movement of a wrinkle and the pursing of a lip are seismic shocks and the flow of tides, the flux and reflux of this human epidermis. But for me Dreyer’s brilliant sense of cinema is evidenced in the exterior scene, which every other director would assuredly have shot in the studio. The décor as built evoked a Middle Ages of the theater and of miniatures. In one sense, nothing is less realistic than this tribunal in the cemetery or this drawbridge, but the whole is lit by the light of the sun and the gravedigger throws a spadeful of real earth into the hole. It is these “secondary” details, apparently aesthetically at odds with the rest of the work, which give it its truly cinematic quality. If the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of concrete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real, it becomes all the more important to discern those elements in filming that confirm our sense of natural reality and those that destroy that feeling. On the other hand, it certainly argues a lack of perception to derive one’s sense of reality from these accumulations of factual detail. It is possible to argue that Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an eminently realistic film, though everything about it is stylized. Everything, except for the rarely noticeable

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sound of a windshield wiper, the murmur of a waterfall, or the rushing sound of soil escaping from a broken vase. These are the noises, chosen precisely for their “indifference” to the action, that guarantee its reality. The cinema being of its essence a dramaturgy of nature, there can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place of the universe rather than as part of it. The screen cannot give us the illusion of this feeling of space without calling on certain natural guarantees. But it is less a question of set construction or of architecture or of immensity than of isolating the aesthetic catalyst, which it is sufficient to introduce in an infinitesimal dose, to have it immediately take on the reality of nature. The concrete forest of Die Nibelungen may well pretend to be an infinite expanse. We do not believe it to be so, whereas the trembling of just one branch in the wind, and the sunlight, would be enough to conjure up all the forests of the world. If this analysis be well founded, then we see that the basic aesthetic problem of filmed theater is indeed that of the décor. The trump card that the director must hold is the reconversion into a window onto the world of a space oriented toward an interior dimension only, namely the closed and conventional area of the theatrical play.

Hamlet (dir. Laurence Oliver, 1948)

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It is not in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet that the text seems to be rendered superfluous or its strength diminished, by directorial interpretations, still less in Orson Welles’s Macbeth, but paradoxically in the stage productions of Gaston Baty, to the precise extent that they go out of their way to create a cinematographic space on the stage; and to deny that the settings have a reverse side, thus reducing the sonority of the text simply to the vibration of the voice of the actor who is left without his “resonance box” like a violin that is nothing else but strings. One would never deny that the essential thing in the theater is the text. The latter conceived for the anthropocentric expression proper to the stage and having as its function to bring nature to it cannot, without losing its raison d’être, be used in a space as transparent as glass. The problem, then, that faces the filmmaker is to give his décor a dramatic opaqueness while at the same time reflecting its natural realism. Once this paradox of space has been dealt with, the director, so far from hesitating to bring theatrical conventions and faithfulness to the text to the screen, will find himself now, on the contrary, completely free to rely on them. From that point on it is no longer a matter of running away from those things that “make theater” but in the long run to acknowledge their existence by rejecting the resources of the cinema, as Cocteau did in Les Parents terribles and Welles in Macbeth, or by putting them in quotation marks as Olivier did in Henry V. The evidence of a return to filmed theater that we have had during the last ten years belongs essentially to the history of décor and editing. It is a conquest of realism—not, certainly, the realism of subject matter or realism of expression but that realism of space, without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema.

An Analogy from Play-Acting This progress in filmed theater has only been possible insofar as the opposition between film and theater did not rest on the ontological category of presence but on a psychology of “play.” In passing from one to the other, one goes from the absolute to the relative, from antinomy to simple contradiction. While the cinema cannot offer the spectator the community feeling of theater, a certain knowledge of direction will allow him finally—and this is a decisive factor—to preserve the meaning and force of the text. The grafting of the theatrical text onto the décor of cinema is an operation that today we know can be successful. There remains that awareness of the active opposition existing between the spectator and the actor, which constitutes the “play” of theater and is symbolized by scenic architecture. But there is a way of reducing even this to the psychology of the cinematic. The reasoning of Rosenkrantz concerning opposition and identification requires in effect an important correction. It carries with it, still, a measure of equivocation. Rosenkrantz seems to equate identification with passivity and

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escape—an accepted fact in his time because of the condition of the cinema but less and less so in its present stage of evolution. Actually the cinema of myth and dream is now only one variety of production and one that is less and less frequent. One must not confuse an accidental and historical social condition with an unalterable psychological one—two activities, that is to say, of the spectator’s consciousness which converge but are not part of one another. I do not identify equally with Tarzan and Bresson’s curé in Diary of a Country Priest. The only denominator common to my attitude to these two heroes is that I believe they really exist, that I cannot refuse, except by staying away from the film, to share their adventures and to live them through with them, inside their universe, a universe that is not metaphorical and figurative but spatially real. This interior sharing does not exclude, in the second example above, a consciousness of myself as distinct from the person from whom I chose to be alienated in the first example. These factors originating in the affective order are not the only ones that argue against passive identification; films like André Malraux’s L’Espoir or Citizen Kane require in the spectator an intellectual alertness incompatible with passivity. The most one can suggest is that the psychology of the cinematographic image offers a natural incline leading towards a sociology of the hero characterized by a passive identification. But in the arts as in morals, inclines are also made to be climbed. While the contemporary man of the theater often tries to lessen the sense of theatricality in a performance by a kind of realism in the production—just as those who love to go to the Grand Guignol play at being frightened but hold on at the very height of the horror to a delicious awareness of being fooled—the film director discovers on his side means of exciting the awareness of the spectator and of provoking him to reflection. And this is something that sets up a conflict at the very heart of the identification. Such a private zone of consciousness, this self-awareness at the height of illusion, creates a kind of private set of footlights. In filmed theater it is no longer the microcosm of the play that is set over against nature, but the spectator who is conscious of himself. On the screen Hamlet and Les Parents terribles cannot, nor should they, escape from the laws of cinematic perception; Elsinore and “La Roulotte” really exist but I pass through them unseen, rejoicing in that equivocal freedom which certain dreams allow us. I am walking but moving backwards. Certainly the possibility of a state of intellectual self-awareness at the moment of psychological identification should never be confused with that act of the will which constitutes theater, and that is why it is foolish to identify stage and screen as Marcel Pagnol does. No matter how conscious of myself, how intelligent a film can make me, it is not to my will that it appeals—only at most to my good will. A film calls for a certain effort on my part so that I may understand and enjoy it, but it does not depend on me for its existence. Nevertheless it would certainly seem, from experience, that the margin of awareness allowed

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by the cinema is enough to establish an acceptable equivalent to the pleasure given by theater, at least enough to preserve what is essential to the artistic values of the play. The film, while it cannot pretend to be a complete substitute for the stage performance, is at least capable of assuring the theater a valid artistic existence and can offer us a comparable pleasure. There can never be a question of anything more than a complex mechanical aesthetic where the original theatrical effectiveness is almost never directly applied; rather it is preserved, reconstituted, and transmitted thanks to a system of circuits, as in Henry V, of amplification as in Macbeth, of induction or interference. The true filmed theater is not the phonograph, it is its Martenot wave [an electro-phonic instrument whose musical notes can be traced to electro-magnetic vibrations ultimately converted into sound waves by some form of loudspeaker].

Morality Thus the practice (certain) like the theory (possible) of successful filmed theater reveals the reasons for former failures. Straightforward animated photography of theater is a childish error recognized as such these thirty years, and on which there is no point in insisting further. The heresy of film adaptation has taken longer to smoke out. It will continue to have its dupes but we now know where it leads—to aesthetic limbos that belong neither to film nor to theater, to that “filmed theater” justly condemned as a sin against the spirit of cinema. The true solution, revealed at last, consists in realizing that it is not a matter of transferring to the screen the dramatic element—an element interchangeable between one art and another—of a theatrical work, but inversely the theatrical quality of the drama. The subject of the adaptation is not that of the play, it is the play precisely in its scenic essence. This truth, apparent at last, will allow us to reach a conclusion concerning three propositions seemingly paradoxical at first, but which on reflection are seen to be quite evident and clear.

Theater, an Aid to Cinema The first proposition is that, so far from being a corruption of cinema, filmed theater serves on the contrary to enrich and elevate it. Let us first look at the matter of theater. It is, alas, only too certain that the level of film production is intellectually much below, if not that of current dramatic production—think of Jean de Létraz and Henry Bernstein—at least of the living heritage of theater, even if only because of its great age. True, our century is no less that of Charlie Chaplin than was the seventeenth century that of Racine and Molière, but after all the cinema has only fifty years of literature behind it while the theater has twenty-five centuries. What would the French theater be like today if, as is the case with the cinema, it had nothing to offer but the production of the

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past decade? Since the cinema is undeniably passing through a crisis of subject matter it is not risking anything by employing screen writers like Shakespeare or even Feydeau. Let us not belabor the subject. The case is only too clear. However, the inferiority is less evident in the realm of form. If the cinema is a major art with its own laws and language, what can it gain by submitting to the laws and language of another art? A great deal! And precisely to the extent to which, laying aside all its vain and puerile tricks, it is seriously concerned to subordinate itself and render a service. To justify this point of view completely, one should really discuss it within the framework of the aesthetic history of influence in art in general. This would almost certainly reveal, I feel, that at some stage in their evolution there has been a definite commerce between the techniques of the various arts. Our prejudice about “pure art” is a critical development of relatively recent origin. But the authority of these precedents is not indispensable to my argument. The art of direction, the mechanics of which in relation to certain major films I had to explain earlier, more even than my theoretical hypotheses, supposes on the part of the director a grasp of the language of cinematography equaled only by his knowledge of what theater is. If the film d’art failed where Olivier and Cocteau have succeeded, it is first of all because these men have at their disposal a much more developed means of expression, but they also know how to use it more effectively than their contemporaries. To say of Les Parents terribles that it is perhaps an excellent film, but that it is not cinema because it follows the play step by step, is critical nonsense. On the contrary, it is precisely for this reason that it is cinema. It is Topaze by Pagnol—in its most recent incarnation—which is not cinema, precisely because it is no longer theater. There is more cinema, and great cinema at that, in Henry V alone than in 90% of original scripts. Pure poetry is certainly not that which has nothing to say, as Cocteau has so well demonstrated: all the examples of pure poetry given by the Abbé Brémond illustrate the exact opposite. Racine’s line “La Fille de Minos et Pasiphae” is as informative as a birth certificate. There is likewise a way, unfortunately not yet practiced, of reciting this poem on the screen that would be pure cinema because it would respect, in the most intelligent way, its true theatrical value. The more the cinema intends to be faithful to the text and to its theatrical requirements, the more of necessity must it delve deeper into its own language. The best translation is that which demonstrates a close intimacy with the genius of both languages and, likewise, a mastery of both.

The Cinema Will Save the Theater That is why the cinema will give back to the theater unstintingly what it took from her, if it has not already done so. For if the success of filmed theater

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supposes that dialectical progress has been made with the cinematic form, it implies both reciprocally and a fortiori a reevaluation of the essentially theatrical. The idea exploited by Marcel Pagnol according to which the cinema will replace the theater by “canning it” is completely false. The screen cannot replace the stage as the piano has supplanted the clavichord. And to begin with, replace the theater for whom? Not for the filmgoing public that long ago deserted the theater. The divorce between public and theater does not date, so far as I know, from that historic evening staged by the Lumière brothers at the Grand Café in 1895. Are we talking then about the privileged minority of culture and wealth that actually makes up the theater audiences? But we see that Jean de Létraz is not bankrupt and that the visitor to Paris from the provinces does not confuse the breasts of Françoise Arnoul, which he has seen on the screen, with those of Nathalie Nattier at the Palais-Royal, although the latter may be covered by a brassiere; but they are there, if I may say so, “in the flesh.” Ah! The irreplaceable presence of the actor! As for the “serious” theaters, say the Marigny or the Français, it is clearly a question of a public that, for the most part, does not go to the cinema and, for the others, of people who go to both without confusing the pleasure to be derived from each. The fact is, if any ground has been taken over it is not the territory of the theatrical spectacle as it exists; it is much more the taking over of the place abandoned long ago by the now-defunct forms of popular theater. So, far from being a serious rival to the stage, the cinema is in the process of giving back, to a public that had lost it, a taste and feeling for theater. It is possible that canned theater had something to do at the time with the disappearance of touring companies from the road. When Marcel Pagnol makes a film of Topaze, there is no doubt about his intentions, namely to make his play available to the provinces with a “Paris cast” at the price of a cinema seat. It is often the same with the boulevard plays: their successful run finished, the film is distributed to those who were unable to see the play. In those areas where the Baret touring companies performed with a second-rate cast, the film offers at a very reasonable price not only the original cast, but even more magnificent sets. But this illusion was really successful for only a few years and we now see provincial tours on the road again, the better for their experience. The public they have recaptured, made blasé by the cinema and its glamorous casting along with its luxurious sets, has “come to,” as they say, and is looking for something that is, more or less, theater. But the popularizing of Paris successes is still not the ultimate end of the theatrical revival nor is it the chief merit of the “competition” between screen and stage. One might even say that this improvement in the situation of the touring companies is due to badly filmed theater. It is the defects of these films that have finally turned the stomach of a section of the public and sent them back into the theaters.

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It was the same situation with regard to photography and painting. Cinema dispensed from photography that which was aesthetically least essential to it: likeness and anecdote. The high standard and the lower cost of photography, together with the ease with which pictures are taken, have at last contributed to the due evaluation of painting and to establishing it unalterably in its proper place. But this is not the end of the benefits derived from their coexistence. The photographers have not just served as the vassals of the painters. At the same time, as it became more conscious of itself, painting absorbed something of photography. It is Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Manet, who have understood from the inside, and in essence, the nature of the photographic phenomenon and, prophetically, even the cinematographic phenomenon. Faced with photography, they opposed it in the only valid way, by a dialectical enriching of pictorial technique. They understood the laws of the new image better than the photographers and well before the moviemakers, and it is they who first applied them. Nevertheless, this is not all, and photography is in the process of rendering services to the plastic arts that are even more decisive still. Their fields henceforth clearly known and delimited, the automatic image multiplies and renews our knowledge of the pictorial image. Malraux has said what needed to be said on this matter. If painting has been able to become the most individual of arts, the most onerous, the most independent and uncompromising of all while at the same time being the most accessible, it is thanks to color photography. The same process applies to the theater; bad “canned theater” has helped true theater to become aware of its own laws. The cinema has likewise contributed to a new concept of theatrical production. These are results henceforth firmly established. But there is a third result that good filmed theater permits us to look for, namely the remarkable increase in the breadth of understanding of theater among the general public. What then is a film like Henry V ? First of all, it is Shakespeare for everybody. Furthermore, and supremely, it is a blazing light thrown onto the dramatic poetry of Shakespeare—the most effective and brilliant of theater lessons. Shakespeare emerges from the process twice himself. Not only does the adaptation of the play multiply his potential audience in the same way that the adaptation of novels makes the fortune of publishers, but also, the public is far better prepared than before to enjoy the stage play. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet itself must obviously increase the audience for Jean-Louis Barrault’s Hamlet and sharpen the critical sense. Just as there is a difference that can never be bridged between the finest modern reproduction of a painting and the pleasure of owning the original, seeing Hamlet on the screen cannot take the place of a performance of the play by, say, a group of English students. But you need a genuine education in theater to appreciate the real-life performance by amateurs, that is, to be able truly to share in what they are doing. So the more successful the filmed theater, the deeper it

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probes into the essence of theater, the better to serve it, the more clearly it will reveal the unbridgeable gulf between stage and screen. It is, on the contrary, the canned theater, on the one hand, and mediocre popular theater, on the other, that give rise to confusion. Les Parents terribles, for example, never misleads its audience. There is not a sequence in it that is not more effective than its stage counterpart, while there is not one which does not allude by implication to that indefinable pleasure that I would have had from the real thing. There is no better propaganda for the real theater than well-filmed theater. These truths are henceforth indisputable and it would have been ridiculous of me to have spent so much time on them if the myth about filmed theater did not still survive too frequently in the form of prejudice, of misunderstanding, and of minds already made up.

From Filmed Theater to Cinematographic Theater My last argument, I realize, will be the boldest. So far we have considered the theater as an aesthetic absolute to which the cinema can come close in a more or less satisfactory fashion, but only in the right circumstances and under the best possible conditions, as its humble servant. However, we can see in slapstick the rebirth of dramatic forms that had practically disappeared, such as farce and the commedia dell’arte. Certain dramatic situations, certain techniques that had degenerated in the course of time, found again, in the cinema, first the sociological nourishment they needed to survive and, still better, the conditions favorable to an expansive use of their aesthetic, which the theater had kept congenitally atrophied. In making a protagonist out of space, the screen does not betray the spirit of farce; it simply gives to the metaphysical meaning of Scapin’s stick its true dimensions, namely those of the whole universe. Slapstick is first and foremost, or at least is also, the dramatic expression of the tyranny of things, out of which Keaton even more than Chaplin knew how to create a tragedy of the object. But it is true that the forms of comedy create something of a special problem in the history of filmed theater, probably because laughter allows the audience to become aware of itself and to use this to experience a measure of the opposition that theater creates between actor and audience. In any case, and that is why we have not gone farther into the study of it, the grafting together of cinema and comedy-theater happened spontaneously and has been so perfect that its fruit has always been accepted as the product of pure cinema. Now that the screen can welcome other kinds of theater besides comedy without betraying them, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot likewise give the theater new life, employing certain of the stage’s own techniques. Film cannot be, indeed must not be, as we have seen, simply a paradoxical modality of theater production, but stage structures have their importance and it is not a matter of

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indifference whether Julius Caesar is played in the arena at Nîmes or in a studio; yet certain dramatic works, and by no means the least of them, have suffered in a very material way these thirty-to-fifty years from a discord between contemporary taste and the style of the staging that the plays call for. I am thinking particularly of tragedy. There, the handicap from which we suffer is due especially to the disappearance of the race of traditional tragedians of the old school—the Mounet-Sullys and the Sarah Bernhardts, that is, who disappeared at the beginning of the century like prehistoric creatures of the secondary period.

Julius Caesar (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953)

By a stroke of irony, it is the cinema that has preserved these tragedians’ bones, fossilized in the films d’art. It has become a commonplace to attribute their disappearance to the cinema and for two converging reasons: one aesthetic, the other sociological. The screen has certainly modified our feeling about verisimilitude in interpretation. It is enough to see one of the little films of Bernhardt or Charles le Bargy to understand that this type of actor was still trussed up to all intents and purposes in cothurnus and mask. But the mask is simply an object of laughter while a close-up can drown us in a tear, and the megaphone is ridiculous when the microphone can produce at will a roar from the feeblest vocal chords. Thus we are accustomed to the inner naturalness that only allows the stage actor a slender margin of stylization beyond verisimilitude. The sociological factor is probably even more decisive. The success and effectiveness of a Jean Mounet-Sully were undoubtedly due to his talent but helped on by the consenting complicity of the public. It was the phenomenon

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of the monstre sacré, which is today diverted almost exclusively to the cinema. To say that the classes at the conservatories do not produce any more tragedians doesn’t by any means imply that no more Sarah Bernhardts are being born, only that their gifts and the times do not consort well. Thus, Voltaire wore out his lungs plagiarizing the tragedy of the seventeenth century because he thought that it was only Racine who had died, when actually it was tragedy itself. Today we see not the slightest difference between Mounet-Sully and a ham from the provinces because we could not recognize a tragedian of the old school when we saw one. Only the “monster” survives in the film d’art for a young man today; the sacred quality has departed. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that Racine’s tragedy is in a period of eclipse. Thanks to its conservative attitude, the Comédie Française is in the fortunate position of being able to guarantee him a reasonable life, but no longer a triumphant one. Furthermore, this is only because of an interesting filtering-through of traditional values and their delicate adaptation to modern tastes—not by a radical renewal straight out of the period. As for ancient tragedy, it is paradoxically to the Sorbonne and to the archaeological enthusiasm of students that it owes the fact that it moves us once more. But it is important to see in these experiments by amateurs an extremely radical reaction against the actor’s theater. Thus, is it not natural to think that if the cinema has completely turned to its own advantage the aesthetic and the sociology of the sacred monster, that it might return them if the theater came looking for them? It is reasonable enough to dream what Racine’s Athalie could have been with Yvonne de Bray and Cocteau directing. But doubtless it would not be just the style of interpretation of tragedy that would find its raison d’être once more on the screen. One could well imagine a corresponding revolution on the stage that, without ceasing to be faithful to the spirit of the theater, would offer it new forms in keeping with modern taste and especially at the level of a great mass audience. Filmtheater is waiting for a Jean Cocteau to make it a cinematographic theater. Thus not only is theater on film from now on aesthetically founded in truth and fact, not only do we know that henceforth there are no plays that cannot be brought to the screen, whatever their style, provided one can visualize a reconversion of stage space in accordance with the data. But it may also be that the only possible modern theatrical production of certain classics would be on the screen. It is no chance matter that some of the best filmmakers are also the best stage directors. Welles and Olivier did not come to the cinema out of cynicism, snobbery, or ambition—not even, like Pagnol, to popularize theatrical works. Cinema is for them only a complementary form of theater, the chance to produce theater precisely as they feel and see it.

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Chapter 8

“Stanislavsky’s System in the Cinema” Vsevolod Pudovkin

From Sight and Sound (Jan.–Mar. 1953) Stanislavsky’s aim was to create a realistic theatre. All his artistic conceptions, the whole of his intuition, were applied to breaking away from the hackneyed theatrical technique and to finding such lines for the actor’s work as would always make the theatre a vivid reflection of real life. To attain this, Stanislavsky began by applying the full power of his creative analysis to a careful study of the basic principles for an artist’s work on his part, and on himself, in the process of creating a stage character. Though before Stanislavsky’s time others had tackled similar problems, the majority had been content either to depict personal emotions or to formulate general principles of a poetic rather than scientific character. Stanislavsky never rejected what had been done before his time, but he succeeded in showing that the achievements of exceptionally gifted individuals were merely isolated victories of outstanding talent, and not the result of a proper training of the artists. Stanislavsky’s great merit lies in the fact that the results of his theatrical analysis, scrupulously verified by experiment, have produced a number of objective principles which can serve every actor and every producer as a basis for methodical and fruitful work, irrespective of their individual temperament or talent. By collecting and analyzing examples of outstanding acting, Stanislavsky sought to reveal the essence and the causes of individual success, and thus discover objective rules suitable for a systematic training of actors in general. The cinema, which is closely linked both with theatrical art and with literature and the graphic arts, has naturally adopted the basic principles of Stanislavsky’s school and continues to develop them successfully. Although Stanislavsky did not directly concern himself with the cinema, in his theatrical work he had to face a number of problems to which the art of the cinema alone could offer a complete solution. In his book My Life in Art, Stanislavsky

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gives the story of the premiere of the play The Loss of the Hope in Studio I of the Arts Theatre. The play was staged and acted in a hall so small that the audience was up close to the actors. Owing to this closeness of the public and cast, all exaggeration of gesture and intonation had to go and every half-tone and subtle nuance acquired extreme importance. The unusually intimate association between actor and spectator produced a feeling of particular sincerity, as in real life. The lifelike quality of this performance impressed Stanislavsky; it revealed to him new possibilities of altering existing theatrical forms and transforming the stage performance into a more direct reflection of real life. He wanted to carry this Studio I experience on to the big stage of the Arts Theatre, but this proved unexpectedly impossible, for the studio performance, created in a small hall, literally could be neither seen nor heard in one built to hold hundreds of spectators, and the charm of the intimate association between cast and audience vanished in a hall that demanded emphasis on voice and gesture. This experience showed Stanislavsky the limits beyond which the reproduction of real life in a mass theatrical spectacle could not go. He decided to seek ways of completely fusing the actor’s realistic behavior on the stage with the emphasis inevitable in theatrical expression. He did not know, of course, that everything which had been discovered during the intimate performance at Studio I, though impracticable on a large stage, was perfectly possible for the new cinematic art, which both brings the actor close to the spectator and yet broadens out the hall to the ends of the earth. Stanislavsky’s endeavour to bring the actor’s art as close as possible to a truthful and delicate rendering of human experience was more than once brought up short by the limitations of the stage. He tells how once he tried to introduce a long pause full of complex inner life. He sat for a long time on a bench set close to the footlights and went through a series of thoughts and emotions, but it was all lost on the audience because of the distance between him and most of the spectators. In close-up, however, the public would have been able to follow on the screen all the fine play of eyes and features and thus take in everything Stanislavsky wished to impart. Stanislavsky’s attempts to create scenery and surroundings as close as possible to reality were often criticized as an unnecessary introduction of superfluous realism onto the stage. This reproach is quite ill-founded. Great artist that he was, Stanislavsky sought to give a consistent unity to the life of the characters by means of the reality surrounding them, though he realized the limits set by the technical possibilities of the stage. In his reminiscences he tells how, when he was in the Crimea with his company, one day in a park he came upon a spot very similar to the setting of a scene in A Month in the Country. He and Olga Knipper were moved to try out their scene in this natural setting, but after the first few sentences they gave it up. The conventional acting elaborated on the stage was in too great a contradiction to the natural

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surroundings for these sensitive artists to go on with their scene. The acting of a screen actor, however, approximating normal human behavior as closely as possible, can merge completely with a natural landscape faithfully reproduced on the screen. The cinema provided the realistic actor with many new opportunities of giving a direct reflection of life, and it became the highway to the development of Stanislavsky’s art. His work over a period of many years laid the foundations of this development. The immediate contact between the art of the cinema and that of the stage came naturally through the actor. So it was with me in the very beginning of my independent work as a director. Among the large number of actors of various theatrical schools, I found those trained by Stanislavsky the most congenial. On starting independent work I was already convinced that the art of the cinema came nearer to giving a true reflection of real life than any other art, and that it could perfectly well do without the theatrical conventions that trammelled the stage. Stanislavsky’s system became my school, and my first experiments in cinematography aimed at shaking off every convention of stage technique unnecessary to the screen actor. From the first I took a dislike to artificial scenery, realizing all the cinema’s capacity to absorb creatively the natural surroundings in which living people—the actors—can move. Having acquainted myself with Stanislavsky’s method of training actors, I realized that while the essence of this realist method was indispensable to cinematic art, much of its technique—created under the special conditions of the stage—was foreign to the very nature of the cinema. The basis of the Stanislavsky method is, first of all, how to form a link between the character and the actor’s natural personality. Stanislavsky’s profound analysis of the process that he called the “transmutation” of the actor—once supposed to be accessible only to men of genius—coupled with incessant experimentation, enabled the director and actor, by means of consistent and concentrated work, to come closer to the great truthfulness in acting that always conquers the audience, acting which had previously been regarded as accidental or even of divine inspiration. The first precept of Stanislavsky’s which I studied was that of “living the part.” By this Stanislavsky understood the process taking place in the actor’s inner self. He knew what a deep gulf lies between the theoretical concept of the inner life of a character formed by the director and the actor when thinking out the part, and the actual acting on the stage, between even the clearest realization of what should be done and the acting itself. Every actor and every director knows how difficult is the first step in this transition from the imagined to the real. The genius of Stanislavsky blazed the trail for this transition. He insisted that every actor should live his part as he would in real life if he were the character he is creating. Naturally, the actor’s first steps in this direction

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must be connected with the world of his personal experience, with memories of how he has behaved in similar moments. When the actor lives some part of his role fully, be it only for a brief moment, he immediately experiences the joy of success so necessary to every artist. In order to progress, a creative artist must not only understand success but feel it. Such direct personal memories, introduced into the life of the character he is creating, give the actor an example of how he should feel throughout his part, though he has to bridge many gaps between his own consciousness and that of the character. When I first met Stanislavsky’s pupils and followers, during the production of the film Mother, we found it hard going. How was I to find a way to the hearts and minds of the people I was to direct, who were to create characters that as yet existed only in my imagination? This was my difficulty. Theirs was of a different kind, for they were artists, masters of a technique elaborated in close contact with the conventions of the stage. As a director I found much of their technique unacceptable. Not that their acting had anything artificial about it (as was quite unjustifiably suggested at the time), but there were external peculiarities of acting unwanted on the screen, a theatrical emphasis of speech and gesture needed on the stage in order to be visible and audible to an audience separated from the actors by considerable distances. Feeling as I did that the screen demanded from acting the nearest possible approach to human behavior in ordinary life, the first task I set myself and the artists was the search for the greatest possible spontaneity and simplicity. I knew, of course, that a superficially natural reproduction of life was not sufficient, and that the screen, like the stage, needed somewhat heightened expressiveness, but even then I realized the special capacities that distinguished the cinema from the theatre. Clearly, with an actor taken in close-up, what was needed first and foremost was complete truthfulness of acting. My first experiences in directing met with a sincere and creative response and I felt that the foundations of complete mutual confidence had been laid. One of the first scenes that I took with the actress playing the part of the mother was the following: under the floor the mother finds weapons hidden by her son. This unexpected discovery reveals the terrible danger that threatens him—prison, Siberia, death. She is kneeling on the floor holding the weapons in her hands. There is a knock at the door. She raises her head. The door opens and the first thing she sees are the soles of the feet of a man who is being carried in. Without yet understanding what has happened, she guesses that the man is her husband. Here the task of the actress and of the young and inexperienced director was an exceptionally difficult one. To begin with, I left the actress to act this scene in her own way, and she naturally tried to do this as she would have done on the stage. She sought to arouse in herself a strong emotion expressed only by gestures: she stepped back, put her hands to her head, made various

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movements—each of which horrified me by its exaggeration. I felt all this to be unnecessary, but what was needed I did not yet know. First I removed all that seemed to me superfluous and exaggerated, and then I decided on a step that even today, as I recall it, amazes me by its temerity, for I was much younger than the actress and far less experienced. This was to suggest that she should act the scene without making a single movement or gesture, while retaining the inner emotional state she had found. The actress did this, and I saw how the complete immobility of one who could arouse in herself a strong and sincere emotion gave her an almost physical sense of suffering. Then I decided on a further step and allowed the actress to make a single gesture that I had noticed among the many she had made in the beginning. It was a movement of the hand as of someone naïvely fending off some terrible threat. I was so deeply persuaded that the inner truth of the emotion would find its best expression in this chosen gesture that I took the risk of filming this scene without any previous rehearsal so as not to lose its freshness. Thus I began to discover the value of the actor’s art through Stanislavsky’s training. Stanislavsky created a whole system of work intended to develop the power of imagination in the actor. And it is up to the director, when helping the artist in his search for truthful acting, to do all he can to remove obstacles to the free play of imagination; further, he must help him by creating a series of impulses that support and develop it, for the less imagination the artist has to expend on picturing the external surroundings, the more easily will he concentrate on his emotions. Temporarily and conventionally I shall separate two fields of work on creative imagination that in reality are closely linked together: the one connected with the external expression of the actor’s thoughts and feelings, his behavior, and the other connected with his emotional state. When speaking of the behavior of the actor, we must turn to that part of the work on the role which Stanislavsky and his pupils called “physical action.” In his search for complete unity in the actor’s living of his part, Stanislavsky was impelled in the later stages of his work to pay particular attention to this field. The actor is expressive, he vividly and clearly impresses the spectator, when he is active, when he solves not only the inner problems arising in his mind, but also the external physical problems confronting his will and impulses. The solving of the physical problem, as Stanislavsky rightly understands it, is as it were the culmination of the inner process and must be organically integrated with the whole of the actor’s experience of living his part. The “physical action” can be best described as the directed action of one moved by thought and feeling. The spectacular nature of stage and screen give particular interest to such human actions as are of a vivid, visible character. The art of the actor in silent films developed first of all in the field of physical action, where both he and the director had to seek the greatest possible truthfulness of expression. Here

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Stanislavsky’s ideas proved exceptionally fruitful, while the practical experience of the silent cinema was in its turn useful and important for experimental work on a scale impossible for the theatre. The subtitles themselves were a sort of summing up of the deep and subtle unspoken acting that gave full expression to the actor’s emotional state. It is important to note at this point that the cinema did not follow the road of pantomime: that is to say, of an art which had elaborated conventional signs to replace speech. The fact that the actor was brought close to the spectator, who could thus perceive the most subtle expressions of human emotion—a glance, a hidden smile, a barely perceptible gesture of the hand—freed the cinema from the need to invent artificial conventional signs. The first claim made on the actor, on which Stanislavsky always insisted, is “transmutation,” the ability to transform, by the power of his imagination, his whole self with all his individual traits and qualities, into something different, which belongs no longer to him but to the character he impersonates. In this process of transition it is vital for him to preserve even in imaginary conditions a live personality, thinking and behaving with the same singleness of purpose as does a real man in real life, and neither break nor lose the links indispensable to this singleness of human behavior. That is why the basis of the actor’s art must be the faculty of finding, preserving, and strengthening the inner links that make every moment of his acting an indissoluble part of the whole. It is the indispensable cooperation between actor and director, directed at the main goal—that of giving life to the created character—which produces the capacity to sense when these links are broken and to restore them. The director who remains an objective observer can immediately realize any such break in the natural unity in any fragment of the part being acted, and he can stop the actor the moment a false note is struck as an inevitable result of this break. Many know the difficulties experienced by the actor searching for the right intonation, when he tries to utter a word or a phrase first in one way, then in another. Even if as a result of such blind attempts he does find an intonation that he or the director regards as successful, he may well be unable to remember or to repeat it. The true intonation should be sought, not by hitor-miss methods, but purposefully in the natural sequence of feeling, gesture, and speech. This complex whole, indivisible in real life, should not be formally memorized by the actor but mastered as a real and complete activity. This is the path towards realistic art. If these precepts of Stanislavsky’s are applied to the cinema, it will appear that the entire period of the silent film was in essence a development and elaboration of the school of acting linked with the search for the truth of physical action. In this sense the period of the silent film provided all that was basic and necessary for the later stages, when sound and speech came in. All my

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work with the speaking actor, our common search for realism in his acting, have proved that it is in the field of gesture, meaning the primary physical movement born of emotion, where the actor must particularly seek to perfect his technique. I knew what it was that frightened me in the acting of artists who did not belong to the Stanislavsky school. It was that their theatrical gesture was stronger than their feeling, and in some particularly bad cases the gesture had become fixed and conventional and quite unconnected with feeling. The Stanislavsky school does not in any circumstances admit such misconceived theatrical effects. The screen offers the actor a special opportunity for reducing gesture to the minimum, which in itself makes it all the more expressive. The screen actor has the advantage over the stage actor that he can behave towards the spectator just as he would towards someone standing at his side; but these special opportunities demand from him the closest possible attention to complete truthfulness in the subtlest of external expressions of his state of mind. Behind the drama or scenario there always lies some phenomenon of life disclosed in the form of conflict. This conflict is always shown in the most expressive, spectacular forms. The character’s every thought and feeling must lead him to physical action, and speech expressing the content of the thought must be organically fused with physical action. Such is the law of any stage or screen production. Thus physical action may and should be considered as the most important, and in most cases the decisive, element with which the actor and the director must concern themselves from the outset. That is why Stanislavsky concentrated so much on physical action as the starting point in the actor’s assimilation of his part. It is not only in separate fragments or scenes that unity and continuity of action are necessary. The actions of the actors carry the characters created by them through the whole play and bring their destinies to fulfilment, to the final aim of the general development of the play or picture and the final formulation of its ideas. Attaining purposefulness and continuity in this general movement means making the play realistic. In the general, purposeful movement of the action every actor must have his personal basic aim, which he achieves at the moment of the play’s ending. The directed impulse of his will, in opposition to the surrounding circumstances that help or hinder the attainment of the final aim, ensures what Stanislavsky called the through-line of the actor in the play. It is easier for the stage actor to achieve this “through-line” than for the screen actor. During rehearsals the stage play is, as a rule, run through in its entirety. Besides, on the stage the actor can continue his search for continuity in his living of the part as it passes through the whole play. In the cinema the purely technical conditions of camerawork seldom afford this opportunity. In

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the great majority of cases it is quite impossible to rehearse the scenario as a whole. Nevertheless, thorough and concentrated work on obtaining this throughline of Stanislavsky’s is as necessary to the screen actor as it is to the stage actor. The problem of preserving the unity and continuity of an acted part lies mainly with the director. This demands first of all intensive imaginative work, the faculty of being always able to see the future picture in its entirety, in the form not of abstract situations and aims but of animated, visible, and audible scenes; it demands secondly an unfailing visual memory that can retain vivid impressions of everything already acted by the artist. Only when he possesses and constantly develops these faculties can the director help the actor master the complicated conditions of filmmaking, which force the actor to play disjointed parts of his role without an immediate perception of the natural sequence. I remember how, when making the film Mother, I purposely began with the last part of the picture, which demanded the maximum effort from the actress: the mother, tearing herself from the body of her dead son, lifts up the red banner and walks toward the onrushing cossacks. This is the supreme moment of the part. Both in the beginning and the middle of the film there were scenes demanding strong emotional expression, but I realized that none of them should be allowed to equal the power of that final scene. The thematic content of the picture must be the moving force in every scene; it must live in every detail. This can be attained only when each part, and the whole picture, are perceived by director and cast as one continuous movement in which there are no gaps between the feelings and gestures of any one of the actors, between gesture and speech, between the text and the translation into physical action of the idea it contains, between physical action and its direct physical object, and finally between any one particular aim and the general aim toward which the action as a whole is directed. Work on a stage or a screen play may present two possibilities: either the director and the actor discover the truth of life hidden but actually existing in the scene, or else they introduce it as a necessary corrective suggested by their perception of truth trained by practical realist experience. In both cases a clear and definite method of working is imperative. This is the method Stanislavsky discovered for theatrical art, which has found tremendous new possibilities of fruitful development in cinematic art.

