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KANSAS

CITY, MO. PUBLIC

LIBRARY

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THE HISTORY OF MOTION PICTURES

*Jhe

IHistory of

MOTION
PICTURES
by

MAURICE BARDECHE
and

ROBERT BRAS1LLACH
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
IRIS

BARRY

W W

New York NORTON & COMPANY

and

INC

'THE MUSKl/\JL QF MODJCRN

ART

:W. NORTON & COMPANY,

Fifth Avenue,

INC.

New

York City

First Edition

Published in France under the

title

Histoire

du Cine?na

PRINTED IN t^HTroTlTElD STATES OF AMERICA FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS

Contents

Part One;

The

Birth of the Film (1895-1908)

THE FIRST STEPS

IN IpOO

AN EARLY MASTER MAKING A FILM MUSEE GREVIN "ART" FILMS COMEDIES

FAIRY TALES AND TRANS AND ANIMATED CARTOONS A BUSINESS ANECDOTE OF 1898 NARRA FORMATIONS TALKING FILMS AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION TIVE FILMS A GLANCE BACKWARDS THE AMERICAN FILM

Part

Two: The Prewar Film (1908-1914)

TRADITIONS ESTABLISHED

37

DRAMAS GERMAN FILM

FILM

THE FILM D ART THE ITALIAN THE RUSSIAN FILM THE DANISH AND THE AMERICAN THE SWEDISH FILM REALISM FRENCH COMEDIES MAX SERIALS FILM: THE COMING OF CHAP AMERICAN COMEDIES LINDER THE THIRD INDUSTRY OF THE WORLD LIN

Part Three:

The Cinema During

the

World War
91

(1914-1918)
NEWSREELS
I.

The

Italian

Film

95 98

II.

The American Film

TRIANGLE CORPORATION THE ROMAN ZUKOR AND HIS \VORRIES TIC LIFE OF MRS. PICKFORD CECIL B. DEMILLE THOMAS INCE D. W. GRIFFITH

THE INDUSTRY

THE FRENCH IN AMERICA SERIALS THE COMEDIANS DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS

LIN
V

TOM MIX AND

CHARLIE CHAP

Contents
II.

ml
251

The German Film THE END OF CALIGARISM E. A. DUPONT ISM CZECH FILMS
The Scandinavian Film
THE FILM IN SWEDEN ISH FILM

G.

W. PABST

THE

NEW REAL

DIFFICULTIES

FRITZ LANG

III.

263

NORWEGIAN FILMS

THE DAN

IV.

The Russian Film

THE SOVIET FILM THE IDEAS OF VERTOV THE MARTIAL THE REVOLUTION ROMANTICIZED: PUDOVREVOLUTION KIN THE PACIFIC REVOLUTION

266

V.

The American Film ART AND COMMERCE FOREIGNERS ARTISTRY COMEDIANS CHAPLIN
SILENT FILM

283

ATTEMPTS TOWARD THE END OF THE

VI.

The Death

of cm Art

300

Part Six:
I.

The Talking Films

(i $29-1 $3$)

33
305

The American Film NEWSREEL SOUND FILMS KING VIDOR COMEDIES NEW COMEDIANS DRAMAS AND STORIES
INVENTIONS

ANIMATED CARTOONS
II.

The French Film FAILURE AND PROGRESS RENE GLAIR CANNED THEATER

325
DISCOVERIES

III.

The German Film OPERETTAS AND VIENNESE FILMS ADVANCES NAZI FILMS FILMS The Russian Film FROM SILENCE TO SOUND
COMEDIES

341

YOUTH

IV.

353

EISENSTEIN

DRAMAS AND

viii

Contents

V.

World Industry ITALIAN FILMS THE NORDIC COUNTRIES

361

AND

ASIA,

TOO

Part Seven: Forty Years of Film

367

THE MUSIC OF IMAGES

Editorial Postscript: (1935-1938)

381

Index of Film Titles

General Index

391

405

ist

of Illustrations

D.

W.

Griffith directing

The Birth

of a Nation

Frontispiece
1

Louis Lumiere's Pastime in the Family Circle (1896) The May Irwm-John C. Rice Kiss (1896)

An

Melies (1904) Impossible Voyage, by Georges studio Melies* Georges

(
z

19
1

The Great Train Robbery

903)

50
50
51 5l

Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (7.907) Re jane in Madame Sans-Gene (1911)

The Last Days

(1915)
Pearl

of Pompeii (1913} Sherman's march to the sea from

The

Birth of a Nation

98

William

White in a characteristic episode S. Hart and Bessie Love in The Aryan (1926)
Pick-ford in Polly anna (1920) Oldfield's Race for a Life (0.1913)
in

99
99
130 130
131
131

Mary

Barney Douglas Fairbanks

Gloria Swanson in

American Aristocracy (1916} Male and Female (1919}

The Covered Wagon ( / ^25 ) Severin-Mars in La Roue (1922) Greta Gar bo in The Story of Gosta
Paris (7^23)

178
1

78

Berling (1923-4)
in

179
of

Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou

A Woman

210
2
1 1

Zasu Pitts in Greed ( 1924) Emil Jannings and Lya de Putti in Variety (1925) Scene from the U.S.S.R. film, Potemkin (1925)
Charlie Chaplin in

211

258

The

Circus (1928)
(

259 290

Al Jolson

in

The

Jazz Singer

1927)
IX

List of Illustrations
in

Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney

Smart

(W)
Straw Hat (1927) Qroucho, Harpo and Chico Marx La Kermesse Heroique (1936) Die Dreigroschenoper (1931)
Italian

Money
290
291

From The

338

339 339

foreword

T
its

.HIS JLei

ing the large public interested in the film. It very properly attempts to survey the entire history of film making in Europe and in America and to describe the exchange of influences to which the

History of Motion Pictures has the merit of approach subject in a form which hitherto has not been available to

whole has been subject. That it surveys the field from a European angle, even from a distinctly French angle, rather than from our own native viewpoint, makes it a useful check on other accounts of this art-industry, today so predominantly and char France was once, if she is no longer, a acteristically American. and she was as early as Germany and country, major producing far quicker than we were in recognizing the intrinsic merits of
film as a

the

new

invention.

For more than forty years films have been produced in large numbers in many countries and, after being seen by millions of people, have vanished from view. Although they were made for
the purpose of entertaining the largest possible public, those films unquestionably had enormous influence in forming the taste and
affecting the attitude to life of that public. At the same time these films were unconsciously reflecting the changing ideas and cus

toms, moral and physical characteristics of the twentieth century. Only quite recently has there been a move to preserve this

unique testimony from destruction, or to re-examine the films of the past with a view to discovering what they reflect of the cul tures and societies that created and enjoyed them and what, on the other hand, were the steps through which this new and pervasive
art has developed.

The Museum
this

of

Modern Art Film Library was

It
all

founded in 1935 for

purpose.

characteristic films of all periods

and

has collected and preserved countries, has made these

xii

Foreword
and has registered
their history

films available for study

and that

of the

men and women who created them. Today a study of the motion picture, its aesthetic and its social content, is being actively pursued in many of our colleges and by
cultural

and educational groups throughout the United States. Moreover, the re-examination of outstanding films of the past has also been undertaken by other institutions and groups abroad. An international exchange of knowledge and opinion about the past
of this

The
is

of the contemporary arts is the order of the day. which Messieurs Bardeche and Brasillach have to tell a fascinating one. It recalls how France, England and Sweden,
liveliest

tale

the U.S.S.R. in turn contributed much to the America furnished so many technical dis while growing coveries as well as so much new subject matter and now today provides the lion's share of this universal entertainment. Only after a prolonged and complete re-examination of the films of the past will a wholly authoritative analysis of the film come to be re corded; in the meantime this animated (if often controversial)
Italy,

Germany and
film,

account

is

most welcome.

text has been translated as closely as possible to retain the attitudes and opinions of its authors, which are extremely reveal ing; it is worth noting how exactly they estimate most of the best

The

American product. Their conclusions do not necessarily coincide with those of the Film Library.

John E. Abbott
DIRECTOR,

MUSEUM

OF MODERN ART

FILM LIBRARY

Translator's

MANY
titles,

foreign films appear here not under their original nor under their French names, but under their Ameri can release titles; e. g., the Swedish film Korkarlen, called
in the text as

La Charrette Fantome in France, appears The Stroke of Midnight.

Some

omissions and corrections have been made.

PART ONE
Jle
'Birth

of the Jilm

1895-19O8

)IENCES nowadays stream ing into sumptuous movie theaters to see Greta Garbo or the Marx Brothers have quite forgotten, if they ever knew, the "he roic age" of the cinema. They seem to think that films came into
cowboys, with Fairbanks and Tom Mix or and The Clutching Hand. As children, they used to see Fatty Arbuckle, imperturbable Buster Keaton and the little man in oversized trousers whom no one at that date yet spoke of as Mr. Chaplin. Consequently, they regard the films
existence with the

A ,/JLUDI

with the old

serials

of these

men
art,

the silent

as the "primitives" of what was once known and continues to be the seventh art.

as

Everyone probably knows,

film
lie

nevertheless, that the origins of the

further back, and that movies date from the era of President Faure and President Cleveland and of Bourget's first novels. They date, in fact, from a time when the boy Proust

much

used to admire
Gilberte in the

Mme. Swann

in the Bois de Boulogne,

and

woo
was

Jewish army captain Champs Elysees. arrested and tried then, but nobody foresaw that a year or
later the

two

name of Dreyfus would convulse

bicycle was
still

the whole French

nation.

a velocipede. The automobile had but older just appeared, people insisted that it would never be as much use as the horse. Boldini was the fashionable painter. It was at such a moment that the film appeared.

The

THE FIRST STEPS

It is one of the peculiarities of this particular art that set the date of its birth.

we

can

The history of those discoveries which finally led to the in vention of cinematography has given rise to many disputes, into
which there
is little point in entering. Animated pictures of one kind or another are very ancient and, for a while, the magic lan tern had attempted to cater to the public liking for them. The

law of the persistence of images, on which the film is based, was known in antiquity and utilized ever since the eighteenth century
3

The History

of Motion Pictures

in toys such as the Dazzling

Top

of

Abbe

Nollet.

Magic

lanterns,

optical toys, Chinese shadow shows and the whole repertory of the conjurer and the illusionist are all common sources of in

spiration

which culminated
as the

finally in the film.

had been discovered principles of photography were there various and by Niepce Daguerre, attempts to add movement to these new and wonderfully accurate pictures. In
1882, Etienne Marey invented a photographic gun with which to record the flight of birds. In 1888, Emile Reynaud patented his

As soon

praxinoscope, which attempted to give the illusion of move ment; he also perfected the perforation of film. He organized a

Theatre Optique which for many years gave shows

at

the

Musee Grevin.

worth noting that, he animated were paintings, and that

It is

at
it

first, the pictures which was only later that he

used photographs. Then, in 1893, Demeny invented chronophotography, while in America Edison, following Muybridge, ap
plied himself to similar problems and

produced the kinetoscope

different

or peep show.

The

task

of

co-ordinating

all

these

experiments

(Marey's was especially important) fell upon the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere. On February 13, 1895* *hey patented

Lunch Hour

their first projection machine. March 28, 1895 the first film at the Lumere Factory -was shown before the

On

Societe d'Encouragement de L'Industrie Nationale. It was fifty feet long. Nine months later, the cinema came into existence.
public or paying performance was given, actually, 28, 1895 at the Grand Cafe, Boulevard des Capuin a basement christened the Salon Indien. Here the film cines, was born, in distinctly humble circumstances. The proprietor
first

The

on December

of the Grand Cafe, somewhat skeptical, had preferred to charge a rental of thirty francs a day in lieu of the customary twenty
For the sake of convenience, it is customary to regard the first public exhibition of motion pictures projected on a screen (in contradistinction to Edison's motion pictures shown in a peep show box or kinetoscope) as the beginning of the film's history. Lumicre's exhibition at the Grand Cafe in this sense followed Latham's exhibition in York in April and May 1895 and Armatfs exhibition in Atlanta in September 1895, Dut preceded Paul's exhibition in London in February 1896.
*

New

The

Birth of the Film

per cent of the takings. Admission was one franc. For this sum, audiences saw ten films, each fifty feet long and lasting one or two minutes. The first day's takings were francs. The
thirty-five

organizers

were rather discouraged. Three weeks

later,

without

a single line of advertising, the profits had risen to two thousand francs a day. Of what did this famous initial show consist? First,

Lunch Hour

at the

Lumiere Factory with

its

cro\vd of re

spectably dressed working girls in ample blouses and ornate hats like characters from a novel by Zola. There was also the

famous Arrival of a Train at the Station, whose engine is said to have terrified the spectators; the Rue de la Republique in Lyons; a shot of Blacksmiths; and, last of all, a Bathing Beach. This de
lighted

everybody by the "marvelous realism of an unmistakably genuine ocean in all its immensity and restlessness," as the paper Le Radical wrote next day in reporting on the new invention, to which, it added, "has been given the somewhat harsh name of cinematograph." Teasing the Gardener, which afterwards be came famous as the first comic film, was not made until later. It was on topical and scenic films that the first success of the cinema was established. The films shown at the Grand Cafe then and later were much like those which amateur cinematographers still turn out today. The Lumiere family's factory and house provided backgrounds
for
brief pictures of domestic life. In one, a little girl sits Luniiere's lap, somewhat messily eating cereal; they called that one Baby^s Breakfast. Beside a pool in the garden,

many

on Mme.

