Walter Julius Bloem

“ The American film is always most effective when it takes its material from the checkered and chic fullness of the very present; when it depends for its inspiration upon reality. It aims at genuineness; it tries to be true. It seems, at least, that it never tries to depict a milieu which it does not know. The great city is the mother-earth of the American film. The minute it abandons the city and goes forth on voyages of discovery in nature it loses its vivacity, its effectiveness, its sense of reality, and goes over into watered makeshifts or highway romanticism. ”

“ The real motion picture poet, however, the one in whose heart there vibrates and pulsates a culture that is natural to him and given him of the gods, will always be able to fill his figures with a noble and royal sensuality that shines out in bright effulgence over and beyond the flat, greedy, paralytic doings of the love that knows not inspiration and to which the staleness of everyday carrying-on is first and second nature. His soul, recruiting in the interests of human kind, will move like a storm across the hills ”

“ At times the Swede grafts an alien twig on the young wild tree of his motion picture art. When he does, it is German if subtle, French if erotic.
The Swede paints his picture with a fine brush, embellishes each on rather broad lines, and coats every picture with a shimmer of hearty intimacy which to a film connoisseur of another country seems altogether unobtrusive. The film action, the ebb and flow of pictures, seems to him a matter of indifference. He avoids excitement; he shuns the raging of man against man. Invented, and therefore affected, action, be it never so refined, leaves him cold. ”

“ A motion picture is successful only when an unusually good and extraordinarily inspired scenario chances to lift it up above the colorless odds in numerical superiority and enables it, for this reason and for other reasons, to shine forth like a lighthouse on a sea of near-darkness.
It is sometimes amazing to see what enormous sums of money may be expended, and what an abundance of ability may be lavished on utterly inadequate and ineffective poetry. Such a film can never hope for wide or world-success. Everything that is deserving of attentive interest is in the picture itself. ”

“ Moreover, the lens of the familiar apparatus is sharper and less indulgent than the human eye. The lens catches everything; nothing escapes it. It makes a living picture of every attempt to deceive and visualizes all that comes before it. No film actor who is not passionately concerned with and about the incident he is to portray will ever bring other people to the point of passion. The inert playing of comedy which infests the legitimate stage with false and idle pathos, with the spirit of repulsive paint and powder, is utterly out of place, and out of the question, in the moving picture. ”

“ Every art must have a basic and fundamental soil, so to speak, in which its particular species of flowers flourish. Poetry has the spoken word, painting has color, music has sounds, the plastic arts the rigid body. It is in these that each seeks and enjoys its originality—and [13] originality is the sole ground on which art of any sort justifies its continued existence. Therefore, grant to the motion picture its mute play of moving bodies, for if you are unwilling to do this, you will doom the film to become merely a hackneyed, parrot-like imitation of the regular stage. ”

“ The great, strange, lonely figures of the motion picture, back of whose brain the thought shines forth, are not to be understood through thought. They are to be felt, not thought. They are not to be conceived of as wise men and prophets; they are brooders and sufferers.
One would have to, and one might, write a Christus film that is apathetic and undramatic: Christus the man, making a pilgrimage over the Earth, a stranger, unapproachable, silent, immediate, unknown, not understood. Such a film could be made a vast deal more effective than a Christus drama on the spoken stage. ”

“ The individual who unites these two parts into a coherent whole, and who breathes the breath of a full and pulsating world into these united parts, is the poet. The means are in his hand, just as hammer and chisel; the picture stands before his soul.
The longing of every artist is to fashion and give shape to a heaven and an earth; he longs to compress the whole of bubbling life into his picture. ”

“ But wherever we sense an attempt on the part of the text to make even a remote effort at touching on the problems of the intellect or spirit, we notice at once the patchouly stench of botched and bungled art. All those expressions of a well-meant and, in poetry, quite permissible brooding and grieving over the sinister incidents of life, as well as such threadbare philosophizing as goes with this species of mental indulgence—all of these utterances taste like thin lemonade, sweet, flat, and insipid. In them there is not a grain of real film feeling; the art of the great picture they know not. ”