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Chapter 9

“Acting in Film and Theatre” Josef von Sternberg

From Film Culture (1955) “The Manager: Not at all. Your soul, or whatever you like to call it, takes shape here. The actors give body and form to it, voice and gesture. And my actors—let me tell you—have given expression to much better material than this little drama of yours, which may or may not hold up on the stage. But if it does, its merit, believe me, will be due to my actors. The Father: I don’t dare contradict you, sir; but it is torture for us who are as we are, with these bodies of ours, to see those faces. . . . The Manager: (Cutting him short and out of patience) Good heavens! The make-up will remedy all that, the make-up. . . .” —Pirandello, Six Characters ın Search of an Author

The rice fields of Java remain in my eyes as if I had been there yesterday. Standing in the center of these lovely green stretches furrowed with quiet water are the most interesting scarecrows that can be found on earth. High over the rice on bamboo stilts is a palmleaf-covered hut and Jong strings with hundreds of tiny bells reach from it to the far corners of these plantations. When the birds come for the rice, a graceful Javanese woman lazily stretches out a shining copper-hued arm and frightens the birds away with an eerie tinkle. The actor is the opposite of a scarecrow—it is his function to attract. The easiest way to attract is to be beautiful. Arnold Schoenberg’s wife once said to me with a good measure of unnecessary passion: “How can a person think and not engrave the face with ugly wrinkles?” Though this is far-fetched, it may not be entirely without foundation. It is not particularly necessary to think deeply, but it is, perhaps, superfluous for a handsome person to think deeply. Fortunately, the ability of an actor to think is not subjected to the same strain as his appearance. 119

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The sing-song girl, wheeled in a festively lighted jinricksha through the streets of China, has a simple task. The girls who live on flower boats have a simpler task. They are not required to sing or to move. Not always is entertainment expressed in this primitive form. The rice-powdered geisha in Japan is many steps higher and often has achieved enough grace and intelligence to make her charm and wit the prime essentials. The theatre tries to make use of all these values. Generally speaking, the original attraction of the theatre was carnal rather than intellectual, and is still so today. But no matter how beautiful men or women may be, they rarely are content to live by looks alone, and the theatre has witnessed interesting combinations of beauty and intelligence. Beauty alone has little lasting effect and so, because of the necessity to interpret elements other than empty beauty, the stage accumulated many who were forced to combine a portion of brain with a portion of beauty. Though the balance to date is strongly in favor of good looks only, we can observe side by side with it old age and ugliness. This would not be tolerated on the stage without compensating qualities. And we often find those who have grown old with countenances so noble that we know their possessors have worked hard to remove every trace of cheap sentiment. Even when an actor has an apparently repulsive face, his features, on closer inspection, have a baseness of classic quality; and in the ugliest faces are found twinkling eyes determined to present their masks relentlessly to portray the basest instincts for critical inspection. Trained memories that know the classics, ability to simulate age or youth at a moment’s notice, joy and grief projected by precise control of feeling, personal suffering forgotten to portray impersonal happiness; a vast army of actors and actresses lurk in every cultural center to carry out the innermost thoughts of dramatists, to whom few, if any, human impulses have remained secret. What sort of human being is this actor and how does he differ from those who form his audience? The most essential qualification in an actor must be not to conceal himself but to show himself freely. All those things that move the engine of our life and that we do our best to conceal are those the actor must do his best to show. What we are most ashamed to acknowledge he does his utmost to accent. No corner is dark enough for us to hide our love, no stage is bright enough for him to display it. The idea of killing inspires us with horror—it fills the actor with celestial delight to hold a dagger or pistol in his hand. Death to us is not pleasant, but no actor I have ever known fails to relish the idea of showing the agonies of abandoning life, gasp by gasp. His life begins when the eyes of others are levelled at him, it ends when he exits from the stage. He is helpless in the fare of flattery and dreams of applause when he shuts his eyes at night. He prefers being hissed to being ignored, and his private life can be an unpleasant break in his design for living.

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These traits have been registered for many centuries, and often with little affection. Lucian writes in the year 122: “Take away their mask and tinseled dress, and what is left over is ridiculous!” Hazlitt in 1817: “It is only when they are themselves that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes: their very thoughts are not their own.” A doctor I knew had many contacts with actors and told me that when he was much younger he had been constantly puzzled by finding symptoms of claustrophobia every time he was called in to treat an actor. Claustrophobia is the fear of being confined in a closed room. He mentioned this to Sigmund Freud. Freud took the doctor by the shoulders and shook him like a puppy when he was asked why every actor had this phobia, and roared that everyone with claustrophobia becomes an actor. It is related that when Sir Henry Irving heard that another actor was going to play Hamlet, he exclaimed: “Good God! How does he know he won’t do himself a grievous physical injury!” I should like to add that the audience, too, can be badly hurt. Acting is not the memorizing of lines while wearing a disguise, but the clear reconstruction of the thoughts that cause the actions and the lines. This is not easy. In the finest sense of the word, the actor is not only an interpreter, and not only a carrier of ideas that originate in others, but himself can be (though not without difficulty) a good creative artist. He is the mechanic who can take the word of the playwright and the instructions of the director and fuse the two with all the complicated elements of which he himself is composed to give fluent voice to inspiring ideas, with an effect so strong that one is impressed with the meaning of even the simplest word. It is his function at his best to tear emotion and mind apart and put them together again in orderly condition. The actor also can take the loftiest sentiment and make it ridiculous, and he can take what apparently is an absurd idea and with it illuminate the most obscure problem. He can give us clear sight instead of darkness as readily as a flash of lightning can show what the deepest night contains. He can portray sin for us in its ugliest form and can purge any evil desire by depicting the brutality of the criminal and his tormented history. He offers us breathless excitement and thrill, no less strong because it is vicarious. He can take our thoughts into his body, and return them safe and sound when the curtain falls. He makes us laugh at human stupidity, and though we prefer not to recognize ourselves, we always notice the resemblance to a neighbor. He can make us howl at the most powerful king, and make us respect a fool. He can make the ugliest qualities attractive by investing them with charm and grace, and he can take a fine sentiment and deliver it to be absurd. Those who sometimes stand in the snow and rain to see a tired actor, divested of his trappings and paint, come hurrying out of the stage door, may

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or may not know that this exhausted animal has just pulled out of himself energy enough to swim the English Channel. But there are some enthusiasts who have sensed that it can be as heroic to struggle with brain and nerves as it is to conquer the elements and have been so responsive that they have carried the actor for miles on their shoulders to his home. They still do that to bullfighters when the bull-fighter succeeds in making vivid the qualities of skill and courage. But a maddened bull is easy to see. Not so easy to perceive is the problem of the actor. Life itself may often teach us little except discouragement, pettiness, and care, and we are grateful to those who recall our ideals and inspire courage and give us new and unsuspected strength. The actor can make us walk out of a theatre with determination to conquer our fears, and he can empty our bag of troubles as if we were newly born. The actor can make us aware of the beauty of something we have seen every day and until now thought ugly—he can make us feel as if we have never before really seen a human being, but he can also make us feel as if we never want to see another. Some of us are partial to the idea that all the world’s a stage with exits and entrances, but for the moment, I confine myself to the man or woman who is professionally known as an actor or actress, and who is paid for it, sometimes with bags of gold, though more often with copper pennies. The pay that an actor receives is not a measure of his worth and many a strutter, making as much noise as a sack full of tin cans, has become rich. The acquisition of wealth is a study in itself. Were quality valued according to income the armament profiteer would be the greatest actor. One of the startling tragedies in our profession was caused by paying an actor ten thousand dollars a week and not permitting him to act at all. I have known many actors and actresses. Some of them were good and some of them were bad, but among the good ones I often found many despicable traits and, among the worst, fine qualities. I don’t believe that actors are essentially different from others, nor that they all get on a stage, nor that they all remain actors. I do believe that they seek exposure more than others, and that a lack of self-esteem drives them to solicit praise and applause. The key to this behavior is the same as the key to the behavior of others—it is to be found in the first few helpless years of life. Since I cannot discuss the great actors who were before my time, my observations must be based on those whom I have myself witnessed. I did see Sarah Bernhardt both on the stage and in films, but only when she was old and crippled, and I have seen all those reputed to be great since. Not always was I impressed. I have been moved and inspired by many lesser known actors and actresses on hundreds of different stages in many corners of the world. But rarely, if ever, have I been inspired or moved by a performer in the films, though I may have been impressed by the film itself.

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There is a very important technical reason for this. On the stage an actor is sent out before an audience on his own, though he may be instructed to the hilt. But, once in front of the footlights, he must establish his own contact with the audience and build a continuity of action and thought. The destiny of his performance is in his own hands. He can gauge the response of the audience clearly—or at least not disregard its testimony easily. He would be a fool to ignore the fact that an intended joke fails to gain response or that an exaggerated gesture is greeted with tittering. (I do not rule out the possibility that fools fail to achieve success.) He is the boss of his own body and of his own mind, knows without any doubt the direction from which he is being watched, and himself relays directly everything he thinks and feels to the audience. All this is not the case in motion pictures. Though the photographed actor is popularized and reproduced so that he can be adored in Bombay, as well as in Milwaukee, and, unlike the actor in the flesh, can appear in both places at the same time, this is accomplished by a mechanism that does not confine itself to multiplication alone. This mechanism not only distributes the actor like popular dolls turned out wholesale, but it actually makes those dolls look as if they could move and speak by themselves. A child, a shark or a horse is made to act the same way as a great actor—easier, as a matter of fact, since they do not resist so much. But whether children, animals, or actors, they are invested with an intelligence that apparently stems from them. In film cartoons, when a tail-wagging duck goes into action, the audience knows at once that behind it there is someone that causes it to move and squawk. When the ventriloquist takes a puppet out of a box, it also is accepted as a unit of intelligence, but the audience is not for a moment deceived about its being a dummy, though it may not care whether it is or not. But when a film actor, who undergoes much more manipulation than a duck or dummy, begins to function, he is judged, praised and condemned, even by our best critics, on the basis of being a self-determining and self-contained human being. This is not so. Actors are usually tricked into a performance not too dissimilar from the process employed by Walt Disney or Edgar Bergen. In films we have a large assortment of actors with a variety of looks and talent, but they are as powerless to function alone as is the mechanical dummy before he is put on his master’s lap and has the strings pulled that move head and jaw. I doubt if many are intensely interested in the mechanism that moves an actual dummy, and it is possible that no one is interested in the strings that move the stars of our day, but I am going to discuss the strings anyway, though they are tangled up badly, pulled by many, and laboriously concealed, after the movements have been made. Though not wishing to imply that the result may be favorable, it is possible for the actor on the stage to select his material and to appear directly to the audience without any distortion of purpose. But this is impossible in films.

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Here a complicated machine extracts an essence from the actor, over which the actor has no control. He can be superior to another in proportion to his personal superiority, but his ultimate importance is regulated by manipulators who demand and receive a pliability that, given graciously, results in his advancement, and given reluctantly, causes him to be discarded. In Paris, the artists lovingly employ a phrase of Cézanne’s: “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail.” May that be my justification for going into detail, even where detail may be unpopular. The more I ponder on the problems of the artist, the less they resemble the problems of the actor. Though the actor in the theatre and in films is interchangeable, and can even be active in both mediums at the same time, there are some generally observable distinctions. On the film stage, in contrast to the theatre, the actor rarely knows where the audience is going to be nor usually cares. Often three cameras are aimed at him from three different directions. He can note (to his surprise) a camera leveled at him from ten feet above and a camera looking at him from the ground, both from opposite directions and both recording his movements simultaneously. If he communicates with the camera attendant, he can persuade him to define what parts of his person will be included. He, himself, can never judge whether he is close or if his whole body is seen, since the determining factor is not his distance from the camera, but the focal length of the lens used. His face can be so enlarged that its features may no longer be viewed without discomfort. An inadvertent light can make his nose look like a twisted radish, or it can completely obliterate the expression of his eyes, which usually is a mercy. Though the actor normally is made to look better than he is, the bad use of a lens or the camera placed at a bad angle can produce an effect over which he has no control. His voice can be garbled beyond recognition by the sound apparatus (unfortunately, it usually is only reproduced), and he can be made voiceless by the dangling microphone swinging in a direction in which he cannot aim his words. No accumulation of emotion or continuity of thought is easy, if at all possible, to the film actor, as the technique of making a film is such that it sometimes requires the player to enter his house from the street three months after he made the street scene, though afterwards the action on the screen takes place in sequence. The exigency of film production may require the street scene to be taken on the sixth day of October and the scene of the house that we see him enter a second later on the fifth of January the following year. (That shrewd arrangement is called a schedule.) The actor has the most extraordinary difficulty in remembering what sort of necktie he wore three months ago, without adding to his concern exactly what he thought or felt. Notes and drawings on the pattern and color of his necktie help a little. If he is a genius and gifted with great memory, even then he is at the mercy of the instructions given him by whoever happens to be the most convincing person around. The most

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convincing person is usually the property-man, the script-girl, his servant, or the boy who measures the distance of his nose from the camera. I have been asked often why it is necessary to be disconnected in the making of a film. Why can not a film be taken in continuity so that the distressed actor will know precisely what he is doing? Aside from the fact that there is rarely room enough to put up all the sets at once, or to construct, let us say, a replica of a street to connect with the house that the actor must enter, a film takes from four weeks to an occasional six months to complete. It usually takes an hour and a half to show the finished work. Somewhere in this loss of time you will find the reason for not making a film in continuity. It takes time to build sets, to place the camera and the lights, and to instruct the actors, though this last function is considered wasteful by all but a few directors. No longer a new medium, the film has absorbed countless men who have attempted to find better ways to good results, and uninterrupted continuity of action has been found too difficult. The actor in motion pictures, as on the stage, is told what to do, but there is no dress rehearsal before an audience, nor a collective tableau to give him any indication that he has been told the right thing. Only the finished product reveals that—and then clearly. But the finished product is not finished with the actor, but with a pair of scissors. These are flourished afterwards by someone who has little idea (usually none) of what was originally intended and he can remove the most precious word from the mouth of the actor or eliminate his most effective expression. This posthumous operator, known as a cutter, literally cuts the actor’s words and face. He can make a stutterer speak rapidly and a person of slow thought think quickly. He can also reverse that process and does not hesitate to do this often. He can change the tempo and the rhythm of the actor’s walk and his purpose. He can retain pieces of the performance that the actor fails to consider essential because at that moment he was no longer acting, but thinking of lunch; and with an easy snip of the shears, he can destroy the one expression the actor valued most or the phrase he thought would make him immortal. He can retain pieces that make hands and legs look like slabs of blubber (physical distortions are less ridiculous than mental ones), and he can cause the most thoughtless woman in the world to think by retaining parts of her anatomy that she planned to conceal. Not only does the cutter cut, but everyone who can possibly contact the film, even including the exhibitor who is to show it, has plans and often the power to alter the film. Actually were each one permitted to exercise his genius for improving a film, nothing would be left but the title, and that is usually debated, too, until the night before the film is shown. Far from being responsible for his own performance, the actor cannot even be quite certain that the final result will not disclose the use of a double or even a voice that is not his. In any form of physical danger, usually featured in the

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motion picture, the actor is replaced by someone who is supposed to look like him, and though the actor often is willing to take the physical risks himself (rather than the mental ones), the producer is not so willing since a bodily injury means delay. As for the voice, he may for some reason be unable to sing, or what is more common, be unable to talk. I have myself replaced the voices of many actors with their own voices from other scenes and in many cases have replaced their voices with the voices of other actors, thereby using the voice of one man and the face of another. Though this is not usual, it can always be done and is to be recommended. (The ideal film will be a synthetic one.) In An American Tragedy I replaced the voice of the man who played the important part of the judge in the famous trial. This man was not a bad actor, but only too late did I discover that his diction betrayed an accent that was inconsistent with the intended portrayal. I was asked afterwards how I had failed to notice this accent. I confessed my fault but pleaded that the actor had impressed me by not speaking when I met him. Rather than replace the actor himself and hurt his feelings, I replaced his voice, without anyone being the wiser for it, except the actor who must have experienced no mean surprise to see his mouth open and speak with a voice not his. This process is called “dubbing” and is extensively used. I have corrected faulty diction and exaggerated sibilants by using pen and ink on the sound track that runs with the film; and it has been announced that someone had succeeded in writing on the sound track markings so skillfully resembling the photostatic image of words that, when projected, the human language was heard. Imagine writing the sound of a human language with pen and ink—or changing the human language not only with pen and ink but with the slightest twist of a dial or alteration of speed raising or lowering the pitch of a voice. Since few are dissatisfied with the voices of our popular actors, little such manipulation is normally indulged in, but ample sections of speech are always eliminated without the actor’s participation, and every actor has been asked to make what is known as “wild track,” sometimes by telephone. This “wild track” is made to be placed in some section of the actor’s performance when his back is turned or when he accidentally waves a hand so that it looks as if he were talking. This “wild” part is usually some tender sentiment that has been omitted by the author or director and that is now recorded separately and then injected into the image of the actor. But normally the voice and body of the same actor is used, though long after he has finished he may be recalled twenty times by twenty different men to patch up something that afterwards passes for a memorable characterization. Personally, I have frequently been forced to cheat sentiment into the “finished” performance by concealing flaws and revealing meanings with sound

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and music (all this is done afterwards without knowledge or authority of the actor) and I have had no end of trouble disguising what is technically known as a dry mouth, which means the clicking of the actor’s tongue against the roof of his mouth is recorded so that it sounds like the clatter of hail. Such an actor has to be continually lubricated by having large quantities of water funneled into his mouth, which process does not improve a performance. Intelligent performances have been coaxed out of idiots who have not been able to walk across a room without stumbling, and I have seen intelligent men and women made to appear like half-wits without their being aware of it until they sat in the theatre and beheld the transformation. Though one can hold the film actor responsible for his person, one cannot hold him responsible for his performance. The more the actor knows about the films, the more he will realize his helplessness and seek to determine the selection of director, cameraman and story, and that process of ultimate demolition known as editing or cutting. But worse than that, until quite recently, not even the most prominent director, except in rare cases (where it could not be prevented) was permitted to cut the film, since the usually anonymous producer had only this opportunity to actively participate as a creative craftsman. Not many actors have ever achieved the position where they can control the factors that influence their career, and when they have, they rarely, if ever, have been able to avoid failure. The history of motion pictures is littered with the wrecks of players who achieved control of their own productions, though there have been two or three unimportant exceptions. The average film actor, capable or not, prefers to be called upon to turn on his emotions like water from a tap at nine in the morning—emotions that normally take time to develop and at the request of even the most incompetent director, the trained star or supporting player will, without too much questioning, laugh hysterically or weep, with or without the aid of tickling or glycerine—and be content in the belief that he is considered to be performing the work of an artist. It is naturally easier for the actor of little ability to adapt himself than for one with great intelligence, as the system of producing films is more often than not a severe shock to anyone whose mind has made some progress since childhood. But an actor is not easily shocked, and so he goes about the task of learning, as swiftly as he knows, just where he fits into the crossword puzzle of films; how he can function best and how he can sneak past the controls. When he finally is so experienced that he manages to do what he thinks is best without authoritative restraint and guidance, the result is not good. Not the system alone, but the intricate mechanism and unavoidable complications are against the actor. Usually organized by men who have no sympathy with problems that require thinking, the confusion of the normal studio is ghastly. Everything is ordered except the work of those who actually make a film.

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When the film actor enters a set in the morning, the chances are that he has never before seen it (he may even not have heard of the director), but five minutes later he is required to behave in it as though it were a home of twenty years standing and to be familiar with every object. That is not very difficult. He is required to act as though he were alone, but from every possible lurking place electricians and other workers inspect each movement. They are indifferent to his problems and yawn at the slightest provocation, and he must purchase their tolerance with forced good fellowship. He soon is used to that, too. He may be required to throw his arms around another actor and call him his best friend—without having seen this individual two seconds before playing such a scene. He is induced, and sometimes prefers, to play ardent love scenes to a space near the lens that, in the absence of the leading lady, who is reclining in her dressing room or still emoting in another film, represents her until she can appear. This doesn’t bother him at all, for if the woman is present, who for the moment represents the love of his life, she is asked to look beyond him or at his ears, as otherwise the camera, due to the fact that film lovers are not separated by normal distance, makes them both appear to be cross-eyed. The actor is often not given a manuscript until half an hour before having to act a part (I am told there exist actors who read an entire script and not only their dialogue excerpts) and must take instructions like a soldier to turn and walk to the left or to the right, and be content with the assurance that he is doing nothing wrong and will learn more by and by. If he rehearses too long he is put down as difficult and his reputation suffers. But he never feels that he needs much rehearsal, though he does feel that the other actors need it badly. With the exception of a very few, whose abnormality should be discussed in detail, 1 have never known an actor to spend so much time on the inside of his head as on its outside. Apparently, the make-up is really worth taking trouble with, and this phase of his interpretive ability is never neglected. I am considered a martinet because of my insistence that an actor listen to my instructions without dividing his attention with a close study of his curling irons, whiskbrooms, powder-puffs and “fan” magazines. But normally, the director will not insist on being listened to very closely (he may then appear to be delaying the schedule) and his performer lends an ear while the other is belabored by a group whose sole purpose it is to make his appearance ready for the ordeal of acting. Generally speaking, an electrifying statement like: “Come on, Charles, put this over and we’ll knock off for lunch” suffices. Melting makeup is then patched with hasty hands, he is brushed off, hustled and thrust into lights that generate enough heat for a Turkish bath, and given those aids, he coolly portrays a man of the world while the perspiration runs down his back and puddles at his feet. If the words he then has to speak in a superior manner prove too much for his memory, he reads them from a blackboard, which is placed out of sight of

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the camera. These words are usually chalked up by someone whose spelling is on the archaic side. Some of the greatest speeches in film history have been put together from thirty different attempts to read them. Sometimes these speeches have been pieced together from efforts to get the actor to speak them that ran over a period of a month. In showing such a speech afterwards to the thrilled mob it can be noticed that instead of seeing the actor deliver this speech, say the Gettysburg speech, one hears the words while other actors are shown listening with open mouths. Their mouths are not opened because of admiration for the orator’s memory. No, in the film world the actor loves to be known as a man who walks on the stage, views the situation with an eagle eye, establishes quick contact with all and sundry, and then if his name is, let us say, Spencer, to be known as “One Take Spencer.” He will value such a nickname more than a gangster who establishes his menace by being lovingly called “Machine Gun Kelly.” I once had an actor who said to me while we were rehearsing: “They call me One Take Warner.” It took all day to get him to say “Good morning.” But to take a scene more than once, though the acting may be execrable, is to waste film, unless the actor fumbles his lines. Believing that every time he opens his mouth the audience will be staggered with delight, the actor is offended if it is intimated that placing words in proper rotation and breathing with relief after every comma is not sufficient to embody them with meaning. But let me continue to describe this intellectual atmosphere. Peter Arno succeeded in epitomizing the whole absurdity of the usual film stage in a cartoon that shows an actor energetically climbing into the bed where his leading lady languidly reposes and being introduced to her by the director as he prepares to lie down at her side. Of course, Arno exaggerates, as the chances are that the actor will have to introduce himself. With some exceptions, actors do not mind that. What they do mind is being ignored. There are but few actors who like to hide. Recently I passed one who was recognized in a theatre lobby by a tourist who approached him and said: “Aren’t you in the movies? Your face is familiar.” The actor turned pale, mumbled: “My God” and vanished. But as a rule, the actor does not vanish quickly enough. Particularly on the screen, where a second often seems to be endless. The one who insists on staying before the camera the longest is the star-actor, and one would think that he ought to remember that he did not become a star that way. But being a star gives him prerogatives. When he portrays, let us say, an explorer, he will do no more than don the smeared uniform selected by the wardrobe, and then enter the stage not as if after an exhausting and dangerous journey, but as if he had just left his dressing room. The director who points out the difference will not long remain his friend, I presume. (Directors are usually chosen by their ability to get along with actors, and with other less essential functionaries.) As for a minor player, who, for example, is to portray a monarch, nobody bothers

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much with him. He is practically booted onto the set by an assistant who, in addition to this doubtful method of inducing the proper kingly mood, has just shouted, “Hey, Emperor, what the hell is the matter with you? Didn’t I tell you to be here on time?” The same actor will immediately assume the part of a noble ruler distinguished for his wisdom, and issue commands to a benign minister who, yesterday, played an apoplectic sheriff in a film in which the king was a horse thief. It is also easy to understand that striking story about the man with a real beard, who was called in hurriedly from the street because the director suddenly had the idea that he wanted a man with a beard to walk across a scene. The beard demanded to read the manuscript. The crew on the stage, the actors who were waiting for this man, the director and his staff, could not credit their ears. Why should a man who merely had to walk across a stage demand a manuscript? The extra, who needed ten dollars very badly, nevertheless insisted, and said that unless he read the manuscript he would not know how to walk or what its purpose was in relation to the story and therefore could no more walk than he was able to fly. It is a tolerably apt commentary on motion pictures that this inquisitive actor was instantly displaced by another beard that did not care how it walked or what for. I later heard that the first man shaved. But it is not easy to understand why the motion picture actor insists on being rated as a creative artist. He may be a hero or an exceptionally charming individual with fantastic energy. He may be worth everything he gets, which in the long run is usually taken from him. He may be one who chooses this rash way of earning a livelihood rather than another, but creative art has other servants and other standards and is based on no such nonsense. I was the first to deal with the film machine in The Last Command, in which the late Emil Jannings played the part of an extra. If anyone remembers this film of long ago, he might recall that Jannings, who had been Commanding General of the Russian Army, is propelled by fate to Hollywood and there chosen from the ranks of the extras to depict his own history. The picture ended with Jannings driven mad and dying in the belief that he was once more in real command. But this ending was poetic, like all my endings. The film actor is not driven crazy—he is driven to become the idol of millions. And the length of time in which he retains his popularity does not depend upon him, but upon his stories, current fads—and his directors. The supporting players usually last the longest in their screen life because they do not carry the burden of the failures. They are selected according to types catalogued as fat, thin, monks, doctors, baldheads, beards, soldiers, detectives, diplomats, leg girls, emperors, etc., and heaven help the man who has once played a monk and thinks that on a better day he may be a doctor. The star is typed as much as the supporting player and strongly identified with the part he plays, not only by public and critic, but by himself (though one

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hears once in a while that some actor or actress aspires to play something that sounds better than the piffle that made them stars) so that he usually assumes the good or bad qualities for which he has been noted and is only with difficulty weaned away from them when another part requires other qualifications. The difference in Jannings’ household when he entered it as a general and when he came home as a film extra was appalling. He would on one day flick the maids with his whip when asking for a cigarette and on the next plead with them in a broken voice for permission to enter. The nature of his work in film does not allow the actor much energy for the contemplation of abstract virtue and he therefore seeks his praise where he finds it in abundance, and he will avoid any extraneous issues by talking only about himself or about his part and will not listen to others unless he knows his turn will come. But there is a reason for this lack of balance in the flustered life of the film actor. It is induced by the abnormal demands made on him. He is asked to play a climax first and the scenes leading to it afterwards. He may play an ardent love scene on the first day of the production, and show how he casually met the girl, originally, after he played the father of her child. These acrobatics are strenuous and exhausting and drain nerves that are needed to restore normality. Remarkable is the stretching of emotions that must be interrupted in flow by hours of preparation for each scene, and sometimes by the finish of the day’s work, which, likely as not, breaks off in the midst of complications that scream for completion, say: when an actor is told that someone followed his wife and saw her enter a hotel with a stranger and register under an assumed name. The suspense will not be broken until nine the next morning. Failing to be guided by the director, the sole guide to which he will trust is whether he feels a scene or not. And no worse guide can be imagined. Acting is not quite so simple. Nor do many directors care to guide the actor, since they thereby assume a responsibility they may not wish to carry—nor do I presume that all directors are capable of guiding the actor. But then the vital interests of the normal film actor are above acting. Though he will battle to have as many words or close-ups as the other, he will not inspect the content of the words or the meaning of the enlargement. He will insist that his dressing room is as good as the other fellow’s and that his lunch when he motors to location is at least as palatable as the director’s, and that when he returns from location that only those ride with him who think him irresistible. Acting is not make-up nor is it memorizing words. Nor is it feeling a scene. An actor must not only feel but be able to guide his feelings, and his delivery must contain criticism and comment on what he is expressing. He must know when to restrain and when to let go and his intellect must always be in advance of his impulse. He must know why the words that he speaks were written and

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whether they were given to reveal or to conceal his thoughts. He must be able to listen to the other actor and to consider what he hears, and not merely think of his cue and then act in his turn uncolored by what the other hand conveyed. His person may be less visible than the ideas he is expressing and he must know when his image interferes with or represents these ideas. Most of all he must be in control of the effect he wishes to cause. His humility as a human being must be genuine and not coupled with false modesty because he feels himself to be important. There is no such thing as an important actor or an unimportant one, there is only the actor who gives full expression to the purpose to which he owes his presence. Wherever such a purpose is unclear or shallow, no actor can do anything but be likewise. We observe how enthusiastic the performance is of someone who dances, skates, sings, rides a horse, or runs to catch a train. But that is only because in those cases the actor knows precisely what he is doing. When portraying a great emotion, the film actor rarely ever can do more than guess where it ultimately will be used—or which of the many attempts to squeeze it from him will finally be shown. There is another man who may know where all these pieces fit and who is capable of determining what is required of the actor who stands on his stage and who, on occasion with the patience of Job, compels everyone to something that can resemble a work of art. But that is not the actor. I, therefore, suggest that the motion picture actor can not function as an artist, and will deal with him not as I might deal with the actor who appears to dominate the stage of the theatre, but only as one of the complex materials of our work. Since he has been magnified in importance, you may detect a tendency on my part to incline in the other direction. But my purpose is neither to reduce nor to increase his stature, but simply to study him. In order to do so properly, further analysis is necessary of the personalities who are literally multiplied into three or four hundred images, each of whom can attract a great audience, and can return to the original fame and fortune such as is not gained by a statesman, a poet, a musician, a painter, a scientist, teacher and physician, or anyone else whose approach to his work cannot be reconciled with a failure to master his profession.

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Chapter 10

“The Theatrical Story” Siegfried Kracauer

From Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) Introduction Form and Content The time-honored differentiation between form and content of artistic achievements affords a convenient starting-point for an analysis of story types. It is true that in any given case these two components of the work of art interpenetrate each other insolubly: each content includes form elements; each form is also content. (Hence the legitimate ambiguity of such terms as “comedy,” “melodrama,” and “tragedy”; they may point to the peculiar contents or the formal aspects of the genres they designate or cover both of them indiscriminately.) But it is no less true that the concepts “form” and “content” have a basis in the properties of the artistic work itself. And the near-impossibility of neatly validating these concepts in the material is rather a point in their favor. With complex live entities the accuracy of definitions does not suffer from the fact that they retain a fringe of indistinct meanings. Quite the contrary, they must be elusive to achieve maximum precision—which implies that any attempt to remove their seeming vagueness for the sake of semantically irreproachable concepts is thoroughly devious. This chapter will be devoted to a breakdown of story types according to differences in form. Since these types should be expected to be relevant cinematically, they must be definable in terms that bear on the inherent affinities of film. They constitute types only if they reveal themselves as such from the angle of cinema.

An Uncinematic Story Form To begin with uncinematic story forms, only one such type stands out distinctly—the “theatrical story,” so called because its prototype is the theatrical 133

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play. Uncinematic stories, then, are patterned on a traditional literary genre; they tend to follow the ways of the theater. Significantly, the literature on film abounds with statements which place all the emphasis on the incompatibility of film and stage, while paying little attention, if any, to the obvious similarities between the two media. Thus Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov in their 1928 manifesto voice misgivings lest the advent of sound might engender a flood of “ ‘highly cultured dramas’ and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort.” In Proust [Remembrance of Things Past, “The Guermantes Way”], the narrator compares the impression his grandmother makes on him after a long absence with a photograph picturing her as the sick, old woman she is. But this is not the way, he continues, in which we usually perceive the world, especially things we cherish. Rather, “our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help us to make its purpose intelligible.” He concludes by calling his lapse into photographic perception a chance event which is bound to happen when our eyes, “arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically like films.” This passage is important because it specifies the sort of theater least amenable to cinematic treatment. Proust identifies it as the classical tragedy. To him the classical tragedy is a story form which, because of its tight and purposeful composition, goes the limit in defying the photographic media. By the way, the Eisenstein of 1928, who had not yet succumbed to the pressures of Stalinism, may have referred to this very compositional entity when he predicted an increase of “highly cultured dramas” in the wake of sound.

Origins and Sources The trend in favor of the theatrical story was initiated as early as 1908 by Film d’Art, a new French film company whose first production, the much-praised and much decried Assassination of the Duc de Guise, represented a deliberate attempt to transform the cinema into an art medium on a par with the traditional literary media. The idea was to demonstrate that films were quite able to tell, in terms of their own, meaningful stories after the manner of the theater or the novel. An academician wrote the scenario of this ambitious film; actors of the Comédie-Française impersonated its historical characters; and dramatic critics of high repute published enthusiastic reviews. From the lower depths the cinema thus rose to the regions of literature and theatrical art. Cultured people could no longer look down on a medium engaged in such noble pursuits. Duc de Guise, then, aimed at rehabilitating the cinema in the name of Art. And since its authors were saturated with stage traditions, it was natural for them to believe that, to be art, the cinema would have to evolve along much

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the same lines as the theater. The action of Duc de Guise is strongly reminiscent of historical dramas, as they unfold on the stage. And so is the mise-enscène. Méliès’s insistence on advancing the narrative with the aid of specifically cinematic devices seems forgotten; instead an immobile camera captures the drama from the angle of the spectator in the pit. The camera is the spectator. And the characters themselves move in settings which for all their realism never let you ignore that they are painted canvas—a château de blois intended to impress the theatergoer, not the moviegoer, as the real thing. It should be noted, though, that, its theatricality notwithstanding, Duc de Guise testifies to a certain awareness of the differences between the two media. The story of the conspiracy against the Duke and his ultimate liquidation appears to have been fashioned with a view to acclimatizing theatrical art to the screen. In any case, the jerky succession of isolated tableaux vivants, customary then, is here superseded by a sort of pictorial continuity which does not depend upon lengthy captions to make itself understood. Also, the actors play their parts with a sense of detailed characterization and a minimum of gestures, thus breaking away from stage conventions. A tremendous success, Duc de Guise fathered hosts of period pictures and “highly cultured dramas” in France. America followed suit. D. W. Griffith let himself be inspired by this first film d’art; and Adolph Zukor began to feature “famous players in famous plays.” Producers, distributors, and exhibitors were quick to realize that Art meant big business. Films capitalizing on the prestige

Death of a Salesman (dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 1985)

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of literary works or imitating them attracted the culture-minded bourgeoisie which had shunned the moviehouses before. The moviehouses themselves became more and more sumptuous in the process. Their cheap, if expensive, glamour was a condoning factor in as much as it denounced the falsity of these cultural aspirations. (Yet in stigmatizing the commercialization of art, the discerning critic will have to acknowledge that it does not necessarily do away with art. Many a commercial film or television production is a genuine achievement besides being a commodity. Germs of new beginnings may develop within a thoroughly alienated environment.) The film d’art movement persists, unbroken, to the present day. As might be expected, numerous films of this type, such as Pygmalion, Death of a Salesman, etc., are actually theatrical adaptations. There is practically no Broadway hit that would not be exploited by Hollywood. Or think of the uninterrupted series of Shakespeare films, down to Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Richard III. However brilliantly executed, in spirit and structure all such screen dramas can still be traced to Duc de Guise. They need not be theatrical adaptations. Films like The Informer, The Heiress, Great Expectations, and Rouge et Noir take their inspiration from novels and yet recall the stage as vividly as does any screen version of a play. About the same applies to Moby Dick; despite its cinematic elaborations it renders the Melville novel in terms of a dramatic action which would be a natural for the theater. Other theatrical films do not borrow from literary sources at all, as is illustrated by Duc de Guise itself. Similarly, Eisenstein’s last films, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, are original screen works; nevertheless, they seem to be patterned after nonexistent plays or operas. It is not by accident that shortly before his death Eisenstein directed Wagner’s Die Walküre. He once rebelled against the theater; he reverted to it at the end.

Characteristics Emphasis on Human Interaction As viewed from both photography and film, one of the main features of the theatrical story form is its strong concern for human characters and human interrelations. This is in accordance with stage conditions. To repeat what has already been said, theatrical mise-en-scène cannot re-create full physical reality in all its incidents. Huge crowds transcend the given frame; tiny objects are lost in the total impression of it. Much must be omitted and much is an allusive substitute rather than the real thing. The stage universe is a shadowy replica of the world we live in, representing only such parts of it as sustain the dialogue and the acting and through them an intrigue which inevitably concentrates on events and experiences purely human. But all this has a restrictive effect on film. The theatrical story limits the appropriate use of a medium which does not differentiate between humans and inanimate objects.