Mme. Lumiere,

in a tussore dress with a polka dot bodice

and

a sailor hat tilted over her forehead, fishes for goldfish with a roguish air. Under an arbor at the end of the garden, Auguste

Lumiere and
beer.

his friend

Mr. Trewey play piquet and drink

in the

their

Such were the masterpieces shown

basement of the

Grand

Cafe, in the salon of the Cafe de la Paix, in the arcade of the Opera where Edison's films were given, in the Musee

Grevin's rival establishment, the Porte-Saint-Martin Museum, at the Petit Journal, at Dufayel's. Admission was fifty centimes and entitled one to from twenty to thirty minutes of entertainment.

6
There was
ters.

The History
a

of Motion Picttires

of their lungs. yelled at the top

piano to accompany the films, and outside barkers Such were the first movie thea

1897 so many people* lost their lives in the dis broke out at the Bazar de la Charite that which astrous the career of the infant industry was almost cut short forever. The calamity was laidincorrectly, as it seems to the celluloid film's catching fire. For years afterwards, the hazard of fire
4,

On May

fire

bulked largest among all the worries of producers and of ex hibitors alike. Early film journals almost invariably carried a
regular feature

on the fire problem. was time to do something more ambitious than Meanwhile, recent grandchild. Photography may be a most one's filming charades and embroidery, but it is also a public like domestic art, material for a magazine just as well as for and furnish it can art;
it

the family album. Thus, many of the first efforts at production were directed towards providing animated pictures similar to
Illustration. The Lumieres were all pictures in pre while traveling through Their principal agent, Promio, pared. Europe to exploit their invention, also took along a camera with which to furnish the firm with new pictures. He photographed

the

still

artillerymen in Spain and, in London, filmed the funeral of Queen Victoria from a balcony. As film in those days was manu factured in very short lengths, in order to be able to shoot un

interruptedly he now provided himself with two cameras, so that one could be reloaded while he was using the other. His work was not without its difficulties. Once at Bremen,
as all the

reload his camera

photographic shops were closed, he only managed to by persuading an undertaker to lend him a coffin which he could use as a darkroom. In Geneva it was an empty beer barrel which served the same purpose. This free-andeasy production method was not to last. The first serious diffi
culty was encountered when Edison, after a vigorous fight, suc ceeded in closing the American market to the Lumiere product

and the Lumiere representatives

*

left

New
130

York

secretly in a

One hundred and

eighty dead, of

whom

were members of the

nobility or persons of eminence.

The
small boat, and

Birth of the Film

hung about in the Bay waiting for a liner to them and take them back home. This up pick picaresque in cident might almost have been invented for use in some future
film.
It was natural enough that the cinema should start with scenic views, since scenic views are really a logical development from picture postcards, just as films of domestic life are a logical step from the family photograph album. Each firm turned

producing

out a series

much

like

one another's.

To

Luniiere's

Lunch Hour

at

the Luniiere Factory, Gaumont retorted with a Lunch the Panhard and Levassor Factories. Promio had

Hour

at

photographed

policemen, but Charles Pathe came back with a Troop of Hus sars. Gaumont filmed The Fountains of Versailles, Melies filmed
the Boulevard des Italiens, Pathe had The Czar*s Arrival in Paris. In addition, there were also such picturesque items as Masons
at

Divers, A Canoe Trip, At the Barber's, A Cabinet His Bench. All of these were about fifty feet in length and could be obtained either in black and white or in color. They were sold outright to the exhibitors, most of whom were travel ing showmen. The average price was twelve cents a foot for black-and-white films, and from twenty-four to thirty cents for

Work,
at

maker

colored films.
All the big producers of the time began by making much the same subjects: they turned out ten different versions of Teasing the Gardener, twenty of a Policemaris Patrol and then attempted simple fairground farces like Gaumont's first film, with Alice
it

Guy, The Misadventures of a Piece of Veal. The actress thought would be a good idea to play the scene against an artificial

instead of a real background. journeyman-painter consequently prepared a backdrop representing the Rue de Belleville with

funicular railway, an employee and an apprentice were pressed into service as actors and the first narrative film of Leon Gaumont
its

was created. Abroad it was much the same

to see one of the
first films

made

an Exclusion, with young men girls bicycling On the face of it, nothing could be more similar to the material

it is interesting, today, story. But in Germany, about 1898. It is and along a road.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

being turned out in France and in America at the same date. Yet there is one great difference. The scene opens in longshot, then in a much closer shot we are shown the long line of bicycles
snaking along the road, then the faces of the young people, then famous shot of legs which was to become one of the standbys of the cinema!). see these legs, encased in button boots, going up and down; then we again see the cyclists
their legs (that

We

length. In this simple little film the whole pictorial sense of the Germans, their attention to detail, their propensity for using the camera's eye to show us things our own eyes would
full

never seek out, are already to be detected. There is also a rudiment of sex appeal. In how many films made before 1900

can one detect an ethnic and national

everywhere

else the films

being made were

character? Otherwise, scenic views of no

great interest, or records of current political and social events. Denmark was one of the first countries to adopt the new in vention. The first Danish film, a was made as

documentary,

photographer, P. Elfelt, who had a camera similar to that of the Lumieres constructed by the village
early as 1898

by

a court

carpenter. During the summer of 1898, instead of photographing the Royal Family he filmed them. It is delightful and even touch

ing to recognize in this black-clad group, with their ill-fitting coats and countrified felt hats, Queen Alexandra of England, the Danish princes and the Czar of all the Russias with the

Czarina holding the pale Czarevitch in her arms. In front of them, seated on the ground, are four little boys in sailor suits and five little girls in white frocks, obediently motionless as they wait for the "birdie to come out of the black box." The

whole group is surrounded by potted fuchsias adorning a terrace like any terrace in a middle-class garden anywhere. Alas, this prehistoric period of the cinema was shortly to draw to a close. The Lumieres were soon to cease exploiting their "After Louis Lumiere "films turned more 1900," discovery. says, and more towards the theater and towards the use of

much

staged

authors do not realize how beautifully French are the Lumiere films like Pastime in the Family Circlel

*The

The

Birth of the Film

scenes, compelling us to abandon production since to do this kind of thing."

we were

not

equipped The cinema was through with exclusively straightforward pho tography. Other men were appearing who foresaw what else the film could do: men like Leon Gaumont and, still more im
portant,

Charles Pathe.

Charles Pathe at the age of thirty possessed a thousand francs. He bought a phonograph and a light van, and began traveling to fairs. Customers paid two sous to hear one record, or ten to

hear

without paying. Yet, by night fall, high as two hundred francs. After a few months of this arduous work, Pathe set up shop in the the cinema through Edison's square at Vincennes, discovered films, went into partnership with the inventor Joly, and manu factured a camera to go into competition with Lumiere. His first
six.

Often enough, they

left

the takings

would be

as

film

a Train at Vincennes Station. Quite a num ber of trains arrived and departed in the early films, but Pathe's

was Arrival of

train

was to carry him

far.

into partner Shortly afterwards, Pathe built a studio, went his brothers but afterwards parted with two of them, with ship and (when he managed to obtain a million francs from M. Grivoambitious venture which was to las) launched the firm on an turn out very fortunately for him. Without ever having had

one really original idea, yet gifted with much perspicacity and remarkable intuition, well able to take advantage of the public's the real pioneers of the changing taste, Charles Pathe is one of Yet the title of creator alke. film, of its good and bad qualities a another man, genuine inventor, Georges belongs properly to
Melies.

AN EARLY MASTER
There is no knowing how long the film might have continued to be pure reportage and newsreel had it not been for the one man who brought to this new technical invention an immense number of ideas, and who finally made of the film
really original

lo

The History

of

Motion Pictures

something other than a mere offshoot of photography. Georges Melies, born in 1861, was thirty-four years old when the Lumieres produced then* invention. To him, their first film show seemed a sort of miracle. "Long before it was over," he relates, "I rushed up to Auguste Lumiere and offered to buy his invention. I of
fered ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand francs. I would gladly have given him my fortune, my house, my family in exchange for it. Lumiere would not listen to me. 'Young man,'
said he, 'you should be grateful, since although

my

invention

is

not for
it

sale, it

would undoubtedly ruin you.

It

can be exploited

for a certain time as a scientific curiosity but, apart " has no commercial future whatsoever.'

from

that,

not
ist

Lumiere was perfectly sincere in saying this. But Melies would listen to him. This young man had been a manufacturer, a
y

mechanic, a cabinetmaker, a draughtsman, a painter, a caricatur on La Griffe which he ran and illustrated almost

entirely

himself throughout the Boulangist period. For the last eight years he had been the manager and proprietor of the Theatre Robert-Houdin at 16, Passage de F Opera, where he gave shows

of magic and prestidigitation, produced puppet shows and de

vised various pieces of electrical apparatus by means of which to present tableaux and transformations like The Marvelous Wreath. Even at school at Louis-le-Grand he had constructed a

wide experience and interests, and the resourcefulness of a Jack-of-all-trades which enabled him to make anything he wanted at a robust and un lightning
films
spoilt talent as rich and

Punch-and-Judy show He brought to the

in his desk.

speed, early painters, an imagination all-embracing as that of a child. He had a curious

much

like that of the

Protean quality in a world which is both changeable and decep "I was at one and the same time," he said one day in his "an intellectual worker and a manual delightfully simple way, worker. That explains why I loved the cinema so
tive.

passionately."

This prestidigitator was just what the cinema needed. As he knew how to do everything, how to make anything, how to de vise all sorts of tricks, the Lumieres' invention gave him a chance
to unleash
all his

gifts.

He

began by showing Edison's films on

The

Birth of the Film

the Boulevard des Italians, then, realizing the possibilities of this new medium, soon became a producer and made a first Trip
to the

Moon

at Montreuil. Films of

trains puffing into stations

marching regiments and of were not enough to satisfy him.

Almost immediately he attempted to apply to the new inven tion what he had learned in the Theatre Robert-Houdin. The Vanishing Lady was his first tentative attempt in this direction. Success gave him confidence. He produced The Bewitched Inn, then in 1896 The Devil's Castle, a film nearly a reel long, and

The Laboratory

of Alephistopheles.