“ Wherever the soul is moved, and whenever it moves with the action, there is purification. But just as the legitimate stage may lose itself in the frigid chill of unanimated intellectuality, so does the motion picture run at all times the danger—if its poet is a bellowing and garrulous individual—of sinking into the fiery swamp of unanimated sensuality. When this is the case, the unwholesome passion of mere sexual perversities becomes a play of social life that is poles removed from real art. ”

“ There is no art in which the star system, the mere existence and independent, inconsiderate activity on the part of a few gifted persons, is so nefarious as in the motion picture. This is an art in which there must be an unreserved ensemble of effort, a friendship of minds, a perfect harmony of creative souls. In the orchestra of productive spirits that plays in the motion picture, no man dare be master, no man dare be assistant. ”

“ The passions of the Swede are subdued; they whisper like waving grain swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze. Because of their lack of display they seem, to the eye and ear of the person accustomed to the bluster of an industrial life, a bit primitive and monotonous. The Swedish film is an æolian harp which is moved unconsciously; the few wonderful tones that lie as potential factors in its strings are melodies only. ”

“ In this way, the moving picture becomes a cheerfully moved and never breathless art. But if the poet throws discipline to the winds and pours out his lyric gentleness over every single scene, his action soon and inevitably sinks into an inert and dripping morass.
There is also no such thing as an epic motion picture; just as there is no such thing as an epic stage play. The epic has an action—that is, a general trend and direction of events, but it has no distinct goal. ”

“ An artist soul that is certain of itself will never find any great difficulty in seizing upon the right tools to accomplish its ends; and it will rely upon its feelings in determining what these tools shall be. And yet the labyrinth in which the film artist is supposed to find himself is so ramified and many-sided that even the greatest connoisseurs not infrequently lose their way in the winding maze of paths that lie open and seem to bid for popular usage. ”

“ The problem of film adaptation cannot be solved by reverence alone. For the spiritual soul mocks the coercive oppression that goes with gestures [146] and refuses to be confined within the narrow circle of such art as the motion picture has at its command. Gold becomes a mere quasi-precious metal, beauty degenerates into paint and powder, truth is routed by phraseology.
No one who is at all judicious will ever attempt to adapt to the screen a bit of poetry whose entire art consists in a complete absorption by and amalgamation with the world of pure thought. ”

“ One cannot catch up an idea through the medium of faint and feeble symbols. Moreover, the road that affects to point to the place where ideas are translated to the hearts of men leads in reality to an infinity of texts, to a surrogate of the intellect. Let us be modest, for the domain of the film is rich enough as it is, and the man who creates exclusively from the abundance of things seen, from visions as it were, will never exhaust the fountainhead.
But there is a gap in this sphere of sensuality; there is an empty place in the field in question. ”

“ But such suspense, in which the most sensitive æsthete might take extreme delight, is not for the masses. For them it has to be laid on thick. The really clever motion picture actor will always make it a point “to bring something to a great many,” to use Goethe’s words. To the few he will offer a tension of refined nature and subtle explanation; to the many he will offer a tension that is sturdy, robust, plain as a pike-staff.
The poet handles his suspense in a calm way. With him, suspense is clarity in spiritual intoxication; it is the sculptor’s chisel marks of complete control. ”

“ Suspense is rather the calm, serene hand of the poet that guides the work he is creating. It is this that enables one to feel that the poet is leading his creation along past all potential hindrances straight to a premeditated goal. The man who is unable to cause to arise, through each picture that he presents, the question, what is going to happen next? is doomed to failure from the very outset. Provide him with the most glorious decoration imaginable and all his work will be in vain, and his decorations will vanish as thin air. ”