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Complex Units The smallest elements of the stageplay—and consequently the theatrical story—are complex units as compared with the elements accessible to the camera. The reason is that, because of its dependence upon stage conditions and its concomitant emphasis on humanly significant action, the theatrical play does not admit indefinite breakdowns. Of course, it may suggest them in varying degrees. Shakespearean plays, for instance, are relatively transparent to unstaged nature, introducing characters and situations which might as well be dispensed with in a strictly compositional interest; and these seeming diversions and excursions evoke, somehow, life in the raw—its random events, its endless combinations. Also, a Kammerspiel may come so close to its characters that it sensitizes the spectator to imperceptible psychological undercurrents and their physiological correspondences. Yet even the most subtle, most open-ended stage play is hardly in a position to implement its suggestions and carry analysis beyond a certain point. The fact that the elements of which it consists—behavior patterns, passions, conflicts, beliefs—are highly complicated aggregates can easily be seen. Take the modern novel: Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf coincide in decomposing the smallest units of older types of the novel—those which cover a series of developments as they occur in chronological time. These modern writers, says Erich Auerbach [in Mimesis], “who prefer the exploitation of random everyday events, contained within a few hours and days, to the complete and chronological representation of a total exterior continuum . . . are guided by the consideration that it is a hopeless venture to try to be really complete within the total exterior continuum and yet to make what is essential stand out. Then too they hesitate to impose upon life, which is their subject, an order which it does not possess in itself.” But the theater goes far beyond any epic genre in forcing such an order on life in its fullness. A glance at the microscopic elements of, say, the Proust novel suffices to reveal the gross nature of the units which form the irreducible cells or nodal points of the stage play. Film not only transcends human interaction but resembles the novel, modern or not, in that it tends to render transient impressions and relationships which are denied to the stage. From the angle of film the theatrical play is composed of units which represent a crude abbreviation of camera-life. To say the same in cinematic terms, the theatrical story proceeds by way of “long shots.” How should it proceed otherwise? It is constructed for the theater, which indeed requires that analysis be curtailed for the sake of dramatic action and that the world onstage be visible from an inalterable, rather remote distance. This is what the young Eisenstein experienced when, as a theater director, he felt increasingly urged to stage the kind of reality germane to the cinema. He removed a wrestling match from the stage to the middle of the auditorium so as to transform it into a real-life event; he even tried—an impossible artifice—to

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isolate hands, pillars, legs, house façades in an effort to create the illusion of close-ups. But it just did not work. So he left the stage for the screen, while at the same time turning his back on the story as such which, he then believed, was bound to feature individual destinies. His goal, a cinematic one, was the depiction of collective action, with the masses as the true hero. Complex units interfere with cinematic narration. Hence the jerkiness of films advancing a theatrical intrigue. It is as if they jumped from unit to unit, leaving unexplored the gaps in-between—whereby it does not in the least matter whether the films are silent or follow the lead of dialogue. And each jump affects the spectator as an arbitrary change of direction, because the units which mark the joints of the intrigue are by far not the last elements at which cinematic analysis may arrive. In the play Romeo and Juliet the Friar’s failure to pass on Juliet’s letter in time is acceptable because it suggests the workings of Fate. But in Romeo and Juliet, the Castellani film, the same event does not stand for anything; rather, it appears as an outside intervention unmotivated by what goes before, a story twist which for no reason at all abruptly alters the course of action. The whole affair with the letter belongs at best to an ideological continuum, not the material one to which film aspires. It is a sham entity which would have to be broken down into its psychophysical components to become part of camera-reality. This does not imply, of course, that the cinema can afford completely to ignore units which, so to speak, are given only in long shots. These units, which resemble intricately structured molecules, transmit common thoughts, emotions, visions. If the film narrative did not occasionally avail itself of them as points of arrival or departure, the spectator would be at a loss how to assimilate the succession of camera revelations.

Detachable Patterns of Meanings In progressing from complex unit to complex unit, the theatrical story evolves distinct patterns of meanings. From the angle of film these patterns give the impression of being prearranged because they assert themselves independently of the flow of visuals; instead of seeming to grow out of it, it is they which determine the direction of that flow, if flow it still is. Compare Romeo and Juliet with Umberto D.: the Shakespeare film relates a self-sufficient story which is significant in its own right, whereas the significance of the De Sica film lies in the penetration with which it pictures the everyday existence of an old man condemned to live on a pension which does not permit him to live; here the story consists in what the camera makes us see. Unlike this truly cinematic story, the theatrical intrigue is detachable from the medium; accordingly, the imagery conveying it illustrates rather than releases its meanings. When looking at a theatrical film, our imagination is in fact not primarily stimulated by pictures of physical reality so that, following their suggestions, it would work its way from them toward significant story contexts; conversely, it

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is first attracted by these contexts and only then takes cognizance of the pictorial material bearing them out.

A Whole with a Purpose Much as theatrical intrigues may be given to meandering and thus acquire an almost epic quality, when compared with film they all appear to be modeled on the classical tragedy which, Proust has it, neglects “every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help us to make its purpose intelligible.” The story form he has in mind is not only a whole—all works of art are, more or less—but a whole with a purpose; its every element, that is, has the sole function of serving that purpose. Now the term “purpose,” as used by Proust, evidently refers to the significance of the story. So one might as well say that, viewed from film, the theatrical intrigue revolves around an ideological center toward which all its patterns of meanings converge. In other words, it must be tightly organized; it is essentially a closed story. From the early thirties on, when the individual hero began to supersede the heroic masses on the Soviet screen, Eisenstein under the pressure of terrorist totalitarianism expressly championed this story type and its compositional implications. He requested each fragment of a film to be “an organic part of an organically conceived whole.” And he declared [in Film Form] toward the end of his life: “For us montage became a means . . . of achieving an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embracing all elements, parts, details of the film-work.” In his youth Eisenstein had been less idealistic-minded, less totalitarian. Legitimately so, for a film built from elements whose only raison d’être consists in implementing the (pre-established) “idea conception” at the core of the whole runs counter to the spirit of a medium privileged to capture “the ripple of leaves in the wind.” There is a nice observation by Béla Balázs [in Der sichtbare Mensch] to the effect that children linger over details while adults tend to neglect the detail in some big design. But since children see the world in close-ups, he argues, they are more at home in the atmosphere of film than in the long-shot universe of the theater. The conclusion, not drawn by Balázs himself, would be that the theatrical film appeals to adults who have suppressed the child in themselves.

Attempts at Adjustment The “Most Marvelous Things” FEYDER’S DICTUM

Jacques Feyder, the French film director, once postulated [in Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17)] that “everything can be transferred to the screen, everything expressed through an image. It is possible to adapt an engaging

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and humane film from the tenth chapter of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois as well as . . . a paragraph of Nietzsche’s Zoroaster.” Yet to do this, he cautiously adds, “it is indispensable to have the sense of the cinema.” Assuming for the sake of argument that Feyder is right, the theatrical story would certainly not resist cinematic treatment. But how can it be transformed into authentic cinema? In narrating such a story, any film maker who has the sense of the medium is obviously faced with two different, if not incompatible, tasks. He will have to put across the story as the purposeful whole it is—a task requiring him to reproduce its complex units and patterns of meanings in a straight manner. At the same time he will have to follow the realistic tendency—a task which prompts him to extend the story into the dimension of physical existence. STRAIGHT REPRESENTATION OF THE INTRIGUE

Many theatrical films, among them some executed with consummate skill, live up to the first task without even trying to pursue the second. They adequately impart the intrigue, with all its inherent meanings but, as if completely absorbed in its straight representation, fail to explore the world around us. The Informer, The Glass Menagerie, Mourning Becomes Electra, Death of a Salesman, Rouge et Noir, etc., are hardly more than custom-made adaptations of tightly composed stories detachable from the medium; they fit the story like a well-tailored suit. Hence an atmosphere which induces claustrophobia in the viewer. This must be laid to the way their imagery is handled.

The Glass Menagerie (dir. Irving Rapper, 1950)

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In the old Griffith film Broken Blossoms, the superb shots of the fog enveloping the Thames and the London East End streets seem to have no other function than to picture the environment in which the action takes place. Whatever they may contribute to establish the action, they do not exhaust themselves in supporting it. They really record city nature. What a contrast between this natural fog and the fog which plays so conspicuous a role in Ford’s The Informer! It is a symbolic fog expressly selected or concocted to point beyond itself toward the “idea conception” of the intrigue. Griffith’s lens opens upon the world, while Ford shuts it out in the interest of theatrical composition. Yet at least The Informer does not pretend to camera-reality. Other films in the same vein do. Thus Kazan leans over backward in an attempt to pass off his On the Waterfront as a semi-documentary. The film, a veritable tour de force, is shot on location and utilizes techniques appropriate to a film of fact. Actually it is nearly the opposite. Every shot of it is calculated to enhance the dramatic impact of a contrived intrigue. There is no air about these shots. True, they let in material reality, but they do so only to drain it of its essence. Reality itself is here employed to build a universe as hermetically closed as that of The Informer. In sum, films which aim at the straight implementation of a theatrical story have the following, easily recognizable features in common. They emphasize the actors and their interplay. In keeping with this main concern, they further coincide in assigning to inanimate objects and environmental factors a subsidiary role. Finally and most important, they include practically no image that would not serve the ends of story construction. This is to say, each image, instead of being established as a fragment of reality which may yield multiple meanings, must assume a meaning derived from contexts alien to the medium—contexts which gravitate toward an ideological center.

Extension of the Intrigue “I am rewriting Shakespeare,” said Zecca [quoted by Sadoul in Les Pionniers du cinéma], the contemporary of Lumière and Méliès, to a friend who found him blue-penciling a manuscript. “The wretched fellow has left out the most marvelous things.” Zecca had the feel of the medium; what he did was simply to devote himself to the task of extending the theatrical story in the direction of camera-life. There is little doubt indeed that his “most marvelous things” are identical with such specifically cinematic subjects as objects moving, the small, the big, the familiar, etc. The necessity of incorporating these subjects, should even the script not provide for them, has been recognized, if with less candor, by modern film makers and critics as well. “The content of theater material,” said Hitchcock to an interviewer [in Films in Review, April 1950], “is much slighter than that of movies. One good movie may need as much

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material as four plays.” And Panofsky holds [in “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”] that “in a film it does not interrupt but rather intensifies the action if the shifting of the scene from one place to another—meaningless as it is psychologically—is thoroughly depicted as an actual transportation with car-driving through heavy street traffic, motor-boating through a nocturnal harbor, galloping on horseback, or whatever the case may be.” Not every extension of a theatrical intrigue, however, is an extension which [in Eisenstein’s words in Film Form] causes “reality itself to participate in the action.” If, for instance, a play includes a verbal reference, indispensable for its understanding, to World War II, and the film version of that play shows a few typical battle scenes, these supplementary shots are unlikely to exert a noticeable impact; they illustrate rather than extend the verbal reference. The whole issue is intelligently paraphrased in the late Norbert Lusk’s memoirs. Reminiscing about the silent 1923 adaptation of O’Neill’s Anna Christie, Lusk observes that the film version comprises two episodes not given on the stage: Anna as a child in her Swedish native village and, somewhat later, Anna being raped by a degenerate. Are these additions in the nature of extensions?

Anna Christie (dir. Clarence Brown, 1930)

The point he makes is that they are not. As he sees it, they just serve to tell in pictures what the play is able to convey through words—that Anna “was a foreigner but wholesome” and that “her subsequent life was no fault of her

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own.” The playwright himself shared this view. “With quick perception of a medium new to him,” relates Lusk [in New Movies, Jan. 1947], “Mr. O’Neill quietly pointed out that the interpolation was necessary to round out the story in terms of photographed action. He . . . accepted the film for the sincere transcription it was.” The two episodes, then, were added for the sole purpose of transcribing faithfully the intentions of the original in a medium which could not yet express them otherwise. For lack of sound, pictures were required not to extend the play but to reproduce it. The excess amount of visuals did not result from a concern with cinematic subjects. Yet, more often than not, theatrical films do manifest such a concern. Their authors really extend the story to include the “most marvelous things.” This may be achieved in a hundred of ways. A run-of-the-mill procedure, referred to by Panofsky, is the insertion of street scenes in films whose plots would be fully intelligible if the protagonists stayed indoors all the time. Whenever film makers want to “take an action out of stylized presentation (however effective) and make it completely natural” [in the words of Otis Ferguson in Films, Spring 1940], they feel irresistibly attracted by the street and its extensions. Presumably the sharp contrast between unstaged street life and purposeful stage action is responsible for this common preference. To mention also a few less typical efforts along similar lines, Laurence Olivier in his Hamlet has the camera incessantly pan and travel through the studio-built maze of Elsinore castle, with its irrational staircases, raw walls, and Romanesque ornaments, in an effort to expand the play into the twilight region of psychophysical correspondences. Or remember Eisenstein’s script of An American Tragedy, which clearly centers on an “idea conception”: his desire to externalize Clyde’s inner struggle in the form of a monologue intérieur marks an attempt to dissolve one of the most decisive complex units of his script into an all but unlimited succession of cinematic elements uncalled-for by the story construction. It sometimes is as if these extensions were considered more essential than the story itself. Stroheim confessed to an interviewer that he was possessed with a “madness for detail” [New York Times, June 22, 1941]. And [in Der sichtbare Mensch] Béla Balázs praises a silent American film for leaving on two occasions its story behind and indulging instead in a “thin hail of small moments of . . . material life” which were to bring the environment into play. No doubt these cinematic elaborations have the function of adjusting the theatrical intrigue to the medium. But what about their relation to the intrigue proper? From the angle of the story they are much in the nature of gratuitous excursions. The story does not depend upon their inclusion to cast its spell over the audience. On the one hand, then, such extensions prove desirable, if not indispensable, cinematically; on the other, they are inconsistent with a story form which for full impact requires straight representation. The concern

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for the extensions and the regard for the fabric of story motifs tend to conflict with each other. This conflict shows in two ways both of which press home the difficulty of a solution.

Two Alternatives THE STORY COMPOSITION OVERSHADOWING THE CINEMATIC ELABORATIONS

“Nevsky I found too stylized and too prearranged,” says Rotha [in Eisenstein, 1898–1948]. And comparing it with Eisenstein’s earlier films, Potemkin and Ten Days, he adds: “The well-known Battle on the Ice never roused me to heights of response as did the Odessa Steps or the Storming of the Winter Palace.” His different reactions must be laid to a difference in story form between Nevsky and the two other films—a difference which Eisenstein himself tried to blur later on. At the time he made Nevsky, he still admitted, it is true, that Potemkin looks like a chronicle or a newsreel but then insisted [in Film Form] that it was in reality a “tragic composition in its most canonic form—the five-act tragedy.” No definition of this film could be more misleading. Even though Potemkin culminates in moments of tragic suspense and is, all in all, a masterpiece of intense and deliberate cutting, it is anything but a tragedy in the sense of Proust—a theatrical composition, that is, which radically obstructs the photographic or cinematic approach. Evidence of this may be found in Eisenstein’s sudden decision to change his script upon seeing the historic Odessa steps. The sight of them moved him to discard much of the work already done and concentrate on the mutiny of the Potemkin sailors, which is a nontheatrical episode rather than a classical drama. The testimony of his eyes seems to have convinced him that the cinema has a special affinity for episodes quivering with life in the raw. Potemkin is a real-life episode told in pictures. One must have seen the sailors’ revolt or the sequence of the Odessa steps to grasp the action. The fact that these pictures embody the intrigue instead of merely illustrating it can be inferred from the indeterminacy of many shots. Not forced to lend color to given story lines, the rising mists in the harbor, the heavily sleeping sailors, and the moonlit waves stand for themselves alone. They are part and parcel of the wide reality involved; and they are under no obligation whatever to serve an extraneous purpose that would impinge on their essence. They are largely purposeless; it is they and their intrinsic meanings which are the action. The same applies to the famous close-up of the surgeon’s pince-nez dangling down the ship rope. A decade or so after Potemkin Eisenstein would refer [in Film Form] to this particular close-up to exemplify the artistic merits of the pars pro toto method. By showing only part of an object or a human figure, says he, the artist compels the spectator to retrogress to primitive modes of

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thinking—a state of mind where the part is at the same time the whole. “The pince-nez, taking the place of a whole surgeon, not only completely fills his role and place, but does so with a huge sensual-emotional increase in the intensity of the impression.” Here too Eisenstein overemphasizes the importance of the whole at the expense of the parts and fragments. To be sure, the pince-nez caught up in the rope signifies the death of its owner. But the haphazard tangle, rich in contrasts, of materials—part rough, part fine—is also significant in its own right; it carries various implications and only one of them points in the direction which Eisenstein has in mind. Now consider the Battle on the Ice in Nevsky. Unlike the Odessa steps, it marks the pictorial climax of an intrigue which conforms better than Potemkin to Eisenstein’s misinterpretation of the latter—that Potemkin is not so much a “chronicle” as a “composition in its most canonic form.” Nevsky is not strictly a five-act tragedy, yet it is a historical drama conceived in terms of the stage. It is a whole with a purpose. Its characters comprise a closed orbit; all its interlinked motifs radiate from an ideological center. Nevsky is utterly remote from a real-life episode. Within this self-contained universe, then, there appears the Lake Peipus Battle, a cinematic elaboration in grand style. It is definitely an extension of the intrigue; for all its thoroughness, however, it does not add anything essential to the story developments. Regarding its structural function, it resembles the battles in Shakespeare plays which need not be seen to produce a dramatic effect; summary eye-witness reports fully do the job. The whole extension is clearly intended to drag an otherwise theatrical narrative through the region of camera-reality. As a matter of fact, it is rather lifeless. Far from reflecting transitory life, the imagery affects you as a (re-)construction meant to be life; each shot seems predetermined; none breathes the allusive indeterminacy of the Potemkin pictures. (This is not to belittle the incomparable beauty of the long-distance shot of the plain on which the sequence opens.) Yet the decisive point is the following: the patterns of motifs and themes which make up the Nevsky story are so pronounced that they subdue everything that comes their way. Hence, even assuming that the Battle on the Ice were cinematically on a par with the episode of the Odessa steps, these patterns which spread octopus-like would nevertheless corrode its substance, turning it from a suggestive rendering of physical events into a luxuriant adornment. Owing to the given compositional arrangements, the Battle sequence cannot possibly exert the impact of that Potemkin episode and thus on its part upset the theatricality of the action. It is nothing but an excrescence on the body of an intrigue imposed upon the medium. (Such “useless” extensions are rather frequent. The battle in Henry V, for instance, is just a decorative pageant. And the final hunt of the whale in Moby Dick is under a cloud of symbolic references which nearly obscure it; its realism is wasted.)

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CINEMATIC ELABORATIONS OVERSHADOWING THE STORY CONSTRUCTION

The Griffith chase. A classic example of the other alternative—cinematic extensions overshadowing the story meanings—is the stereotyped chase sequence in D. W. Griffith films. Griffith indulges in theatrical intrigues; for long stretches he is content with rendering, one by one, dramatic actions and situations which are highly complex units from a cinematic point of view. Yet beginning with The Lonely Villa, all his major films invariably conclude on a drawn-out chase which owes its particular thrill to the device of accelerated parallel cutting. While we are witnessing the agony of some innocent character doomed to death, we are at the same time permitted to watch the advance of his prospective rescuers, and these alternating scenes, or flashes of scenes, follow each other in ever shorter intervals until they ultimately merge, with the victim being redeemed. The Griffith chase dramatizes an intrinsically cinematic subject: objective physical movement. More important, it is an ingenious attempt not only to extend theater into dimensions where material phenomena mean everything, but to make the extension itself appear as an expression of the story’s ideological climax. Griffith aspires to nothing less than to reconcile the requirements of the theater with those arising from the cinema’s preference for physical reality and the flow of life. His attempt proves abortive, though. He does not, and cannot, succeed in bridging the gap between the theatrical and the cinematic narrative. True, his chases seem to transform ideological suspense into physical suspense without any friction; but upon closer inspection they represent an excess amount of the latter. Thus the “last-minute-rescue” in the “modern story” of Intolerance is by no means a translation into cinematic terms of the conclusion at which the story itself arrives; rather, this finale captivates and thrills the spectator as a physical race between antagonistic forces. It provides sensations which do not really bear on, and bring out, the “idea conception” of the story—the triumph of justice over the evil of intolerance. The Griffith chase is not so much the fulfillment of the story as a cinematically effective diversion from it. It drowns ideological suspense in physical excitement. Pygmalion. The screen adaptation of Pygmalion is a case in point also. This film adds to Shaw’s comedy a montage of recording machinery in close shots, a detailed depiction of Eliza’s phonetic education, including her suffering under its ruthlessness, and the whole embassy ball episode replete with amusing trifles—sequences, all of which feature the physical life and the environment of the stage characters. What is the good of them? Since Shaw states everything he wants to impart in his play, they are certainly not needed to clarify his intentions. Yet there they are. And the embassy ball and the sequence of Higgins pouncing on Eliza are easily the most impressive episodes of the film. Erwin Panofsky has it [in “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”] that “these two scenes, entirely absent from the play, and

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indeed unachievable on the stage, were the highlights of the film; whereas the Shavian dialogue, however severely cut, turned out to fall a little flat in certain moments.” On the screen, then, the brilliant satire of middle-class morals loses much of its impact, and what remains of it at all affects us as a leftover from the theater rather than genuine cinema. Or in more general terms, the metamorphosis of the play into a film entails a shift of emphasis from the dimension of intellectual messages to that of photographable objects. Sociological notions are overwhelmed by environmental facts; conceptual reasoning succumbs to the ambiguous manifestations of nature. The stage play evolves, so to speak, above the level of physical existence, while the film tends to pass right through it in an effort to record it exhaustively. Unlike the film, which brings the embassy staircase, Eliza’s nightmares, and Higgins’s gadgets into focus, the play takes all this for granted as a background to sophisticated dialogue. It is as if the screen version sprang from a desire to retrieve the raw materials out of which Shaw has carved his comedy and as if this desire automatically weakened the concern with the topics and arguments which keep the comedy going. Those “most marvelous things” which Zecca tried to graft upon Shakespeare are

Pygmalion (dir. Anthony Asquith, 1957)

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evidently the most ephemeral ones. And sure enough, their insertion calls for a sacrifice. Running controversy. The extensions of this second type have time and again been categorically rejected or wholeheartedly acclaimed—a smoldering controversy which confirms the depth of the conflict between theatrical and cinematic designs. In the camp of the theatrical-minded, who value above all the straight representation of the intrigue, elaborations which, Pygmalion fashion, becloud the intentions of the original are not readily tolerated. These critics condemn the spread of incidentals which do not seem to be integrant elements of the whole. “Is this the experts’ way of telling a story?” asks one of them [in Penguin Film Review, 1949] indignantly. And he answers: “The living story is told in people and the things they say, with an occasional essential prop necessary for the progress of the story.” The cinematic-minded on their part are interested not so much in story composition as the incidence of “small moments of material life.” They prefer a straying from the preordained course of action toward camera-reality to the rigidity of films which confine themselves dutifully to following that course. Lang’s Fury, says Otis Ferguson [in Garbo and the Night Watchman], “has the true creative genius of including little things not germane to the concept but, once you see them, the spit and image of life itself.” This perennial dispute acquires a peculiar poignancy if it comes into the open on occasion of one and the same film. Take the reviews of Vincente Minelli’s 1945 film, The Clock: whether or not its boy-meets-girl story is a theatrical story proper, the cinematic excursions from it made themselves strongly felt as such at the time and gave rise to diametrically opposed opinions. The theatrical-minded Stephen Longstreet, angry at the director’s apparently aimless indulgence in New York street life, requested of him [in The Screen Writer, Aug. 1945] that he should in future shoot scripts that have “honesty, density and depth,” shoot them with “old standing sets, some lights and shadows, and a dumb cameraman.” Not so Louis Kronenberger. More cinematic-minded, he delighted [in PM, May 4, 1945] in Minelli’s gift for “incident and detail” and his ability to get “something into The Clock that transcends its formula.”

Conclusions Insoluble Dilemma The upshot is that Feyder is wrong in contending that everything can be transferred to the screen in a cinematic spirit. His dictum breathes complacency; it is that of a man of all too catholic tastes. The theatrical story stems from formative aspirations which conflict irrevocably with the realistic tendency. Consequently, all attempts to adjust it to the cinema by extending its range

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into regions where the camera is at home result at best in some compromise of a sort. The extensions required for the adjustment either disintegrate the intrigue—the case of Pygmalion—or are, themselves, rendered ineffective by its indelible suggestions—the case of the Nevsky story themes overgrowing the Battle on the Ice. In spite of these difficulties there is no end of films which follow the tradition of the film d’art. Their undeniable popularity, however, is by no means an indicator of their aesthetic validity. It only proves that a mass medium like the film is bound to yield to the enormous pressures of social and cultural conventions, collective preferences, and ingrained habits of perceiving, all of which combine to favor spectacles which may be high-level entertainment but have little to do with films. Within this context an argument by Pierre Bost, the well-known French scenarist, deserves mentioning. Bost collaborated with Jean Aurenche on two scripts differing radically in cinematic quality—the script of Gervaise, an excellent film drawn from Zola’s L’Assommoir, and that of Rouge et Noir, a Stendhal adaptation which is theater pure and simple. In a conversation with Bost, I was pleasantly surprised at learning that he was against using Stendhal in the first place and that he too does not consider Rouge et Noir true cinema, as are, say, La Strada or Umberto D. Yet the point of interest is one of his arguments in defense of the Stendhal film. Bost holds that adaptations from literary classics cater to a lasting demand of the public; at any rate, they are an established French film genre. And this would account for their relative legitimacy, even if they fall back on the ways of the stage. The yardstick by which to appraise them is not primarily their adequacy to the medium but their closeness to the essence of the original (and of course the quality of their execution).

D. W. Griffith’s Admirable Nonsolution Griffith is generally recognized as the first to narrate a given story—mostly a theatrical one—in cinematic terms. But perhaps his greatest merit is that, unlike many of his successors, he remains keenly aware of the gulf which separates the theatrical story from the cinematic narrative. Except for his chase finales in which he tries in vain to blend these two incompatible modes of representation, he always keeps apart what does not belong together. His films are full of fissures traceable to his cinematic instinct rather than technical awkwardness. On the one hand, he certainly aims at establishing dramatic continuity as impressively as possible; on the other, he invariably inserts images which do not just serve to further the action or convey relevant moods but retain a degree of independence of the intrigue and thus succeed in summoning physical existence. This is precisely the significance of his first close-up. And so do his extreme long shots, his seething crowds, his street

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episodes and his many fragmentary scenes invite us to absorb them intensely. In watching these pictures or pictorial configurations, we may indeed forget the drama they punctuate in their own diffuse meanings. Eisenstein did, for one. Years after having seen Intolerance, he no longer remembered who is who in the street sequences of this film’s “modem story”; but the figure of a passer-by visible only “for a flashing glimpse” still stood vividly before his inner eye.

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Chapter 11

“Movies versus Theatre: The Case for the Theatre” Tyrone Guthrie

From The New York Times (Apr. 1962) I hope to establish that live drama has certain superiorities over its canned rivals, movie and television drama, so important that they outweigh various admitted inferiorities and will ensure its survival, not as the most popular form of dramatic expression—it has ceased to be that for at least forty years—but as the most significant. I need hardly enlarge upon the commercial advantages of canned drama. A television play can command in a single performance an audience that would fill the theatre eight times a week for ten years. This means that enormously more money is available, not only for the production of canned drama but for its advertisement. By huge outlays for promotion, a demand can be created for a product which would otherwise be of negligible interest, even commercially. But larger budgets are not the only advantage of canned drama. There are also certain important technical advantages. To me, the most important of these is the ability of camera and, to a much lesser extent, microphone to change their focus. At one moment, we can command an immense panorama—a triumph, say, in Imperial Rome. Then—cut—and, in literally the twinkling of an eye, we come into closeup, see the expression on a single face, hear a whispered message passed from one spy to another, watch a hand close surreptitiously upon a bribe. The canned drama will always tend to outdo the live in realistic plays, partly because of this flexibility; partly because the background can be so much more “real”—if the scene is supposed to be Mount Everest, you can take a camera there and photograph the actors scrambling about the real thing; and partly— this is the subtlest advantage of all—because there need be no discrepancy

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between a real actor and his supposedly real background. In a realistic play on the stage, the real, live actors perform in front of a background which pretends to be real, but is, instead, a highly artificial contrivance. The movies in this respect are consistent: the background and the characters alike are photographs of the real thing. But there, precisely, is the rub. They are only photographs; and, as Puck says, “the best in this kind are but shadows.” Mind you, I do not offer the argument that a live actor must be, without qualification, better than the shadow of an actor on a screen. I do believe that, other things being equal, a real live creature, breathing and feeling and thinking his part right then and there before you, is apt to be more vivid than a photograph reproducing, perhaps for the thousandth time, movements made, maybe, years before and on another continent. But then other things hardly ever are equal. The casts of canned entertainments are, on the average, more expensive than any the stage can muster. This does not mean that they are invariably better. But cost does bear some relation to quality and I confess that I would rather see the shadow of a good actor than the substance of a bad one. Further, live acting is only vivid for those within easy distance for seeing and hearing. This in a large theatre applies only to a minority of those present. When there was no better alternative, the public was prepared to buy seats where the best that could be expected was a dim and distant relation with the stage. But as soon as it was found that in the movies everyone could see and hear fully, then very naturally the theatres began to feel a terrible draught. Nevertheless, while in the movies one can see and hear fully, what one sees and hears is inevitably greatly distorted. Even the best soundtracks signally lack the nuance and variety of which the human voice is capable, when they have been enlarged to the degree needful to make them audible all over a large house. And even in television, where the sound always seems to me far more satisfactory than the picture, there is, for instance, scarcely any difference in volume between the enormously magnified mutter, in which closeups are acted, and the loudest roars and screams. Also, while it is pleasant to see clearly, don’t you agree that, in the movies, especially since wide screens came in, we tend to get too much of an eyeful. I was at a spectacular movie recently with masses of people de-Milleing about in gigantic sets. It was distinctly impressive, but only administratively and financially. Dramatically, these blockbusting, supercolossal scenes were frightfully tedious. And then—SNAP—the wide screen was filled with nothing but the jumbo-sized features of a handsome young man, each of whose splendid, regular, white teeth was larger than a postcard. And when, like two gargantuan meat curtains, the lips parted and revealed dozens more postcards . . . well, it was only the frank, boyish grin of a peach-fed California Ham, but I had to be led away, sweating and trembling, to be revived by a draught of

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strong waters and by resolutely thinking beautiful thoughts about children and flowers—very small flowers. The fact, however, remains that it is better to see, even distorted, overwhelmingly large visions and to hear clearly the tiny, simplified voices of the loudspeaker than to suffer the frustration of neither seeing nor hearing enough. Indeed, the theatre will not survive unless the fact is faced—and that right soon—that live acting is not indefinitely expansible. It is my belief that anything subtle or intimate cannot be projected much beyond fifteen rows. Theatre management, however, is still conducted on the assumption that a play must be a “success”; and, since success can only be objectively measured by numbers of tickets sold, quality gets confounded with quantity, value with popularity. The confusion is the greater because, owing to the insane pressure of competition on Broadway, currently the only stronghold of professional live theatre on the American continent, everything needed for a production—from the rent of a theatre to the wages of sceneshifters—has become exorbitantly expensive. This compels managers to pursue the sort of success which will keep them solvent. Confusion is worse confounded because, just now and again, about once in ten or twelve times, the golden goose lays a stunning eighteen-carat gold egg, like My Fair Lady, and the backers make such mouth-watering profits that the field of theatrical finance becomes thronged with greedy and ignorant speculators. I reckon that the money lost by speculators every season on Broadway— and lost for the most part in backing the most ephemeral trash—would exceed tenfold the endowment of a sumptuous national theatre. It is not on this account implied that theatrical speculation ought to be forbidden, or that only government-endowed and government approved theatres should be permitted. Far from it. I merely suggest that our theatre is still operating in a financial and administrative framework based on its being the principal, indeed the only, form of theatrical entertainment; as if, in short, its business were to supply the mass market. The mass market is being taken care of by the movies and television, which are administratively and financially set up for that very purpose—and no other. The theatre must turn its attention to a smaller and therefore less materially rewarding market. But it is perhaps more truly rewarding to try to please a less massive, but possibly more important public which has some considered standards of value, which will not therefore be bamboozled by the childish ballyhoo of the mass salesmen, and which will regard its entertainment as being something affecting its physical and spiritual welfare at least as much as, and in just the same way as, its food and drink and the company it keeps. Movies and television frankly, and even proudly, proclaim themselves to be not arts but industries. Their aim is to create a mass market, and to sell their products in the most profitable way. This, I suggest, leaves not only room but

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need for a theatre which consciously alms at a less numerous, but ultimately more influential, public of more than average intelligence and sensibility. Further, because the film or television play has to be regarded principally as an investment, people who have money at stake, but no taste at all, feel entitled to tell an author what he may, and especially what he may not, say, and how and why. It would not be true to say that the live theatre is entirely free of such interference. In the production of big musicals especially, because of the size of the investment and because the aim of the operation is nearly always commercial, there has to be a good deal of pandering to the wishes of people whose only claim to attention is their dough. But the theatre need not so operate. It is possible to operate on a budget which enables the directors to be chosen because their artistic judgment is thought to be sound rather than because they are shrewd money-men. Such a theatre might operate at a loss. No one expects research laboratories, museums, hospitals, churches, universities, art galleries or symphony orchestras to be commercially profitable. The idea that a theatre should be so is simply a hangover from a period when the theatre was the sole provider of dramatic fare. The point is that a well-run theatre can still, though not in New York, present a first-class performance of a first-class program, not necessarily at a profit, but at a loss so moderate that a few hundred backers could make up the deficit without any pain. This is because the budget, even without any skimping, is, compared to the budgets of movies or TV, chicken feed. Third, the role of the audience at a canned drama is a passive one. Its reaction cannot affect the product. In the live theatre, on the other hand, the audience’s role is creative. Every audience evokes from the actors the performance which it deserves. Acting is more, much more, than a mere recapitulation of a planned routine. Within the framework of a precisely executed routine, a good actor “feels” his audience. Like a good rider in charge of a horse, he knows when to leave matters in the spectators’ hands, when gently to encourage them, when their attention and energy have to be commanded, even against their will, even with whip and spur. And he knows, as a good horseman should, that an audience wants above all else to surrender itself with trust and affection to the guidance of a skillful and confident master. I think it is true that the value we place upon an object is proportionate to our association with it. We value the cheap little watch, which Father gave us on our twelfth birthday, more highly than the grand, gold repeater bequeathed by unloved Uncle Silas; we value the nasturtiums we ourselves grew on the back porch more highly than the splendiferous exotics which “they” grew in the Botanical Gardens. It is the same with experience. We value a performance to which we ourselves have contributed blood, sweat, and tears more highly than a possibly more expert and elaborate performance, which owes nothing,

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whatever to our participation, at which our “assistance” was perforce and solely passive. I have admitted that in realistic plays the canned drama is at an advantage. But there are other, and perhaps more important, kinds of plays. The theatre has an advantage in that it commands the repertory of dramatic classics. A classic is so because leaders of opinion agree for several generations that it has exceptional merit. Classics of the theatre are, of course, constantly “adapted” for screen and television. But such adaptations can hardly fail to be damaging reductions of the originals. It is scarcely reasonable to suppose that the work of adapting Shakespeare, Molière, or Ibsen will be done by persons of comparable genius, or in a fine frenzy of creative energy. It will be done by dispirited hacks to pay their bills. Also, it is a fact that few, if any, great classic works are realistic in a way that movies and television can cope with; they tend to be concerned with large thoughts and feelings expressed with eloquence by beings of greater than average stature. Now camera and microphone are ill-suited to reproduce large eloquence. They are better suited by a kind of acting so small that it doesn’t seem to be acting at all. It is true that certain actors can, even without the aid of eloquence, project on the screen an importance which is commensurate with classic stature. Jannings did so; Charles Laughton and Lillian Gish have done so many times; Pauline Frederick, for all that she appeared in meretricious trash, had the dignity and power of a tragedienne. But on the screen these people have to make their effects with limited means, on a miniature scale. They cannot pull out all the stops and stun an audience, as great acting should, battering it like a typhoon. Likewise, the writers of canned drama start with an almost insuperable handicap in that they must eschew the big speech, the “scene à faire,” the great theatrical effects, corny when inefficiently attempted but which, in the hands of a master, make drama uniquely thrilling and memorable. Finally, movies and television will continue to be forced to change their dramatic techniques to keep abreast of technological developments. Just as the makers of silent movies were, after about thirty years, beginning to get some mastery over the job, along came talkies and revolutionized the whole business. Long before the technical and artistic problems of talking pictures had been solved, color photography added a whole new complication. Now it is wide screen. Soon it will be stereoscopy. In television, the technological changes are even more bewilderingly rapid. And—this is the point—while such changes doubtless make for fuller and more realistic reproduction of factual images, the goal is achieved by everincreasing technical complexity and expense. That means that the media are being dominated more and more by engineers and financiers, taken more and more out of the hands of artists.

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The theatre, on the other hand, tends, possibly in reaction, to get more simple in technique. For example, simplified, composite sets are more and more used, where formerly a series of pseudo-realistic pictures would have been demanded, with desperate and costly devices to hasten the cumbersome changes from one to another. All this encourages, maybe even compels, an extravagance in the canned media and imposes an economy on the live theatre, which I regard as importantly in favor of the latter. The discipline of strict artistic economy in storytelling is valuable to authors. A like economy in production is valuable to directors. It forces them and it forces their audience to use the one essential tool of the theatrical trade—imagination. To sum up: canned drama has commercial and technical advantages, but I have never seen a talking picture or television play which succeeded in rising above the rank of journalism—sometimes very witty, wise or provocative journalism, but not important enough to stand a chance of impressing a discriminating taste once it has ceased to be topical. This is not just because the administrative and financial structures of the canning “industry” are so inimical to creative work of a high order. It is because of limitations inherent in camera and microphone. They are marvelous mechanisms for reproducing facts—visual and aural facts. It is when drama leaves matters of fact and concerns itself with ideas and personages which transcend the facts of everyday experience that photograph and soundtrack convey only a feeble, just because matter-of-fact, impression. But it is with just such ideas and personages that classic drama is predominantly concerned. They are the concern, too, of such modern dramatists as may eventually attain a classic status. Eventually, the creative person who has something important to say will find that both the administrative and technical limitations of the canned drama stand between him and his expression. The need to express himself, to what he believes to be the best of his ability, will prove to be more important than the wealth and the kind of celebrity which canned drama can offer and which are its sole, though extremely attractive, lure to the artist. If you doubt this, why did Paddy Chayefsky quit the worlds of cinema and television at the very moment when he had reached the top of the heap? Are not the best movie scripts of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Lillian Hellman painfully inferior to the best of their work for the stage? Have Arthur Penn and a dozen other of the best directorial talents, here and in Britain, nurtured in television, forsaken their good, kind nurse for that tricky, painted, ill-provided whore, the stage? Speaking of Paddy Chayefsky, two customers recently stormed out of a performance of Gideon purple with rage. “Why must they?” one said to the other. “Will you please tell me, why?” Suspecting that he was referring to the

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performance that they had just left, and feeling that the man’s question was addressed to the cosmos as well as to his companion, I decided to eavesdrop. “Gideon, for God’s sake!” he shouted. “And GOD, for God’s sake! Who wants them? Why can’t they write about ordinary Americans?” If you want dramatic journalism, and on the whole lively, capable journalism, about ordinary Americans, ordinary Russians, ordinary Chinese doing ordinary things in an ordinary way, then it’s telly and the movies for you. But, if you want something larger, louder, wilder, more high-colored and—yes— nobler than ordinary life, I can give you her address. She’s tricky, ill-provided, and she’s been at it for more than two thousand years. But go up and see her some time. There’s life in the old girl yet.