Chance played its usual jocular role in his development. One day when he was filming the traffic on the Place de 1'Opera, his camera jammed. It took him all of a minute to readjust it. He continued to crank and finished his picture, but when he came to develop it he perceived that while his camera had been out of gear the scene had undergone a change, and that a passing omnibus had suddenly been metamorphosed into a hearse as
unexpectedly
ingly appeared in Entr'acte.

another hearse also surpris mishap, Melies learned the realm of the cinema in that something extremely important there is no such thing as fair play, that the hand of the director
as,

twenty years

later,

From

this

can control everything in a film and

that,

above

all,

the film's

chief purpose is to entertain the public by tricks like this one which accident had just fortuitously discovered for him. Melies soon afterwards produced his One Man Band in which
he, as the

one and only

actor, appeared in

numerous

roles

si

multaneously. Besides multiple exposure, he also introduced stopmotion photography, taken frame by frame, so that inanimate in 1925, we saw the objects appear to move on the screen as, furniture scuttling from the house in Rene Glair's Italian Straw

Hat.
these innovations another important one was shortly to be added. Early in 1897, the singer Paulus came to Melies and asked

To

him to make movies of him singing his songs.* At the last mo ment Paulus, made up as for the stage, refused to perform in
the daylight. Faced with this problem, Melies hurriedly painted
*

To

be shown with phonograph accompaniment,

12

The History
fixed

of Motion Pictures

up adequate illumination, and made the films indoors. The results were satisfactory, and thus the idea of a studio was born.*
some scenery,

MAKING A FILM

IN IpOO

success of such novelties as these gave the improvised or manufactured film an advantage over the straightforward pho

The

tography of everyday events. It was now that Melies' gifts really came into play: he became the general factotum of the new art and turned out a fresh film each week (though of course the longest of them was at first only two hundred feet) The work entailed in production was huge. First, scenery had to be pre
.

background in the form of a large painted canvas hung at the end of the studio, like a back cloth in an oldfashioned photographic studio. The desired scenery was de picted in grays and blacks, for if colors were used they created false photographic values. Once the background was ready, the producer then manufactured whatever furniture or stage proper ties he thought fit to introduce. This was the work that Melies loved best. He has preserved to this day enormous portfolios full of his sketches. "Film production is interesting because it is first and foremost manual work," he declared some years later. At times quite complicated sets were used. For instance, if a factory were to be shown in the distance, this had to be con
pared
as a

structed in miniature

(much

as a child

might laboriously make

one out of toy bricks, rather than in the highly scientific man ner used by Fritz Lang in Metropolis). All these contrivances were executed in a workmanlike studio, "the first in the world,"
built to his own design behind his house at Montreuil. "In a word," he said, "it is a combination of an im mense photographic studio and the stage of a theater." This gi

which Melies had

gantic building was

all

The backdrops hung

*The
Edison

at

of fifty feet long by thirty feet wide. one end as in the theater. Often there

Edison "studio," the Black Maria, existed from 1893, hut many Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, were made in the open Black Maria.
films, such as The air outside the

f,f

The

Birth of the Film

15

were also wings and set pieces in the foreground as well. Light came in through the glass roof and sides, and the actual filming had to be done promptly, since "if time were wasted, the day to fade and made it light began impossible to shoot." The really
about the place original thing
for
holes, chutes, ropes, capstans, revolving

was the number of trap doors, drums and winches used

vanish, and for creating "ap the looked much more like a tor building paritions." Actually ture chamber than like a modern studio, though it retained the

making characters appear or

glass

^C
I

When

panes of the old-fashioned photographer. the setting was all ready, two strings were attached to

the foot of the camera, carried thence to the extreme right and *left edges of the background and there secured. These marked f) the limits of the photographic field of vision. Next the cameraman fixed another string across, parallel to the back cloth, to ^ delimit the area beyond which a player must not advance if he ^Owere to appear full length. Now, closer to the camera, he fixed
v

$\yet another

string parallel to the first to

mark the point

at

which

an actor would be photographed down to the knees and yet an other at the point where he would be visible only to the waist. One director, Robert Peguy, has related how once, when he

wanted to use these medium

shots, his

lyou

crazy?" he cried.

"What

are

all

producer objected. these individuals of

"Are

whom

one sees only the upper half? Audiences are going to think that * ft we have hired a lot of cripples!"
pfi

Leon Gaumont's first films the star, Alice Guy, was was a studio me supported by two leading men, one of whom
In
all

of

chanic and the other an apprentice at the factory. Carpenters,

^
j\^

and engineers working in the studio frequently played Everybody took part. Zecca, Pathe's collaborator, starring acted drunks, and just before the war Leonce Perret was more
electricians
roles.

often occupied as a comedian than as a director, particularly in

the series of Leonce comedies.

When

an attempt was made to

employ
opened
*

difficulties arose. They professional actors, unexpected their mouths wide, threw back their heads and thumped
is

A similar anecdote

told of D.

W.

Griffith's earliest films using

medium

shots and close-ups.

i^

The History

of Motion Pictures

their chests but failed to register anything comprehensible in this unfamiliar medium. Besides, they heartily despised the cin

ema, which they regarded as a proper field only for jugglers and acrobats. Rather than struggle with such artists, the producers to do their own acting or to employ their relatives and
preferred
friends. This

Melies did, and so did Pathe. After the film had been photographed, it had to be edited and often colored, too. Editing was a complicated job at first because six-foot lengths in order it was necessary to cut up the film into to develop it. Coloring was carried out in two special workrooms
is
T

w hat

in Paris,

run by a

Mme.

ploying about
a single

each fifty colorists, color, like the rabbits in

Thuilier and Mile. Chaumont, both em of whom was entrusted with

Bunnies.

The work was done

Walt Disney's Funny Little entirely by hand, which accounts

for the freshness, the naivete and accuracy of the color in the few years later, Pathe invented stencil coloring: early films. an end to hand coloring but it also shortly put an end this put

to colored film.

MUSEE GREVIN

From now

on, films

became more

diversified. It

would be im

to understand the real nature of this radically popular possible * art without considering certain very important influences which
it

absorbed.

The

film originally derived

much

of

its

character

from the picture postcard, from the Musee Grevin t and from
the colored pages of the Petit Journal. Thirty years ago in any little village you could find (and sometimes still find today) one

and

of those small stores smelling of licorice, flypapers, barley sugar coffee. Inside, a little old woman as placid as a cabbage sits among reels of thread and jars of candy. At her right on a re* Dr. Erwin Panofsky has niuminatingly defined the three principal in gredients of the motion picture in his article "Style and Medium in the Motion Picture," Transition, No. 26, 1937, pp. 121-133. They are "Melo dramatic incidents, preferably of a sanguinary kind . . crudely comical . incidents as illustrated in the cheapest kind of funny cartoons . mildly
. .

pornographic postcards

This important article deserves close study. t Similar to the Eden Musee and Mme. Tussaud's.
.
.

."

The

Birth of the Film

/j

volving stand are displayed faded picture postcards, of Czar Nicholas with President Loubet, a train puffing into a station and sweethearts gazing at each other across a pink fence. On her

hang illustrations from the Petit Journal, such as have excited the dramatic instincts of the local rustics by their melodramatic
left

style

colors in presenting the Assassination of Presi dent Carnot, the Fire at the Bazar de la Charite or the Execution of Bolo Pacha. Such were the models on which the film based

and violent

itself, as it

became

self-conscious and realized

its

power

to deceive

the eye.

One
films in

of Melies' earliest successes, late in 1898, was a series of which he reconstructed (in little incidents barely sixty
the principal events in the Dreyfus case.

feet long)

Among
"Devil's

them were "Dreyfus' Court-MartialArrest of Dreyfus,"

Island-Within the Palisade," "Suicide of Colonel Henry," "Drey fus Meets His Wife at Rennes" and "The Degradation of Drey
fus."

This admirable
works,

series of

somehow reminds one

primitives, a sort of animated wax of the character in Pabst's Drei-

groschenoper who sings of the various adventures of Mackie Messer to the music of a hand organ.*

A prototype

Story of a Crime, issued

successes. It

of Mackie himself was about to appear In Zecca's by Pathe and one of that firm's biggest showed an apache with peaked cap and sinister fore
tasks in a

lock,

engaged upon nefarious

dark

street;

then the night

patrol and the discovery of the crime; magistrates in frock coats, and the medical officer with his precise gestures; witnesses giv ing evidence; the arrest in a wretched bar; and, finally, an early-

morning scene
film

at the guillotine. It

this final tableau.

was thought necessary to ban Censorship came into action almost before the

was out of its cradle. few months later, Pathe produced a series of Capital Pun ishments in Various European Countries by the ax, by hanging,

Actually the Dreyfus film "reminds" one much more appropriately of the magic lantern slides which were so popular before the invention of the motion picture: there is a definite relationship between them and primitive films of this sort.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

feet long. Simultaneously, the garroting, etc., each thirty maga Tons ran Pour some copiously illustrated articles Lectures zine

on the same
direction.

source of inspiration gave us the film Under Paris in 1906 and The Exploits ,of Elaine in 1915. For world of this films of type any current event might furnish a fresh sub
ject-

A similar

topic: public taste at the time ran

very

much

in this

r McKinley^was re-enacted in one studio and followed suitably enough by The Execution of His Murder er, by The Death of Pope Leo XIII, The Assassination of the Serbian Royal Family and The Eruption of Mont-Pele. Fore most among reconstructed events, however,, was the film of Ed ward VIPs Coronation which Melies made for the English firm, Warwick Trading Company. It was produced at Montreuil and provided the monarch himself with considerable amusement when he eventually saw it.

An

Assassination of President

There was yet another traditional source upon which the were to draw, and here too the influence of the picture
is

films

postcard

to be traced, though with a difference, for they were a rather special type of postcard. They were those which in catalogues are rather prettily described as "piquant." These "piquant scenes" had been popularized by Piron, the famous Parisian

"Royal Photographer," who conceived the idea of producing an album of "art" photographs; they included some very seductive studies of Mile. Louise Milly. One of his friends thought the cinema might as well profit by his success in this direction and, under his supervision and that of Lear, the album was translated to the screen in a film christened Bedtime for the Bride. Two new halls had to be opened to cope with the demand for this. Today most films of this type appeal to us, if at all, by their ridiculous coyness, but at that time they struck the
as the

known

photographer,

public imagination in quite another way. There is no more astonishing document for us today on the morals of the era of the Paris Ex or a childish position than the films like The Indiscreet

Maid,

General Sherman's march to the sea from

The

Birth of a Nation

Pearl

White
S.

a characteristic episode -from a serial film.

Bessie

William

Hart and

Love

hi

The Aryan,
(1916).

directed by

Thomas H. hue

The

Birth of the Film

ij

and reticent Flirting on the Train, in which gentlemen in morn ing coats with immensely high starched collars sway amorously towards ladies in satin waists and button boots, all nonchalance and prudery. There is, for instance, a Judgment of Paris of this period in which the roles are enacted by acrobats with carefully curled hair, in flesh-colored tights from the ends of which toes and fingers of a darker tone protrude; the whole thing takes place in a grotto straight out of comic opera. An Awakening of Chrysis
is

negress tends her respectfully, as languorously she raises from her couch her slumbrous body." This film cost forty francs outright. If you had the price, you could see Mile. Milly smoking a ciga rette in the sumptuous boudoir of a demimondaine, or vainly

wakes

lyrically described in a catalogue of the time: in an atmosphere redolent of Oriental

perfumes.

"Chrysis

Lady at bathroom decked in silken draperies and a Japanese screen on which exotic birds sported among bamboos. But let us draw a veil here. It is an exag geration to say, as some have, that the film was born in ques tionable surroundings. That it obtained some of its education

hunting for a

flea in

her tussore petticoat.

A Fashionable

Her Bath was shown

receiving visitors in a

there cannot be denied.

COMEDIES AND ANIMATED CARTOONS

The
ple.

remember

era of the short film persisted for a long time. that most of the first exhibitors were fairground

We

must
peo

In their eyes, a film had to provide a substitute for an acrobatic turn or a parade, and the films they liked best were comedies from sixty to a hundred and twenty feet long. The

comedian Dranem
man,

now

as

an old

in his first films appeared now as a baker's soldier, an elderly hag or a man smitten with

elderly dude, the policeman, the detective, the the the lady's maid, pastry cook, the drunk and the porter were little varied which in these characters comedies, very principal and were all based on the inexhaustible material drawn from cir

the colic.

The

cuses and pantomimes. Trick photography added ludicrous novel tiesgarments disappeared or flung themselves onto human torsos

The History

of Motion Pictzires

with unbelievable rapidity, beefsteaks vanished, pots of paint flew about, furniture executed a wild dance.

Then animated
cartoon-on-filrn

cartoons

made

their

appearance.

The

first

was made by Emile Cohl in 1908 with the appro title of Phantasmagoria. It was composed of two thousand priate The essential technique drawings and was one hundred feet long. of animated cartoons was exhibited in it, though the drawings themselves were crude. Le Petard of 1908, for instance, is little

more than schoolboy scribbling. Curiously enough, when the * Russians began making animated cartoons in 1934 they used
the same rather infantile fashion of drawing faces and bodies, had not elapsed. if thirty years of technical improvement just as Emile Cohl made many cartoons such as When Matches Struck,

Merry Microbes and

his

parody on Chanteclerbut

later

on

turned to the production of popular-scientific films.

FAIRY TALES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

The contribution of all these early producers cannot be over looked. Despite the founding of American or Italian firms, the film throughout its first years was predominantly French Gaumont, Pathe, Lear. Also, one must not overlook the part played
by Mesguich
men,
t

one of Lumiere's

first

projectionists

and camera

who opened movie shows in the United States and all over the world. He traveled as far afield as Tibet and China, was the first man to photograph Lhasa and explored the country of the Tuaregs and the Far West. It was he who suggested having A Trip to the Moon accompanied by appropriate music. But the
greatest creative

worker was

still

Melies.
as

His

earliest fantastic films,

such

The

Devil's Castle,

were

much
*

to the liking of the youthful audiences at the Theatre Robert-Houdin. Partly out of a desire to please them, partly

An

toons were

was

error, perhaps a misprint for 1914. The first Russian animated car made by Starevich in 1913. After the Revolution, production resumed in 1923.

t Mesguich has recounted his experiences in Tours de Manivelle, Grasset,

Paris, 1933.

early

French

film,

Louis Lumiere's Pastime in the Family

Circle (1896).

The May Irwin-John

C. Rice Kiss, a popular

American film

of 1896.

An

Impossible

Voyage (1904), one of the many trick- films produced, designed and directed by Georges Melies.