“ He must be depicted, in my film book, just as he stands before me, just as he acts—and reacts—toward the producer, the director, and toward the poor people who make up the crew of supernumeraries. I have got to have the man, and not his mask, if I am going to succeed with him on the screen. The poetic play associated with this type of acquired information and insight is at once singular and fascinating. We lift a human flower up out of its original soil with its tender roots and transplant it to a new clime and a new earth. ”

“ In this excess of excelsior, however, in this defection from the wishes of this earth, lies a real danger to which not merely the poetising dilettant is apt to succumb; indeed the very greatest of German poets have at times failed to escape its intriguing peculiarity. It is the danger of the too-high, of arctic clarity, of the exclusively intellectual. The soul glows through real art like a vestal fire, pure, mild, serene. Let the flight be too hardy and too upward, and the fire goes out, art ceases, and shrewd, shivering theatrical dialectics set in. ”

“ Just how high the motion picture will rise, the extent to which it may succeed in going, no man knows. But it will reach the soul. Music originated from sensuality—from a union of rhythm and euphony. Music, too, has a sensual soul the very psychic power of which burns away all sensuality.
To place relative estimates on the value of each of the arts is an irrational undertaking. On the flowery tree of humanity each art has its mysterious meaning—over which we should not brood: cold intellect cannot solve such problems as are associated with this indubitable fact. ”

“ And thus the moving picture, attacked by the entire “cultured” world, went on its way, unimpeded by the objections that were raised against it, to the heights on which it at present rests. The scholar proved that there is one thing at least which he is not: a prophet, a seer, a herald of the new. To be a pioneer does not mean that one must cast slurs on that which has not yet found itself; it means much rather the ability to catch, by fair means and fanciful, the first distinct notes of remote clarity. ”

“ If in the meantime the visualization of human feelings has come to occupy the lion’s share of attention, it is merely a proof of the fact that the human soul has taken possession of the film in order, through it, to acquire new forms of expression for its feelings.
Who would have the audacity to contend that the number of arts was definitely decided upon centuries ago, and that new ones cannot be added to the already existing list? Who will deny that every art has sprung from some technical invention or other? ”

“ There dare not, at the same time, be anything even approaching a perfect lack of consideration for the art that is being indulged in: we dare not forget that the prime feature of the film is its silence. We are willing to put up with colorlessness and an altogether inadequate depiction of space and perspective, but we become indignant when living and life-sized human beings converse with each other for a long while and in absolute silence. Again and again, and even in the best of motion pictures, we see the “soundless conversation.” ”

“ To be a poet is to be a brooder. In order to acquire the title of poet, one must be able to conjure a coveted picture from the refractory clay.
The poets of German Romanticism did their creative work in rain-soaked, wind-rattled attic rooms far from every vestige of external culture. They suffered the inconvenient pangs of hunger while so engaged. But no one has ever become fat from their creations at the same time that the thanks they have received have come from the heart, and have been repaid a thousandfold. ”

“ Is the photograph which makes the film possible also an art? No, it is not; and will not be an art. But the operator is an artist. His tool is the lifeless material, just as marble is the tool of the sculptor. And he animates his picture, he gives it life, by means of the most delicate lights and shades, through the introduction and application of the tenderest of moods. ”

“ It is expediency that moves him to avoid purely and rigidly intellectual themes, such as are appropriate for private audiences only. It is expediency that suggests to him cheerful, vigorous, bright, and fanciful themes in which the world is made to shine and flash. It is expediency that causes him to fill even the gloomiest theme with a good measure of happiness. There are, indeed, many roads that lead to idealism.
The American does not seem to be at all familiar with the word “Art” when he takes and makes a motion picture. ”

“ Anyone who has ever seen that wonderful Goldwyn film entitled Honor Thy Mother knows that by passions I mean, not merely what is ordinarily connoted by the term, but also that calm, melancholy faith of the heart which characterizes all reverential and respectful people. Every impulse that arises in a perfectly natural way, and which cannot be separated from the heart by any power on earth, is a passion.
Everything that is an initial, original, and uninfluenced impulse is stuff for the motion picture. ”