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Chapter 12

“Movies versus Theatre: The Case for the Movies” Carl Foreman

From The New York Times (Apr. 1962) I am writing this article in a New York hotel, en route to my home in London, and if I finish in time, I will have this evening to myself. I should like to go to the theatre, and I have already checked the entertainment section of this morning’s Times in anticipation. However, on and off Broadway, I find nothing of more than routine interest, except for A Man for All Seasons, Rosa, A Passage to India, and The Aspern Papers, all of which I have already seen in London and have no desire to see again. On the other hand, the film section tells me that I can see Antonioni’s The Night, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Clément’s Purple Noon, and Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, all of which I should dearly love to see again, plus literally a dozen more first-class French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian films, an equal number of excellent American films, and, as a bonus, a wonderful double-bill revival of Night Must Fall and the Marx Brothers in The Big Store. So I’m going to the movies tonight. Entertainment? The world is my oyster. I have only one problem: there are so many I can see, and I have to make a choice. In other words, if I want an exciting evening in the theatre these days, my best buy is a good movie, and there are a lot of them. For the fact is that there are many more good movies nowadays than there are good plays; the fact is that the movies have grown more in the last fifty years than the theatre has in the last five hundred: the fact is that the so-called living theatre remains a limited and primitive form of entertainment that has not kept pace with its audience; the fact is that if the function of art is to hold a mirror up to life, the screen is far more capable of performing that function today than the stage.

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I can hear the outrage of the culture snobs, the people who react to the word “Hollywood” as mindlessly as less polished Philistines react to the sound of “Brooklyn.” What? Canned theatre better than living theatre? Never! And already we are speaking in the language of cliché. Well, I know that I am attacking the great sacred cow of our times. Nevertheless, let me tell you as simply and honestly as I can why I feel that the movies (and I mean theatrical movies, not television) are more rewarding and fulfilling today than plays. (1) The movies can take us anywhere in time or space, in terms of either fantasy or realism, and make us believe it. Thanks to the camera, here is a magic carpet that really flies. The stage, on the other hand—once it moves out of an interior set—is pathetically earth-bound. And, of course, when it comes to production design or scenic effects, there is no comparison. The effort of will and imagination needed to pretend that stage settings are more than canvas and papier-mâché necessary a millennium ago, should not be required of the audiences of today. To make a virtue of the physical limitations of the stage is as silly as to say that good coffee tastes even better in a paper cup. (2) The level of content in the movies, at home (despite censorship and pressure groups) and overseas, is constantly rising, and richer and more serious themes are being explored. In contrast, if one accepts that dirty words do not necessarily make for adult entertainment, then one must admit that the Broadway seasons of the last five years have not been particularly inspiring or edifying to the adult mind. Why has this come about? Because the insane economics of the theatre makes it even more ruthlessly commercial-minded than Hollywood ever was supposed to be. In New York, experimental or, if you like, nouvelle vague theatre can be found only off-Broadway where, unfortunately, the level of both production and acting is, let’s face it, wretchedly low. (3) The general standard of acting in the movies is infinitely better than that provided by the stage. Why? Because a movie serves its audiences the best acting an actor is capable of, meticulously and painstakingly selected by the director. And that best performance captured on film is preserved forever. Theatregoing, however, is a lottery. The more successful a play is and the longer it runs, the more the likelihood of lazy, slip-shod performance, dulled by familiarity and monotony. There is, and always has been, a great deal of nonsense talked about acting in the “flesh,” but flesh is notoriously weak, and fortunate is the playgoer who attends on a night when the star is not tired, or hasn’t a headache, or hasn’t had a quarrel at home, or too many martinis at lunch, or isn’t just bored with the whole thing. True, the theatre may be more fun for the actor, and particularly for the actor who needs a large audience, but surely the satisfaction of the audience, not the actor, is what we are discussing here. So, how many theatrical companies are consistently up to the mark throughout a run? How many directors stay with a play throughout a run to keep its level high? And why should an

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audience have to gamble on what it is going to get for its money? And to make matters worse, most so-called “national’ companies are a disgrace, carelessly and cynically thrown together. Incidentally, when was the last time you were so moved in the theatre that you wept, openly and unashamedly? (4) Practically any seat in a movie theatre is a good seat: I know that the moviemaker will have gone to every possible length to make sure that no matter where I sit, I will see and hear and be given the chance to receive and react to everything the film has to offer. Visually and acoustically, I am treated with respect. Moreover, the wonderful fluidity of the camera and the miracle of editing transport me into the center of the action. I see the faces, the very eyes of the players, and I become one with them. I hear the slightest whisper, the faintest sigh. Music stimulates and enhances my emotions and my thoughts, allowing me a full and uninhibited appreciation of the events taking place before my eyes. In the theatre, however, the price I pay for my seat must determine both my empathy with the players and the amount of pleasure I derive from the performance. But if I am too close, I can see the make-up, and the illusion is destroyed by the painted faces. And if I am too far away, I cannot, usually, hear what is going on way down there, a city block away. And yet there are so many, many scenes that cannot, and should not, be played loudly enough to be heard in the balcony. (5) The movies are the great mass art of our times, the people’s art, the international theatre of this century, and theatre that knows no boundaries. When we go to the movies, we can see the works of the great foreign filmmakers of our time exactly as they created them, not domestic imitations of the original vintage wines. What is more, the continuing vitality of the European and Far Eastern film communities not only indicates an increasing flow of exciting and stimulating films in the future, but serves as a challenge and inspiration to our own film makers. And the majority of the overseas filmmakers are dedicated to the exploration of the problems and issues of our times. Most foreign playwrights, on the other hand, seem, like our own, to be trimming their sails to conform to the prevailing commercial winds. (6) In this country, a new generation of filmmakers whose first and only love is the movies, a generation steeped and schooled in the grammar of films, is taking command. The old factory system of production is breaking up. The writer is moving into the pivotal position he has long been denied and, as director or producer, he is more and more dominating the creative process. And the independent producer is bringing a new sweep and daring to bear on the Hollywood scene. (7) The movies, being basically a visual art form, give the audience more work to do, and consequently more scope for the imagination. The theatre,

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since it must rely almost solely on dialogue, subjects the audience to a constant and unnatural flow of words, words, words. If people talked as much in real life as they do on the stage, we would all go out of our minds. (8) The theatre is far too expensive. One can take an entire (reasonably sized) family to the movies for the price of one Broadway theatre ticket, and at the same time be treated with considerably more courtesy and consideration. The cost of theatre-going is high because of the ridiculous economics of the stage business, and because of the get-rich-quick philosophy of the theatre industry. But why should the audience be forced to pay ransom to a business that does not know how to manage itself? (9) The theatre is so horribly old-fashioned, so rigid. Why must we be forced out of our seats twice during the course of the evening? And those cumbersome scene changes, breaking the mood. All those antiquated conventions, indicating only a hardening of the arteries. (10) Lastly, what of our children? At least the movies make an attempt to provide for children, and there are generally enough films suitable for children to keep them occupied and happy on weekends throughout the year. But the stage, with its high admission prices, has no concern for youthful audiences. For all these, and other, reasons movie-going is more satisfactory than playgoing today, and it will continue to be so. Time does not reverse itself, and the machines cannot be broken. And a film like Last Year at Marienbad shows us that the full potential of the cinema as an art form has yet to be explored, but the explorers are already on the quayside, and there are more and more of them every day. I do not, of course, say that there are not good, indeed excellent, plays being written today. I say that the writers of these good plays would be better served by the movies. I do not say that the so-called living theatre is dead. I say that it is both senile and corrupt. I do not say that it has nothing to offer. I say that its great days are gone forever. I do not say that it should be treated with contempt. I say that it should be viewed from a proper perspective, as it really is and not as it once was. I do not say that it should disappear from our cultural life. I say I should like to see it at least make an attempt to keep up with the twentieth century. And I should like to see it preserved, if for no other reasons than to provide training for young actors and directors and writers, and to keep alive the works of the great playwrights of the past. In other words, despite its manifest limitations, I should still like to see it live up to its responsibilities as an art form, however primitive. However, it will not do so until and unless its practitioners and entrepreneurs treat the audience with the respect it deserves. And that is why, together with millions of other lovers of the drama throughout the world, I will be going to the movies tonight.

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Chapter 13

“Finding Shakespeare on Film” Peter Brook

From an unpublished interview with Brook by Geoffrey Reeves (1964) There are two Shakespeare films that warrant special attention, the Soviet Hamlet (1964) by Kozintsev and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957), which is a great masterpiece, perhaps the only true masterpiece inspired by Shakespeare, but it cannot properly be considered Shakespeare because it doesn’t use the text. Kurosawa follows the plot very closely, but by

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transposing it into the Japan of the Middle Ages and making Macbeth a samurai, he is doing another Seven Samurai. Where the story comes from doesn’t matter; he is doing what every filmmaker has always done—constructing a film from an idea and using appropriate dialogue. So that what may be the best Shakespearean film doesn’t help us with the problems of filming Shakespeare. The Russian Hamlet has been criticized for being academic, and it is; however, it has one gigantic merit: everything in it is related to the director’s search for the sense of the play—his structure is inseparable from his meaning. The strength of the film is in Kozintsev’s ability to realize his own conception with clarity. This is the first Shakespeare film to reflect this form of directorial approach: a search for overall meaning as opposed to the many and varied, sometimes dazzling, attempts to capture on the screen the actor-manager’s view of the play as imagery, theatricality, passion, color, effects. Hamlet is a firm piece of work; Kozintsev knows where he stands politically and socially. He knows what bars and wood and stone and fire mean to him; he knows the relationship of black to white, of full screen to empty screen, in terms of content. Moreover, Kozintsev managed to get away from the Russian tradition of operatic theater by using the new Pasternak translation, which is colder, quicker, and more realistic than the nineteenth-century version, and by avoiding conventional theater actors. But the limitation lies in its style: when all is said and done, the Soviet Hamlet is post-Eisenstein realistic—thus, superromantic—thus, a far cry from essential Shakespeare, which is neither epic, nor barbaric, nor colorful, nor abstract, nor realistic in any of our uses of the words. The Elizabethan theater had a very complicated yet marvelously free technique, a use of words that was most sophisticated; its blank verse slides in and out of prose, producing texts that continually change gear. If you could extract the mental impression made by the Shakespearean strategy of images, you would get a piece of pop collage. The effect is like a word whose letters are written across three overlapping pictures in the mind. You see the actor as a man standing in the distance and you also see his face, very close to you—perhaps his profile and the back of his head at the same time; you also see the background. When Hamlet is doing any one of his soliloquies, the background that Shakespeare can conjure in one line evaporates in the next and new images take over. I think that the freedom of the Elizabethan theater is still only partially understood, people having got used to talking in clichés about the nonlocalized stage. What people do not fully face is that the non-localized stage means that every single thing under the sun is possible, not only quick changes of location: a man can turn into twins, change sex, be his past, his present, his future, be a comic version of himself and a tragic version of himself, and be none of them, all at the same time.

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Jan Kott’s great essay on Gloucester’s suicide points out that the act of jumping off an imaginary cliff only takes on its full meaning when performed on a bare stage. Then it becomes a character doing a meaningless jump, and also an actor doing a meaningful jump—both, with full implications both concrete and imaginary, at the same moment. In the cinema, at least in all the films of Shakespeare we have seen, a Gloucester would be forced to stand on a windy heath of some description, although fifty percent of the extraordinariness of the powerful image is that this is happening on a pretended heath, on the boards of nowhere. A meaning is released by the double nature of the act, a meaning that isn’t there if you isolate one aspect of it. A leap on a bare stage can be done by anyone, and a leap on a heath is just as simple. But Lear gives you both at once in the theater. So the result is like the idea itself striking you in its purest form. Putting the Gloucester suicide on film would seem to me to involve the use of alienation. Alienation provides infinite possibilities, and is the only device that leads us back to the possibilities of blank verse. The verse image repeatedly puts objects and ideas into fresh perspective, and so does alienation. The freeze frame, caption, subtitle, etc., are all crude examples of filmic alienation. But meeting Shakespeare’s requirements poses a problem very different in scope. Jean-Luc Godard’s films may be leading a search for a new style, but this style cannot cope with the huge resources, the scale and range of action, which Shakespeare demands. On the other hand, in Kozintsev’s Hamlet its style is eventually its prison. The film creates a plausible world in which the action can reasonably unfold, but the price we pay for this plausible world is that the complexities I have been talking about cannot be encompassed and demonstrated. That is, the problem of filming Shakespeare is one of finding ways of shifting gears, styles, and conventions as lightly and deftly on the screen as within the mental processes reflected by Elizabethan blank verse onto the screen of the mind. The ponderousness of film is that everything about it tends towards consistency within each single image. And we once thought the cinema mobile! The effect that the invention of sound had on film in general, and on this problem especially, is curious and crucial. Sound stopped the cinema right in its tracks. People thought that sound would deprive the camera of mobility, and so it did—but only for a short time. Then the crane began swinging and gibbing—and for years everyone fondly imagined that the cinema was mobile again. Mobility of thought, which the silent film had, is only now being recaptured in post-Godardian techniques. In experiment (if not in actual subject matter) Godard is the most important director today. Continually he liberates the picture from its own consistency. At one moment, you are genuinely looking at a photograph of two people in a bar, then you are half alienated, then you are three-quarters alienated, then you are looking at it as a filmmaker, then

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you are reminded that it is made by actors, and then you are thrown right back into believing it. This relates to alienation in the theater and directly with the free theater-free cinema that the original Elizabethan Shakespeare must have been. A man being objectively recorded sitting in front of a camera does not constitute an objective reality. This particular cul de sac has been with us for a number of years. Gradually, we are coming to realize that photography is not objective, is not realistic—the reality of the cinema exists at the time of the projection, at the moment when an image is projected on the screen; if there is a spectator, then the interplay of image and spectator is the only reality. The reality of six weeks or six months before—a man sitting in a room—is no longer real; there is no virtue in the so-called “naturalism” of the photographic process. It would be real if it gave you total information, but simple recording cannot begin to do that. We did a very interesting exercise in this connection in the Stratford studio. I seated one of the actors in front of the group and asked him to think up an elaborate situation for himself and then to live, as an actor, all he could of the inner conditions of this situation. Then the group questioned him to find out what was going on. He was not allowed to answer them. This, of course, created a completely absurd situation. One saw a man who was going through something in his mind. That was all. Eventually he revealed his inner novelette—that he was waiting for his girlfriend to see a doctor to discover if she was pregnant, which would mean an abortion and finding the money, and possibly his wife discovering, etc., but of course none of this could possibly be indicated. The exercise simply drove home the fact that what the eye sees is often of no narrative value whatsoever. The actor stayed motionless, deadpan; interpretations of his state varied from the idea that he was waiting for the dentist, to all kinds of wild interpretations. Frustration built as the group couldn’t reach the actor and the silent immobile actor couldn’t reach them; so, they realized that surface appearances are non-communicative. It is this realization that leads, to take extremes, both Antonioni and Godard to their (very different) ways of working. Antonioni accepts the stability of the shot and then employs a variety of devices in the attempt to capture the invisible. Godard attacks the stability of the shot, and tries to capture a multiplicity of aspects. What both of them are rejecting is the notion that the frame, by itself or in temporal juxtaposition, carries the meaning—that a single frame is a full unit. The classical theory of cutting, based on the belief that you are juxtaposing units that in themselves have a certain completeness—the shot is a unit, the shot is a word, the shot is a brick—is false. My film Moderate Cantabile (1960) was a personal experiment to discover whether it is possible to photograph an almost invisible reality, whether it is possible in photographing nothing but a surface to get under that surface.

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My premise is a greedy one: in the theater, and especially in the cinema, I want to capture all possible information. This leads me to suspect the selfimposed consistency of any consistent style, because this precludes one’s learning something one might want to know. If you have a purely intimate story about two people, then one wants to know the social reference; if it is an epic subject, one wants to know something of the inner life. It is only in Shakespeare that you find the balance: nothing is sacrificed, nothing is made less. There is no watering down for the sake of cohesion; all aspects are there in full strength without neutralizing each other. A technique with great potential for Shakespeare was used in Francis Thompson’s lyrical documentary for the Johnson’s Wax pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. People fought to get to see this little study of boys growing up in different parts of the world. The film brilliantly uses the old Abel Gance multiple-screen technique, and shows its extraordinary possibilities. There are three screens side by side, three simultaneous projections. This gives an area as great as a Cinerama screen, but whereas Cinerama pretends that it is all one huge image, one vast window on the world, Thompson’s technique is more Brechtian. The thin black gaps between his screens never let you forget that you are looking at three separate frames. Sometimes the screens are used as one, as in the great canoeing sequences on enormous landscapes, the canoes shooting across, jumping the break— it is like sitting behind a pillar in an old movie house. But those breaks are there as constant reminders that the instant the director no longer needs or wants a full Cinerama scale, he can cut to something quite different. And that is Thompson’s strategy: one minute the three screens show traffic flowing in America, a wedding in Italy, an African landscape; then the juxtaposition splinters and one screen shows an African boy while the other two are still in New York; next, there may be three different views of the same thing; next, identical close-ups; then, one screen may keep the same view while the others show different angles and aspects, and so on. This is not aesthetically wrenching: Thompson’s film makes no greater demands of imaginative effort than standard filmmaking, but he can make his audience shift from three screens saying the same thing to three saying different things as a natural part of his language, a language potentially as flexible as verse. The great advantage of this device is that it breaks into the inner consistency of each frame, by opening the range of endless possible permutations. You can show Hamlet in the battlements of Elsinore on the right-hand screen, and the other two screens may just show a rampart and the sea. Or, to return to Gloucester, you can have a heath, and the moment that a soliloquy begins you can drop the heath out of your picture and concentrate on different views of Gloucester. If you like, you can suddenly open one of your screens to a caption, write a line, write a subtitle. If you want, in the middle of a realistic action in

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color you could have another or the same in black and white, and the third captioned. You could have statistics, or a cartoon parodying the photographic action. This is a film technique that has exactly the possibilities of a Brechtian stage and an Elizabethan one. I believe that this multiple-screen technique is a real opening, a way that Shakespeare might be found on film. But this is just a hunch, and economically hard to realize. The only thing that matters today is to define the problem. The filmed picture of an actor on a bare stage is a more cramped and constipated statement than the simple fact of an actor on a bare stage. But at the start bare stage and blank screen are equal. How can the screen free itself of its own consistencies so as to reflect the mobility of thought that blank verse demands?

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Chapter 14

“Film and Theatre” Susan Sontag

From The Drama Review, 11, no. 1 (Fall 1966): 24–37 The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, between the two arts. Is there something genuinely “cinematic”? Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebrated essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934, rewritten in 1947), that one of the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality. To talk about film, one must first define “the basic nature of the medium.” Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of their art than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line. The history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models. First of all from theatrical “frontality” (the unmoving camera reproducing the situation of the spectator of a play fixed in his seat), then from theatrical acting (gestures needlessly stylized, exaggerated—needlessly, because now the actor could be seen “close up”), then from theatrical furnishings (unnecessary “distancing” of the audience’s emotions, disregarding the opportunity to immerse the audience in reality). Movies are regarded as advancing from theatrical stasis to cinematic fluidity, from theatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediacy. But this view is far too simple. Such oversimplification testifies to the ambiguous scope of the camera eye. Because the camera can be used to project a relatively passive, unselective kind of vision—as well as the highly selective (“edited”) vision generally associated with movies—cinema is a “medium” as well as an art, in the sense that it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription. (This “medium” or non-art aspect of film attained its routine incarnation with the advent of television. There, movies themselves became another performing

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art to be transcribed, miniaturized on film.) One can film a play or ballet or opera or sporting event in such a way that film becomes, relatively speaking, a transparency, and it seems correct to say that one is seeing the event filmed. But theatre is never a “medium.” Thus, because one can make a movie “of ” a play but not a play “of ” a movie, cinema had an early but, I should argue, fortuitous connection with the stage. Some of the earliest films were filmed plays. Duse and Bernhardt and Barrymore are on film—marooned, in time, absurd, touching; there is a 1913 British film of Forbes-Robertson playing Hamlet, a 1923 German film of Othello starring Emil Jannings. More recently, the camera has “preserved” Helene Weigel’s performance of Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble, the Living Theatre production of The Brig (filmed by the Mekas brothers), and Peter Brook’s staging of Weiss’s Marat/Sade.

Marat/Sade (dir. Peter Brook, 1967)

But from the beginning, even within the confines of the notion of film as a “medium” and the camera as a “recording” instrument, a great deal other than what occurred in theatres was taken down. As with still photography, some of the events captured on moving photographs were staged but others were valued precisely because they were not staged—the camera being the witness, the invisible spectator, the invulnerable voyeuristic eye. (Perhaps public happenings, “news,” constitute an intermediate case between staged and unstaged events; but film as “newsreel” generally amounts to using film as a “medium.”) To create on film a document of a transient reality is a conception

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quite unrelated to the purposes of theatre. It only appears related when the “real event” being recorded is a theatrical performance. And the first use of the motion-picture camera was to make a documentary record of unstaged, casual reality: Louis Lumière’s films of crowd-scenes in Paris and New York made in the 1890s antedate any use of film in the service of plays. The other paradigmatic non-theatrical use of film, which dates from the earliest activity of the motion-picture camera, is for the creation of illusion, the construction of fantasy. The pioneer figure here is, of course, Georges Méliès. To be sure, Méliès (like many directors after him) conceived of the rectangle of the screen in analogy with the proscenium stage. And not only were the events staged; they were the very stuff of invention: imaginary journeys, imaginary objects, physical metamorphoses. But this, even adding the fact that Méliès situated his camera “in front of ” the action and hardly moved it, does not make his films theatrical in an invidious sense. In their treatment of persons as things (physical objects) and in their disjunctive presentation of time and space, Méliès’s films are quintessentially “cinematic”—so far as there is such a thing. The contrast between theatre and films is usually taken to lie in the materials represented or depicted. But exactly where does the difference lie? It’s tempting to draw a crude boundary. Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality, indeed to an ultimately physical reality that is “redeemed,” to use Siegfried Kracauer’s striking word, by the camera. The aesthetic judgment that follows this bit of intellectual map-making is that films shot in real-life settings are better (i.e., more cinematic) than those shot in a studio (where one can detect the difference). Obviously, if Flaherty and Italian neorealism and the cinéma vérité of Vertov, Rouch, Marker, and Ruspoli are the preferred models, one would judge rather harshly the period of 100% studio-made films inaugurated around 1920 by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, films with ostentatiously artificial landscapes and décor, and deem the right direction to be that taken at the same period in Sweden, where many films with strenuous natural settings were being shot “on location.” Thus, Panofsky attacks Dr. Caligari for “prestylizing reality,” and urges upon cinema “the problem of manipulating and shooting unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style.” But there is no reason to insist on a single model for film. And it is helpful to notice that, for the most part, the apotheosis of realism, the prestige of “unstylized reality,” in cinema is actually a covert political-moral position. Films have been rather too often acclaimed as the democratic art, the art of mass society. Once one takes this description very seriously, one tends (like Panofsky and Kracauer) to want movies to continue to reflect their origins in a vulgar level of the arts, to remain loyal to their vast uneducated audience. Thus, a vaguely Marxist orientation jibes with a fundamental tenet of romanticism. Cinema, at once high art and popular art, is cast as the art of the authentic. Theatre, by

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contrast, means dressing up, pretense, lies. It smacks of aristocratic taste and the class society. Behind the objection of critics to the stagy sets of Dr. Caligari, the improbable costumes and florid acting of Renoir’s Nana, the talkiness of Dreyer’s Gertrud, as “theatrical,” lay the feeling that such films were false, that they exhibited a sensibility both pretentious and reactionary that was out-ofstep with the democratic and more mundane sensibility of modern life. Anyway, whether aesthetic defect or not in the particular case, the synthetic look in films is not necessarily a misplaced theatricalism. From the beginning of film history, there were painters and sculptors who claimed that cinema’s true future resided in artifice, construction. It lay not in figurative narration or storytelling of any kind (either in a relatively realistic or in a “surrealistic” vein), but in abstraction. Thus, Theo van Doesburg in his essay of 1929, “Film as Pure Form,” envisages film as the vehicle of “optical poetry,” “dynamic light architecture,” “the creation of a moving ornament.” Films will realize “Bach’s dream of finding an optical equivalent for the temporal structure of a musical composition.” Today, a few filmmakers—for example, Robert Breer—continue to pursue this conception of film, and who is to say it is not cinematic? Could anything be farther from the scope of theatre than such a degree of abstraction? It’s important not to answer that question too quickly. Some locate the division between theatre and film as the difference between the play and the film script. Panofsky derives this difference from what he takes to be the most profound one: the difference between the formal conditions of seeing a play and those of seeing a movie. In the theatre, says Panofsky, “space is static, that is, the space represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle, is unalterably fixed,” while in the cinema “the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience.” In the cinema, the spectator is “aesthetically . . . in permanent motion as his eye identifies with the lens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction.” True enough. But the observation does not warrant a radical dissociation of theatre from film. Like many critics, Panofsky is assuming a “literary” conception of theatre. To a theatre which is conceived of basically as dramatized literature, texts, words, he contrasts cinema which is, according to the received phrase, primarily “a visual experience.” In effect, we are being asked to acknowledge tacitly the period of silent films as definitive of cinematic art and to identify theatre with “plays,” from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams. But many of the most interesting movies today are not adequately described as images with sound added. And what if theatre is conceived of as more than, or something different from, plays? Panofsky may be oversimplifying when he decries the theatrical taint in movies, but he is sound when he argues that, historically, theatre is only one of the arts that feeds into cinema. As he remarks, it is apt that films came to

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be known popularly as moving pictures rather than as “photoplays” or “screen plays.” Movies derive less from the theatre, from a performance art, an art that already moves, than they do from works of art that were stationary. Bad nineteenth-century paintings and postcards, wax-works à la Madame Tussaud, and comic strips are the sources Panofsky cites. What is surprising is that he doesn’t connect movies with earlier narrative uses of still photography— like the family photo-album. The narrative techniques developed by certain nineteenth-century novelists, as Eisenstein pointed out in his brilliant essay on Dickens, supplied still another prototype for cinema. Movies are images (usually photographs) that move, to be sure. But the distinctive unit of films is not the image but the principle of connection between the images, the relation of a “shot” to the one that preceded it and the one that comes after. There is no peculiarly “cinematic” as opposed to “theatrical” mode of linking images. Panofsky tries to hold the line against the infiltration of theatre by cinema, as well as vice versa. In the theatre, not only can the spectator not change his angle of vision but, unlike movies, “the settings of the stage cannot change during one act (except for such incidentals as rising moons or gathering clouds and such illegitimate reborrowings from film as turning wings or gliding backdrops).” Were we to assent to this, the ideal play would be No Exit, the ideal set a realistic living room or a blank stage. No less dogmatic is the complementary dictum about what is illegitimate in films—according to which, since films are “a visual experience,” all components must be demonstrably subordinate to the image. Thus, Panofsky asserts: “Wherever a poetic emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit (even, I am grieved to say, some of the wisecracks of Groucho Marx) entirely lose contact with visible movement, they strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place.” What, then, of the films of Bresson and Godard, with their allusive, densely thoughtful texts and their characteristic refusal to be visually beautiful? How could one explain the extraordinary rightness of Ozu’s relatively immobilized camera? The decline in average quality of films in the early sound period (compared with the level reached by films in the 1920s) is undeniable. Although it would be facile to call the sheer uninterestingness of most films of this period simply a regression to theatre, it is a fact that filmmakers did turn more frequently to plays in the 1930s than they had in the preceding decade. Countless stage successes like Outward Bound, Dinner at Eight, Blithe Spirit, Faisons un Rève, Twentieth Century, Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, She Done Him Wrong, Anna Christie, Marius, Animal Crackers, The Petrified Forest, were filmed. The success of movie versions of plays is measured by the extent to which the script rearranges and displaces the action and deals less than respectfully with the spoken text—as do certain films of plays by Wilde and Shaw, the Olivier Shakespeare films (at

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least Henry V), and Sjöberg’s Miss Julie. But the basic disapproval of films that betray their origins in plays remains. A recent example: the outright hostility that greeted Dreyer’s latest film, Gertrud. Not only does Gertrud, which I believe to be a minor masterpiece, follow a turn-of-the-century play that has characters conversing at length and quite formally, but it is filmed almost entirely in middle-shot.

Miss Julie (dir. Alf Sjöberg, 1951)

Some of the films I have just mentioned are negligible as art; several are first-rate. (The same for the plays, though no correlation between the merits of the movies and those of the “original” plays can be established.) However, their virtues and faults cannot be sorted out as a cinematic versus a theatrical element. Whether derived from plays or not, films with complex or formal dialogue, films in which the camera is static or in which the action stays indoors, are not necessarily theatrical. Per contra, it is no more part of the putative “essence” of movies that the camera must rove over a large physical area, than it is that movies ought to be silent. Though most of the action of Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths, a fairly faithful transcription of Gorky’s play, is confined to one large room, it is as cinematic as the same director’s Throne of Blood, a very free and laconic adaptation of Macbeth. The quality of Melville’s claustrophobic Les Enfants terribles is as peculiar to the movies as Ford’s The Searchers or a train journey in Cinerama. What does make a film theatrical in an invidious sense is when the narration becomes coy or self-conscious: compare Autant-Lara’s Occupe-Toi d’Amélie, a

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brilliant cinematic use of the conventions and materials of theatricality, with Ophüls’s clumsy use of similar conventions and materials in La Ronde. Allardyce Nicoll, in his book Film and Theatre (1936), argues that the difference may be understood as a difference in kinds of characters. “Practically all effectively drawn stage characters are types [while] in the cinema we demand individualization and impute greater power of independent life to the figures on the screen.” (Panofsky, it might be mentioned, makes exactly the opposite point: that the nature of films, in contrast to plays, requires flat or stock characters.) Nicoll’s thesis is not as arbitrary as it may at first appear. I would relate it to the fact that often the indelible moments of a film, and the most potent elements of characterization, are precisely the “irrelevant” or unfunctional details. (A random example: the ping-pong ball the schoolmaster toys with in Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah.) Movies thrive on the narrative equivalent of a technique familiar from painting and photography, off-centering. It is this that creates the pleasing disunity of the fragmentariness (what Nicoll means by “individualization”?) of the characters of many of the greatest films. In contrast, linear “coherence” of detail (the gun on the wall in the first act that must go off by the end of the third) is the rule in Occidental narrative theatre, and gives rise to the sense of the unity of the characters (a unity that may appear like the statement of a “type”). But even with these adjustments, Nicoll’s thesis seems less than appealing when one perceives that it rests on the idea that “When we go to the theatre, we expect theatre and nothing else.” What is this theatre-and-nothing-else? It is the old notion of artifice. (As if art were ever anything else. As if some arts were artificial but others not.) According to Nicoll, when we are in a theatre “in every way the ‘falsity’ of a theatrical production is borne in upon us, so that we are prepared to demand nothing save a theatrical truth.” In the cinema, however, every member of the audience, no matter how sophisticated, is on essentially the same level; we all believe that the camera cannot lie. As the film actor and his role are identical, so the image cannot be dissociated from what is imaged. Cinema, therefore, gives us what is experienced as the truth of life. Couldn’t theatre dissolve the distinction between the truth of artifice and the truth of life? Isn’t that just what the theatre as ritual seeks to do? Isn’t that what is being sought when theatre is conceived as an exchange with an audience?— something that films can never be. If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this. Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema (through editing, that is, through the change of shot—which is the basic unit of film construction) has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. In the theatre, people are either in the stage space or “off.” When “on,” they are always visible or visualizable in contiguity with each other. In the cinema, no

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such relation is necessarily visible or even visualizable. (Example: the last shot of Paradjanov’s In the Shadows of Our Ancestors.) Some films considered objectionably theatrical are those that seem to emphasize spatial continuities, like Hitchcock’s virtuoso Rope or the daringly anachronistic Gertrud. But closer analysis of both these films would show how complex their treatment of space is. The longer and longer “takes” toward which sound films have been moving are, in themselves, neither more nor less cinematic than the short “takes” characteristic of silents. Thus, cinematic virtue does not reside in the fluidity of the positioning of the camera nor in the mere frequency of the change of shot. It consists in the arrangement of screen images and (now) of sounds. Méliès, for example, though he didn’t get beyond the static positioning of his camera, had a very striking conception of how to link screen images. He grasped that editing an equivalent to the magician’s sleight of hand—thereby suggesting that one of the features of film (as distinct from theatre) is that anything can happen, that there is nothing that can’t be represented convincingly. Through editing, Méliès presents discontinuities of physical substance and behavior. In his films, the discontinuities are, so to speak, practical, functional; they accomplish a transformation of ordinary reality. But the continuous reinvention of space (as well as the option of temporal indeterminacy) peculiar to film narration does not pertain only to the cinema’s ability to fabricate “visions,” to show us a radically altered world. The most “realistic” use of the motion-picture camera also involves a discontinuous account of space. Film narration has a “syntax,” composed of the rhythm of associations and disjunctions. As Cocteau has written, “My primary concern in a film is to prevent the images from flowing, to oppose them to each other, to anchor them and join them without destroying their relief.” (But does such a conception of film syntax entail, as Cocteau thinks, our disavowal of movies as “mere entertainment instead of a vehicle for thought”?) In drawing a line of demarcation between theatre and films, the issue of the continuity of space seems to me more fundamental than the difference that might be pointed out between theatre as an organization of movement in three-dimensional space (like dance) versus cinema as an organization of plane space (like painting). The theatre’s capacities for manipulating space and time are, simply, much cruder and more labored than film’s. Theatre cannot equal the cinema’s facilities for the strictly controlled repetition of images, for the duplication or matching of word and image, and for the juxtaposition and overlapping of images. (Through advanced lighting techniques, one can now “dissolve” on the stage. But as yet there is no equivalent, not even through the most adept use of a scrim, of the “lap dissolve.”) Theatre has been described as a mediated art, presumably because it usually consists of a pre-existent play mediated by a particular performance which

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offers one of many possible interpretations of the play. Film, in contrast, is regarded as unmediated—because of its larger-than-life scale and more unrefusable impact on the eye, and because (in Panofsky’s words) “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such” and the characters in a movie “have no aesthetic existence outside the actors.” But there is an equally valid sense that shows movies to be the mediated art and theatre the unmediated one. We see what happens on the stage with our own eyes. We see on the screen what the camera sees. In the cinema, narration proceeds by ellipsis (the “cut” or change of shot); the camera eye is a unified point of view that continually displaces itself. But the change of shot can provoke questions, the simplest of which is: from whose point of view is the shot seen? And the ambiguity of point of view latent in all cinematic narration has no equivalent in the theatre. Indeed, one should not neglect to emphasize the aesthetically positive role of disorientation in the cinema. Examples: Busby Berkeley dollying back from an ordinary-looking stage already established as some thirty feet deep to disclose a stage area three hundred feet square. Resnais panning from character X’s point of view a full 360°, to come to rest upon X’s face. Much may be made of the fact that, in its concrete existence, cinema is an object (a product, even) while theatre is a performance. Is this so important? In a way, no. Whether objects (like films or paintings) or performances (like music or theatre), all art is first a mental act, a fact of consciousness. The object aspect of film or the performance aspect of theatre is merely a means—a means to the experience, which is not only “of ” but “through” the film and the theatre event. Each subject of an aesthetic experience shapes it to his own measure. With respect to any single experience, it hardly matters that a film is usually identical from one projection of it to another while theatre performances are highly mutable. The difference between object-art and performance-art lies behind Panofsky’s observation that “the screenplay, in contrast to the theatre play, has no aesthetic existence independent of its performance,” and characters in movies are the stars who enact them. It is because the film is an object, a totality which is set, that movie roles are identical with the actors’ performances; while in the theatre (in the West, an additive rather than an organic art?) only the written play is “fixed,” an object and therefore existing apart from any staging of it. Yet this dichotomy is not beyond dispute. Just as movies needn’t necessarily be designed to be shown in theatres at all (they can be intended for more continuous and casual looking), a movie may be altered from one projection to the next. Harry Smith, when he runs off his own films, makes each projection an unrepeatable performance. And, again, it is not true that all theatre is only about written plays that may be given a good or a bad production. In Happenings and other recent theatre events, we are precisely being offered “plays” identical with their productions in the same sense as the screenplay is identical with the film.