The

studio

which Georges Melies made

his fih/zs.

20
what

The History

of

Motion Pictures

particularly struck his contemporaries and gave him a front place in their ranks. But his films as a whole would seem to us little better than ingenious mechanical contrivances today were

they not redeemed by more important elements.

in Melies
is

What we

love

poetical quality,
full

somewhat painstaking and clum

of unexpected and sincere lovableness. from old missals, landscapes such as only fairy land knows, meticulous and primitive perspectives, a rather acid color, settings and characters straight out of Mme. Tussaud's,
sily archaic,

but

Castles copied

all surge up in the thick of incredible adventures, reminding us sometimes of a valentine and sometimes of the little Tuscan vil lages in Lorenzetti's paintings and all in bad taste so ingenuous that it is transformed in some strange way into the most elegant

poetry. It

is

elements like these which combine to

make

his

early

was not merely a gifted presti he the first poet of the cinema. also be to digitator: happened There have not been many of them since. The nearest thing to these laboriously tinted films, with their deliberately unreal set
tings and infinite repertory of tricks, is the animated cartoons of today. The heir to Melies is Walt Disney. But others, too, learned much from him. Otherwise, should we ever have had that ascension scene in Liliom, where created a Lang so

masterpieces so precious. This Jules Verne of the screen

charmingly

paradise out of fairgrounds and merry-go-rounds? When we look at one of Melies' exquisite scenes some little seaport with its fleet dainty straight out of Gozzoli we can readily forgive the heavy make-up and frenzied gesturing of the actors (who are the weakest part of his films). He has only to show us a gilded coach drawn by one old skeleton of a horse to put us in the frame of mind to set forth too, in with this fancy, quixotic steed, to realize that the is a in a 1900 costume, Milky pretty girl that the stars know how to the or to the exist

Way

play lyre, accept ence of a whole miraculous cosmogony such as we see at the end of The Merry Frolics of Satan. It seems quite natural that men should walk upside down on the ceiling, evil spirits spring out of clocks, Aurora and the Great Bear engage in a swimming contest, an umbrella turn into a giant mushroom, Saturn appear

The
in the

Birth of the Film

rings and ten

21
tumbling out

midst of his

own

women come

of a parasol.

A BUSINESS ANECDOTE OF 1898

Melies was going full blast. His firm, Star-Films, was pre cir eminent in the French market and his product was

widely

culated abroad. His competitors

mont
land,

in France,

Leon GauUrban and Warwick Trading Company in Eng

Charles Pathe and

tated his
a

in Italy followed his recipes and imi methods. In 1904, despite Edison's opposition, he opened branch in the United States. In 1908, Melies presided over the

Ambrosio and Cines

International Congress of Film Producers, at which all the most important film makers gathered. It was on this occasion that he succeeded, despite opposition, in getting a standard

perforation of film stock adopted, a step which finally made possible a really international motion-picture industry. President of the Chambre Syndicale du Cinema which he had founded in 1897, he was the

new industry. At the same time he was most creative technician. To the innumerable trick effects he invented, which his fellow producers sought unavailingly to imi tate, he had just added the "dissolve" which rendered unneces sary abrupt cuts between scenes. Here again a lucky accident
undisputed leader of the
its

helped him. In his studio

it had become customary gradually to diminish the aperture of the lens while shooting the last few feet of each scene, in order not to fog the film. When the work of editing

followed, this portion was eliminated as being no part of the foot age proper. One day someone forgot to cut it, and, when the
film

tion

was projected, Melies realized that a much smoother transi from one scene to the next could thus be achieved. He ex

perimented with repeating the process inversely, commencing each new scene with the diaphragm almost closed, then opening the aperture gradually as the new scene started. By doing this at the beginning and end of each scene he effected a rough dis
solve. Melies also discovered the use of

masking, double-exposure,

slow-motion and rapid-motion photography.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

His prosperity concealed one serious weakness, which was the

financial organization of his firm, Star-Films. At the beginning of 1898, when Melies' business was beginning to expand, an agent

came

to

him to propose putting him

in

touch with important

few days later, the agent called silent partners. Melies agreed. introduced himself as director of the with a Mr. W.,

again Societe d'Etudes Industrielles et Commerciales. Melies explained

his business operated:

who

how

they listened with

interest.

Next came

an expert, then an engineer, then another expert. Each of them declared that the firm seemed extremely sound and that the So ciete d'Etudcs would willingly undertake to find capital to invest
in

Only, there were certain steps to be taken first, they would in short, they probably have to sound out various parties and, asked Melies to pay down twenty-five thousand francs. Melies
it.

paid.

gave

Several months passed: Melies waited. The Societe d'Etudes no sign of life. Melies became worried and finally reached

the point where he should have started: he began investigations. They were sadly conclusive. The Societe d'Etudes had
in various financial operations

engaged about which numerous firms in the

lies

to report that was pleasant. asked to lay out sixty thousand He felt disinclined francs before he could appear against Mr. to pursue his course untroubled. This to do so and left Mr.

entertainment business had

little

Me

wanted

to bring suit.

He was

W.

W.

incident gave Melies

little

Some time later another man came Grivolas. I am in the electrical supply
terest

liking for investments or for partners. to see Melies. "I am M.

business and the films in

me."

"I see," said Melies.

"Are you doing well?" "Not

badly," said he. "And are you breaking into the foreign mar kets?" "Here and there," said Melies. "M. Melies," continued

M.

Grivolas, "it has occurred to

me

that the capital at

my

dis

posal (here Melies pricked up his ears) might be of consider able service to some sound firm in the motion-picture business able to offer

me

suitable

inducements to invest in

it."

Melies had

now
see

reared up in alarming fashion, but the unsuspecting M. Gri volas continued: "If you are to let willing my experts come and

you and

also to

give

me

security,

am

willing to invest the

The
sum of
.

Birth of the Plhn

23

."

M.

Grivolas was unable to complete his sentence.

Melies had risen and in silent fury showed him the door. M. Grivolas was much mystified but little disposed to

He w ent
r

to see

M. Pathe

instead and enabled

a

him

to

form

argue. a

limited liability
to me,

company with

Grivolas meets Melies he never

capital of 2,600,000 francs. fails to say: "If you had listened

When

today you would

tells

own

the firm of Melies-Natan."

When

Melies

the anecdote, he sighs.

The
first,

tem

situation generally was about to undergo a change. At sold their films outright to the exhibitors, a producers sys which made it possible for independents like Melies to

compete with more extensively financed producers. In 1904, however, three of Melies' assistants, Michaux, Astaix and Lallement, opened a film-renting agency. This enterprise, after initial
difficulties,

don the
for this

sale

offices all

so successful that in 1907 Pathe decided to aban of films and to organize instead a chain of renting cy c? over France. Melies, feeling that he was ill-equipped

was

method of operation, stuck to outright sales. From that time on his position became that of a lively and colorful pioneer, more interesting by reason of the variety and originality of his
output than any of his competitors, but destined to defeat at their hands in the field of commerce. Thenceforward he specialized.

domain of the fantastic and trick film, in which his remained incontestable, but he stood aside from the superiority which the motion picture was now to pro main avenues along
a
gress.

He made

NARRATIVE FILMS
chief of these avenues, as was inevitable once the first feet had appeared, superfilms of six hundred to twelve hundred was that of the narrative film. There was at first a sort of instinc
tive

The

a unified

repugnance to the construction of motion pictures around and set plot. The idea of a scenario developed slowly. Melies himself regarded his own films as a series of gags and of
each single incident or scene diverting trick effects:

which

of-

24
fered
torial
films.

The History

of illation Pictures

him the opportunity to create a startling or comical pic effect interested him far more than the main plot of his
it

Again
films

tradition,

was the Alusee Grevin, that repository of undeviating which inspired the coming change. The first ambitious
series of tableaux vivants rather

had consisted of a

than of

* Cartouches" and "La Defense du Drapeau." Next, a whole sequence of illustrations was used as the basis for an early of the Cross which Life of Christ^ a sort of photographic Stations bore more resemblance to cheap religious chromos than to the

the idea of translating famous paint plots. for instance, or "Les Derthe screenMillet's to "Angelas," ings

coherent

Someone had

nieres

famous paintings they affected to represent. A long lineage of films was founded by Zecca's Story of a Crime a picture of real importance. Here for the first time was of sanguinary crime as illustrated tapped the whole repertory in the daily papers. From The Story of a Crime sprang a poster violence which is still with us. In 1906 Pathe produced a ity of "dramatic and realistic" Underworld of Paris, half a reel in length.
y

Here

is

the plot of this ancestor of

The

Exploits of Elaine:

This film offers us an authentic study of the lower depths of the city and reveals the operations of the fearsome apaches, so much dreaded by the inhabitants of Paris. In eight strikingly real istic scenes we are offered a complete survey of the Paris under

world and

its

sinister denizens.

o'clock in the morning: The bold robbers under cover of darkness pry up the heavy cover of a sewer and disappear into the bowels of the earth. The gang proceeds to the cellars of a
see the floor give bank and breaks in through a wall. way be neath their repeated blows and the thieves climbing through one by one. They seize the safe, lower it into the street and carry it
off.

Two

We

At dawn near the fortifications: Near the fortifications, meet ing place for all the most dangerous of Paris' human vermin, the
"Les Dernieres Cartouches" by Alphonse de Neuville, "La Defense Protais exhibited respectively at the Salons of 1873 and 1876. The first depicts an incident during the battle of Sedan and the other an incident at Metz.
*

du Drapeau" by Paul Alexandra

The

Birth of the Film

25

bandits gather to divide the spoils. The empty safe lies abandoned in the grass: the bags of gold it once contained are being passed from hand to hand. Vagrant women, the pitiful companions of these thieves, lend their aid. But now the police, hot on the trail,
arrive

on the scene and by an ingenious maneuver, ever}7 detail can be followed, encircle the gang. After a stubborn which of

resistance the bandits are captured, save one of the fiercest in a hand-to-hand contest. the
en<?ao;es

who

police sergeant This extremely lively film will delight all with its vivid realism, as it does one of the depredations carried out daily by depicting these bold thieves who are the terror of the merchants of Paris

and the despair of

its

police.

As

this

to issue quantities of story films.

dramatic genre proved popular, each firm now started Pathe began with The School of

Adversity, ancestor of many psychological pictures. In 1904 his Drama Relived, in seven Amour: firm produced Roman a Life of Pleasure Aban Toil to From Seduction The scenes:

doned Dying of Hunger

ful Expiation

Letter to

Her

Parents

The Dread

In the Hospital This film was issued with a col

little later came ored poster and with illustrated handbills. Drama. This was Venetian A in Woman A Fair Spy, Despair, velvet of from of era rich Bataille, a gowns a la Henry plots

Worth, of bicycles and of last-minute reconciliations. There was movies from progressing from plots in nothing to prevent the
spired

by the penny

novelette to the full splendor of the psycho

-for

and Pathe produced The Age logical drama; this the Pathe catalogue grows lyrical:
She had married out of ignorance, or
difference, as
fear,

Love. About

or obedience, or in

an elderly general, gallant and covered with medals, decorations and glory. ... She was everything in the world to him, the one great love in

young

girls

do.

He was

the

life

of a

man

round of 'engagements and visits where everyone ate and drank and laughed without knowing why. She had no child. She lived without cares, without hope, without anchorage.

Her days were

already growing old. and gay, long, meaningless

filled

up with a

26

The History

of

Motion Pictures

A young acquaintance

of her husband's

who came

often to the

house brought new Interest into her life. She felt happy, suffused with a quick and radiant joy under the influence of a dawning sympathy for him. They went for walks together, talking as they strolled slowly side by side. She drank in his every word, gazing entranced as he spoke of things often disturbing to hear but
delicious to listen to.

He became
r

her lover.

How

should

it

happen otherwise

w hen two human

drawn together by a mutual love? The husband, warned by an anonymous letter, surprises them
beings are

in a hunting lodge. Yet in his troubled soul pity arises and, maybe, a realization of the helplessness of two such young and arclent

and he turns against himself the weapon with which he had thought to reap revenge. 250 feet,* price 170 francs.
lovers,

In 1902 Pathe also produced an ancestor of many a screen adaptation by offering the first Quo Vadis, a film that lasted all

of twenty minutes and which, apparently, caused audiences to

roar with laughter.

TALKING FILMS AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION

Only
pily,
films,

the spoken

word was needed

Bataille's

to

make

these

masterpieces
1

the equal of

and Henri Lavedan's plays but, Henry hap at that time speech was reserved for other uses. Talkino however, were not unknown and before the war Leon
a talkie

week in his theaters. In 1900 he had between the phonograph and the movie; in 1902 he put the Chronophone on the market. Synchronized films were also given under the name of Phonos-Scenes. In 1912, even colored talkies were to appear. Here again Melies had led the way. When Paulus had inspired him to create a studio, he had also given him the idea of
each
effected a combination
allying

Gaumont gave

the old-fashioned cylindrical phonograph record to the movie machine. Paulus projection sang on the screen
thereafter.

every evening

Others were not slow to take the

*

hint.

