The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 5

with extreme commercial formulas in the regular line of the "movie trade." But compare The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a book of Rackham or Du Lac or D��rer, or Rembrandt's etchings, and Dr. Caligari is more realistic. And Eggers insists the whole film is replete with suggestions of the work of Pieter Breughel, the painter. Hundreds of indoor stories will be along such lines, once the merely commercial motive is eliminated, and the artist is set free. This film is an extraordinary variation of the intimate, as expounded in chapter three. It is drawing-in-motion, instead of painting-in-motion. Because it was drawing instead of painting, literary-minded people stepped to the hasty conclusion it was experimental. Half-tone effects are, for the most part, eliminated. Line is dominant everywhere. It is the opposite of vast conceptions like Theodora--which are architecture-in-motion. All the architecture of the Caligari film seems pasteboard. The whole thing happens in a cabinet.
It is the most overwhelming contrast to Griffith's Intolerance that could be in any way imagined. It contains, one may say, all the effects left out of Intolerance. The word cabinet is a quadruple pun. Not only does it mean a mystery box and a box holding a somnambulist, but a kind of treasury of tiny twisted thoughts. There is not one line or conception in it on the grand scale, or even the grandiose. It is a devil's toy-house. One feels like a mouse in a mouse-trap so small one cannot turn around. In Intolerance, Griffith hurls nation at nation, race at race, century against century, and his camera is not only a telescope across the plains of Babylon, but across the ages. Griffith is, in Intolerance, the ungrammatical Byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent as Byron, and since he is the first of his kind I, for one, am willing to name him with Marlowe.
But for technical study for Art Schools, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more profitable. It shows how masterpieces can be made, with the second-hand furniture of any attic. But I hope fairy-tales, not diabolical stories, will come from these attics. Fairy-tales are inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not willing to stop to tell them. Lillian Gish could be given wings and a wand if she only had directors and scenario writers who believed in fairies. And the same can most heartily be said of Mae Marsh.
Chapter XI
--Architecture-in-Motion, being a continuation of the argument about the Splendor Pictures, in chapters five, six, and seven. This is an element constantly re-illustrated in a magnificent but fragmentary way by the News Films. Any picture of a seagull flying so close to the camera that it becomes as large as a flying machine, or any flying machine made by man and photographed in epic flight captures the eye because it is architecture and in motion, motion which is the mysterious fourth dimension of its grace and glory. So likewise, and in kind, any picture of a tossing ship. The most superb example of architecture-in-motion in the commercial history of the films is the march of the moving war-towers against the walls of Babylon in Griffith's Intolerance. But Griffith is the only person so far who has known how to put a fighting soul into a moving tower.
The only real war that has occurred in the films with the world's greatest war going on outside was Griffith's War Against Babylon. The rest was news.
Chapter XII
--Thirty Differences between the Photoplays and the Stage. The argument of the whole of the 1915 edition has been accepted by the studios, the motion picture magazines, and the daily motion picture columns throughout the land. I have read hundreds of editorials and magazines, and scarcely one that differed from it in theory. Most of them read like paraphrases of this work. And of all arguments made, the one in this chapter is the one oftenest accepted in its entirety. The people who dominate the films are obviously those who grew up with them from the very beginning, and the merely stage actors who rushed in with the highest tide of prosperity now have to take second rank if they remain in the films. But most of these have gone back to the stage by this time, with their managers as well, and certainly this chapter is abundantly proved out.
Chapter XIII
--Hieroglyphics. One of the implications of this chapter and the one preceding is that the fewer words printed on the screen the better, and that the ideal film has no words printed on it at all, but is one unbroken sheet of photography. This is admitted in theory in all the studios now, though the only film of the kind