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Yet, a difference remains. Because the film is an object, it is totally manipulable, totally calculable. A film is like a book, another portable art-object; making a film, like writing a book, means constructing an inanimate thing, every element of which is determinate. Indeed, in films, this determinacy has or can have a quasi-mathematical form, like music. (A shot lasts a certain number of seconds, a change of angle of so many degrees is required to “match” two shots.) Given the total determinacy of the result on celluloid (whatever the extent of the director’s conscious intervention), it was inevitable that some film directors would want to devise schemas to make their intentions more exact. Thus, it was neither perverse nor primitive of Busby Berkeley to have used only one camera to shoot the whole of each of his mammoth dance numbers. Every “set-up” was designed to be shot from only one exactly calculated angle. Bresson, working on a far more self-conscious level of artistry, has declared that, for him, the director’s task is to find the single correct way of doing each shot. An image cannot be justified in itself, according to Bresson; it has an exactly specifiable relation to the temporally adjacent images, which relation constitutes its “meaning.” But the theatre allows only the loosest approximation to this sort of formal concern. (And responsibility. Justly, French critics speak of the director of a film as its “author.”) Because they are performances, something always “live,” theatre events are not subject to a comparable degree of control, do not admit a comparably exact integration of effects. It would be foolish to conclude that the best films are those that arise from the greatest amount of conscious planning; the plan may be faulty; and with some directors, instinct works better than any plan. Besides, there is an impressive body of “improvised” cinema. (To be distinguished from the work of some filmmakers, notably Godard, who have become fascinated with the “look” of improvised cinema.) Nevertheless, it seems indisputable that cinema, not only potentially but by its nature, is a more rigorous art than theatre. Thus, not merely a failure of nerve accounts for the fact that theatre, this seasoned art, occupied since antiquity with all sorts of local offices—enacting sacred rites, reinforcing communal loyalty, guiding morals, provoking the therapeutic discharge of violent emotions, conferring social status, giving practical instruction, affording entertainment, dignifying celebrations, subverting established authority—is now on the defensive before movies, this brash art with its huge, amorphous, passive audience. Meanwhile, movies continue to maintain their astonishing pace of formal articulation. (Take the commercial cinema of Europe, Japan, and the United States simply since 1960, and consider what audiences have become habituated to in the way of increasingly elliptical storytelling and visualization.) But note: this youngest of the arts is also the one most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, while

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theatres—no matter how devoted to the classics, to old plays—can only “modernize.” Movies resurrect the beautiful dead; present intact vanished or ruined environments; employ, without irony, styles and fashions that seem funny today; solemnly ponder irrelevant or naïve problems. The historical flavor of anything registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than two years or so are saturated with a kind of pathos. (The pathos I am describing, which overtakes animated cartoons and drawn, abstract films as well as ordinary movies, is not simply that of old photographs.) Films age (being objects) as no theatre event does (being always new). There is no pathos of mortality in theatre’s “reality” as such, nothing in our response to a good performance of a Mayakovsky play comparable to the aesthetic role the emotion of nostalgia has when we see a film by Pudovkin. Also worth noting: compared with the theatre, innovations in cinema seem to be assimilated more efficiently, seem altogether to be more shareable—and not only because new films are quickly and widely circulated. Also, partly because virtually the entire body of accomplishment in film can be consulted in the present, most filmmakers are more knowledgeable about the history of their art than most theatre directors are about the recent past of theirs. The key word in many discussions of cinema is “possibility.” A merely classifying use of the word occurs, as in Panofsky’s engaging judgment that, “within their self-imposed limitations the earlier Disney films . . . represent, as it were, a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities.” But behind this relatively neutral sense lurks a more polemical sense of cinema’s “possibility.” What is regularly intimated is the obsolescence of theatre, its supercession by films. Thus, Panofsky describes the mediation of the camera eye as opening “up a world of possibility of which the stage can never dream.” Artaud, earlier, thought that motion pictures may have made the theatre obsolete. Movies “possess a sort of virtual power that probes into the mind and uncovers undreamt of possibilities. . . . When this art’s exhilaration has been blended in the right proportions with the psychic ingredient it commands, it will leave the theatre far behind and we will relegate the latter to the attic of our memories.” Meyerhold, facing the challenge head-on, thought the only hope for theatre lay in a wholesale emulation of the cinema. “Let us ‘cinematify’ the theatre,” he urged. The staging of plays must be “industrialized,” theatres must accommodate audiences in the tens of thousands rather than in the hundreds, etc. Meyerhold also seemed to find some relief in the idea that the coming of sound signalled the downfall of movies. Believing that their international appeal depended entirely on the fact that screen actors didn’t speak any particular language, he couldn’t imagine in 1930 that, even if that were so, technology (dubbing, subtitling) could solve the problem. Is cinema the successor, the rival, or the revivifier of the theatre?

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Art forms have been abandoned. (Whether because they became obsolete is another question.) One can’t be sure that theatre is not in a state of irremediable decline, spurts of local vitality notwithstanding. But why should it be rendered obsolete by movies? It’s worth remembering that predictions of obsolescence amount to declaring that something has one peculiar task (which another something may do as well or better). Has theatre one peculiar task or aptitude? Those who predict the demise of the theatre, assuming that cinema has engulfed its function, tend to impute a relation between films and theatre reminiscent of what was once said about photography and painting. If the painter’s job had been no more than fabricating likenesses, the invention of the camera might indeed have made painting obsolete. But painting is hardly just “pictures,” any more than cinema is just theatre for the masses, available in portable standard units. In the naïve tale of photography and painting, painting was reprieved when it claimed a new task, abstraction. As the superior realism of photography was supposed to have liberated painting, allowing it to go abstract, cinema’s superior power to represent (not merely to stimulate) the imagination may appear to have emboldened the theatre in a similar fashion, inviting the gradual obliteration of the conventional “plot.” Actually, painting and photography evidence parallel developments rather than a rivalry or a supercession. And, at least in principle, so have theatre and film. The possibilities for theatre that lie in going beyond psychological realism, in seeking greater abstractness, are not less germane to the future of narrative films. Conversely, the notion of movies as witness to real life, testimony rather than invention, the treatment of collective situations rather than the depiction of personal “dramas,” is equally relevant to the stage. Not surprisingly, what follows some years after the rise of cinéma vérité, the sophisticated heir of documentary films, is a documentary theatre, the “theatre of fact.” (Cf. Hochhuth, Weiss’s The Investigation, recent projects of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.) The influence of the theatre upon films in the early years is well known. According to Kracauer, the distinctive lighting of Dr. Caligari (and of many subsequent German silents) can be traced to an experiment with lighting Max Reinhardt made shortly before, in his production of Sorge’s play The Beggar. Even in this period, however, the impact was reciprocal. The accomplishments of the “Expressionist film” were immediately absorbed by the Expressionist theatre. Stimulated by the cinematic technique of the “iris-in,” stage lighting took to singling out a lone player, or some segment of the scene, masking out the rest of the stage. Rotating sets tried to approximate the instantaneous displacement of the camera eye. (More recently, reports have come of ingenious lighting techniques used by the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad, directed since

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1956 by Georgi Tovstonogov, which allow for incredibly rapid scene changes taking place behind a horizontal curtain of light.) Today traffic seems, with few exceptions, entirely one way: film to theatre. Particularly in France and in Central and Eastern Europe, the staging of many plays is inspired by the movies. The aim of adapting neo-cinematic devices for the stage (I exclude the outright use of films within the theatre production) seems mainly to tighten up the theatrical experience, to approximate the cinema’s absolute control of the flow and location of the audience’s attention. But the conception can be even more directly cinematic. Example: Josef Svoboda’s production of The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers at the Czech National Theatre in Prague (recently seen in London), which frankly attempted to install a mediated vision upon the stage equivalent to the discontinuous intensifications of the camera eye. According to a London critic’s account, “the set consisted of two huge, faceted mirrors slung at an angle to the stage, so that they reflect whatever happens there defracted as if through a decanter stopper or the colossally magnified eye of a fly. Any figure placed at the base of their angle becomes multiplied from floor to proscenium; farther out, and you find yourself viewing it not only face to face but from overhead, the vantage point of a camera slung to a bird or a helicopter.” Perhaps the first to propose the use of film itself as one element in a theatre experience was Marinetti. Writing between 1910 and 1914, he envisaged the theatre as a final synthesis of all the arts; and as such it had to use the newest art form, movies. No doubt the cinema also recommended itself for inclusion because of the priority Marinetti gave to the use of existing forms of popular entertainment, such as the variety theatre and the café-chantant. (He called his projected art form the “Futurist Variety Theatre.”) And cinema, at that time, was not considered as anything other than a vulgar art. Soon after, the idea begins to occur frequently. In the total-theatre projects of the Bauhaus group in the 1920s (Gropius, Piscator, etc.), film had a regular place. Meyerhold insisted on its use in the theatre. (He described his program as fulfilling Wagner’s once “wholly Utopian” proposals to “use all means available from the other arts.”) Film’s actual employment has by now a fairly long history, which includes “the living newspaper,” “epic theatre,” and “happenings.” This year marked the introduction of a film sequence into Broadwaytype theatre. In two highly successful musicals, London’s Come Spy with Me and New York’s Superman, both parodic in tone, the action is interrupted to lower a screen and run off a movie showing the pop-art hero’s exploits. Thus far, the use of film within live theatre events has tended to be stereotyped. Film is employed as document, supportive of or redundant to the live stage events (as in Brecht’s productions in East Berlin). Or else it is employed as hallucinant; recent examples are Bob Whitman’s Happenings, and a new kind of nightclub situation, the mixed-media discothèque (Andy Warhol’s The

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Plastic Inevitable, Murray the K’s World). The interpolation of film into the theatre experience may be enlarging from the point of view of theatre. But in terms of what film is capable of, it seems a reductive, monotonous use of film. Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question each artist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and temperament? This doesn’t mean all contemporary artists believe that art progresses. A radical position isn’t necessarily a forward-looking position. Consider the two principal radical positions in the arts today. One recommends the breaking down of distinctions between genres: the arts would eventuate in one art, consisting of many different kinds of behavior going on at the same time, a vast behavioral magma or synesthesis. The other position recommends the maintaining and clarifying of barriers between the arts, by the intensification of what each art distinctively is; painting must use only those means that pertain to painting, music only those that are musical, novels those that pertain to the novel and to no other literary form, etc. The two positions are, in a sense, irreconcilable. Except that both are invoked to support a perennial modern quest—the quest for the definitive art form. An art may be proposed as definitive because it is considered the most rigorous, or most fundamental. For these reasons, Schopenhauer suggested and Pater asserted that all art aspires to the condition of music. More recently, the thesis that all the arts are leading toward one art has been advanced by enthusiasts of the cinema. The candidacy of film is founded on its being so exact and, potentially, so complex—a rigorous combination of music, literature, and the image. Or, an art may be proposed as definitive because it is the most inclusive. This is the basis of the destiny for theatre held out by Wagner, Marinetti, Artaud, John Cage—all of whom envisage theatre as nothing less than a total art, potentially conscripting all the arts into its service. And as the ideas of synesthesia continue to proliferate among painters, sculptors, architects, and composers, theatre remains the favored candidate for the role of summative art. So conceived, of course, theatre’s claims do contradict those of cinema. Partisans of theatre would argue that while music, painting, dance, cinema, the speaking of words, etc. can all converge on a “stage,” the film-object can only become bigger (multiple screens, 360° projection, etc.) or longer in duration or more internally articulated and complex. Theatre can be anything, everything; in the end, films can only be more of what they specifically (that is to say, cinematically) are. Underlying the competing apocalyptic expectations for both arts, one detects a common animus. In 1923 Béla Balázs, anticipating in great detail the thesis of Marshall McLuhan, described movies as the herald of a new “visual culture” that will give us back our bodies, and particularly our faces, which have been rendered illegible, soulless, unexpressive by the centuries-old ascendancy

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of “print.” An animus against literature, against “the printing press” and its “culture of concepts,” also informs most of the interesting thinking about the theatre in our time. What’s important is that no definition or characterization of theatre and cinema, even the most self-evident, be taken for granted. For instance: both cinema and theatre are temporal arts. As in music (and unlike painting), everything is not present all at once. Could this be modified? The allure of mixed-media forms in theatre suggests not only a more elongated and more complex “drama” (like Wagnerian opera) but also a more compact theatre experience that approaches the condition of painting. This prospect of increased compactness is broached by Marinetti; he calls it simultaneity, a leading idea of Futurist aesthetics. In becoming a final synthesis of all the arts, says Marinetti, theatre “would use the new twentiethcentury devices of electricity and the cinema; this would enable plays to be extremely short, since all these technical means would enable the theatrical synthesis to be achieved in the shortest possible space of time, as all the elements could be presented simultaneously.” A pervasive notion in both advanced cinema and theatre is the idea of art as an act of violence. Its source is to be found in the aesthetics of Futurism and of Surrealism; its principal “texts” are, for theatre, the writings of Artaud and, for cinema, the two classic films of Luis Buñuel, L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou. (More recent examples: the early plays of Ionesco, at least as conceived; the “cinema of cruelty” of Hitchcock, Clouzot, Franju, Robert Aldrich, Polanski; work by the Living Theatre; some of the neo-cinematic lighting techniques used in experimental theatres; the sound of late Cage and LaMonte Young.) The relation of art to an audience understood to be passive, inert, surfeited, can only be assault. Art becomes identical with aggression. This theory of art as assault on the audience—like the complementary notion of art as ritual—is understandable, and precious. Still, one must not neglect to question it, particularly in the theatre. For it can become as much a convention as anything else; and end, like all theatrical conventions, by reinforcing the deadness of the audience. (As Wagner’s ideology of a total theatre played its role in confirming the stupidity and bestiality of German culture.) Moreover, the depth of the assault must be assessed honestly. In the theatre, this entails not “diluting” Artaud. Artaud’s writings represent the demand for a totally open (therefore, flayed, self-cruel) consciousness of which theatre would be one adjunct or instrument. No work in the theatre has yet amounted to this. Thus, Peter Brook has astutely and forthrightly disclaimed that his company’s work in London in the “Theatre of Cruelty,” which culminated in his celebrated production of Weiss’s Marat/Sade, is genuinely Artaudian. It is Artaudian, he says, in a trivial sense only. (Trivial from Artaud’s point of view, not from ours.)

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Macbeth (dir. Roman Polanski, 1971)

For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated. Like the idea that everything is what it is, and not another thing. A painting is a painting. Sculpture is sculpture. A poem is a poem, not prose. Et cetera. And the complementary idea: a painting can be “literary” or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical. We need a new idea. It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to recognize it?

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Chapter 15

“Filmmaker, Actor, and Audience; Dramatist, Screenwriter, and Director” Roger Manvell

From Theater and Film (1979) Filmmaker, Actor, and Audience A first consideration in making any comparison between the fiction film (so-called) and the stage play is to understand the physical differences between these two dramatic media. Both present reenacted stories; thus both involve stories created in such a way that actors can perform them before audiences. But here the basic similarity—that both are forms of dramatic presentation—ends. A stage play depends on a dramatist’s writing a dialogue script that, presented by the actors, is given a separate and distinct rendering to each audience that assembles to see it. It is a “live show” in the fullest sense; the actors are physically present on each occasion and rework their performance, both as a team reacting to one another and as individual performers reacting to their audience. Each performance is therefore, a unique event; one of the great privileges of the theater, one of its principal creative qualities, is that each member of the audience is fully aware of this uniqueness, knowing that the actors (including, perhaps, artists of the highest reputation) are present to exhibit their art in a way that makes each appearance something special. A stage play belongs, like music, to the field of the performed arts, often radically changing its nature with each new rendering by a new cast. The artistic values of a film are quite different. It is the projection of a recorded performance that has been (so far as the circumstances of its production have permitted) perfected apart from the audience. The individual live audiences, therefore, play no part in creating the unique atmosphere to which the live performers in the theater can respond. This does not mean that a film is inferior to a stage production—only that it is different. The fact that (ideally

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speaking) weeks or months are spent in polishing and perfecting each shot that makes up the mosaic of a film’s presentation of a dramatic story constitutes its particular nature as an art form. A film offers a minutely observed, technically perfected, and detailed rendering of the drama, which, once completed, offers exactly the same experience to audiences all over the world; only flaws in technical projection can lower the standard of performance. The work itself, properly preserved in archive, lasts forever. A film belongs, like a painting or a statue, to the field of the fine arts, to be exhibited as it was finally perfected by its makers. Another difference is that a stage play, with its values invested largely in dialogue, becomes also a branch of literature, and therefore not only performable, but publishable. This is at once a great advantage because it makes it easily accessible on the printed age; it is a distraction because plays too often are only read rather than witnessed in a theater, to their great loss. However great a play may be as literature, it can only be appreciated and judged as drama through performance on a stage. Shakespeare’s plays were all conceived as working theater scripts. Turning them into unperformed literature is to do them a disservice. Film scripts, especially today, are frequently published, but it is evident from the very appearance of the printed page that very few of them can rank as literature: the description of the action is very evidently a secondhand affair, losing visual impact through the referential nature of the words. It is like a description of a painting instead of the painting itself. The dialogue of a film seldom has, or is required to have, the same completeness of literary quality that the best stage dialogue must have; dialogue in a film, much as conversation in real life, forms a part of human behavior, the spoken part involving action and reaction. In a film, the total behavior of a human being, as observed minutely by camera and recorded by microphone, makes up the nature of action. This can only be described, or referred to, on a printed page. Film scripts, therefore, whether the original projects for a film (as in the case of many of Ingmar Bergman’s published scripts, revealing considerable variations between text and finished film), or the subsequent shot-by-shot scripts describing, with dialogue, the finished films once they have been realized, are rarely works of literary art, even when decently written. They are putting into words an art form the basis of which is images on a screen accompanied by sound, which integrates natural sound with music and dialogue. Another major physical distinction between a stage play and a film is the “acting area” within which the action takes place. We have seen that the writing of stage plays has been greatly affected by the kinds of stage available for performance and that the structuring of plays has responded to the opportunities offered. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for the Elizabethan thrust stage and so as a dramatist was independent of setting or scene change; hence, the play

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has twenty-five changes of location following on each other in rapid continuity without intermission and identified clearly in the dialogue, while Antony and Cleopatra has no less than forty-two changes of location. On the other hand, Congreve, writing The Way of the World about a century later for a theater with visual settings shown behind the proscenium arch, uses only three scene changes throughout a five-act play. A modern play presented on a stage equipped with all the contemporary facilities for scene change and continuity can, like Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, become as fluctuating in its rapid environmental switches as Shakespeare’s open theater, while Peter Shaffer’s Equus can make demands, as Shakespeare did, on the imagination of the audience, using in the process a single set in the round, rather like a boxing ring. But however the acting area of the stage is used (whether it be proscenium, thrust, or round), the fact always remains that it is a stage in an auditorium and that the settings (realistic, stylized, or merely imagined) are representations accepted by theatrical convention as substitutes for the real or imaginary places demanded by the action.

Antony and Cleopatra (dir. Charlton Heston, 1972)

The film uses every kind of environment, real or representational, for its acting area. The great landscapes in John Ford’s westerns are the real mesas to be found in the Navajo Indian reservation between Arizona and Utah, but the little western townships so familiar on film are special structures built on open ground that are no more “real” than a stage set. The mansions supposedly located in Alexandria in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia were actually

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Spanish mansions adapted to look like mansions found in Egypt. The settings used in Busby Berkeley’s musicals were structures built in a studio no different in kind from an elaborate stage in some giant theater. The great difference between stage and screen is that the film is always free to use natural or man-made locations, adapting real streets, landscapes, seas, and mountains for its environmental territory: the screenplay, unlike the stage play, by its photographic nature is liberated from the confines of the theater’s acting area. Similarly, it can take its actors from the ranks of nonprofessional players, widening the casting of characters beyond the limits set by the professional player on the stage by using any selected person willing to be put before the cameras. The value of this has been seen in films as varied as the work of Flaherty, Eisenstein, De Sica, or Satyajit Ray, or in the documentaries of the period of the Second World War, in which servicemen were constantly called upon to reenact incidents from their experiences, as in the outstanding British war film Western Approaches, by Pat Jackson, and Fires Were Started, by Humphrey Jennings. The price that has to be paid for this enrichment of setting and characterization is the severance of the actor from his audience. The film is created apart from its future public because it has to be made up from a mosaic of hundreds of photographic setups. The interesting hybrid of early television drama production represented the last stronghold in the attempt to retain an immediacy of performance in the otherwise filmlike medium of the television play; certain die-hard British television directors insisted on presenting their plays “live” before the viewing public; that is, they transmitted their productions over the air in live performance coming direct from the studio stages with their multiple settings, their television cameras with their trailing mass of cables, and their microphones angled above the moving players on booms. But only the simplest kind of dialogue plays with the barest of settings and camera coverage could stand up to the strain of such presentation without evident signs of faults and technical roughness. The more elaborate moments of action had to be prefilmed and inserted into the live show by means of telecine, and it soon became necessary to prerecord the whole, whether on tape or film, to achieve the higher standards of flexible production associated with film. The old principle that actors gave of their best only when they were aware that the public was actually watching them as they worked was replaced in television by the opposing principle that the best performance could be achieved with all the refinements of close recording by camera and microphone, if directed under the fully controlled conditions of studio or location production made in advance exhibition. The television play and the film became two facets of a similar form of presentation, twin arts created and recorded in different, though kindred, physical and technical circumstances.

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Dramatist, Screenwriter, and Director The dramatist has always taken pride of place in the theater. The screenwriter, even though many films have been his original creation written quite apart from the director, has never succeeded in becoming the acknowledged principal creative name in films, although top screenwriters are paid vastly more money than even the most successful dramatists, owing to the different economics of theater and cinema production. The reason for this is apparent. Plays in the theater were initially directed either by their authors (more especially if the author was himself a member of the acting company, as in the case of Shakespeare) or by a leading player, a tradition confirmed in England by the emergence of the great actormanagers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, such as Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, and Irving. Only in the twentieth century have certain celebrated theater directors emerged to put their specific hallmark on stage presentation—among them Tyrone Guthrie, Peter Brook, and Peter Hall—without themselves being actors. This development would seem to be inevitable considering the growing technical complexity of stage presentation, making its full exploitation a matter demanding the skill of the expert undistracted by commitment to playing a leading part in his own production. Nevertheless, certain star actors still remain outstanding directors as well— most notably, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud—but the combination of acting and directing as a profession is very much on the decline. The status of the dramatist, however, has never been overtaken by that of the most eminent stage director, though the latter may seek to impose unique forms of stylization on his play, as Gordon Craig, Theodor Komisajevski, or Peter Brook have all imposed on Shakespeare. The reverse has been the case in the cinema. During the period of the silent film, the scenarist merely provided the outline narrative and character treatment for the director, who assumed pride of place as the creator of the film. No one disputed the supremacy in the cinema of D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Cecil B. De Mille, Eisenstein, or Pudovkin. Few critics queried whether these great filmmakers in fact scripted their own films or not. For the unlettered, unsophisticated filmgoing public the star was the person who mattered most, and for those becoming conscious of the film as a new art, the director was held to be the stylist in the realization of the film. Screenwriters were names for the public only if they were also well-known dramatists or novelists, receiving appropriate publicity. With the emergence of the sound film the situation changed—if not radically, at least noticeably. Within the industry the screenwriter who could create good dialogue as well as good stories and characters suitable for the stars to

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interpret became an absolute necessity, though so firmly established was the concept that the film was wholly a director’s medium that during the 1930s and 1940s screenwriters of note had to fight for a more just placement of their names among the credits on the screen as well as for the billing and publicity they deserved. It was a long-drawn-out struggle with front office, and many prominent dramatists and novelists found themselves confined in the writers’ ghetto in Hollywood, albeit with golden collars round their necks. As far as the producers and directors were concerned, they were second-class citizens from the creative point of view. Yet the impulse to introduce dramatists into film production was a natural one, and while many dramatists saw the sound film (the “talkies”) as a direct threat to the future of the theater, many more viewed it as a remarkable new opportunity for plays to be recorded in a form that would introduce their work to the greater public of the cinemas. This was the stated view, notably, of the dramatists Marcel Pagnol in France and Bernard Shaw in Britain. The initial adaptation of stage plays for the “100 percent talkie” film kept relatively close to recorded theater, with a few bold outdoor scenes or montages thrown in between acts or scenes to show that the sound film was still, after all, a film. But as filmmakers became more self-assured and technical equipment more adaptable in the mid-thirties, dramatists soon found that great liberties (in their opinion) were being taken with their work during the course of adaptation and that considerable rewriting was required either by themselves or, more likely, by others. Certain dramatists, notably Bernard Shaw, initially stood out against this, with the result that the early adaptations of Shaw’s work made under his dominant influence—How He Lied to Her Husband and Arms and the Man—were artistic and economic disasters, and that, in consequence, his plays were to remain neglected by producers for several years until he learned the necessity for adaptation to a medium so radically different from the theater. A play, as we have seen, is a work that communicates primarily through its dialogue, spoken by actors from the stage, their voices projecting through the auditorium. The skill of the dramatist lies in writing “projectable” theatrical dialogue; in this sense, the dialogue of most plays is written “up,” pitched beyond normal speech, in order to become effective as spoken by actors and actresses. It must command attention, it must have dramatic power in the form of emotional tension, psychological involvement, wit, or humor. It must underline the character. However realistic dialogue may seem when first heard, underlying it always is the fact of projection, a continuity or significance of speech alone that commands attention from an assembled audience. Dramatists from Euripides to Pinter, from Aristophanes to Albee, from Molière to Shaw, from Plautus to Stoppard—all have a recognized style of writing such dialogue.

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Arms and the Man (dir. Cecil Lewis, 1932)

The style of a film is established by very different means, though quality in the dialogue involving a considerable degree of verbal “projection” from the screen may become a part of this, as in the films of Billy Wilder. But the scale of this projection is different; speech becomes a part of total behavior, often involving as much “business” as actual speech, as much facial as verbal expression. The deviations of human behavior are the stuff of films, the actions and reactions counterpointing, even belying, the words. This of course can happen on the stage, but the relative emphases of film and theater differ because film accentuates every detail of acting by the sheer closeness of its camera-cummicrophone recording. Through it frequently observes the action at far greater distance than would be practicable in the theater (for example, the beating-up of the hero, played by Albert Finney, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning a hundred meters or so from the camera, the violence of this climactic moment emphasized by the isolation of the figures in almost empty space), for the most part of film records its action with the characters a bare meter or so from the camera, with all the proximity we are used to when talking together in real life. Dialogue does not require more than seemingly casual emphasis; indeed, the problem is often to give it significance along with apparent aural weightlessness.

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American filmmakers, in particular, seem somehow to resent this, with the result that the dialogue (often quite styleless) appears to be relentlessly shouted, person to person, especially in films made for television, which are usually heavy with dialogue, since this is the cheapest form of action to shoot. So the dramatist-screenwriter finds that his greatest asset, dialogue writing, does not possess the premium it has on the stage and that, consequently, the controller of the action, the director, moves into ascendency over him. It is he, rather than the writer, who establishes the overall style of the movie. (It should be noted, however, that many outstanding filmmakers script their own films—among them Bergman, Godard, Fellini, and Pasolini—or work very closely with their writers—as do Buñuel, Resnais, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, or Lean.) As a result, to the writer’s just resentment, films are usually known by their director’s name. It may be Shakespeare’s or Pinter’s play you are seeing in the theater, but Hitchcock’s or Wilder’s film, depending on who (director or screenwriter, or both writing together) originated the screenplay. This seems inevitable in all normal filmmaking. There has to be a master stylist who takes control of the presentation, especially since the realization of a film is a time-consuming and costly technical process, mostly beyond the skill and comprehension of a writer. The master stylist is the director, who coordinates the work of his players with that of his technicians shot by shot, the total film involving hundreds of different camera setups, with the accompanying rehearsal, lighting, and camera and sound coverage. The style of a film obviously is very closely tied to photography, and many directors work closely with the cameramen, the photographic qualities of whose work suits their own style in filmmaking, as evidenced by the association of Eisenstein and Tisse or of Bergman and Sven Nykvist. The photography becomes a projection of the director’s personal style, a visual response to his dramatic needs. Music is another factor where a closeness of spirit is necessary, as that which grew up between Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock or between William Walton and Laurence Olivier for the latter’s Shakespearean films. It is from this situation, which governs all filmmaking, at least in the field of the fiction or dramatic film, that the so-termed auteur theory has evolved, which totally identifies the director as the creator of the film, whether he scripted it or not. The film reflects his integrated vision; whether it be good or indifferent, it remains hallmarked as his—if, that is, he is sufficiently a filmmaker to have a unique style. Fair or unfair, this is how the bias of recognition has gone—for the director and against the screenwriter, and the latter, however great his initial contribution, suffers from this comparative, if well-rewarded, obscurity. However, when a highly established novel or stage play is adapted for the screen, the writer’s or dramatist’s name (if not the screen adaptor’s, if he is a different person) retains prominence, and the absolute auteur status of the film director is evidently modified. If one refers to Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, no one is likely to overlook the fact that the original play was by Shakespeare

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and that the film, however original in its cinematic conception, is rooted in Shakespeare’s work. In fact, in the case of outstanding film adaptations of notable plays, a much fairer balance is normally maintained in public recognition of the debt of the director to the writer and of the writer to the director. It is a pity that the same recognition of this initial indebtedness in the case of good original screenplays cannot be extended to all filmmaking. In all the individual cases of screen adaptation that are discussed in some details in this study, the process of adaptation, where most successful, has been the result of a reworking, or reorientation, of the original theater piece into a form that suits the new medium and that enables the characters and action to be observed much more closely and flexibly than is possible, or even desirable, in the theater. Compromises in favor of filming the stage play as if it were still a theater piece—that is, as if it were being played in a theater—always show up as such. However, as we shall see, the film is itself a highly adaptable medium and special techniques have been evolved that, while remaining uncommon in normal cinema, are not alien to it. Their use has helped certain stage plays to retain their essential theatricality on the screen. This has been evident, for instance, in the best film adaptations of Greek tragedy and of Shakespearean plays. As can be shown in the discussion of certain representative plays brought to the screen, there exist several degrees of adaptation, from none at all to total transmutation. The range includes— 1. films that are undisguised recordings of a production taking place in a theater but that are viewed from the variety of positions open to directors using several cameras simultaneously in different locations. Falling into this category are the recording of John Gielgud’s production of Hamlet in New York, starring Richard Burton, and Paul Czinner’s film recordings of special established productions of ballet or opera made between 1955 and 1966 in London theaters; 2. the “transplant” of notable stage productions from the theater to film studios, though with new, if sometimes still stagelike, settings in which the original production is shot as a film. Stuart Burge’s version of the celebrated National Theatre production in London and New York of Othello, starring Laurence Olivier, is one such film; 3. the reconception in film terms of notable stage productions—for example, Peter Hall’s reconception of his stage production for the Royal Shakespeare Company of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made entirely on location, or Peter Brook’s film of his Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Marat-Sade, or Elia Kazan’s film-studio version of A Streetcar Named Desire, with only a single change of cast in key roles from his stage production in New York (Vivien Leigh in place of Jessica Tandy as Blanche). Certain productions in the American Film Theater series were similarly derived from successful stage productions, while others were entirely original undertakings;

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A Streetcar Named Desire (dir. Elia Kazan, 1951) 4. the staging under special conditions within a film-studio complex (that is, on the lot or on the studio stage) of an original production of a classical play). One example is Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, which was shot in scene order using a large, outdoor composite set, except for some concluding battle scenes shot on location; 5. special adaptations of plays of all periods, shot in a studio or on location, independent of any prior specific production for the theater. This category represents the majority of filmed stage plays, from Cacoyannis’s Electra to the film versions of modern plays such as Mike Nichols’ version of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?. Nevertheless, in spite of the skill involved in the use of film technique, the plays are allowed to retain the virtues of their theatricality, especially the brilliance of their dialogue and its interpretation; 6. adaptations that appear to transform the plays entirely in bringing them to the screen. An extreme example is Kurosawa’s use of Macbeth as the basis for an entirely Japanese rendering of the essential characters and situations in Shakespeare’s play in Castle of the Spider’s Web (Throne of Blood). Throne of Blood is virtually a new work, making no use whatsoever of Shakespeare’s dialogue in translation. Kurosawa wrote his own dialogue for this film, which nevertheless remains one of the most successful renderings of a Shakespearean tragedy in visual terms on the screen.

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Chapter 16

“Theater and Film, or Adolphe Appia and Me” Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

From The New Republic (1988) INTERVIEWER: It seems to me that in your films to date, at least up to Our Hitler [1977] and Parsifal [1983], there is a certain affinity with the work of Adolphe Appia. The question is, just what is that affinity? Hans-Jürgen In Our Hitler, it could be seen as the empty space lighted by the Syberberg: projection of a few symbolic objects, which in Parsifal became one symbolic object: Richard Wagner’s death mask. (This space was, of course, economically outfitted with stairs as well as workable or usable scenery and props.) The case for my affinity with Appia should more likely be made, however, in the realm of ideas, seeing Appia in the context of history; for I myself make films, after all, and Appia was a man of the theater. INTERVIEWER: But you also have become a man of the theater, haven’t you? HJS: Yes, I have directed my own scripts (The Night, 1985) as well as those of others (Kleist’s Penthesilea [1808]) in the theater—that is, in live theaters—instead of for film. This has resulted for me in the necessary adoption or, better, in the necessary detachment of an artistic personality that looks to history for guidance, even when grappling with projects from my own era. And that’s where Appia enters the picture and, through him, Richard Wagner, the great influence on his thinking. INTERVIEWER: Could you speak a bit about the historical context of Appia’s work? HJS: When Adolphe Appia was thinking, writing, and trying to realize himself as an artist, he first had to do away with the theater

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Hitler: A Film from Germany (a.k.a. Our Hitler; dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977)

dominated by historicism, which was allied with naturalism. Electric light presented new possibilities for the theater, though a retrogressive profession by nature (take Heiner Müller), and for film, which was competing against theater just as photography was competing against painting. Both were calling into question other art forms, were asking what their unique possibilities were and were not. Was art still to be regarded in the old sense, with photography and film united against it in a sudden, egotistical dictatorship of the masses, who would no longer have any need for qualitative hierarchies? Film began in Germany in the cinematographs. What has become of it? That is, how have film and theater differentiated themselves from each other as separate expressions of the same longing? How have they influenced each other: fruitfully or faithfully? INTERVIEWER: One could easily ask the same questions about theater and film in the United States. HJS: In America, as I see it, the theater is dwindling into mere entertainment, with an interest in nothing but the marketplace. Similarly, American film has for decades been turning itself into a huge factory of boulevard theater, with its time-tested mixture of kitsch and commerce, the most popular example of which is what I call the throwaway melodrama, intended for the mentality that demands little more satisfaction from a show than

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a customer does from a visit to a brothel. In Germany, by contrast, expressionistic film arose out of the expressionistic theater and in accordance with old artistic traditions. But after the war such continuity disappeared. Under the influence of the American (film) occupation, the public theater of today originated—that mixture of ideology, state subsidy, high pretentiousness, and quickly changing fashion. Alongside this public theater sprang up such events as happenings, environmental theater, performance art, and theatricalized works of art containing frozen figures and objects. Josef Beuys should be mentioned in this connection, as should Robert Wilson. Along the way there have been several influences, as on any intellectual movement: Wieland Wagner, Fritz Kortner, Bert Brecht. But were Leni Riefenstahl’s films and Albert Speer’s cathedral of light also influences, in that they were attempts to mirror the aesthetic side of the Volk in its adherence to the Führer’s will? The living reflection of the masses was the art of the Volk-become-classicism on the screen. Consider, too, the “blood and soil” films of UFA under the Nazis and the neorealist cinema of postwar Italy. All this, I have to say, is very much in accord with my current interests, projects, problems. INTERVIEWER: Like the work of Appia, right? HJS: Oh, yes. I would so much like to be a student again, possessing Adolphe Appia’s intellectual intensity, and studying his textbook of the modern theater modeled on the work of Richard Wagner; learning how Appia attempted to make the music embedded in a text manifest, through the translation of that text’s inner rhythm into an intellectual-spiritual body of gesture and movement; how he attempted to clear the stage, to free it from all the constraints of obstructive technology and the pseudo-wealth of management’s budget, as well as from the aesthetic fashions and ideologies of scenic discourse. Coming from film, however, I pursued my own course (which in recent years has escaped American viewers). I still very much stand by my previous ventures, both as a writer and a director (even to the point of letting those films be seen on videotape in other countries, if that is what people want). There was a mixture of theater and film in that work, and it showed itself to be as absolute in its rejection of the status quo as was Adolphe Appia when he envisioned his new stage. INTERVIEWER: But you’re departing from that mixture now, aren’t you?