Various kinds of spe-

Two

hundred and

fifty feet of film last

four minutes.

The

Birth of the Film

27

cial phonographs for synchronization were manufactured. Several Duos from Carmen (film and record, 120 francs) and the like

were issued. Sketches by Galipaux, songs by Yvette Guilbert were recorded; and in 1902 for the delectation of those sensitive souls in love with high-class poetry they produced a talkie of The Dress by Eugene Manuel, with the sound of a distant noc turne apparently drifting in through a window and a doublearound: film and record, 120 francs. exposure angel floating

At mous

the Paris Exposition of 1900, talkies of recitations by fa actors, of songs and of snatches of opera enacted before

shaky scenery, in fact everything from Little Tich to Coquelin and Rostand was shown, though only with relative success. To day these early talkies strike one as extraordinary, for, despite their imperfections, one can observe the gestures, catch the in

and study the postures of the famous performers of yes duel scene from Cyrano^ a fragment from Les Pre~ terday. cieuses Ridicules has the power to amaze and disconcert us. Was
flections

The

that what they called great acting in 1900? Can they actually have admired such barefaced mugging, such winks and nods to the audience, such poses, such an extraordinary style of delivery?

The

is that the film, deriving in part from really astonishing thing a theatrical tradition such as this, should ever have developed a

its style of

own.

At
lous

times the primitive talkies have

be.

power

to

move

us, ridicu

Yet they were hardly more effective in though they their way than the old cinema noise machines, borrowed from the Chatelet, from which, by means of a complicated system of cranks and rolls, emanated the sound of hoofbeats, trains, auto mobiles and the smashing of china. These reproduced sounds about as well as the early sound films of 1928. As recording for the phonograph was a tricky business at best, and as it was necessary to speak close to the recording apparatus, these early talkies were made by two separate operations. The
actors sang
first,

then acted afterwards.

An

ingenious device

roughly synchronized lip very birth of the talking

movements and sound. Thus from the

film, sound-synchronization has been birth the of cinematography the films have and from used, very

2S
talked.

The History
now

of

Motion Pictures
It

Understandably enough,
attained
its

was announced In 1907

that

"the cinema has

climax."

THE AMERICAN FILM

"

What was
film.

happening

in

America

all this

time?

of the American film resemble in

many ways

The early years those of the French

experi

Events were perhaps more excessive and frenzied, and there was an almost terrifying amount of invention, of wild
ments, of crazy ideas and of fortunes made in a few weeks and lost in a horde of adventurers of every description cat day. tlemen and plumbers, furriers, secondhand furniture dealers and fairground proprietors hurled themselves upon the new amuse

ment, engaged in epic struggles with one another and finally from out of chaos created the foundations of a great
industry.

about the same time as Lumiere, a ma chine called the kinetoscope.t In 1895, Arrnat and Jenkins had
at

Edison had invented,

better adapted for projection, vitascope. The first private exhibitions with the vitascope were given during the summer of 1895. Edi son invited Armat to join the firm he had already founded for

also perfected a machine which they called the

much

the exploitation of the kinetoscope, and to use a projector which would combine the features of both machines.! This was done
and, in April 1896, Edison gave a first public performance at Koster and Rial's in New York, which proved as much of a suc cess as had Lumiere's first exhibition in December A- ^ ew
1895.

Lumiere company and B. F. Keith also gave ex hibitions in New York, the former at the Eden Musee and the latter in a theater on Union Square. These first shows were re ceived well enough, though with a certain suspicion. The Amerilater the
*
is

weeks

Much

based on Hampton's

of this and of subsequent sections devoted to the American film History of the Movies, Covici Friede, New York,

1930. q.v.

t Edison had invented the kinetoscope or peep show in 1889; it was this inspired Lumiere to make motion pictures which could be projected, in 1895. The first kinetoscope parlor opened on Broadway in 1894. t the sequence of events wT as not as Actually simple as this. The facts can be found in Million and One by

which

Schuster,

New

Nights,

Terry Ramsaye, Simon &

York, 1926,

2 vols.

The

Birth of the Film

all

2$

cans had recently been familiarized with

sorts of

new

marvels

by Barnum and others, and had encountered various good reasons for mistrusting dark halls. There seemed something odd about
this

novelty which offered so much in the way of entertainment for a few cents; and the public remained so obstinately suspicious of a trick of some kind that one enterprising exhibitor cut a hole
of his hall so that prospective customers might a ticket and convince themselves that there peep in before buying
in the

back

w all
r

really

would be something

inside

worth

seeing.

There was

also

the danger of pickpockets but, as people gradually discovered that darkness provided certain compensations as well as dangers, used to the idea. they finally got

By some common instinct, the first American films were very much like those being turned out by Pathe or Gaumont or Melies.

In any case, the Americans did not

insist

upon

originality.

As

late as 1905 their films, broadly speaking, followed the lines indi the French. Their studios painstakingly imitated the cated

by

brief farces

and the love scenes made

in France.

During those

the producers cared little enough about what they early years turned out, though they were firmly convinced that the public would accept only films lasting no more than two or three min utes and that anything longer would prove bewildering or in As they themselves made up both the plot and comprehensible. films it is easy to imagine the sort of things their of incidents the

they were.

They
istically

American

did produce, however, a certain amount of character films and newsreels were material.

Topical

among their earliest successes. In 1897, patriotic superfilm made one night on top of the Morse Building only a few hours after the declaration of war with Spain; its title, Tearing Down
the Spanish Flag! This early effort of the Vitagraph Company a tremendous (afterwards merged in Warner Brothers) proved one better and film the actual to hit. Other

was

producers sought

go

were not permitted to get anywhere near fighting in Cuba. They the scene of actual hostilities, for the unfamiliar cameras they of sinister uses and the cam with them were

suspected brought eramen were sent packing. Nothing daunted, one of them named

$o
Amet, on
flotilla

The History
his return to

of Motion Pictures

York, launched in his bathtub a cork, or wood, or paper, and so filmed the sinking of Cernera's fleet before Santiago. According to A'l. Ferri-Pisani * the Spaniards purchased a print of this naval
of
little

New

boats

made of

epic and placed it in their national archives as a record of their stubborn and heroic resistance.

simple manner, American produc Boer War: audiences vigorously booed the English troops. At other times, however, they went to the actual scene, as when in 1899 gold was discovered in Alaska and propaganda films financed by

Having

set a fashion in this

ers

proceeded to

film, at a safe distance, episodes of the

railroad and steamship companies were made to show the public (much after the fashion described in Jules Remains' Dono goo-

Tonka)
Quite

the attractions of
as

life

in the

Far North.

American and even more revealing of Amer ican temperament was the first superfilm, two reels long and consecrated to religious propaganda. It was estimated that the piety of the public would admit of a film of such extraordinary length, and no expense was spared in the making of it. Hurd, the American representative of Lumiere, was accordingly sent abroad to film the Oberammergau Passion Play. So popular was it that the manager of the Eden Musee decided to film another Passion
typically

Play, but without incurring any traveling expenses. He assembled a group of actors on the roof of an office building and made the film there in deep secrecy. Though the secret of its origin

too earned great success. genuine expression of the national spirit did not make its appearance until 1903, w hen Edwin S. Porter furnished new inspiration with his Great Train Robbery. This was the first
leaked out,
this film

The

first

genuine narrative film in America, lasting twelve minutes and having a real if crude plot. The Great Train Robbery holds the

same place in the history of the American film as the Arrival of a Train held in that of the French film.t Its success established
*

Who

borrowed
is

it

surely an error. The Black Diamond Express made by Edison in 1897 was the equivalent of Arrival of a Train, and The Great Train Robbery of Zecca's Story of a Crime.

tThis

from Terry Ramsaye.

The
a

Birth of the Film

31

whole school: burglaries and criminal assaults were to be the order of the day. The Great Bank Robbery followed, then a host of others whose success was reinforced if not inspired by French films of the same sort, such as Story of a Crime and Underworld was making Raffles, the Gentleman of Paris. By 1905, Vitagraph
Crook.

crowd of people had been drawn into the were and new industry fighting ferociously with one another From for pre-eminence. Chicago, New York and St. Louis they and bold of host a came, crafty businessmen hot on the scent of firstcomers were the most picturesque. Mar The new. something cus Loew, a furrier, bought a projector and traveled around the fairs with it; he made money and rented two or three halls. He then took one of his friends as partner, Adolph Zukor, also a fur dealer rier, and was shortly followed by a secondhand clothes
Meanwhile
a queer

William Fox. Carl Laemmle, a clothier, left a tow^n in Wisconsin in order to rent a hall in Chicago, after long debating whether there really were people crazy enough to pay money for something they couldn't carry away with them. A fireman in Kansas City made a fortune by giving shows in a simulated rail way coach across the end of w hich shimmered movies of far had away lands.* In 1905 an ingenious Pittsburgh businessman the happy idea of renting a store, outside which he erected a glit faade. Here he provided a show lasting tering and many-hued all for five cents; he with minutes piano accompaniment, twenty remained open from 8 A. M. to midnight. This emporium of ele was baptized a nickelodeon, a gance combined with cheapness name which hit the public fancy and also indicated exactly what the cinema was to be for years to corne. Nickelodeons opened in towns everywhere, attracted a large public and made it difficult for the producers to keep up with the demand for film. In 1895 t Edison had were not well The
called
r

organized. producers taken out a patent on his kinetoscope, and again for the vitascope
*These were shown similarly
"Hale's Tours."
t Edison applied for his first patent
1891.
all

over the world and were

known

as

on the kinetoscope on August

24,

See Terry

Ramsay e.

52

The History

of

Motion Pictures

when he went

into business with Armat. But, like Lumiere, he films as a mere toy, interesting as a scientific the regarded prob lem but due for a vogue of a few months only. When he was

urged to take out international patents he replied that he would not lay out so much as a dollar on any such foolery. He was an obstinate man and a genius: no one argued with him. But a few years later, when Edison saw how the film industry was
develop

he became anxious to protect his patents in the United States and thus to exercise an absolute monopoly over the whole Amer
ing,

ican industry.

As early as 1897 he started to fight by putting his affairs in the hands of a celebrated firm of lawyers, Dyer and Dyer, and insti
tuting suits against all existing producers. It was the beginninoof a protracted battle. Edison employed private detectives to fer
ret out
at that

unauthorized copies of his machines. The old inventor time cut a singular figure, and a harsh one. Passionately intent on protecting his own interests, he actually bore little re
all

semblance to the
in

idyllic savant whom we were taught to admire our childhood. Litigious, rapacious, he became a positive men ace to film businessmen, who never knew when the sheriff would

serve a subpoena of Edison's on them next. As a matter of fact, the other producers themselves were no better, and it is rather

America developed as a series of wars between armed guerrilla gangs literally as well as figura had Pathe founded an American branch and attempted in tively. in the to endless series of law suits, but without 1907 interpose
significant that the industry in
r

success. All the talent of the best

ficed to deliver

American lawyers barely suf the other producers from Edison's domination.
at a

Peace was signed in 1908

great and solemn banquet at which,

in the presence of his rivals, the artful old fellow faced with the threat of a relentless war against him waged by all of them in concert finally came to terms.

industry could go ahead and though the earliest years are not without interest. America had no Melies, but already in her first full so of movement and It is to foresee efforts, action,
It

was only begin to make

after this that the

films seriously,

what she was

to develop. It

is

possible possible also to foresee in

what

The
entertaining industry.

