The Art of the Moving Picture | Page 5

Streets are always streets, roofs are always roofs. The actors
do not move about in a kind of crazy geometry as I was led to believe.
The scenery is oppressive, but sane, and the obsession is for the most
part expressed in the acting and plot. The fair looks like a fair and the
library looks like a library. There is nothing experimental about any of
the setting, nothing unconsidered or strained or over-considered. It
seems experimental because it is thrown into contrast 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 Dürer, 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