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HJS:

Yes, that’s absolutely true. And therefore a few remarks may help to explain what happened, may serve for friends of my work as an intimate reminder of that which they once knew and as a distant report on what became of it. Adolphe Appia had something to do with my change in direction. After Parsifal, doubtless the last film of mine seen by American audiences, I decided to clear the studio, to make it into an empty stage—to free my work of projections and meticulous editing and, more and more, of those layers that had previously characterized my films and given them density as one of their qualities: music, sound effects, words, and images, themselves uniquely layered. As it happened, my next work, The Night, originated both in theater and on film, but without the characteristic qualities of my films up to that point. And if until now my films have been different from those of other directors, in that they were an expression of my inner worlds, were counterworlds to the world as it exists and to the world as it is ordinarily portrayed on movie screens and theater stages, then what I was presently creating would also be different. INTERVIEWER: How so? What’s different about it? HJS: Well, I abandoned the character from Parsifal, called Kundry by Wagner, and played by Edith Clever, who at the beginning and the end defined the limits of my film’s cosmos, who contained it in herself, and yet who, when everything is over, will still be what she had been before it began. I chose instead a single human being to embody all the possibilities of expression, to express that for which in my films I needed design, music, words, and sound effects. In this human being, herself a different score for each of several texts, worlds were originated and expressed that contained those texts, on stage as on film. This was more realistic than any reality, but it was realism of the inner sort, expressed through the face and through movement, whose various manifestations represent the coordinates of the spiritual realm; through light changes, through the eyes, and through the props and the gestures otherwise necessary to the performance. Everything in one human being: cutting and close-ups and long shots of landscapes; ubiquity of place and simultaneity of time; stairways and doorways; chases on land and chases on sea; heroes and beasts; nightmares and fantasies—all the images and the figures that populate the arts and with which we fill our films and plays. The same goes for rivers and walls, stones and trees, clothes

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and the elements, for everything from a storm to deadly silence: it was all able to be encompassed in a single human being. INTERVIEWER: Isn’t this what is often described as cinematic in books—the cutting to a close-up and then back to a full shot, which creates a corresponding emotional effect in the viewer, mining his psychic depths through the manipulation of two-dimensional space? HJS: Precisely! But all of this is created here by one human being, by the story contained in that human being’s body and face. And if light helped in this process, it was not the kind that illuminates an area of the stage, but rather the kind that illuminates the play of spiritual forces on the face and over the body, as they move, figuratively speaking, from light into darkness and from darkness into light, either directly or in a roundabout way. Thus an aesthetic system developed for something that required untraditional means for its expression. I was using a text that would be deemed unrepresentable or untransmittable, as it were, just as I had used Parsifal, that most difficult of operas. INTERVIEWER: What was the subject of The Night, and what work followed it in your career? HJS: The subject of The Night was the world of conflicting scenarios produced by the devastation of Europe during World War II. Then came work based on the character of Molly Bloom, from Joyce’s Ulysses [1922] and on Fräulein Else, from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella [1924] of the same name. Then, at last, I found Kleist’s Penthesilea, the Prussian tragedy of a sacrificial love so absolute in its expression that it shames the gods into rescinding their own inflexible, murderous laws. (Interviewer’s note: Syberberg refers, in this sentence and the previous one, to the following films of his: Edith Clever Reads James Joyce [1985], Miss Else [1986], and Penthesilea [1987]. After directing Kleist’s play Penthesilea on film as well as onstage, Syberberg adapted Kleist’s novella The Marquise of O. [1810] to the cinema in 1989. This novella had previously been adapted to the screen by the French director Éric Rohmer in 1976.) INTERVIEWER: Why do you say “at last”? I share what appears to be your esteem for this relatively unknown play by a playwright who deserves to be better known; still, I’d like you to expound. HJS: Certainly I will. This work succeeded where others had failed in eliciting a certain kind of visual response from me. That is,

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it stimulated me to express my inner worlds and thoughts and configurations in images and tones from another artist’s work. And again it stirred me to defy the existing order: the real world, which resists its immortalization in art, and its art forms, which instead of doing justice to the world’s complexities devote themselves to chronicling its ever-changing superficialities. I would defy the existing order, moreover, in a form whose richness was not an artistic substitute for material wealth or religious surety, each of which sells itself as the ultimate answer to life’s difficulties. I would create my art for the sake of human life, whose ancient nature has led to its ruin. I mean ancient in the simplest sense: human. And as if for the first time, to the few who were still in a position to bear its sight, I would present the human as it incorporates the whole of mankind in every aspect and particular. INTERVIEWER: Wasn’t it after returning from your “journey” with Penthesilea that you read Adolphe Appia for the first time? HJS: That’s right. I read of Appia’s struggles and his pronouncements, as close to me as they were far away. “Scenic illusion is the presence of the living actor.” And also, as he again underscores the primacy of the actor who alone provides the key to the mise-enscène: “It is imperative that we base a production on the presence of the actor, and in order to achieve this that we clear the stage of everything that is in conflict with him.” Here we see the primacy of the actor in the master’s blueprint for the stage, which he empties in order to enhance the actor’s powers. And the man who uttered those words had to work with amateurs, who obviously did not have the talent of the great actors of his time, and with a poorly outfitted stage apparatus. But he also knew about music and its power once it took hold of someone who could respond to it. I read, then, of one of those revolutionaries whom you simultaneously push to the side and start curiously taking nibbles at, the heritage of whose experiment will produce great new riches. INTERVIEWER: Surely you must also have read of light as the soul of direction. HJS: Yes, but I also read that even at that time the electric light had produced a technical revolution whose wires and switches and lamps threatened to engulf the stage. And I read Appia’s thoughts about the three-dimensional versus the two-dimensional representation of a forest onstage: for him the question really

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was, did you try to create a two-dimensional representation of a human being in that forest? (This question doesn’t apply to film, of course, which in its two dimensions can record the real world.) I read, in addition, how to use objects and stage levels, together with light changes, to reveal the meaning of this facial expression or that body movement. And I thought of the cradle of dramatic representation, the ancient theater, which was set in the earth and under the sun instead of in some cave in the city, where our plays are staged. I thought of the selfknowledge that the ancients achieved through their plays, and of how hard it is for us to do the same. And the music beneath the surface of the scripts I’ve read lately tells me that out of the fragments into which our world has split—a fragmentation or atomization of which film is one expression—we must build the world up again, we must make it whole; and we can do this through renewed emphasis on the living actor, to the exclusion of everything on stage that does not bear on his art and his revelation. INTERVIEWER: In Appia’s day, as you have pointed out, there was an attempt, aided by the advent of new lighting techniques, to cleanse the theater of historicism by clearing the stage and concentrating on essences. There were also clashes between the theater and the new medium of film—clashes that were not taken seriously because film wasn’t recognized as an art form. HJS: Today, however, as we live under the threat of the world’s destruction, we will have to decide whether we want an aesthetic of protest that lives by the soiled and lame ideology of technical supply and demand, or whether we want once again to clear the stage, to concentrate our thinking on what enhances nature, not on the technological consumption and the ideological colonization that destroy it. It will take very little to complete this destruction. INTERVIEWER: Well, knowing how much has been lost already, an artist must find it difficult to carry the burden of protest on his shoulders. HJS: Yes, but whether the burden is carried by the film’s succession of flat images or the theater’s three-dimensional stage, by pictures or by words, by music or by the human beings who make it, isn’t the most important thing, finally. What is, is the point at which the imitation of nature starts thinking of itself as a substitute for nature. This practice should be avoided. Nature will achieve immortality only through art that is true to itself: that stands

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out authentically from the density of the whole and acknowledges the tragedy of our time; that stands fast and takes root in the firm knowledge of whence it has come and where it is headed, to what heights it is striving. So, we have the old confrontation between the audience’s desire for realism and art’s guilty longing for immortality, which its descendants alone can grant it in the very process of continuing the species, which is to say, mankind. And we have the confrontation between artists themselves: between the ones whose ritual is dying out and the ones whose new ritual will replace it. INTERVIEWER: In the early twentieth century, this was a struggle between old and new forms of theater. HJS: For me, it was already a struggle between old and new kinds of film. In that sector of Europe’s subsidized theater that is committed to art, the struggle lies elsewhere: it is a headlong, absolutely destructive struggle between the community of intellect and the forces of the banal, the obscene, and the trivial over whether the genuinely serious stage, which always seeks ideal truth, shall be permitted to survive. We can call this theater utopian, paradisiacal, or Arcadian if we want, but we shall endure as a civilization only so long as we take up the mandate, issued to us by a protean reality, to find ourselves in art, in the high art of the theater as well as the other forms. If we do not, our culture’s decline will be mirrored by our own. We can angrily tear the mandate up, if we wish; or, in frustration, we can just walk away and refuse to acknowledge its existence. On the other hand, we can zealously urge it on the public. But first it must at least be formulated as an expression of society’s better judgment, if only to be consigned to our unconscious. For without such a mandate for art, society is dead, and in time even its echo will die. INTERVIEWER: Adolphe Appia clearly did his part in this struggle. HJS: Appia fought in art’s behalf, and his successors have done so, too. We have come quite far, but we have unintentionally run up against the business of art and its museums for tourists. Still, in our refusal to collaborate with the merchandisers, we do not run the risk, like Appia, of never realizing ourselves in the practice of our art. Like the late Glenn Gould, like the monks of old, we are still able to employ our skills to the extent that our memory will be preserved, that future generations will know why we lived.

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INTERVIEWER: Whether or not Appia realized himself in the practice of his art, one can regard the rebirth of electric light in his theater as the event that made possible the fusion of all visual elements into an artistic whole, with the director as its overseer. HJS: But one can also regard this rebirth of electric light as the event that ultimately made film possible: film, the form that shined light on celluloid and thereby gave rise to the mass-produced living image—in contrast with the unique occurrence of live theater—the form that through the easy availability of its prints (its color prints, eventually) was mass-consumed in the movie house, and then was mass-consumed in the isolation of the home, first on television and then on videotape. INTERVIEWER: Moreover, film’s disciples greeted the theater’s loss of aura as a victory over its obscurantism of the soul, its obscurantist metaphysic of the avant-garde. HJS: True, but in reality the theater’s “death” was the birth of dead light and dead images, the birth of a plastic art on film that split the nucleus of the world into a series of views and angles, much as scientists split the atom, and thus disturbed the world in ways we all know. Only the human spirit, like an echo of cultures past, has been able to cohere in the face of environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear holocaust. INTERVIEWER: Even with a bad production in the theater, as we all know but which we must recall, one is still guaranteed the sight of human life—be it evil, miserable, or ordinary. HJS: Unable to present us firsthand with the grace of pure life, film has become, by contrast, evidence for the death of culture. Film’s play of dead light represents the destruction of the world, the director as demiurge without the power to love and without the power to create, who has turned the stage into a studio where the dark light of the image is more important than the living light of human beings. And this same director, in a television studio for the taping of a show, becomes preoccupied with nothing so much as the lamps over and among the heads of his live audience, which in this era of network audience-shares achieves only a symbolic existence for its trouble and is finally dispensable, like the king at his court theater. The consumers of the media are the new audience, and they confirm the death of the old, live one. INTERVIEWER: Like the death of certain kinds of light in the theater.

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HJS:

Yes, exactly. Light belongs in the theater just as fire belonged on the altars of the ancient gods. One can even say that theaters exist for the purpose of letting light shine. The ordinances in Germany that, in the name of democracy, proudly prohibit the use in our best subsidized spaces of certain kinds of light in favor of the other, more technically advanced kinds, and do so without any inkling of the artistic damage done—these ordinances are signs of self-government’s own extinguishment under a mountain of official decree. They are signs as well of the extinguishment of the human spirit, which for centuries in Germany has had the freedom to challenge and to extend itself. These ordinances seal off our theaters from life and even from death, from the risks attendant in art—an art that is replaced, as a result, by protest ideologically founded on the Promethean gift of fire, that wellspring of life out of which art itself is fashioned. The loss to our stage of such domesticated fire as the living light of candles and gas signifies yet another gain for the cult of bureaucracy. INTERVIEWER: And what about the light that film took from the theater? Can film give the theater something in return? HJS: Good question. Let me follow it with another: Could this gift be the very forbidden fire from which films live, and could it be in the form of a metaphor for the radiant or electronic impulses printed on those artificial substances, celluloid and videotape? That is, can film’s visual freedom and its visual provocation—the ability that it has to set free in the viewer’s unconscious a quiet profusion of images that flow unchecked into the depths of his heart— can these qualities be adapted to the theater, where they would become only one more leaf on the tree of artistic knowledge? INTERVIEWER: How would that happen? The offstage events reported in the theater by messengers, for example, are realized on film in action. HJS: Film does cut up these dramatic word-pictures into a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and deeds from all over the world. But these can themselves be transformed back into the palpable motion of imagined worlds in the monologue of the representational self, the single human being onstage who becomes synonymous with the world and taps the selves of his spectators. The ancient dream of the poet would thus be fulfilled: to write poetry for the stage and have it realized there, this time in rhythms borrowed from film—the same rhythms that lend meaning to what otherwise would be an empty succession of images.

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INTERVIEWER: So film in this instance would be sacrificing itself to the theater, not the other way around? HJS: Yes, the film must learn that it is art which sacrifices itself, in the end, to civilization. Yet, living off its own demise, as it were, art continues its celebration of civilization. Is it possible that it does so as never before? INTERVIEWER: Yes, if you’re speaking in terms of the sheer quantity of artistic production throughout the world. HJS: Well, it turns out that I am more hopeful or optimistic in this regard than you, which surprises me. Thank you for a stimulating discussion. INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Mr. Syberberg.

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Chapter 17

“Playing to the Camera or the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting” Bert Cardullo

From Playing to the Camera: Film Actors Discuss Their Craft (1998) Everybody in the world is an actor. Conversation is acting. Man as a social animal is an actor; everything we do is some sort of a performance. But the actor whose profession it is to act is then something else again. . . . I don’t understand what a picture is if there is bad acting. I don’t understand how movies exist independently of the actor—I truly don’t. —Orson Welles

When viewers had their first exposure to film one hundred years ago, it is unlikely that they interpreted silence as loss. Then, motion pictures represented a striking novelty: the ability to convey photographic detail in motionproduced images that on initial viewing must have seemed quite dramatic in themselves. Oddly enough, it was filmmakers’ earliest efforts to convey a story that may have called attention to the unremitting silence of actors on the screen. Almost immediately, dramatic episodes adapted or drawn directly from the legitimate stage began to contend with more strictly documentary forms such as travelogues and newsreels. And the simple sight of people’s mouths moving—an alien one, given the stiffness of nineteenth-century photography— must have prompted audiences to wish for the same range of expression on the screen that they had grown accustomed to in live performances. When stage actors first came to film, they moved and spoke as they had been used to doing before live audiences. In fact, when acting in screenplays adapted from the theater, actors in silent films were sometimes called on to utter the very same lines of dialogue they had spoken on stage. Actors used speech in this way to protect themselves against the distractions endemic to filmmaking, even though they knew their words would not be heard from the 205

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screen. They were trying in part to maintain the energy necessary to command the stage and in part to bring the respectability of stage work to the rough-andtumble world of filmmaking. It is not surprising, however, that many stage actors wondered whether film required techniques different from those they had refined before live audiences. Should they merely try to adapt stage methods to film, or did they need to take more drastic measures to meet the demands of the camera and those of the huge new audience that film had attracted? Was film even worth considering as an arena for serious acting? First-generation movie actors posed such questions with increasing insistence. Yet by 1910 or so, silent film had begun to breed its own stars, in proud and conscious independence from the stage. A number of these, like Betty Compson, came to film with only minimal experience before live audiences. Nonetheless, they helped to build a cult of glamour that quickly became distinctive to film, in which physical appearance outweighed more traditional acting skills. Launched with assistance from Hollywood’s burgeoning journalistic establishment, silent film stars achieved a kind of fame without precedent among stage actors. If character actors did not attract the same adoration accorded stars, they lent a cosmopolitan flavor to some of the most important films made in American from the late 1920s until World War II. They were able to do this in part because their stage skills left them better adapted than rank beginners to meet the challenges posed by early sound. Once directors could no longer call out commands during filming, they were forced to rehearse their actors more extensively to achieve the results they desired. In this way among others, sound brought film acting into closer consonance with stage acting, and it lent veterans of the stage assurance in exploiting the latest film technology. Measured against what has arisen since, though, “technology” is probably too flattering a word. The earliest sound equipment was crude enough to make it necessary for much filming to take place either indoors, in controlled conditions that only studios on the east coast could offer, or, sometimes, in the wide open spaces of southern California. In this connection, the advent of sound increased the importance of studios both as sites for production and as agencies for marketing and publicity. Until the mid-1930s, primitive sound recording also required actors to project their voices in much the same way they had needed to do before live audiences. This necessity made actors’ work in films even more like what they had done in the theater, and so placed a higher premium on stage experience than had been the case when silent films were enforcing a more purely visual standard. Even after sound technology had improved, ways of acting and speaking derived from the theater continued to manifest themselves in films from Hollywood as well as Europe; these

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were the very techniques that had entrenched themselves on both sides of the Atlantic during the early years of sound. Furthermore, actors with crisp delivery prompted more elaborate dialogue as time went on. Screenplays containing such dialogue, in turn, demanded subtler measures for their construction than the melodramatic, formulaic plots typical of silent films. Refinements in filmic narrative additionally had the effect of multiplying the number of character actors, who were generally charged with carrying the twists of plot characteristic of more complex dramatic material. This demand then led to the reconstitution of the older theatrical “stock companies.” These companies were enlarged in the 1920s and 1930s by American actors, of course, but also by Europeans in search of higher salaries or refuge from political and economic ills in their native countries. Under the stewardship of the Hollywood studios, such companies of film actors grew more elaborate and cosmopolitan than any legitimate theater had ever sponsored. A close and often jealous relationship between theater and film extends, in fact, back to the inception of the younger form. Several of the Edison Company’s films of the mid-to-late 1890s, for example, captured scenes from then-familiar plays, musicals, and operettas. Since the days of its early and rather leechlike fealty to the stage, moreover, film has enjoyed a broad popularity that has been held against it by theater folk. Those who align themselves with high culture have often denigrated films in part to erase the theater’s own historical lineage as a popular and therefore degraded entertainment, at least by the standards of the modernist avant-garde. Partisans of the theater have done more than voice steady disapproval, however; they have sought to justify the tendency of the modern stage to reach smaller and presumably more sophisticated audiences. Films, by contrast, were drawing much larger and more inclusive audiences than the stage within a decade of their invention. Largely because of this patronizing attitude on the part of adherents of the legitimate stage, there existed no serious criticism of film acting until the form was nearly twenty years old. Whether performances on film could be considered acting at all in a legitimate theatrical sense remained problematic until the introduction of live sound recording for feature films in the late 1920s. To wit: some of the earliest French films, by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s, used the directors’ family members as performers, and many of the filmmakers who followed the Lumières evinced a similar indifference toward acting talent. With acrobatics, action sequences, travelogues, and trick photography so popular among the earliest film audiences, acting skill of the sort valued on the stage was largely moot. D. W. Griffith shifted the terms of the debate, though, when he advanced the view that acting before cameras posed challenges of its own. Indeed, Griffith’s opinions gave a boost to film at a time when the form needed buttressing if

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it was to outlive the period of its sheer novelty. A former stage actor himself, Griffith explored means for suggesting and indeed for creating characters’ subjective responses through his pioneering uses of the camera and of cross-cutting. His aim was to refine the previously crude narrative texture of cinema, but his innovations also helped increase the range of challenge—and expression—for film actors. Griffith accomplished this improvement, however, even as he chose to diminish the degree to which early film scripts mimicked those of the theater. That emulation of the theater included the appearance of stage stars to promote some of the earliest feature films, first in France and later in the United States as well as Great Britain; the deferential and derivative ways in which film featured stars on the very same sets and even at times the same stages used for theatrical premieres or revivals; the dependence of early film actors on a set of gestures codified by the nineteenth-century French acting theorist François Delsarte; and the dependence of early film narratives on a brand of melodrama that created an even starker opposition between good and evil than the theater had. This last tendency was a consequence of silent film’s lack of audible dialogue and its reliance on typecasting more rigid than had ever been in force on the stage. In light of the ascendancy film had enjoyed since its early decades, it is not surprising that Griffith’s opinions on the distinctive qualities of film acting found, and continue to find, support among a number of actors. At the same time, though, many who have conducted the greater part of their careers in film believe that stage acting offers better training and still stands as the most rigorous test of their skill. Others are willing to give stage and film acting equal weight, in the belief that both make legitimate, if distinct, demands. But most of these actors also express a preference for one kind of acting over the other, with a surprising number (given their success in films) saying that they prefer stage to film. Numerous actors say they value the time for rehearsal and preparation the stage affords them, while even more performers miss the intimacy and the highly charged atmosphere they associate with performing before live audiences. Actors who prefer the stage generally fall into two groups. There are those who assert that they feel greater freedom on the stage and those, by contrast, who contend that they feel greater control there. For some actors, however, “freedom” seems to derive precisely from their notion of control; and perhaps these seemingly antithetical values are only nominally so. Although many actors believe that film acting has effectively supplanted stage acting in its influence on culture as a whole (even going so far as to contend that film acting has wrought permanent and irreversible effects on stage acting), only a small number assert that film acting entails a greater range, complexity, and sophistication in the demands it makes.

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The view that film and stage acting have maintained a dialogue for some time thus is gaining credibility, although not as steadily as might be expected. Actors’ compulsive need to compare stage to film is indicative of the difficulties they experience in describing either medium. The discourse about stage acting is much older, of course, and has lent film acting a stable and legitimate context. Yet stage and film acting seem to resist verbal description in equal measure. The common actorly inclination to define the one in terms of the other may show merely that actors find it easier to talk about what a particular kind of acting is not than about what it is or might be. In any event, from the beginning a chief concern of actors in the new medium was that it was different from the theater, especially that there was no audience. Remembering his work in 1912, Charles Graham says in “Acting for the Films”: “One thing the shadow people of the screen can never know is the joy that comes from feeling the audience begin to play their part.” In 1916 the Shakespearean star E. H. Sothern writes in “The ‘New Art’ ”: “One of the strangest experiences in this posing for the ‘movies’ is the absence of the audience.” But by 1938 Lionel Barrymore, a theater veteran who had become a screen eminence, opines in “The Actor” that “the stage actor has an audience trained to contribute to the dramatic illusion. . . . The film audience is not so trained. . . . So the [screen] actor has to compete with reality.” In other words, Barrymore thinks that film acting, instead of being shrunken by an audience’s absence, is spurred to contribute even more: collaboration between actor and audience still exists, but a greater share devolves upon the actor. Yet no matter how sophisticated the views of film acting become, comparisons with the theater do not cease. Albert Finney, much later than the people cited above, misses the “sense of space and time” of the theater, he says in “Talking about Acting” (1961), but is glad to be rid of the burdensome realization that in a long-run play, he’ll “be putting the same glass down in the same place at the same time four months from now.” On the other hand, he declares, acting brings the sobering thought that “the first-day’s shooting is intended to be part of the film”; unlike in the theater, that is, the actor begins work with the finished product. Against a widespread view, Mai Zetterling argues in “Some Notes on Acting” (1951) that though screen acting is fragmentary, done in bits and pieces, the view of theater acting as unitary is false: scene breaks and act breaks fragment stage performances, too. She feels that sufficient rehearsal time for films would eliminate the much-mooted differences in continuity between film and theater acting. But Rod Steiger refutes the argument that film actors don’t have enough time to prepare. In “On the Actor” (1972), he says he has seen them “while they sit around for two and a half hours waiting for a technician to light a candle thirty blocks away.” It’s notable that, from the start, actors believe that screen acting involves personality much more than theater acting does. This view, in itself debatable,

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was possibly promoted by the proximity of the film audience, for the camera is much closer most of the time than any theater spectator is. Sothern declares, “In the moving picture art you are never your hero [your character] for one moment, you are always yourself intensely interested in showing through your expression what kind of man your hero was.” In “The Film Actor” (1947), Eric Portman decades later suggests, rather oddly, to the screen aspirant “that you can test your audience projection in ordinary life. The next time you go into a crowded room, see if you can project your personality. See if people stop talking when you enter, look at you, rise quickly to give you a drink, a cigarette.” This unique screen test would not appeal to Marcello Mastroianni, who loves to change roles because, he says in “The Game of Truth” (1992), either mistakenly or modestly, “changing helped me overcome the problem of not having a strong personality.” Several other issues in the debate about stage versus film acting need to be examined, or examined further. Foremost among these, in prevalence and theoretical significance, is the definition of audience as crucial to film acting. The most commonly held perception is that the camera functions as a kind of spectator, or, in more literal terms, as a viewer. Actors who advance such notions, though, differ in their views of the camera’s nature. Some regard it as a foreign, relentless, and entirely mechanical presence, while others see it as a sort of friendly eye or even, as Michael Caine has written in Acting in Film (1990), as a paramour. This last opinion is noteworthy in gainsaying, probably unwittingly, the contention advanced by Laura Mulvey and others in the late 1970s that the camera’s gaze has, throughout the history of film, been decidedly “male.” This is unavoidable, Mulvey and others have argued, so long as the camera has been wielded in a patriarchal society and largely at the discretion of male directors, producers, writers, and technicians. Feminist film theorists mistrust the camera as a source of power; and, indeed, female and male film actors alike accord it respect. The very reverence actors of both sexes show the camera, however, seems to foster ambivalence toward the instrument recording their labor. Some actors recommend ignoring the camera entirely, to avoid a sense of pressure, particularly in close-ups, while others say that the camera should be acknowledged at the least, or even wooed. It is, again, paradoxical that as “presence” has come under attack in many poststructuralist theories of human agency, awareness of a mechanical presence, of the machine as almost a living being, has become customary in other quarters—for example, among actors, who attribute to the camera the ability to heighten or at least alter their own efforts. Most actors regard the camera as either a stand-in or a synecdoche for a group of living spectators. A good many others, though, during the process of filming routinely envision a live audience—an image pulled from their recollections of a screening or a live theatrical performance. The feeling of

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obligation to hypothetical viewers may well be a legacy of the theater, where actors are used to performing for a body of sentient, engaged, lay spectators. Yet actors also regard their fellow actors, or more often still their crews, as their first and most consequential viewers. This response may seem exaggerated, but film actors are thrown together with crew members during the entire filming, whereas they usually see their fellow actors only during the shooting of shared scenes. With film it is possible for performers to serve as their own audience, too, by watching “rushes,” or previews of filmed sequences. This is yet a further trait that distinguishes film acting from that practiced on the stage. Some actors, however, refuse to watch rushes of themselves, in the belief that though such self-observation might sharpen their critical faculties, it would diminish their intuitive ones. Whom or what actors regard as their audience casts light on broader assumptions about the cultural and political authority they perceive their work to have. It can also reveal what actors crave, or fear, from criticism, and what influence they concede to the public as arbiters of their work. Even more than they vary in their images of audience, film actors differ in whether they regard themselves as part of an ensemble or as individuals performing the histrionic equivalent of musical solos. This divergence is owing to a more fundamental disparity, between the actors who retain a sense of utter solitude before the cameras and those who feel themselves to be integrated within a collective enterprise. The actors who are most obviously and strongly politicized, such as those who appeared in the early Soviet cinema, are more likely to view themselves as collaborators than as stars. Some actors extend the collaborative—or critical and nurturing—capacities of their fellow actors only to the film community, and still more narrowly, in some cases, to the film colony located in and around Hollywood. This clannishness or esprit de corps has its roots in the history of the theatrical world. Actors have always led a life apart from the norm, whether the gypsy-like existence in the theater of former times or the extreme celebrity that has, since the early years of this century, attached to the best known stars of stage and screen. If film actors are in accord on any single issue, it is that film is a director’s preserve, just as in their eyes the stage is incontestably the actor’s realm. But oddly enough, actors’ sense of the power that film directors exercise can feed feelings either of creative communion or of alienation. And which will prevail depends as much on how actors respond to particular directors as it does on how their directors deal with them. Both groups share responsibility for complex relationships that can change drastically from one film to the next, or even over the course of a single film. This process of transformation inevitably involves surprises, seldom all pleasant. Actors’ general agreement about directors’ right to the preeminent role in filmmaking in no way precludes expressions of frustration or even hostility toward directors, whom actors nonetheless regard as

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their closest collaborators, and vice versa. Their collective sense of film directors’ power may also explain actors’ wish—granted increasingly often in recent years—to direct films in their own right. Even so, some of the actors who are eager to direct also welcome relinquishing a measure of freedom to their film directors, and with it a potentially crushing sense of responsibility for the success of the films in which their appear. Such actors are less likely to regard themselves as stars and more inclined, in interviews, to discuss their directors in detail than are actors who consider their film work as their own, or who imply that they are autonomous, by mentioning only in passing (or not at all) the directors with whom they have worked. Some actors even seem positively to relish the hurly-burly of film work, the technicians and the technology; for all the actors who feel distracted by the bustle, there are always those who draw inspiration from the concentrated efforts of other professionals on the set. One of the reasons that film acting has had insufficient attention in film studies is precisely that film is the director’s medium—at any rate, the filmmakers’ medium. The director and cinematographer, usually joined later by the editor and producer, choose what the audience will look at and how it is to be seen. Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton, successful theater clowns before they made films, were among the first to understand that they had to control the whole process if their performances were to be seen as they intended. But not many actors have had complete control of films, and therefore of their performances—something they have deplored all through the decades of film’s existence. Yet though these matters of execution are fixed, there is a paradox. If the film is finally the director’s work, then, when we think of good films, why do we think of actors as often as of directors? When I remember Way Down East (1920), certainly I recall D. W. Griffith’s mastery, but equally I think of Lillian Gish’s body language as her life and status change. With Mother (1926), V. I. Pudovkin, yes, but at the crucial moment, it is Vera Baranovskaya who picks up the flag, not Pudovkin. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is exalted by Carl Dreyer’s genius, but Dreyer’s work would have come to little without the consecration of Renée Falconetti’s performance. In the sound era, the paradox is even more striking. With Twentieth Century (1934), it’s not Howard Hawks I think of first but John Barrymore, epitomizing nineteenth-century acting. With The Grapes of Wrath (1940), not John Ford but Henry Fonda, speaking out of the heart of stricken, Depression-era America. With Camille (1937), not George Cukor but Greta Garbo, dying. With The Organizer (1963), not Mario Monicelli but Marcello Mastroianni, rallying the strikers. With Ikiru (1952), not Akira Kurosawa but Takashi Shimura, singing softly in the snow on the playground swing. With The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), not Karel Reisz but Meryl Streep waiting for her lover. With

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Way Down East (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1920)

Howards End (1992), not James Ivory but Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson in their epoch-ending duet. With The Verdict (1982), not Sidney Lumet but Paul Newman addressing the jury. Certainly directors touched all those performances, to one degree or another, but it was the actors whose talents fulfilled the films. Still, despite its potential lucrativeness, film acting has not always garnered ungrudging respect, particularly when nonprofessionals or fledgling actors figure prominently, as they do in the films of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein or the Italian neorealists. Such noted directors were convinced that editing could override and definitely shape any impressions actors could make on film. Early producers exploited nonprofessionals as a money-saving measure; but over the succeeding decades, some directors have come to rely for artistic reasons on the acting of “authentic,” “spontaneous” amateurs, especially children, whose innocence and transparency can sometimes outshine more studied performances. This successful casting of amateurs has given some credence to doubts about the need for any trained acting skill at all in film. Despite their own trained acting skill, many well-established stage actors have bridled at the degree to which they are treated as commodities in the film world. Issues of marketing and consumption naturally figure in the utopian dream of a state-directed “people’s art” invoked by the Soviets, but also in the ambivalence actors commonly express toward American filmmaking, whose moguls evince an often slavish regard for the marketplace. After all, successful actors’ work is influenced, sometimes profoundly, by the ways their careers are funded. This is not to say that all actors view commercialism with

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a jaundiced eye. In fact, surprising numbers of them are partisans of the oldstyle Hollywood studios, and many believe that with the studios’ decline came a diminution in the quality of American films. Not all actors take such a nostalgic view of the studios, though, or of the prerogative those studios exercised over actors’ services. Some of the more onerous aspects of stardom have been voiced by Louise Brooks (in “Dialogue with the Actress,” 1965), who worked when silent movies endowed film stars more heavily with mythic qualities than at any time since. The sort of spectacular stardom that dates from Theda Bara’s heyday might be easier to understand if all the film stars who succeeded her had been great actors. But because that is not the case, it seems reasonable to interpret stardom as a commercial device that film borrowed from the stage and then expanded on in a way only a mass entertainment could. Moreover, most of the actors who have experienced stardom at first or second hand express mixed feelings about it. Latter-day versions of Denis Diderot’s distinction between public and private often seem to lie at the heart of their critiques of stardom; and men and women appear equally inclined to make that distinction. (In his “Paradox of the Actor,” Diderot—writing in 1773—attributed to performers the enigmatic ability to render public a realm of experience more generally considered private.) Actors of both sexes also agree that casting and “character,” as indicated in the pages of a screenplay, are crucial to them, and that character is almost always expressed in gender-specific ways. It may be equally true that casting is so decisive in its effects on performers that its indications of gender render other matters of collaboration and characterization merely secondary for performers. But when it comes to cases, for every actress who discusses her “feminine” sensitivity to her collaborators, at least one other displays steadfast “masculine” independence. And for every actress who feels objectified, at least one actor reports having felt the same way. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, will change as the number of women grows in specialties other than acting within the world of filmmaking, as is already the case and will continue to be. Will actresses find themselves less objectified, or only differently objectified with change and over time? The same question applies to performers of color. One way to escape objectification may well be to follow the recommendation that actors produce and write screenplays, as well as direct, if they wish to exercise greater influence over their films. Broader and more diverse engagement in the work of production might furnish film actors with at least some recompense for the relentless objectification and commercialization they feel they endure, and for their fans’ volatile and sometimes destructive identification with them. Mae Marsh, who acted in several of D. W. Griffith’s films, for her part did not seem to be bothered by the commercialization of cinema. She considered

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the invention of “business” in film acting to be her most fundamental obligation, and her interest in “good business,” as she puts it in Screen Acting (1921), underscores the conflation of art and commerce that has typified commercial filmmaking. In its most popular forms, film has not drawn on the religious and sacred origins of the stage but has instead often been conceived in and dedicated to the proposition that it should make money, and the more of it the better. Film acting and, to a still greater degree, stardom in films have been essential to this formula. Some may find it strange, therefore, that film actors—and especially the stars—should feel so tormented about how much they make. But the amount of money that most successful actors in film earn implicates them in the corporate mentality that has come to typify the entertainment industry in the United States and, increasingly, everywhere else. At the same time, these actors’ agonizing over their complicity in a business that is so often crass and exploitative betokens the idealism that most performers here in America have brought to their work. As for the insufficient attention to their work by film scholars, consider the following: it has often been claimed or assumed, at least in academic circles, that any credit for the poststructuralist and postmodernist outlook should go directly to the theorists, or occasionally creative writers, who have given those movements shape in writing. But equal credit at least may be due to film actors, who, in considering the disjointed qualities of filmmaking, have offered repeated testimonies to the mechanization, discontinuity, and lack of community now widely understood to plague modern life. In a reactionary or self-protective mode, Jack Nicholson recalls his dawning realization of the significance of film acting, which took place at the moment he “began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor.” This remark, from “The Bird Is on His Own” (1985), signals the degree to which images, often speaking images, have come to challenge literature for creative or authorial hegemony in the course of what has sometimes been called the Film Age. Perhaps the Film Age has given way already to the Television Age, and more lately to the Video Age. In any case, actors on film, television, and video have embodied and in some ways helped usher in the postmodern moment. They have come to terms with shooting scenes out of narrative sequence, realized their roles in bits and pieces, reinvented themselves continually, and performed before machines that orient, frame, and finally absorb their efforts. Actors working in front of cameras have thus given the “post-” movements some substance by dealing in fragmented images of humanity. Over time, the very diversity of these images has posed a challenge to the notion that human behavior is cohesive, sustained, and “universal”—a notion that no longer seems credible or even desirable to many. Indeed, it is striking how many actors refer to chance or accidents as propitious and even spiritually-laden elements of their work.

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Therefore, when E. H. Sothern, as much a dyed-in-the-wool stage actor as any, called film a “new language” back while the First World War was still raging, he showed great prescience. The language that film actors have studied and in some measure coined over the last several generations has not always been euphonious, nor has its development been linear. And film portrayals have even come to seem troubling, in part, through their enlargement on the longstanding affinity for conflict, tension, and paradox in the theater world (where drama takes its very definition from conflicts at the heart of society and humanity, and acting shows us people in their moments of greatest tension or opposition). In many instances, a casual but persistent utopianism mingles with a distinctly capitalist fervor in filmmaking as a whole, and ever more sophisticated technologies combine to enhance—but, in some cases, detract from—human agency. Most recently these technologies have permitted electronic, computerized, and digitized effects that at times threaten to supplant acting and writing in the forms in which we have come to know them. Screen acting may still be a relatively unexplored subject precisely because such acting takes place in such a daunting variety of technological, material, and procedural circumstances. Screen acting is, moreover, perhaps even more puzzling in its essential mysteriousness of effect and affect than are older forms of acting, in which at least the “bare forked animals” are continually in view as they perform in real time. It may be startling to say so, but we know relatively little about the ancient practice of acting, in spite of the vast secondary literature on the subject and the abundant testimony of its practitioners. What we do know for certain by now is that the human voice can be—and has always been—a powerful instrument of ideology that enables destructive giants to come to power. We also know, in Wallace Stevens’ words, that a voice can undo a giant by whispering “heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.” We understand that the body is a tongue that speaks to the unconscious as well as to more mediated forms of awareness. We know, in short, that performers and their witnesses are the tines of a tuning fork by means of which, at least for a time, human isolation can be breached and mortal fixity made to flow. A theater is thus a place where, paradoxically, we can become ourselves by becoming others. And in a movie theater, this may be even truer.

WORKS CITED Barr, Tony. Acting for the Camera. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1982. Barrymore, Lionel. “The Actor.” In Watts, Stephen, ed. Behind the Scenes: How Films are Made. London: Arthur Barker, 1938, pp. 93–101. Bermel, Albert. “Do Film Actors Act?” New Leader, 69 (Sept. 22, 1986), pp. 20–3. Bogdanovich, Peter, and Orson Welles. This is Orson Welles. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.

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Braudy, Leo. “Film Acting: Some Critical Problems and Proposals.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1.1 (Feb. 1976), pp. 1–18. Brooks, Louise. “1965 Interview.” In Kobal, John, ed. People Will Talk. New York: Aurum Press/Alfred Knopf, 1986, pp. 71–97. Caine, Michael. Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making. New York: Applause, 1990. Cole, Toby, and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds. Actors on Acting. New York: Crown, 1949. Compson, Betty. “Acting in Talking Pictures.” In Bonica, Joe, ed. How Talkies are Made. Hollywood: J. Bonica, 1930, n.p. Diderot, Denis. Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Trans. Geoffrey Bremner. London: Penguin, 1994. Eidsvik, Charles. “Perception and Convention in Acting for Theatre and Film.” Post Script, 8.2 (1989), pp. 21–35. Graham, Charles. “Acting for the Films in 1912.” Sight and Sound, 4.15 (Autumn 1935), pp. 118–19. Hornby, Richard. “Understanding Acting.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 17.3 (1983), pp. 19–37. Kalter, Joanmarie, ed. Actors on Acting: Performing in Theatre and Film Today. New York: Sterling, 1979. Marcorelles, Louis. “Albert Finney and Mary Ure Talking about Acting.” Sight and Sound, 30.2 (Spring 1961), pp. 56–61, 102. Marsh, Mae. Screen Acting. Los Angeles: Photo-Star Publishing, 1921. Mastroianni, Marcello. “The Game of Truth.” Film Quarterly, 46.2 (Winter 1992–3), pp. 2–7. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Nicholson, Jack. “The Bird is on His Own: Interview.” Film Comment, 21.3 (May–June 1985), pp. 53–61. Portman, Eric. “The Film Actor.” In Blakeston, Oswell, ed. Working for the Films. London: Focal Press, 1947, pp. 48–55. Sothern, E. H. “The ‘New Art’. ” The Craftsman, 30 (Sept. 1916), pp. 572–9, 642–3. Stanbrook, Alan. “Towards Film Acting.” Film, 17 (Sept.–Oct. 1958), pp. 15–18. Steiger, Rod. “On the Actor.” In Naker, Fred, and Ross Firestone, eds. Movie People: At Work in the Business of Film. New York: Douglas Book, 1972, pp. 101–22. Stevens, Wallace. “The Plot against the Giant.” In Harmonium. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1923. Taylor, Malcolm. The Actor and the Camera. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Methuen, 1994. Von Sternberg, Josef. “Acting in Film and Theatre.” Film Culture, 1.5–6 (Winter 1955), pp. 1–4. Zetterling, Mai. “Some Notes on Acting.” Sight and Sound, 21.2 (Oct.–Dec. 1951), pp. 83, 96. Zucker, Carole, ed. Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of Original Essays on Film Acting. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1990.