Birth of the Film

as a

33
as a rich

America was to regard the cinema

whole:

and

A GLANCE BACKWARDS
After 1900 the film was to enter upon a new phase, but in its first years it most singularly recorded the death throes of an

More clearly even than in the advertisements of the maga epoch. the period one may discern in the earliest films what the of zines character of the era was, the secret history of its fashions, its bad and illusions. In the topical films and newstaste, its
aspirations
reels, in

the buffooneries of the vulgar little comedies and farces, the very flavor of the period when dining rooms, to catches one to be furnished with Tudor reproductions, when had be
elegant,

the art-nouveau
erected,

entrances to the Paris

first

subway
full

stations

were
like

when automobiles
all

chugged along the highways and

It is

melodramas were

the rage.

not a

photographic

ness of the time, but the cross references are unmistakable and not very flattering. An involuntary gesture can sometimes tell us more than a whole volume of memoirs, and the films with their

reveal the age. When the abrupt and unstudied imagery really to be written the his comes of manners of 1897-1905 history torians must not neglect to refer to these documents, for the au
thentic look of the

Melies stood apart. Very much a man years, of his time, he was greatly impressed by "the marvels of science." As the Jules Verne of the cinema, he stems from the same im
In
all

epoch

is

there.

those

first

pulses as

the novels of

and produced the Eiffel Tower, the switchback railway H. G. Wells. His predilection for make-believe was his salvation. He saw clearly that the cinema is not vowed to that it knows no compulsion to honesty and mere representation, all else, it is a machine for above and or that, probability logic illusions. Stamped all over his work is the first great law creating of the cinema: "Thou shalt deceive," and thus he invented an
art

He was
its

and forged far ahead of his rivals. one of the first to love his work genuinely, to realize and greatness. "The art of cinematography," potential richness

54
he wrote,

The History
"calls for so

of Motion Pictures
experiment, necessitates so

much

many

and requires so much sustained atten tion that I do not hesitate to say in all sincerity that it Is the most alluring and the most interesting of all the arts, for it makes use of virtually all of them: drawing, painting, the drama, sculpture, architecture, mechanics and manual labor of every sort are all
different kinds of activity
called into play in pursuing this extraordinary profession." It was only much later that some extraordinary results of this

and they were to appear in an other land. Using quite different methods from his, the animated cartoon was later to reveal what absolute freedom the moving
attitude of his \vere to be seen,

Image enjoys. The laws that govern the elements, the la\v of gravity, even life and death itself were to be suspended in favor of Mickey Mouse when trickery again became the inspiration of the cinema. But that was far ahead. When the champion in Mil lion Dollar Legs flashed fifteen times around the stadium at the
speed of a motorcycle, bark to reveal cautious

when

the trees in the garden shed their the dictator's palace spies, proved

when

to be a positive nest of trap doors and false panels, who could fail to recognize in this film a younger brother of An Impossible

Voyage and The Merry Frolics of Satan ? Even if it had not been destined to constitute the
tive step towards an original

first

tenta

of Melies would
in sadly

still

development of the film, the work have been valuable. It can only be studied

few examples. In 1914 Star-Films was already in today solvent when the government commandeered its offices and stu dios for military uses. There were several hundred kilograms of
film there, the product of

twenty years of work. In order to

re

move them, money was needed both for transportation and new storage room. Melies had lost most of his customers,
affairs

for
his

bad shape, all entertainments had momentarily been closed and so he accepted an offer from a junk merchant, who melted his four hundred films down into a substance used in the manufacture of footwear. M. Maucleres, founder of Studio
in
28, has since

were

unearthed a few reels in an

attic.

known

ones

They

are the best-

The Conquest

Trip to the Moon, The Merry Frolics of Satan, of the Pole, and one or two others. Caroly, a well-

The
known

Birth of the Film

55
is

prestidigitator, owns a few others, remains in France of the work of this

and that

all

that

consolation, however, in the

New
it

York branch which prospered not

knowledge

pioneer. There is some that Star-Films had a

all:

at

out in 1913.

An
a

now owned by

almost complete collection of Alelies'

S.

Vitagraph bought
films' is

Mr.

... He

will neither sell

them nor show

quarters in its Home for the Aged there. One would imagine that something more might have been managed, in recognition of the role he played and of his own eminence as well as that which he conferred on the French film internation ally. He was the only one of the first producers who did not make a fortune.
dent, offered

them, presumably believing that some day they may have a value. In 1928 M. Druhot, of the Cine-Journal, discovered Melies selling candy and toys in a booth at the Gare Montparnasse. He was given a banquet, and much lauded; he was even given some sort of decoration. Today he lives at Orly.* The Chambre Syndi cate, which he founded and of which for ten years he was

him

presi

Georges Melies died

after a short illness in January, 1938.

PART

TWO

The Prewar 7i
19O8-1914

the sideshows and fairgrounds

elapse before hearts, into whose
it

broke arms chance as well as affection had thrown it. In the French provinces and the small towns of America The Story of a Crime and The Great Train Robbery continued for in tents and barns with a sheet for screen, years to be projected bandits the on which appeared in an aura of spots and "rain." the However, early cinema men gradually became sophisti to wear stiff collars, groom their nails and be in cated, learning
terviewed
or
the

at once. Several years were to off relations with these childhood sweet
all

JLH] .HE

film

was not to abandon

by journalists. They gave up roaming through Ohio Normandy. Soon they were to be intimate with ladies from
Comedie Frangaise and
and their
their politician-sweethearts,
girl friends,

vestors

with in with town councilors and subsidies, with editors of independent journals and thek advertising spacerates.

the Congress of Film Producers, February 2, 1908, it was decided to stop renting films to the little cafes that showed them without charge to their customers. There was a general desire to raise the prestige of the cinema and erase the memory of its The cinema, last-born of the arts, was becoming re

At

lowly

past.

spectable.

Pathe was to be

its

leader.

TRADITIONS ESTABLISHED

The primitive films did not die out immediately. Melies con tinued to make films right up to the war, and in 1912, for in stance, produced a Conquest of the Pole, slightly heavy-handed in detail, with a monstrous bearded old Father Pole but

who devoured

though he had escaped from a pantomime of the Odyssey. Many of his imitators, both American and French, also continued to exploit the fantastic film with its transformation scenes, magicians in conical hats and men
travelers

charming

and looked

as

during metamorphosed into animals or films of his were still current and appealed to children almost
39

monsters.

Even

the

war
as

$0

The History
as

of Motion Pictures

Fantomas and Miss Pearl White. Fairy Bell, The En chanted Lake, The Good Little Shepherdess and the Wicked Princess, The Spirit of the Chimes, all by Alelies, were in fact shown exclusively for children, something to be remembered when considering them. But by 1908 the film was ceasing to be a mere childish entertainment: adults had acquired a steady taste for it. It was for them that films of quite another kind were de

much

veloped.
also

America had early and successfully essayed the religious film, popular in France. Before the war, producing firms evinced Easter and Christmas, which startling degree of piety every

rose to frenzied heights when the Italian film began to develop. In the "for sale and wanted" columns of the movie magazines of

1908 there was a lively demand for secondhand copies of a twelve-hundred-foot Pa$sio?i* of Pathe's, a three-reel Life of Christ in color, side by side with offers for Operations by Dr.

Doyen. In 1911 Jacques Guilhene was featured in a Jesus, and in 1914 Pathe produced yet another Passion. The bishops, somewhat skeptical of the real motives of the pro ducers, were rather alarmed by this invasion of the territory of religion with its queer blend of commerce and piety, and they

quickly took measures. In 1913, His Holiness Pius X very wisely forbade the use of films for religious instruction, and formally

condemned
tirely,

the representation on the screen of scenes from the and sacred themes generally. This somewhat, but not en Gospel

damped the fervor of the film people. In another direction, the film continued throughout the de cisive years to be what it had originally set out to be: a sort of
first

magazine. In 1909 the

vards.

newsreel theater opened on the boule

News was still frequently faked, as in the earlier days. When scenes from the Russo-Japanese War were made, the producer forgot to disguise his backgrounds, and audiences watched with
some amazement the
soldiers of the

Mikado engaged

in

blood

thirsty battle with the troops of the Czar in front of the grand stand at Chantilly. Not all producers erred so flagrantly, but at
*

Made by

Zecca.

The Prewar Film

the time of the Steinheil case one of them reconstructed before the trial, including those as yet
cipal episodes
its

41
prin

wholly un

predictable,
acquittal
as

such

as the

and the

crowd

course justice would eventually take, the outside Saint-Lazare lynching the culprit

he came out.

Newsreels of a sensational kind enjoyed a field day at the time of the Messina earthquake. "A film so moving that audiences

weep

The

Russian

sailors!

The

ruins!

Rescue work! Etc! Etc!

two days." A week "After Three film later a second Days Under the Ruins appeared: Board on Wounded the Night in a Living Tomb Taking
387 copies sold in

Terrifying scenes!

of the film was followed by Burying the Dead." This description information: the "following practical "700 feet, price 150 francs. EPOUVANTE." * word: code Telegraphic Celebrities of the day now began to appear on the screen; au diences could hiss Caillaux, applaud Barthou and thrill at the

army maneuvers: "Audiences cheer

this to the echo,

enraptured

with the gaiety, courage and endurance of our brave troops." These old reels are fascinating. Since 1925 the little cinemas and newsreel theaters have often revived them, and they delight
us with their

outmoded

dresses

and vanished
as

celebrities.

Some

times pathos provided, from sky of long ago, Pegoud's t airplane gradually disappear films are not the whole of the cinema, but Documentary
sight.

as

well as pleasure

is

when we

see, in a

feature of it. Gradually the screen journal they are an important no longer ists learned how to handle their material better and,

content merely to photograph, began to compose. There is much of interest and beauty an unintentional beauty in some of these reels which often are useful to incorporate into current produc
tions. It

from

excellent idea to compile a prewar history old material, but the work would have to be done by an artist, not a hack, by someone who understood their real able to do with them charm, someone with a feeling for rhythm,

would be an

this

At

which was identified by a code word them inexpensively. t Pegoud was the first to loop the loop.
of

each one that time the producers issued catalogues of their films, so that exhibitors could wire for

$2

The History
not Jean Cocteau?

of Motion Pictures
in

what Walter Ruttmann attempted

Melody of

the

World.

Why
At

times these accidental compositions have a more intrinsic interest. There is a Tolstoy at Home of 1908 which registers all

the Christlike

of this false prophet, pseudo-great man and very great writer. There is a Poincarffs Visit to Russia, with the whole Royal Family magnificent in this composition in black and white, the women saluting the flag with a little jerk of the chin but no other movement of the body, the pallid Czar, the

mummery

plain of Tsarskoyereview Selo a superb military photographed with a sense of the w hich is quite extraor movement dramatic and a feeling for

tough

little

Frenchman and deployed on the

T

dinary.

were also made at this period. Dr. were recorded, Pathe made a picture Doyen's surgical operations an Eclair of ant life in 1912 and Entomological Studies after real life were prime fa from All these pictures Fabre, in 1913. vorites with the public from 1910 to 1914 and rightly so.
first scientific

The

films

THE FILM D'ART

Films were becoming longer: from two reels they were in creasing to four and even more. As the length of their films in
creased, so did the ambition of the producers to set foot on the rocky but honorable path of "real art." On November 17, 1908

the

first production of a new firm, the Film d'Art, saw the light the famous Assassination of the Due de Guise. This historic event has sometimes erroneously been given as of 1903, when

in fact an earlier Assassination

had been produced from a scenario the scenario for the very pop wrote by Jules Lernaitre, ular Return of Ulysses. But it was the second Assassination from a scenario by Henri Lavedan, well-known Academician, which

who

also

made

history.

it; they insisted on its being Le who lost time in summoning his friends no by Bargy, from the Comedie Frangaise to come and confer distinction on the new medium. A replica of the great staircase of the Chateau

The

brothers Lafitte had financed

directed

The Prewar Film

de Blois was constructed out of
this structure

43

the

body

wood and painted canvas. Down of the murdered duke (In the person of

Albert Lambert) was borne. At each step, the whole staircase shook and the scenery quivered. Spectators must have been sur
prised

to find Renaissance architecture so fragile. caused a sensation. Its opening was a solemn affair.
cited poetry

But the film Le Bargy re

by Rostand, Regina Badet made an appearance, and

a special musical accompaniment by Saint-Saens had been pro vided. It was the first time that eminent actors had condescended * the cinema was bidding farewell to tents to act for the films:

and circuses in order to

woo

a buskined Muse. Confronted

by

to bombast and M. Charles this everlasting stupidity, Lafitte the to brothers with tears in his eyes and Pathe turned
cried aloud: "Ah, gentlemen, you are our masters!" Highly flat tered, the two gentlemen bowed in response, while Le Bargy and
his

monument

co-director

Andre Calmettes almost

as a

burst with pride.

The film industry new producing firm

whole was anything but cordial to the

or its output. Severe articles appeared, re the producers for having been "too artistic." They proaching compared this literary monstrosity very unfavorably with cur rent Italian films and especially with Ambrosio's Last Days of

Pompeii. The public, however, lapped up the new film. Dra matic critics like Adolphe Brisson and Claretie were wildly en thusiastic. Even the Academy acknowledged the existence of the
cinema, which almost
date as

made November

17,

1908 as memorable a

(Societe Cinematographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres) was founded, in which literature was represented by those eminent masters of the serial, Eugene Gugenheim and Pierre Decourcelle. Pathe became affiliated with an Italian Film d'Art, and launched a Serie d'Art Pathe. Gaumont

As

28, 1895. a result, the S.C.A.G.L.

December

launched a Film Esthetique. Eclair organized the Association Film d'Auteurs Cinematographique des Auteurs Drarnatiques.

was founded independently, and

a Theatro-Film

founded by

* That is, in narrative films. Bernhardt, Coquelin, etc., had made records of their stage performances in 1900. In America, Jefferson had appeared for Mutoscope in a scene from Rip van Winkle as early as 1895.

44
Feraudy, but
into service

The History
this

of

Motion Pictures

was

short-lived.

tiousness threatened to

swamp

By 1909, a sea of artistic preten the film. Everything was pressed

prose and poetry, tragedies, novels, light comedies, history, Georges Ohnet and Brieux, Francois Coppee and Aiichelet and, of course, Lavedan and Sardou. The Film d'Art pro

duced Theodora, For the Crown, Madame Sans-Gene, The Abbe Constmtin, Louis XI, The Red Robe, The Iron-Master, Oliver Tivist, La Tosca and even Werther with Andre Brule. France, Italy and Denmark all flung themselves into adaptations from the stage or from books. The art of the film suffers to this day from
the results.

No
in

in

venture was too daring. Edmond Rostand wrote scenarios which the gods descended from Olympus only to get involved automobile accidents. Someone asked permission of Anatole

France to film The Red Lily. As he had never seen a film at that time he was a little surprised: "Can it really be done?" he asked. They assured him it could, he gave the necessary consent and, shortly afterwards (for it did not take long to make a film in

new

those days), they came to fetch him to see his masterpiece in its dress. When the film was over, France w as full of admira
r

tion and praise.

"How
And

very interesting," he

said,

"how

really

then he added, quietly: "But are you quite extraordinary!" sure that it is really The Red Lily?" The original impulse provided by Le Bargy continued its in fluence, no matter what fate befell the producing companies or

even the Film d'Art, which went bankrupt, was reorganized, changed hands and passed into the control of a newcomer, BenKaled (otherwise known as Charles Delac, who made an im

mense fortune out of the cinema and drew unto himself Louis Nalpas and others). Le Bargy and Calmettes had made the basic
error of approaching the new medium in terms of the theater. They wanted to elevate the film, an excellent motive
certainly,

might have been better had they left it to the tender mer cies of the clowns and the prestidigitators. It was Melies and Max Linder who developed the film, not the Comedie Franchise.
it

but

It

was

certed

by

heyday for stage actors. Of course, they were discon the film's lack of words. When

Mounet-Sully appeared

The Prewar Film

45

In a film Oedipus, he refused to omit a single word of the great and the film showed him grotesquely mouthing and speeches as he strode in silence up and down the papiero-esticulating

mache scenery,

all his talent counted submit to the demands of a for nothing nowise the This entire Come die Frannew medium. prevented actors other from his countless unfortunate caise and following

quite unable to realize that

in face of his refusal to

Lambert and Robinne appeared in the Assassina example. Albert de Guise, Gretillat in The Man with White Due the tion of
Gloves (made in 1906 under Capellani's direction); Madeleine Roch, Mme. Delvair, Napierkowska, Alexandra, Jean Worms and

Bovy (who was Pathe's leading lady for years) all fol Re jane made Madame Sans-Gene and even Sarah lowed a screen debut in La Tosca.* Her greatest tri made Bernhardt
Berthe
suit.

umph, however, was

in

Mercanton's Queen Elizabeth (1912),

in a sort of imaginary Renaissance style. presented

Her

pale face,

and sumptuous costumes (but large gestures

alas

not her glorious

voice) continued to astound the public for years to come; the film had a big success abroad and especially in America. Finally

de

Max

himself ventured

The Mask

tion of a

young man from

of Horror under the direc the Film d'Art called Abel Gance.

in Paris on October 25, 1889. He had acted a book of poems entitled Un Doigt sur le Cla written a had little, vier and even a volume of metaphysical essays (unpublished), besides The Samothracian Victory, a five-act tragedy in verse

Gance was born

and prose intended for Bernhardt. He entered the films as an actor, played several leading roles and appeared with Max Linder. The screen provided an outlet for his poetic leanings. He sold his first scenarioabout Paganini for thirty-five francs to

Gaumont, who later paid him forty-five francs for another, The Crime of a Grand-father, for Severin-Mars. Launched as a sce narist, he now wrote Cyrano and tfAssoucy, Moonlight Under Richelieu, The Tragic Love of Mona Lisa which Capellani di rected, The Nurse which Pouctal directed for the Film d'Art. A few months later, Louis Nalpas paid him five thousand francs to make Drama at the Chateau d'Acre in a week. Next, inventing
*

Not

a debut; she

had made

a scene

from Hamlet

in 1900.

$6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

directed The Folly of Doctor Caligarism long before Caligari, he in breaking who succeeded a of madman Tube, the story up light He so of deformities. world a rays and creating strange
greatly

abused the use of distorting lenses and out-of-focus photography that it was considered inadvisable to release the film. Gance was to go far. Not even his worst errors as monu
can erase the memory of what the cinema La Roue of 1922 or Napoleon of 1926. In 1906, however, nobody really understood the proper function of a di rector. The films of some of the really original directors are, it

mental
r

as his talents

ow es him for

is

true, unmistakable,

such

as those

of Melies. But Melies was

period

also a producer. Otherwise, it was only towards the end of the under review that the names of directors were even cred

ited. It

must be

said in favor of

Film

d' Art

which did

in certain

ways contribute something to the development of the film it also gave more importance to the director.

that

One of the outstanding directors was Zecca, who worked with Pathe from the very beginning. He had been hired by Charles Pathe in 1895 but for his voice! It was he, in fact, who deliv ered the speeches of famous people for phonograph recordings, such as the sermons of Pere Olivier, and Carnot's last address at Lyons. When Pathe began to make films, he employed Zecca
as

compere or commentator, to explain the action on the

screen,

for there were no subtitles in those days. Next, Zecca turned director of films, at first after Melies' recipe as in his Seven
Castles of the Devil, and finally of all sorts and kinds. He was one of the real giants of that era of glorious absurdities. One remark of his gives the measure of the man. Michel Carre went to see

him. Zecca was busily blue-penciling a manuscript. Zecca barely paused long enough to greet him and growled out: "I'm rewrit ing Shakespeare. The wretched fellow has left out the most mar velous things."

The whole story of the Film d'Art is in that cry. that the film had mastered its technical it to look problems, began upon art just as a nouveau riche might. Ten years of horrors were
to result. Camille de Morlhon, author of numerous melodramas, was the most important figure. Gaumont one day asked him for

Now

The Prewar Film

47

a scenario: he wrote the story of an army officer turned thief, but the Dreyfus affair was too recent and Gaumont turned it down. Morlhon, disgusted, was only reconciled to the cinema bv Edmond Benoit-Levy and Pathe, and thereupon turned out a

Twenty Years of Hate, A The Orphans Secret and his biggest suc Superhuman Sacrifice, Human in cess A Beast Shape. Andre Heuze, author of The Age The directed Hunchback; Albert Capellani made The for Love, de Paris, and The Wild Ass' Skin with Dame Notre Arlesienne, Two The Orphans, Athalie and UAssojmnoir Napierkowska, Mail and Les Miserable*. "We now The Lyons with de Max, the film wrote enter a new era," journals of the period, "of ac
succession of sentimental dramas:
curate settings, of admirable reconstructions of history, of adap tations from the masterpieces which are the glory of our race

and of our language." Michel Carre in 1907 filmed

in three parts thin^ new, in the

his pantomime The Prodigal Child, of fifteen hundred feet each. It introduced some-

form of

musical score
itself

by Wormser

fitted

had been carefully adaptation the roles were entrusted to pro and prepared by Benoit-Levy fessional actors. It opened at the Varietes on June 15, 1907, and ran for more than a hundred performances one of the biggest to that time. The special musical score was clearly successes
exactly to the action.

The

up

an improvement but proved too expensive for general use. It was reintroduced by Gaumont in 1911. The most important names of the period were unquestionably
those of Capellani, Daniel Riche, the fecund author of so many de Morlhon and above all Louis Feuilpopular novels, Camille from 1906 on, became his art Gaumont for lade, who worked
director and, just before the war, directed the famous series of shall meet him again later in the company Fantomas films.

We

of Louis Nalpas, former general secretary of the Film d'Art. Such were the men and such the birth of a new movement

which wasted
efforts

all

doomed

to

the prewar years in misdirected energy and come to naught. It remains to consider the

influence of the Italian films, which, with the Film d'Art,

stituted

con

the most

characteristic production of the period.

^8

The History

of

Motion Pictures

THE ITALIAN FILM

firm of Ambrosio, which began by making short com been founded in 1908, and was followed by the firms had edies, and Itala. With Cines, these constituted the Italian film, Pasquali

The

which was of

real

importance before the war.

The Ambrosio

films featuring iMme. Tarlarini and Alberto Capozzi included a series, known as the Golden Series, which reached the limits of

unintentional humor: Perjury, Grandmothers Lavnp, The Mys terious Piano carried to extreme lengths the worst excesses of melodrama, of theatrical gesturing and of the contortions cus

tomary in bel canto. The Italian films went in heavily for history and pseudohistory. Pasquali produced several about the French Revolution, the most important of which was Citoyen Simon. Among the numerous companies founded in Rome was, inev
itably, a Film d'Arte. The first of its productions featuring fa mous Italian actors were Othello, The Rape of the Sabines and

Phedre; these were distributed in France by Pathe and thus exer cised considerable influence on the French film. This firm spe cialized in antiquity. One of the greatest successes in America

was enjoyed by the

Italian Quo Vadis, which, in 1912, completely revolutionized methods of film production with its vast crowds of extras and its emphasis on grandiose spectacle. It came at the

end of a long line of historical dramas on subjects that ranged from the French Revolution to the fourteenth century and the
early Christians.

The most important film of the period, not generally released in France until 1916, was the superproduction Cabiria, based on an original scenario by Gabriele d'Annunzio. It is a real docu
the period, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and begun in 1912 was not finished until 1914. Audiences stared in amazement at its statue of Moloch, one hundred and
five feet high, at the

ment of

twenty-

imitation of

Quo

crossing the Alps in the snow. In Vadis and Salammbo, it included all the cus

army

spectacles and also a siege, with the besieged raining stones and pepper on the besiegers, advancing under a roof of their own shields and in siege towers. The assault by a pyramid

tomary

The Prewar Film

4$

of soldiers, standing on one another's shoulders with their shields over their heads, made audiences gasp. But best of all was Maciste. For everyone who was young in 1914, Alaciste as the giant slave will ever remain an imperishable memory of heroism. It is said that the actor had been a furniture-mover, whom they had to act a little. He was an painstakingly taught astounding crea
ture, as gentle as

he appeared fearsome, with unbelievable muscle.

as though they were feathers, tore chains picked his bare hands, threw walls down. He with apart instinctively translated his role of the Avenger of Wrongs into terms of the circus and the variety stage; he was like some great natural force

He

up women

in the

splendor of

his

unconscious strength. Louis Delluc has

him "the Guitry of the biceps." Maciste and the other sensational elements of the film earned it a success such as even Ben Hur never surpassed. Nothing else was talked of in France for years: the film opened at the Vaude
called

Theatre in 1915 and ran for months. The great naval battle, the meeting of Hasdrubal and Massinissa in a Carthaginian palace whose roof was supported by two golden elephants, the setting
ville

on fire of the fleet by the aid of Archimedes' mirrors all com bined to create a "masterpiece" such as no one imagined could ever be outrivaled. People especially enjoyed qualities in this film

which were not

and consequently cinemat of Etna was admired as though it had eruption ographic. been an etching or a painting, and the critics ran out of adjec
theatrical but visual,

The

tives in expressing their delight. "M. d'Annunzio," Le wrote, "seems to have laid the foundation here for a

Cinema

new

art

perfectly in the spirit and to the taste of our times." Opinion hailed him (for d'Annunzio was given all the credit, the director Pastrone was quite overlooked) as "the early master

which

is

of a

new

art,

the Giotto of the cinema."