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Chapter 18

“Drama into Film” Thomas Erskine and James Welsh

From Video Versions: Film Adaptations of Plays on Video (2000) Introduction: Drama into Film Few Americans have the opportunity to see professional theatre onstage, beyond those who live in or near cosmopolitan urban centers where theatre still thrives and is honored—for example, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hollywood performs a service for the rest of us by providing a secondhand representation, the nearest thing to the real thing. Purists unwilling to compromise for an inferior medium can gratify their theatrical appetites only by becoming pilgrims, traveling to London to worship at the time-honored shrines of theatrical England, for example, from the National Theatre complex and the restored Globe on the South Bank, to the Royal Court on Sloane Square, to Covent Garden and Leicester Square. We understand that the theatrical experience is unique and that some of the best plays are simply unfilmable. Cinema cannot replicate the effect of John Dexter’s staging of Peter Shaffer Equus; or Stephen Daldry’s revival of J. B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls; or Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers at the Phoenix; or Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, with its abusive chorus; or Dennis Potter’s The Chosen One at the Barbican; or David Hare’s Pravda at the National Theatre. In short, theatre is one medium, and film quite another. The two are not entirely interchangeable. Although the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman once claimed that theatre had nothing to do with film, that claim is surely an overstatement. Plays are, after all, written in dialogue that is intended to be spoken and performed, and cinema is a performance medium. On the other hand, film should not be simply photographed theatre. Such approaches were taken in the early days of cinema when great moments of drama were captured on film in an attempt to appropriate the “prestige” of the legitimate stage. But as cinema developed from the turn of the century, this approach, which did not take full advantage

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of film’s unique processes and effects, was dismissed because of its obvious limitations. Clearly, the circumstances of performance are different. Onstage the action is limited to a given space, viewed by the spectator from a fixed position and distance. Acting, voice, and gesture will necessarily be exaggerated to compensate for that distance. In cinema, on the other hand, the camera is able to bridge that distance, bringing the viewer closer to the action and the actors, embracing a “reality” that is simulated. Gone are the constraints of the stage, since the camera is able to transport the viewer into apparently “real” settings. The acting no longer needs to be exaggerated and is more subdued and “natural.” The action is performed and captured in short sequences. Because the action is organized differently, actors do not have to dominate the playing space for extended periods of time. Film acting requires less training, therefore, than acting onstage. Some film directors even prefer to work with nonprofessional “actors” and have achieved good results, but professional training for actors can also be an advantage. Some basic distinctions have been offered by Peter R. Gerdes in a special issue of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory (No. 7, 1980), and a recapitulation of these may be useful here. Theatre involves unrepeatable performances: because “each performance is unique, there is no ‘finished product.’ ” Filmed performances are repeatable, however, because “[f]ilm is a finished product; it can only be ‘shown,’ not performed.” Onstage the actor is the “creator,” whereas on film the actor is the “created.” Theatre is an actor’s medium: “The art of the stage is an art of the actor.” Film, however, is a director’s medium: “The art of the screen is an art of the image,” as orchestrated by the director who “is responsible for the script and its representation,” whereas onstage “the representation serves the play.” Theatre requires trained specialists: “On stage the actor is always present with the whole of his personality,” whereas on film “the physical presence of the actor may be indicated by showing parts of his body only.” For example, in Joshua Logan film of the William Inge play Picnic, the action reaches an emotional climax at a Labor Day picnic dance in Kansas. The scene, remarkable for its sensuality and suggestiveness, involves Kim Novak and William Holden, who was not a gifted dancer; however, his lack of skill is disguised by close camera work that shows only parts of their entwined dancing bodies. Finally, Gerdes contends that “the drama text is an independent art work to be read or performed,” whereas “the film script is not an independent art work and cannot be read or ‘performed’; it is a preparatory element for a future art work,” nothing more. However, the original film scripts of Ingmar Bergman and others have been published and can be read and studied and in that respect may be considered coequal to play scripts. Such a script as Persona, however, could not be performed onstage, particularly the fusion sequence in which the

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camera merges and blends the faces of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, an effect impossible to achieve onstage. Tony Richardson, who worked both onstage and on-screen, wrote in his autobiography (1993): “The director in the cinema is a real creative force, while in the theatre he’s just an interpreter of the text.” According to Richardson, his frequent collaborator, the playwright John Osborne, regarded “a script once finished as the script of a play, with the director being responsible for staging the author’s vision in the most effective way he can. But in movies the director’s is the final sensibility. Every choice, every decision, has to be filtered through him and he converts them all into images the way a writer converts his experience into words.” In his later career, Richardson preferred to work in cinema, but he also continued to direct onstage, and several of his films derived from the plays of John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Edward Albee, and William Shakespeare. The latter, as will be seen, poses distinctive problems for the film director to resolve.

“Something touching the Lord Hamlet” (Ophelia, Hamlet I.iii) Plays were written as performance vehicles, and one could argue that they cannot be fully realized or completely understood until they have been properly performed onstage. Yet they are also read and studied as independent works of literature. Students commonly spend whole semesters reading the plays of Shakespeare, for example, to appreciate dramatic poetry of the highest order without necessarily giving much attention to how such a play as Hamlet or King Lear might be performed onstage. To stage a play is also to interpret it, however, as Tony Richardson noted, for the director will have to make many critical decisions about how the characters should be played, how to enact and frame the action, and what subjects and themes to emphasize. In the case of Hamlet, for example, how should the prince be represented? As the conventional, melancholy Dane consumed by his grief and sadness, disappointed by his mother’s behavior, disgusted by her “o’erhasty marriage” to his uncle Claudius, both horrified and debilitated by the information brought to him by a ghost that claims to be his dead father’s spirit, and uncertain about how to avenge his father’s murder? There are no fixed answers here. The character of Hamlet is multidimensional, so each generation is free to invent its own Hamlet. The oedipal Hamlet played by Laurence Olivier in 1948, for example, is far different from the impudent Hamlet played by Nicol Williamson in the 1969 Tony Richardson version or the brutally misogynist Hamlet of Kenneth Branagh in 1996. All of these interpretations have validity, and not one of them is necessarily “right” or “wrong.” But these decisions necessarily influence how the supporting characters are played. How should his mother, Gertrude, be represented? As a potential

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co-conspirator aware of what Claudius has done or as an innocent, but frail, loving, mother who is simply too free with her affection? Claudius himself is the villain of the piece, but he is also a scheming and devious politician, smart enough to be a worthy opponent of Hamlet, a dangerous foe who will stop at nothing to consolidate his rule and to marginalize any threat that Hamlet might pose. The play is very long by modern standards, and the text will often be cut and reduced for the sake of convenience in stage productions. To cut the text and abridge it require compromise. What scenes or lines may be considered expendable? What will be lost if, for example, Young Fortinbras is removed from the end of act V? If the role of Horatio is diminished, can the viewer fully grasp the theme of friendship that was so meticulously developed by Shakespeare? Who would presume to tamper with the unity, balance, and harmony of Shakespeare’s design? Purists respectful of Shakespeare’s integrity will strenuously object to such tampering. Theatrical people will be more tolerant, perhaps, realizing that reasonable compromises will have to be made out of pragmatic considerations, if the running time has to be kept under three hours plus, for this play is simply too long for contemporary audiences. Few productions onstage will therefore achieve a full realization of the play, offering little more than a fragmented interpretation that, if the director is clever enough, will make sense. As already noted, cinema is also a performance medium, and a director mounting a filmed production of Shakespeare will be faced with the same dilemma when faced with Hamlet or Lear, though shorter plays, such as Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, may be easier to render in full. But the challenge of mounting a longer and more complicated text such as Hamlet will be made even more difficult, since the text will have to be “translated” and simplified for a mass audience less capable than an experienced, educated theatre audience of following the verbal density of Shakespeare. Hollywood will attempt to popularize Shakespeare by casting star talent in the lead roles as a hedge to protect the studio’s investment, since cinema productions are obscenely expensive to finance. Thus, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990) hedged its bet by casting the tremendously popular Mel Gibson, an action star, as the meditative Prince and Glenn Close as Gertrude. Helena Bonham Carter, an actress with some screen exposure, was well cast as Ophelia. The rest of the cast was made up of British actors with stage credentials, most notably, Ian Holm as Polonius, Paul Scofield as the Ghost, Alan Bates as Claudius, and Stephen Dillane, who would later play Hamlet himself on the London stage, playing Horatio for Zeffirelli. It is difficult to fault the casting of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, but in other respects the film was a failure. Franco Zeffirelli’s career was launched by his brilliant staging of operas. He had directed a wonderfully atmospheric film adaptation

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of Romeo and Juliet (1968) that was operatic, overwrought, and overdone but tremendously popular and well regarded, even though it had simplified the text, removing the house of pestilence complication for Friar John, Romeo’s visit to the Apothecary, and the blocking presence of Paris at the Capulet crypt. The emotional treatment was appropriate for this play, but simplifying the text of Hamlet was not so easily done.

Romeo and Juliet (dir. Franco Zeffirelli, 1968)

At the expense of completely removing act I, scene 1, Zeffirelli began his film with a flashback to the dead King’s funeral, stealing lines from I.ii to cover the action. This is followed by a badly abridged rendering of the court scene (I.ii), the better part of which is represented not in public at court, as in Shakespeare, which gave the King’s words the full authority of a royal proclamation, but in a domestic setting in the King and Queen’s quarters, which diminishes the importance of what is said by changing the context in which Claudius’ criticisms of Hamlet are voiced. Whole scenes that should follow, moreover, are removed. Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery,” for example, is absurdly inserted into the “Mousetrap” scene where Hamlet has instructed the

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traveling players to perform a modified play, The Murder of Gonzago, which is intended to test the King’s guilty conscience and the verity of what the Ghost has told Hamlet about the circumstances of his murder. Alan Bates plays a weak Claudius, who seems no match for Hamlet’s scheming. Horatio is so diminished that he seems to be merely a casual acquaintance rather than the very emblem of friendship and loyalty. Shakespeare develops Hamlet’s psychological state of mind carefully through the four major soliloquies that trace his emotional progression from suicidal melancholy, to horrified revulsion and righteous rage and, finally, to resolution in the fourth and final soliloquy, which is missing from the Zeffirelli film. However, compensations are to be found in the film’s medieval setting, impressively photographed by David Watkin, and in the duel scene in act V, which, though operatic, extended, and overdone, brings the play to an effective emotional conclusion. Nonetheless, the idea of the play has been severely stunted. In this instance, Shakespeare was more undone than done. Hamlet was better served by the low-budget adaptation filmed by Tony Richardson at the Round House Theatre in London in 1969, starring Nicol Williamson as Hamlet and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. This film, done essentially as modified filmed theatre, is not especially “cinematic” but strikingly contrasts Nicol Williamson’s remarkable, inventive, and energetic interpretation of the Prince with the earlier lethargic, moping Hamlet of Olivier that had become the pedantic standard. Richardson cut about half the text cleverly and judiciously, pruning lines carefully to shorten the dialogue in such a way that the play seems more complete than it is. This is an actor’s Hamlet that works especially well on the television screen because of the camera technique that favors close-ups and medium shots and places the emphasis squarely on the text, which is to say, on Shakespeare. The most complete and, arguably, the most impressive rendering of Hamlet on film, however, was the adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh in 1996, which ran to just over four hours and was graced by an amazing international cast led by Branagh himself as Hamlet and Derek Jacobi as the most malicious Claudius ever realized on film. Though purists might question the peculiarities of the casting—Robin Williams as a not-so-young Osric, for example, or Billy Crystal as the First Gravedigger, or Gérard Depardieu as Reynaldo, sent by Polonius to his native Paris to spy on Laertes—they could not complain about the film’s fidelity to the text, which is exactly as Shakespeare wrote and rewrote it. More important, however, is Branagh’s audacious use of situation and setting. Branagh moves the film forward in time to the nineteenth century, which at first seems a little odd but ultimately makes sense. Hamlet’s great “To be, or not to be” soliloquy is ingeniously staged in the mirrored hall at Blenheim Palace, with Claudius and Polonius eavesdropping behind a

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two-way mirror. Hamlet delivers his lines not only to himself—his mirrored image—but directly to his adversary, so that Jacobi knows exactly what is on Hamlet’s mind. The supernatural spectacle of the Ghost is extended to metaphysical dimensions. When Brian Blessed’s Ghost appears, the ground trembles and quakes. The spectacle of the duel scene is even more exaggerated and overdone than Zeffirelli’s: Laertes takes a fall off a balcony and breaks his back after having been poisoned by his own treachery, and Hamlet throws his sword like a javelin the length of the great hall to puncture Claudius, then swings the length of the hall on a chandelier, as Fortinbras and his army crash into the palace to restore order. The cinema has the wherewithal to deliver amazing spectacles; the problem is that such an indulgence in spectacle can divert attention away from the poetry. A Shakespeare film with no spectacular potential, such as the one by Tony Richardson, may, therefore, in its very simplicity have an advantage over the spectacular treatments of Zeffirelli and Branagh, at least in the case of Hamlet. A different case, perhaps, needs to be made for Henry V, since in that play the spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt is the main action of the play, and, as Olivier and Branagh both demonstrated in their film adaptations, it is a battle spectacle more adaptable to the screen than to the stage.

Henry V (dir. Laurence Olivier, 1944)

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Fidelity: A “Tiresome” Consideration? In both his Hamlet and his Henry V (1989), Kenneth Branagh displayed a particular genius for adapting Shakespeare to the screen in a way that “fidelity” to the source was not an impediment. Besides demonstrating superior skills as a filmmaker, Branagh is capable of being true to both the spirit and the letter of the text. To anyone who knows, has studied, and appreciates literature, this should be an obvious and important consideration. But to show enthusiasm for such considerations is not, alas, the fashion these days. Dudley Andrew, addressing a cinema studies orthodoxy that he helped to create, dismisses considerations of textual fidelity as merely “tiresome” when he asserts that “the truth of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text.” But how can a film adaptation be coherently evaluated by those who respect literature without reference or regard for the text that is being treated? Andrew prefers the “more fashionable” approach of semiotics, less fashionable now than it was when he pontificated on it so absurdly in his Concepts in Film Theory in 1984. Then he utilized a “vocabulary” (i.e., jargon appropriated from French critics and linguists) that truly gave meaning to the word “tiresome” but that was used by academic philistines intent upon demonstrating their superior intelligence by parlaying a “language” that would be nearly incomprehensible to more reasonable people.

Henry V (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1989)

Andrew would ask, How does adaptation serve the cinema? More responsible literary and dramatic critics might turn that question around by asking,

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How does film adaptation serve literature? Clearly, some plays are more easily adapted to cinema than others, and some are so unique as to be virtually unfilmable. The more theatrical and abstract the design of a play, the less likely it is to be adapted successfully. Peter Shaffer’s Equus, for example, is abstract and symbolic. The six horses blinded by the psychotic Alan Strang were originally represented by actors onstage. Of course, Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation used real horses because film is a literal medium, and mass audiences would have scoffed to see actors in these horsey roles. What worked as an astonishing novelty onstage would have seemed simply too weird on film, so Lumet’s approach was to literalize the play; but a spectacle that shows real horses being blinded with a metal spike (in the play) or a sickle (in the film) is neither abstract nor elegant but merely repulsive. Changing the spectacle in this way also changes the play and its impact on the audience. To examine such changes is not necessarily “tiresome” but enables one to better understand what may be at the heart of the theatrical experience. Onstage, the symbolic spectacle is astonishing, but that symbolic experience cannot be replicated by realistic staging.

Equus (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1977)

Lumet’s Equus was certainly true to the letter of the text at the risk of verbally overloading the film by anchoring it to the extended, disturbed monologues of Dr. Dysart (effectively delivered by Richard Burton), but it was not true to the “spirit”—which is to say, the magic—of the play. Without that magic

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the play is not exactly pointless (e.g., it still effectively addresses the concerns of Burton’s wretchedly unhappy and burned out psychiatrist who laments his own inability to experience “passion” in a way that comes naturally to his patient), but it inherits the verbal density of the text while rejecting the novelty of the performance text. Even so, watching this failed film may help the viewer to unlock the secrets of the play by paying close attention to what the film lacks and the way it emphasizes the ordinary at the expense of the extraordinary. Dr. Dysart himself is exonerated of any hints of homosexual attraction to his patient in the film, which instead suggests an established heterosexual relationship between Dysart and Hesther Salomon, the magistrate who first brings Alan to Dysart, asserting, “The boy’s in pain” and needs professional help. The thematic concerns of the play—a doctor’s professional obligation to treat and “cure” his patient and his reluctance to do so; the issue of madness, shared, transformed, and transfigured; and symbolic impotence and displaced passion—are faithfully represented, though less ambiguous. The magic is gone, and the passion is differently imagined. The book you are holding in your hands expresses enthusiasms and passions shared by its editor and contributors toward the variety of attempts to translate stage plays into film. We do not apologize for this. Passion is often lacking in much of the film criticism one reads. It all too studiously avoids the enthusiasm ordinary people may experience by reading a novel, watching a play, or viewing a film, but, surprisingly, almost no one has deigned to challenge the cinema studies establishment or call their critical bluff. One exception is Kevin Brownlow, whose enthusiasm for the work of Abel Gance launched his career as filmmaker, historian, archivist, and television producer. In Brownlow’s documentary The Charm of Dynamite, Gance remarks, “Enthusiasm is essential in the cinema. It must be communicated to people like a flame. The cinema is a flame in the shadows fed by enthusiasm. It can dispel them. This is why enthusiasm is everything to me.” Sharing that sense of enthusiasm in his own way, Brownlow has been more productive than whole legions of film theorists. His Unknown Chaplin television series, for example, built upon “lost” footage Brownlow discovered in Lady Chaplin’s vaults, revealed more about Chaplin’s working habits and the development of his comic genius than any of the books published on the subject.

The Recycling of Drama: Stage to Screen and Screen to Stage Commercial cinema demands new material or exploitable material that can be reshaped in the interest of profits. What has succeeded in one medium might be transformable to another; what has succeeded in the medium of film could be reworked and updated profitably. Each adaptation may build upon the one preceding it. Consider, for example, the classic Ernst Lubitsch

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comedy The Shop Around the Corner ( 1940), adapted by Samson Raphelson for Lubitsch from an original Miklos Laszlo play entitled Parfumerie. In 1949 the film was remade as a Judy Garland musical directed by Robert Z. Leonard under a new title, In the Good Old Summertime, which held to the play’s core concept involving pen pals falling in love. The “concept” (in the Hollywood parlance) was then transformed into the Broadway musical She Loves Me, only to be revived again years later, in 1998, by director Nora Ephron and her sister Delia, and upgraded to e-mail technology in You’ve Got Mail, which not only recycled Laszlo and Lubitsch but also the romantic pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan from Nora Ephron’s earlier hit, Sleepless in Seattle (1993). This is a two-way street, however, and the process has also worked in reverse order. Consider, for example, The Little Shop of Horrors, which began as a cheap and cheesy Roger Corman B-movie shot in two days in 1960. This “black” comedy was then transformed into a campy stage musical on Broadway and in London’s West End at the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street and finally was recycled back into cinema as the musical directed by Frank Oz in 1986. A film that made the transition from stage to screen to stage was La Cage aux Folles (1978), which began as a French stage farce involving a gay couple. Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film adaptation appeared just as the door of the closet began to swing open in a new era of sophisticated tolerance about what was awkwardly called “alternative lifestyles” and was so popular that it generated two movie sequels in 1980 and 1985. The Broadway musical won Tony awards for best musical, book, direction, costumes, and star, George Hearn. It was even more popular onstage in London than in New York. After the film was transformed into the successful stage musical during the 1980s, it was then reworked again in the 1990s as an American remake called The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. Movies are often accused of artistic plagiarism, which could more kindly be called creative cross-fertilization, borrowing liberally from other sources. But a similar kind of borrowing sometimes takes place in drama. In 1967, for example, Tom Stoppard constructed a whole play out of a slice of Hamlet by telling the story of Hamlet from the cockeyed and uninformed perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s false friends brought to Elsinore by Claudius to spy on Hamlet. Stoppard then made his first foray into film directing by adapting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the screen in 1990, featuring the acting talents of Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss. Playwriting “is slow and painstaking, and you keep more in view all the time,” Stoppard explained in The Washington Post (Dec. 26, 1998). “But you can manipulate the bits in a screenplay and you don’t need a week to sit down and worry about it. Sometimes they’re shooting it the next day. You’re involved with something that’s not in love with its own mystery. It’s pragmatic.” Stoppard made these comments after having appropriated bits and

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pieces of Romeo and Juliet for the film Shakespeare in Love (1998), directed by John Madden from a screenplay started by Marc Norman and completed by Stoppard. Stoppard imagined Shakespeare as a young, untried playwright who was a blocked writer facing a deadline, hacking out a potboiler called “Romeo and Ethel” that was ultimately to become, well, something else and something better.

The Madness of King George (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 1994)

Screenwriting is more spontaneous, perhaps. “Film is drama at its most impatient, ‘What happens next?’ the perpetual nag,” according to the British playwright Alan Bennett, who transformed his play The Madness of George III into The Madness of King George, having to change the title to protect uninformed American viewers from thinking that the film was a sequel. “One can never hang about, thinks the writer, petulantly. There’s a bit more leeway on stage, depending on the kind of story one’s telling, and more still on television, where the viewers are so close to the characters as not to mind whether they dawdle a bit. But with film, meandering is out of the question; it has to be brisk.”

Art “Encased by Technology” “The movies stand between the past and the future, between human history and human extinction,” the playwright David Mamet wrote in Some

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Freaks (1989). “They come into being at the beginning of the last stage of the Industrial Revolution, which is to say at the beginning of the End of the World. As a sometime movie director, I have had the experience of standing, encased by technology, between those two worlds of the past and the future, of dealing with the most ancient art of Drama in a medium requiring the assistance and compliance of several hundred people, of being, in effect, a pilot.” Motion pictures “draw on existing arts and combine them into a legitimate new art. They are made to be shown in a theatre so that members of the audience can commune with each other. To order the dreams of the populace so that the populace en masse, acting as ‘the audience,’ can celebrate itself, is the art of the movies.” Thus, for Mamet, “The movies are a momentary and beautiful aberration of a technological society in the last stages of decay.” By contrast, the theatre requires “no technology whatever” and simply involves telling stories “in a formulized manner.” Movies are both communal and technological and the most appropriate form of artistic expression in the twentieth century. In contrast to Mamet’s melancholy fixation on contemporary decadence and his disillusionment late in the century is the excitement, once again, that the French director Abel Gance had seventy years earlier: “I’ve always tried to use this magical instrument, this absolutely magical instrument,” the cinema, Gance remarked to Steven Kramer in 1973 at the age of eighty-four, stressing the magical and tribal potential of the cinema. “As Novalis said, ‘An image is an incantation: a certain spirit is called; a certain spirit appears.’ But the spirit must be called! The spirit is found between the images” (quoted in Kramer, Abel Gance [1978]). “For me,” Gance continued, “a spectator who maintains his critical sense is not a true spectator. I wanted the audience to come out of the theatre amazed victims, completely won over, emerging from paradise to find, alas, the hell of the street. That is the cinema!” That is exactly what the cinema can do better than drama, to transport the audience completely into another world. “There will always be people to do normal dramas,” Gance said, but it is “more difficult to make Epics.” Gance believed, to his dying day, in a new divinity in gestation: “God is not an accomplished thing, but something eternal which recreates itself, which dies and does not die, which transfigures itself in different ways, according to generations, continents, and time. That transcendental aspect is fundamental.” But to tap into that transcendental sense requires men of vision inventive enough to adapt the technology to their goals.

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Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals (Dates are for the film versions of these works.) • 1776 (1972) • The 24th Day (2004) • 8 Women (2002) • Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) • Abie’s Irish Rose (1928) • About Last Night . . . (1986) • The Adding Machine (1969) • The Admirable Crichton (1957) • After the Fox (1966) • Agnes of God (1985) • Ah, Wilderness! (1935) • The Alarmist (1997) • Alfie (1966, 2004) • All My Sons (1948) • Amadeus (1984) • American Buffalo (1997) • Anastasia (1956, 1997) • Androcles and the Lion (1952) • Angels in America (2003) • Animal Crackers (1930) • The Animal Kingdom (1932) • Anna Christie (1923, 1930, 1931) • Annie (1982, 1995, 1999) • Annie Get Your Gun (1950, 1956, 1967) • Another Country (1984) • Another Part of the Forest (1948) • Antigone (1961) • Arms and the Man (1932) • Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) • As Is (1986) • Assunta Spina (1915) • Baby Doll (1956) • Bad Girl (1931) • The Balcony (1963) • Barefoot in the Park (1967) 231

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals The Bargain (1931) Bar Girls (1994) The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1956) Barstool Words (2006) Beautiful Thing (1995) Becket (1964) Becky Sharp (1935) The Beggar’s Opera (1953) Bent (1997) The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) The Best Man (1964) Betrayal (1983) The Big Kahuna (1999) The Big Knife (1955) A Bill of Divorcement (1932) Billy Liar (1963) Biloxi Blues (1988) The Birthday Party (1968) Blithe Spirit (1945, 1956) Blood Wedding (1981) The Blue Bird (1910, 1918, 1940, 1970, 1976) Blue Denim (1959) Boesman and Lena (2000) Boom! (1968) Born Yesterday (1950, 1993) The Boys in the Band (1970) The Boy Who Loved Trolls (1984) Breaker Morant (1980) Brief Encounter (1945) The Brig (1964) Brigadoon (1954) Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) Broadway Bound (1992) A Bronx Tale (1993) The Browning Version (1951, 1955, 1985, 1994) Bug (2007) Bus Stop (1956) Butley (1973) Butterflies Are Free (1972) Bye Bye Birdie (1963) Cabaret (1972) Cabin in the Sky (1943) Cactus Flower (1969) Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) California Suite (1978) Camelot (1967)

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233

• Camille (La Dame aux Camélias) (1907, 1909, 1910, 1915, 1917, 1921, 1925, 1926, 1934, • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

1936, 1953, 1954, 1969, 1980, 1984, 2000) The Captain from Koepenick (1956) The Caretaker (1963) Carousel (1956, 2008) Casablanca (1942) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) César (1936) Chapter Two (1979) Chicago (1927, 2002) Child of Manhattan (1933) Children of a Lesser God (1986) The Children’s Hour (1961) The Chocolate Soldier (1941) A Chorus Line (1985) Clash by Night (1952) Closer (2004) The Cocoanuts (1929) Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) Come Blow Your Horn (1963) Command Decision (1948) The Condemned of Altona (1962) The Connection (1961) Copenhagen (2002) The Country Girl (1954) The Crucible (1957, 1996) Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) Da (1988) Damn Yankees (1958) The Dance of Death (1969) Dancer in the Dark (2000) Dancing at Lughnasa (1998) Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1970) Dead End (1937) Death and the Maiden (1994) Death of a Salesman (1951, 1985) Deathtrap (1982) A Delicate Balance (1973) The Designated Mourner (1997) Design for Living (1933) Desire under the Elms (1958) Desk Set (1957) The Devil’s Disciple (1959)

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Dangerous Liaisons (dir. Stephen Frears, 1988)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Devil’s General (1955) Dial M for Murder (1954) Dinner at Eight (1933) Doctor Faustus (1967) The Doctor’s Dilemma (1958) Dodsworth (1936) A Doll’s House (1918, 1922, 1943, 1959, 1973, 1992) Don’t Drink the Water (1969, 1994) Doubt (2008) Dracula (1931, 1979) Dreamgirls (2006) The Dresser (1983) Driving Miss Daisy (1999) Dutchman (1966) The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947) Edmond (2005) Edward II (1992) The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) Electra (1961) The Elephant Man (1980) Elizabeth the Queen (1939) The Emperor Jones (1933) The Entertainer (1960)

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Edward II (dir. Derek Jarman, 1991)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Equus (1977) Escape in the Desert (1945) Evita (1996) Family Life (1971) The Family Way (1966) Fanny (1932, 1961) The Fantasticks (2000) The Father (1969) A Few Good Men (1992) Fiddler on the Roof (1971) Finian’s Rainbow (1968) Five Finger Exercise (1962) A Flea in Her Ear (1968) Flesh and Blood (1949) Flower Drum Song (1961) Fool for Love (1985) Footloose (2010) The Front Page (1931, 1974) Frost/Nixon (2008) The Fugitive Kind (1959) Fumed Oak (1952) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way of the Forum (1966) Gaby (1955) Galileo (1974) Gaslight (1940, 1944) Gertrud (1964)

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Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals Gigi (1958) The Gin Game (2003) The Glass Menagerie (1950, 1987) Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) Godspell (1973) Golden Boy (1939) Goodbye Again (1933) The Goodbye Girl (1977) Gray’s Anatomy (1996) Grease (1978) The Great Gatsby (1926) The Great White Hope (1970) Green Pastures (1936) The Guardsman (1931) Guys and Dolls (1955) Gypsy (1962, 1993) Hair (1955) Hairspray (2007) The Hairy Ape (1944) Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) Harvey (1950) Hedda (1975) Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) Hello, Dolly! (1969) He Who Gets Slapped (1924) The Hide (2008) High Society (1956) His Girl Friday (1940) Holiday (1930, 1938) The Homecoming (1973) The House of Yes (1997) How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) The Human Voice (1947) Hunting Scenes From Bavaria (1969) Hurlyburly (1998) I Am a Camera (1955) The Iceman Cometh (1973) An Ideal Husband (1947, 1999) Idiot’s Delight (1939) The Importance of Being Earnest (1952, 2002) Inadmissible Evidence (1968) Indiscreet (1958) Inherit the Wind (1960) The Inspector General (1949) I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982) Iphigenia (1978)

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237

I Remember Mama (1948) Jake’s Women (1996) The Jazz Singer (1927, 1980) Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) Joan of Lorraine (1948) Juno and the Paycock (1930) Jupiter’s Darling (1954) Key Largo (1948) The King and I (1956, 1999) Kiss Me, Kate (1953) The Kitchen (1961) The Knack (1965) Lady in the Dark (1944) Lady Windermere’s Fan (1949) Lakeboat (2000) The Laramie Project (2002) The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) Laughter on the 23rd Floor (2001) Lenny (1974) The Letter (1929, 1940) Life with Father (1947) Lip Service (1988) The Little Foxes (1941)

The Little Foxes (dir. William Wyler, 1941)

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Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs (1974) Little Murders (1972) Little Shop of Horrors (1986) London Suite (1996) Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) The Long Voyage Home (1940) Look Back in Anger (1959) Loot (1971) Lost in the Stars (1973) Lost in Yonkers (1993) Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997) The Lower Depths (1936, 1957) Luther (1973) The Madness of King George (1994) The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) The Maids (1974) Major Barbara (1941) Mame (1974) Mamma Mia! (2008) A Man for All Seasons (1966) Man of La Mancha (1972) The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942, 2000) Marat/Sade (1967) Marius (1931) The Marriage of Figaro (1959) The Matchmaker (1957) M. Butterfly (1993) Medea (1969) The Middle of the Night (1959) The Miracle Worker (1962) Miss Julie (1951, 1972, 1999) Miss Sadie Thompson (1954) Mister Puntilla and His Man Matti (1955) Mister Robert (1955, 1984) Monster in a Box (1991) Morgan (1966) Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) Murder in the Cathedral (1951) The Music Man (1962) My Fair Lady (1964) Nell (1994) New Faces (1954) ’night, Mother (1986) Night Must Fall (1937) The Night of the Iguana (1964) Nine (2009)

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

239

Noises Off (1992) No Time for Sergeants (1958) The Odd Couple (1968) Oedipus the King (1967) Oh Dad, Poor Dad (1966) Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) Oklahoma! (1955) Oleanna (1994) Oliver! (1968) One, Two, Three (1961) One Way Pendulum (1964) On Golden Pond (1981) Only When I Laugh (1981) On the Town (1949) Our Town (1940, 1955, 2003) Paint Your Wagon (1969) The Pajama Game (1957) Pal Joey (1957) Les Parents terribles (1948) Paris Bound (1929) Pastor Hall (1939) Period of Adjustment (1962) Peter Pan (1924, 1953, 2003) The Petrified Forest (1936) The Phantom of the Opera (2004) The Philadelphia Story (1940) The Piano Lesson (1994) Picnic (1955) The Pirate Movie (1982) The Pirates of Penzance (1983) Play It Again, Sam (1972) Plaza Suite (1971) Plenty (1985) The Plough and the Stars (1936) Pokrovsky Gates (1982) Prelude to a Kiss (1992) Pretty Polly (1967) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) The Prisoner (1955) The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) Private Lives (1931) The Producers (2005) Proof (2005) Pygmalion (1938) Quality Street (1937) The Quare Fellow (1962)

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals Rain (1932) Raise Your Voice (2004) A Raisin in the Sun (1960) Red Peppers (1952) Red Roses and Petrol (2008) Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2005) Relative Values (2000) Rent (2005) The Respectful Prostitute (1955) Reunion in Vienna (1933) Revizor (1934) Rhinoceros (1973) The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Romanoff and Juliet (1961) La Ronde (1964) Rope (1948) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) The Rose Tattoo (1955) Roxie Hart (1942) Royal Bed (1931) The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969) The Ruling Class (1972) Same Time, Next Year (1978) Saturday’s Children (1940) The Seagull (1968, 1974) The Searching Wind (1946) Separate Tables (1958) Seventh Heaven (1927, 1937) The Seven Year Itch (1955) Shadowlands (1995) The Shape of Things (2003) Shirley Valentine (1990) A Shot in the Dark (1964) Show Boat (1936, 1951) Six Degrees of Separation (1994) The Skin Game (1931) Sleuth (1972, 2007) Sly Fox (1976) A Soldier’s Story (1984) The Sound of Music (1965) South Pacific (1958) Spring Madness (1938) Stage Door (1937) Stalag 17 (1953) Star Spangled Girl (1971) Steel Magnolias (1987)

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241

Strange Interlude (1932) Streamers (1983) A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) Street Scene (1931) Strictly Ballroom (1993) Strictly Dishonorable (1931, 1951) SubUrbia (1996) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) Summer and Smoke (1961) The Sunshine Boys (1975) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) Sweet Bird of Youth (1961) Sweet Charity (1969) Swimming to Cambodia (1987) Switching Channels (1988) Talk Radio (1988) Tape (2001) A Taste of Honey (1961) Terrors of Pleasure (1988) These Three (1936) They Knew What They Wanted (1940) They Might Be Giants (1971) This Happy Breed (1947) This Property Is Condemned (1966) Those Were the Days (1940) The Threepenny Opera (1931) Three Sisters (1964, 1966, 1970) Thunder Rock (1942) Tonight Is Ours (1933) Topaze (1932) Toys in the Attic (1963) The Trojan Women (1972) Two for the Seesaw (1962) Two Kinds of Woman (1932) Uncle Vanya (1971) Uncommon Women and Others (1978) Under Milk Wood (1972) The Unknown Purple (1923) The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) Up the Junction (1963) Urbania (2000) The Valiant (1929) Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) Va savoir (2001) Victor/Victoria (1995) A View from the Bridge (1961)

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Select List of Films Based on Stage Plays or Musicals The Visit (1964) Voice of the City (1929) Voice of the Turtle (1947) Wait until Dark (1967) Waltz of the Toreadors (1962) Watch on the Rhine (1943) Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) Waterloo Bridge (1930, 1940) Ways and Means (1952) The Way to the Stars (1945) We’re Not Dressing (1934) West Side Story (1961) We Were Dancing (1942) What Every Woman Knows (1934) What Price Glory? (1926, 1952) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Who Was That Lady? (1960) The Winslow Boy (1948, 1999) Winterset (1936) Without Love (1945) Without You I’m Nothing (1990) The Wiz (1978) The Wizard of Oz (1939) The Women (1939) The Woodsman (2004) Woyzeck (1979) You Can’t Take It with You (1938) Zoot Suit (1981)

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FILMED SHAKESPEARE Comedies All’s Well That Ends Well • BBC Television Shakespeare All’s Well That Ends Well (TV, UK, 1980) As You Like It • As You Like It (USA, 1936) • BBC Television Shakespeare As You Like It (TV, UK, 1979) • As You Like It (Canada 1983, Stratford Festival of Canada, Stratford, Ontario) • As You Like It (UK, 1992) • The Animated Shakespeare As You Like It (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) • As You Like It (UK, 2006) The Comedy of Errors • The Comedy of Errors (UK 1978, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon) • BBC Television Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors (TV, UK, 1983) • The Comedy of Errors (Canada 1983, Stratford Festival of Canada, Stratford, Ontario) Adaptations

• Angoor (Hindi, India, 1982), a Bollywood adaptation • The Boys from Syracuse (USA, 1940; musical adaptation) Cymbeline • Cymbeline (1913, USA) • Cymbeline (1981, USA) • BBC Television Shakespeare Cymbeline (TV, UK, 1983) Love’s Labour’s Lost • BBC Television Shakespeare Love’s Labour’s Lost (TV, UK, 1985) • Love’s Labour’s Lost (UK, 2000; part musical adaptation) Measure for Measure • BBC Television Shakespeare Measure for Measure (TV, UK, 1978) • Measure for Measure (UK, 1994, TV) The Merchant of Venice • The Merchant of Venice (US, 1973) • BBC Television Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice (TV, UK, 1980)

243

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Filmed Shakespeare

• The Merchant of Venice (UK, 2003; film of Royal National Theatre’s stage version) • The Merchant of Venice (USA, 2004) The Merry Wives of Windsor • BBC Television Shakespeare The Merry Wives of Windsor (TV, UK, 1982) • The Merry Wives of Windsor (TV/video, USA, 1982) Adaptations

• Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff; USA, 1967; an amalgamation of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor) A Midsummer Night’s Dream • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (USA, 1935) • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (UK, 1968; Royal Shakespeare Company film) • BBC Television Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream (TV, UK, 1981) • The Animated Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (UK, 1995; Royal Shakespeare Company film) • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (USA, 1999) • The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (UK, 2001; performed by a cast of children) Adaptations

• Midsummer (USA, 1999) • ShakespeaRe-Told A Midsummer Night’s Dream (TV, UK, 2005) Much Ado about Nothing • Much Ado about Nothing (TV, US, 1973) • BBC Television Shakespeare Much Ado about Nothing (TV, UK, 1984) • Much Ado about Nothing (UK, 1993) Adaptations

• ShakespeaRe-Told Much Ado about Nothing (UK, TV, 2005) Pericles, Prince of Tyre • BBC Television Shakespeare Pericles, Prince of Tyre (TV, UK, 1984) The Taming of the Shrew • The Taming of the Shrew (USA, 1908) • The Taming of the Shrew (USA, 1929) • The Taming of the Shrew (USA, 1967) • BBC Television Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew (TV, UK, 1980) • The Animated Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) Adaptations

• Kiss Me, Kate (USA, 1948) • 10 Things I Hate about You (USA, 1999)

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245

• Deliver Us from Eva (USA, 2003) • Shrew in the Park (Canada, TV, 2003) • ShakespeaRe-Told The Taming of The Shrew (UK, TV, 2005) The Tempest • The Tempest (USA, 1911) • Hallmark Hall of Fame The Tempest (TV, USA, 1960) • The Tempest (UK, 1979) • BBC Television Shakespeare The Tempest (TV, UK, 1980) • The Tempest (TV/video, USA, 1983) • The Animated Shakespeare The Tempest (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • The Tempest (USA, 2009) Adaptations

• Tempest (USA, 1982) • The Tempest (USA, 1998) Twelfth Night • Twelfth Night (USA, 1910) • Twelfth Night (USSR, 1955) • Twelfth Night (TV, UK, 1969) • BBC Television Shakespeare Twelfth Night (TV, UK, 1980) • Twelfth Night (TV, UK, 1988) • The Animated Shakespeare Twelfth Night (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • Twelfth Night (UK, 1996) • Twelfth Night, or What You Will (TV, UK, 2003) The Two Gentlemen of Verona • BBC Television Shakespeare The Two Gentlemen of Verona (TV, UK, 1984) The Winter’s Tale • BBC Television Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale (TV, UK, 1980) • The Animated Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) • The Winter’s Tale (1999; Royal Shakespeare Company film)

Tragedies Antony and Cleopatra • Antony and Cleopatra (USA, 1908) • Antony and Cleopatra (UK, 1972) • Antony and Cleopatra (TV, UK, 1974) • BBC Television Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra (TV, UK, 1981) Adaptations

• Carry On Cleo (UK, 1965) • Kannaki (Malayalam, India, 2002)

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Filmed Shakespeare

Coriolanus • BBC Television Shakespeare Coriolanus (TV, UK, 1984) Hamlet • Hamlet (Germany, 1920) • Hamlet (UK, 1948) • Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark (West Germany, 1961) • Hamlet (USSR, 1964) • Hamlet at Elsinore (TV, UK, 1964) • Hamlet (UK, 1969) • BBC Television Shakespeare Hamlet (TV, UK, 1980) • Hamlet (USA, 1990) • The Animated Shakespeare Hamlet (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • Hamlet (UK, 1996) • Hamlet (USA, 2000) • The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Australia, 2007) Adaptations

• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (USA, 1990) • The Bleak Midwinter (a.k.a. A Midwinter’s Tale) (UK, 1996) • The Banquet (China, 2006) Julius Caesar • Julius Caesar (USA, 1949) • Julius Caesar (USA, 1953) • Julius Caesar (USA, 1970) • BBC Television Shakespeare Julius Caesar (TV, UK, 1979) • The Animated Shakespeare Julius Caesar (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) Adaptations

• Carry On, Cleo (UK, 1965) King Lear • King Lear (TV, USA, 1953) • King Lear (UK, 1971) • King Lear (Russia, 1971) • New York Shakespeare Festival King Lear (USA, 1974) • King Lear (TV, UK, 1976) • BBC Television Shakespeare King Lear (TV, UK, 1982) • King Lear (TV, UK, 1983) • King Lear (TV, UK, 1997; Royal National Theatre film) • King Lear (UK, 1999) Adaptations

• Ran (Japan, 1985) • King Lear (Bahamas/USA, 1987)

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247

Macbeth • Macbeth (USA, 1948) • Macbeth (TV, UK, 1965) • Macbeth (USA and UK, 1971) • Macbeth (UK, 1978; Royal Shakespeare Company film) • Macbeth (UK, 1981) • BBC Television Shakespeare Macbeth (TV, UK, 1983) • The Animated Shakespeare Macbeth (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • Macbeth (UK, 1997) • Macbeth (TV, UK, 1998) • Macbeth (video, UK, 2001; Royal Shakespeare Company) • Macbeth (Australia, 2006) Adaptations

• • • •

Throne of Blood (Japan, 1957) Rave Macbeth (Germany, 2001) Maqbool (India, 2004) ShakespeaRe-Told Macbeth (UK, TV, 2005)

Othello • Othello (Germany, 1922) • Othello (UK, 1946) • Othello (USA, 1952) • Othello (Russia, 1955) • Othello (UK, 1965; Royal National Theatre film) • BBC Television Shakespeare Othello (TV, UK, 1980) • Othello (TV, UK, 1990; Royal Shakespeare Company film) • The Animated Shakespeare Othello (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) • Othello (USA, 1995) Adaptations

• • • • •

Kaliyattam (India, 1997) O (USA, 2001) Othello (TV, UK, 2001) Omkara (India, 2006) Iago (Italy, 2009)

Romeo and Juliet • Romeo and Juliet (USA, 1908) • Romeo and Juliet (USA, 1936) • Romeo and Juliet (UK, 1954) • Romeo and Juliet (Italy, 1968) • BBC Television Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet (TV, UK, 1978) • The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (USA, 1982) • The Animated Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet (TV, Russia and UK, 1992) • Romeo+Juliet (USA, 1996)

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Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations

• West Side Story (USA, 1961) • Romie-0 and Julie-8 (Canada, 1979) • Tromeo and Juliet (USA, 1996) Timon of Athens • BBC Television Shakespeare Timon of Athens (TV, UK, 1981) Titus Andronicus • BBC Television Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (TV, UK, 1985) • Titus (USA, 1999) • Titus Andronicus (USA, 1999) Troilus and Cressida • BBC Television Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (TV, UK, 1981)

Titus (dir. Julie Taymor, 1999)

Histories Henry IV Part 1 • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries, 1960) • The War of the Roses (TV miniseries, 1965) • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry IV Part 1 (TV, UK, 1979) • The War of the Roses: Henry IV Part 1 (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film) Adaptations

• Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff; USA, 1967; an amalgamation of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor)

• My Own Private Idaho (USA, 1991)

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249

Henry IV Part 2 • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry IV Part 2 (TV, UK, 1979) • The War of the Roses: Henry IV Part 2 (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film) Adaptations

• Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff; USA, 1967; an amalgamation of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor)

• My Own Private Idaho (USA, 1991) Henry V • Henry V (UK, 1944) • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, Miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry V (TV, UK, 1979) • Henry V (UK, 1989) • The War of the Roses: Henry V (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company) Adaptations

• Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff; USA, 1967; an amalgamation of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor)

• My Own Private Idaho (USA, 1991) Henry VI Part 1 • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry VI Part 1 (TV, UK, 1983) • The War of the Roses: Henry VI—House of Lancaster (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film) Henry VI Part 2 • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry VI Part 2 (TV, UK, 1983) • The War of the Roses: Henry VI—House of Lancaster (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film); The War of the Roses: Henry VI—House of York (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film) Henry VI Part 3 • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry VI Part 3 (TV, UK, 1983) • The War of the Roses: Henry VI—House of York (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film)

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Filmed Shakespeare

Henry VIII • BBC Television Shakespeare Henry VIII (TV, UK, 1979) The Life and Death of King John • BBC Television Shakespeare King John (TV, UK, 1984) Richard II • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Richard II (TV, UK, 1978) • The War of the Roses: Richard II (UK, 1990; English Shakespeare Company film) • Richard II (UK, TV, 1997) • Richard the Second (USA, 2001) Adaptations

• Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff; USA, 1967; an amalgamation of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor) Richard III • Richard III (UK, 1955) • An Age of Kings (UK, TV, miniseries 1960) • The War of the Roses television miniseries 1965 • BBC Television Shakespeare Richard III (TV, UK, 1982) • The War of the Roses: Richard III (UK, 1990, English Shakespeare Company film) • The Animated Shakespeare King Richard III (TV, Russia and UK, 1994) • Richard III (UK, 1995) • Richard III (USA, 2008) Adaptations

• Tower of London (1939; remade 1962) • Looking for Richard (USA, 1996; documentary)

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STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What are Vachel Lindsay’s thirty differences between the screen and the stage? Some commentators get a different number each time they count; how many differences can you locate? 2. When Hugo Münsterberg observes (in 1916) that theater is bound by causality whereas film is not, how accurate is his observation? Is avant-garde theater—which by this time had already begun to appear—bound by causality? 3. Compare the films made of Bernard Shaw’s plays subsequent to this 1925 interview—and subsequent to Shaw’s death in 1950—with his criticisms here of the films made of his plays. Would he approve or disapprove of the later films, and why? Would he agree or disagree with what Siegfried Kracauer says, in “The Theatrical Story,” about the film of Pygmalion (1938)? 4. To what extent are Erwin Panofsky’s and Rudolf Arnheim’s views about the cinema in general, and sound film in particular, conditioned by the fact that they both saw their first movies during the silent era? 5. Why does Allardyce Nicoll believe that stage acting—where the actor is actually present in the flesh—is more typified and less “real” than film acting— where the actor is only an image on the screen? Related to this, do you agree with Nicoll’s idea that theater cannot be as psychologically “deep” as cinema, due to film’s ability to express a subjective point of view? 6. Why does André Bazin see theater as more “moral” and its spectator as more alive or sentient than the film spectator? How is Bazin’s argument buttressed by Allardyce Nicoll’s argument that stage acting is less “real” than film acting? 7. Stanislavsky’s method, as described by Vsevolod Pudovkin, is not the same as the method used by actors in American theater and film. Stanislavsky’s method could be used by an actor playing Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954) or Brutus in Julius Caesar (film or play). But the American method ideally could be used only by the actor playing Terry Malloy. Why? What are the major differences between these two methods? 8. Describe the extent to which it is clear that both Josef von Sternberg’s and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s essays were written by film directors, as opposed to film scholars or theorists. 9. Who makes the more convincing case, Tyrone Guthrie for the theater or Carl Foreman for the cinema, and why?

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10. How, as Peter Brook asks in 1964, “can the screen free itself of its own consistencies so as to reflect the mobility of thought that blank verse demands?” What exactly does Brook mean, and has the screen achieved this goal in such subsequent Shakespearean adaptations as Much Ado about Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), Titus (1999), and The Tempest (2009)? 11. Susan Sontag calls for a new notion of the relationship between film and theater without proposing one, thereby provocatively challenging us. “We need a new idea,” she writes. “It will probably be a very simple one. Will we be able to recognize it?” What might this idea be, and, if it does not already exist forty-five years subsequent to Sontag’s essay, how will we go about discovering it? 12. Agree or disagree with the following statements by Roger Manvell and Jacques Feyder (as quoted by Siegfried Kracauer), respectively: “Film scripts . . . are frequently published, but it is evident . . . that very few of them can rank as literature”; “Everything can be transferred to the screen, everything expressed through an image.” 13. How do you account for film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s paradoxical, almost violent anti-cinematic prejudice in his interview? 14. The critic Vernon Young once said that “Film criticism can usually afford to disregard actors in a film’s total effect.” Orson Welles writes in the epigraph to Bert Cardullo’s essay, “I don’t understand how movies exist independently of the actor—I truly don’t.” With which man do you concur and why? 15. Which of the following two questions would you choose to ask, and why? Dudley Andrew (as quoted by Thomas Erskine and James Welsh): “How does adaptation serve the cinema?” Thomas Erskine and James Welsh: “How does film adaptation serve literature?”

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Index

Balázs, Béla 139, 143, 181 Bara, Theda 49, 214 Baranovskaya, Vera 212 Barbican Theatre 218 Bargy, Charles le 109 Barrault, Jean-Louis 107 Barrie, J. M. 37 Barrymore, John 75, 169, 212 Barrymore, Lionel 209 Bash 16 Bates, Alan 221, 223 The Battlecry of Peace 32 The Battleship Potemkin 13, 47, 144–5 Baty, Gaston 102 Baudelaire, Charles 98 Bauhaus 4 , 180 Bazin, André viii, 251 Beckett, Samuel 6 Beethoven, Ludwig van 61 The Beggar 179 Behrman, S. N. 88 Belasco, David 2 Ben Hur 3 Bennett, Alan 229 Bentley, Eric Russell 43 Bérard, Christian 96 Bergen, Edgar 123 Bergman, Ingmar 6, 16, 185, 191, 218–19 Bergner, Elizabeth 73 Berkeley, Busby 176–7, 187 Berliner Ensemble 169 Bernhardt, Sarah 21, 41, 109–10, 122 , 169 Bernstein, Henry 104 Betterton, Thomas 188 Between the Lines 30 Beuys, Josef 196 The Big Store 158 The Birdcage 228 The Birth of a Nation 3, 75 Blessed, Brian 224 Blithe Spirit 172 Blok, Alexander 1 Blood Brothers 218 Blue Man Group 15 Bost, Pierre 149 Boudu Sauvé des Eaux 172

Aeschylus 13, 87, 89 Agamemnon 13 L’Age d’Or 182 Albee, Edward 13–14 , 189, 220 Alden, Mary 19 Aldrich, Robert 182 Alexander Nevsky 136, 144–5, 149 Alexandrov, Grigori 134 American Film Theater 192 An American Tragedy 126, 143 L’Amour Fou 16 Anderson, Margaret 18 Anderson, Maxwell 87–8 Andersson, Bibi 220 Andrew, Dudley 225 Animal Crackers 172 Anna Christie 49, 51, 142–3, 172 Anna Karenina 50–2 Anouilh, Jean 99 Antonioni, Michelangelo 6, 158, 165 Antony and Cleopatra 186 Apollinaire, Guillaume 4 Appia, Adolphe 194–204 Aragon, Louis 4 Arcand, Denys 16 Archer, William 18 Aristophanes 89, 189 Aristotle 10, 48, 94 Arliss, George 76, 78 Arms and the Man 73–5, 189–90 Arnheim, Rudolf viii, 251 Arno, Peter 129 Arnoul, Françoise 106 Arrival of the Paris Express 11 Artaud, Antonin 4 , 12 , 181–2 The Aspern Papers 158 Asquith, Anthony 147 Assassination of the Duc de Guise 134–6 L’Assommoir 149 Athalie 110 Auerbach, Erich 137 Aurenche, Jean 149 Autant-Lara, Claude 173 auteurism 10–11 avant-gardism 4 , 202 , 207, 251 Awake and Sing! 88

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Branagh, Kenneth 220, 223–5 Brand 18 Bray, Yvonne de 110 Brecht, Bertolt 4 , 12–13, 166–7, 196 Breer, Robert 171 Bresson, Robert 100, 103, 172 , 177 Breton, André 4 Brieux, Eugène 2 The Brig 169 Broadway vii, 21, 83, 136, 153, 158–9, 161, 180, 228 Broken Blossoms 141 Brook, Peter viii, 11–12 , 169, 182 , 188, 192 Brooks, Louise 214 Brown, Clarence 142 Brownlow, Kevin 227 Brustein, Robert 8 Buñuel, Luis 182 , 191 Burge, Stuart 51, 192 Burton, Richard 192 , 226–7

Cabaret 7 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 4 , 46, 54 , 99–100, 170–1, 179 Cabiria 22 Cacoyannis, Michael 193 Cage, John 181–2 La Cage aux Folles 228 Cagney, James 54 Caine, Michael 210 Camille 21, 212 Campbell, Malcolm 82 Cantet, Laurent 6 Čapek, Josef 180 Čapek, Karel 180 Carter, Helena Bonham 221 Casablanca 8, 48 Castellani, Renato 138 Castle of the Spider’s Web 193 The Caucasian Chalk Circle 13 Cenere 49 Cézanne, Paul 124 Chaikin, Joseph 11 Chaplin, Charles 36–7, 46, 49, 76, 104 , 108, 188, 212 , 227 The Charm of Dynamite 227 Chayevsky, Paddy 156 Chekhov, Anton 2 Un Chien Andalou 182 The Children’s Hour 86 The Chosen One 218 Churchill, Caryl 218 cinemascope 5 cinéma vérité 170, 179 cinerama 5, 166, 173 Citizen Kane 103 Clair, René 5, 46, 76 Clément, René 158 Clever, Edith 197 The Clock 148 Close, Glenn 221 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 182 Cocteau, Jean 4 , 91, 102 , 105, 110, 175 Comédie Française 110, 134 comedy 2 , 27, 41, 45–7, 84 , 89, 108, 133, 146–7, 163, 172 , 227–8 Come Spy with Me 180

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Commedia dell’arte 108 Compson, Betty 206 Congreve, William 186 Coogan, Jackie 36 Corman, Roger 228 Corneille, Pierre 93 A Corner in Wheat 46 Covent Garden Theatre 218 The Covered Wagon 36 Craig, Gordon 24 , 188 Cravenne, Marcel 96 Crystal, Billy 223 Cukor, George 212 Czech National Theatre (Prague) 180 Czinner, Paul 192 Daldry, Stephen 218 La Dame de la mort 96 Les Dames aux camellias 96 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne 100 Dangerous Liaisons 234 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre 6 Dardenne, Luc 6 Dead End 85 Deafman Glance 15 Death of a Salesman 14 , 135–6, 140 Debrullier, Nigel 19 Degas, Edgar 107 De La Guarda 15 Delaney, Shelagh 220 De Létraz, Jean 104 , 106 Dell, Floyd 18 Delsarte, François 208 De Mille, Cecil B. 35, 188 Depardieu, Gérard 223 De Sica, Vittorio 138, 187 Deutsch, Babette 80–1, 84 Dexter, John 218 Diary of a Country Priest 103 Dickens, Charles 25, 36, 172 Diderot, Denis 214 Dietrich, Marlene 75 Dillane, Stephen 221 Dinner at Eight 172 Disney, Walt 41, 46, 88–9, 123, 178 Disraeli, Benjamin 78 documentary 100, 141, 166, 170, 179, 205, 227 Doesburg, Theo van 171 La Dolce Vita 158 A Doll’s House 19–20, 51 Doyle, Arthur Conan 46 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 96, 98, 100, 171, 173, 212 Dreyfuss, Richard 228 Dürer, Albrecht 47, 49, 53 Duse, Eleonora 49, 51, 169 Dwan, Allan 35 D’Yd, Jean 100 Edgar Allan Poe 46 Edison Kinetoscope 3, 39 Edison Studios 1, 207 Edith Clever Reads James Joyce 198 Edward II 235

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Index Ehrlich, Paul 48, 54 Eisenstein, Sergei viii, 5, 13, 47, 134 , 136–7, 139, 143–5, 150, 163, 187–8, 191, 213 Electra 193 Eliot, T. S. 87–8 L’Enfant Prodigue 28 Les Enfants terrible 173 Ephron, Delia 228 Ephron, Nora 228 epic theater 4 Equus 186, 218, 226–7 L’Espoir 103 L’esprit des lois 140 Euripides 24 , 189 “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” 3 expressionism 4 , 46, 54 , 89, 99–100, 179, 196 Eyck, Jan van 49

Fairbanks, Douglas 36–7, 49 Faisons un Rève 172 Falconetti, Renée 100, 212 Faust 41 Fellini, Federico 6, 158, 191 Ferguson, Otis 143, 148 Feydeau, Georges 105 Feyder, Jacques 139–40, 148 Fift h Generation (China) 6 Film d’art 109–10, 134 , 136, 149 Film Form 139, 142 , 144 Finney, Albert 190, 209 Fires Were Started 187 Fiske, Minnie Maddern (Mrs.) 20–1 Flaherty, Robert 170, 187 Fonda, Henry 212 Fool Moon 15 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 169 Ford, John 5, 141, 173, 186, 212 Foreman, Carl 251 Fosse, Bob 7 Franju, Georges 182 Fräulein Else 198 Frears, Stephen 234 Frederick, Pauline 155 Freie Bühne (Berlin) 2 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 212 Frida 15 Fuller, Mary 24 Fury 148 futurism 4 , 180, 182

Gance, Abel 227, 230 Garbo, Greta 49, 51, 75, 212 Garland, Judy 228 Garland, Patrick 20 Garrick, David 66, 188 The General 47 Genêt, Jean 6 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies 21 Gerdes, Peter R. 219 Gertrud 171, 173, 175 Gervaise 149 Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) 9–10

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271

The Ghost Goes West 76 Ghosts 18–20, 52 Gibson, Mel 221 Gideon 156–7 Gielgud, John 188, 192 Gilbert, W. S. 3 Gish, Lillian 155, 212 The Glass Menagerie 140 Globe Theatre (London) 83, 218 Godard, Jean-Luc 6, 12 , 164–5, 172 , 177, 191 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2 , 59, 67 Goldoni, Carlo 67 Gorky, Maxim 173 Gorky Theatre (Leningrad) 179 Gouhier, Henri 91, 99 Gould, Glenn 201 Graham, Charles 209 Grande Jatte 53 Grand Guignol 103 Granville-Barker, Harley 24 The Grapes of Wrath 212 The Great Dictator 49 Great Expectations 136 The Great Train Robbery 46 The Green Bird 15 Gregory, Horace 81 Grein, J. T. 2 Griffith, D. W. 1, 3–4 , 35, 46, 135, 141, 146, 149–50, 188, 207–8, 212–14 Gropius, Walter 180 Grotowski, Jerzy 11 Guitry, Sacha 50 Guthrie, Tyrone vii, 188, 251 Hackett, James K. 38 Hall, Peter 188, 192 Hamlet 42 , 52 , 66, 74 , 101–3, 107, 121, 143, 162–4 , 166, 169, 192 , 220–5, 228 Hammett, Dashiell 46 Haneke, Michael 6 Hanks, Tom 228 happenings 176, 180 Hardwicke, Cedric 48, 73 Hardy, Oliver 76 Hardy, Thomas 21 Hare, David 218 Hart, Bill 37 Hauptmann, Gerhart 27 Hawks, Howard 212 Hazlitt, William 121 Hearn, George 228 The Heiress 136 Heiss, William 3 Hellman, Lillian 15, 156 Henderson, Archibald 34 Henry V 45, 50, 102 , 104–5, 107, 145, 173, 191, 224–5 Hepburn, Katharine 76 Here Comes Mr. Jordan 48 Herrmann, Bernard 191 Heston, Charlton 186 Hewlett, Maurice 25 Histoire d’un Tricheur 50 Hitchcock, Alfred 141, 175, 182 , 191

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272

Index

Hitler: A Film from Germany 195 Hochhuth, Rolf 179 Holden, William 219 Hollywood vii, 12 , 46, 53–4 , 75, 130, 136, 159–60, 189, 206–7, 211, 214 , 218, 221, 228 Holm, Ian 221 Home Alone 8 The Homecoming 13 Homer 51 Hong, Sang-soo 6 Hopkins, Anthony 223 Hopkins, Priscilla 78 Howard, Leslie 80 Howards End 213 How He Lied to Her Husband 189 Hugo, Victor 96, 100 The Hunchback of Notre Dame 36 Hurt, James viii Huxley, Aldous 50 Hytner, Nicholas 229 I Am a Camera 7 Ibsen, Henrik 2 , 18–20, 24 , 27, 50, 84–5, 155 Ichikawa, Jun 6 Ikiru 212 impressionism 34 , 89 Independent Theatre (London) 2 The Informer 136, 140–1 Inge, William 219 The Insect Play 180 An Inspector Calls 218 In the Company of Men 15 In the Good Old Summertime 228 In the Shadows of Our Ancestors 175 Intolerance 3, 146, 150 The Investigation 179 Ionesco, Eugène 6 Irving, Henry 2 , 76, 121, 188 Irwin, Bill 15 Isherwood, Christopher 7 Itallie, Jean-Claude van 13 Ivan the Terrible 136 Ivory, James 174 , 213 Jackson, Pat 187 Jacobi, Derek 223–4 Jannings Emil 130–1, 169 Jarman, Derek 235 Jellicoe, Ann 15 Jennings, Humphrey 187 Jesus of Montreal 16 John, Augustus 34 Joyce, James 80, 137, 198 Judith of Bethulia 3, 21–2 Julius Caesar 109, 136, 193, 251 Jumpers 186 Kammerspiel (chamber play) 137 Kauff mann, Stanley viii Kaurismäki, Aki 6 Kazan, Elia 141, 192–3

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Keaton, Buster 37, 46–7, 49, 108, 212 Keats, John 23 Kemble, Charles 188 Kim, Ki-duk 6 King Lear 98, 164 , 166, 220–1 Kleist, Heinrich von 67, 194 , 198 The Knack, and How to Get It 15 Knipper, Olga 112 Knopf, Robert viii Komisajevski, Thomas 188 Kortner, Fritz 196 Kott, Jan 164 Kozintsev, Grigori 162–4 Kracauer, Siegfried viii, 170, 179, 251 Kramer, Steven 230 Kronenberger, Louis 148 Kubrick, Stanley 6 Kurosawa, Akira 162 , 173, 191, 193, 212 LaBute, Neil 6, 15 Lane, Nathan 228 Lang, Fritz 148, 188 Laocoön 64 Largely New York 15 The Last Command 130–1 Last Year at Marienbad 158, 161 Laszlo, Miklos 228 Laughton, Charles 51–2 , 73, 155 Laurel, Stan 76 Lawrence of Arabia 186 Lean, David 186, 191 Leigh, Mike 6 Leigh, Vivian 192 Lenin, V. I. 4 Leonard, Robert Z. 228 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 64 Lester, Richard 15 Lewis, Cecil 190 Les Liaisons Dangereuses 158 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 66 Life with Father 52 The Light That Failed 3 Linder, Max 46 Lindsay, Vachel 251 The Lion King 15 The Little Foxes 15, 237 The Little Shop of Horrors 228 Living Theatre 12 , 169, 182 Lloyd, Harold 37 Logan, Joshua 219 The Lonely Villa 146 Longstreet, Stephen 148 The Loss of the Hope 112 Lost Weekend 43 Louis Pasteur 42 The Lower Depths 173 Lubitsch, Ernst 5, 35, 227–8 Lucian 121 Lumet, Sidney 213, 226 Lumière, Auguste 3, 106, 141, 207 Lumière, Louis 3, 11, 106, 141, 170, 207 Lusk, Norbert 142–3

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Index Lynch, David 6 M 80 Macbeth 38, 83, 102 , 104 , 136, 162–3, 173, 183, 185, 193, 221 Macdermott, Marc 24 MacKaye, Steele 2 McLuhan, Marshall 11, 181 Madame Curie 42 Madden, John 229 The Madness of George III 229 The Madness of King George 229 Mahler, Gustav 61 Malraux, André 103, 107 Malle, Louis 16 Mamet, David 16, 229–30 Mamoulian, Rouben 5 Manet, Edouard 107 A Man for All Seasons 158 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 109, 193 Man of Aran 95 Manolete (M.L.R. Sánchez) 92 The Man Who Could Work Miracles 42 Marat/Sade 12 , 169, 182 , 192 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 4 , 180–2 Marius 172 Marker, Chris 170 The Marquise of O. 198 Marsh, Mae 214–15 Marx, Groucho 45–6, 158, 172 Marx, Harpo 46, 49, 158 Marxism 170 Mastroianni, Marcello 210, 212 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 178 Mayo, Archie 79 Mekas, Adolfas 169 Mekas, Jonas 169 Méliès, Georges 3, 46, 135, 141, 170, 175 melodrama 2 , 20, 45–6, 48, 133, 195, 207–8 Melville, Herman 136 Melville, Jean-Pierre 173 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 4 , 178, 180 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 45, 67, 82–3, 192 Milestone, Lewis 6 Miller, Arthur 14 , 156 Minelli, Vicente 148 Miss Else 198 Miss Julie 7, 173 Moby Dick 136, 145 Moderate Cantabile 165 Molière 24 , 67, 78, 92 , 98, 104 , 155, 189 Molinaro, Edouard 228 Monicelli, Mario 212 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 140 Montgomery, Robert 51, 75 A Month in the Country 112 Moretti, Nanni 6 Moscow Art Theatre 2 , 4 , 112 Mother 36, 114–15, 118, 212 Mother Courage 169 Mounet-Sully, Jean 109–10 Mourning Becomes Electra 140 Müller, Heiner 195

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273

Mulvey, Laura 210 Münsterberg, Hugo, 251 Murder in the Cathedral 87–8 The Murder of Gonzago 223 Murnau, F. W. 100 My Fair Lady 153 My Life in Art 111 Nana 171 Nanook of the North 36, 95 Naremore, James viii National Theatre (London) 192 , 218 Nattier, Nathalie 106 naturalism 47, 84–8, 165, 195 The Navigator 47 Nazimova, Alia 37 neorealism, Italian 170, 196, 213 Newman, Paul 213 New Romanian Cinema 6 New Theatre (London) 34 Niagara Falls 47 Die Nibelungen 99, 101 Nichols, Mike 14 , 193 Nicholson, Jack 215 Nicoll, Allardyce 174 , 251 Nielsen, Asta 49 Nietzsche, Friedrich 140 The Night (Antonioni) 158 The Night (Syberberg) 194 , 197–8 Night Must Fall 158 Ninth Symphony 61 No Exit 172 No Retreat: New York, Cassandra 81 Norman, Marc 229 Nosferatu 99–100 Novak, Kim 219 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 230 Nuñez, Victor 6 Nykvist, Sven 191

O’Casey, Sean 88 Occupe-Toi d’Amélie 173 Odets, Clifford 88 Of Mice and Men 6–7 Oldman, Gary 228 Olivier, Laurence 45, 91, 93, 101–2 , 105, 107, 110, 143, 172 , 188, 191, 220, 224 On Borrowed Time 48 Once in a Blue Moon 76 O’Neill, Eugene 142–3 On the Waterfront 141, 251 On Tria 30 Ophüls, Max 174 The Organizer 212 Osborne, John 6, 220 Othello 51, 74 , 80, 169, 192 Our Hitler 194–5 Outward Bound 172 Oz, Frank 228 Ozu, Yasujiro 172

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274

Index

Pabst, G. W. 188 Pagnol, Marcel 93, 96, 103, 105–6, 110, 189 Panofsky, Erwin 142–3, 146, 168, 170–2 , 174–6, 178, 251 Paradjanov, Sergei 175 Les Parents terribles 96, 102–3, 105, 108 Parfumerie 228 Paris Belongs to Us 16 Parsifal 194 , 197–8 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 191 A Passage to India 158 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc 96, 98–100, 212 Pasteur, Louis 48 Pater, Walter 181 Peer Gynt 18 Penn, Arthur 156 Penthesilea 67, 194 , 198–9 Persona 12 , 219 The Petrified Forest 78–9, 88, 172 Petroushka 28 Phèdre 98 Phoenix Theatre 218 Pickford, Mary 36–7 Picnic 219 Pinter, Harold 6, 10, 13, 189, 191 Pirandello, Luigi 119 Piscator, Erwin 180 Plautus 189 Poe, Edgar Allan 24 Polanski, Roman 182–3 Polish Laboratory Theatre 12 Porter, Edwin S. 4 , 46 Portman, Eric 210 poststructuralism 210 Potter, Dennis 218 Pravda 218 Preminger, Otto 35 Priestly, J. B. 218 The Prisoner of Shark’s Island 89 Proust, Marcel 134 , 137, 139, 144 Pudovkin, Vsevelod viii, 77, 134 , 178, 188, 212 , 251 Purple Noon 158 Purviance, Edna 37 Pygmalion 44 , 136, 146–9, 251

Queen Elizabeth of England 41 The Queen’s Quair 25

Racine, Jean 2 , 98, 104–5, 110 Rafelson, Samson 228 Rain from Heaven 88 Rains, Claude 48 Rapper, Irving 140 Ray, Satyajit 187 realism 2–3, 5, 11–12 , 14 , 17, 47, 76, 81, 84–5, 87–90, 95, 98– 100, 102–3, 111–13, 116–18, 135, 140, 145, 148, 151–2 , 155–6, 161, 163, 165–6, 170–2 , 175, 179, 186, 189, 197, 201, 226 Redgrave, Vanessa 213 La Règle du jeu 17, 98 Reinhardt, Max 45, 82 , 179 Reisz, Karel 212

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Remembrance of Things Past 134 Renoir, Auguste 107 Renoir, Jean 5, 17, 171 representationalism 4 , 53, 64 , 186, 203 Resnais, Alain 158, 176, 191 Richard III 136 Richardson, Tony 220, 223–4 Riefenstahl, Leni 196 Rivette, Jacques 16 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 10 Robeson, Paul 51 Robinson, Edward G. 54 Rogers, Will 49 Rohmer, Éric 198 Romeo and Juliet 14 , 45, 74 , 138, 221–2 , 229 La Ronde 174 Rope 175 Rosa 158 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 228 Rostand, Edmond 27 Roth, Tim 228 Rotha, Paul 144 Rothschild family 78 Rouch, Jean 170 Rouge et Noir 136, 140, 149 Round House Theatre (London) 223 Royal Court Theatre (London) 218 Royal Shakespeare Company 179, 192 The Rules of the Game 17, 98 Ruspoli, Alessandro 170 Russell, Willy 218 Ryan, Meg 228 Sadoul, Georges 141 Saint Joan 34–5 Sang d’un Poète 46 Sartre, Jean-Paul 95 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 190 Savo, Jimmy 76 Scaramouche 36 Schiller, Friedrich von 67 Schlöndorff, Volker 135 Schnitzler, Arthur 198 Schoenberg, Arnold 119 The School for Scandal 78 Schopenhauer, Arthur 59, 181 Scofield, Paul 221 Scott, Walter 80 The Searchers 173 Serious Money 218 Seurat, Georges 53 The Seven Samurai 163 The Sex Life of the Starfi sh 40 Shaffer, Peter 186, 218, 226 Shakespeare in Love 229 Shakespeare Wallah 174 Shakespeare, William 2 , 13, 18, 21, 24 , 46, 53, 63, 67, 74 , 78, 82–3, 87, 98, 105, 107, 136–8, 141, 145, 155, 162–7, 171–2 , 185–6, 188, 191–3, 209, 220–5, 229 The Shape of Things 16 Shaw, George Bernard vii, 2 , 27, 34–8, 44–5, 73, 146–7, 172 ,

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Index 189, 251 She Done Him Wrong 172 She Loves Me Not 84 , 228 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 78, 80 Sherwood, Robert 78, 88 Shimura, Takashi 212 The Shop Around the Corner 228 Six Characters in Search of an Author 119 Sixth Generation (China) 6 Sjöberg, Alf 173 Sleepless in Seattle 228 Smith, Harry 176 Solondz, Todd 6 Sontag, Susan viii So Red the Rose 77 Sorge, Reinhard 179 Sothern, E. H. 209, 216 Sous les Toits de Paris 50 Speer, Albert 196 Stagecoach 96 Stalinism 134 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 111–18, 251 Steiger, Rod 209 Steinbeck, John 7 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 149 Sternberg, Josef von viii, 251 Stevens, Wallace 8, 216 Stoppard, Tom 186, 189, 228 The Story of Pasteur 89 La Strada 149 Streep, Meryl 212 A Streetcar Named Desire 192–3 Strindberg, August 2 , 7 Stroheim, Erich von 188 Sumurun 28 Superman 180 supernaturalism 47 surrealism 4 , 46, 171, 182 Svoboda, Josef 180 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen viii, 194–204 symbolism 1, 46, 48, 81 Tandy, Jessica 192 Taymor, Julie 15, 248 technicolor 50 The Ten Commandments 36 Ten Days That Shook the World 144 Terry, Ellen 25 Tess 21 Theater of Guilt 8 Theatre of Cruelty 182 Théâtre Libre (Paris) 2 Thesiger, Ernest 73 Thompson, Emma 213 Thompson, Francis 166 3-D 5, 8 Throne of Blood 162 , 193 Tisse, Eduard 191 Titus 15, 248 Tobacco Road 85 Tolstoy, Leo 51

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Tom Jones 12 Topaze 105–6 Topper 42 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 107 Tovstonogov, Georgi 180 tragedy 15, 19, 27–8, 41, 89, 108–10, 126, 133–4 , 139, 143–5, 163, 192–3, 198 The Traveler without Luggage 99 Tsai, Ming-liang 6 Tubes 15 Tussaud, Madame 41, 172 Twentieth Century 172 , 212 UFA (Universum Film AG) 196 Ullmann, Liv 220 Ulysses 198 Umberto D. 138, 149 Under Cover 30 Unknown Chaplin 227 Vadim, Roger 158 Valentino, Rudolph 75 Vanity Fair 21 Vanya on 42nd Street 16 Vardac, A. Nicholas viii, 2 Vaudeville 2 The Verdict 213 Vertov, Dziga 170 Vidor, King 5 Vilar, Jean 96 Villa Villa, 15 Voltaire 110 Le Voyageur sans baggages 99 Wagner, Richard 67, 136, 180–2 , 194 , 196–7 Wagner, Wieland 196 Die Walküre 136 Walthall, Henry 19 Walton, William 191 Warhol, Andy, 180 Watkin, David 223 Watts, George Frederic 25 Way Down East 212–13 The Way of the World 186 Weigel, Helene 169 Weiss, Peter 169, 179, 182 Welles, Orson 91, 95, 102 , 110, 205 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley) 78 Western Approaches 187 Whistler, James 21 Whitman, Robert 180 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 13–14 , 193 Wiene, Robert 100 Wilde, Oscar 37, 172 Wilder, Billy 190–1 Williams, Robin 223, 228 Williams, Tennessee 157, 171 Williamson, Nicol 220, 223 Wilson, Robert 15, 196 Winterset 87–8

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276 Within the Gates 88 Woolf, Virginia 137 Wyler, William 15, 85–6, 237 Yellow Jack 89 Young, LaMonte 182 Young, Roland 42 Your Friends and Neighbors 15–16 You’ve Got Mail 228

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Index Zecca, Ferdinand 141, 147 Zeffi relli, Franco 14 , 221–4 Zetterling, Mai 209 Zola, Emile 48, 149 Zoroaster 140 Zukor, Adolph 135

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