The

film

made

a lasting

absurd when, as late as 1920, impression. the in Baur closing scenes of the film wrote describing Harry in Le Crapouillot as follows:
it

No

one thought

itself

Abstract poetry has never been better made concrete, thought has never more admirably been made tangible. On a calm evening, a trireme glides over a calm ocean leaving

jo

The History

of Motion Pictures

a sprinkling of stars in its wake: hills loom in the distance. Shel tered by a sail, a young couple in simple linen tunics whisper of
their love. Maciste, herculean

and

childlike guardian out of

some

old legend, plays on the pipes of Pan. Above the hilltops, mingling with the stars in the infinite heav ens, we discern living shapes: they grow more clearly visible as

human beings in filmy veils that drift like mists as they move into a dance such as Botticelli might have painted, and then slowly vanish*
Cabiria, that series of colossal picture postcards, inspired much r as the cheap but lyrical praise for years to come. Though it

was not the only one of its kind. Italy at tempted to dazzle the masses with a hundred historical spectacles. In 1908 The Last Days of Pompeii had appeared to compete with the first films d'art. In June 1912, the firm Artistica Gloria ad vertised widely throughout France a Nero and -Agrippina. This was a favorite subject: Arnbrosio had made a Nero in 1908 and Cines an Agrippma in 1912. The inevitable lavish spectacles
it

most celebrated

torches,

pagan orgy, imperial trireme, Christians with lions, human Rome burning were advertised as unheard-of marvels:

city

Every was
. .

exhibitor will hasten to show this film, for which a whole rebuilt at a cost of more than a million francs, with its
.

reconstructed palaces and forums, its Coliseum and its armored fleet. Never before has anything so artistic been attempted, never has such brilliant success attended an effort of this kind. It puts everything heretofore attempted into the shade. Here is the Rome of the Caesars. Neither words nor illustrations can convey any real idea of the lavishness of this cinematographic tour de -force. .
. . . . .

Tacitus, Suetonius, Racine, Sienkiewicz and Bulwer-Lytton had all been pillaged to provide this strange medley produced under Mario CaserinFs direction. Pathe bought the French rights for a hundred and fifty thousand francs. It seems a pity that, almost before there had been time to show it in a few first-run
theaters in the biggest cities, the

war came

to change public taste

in

for spectacles of this type.

These

spectacles

were impressive. Portly operatic tenors

The Prewar Film

togas, stout matrons

51
giving the

waving

olive branches or

Roman

running at a trot, howling mobs raising or lowering their thumbs provided the constant ingredients. Ro man orgies, a positive rain of blossoms, and the games were but
salute, little legionaries

a prelude to the inevitable splendors of the finale in which a whole cardboard city blazed merrily under the calm ^aze of a paunchy and bemonocled emperor as dignified as a bishop. While historical spectacles, and especially classical ones, were a specialty of the Italians, they sometimes explored the modern soul too. Cines came to it late under the influence of Danish and

d'Arte had launched Paola Monti in The which proved popular. After Quo Vadls and Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Cines announced The Vow of Hatred, its first modern film, which appeared in 1914. "Cines," wrote the critics, "comes through the ordeal even greater than before." The film was based on an original story about a young after taking part in some amateur theatricals, ran awav girl who, from home. "Romantic and anxious to live a life of her own,
films.

French

The Film

Kiss of Glory,

the

took seriously the part she had been playing and girl the paternal roof to follow the actor Steno, who had been coaching her. Heedless of the tears and entreaties of her sister,

young

left

she consented finally, so as to avoid scandal, to simulate death." Maria was then abandoned by the actor, became a singer in a
tavern, then a celebrated artiste. Misfortunes of every sort over take both the heroine and her sister. This tear-jerker made a

name

for the actress

who

played the leading role

Maria Carmi.

There followed an avalanche of melodramas and of adaptations from novels. The most extraordinary subjects found producers and back were not spared, nor Shakespeare, Racine ing. Dante and Homer and the Bible. Cines made several Lives of Christ and The Mac cabees. The Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso were each made into half-hour films. Ambitious directors hurled themselves on Francesca da Rimini and Virgil. What is more, the Americans had replied to Cines' Ha?nlet with a Romeo, a Richard III and another Hamlet. When Ambrosio's Priestess of Tanit modeled itself too freely on Salmnmbo, the French were outraged. "For

_p
shame,

The History

of

Motion Pictures

the Italians," they screamed. As for Spain, which had also discovered the cinema by now, there emanated from

MM.

the short-lived Hispano-Film a

Carmen

(naturally)

and

Don

Juan de Serra-longa.

It

was

a universal disease.

DRAMAS
Meanwhile the Assassination of the Due de Guise had given birth to a host of historical romances The Queen's Necklace, Escape -from the Tuileries ("based on the erudite studies of M. Georges Cain, curator of the Musee Carnavalet"), The Death Maison Rouge, Camille Desof Robespierre, The Chevalier of The Due de Reichstadt, Lara. Mile. and moulins, with Dehelly and Theodora likewise Charles his and wives, Henry VIII drawn for indifferently from Michelet, plots subjects

provided

an easy step to costume pictures: fiction were drama and the drained, as the example of Italy and of the d'Arte Film suggested what treasures lay ready to hand. The Roman (fun Spahi was screened. Bernhardt appeared in an adap tation of her own production, Adrienne Lecotivreur. Pathe ven tured into prehistory with La Guerre du Feu and into Biblical and Goliath. In a magazine of 1914 one learns history with David

Dumas or Sardou. From history it was

with astonishment that, according to report, M. Andre Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures was to be filmed (but the rumor proved false). Pathe provided The Children of Edward, "based on Shake M. Casimir Delavigne, adapted by M. Paul d'lvoi, speare and
directed

by M. Andreani,

featuring

Mme.

Delvair of the

Comedie

Frangaise." Robinne and Alexandre appeared in The Queen of Sheba and an effort at modernism Pathe produced Bernstein's The Thief, The Assault and The Claw, as Pathe-Natan were to do again twenty years later. These dramas which overburdened the screen with speechless suffering from 1908 to 1912 were not essentially very different from those which Pathe had turned out in 1904, but they were longer and played by better-known actors and they strove val iantly after psychological profundity. Most of the themes which

The Prewar Film

55

the cinema was later to develop with so much unintentional ab in existence in those half-hour or surdity were already hour-long romantic whole that films, repertory of the unbelievable and the

ridiculousdeserted wives, illegitimate offspring, society ladies, wicked sirens and good-hearted crooks. The public loved them. In 1912 Pathe engaged Alexandre and Dehelly and summoned
all

the

Comedie Frangaise

to create the

first

monument

to the

"vamp," and gave her her proper name in a film called Fenmie Fatale. It was a story about one Juliet, a servant who bewitches her employer's son. She tempts him to steal, then runs off to Paris with him. There she makes the acquaintance of a baron and the young man commits suicide. Juliet becomes an actress and seduces a grand duke. In the end, she is laid low by an ill ness that disfigures her. An object of horror, she dies haunted by the specters of her victims. In this superfilm, which ran for a whole hour, Madeleine Roch represented the femme fatale with a rich repertory of sweeping gestures and expressions. Though it is possible sincerely to admire the films of Melies and of Max Linder on other than purely archaeological grounds, the huge flood of prewar dramas merely bore or convulse one today. Yet through their medium a style of acting less and less theatrical and more and more simple was developed. Mimes like Wague or Paul Franck and above all Severin-Mars brought to the screen the expressive gestures and rounded technique of a noble and ancient art. Their films today may look as meaning less as those of their contemporaries, but if we examine them
closely
acting.

we

realize

how much
is

these

men

contributed to screen

Pantomime

not, perhaps, the language of the film:

pantomime seeks to express everything in symbolical gestures, whereas the cinema can manage without symbols. But it was pantomime that pointed the way to the proper method of screen
acting as a purely theatrical style could never have done. The art of telling a story was slowly being discovered as the

opened impor tant historically because they mark a real development. Yet even for the historian the prewar dramas themselves are dull stuff, and
that

actors adapted themselves to the medium, and paths now were to lead to The Cheat and Broken Blossoms so

54

The History

of

Motion Pictures

the best use to be

made of them is to show never more than brief from them and simply to enjoy their otter absurdity. excerpts Rene Clair in his most ironical moments has never made anything funnier than these "thrilling dramas of modern life," which today hardly seem to us like films at all, for all that they were so much
admired
at the time.

Meanwhile Gaumont had improved its talking films, synchro nized with phonograph records. Edison in New York had also, though less successfully, run synchronized filmland-phonograph talkies. Leon Gaumont show ed one of his before the Academic des Sciences: a M. d'Arsonval was both seen and heard from the screen. "A moment later," wrote L 'Illustration, "the illustrious Academician vanished and in his place appeared a magnificent
r

crowing lustily." By 1912 many synchronizing machines were on the market. One of them, called Le Chantant, had for its slogan: "A film without Mendel synchronization is like a
rooster,

beautiful

woman who is unable to speak." The "wonderful dramas from modern life" were

to expire

un

expectedly in a blaze of patriotism. In the troubled conditions of 1913 and under the influence of the new conscription laws, the cinema discovered a new vein. 1870-1871 extolled the heroism of

The Old Sergeant recalled the internment of Switzerland. Even better was A Soldier's army Honor while Hands off the Flag stirred the crowd to its depths. The very titles of its scenes were eloquent: The Revenge of a Wretch At the Maneuvers Theft of the Sacred Emblem-Sa
the French armies.

Bourbaki's
y

in

lute to the

French Flag.

taille a

the inspiration of Dumas and Hervieu and Bapatriotic trend was developed, and, in imitation of Balzac (whose works as adapted to the screen bore a curious

Thus through

new

resemblance to those of Eugene Sue), the cinema slowly pro gressed towards a new prewar development that of the serial film and the adventure film. Far removed from the pomposities of the Film d'Art, they were of real importance. Our popular fare of this type was to undergo the influence of the American as our historical films had undergone that of the Italian. films,

The most

typically French of films

the love

drama and sob

The Prewar Film

stuff

yj

were themselves become important in the realm of

a

model for three other nations about to

film production.

THE RUSSIAN FILM

In other countries, film dramas were
France.

much

the same as HI

The

production,
tion they

Russians, particularly, specialized in this type of though with the difference that the theatrical tradi

brought to the screen was of a different kind, that they took more care for pictorial composition and were more gen their tragedies. Russia exported little but uinely pessimistic in were somber which admired and esteemed dramas, exceedingly above their French prototypes. Russian society and Russian na
tional traditions

provided picturesque material for films such

the Forest Said. There

as

The Alchemist and What

was novelty

in

the Russian product generally and in the adaptations of Tolstoy and other writers, which were produced in considerable num
bers. In a film like

The

Suicide Club audiences detected a sort

of Russian essence
nihilism.
later on,

The

the Little Father, nitchevo and intellectual prewar Russian films were not negligible, and,

Russian directors

who

emigrated to France and to Ger

many made competent and

janski,

attractive pictures

Volkov, Tour
films,

Mosjoukine and Buchovetski.

Russian cinemas at that time showed

original

many French

but

work was

for Khanjonkov, per and the Ant,

also being done. Ladislas Starevich, director produced his first puppet film, The Grasshop

which was shown before the Czar,

in

1913.

Tourjanski, former stage actor, directed Mozart and Salieri in 1913, then The Brothers Karamazov with actors from the Mos cow Art Theatre. This revealed the influence of Stanislavsky and of those scenic artists of the balletAlexander Benois and Leon Bakst. shall meet Tourjanski again, with Volkov and

We

Mosjoukine.

seemed to French audiences that the Russian films they saw were more intelligent than similar productions made else where, and this of course conferred on the Russian film a cerIt

$6

The History

of

Motion Pictures
also a certain

tain snobbish appeal.

in

There was

snobbism about

the Danish and the Swedish film.

With

certain characteristics

common,

the films of these three countries revealed a par

ticular attention to pictorial composition, an impressive choly, a dramatic power rendered more effective by its

melan
foreign

accent, and an appealing exoticism Danish film larity. In the case of the

which earned them popu it was a quite considerable

popularity.

THE DANISH AND GERMAN FILM was not until 1906 that the first Danish film-producing com pany, Nordisk Films, was founded by the resourceful Ole Olsen. He purchased an aged horse, a rheumatic lion which the Zoo had decided to have destroyed, and some shrubs. These he car
It

ried off to a small island and there produced a picture of a lion hunt, much to the annoyance of the aged lion. Thus Nordisk was

born.

of these early Danish films by hearsay but were today, very popular before the war. In 1913 more they than two hundred and fifty copies of At the Prison Gates were sold. In Denmark, as elsewhere, films at that time were com
novels such as Hermann Bang's Pour Devils, and plays such as A Marriage Under the Revolution, both of which were used several times. This does not sound as though the Danish film were very different from the general output of the period, or of particular originality. Nevertheless, it was highly esteemed: Nordisk flooded the French market with pic tures which were admired for their dramatic intensity and their artistic qualities. Among them must be noted the work of

One can only judge

monly based on

for he discovered a really great actress whom Ger afterwards acquired Asta Nielsen. The future star of The * Joyless Street and The Tragedy of the Street faced the camera for the first time in 1910 in The Abyss for Urban Gad, under

Urban Gad,

many

whose direction she worked for many years. Even as a girl her face was already a tragic mask, almost impassive yet strangely
*

The

Joyless Street (1925)

was

also

Greta Garbo's second picture.

The Prewar Film

with great burning eyes: expressive
title
it

57

earned for her later the

is

of "the

Duse of

the screen." It

instructive to read the

articles

about her

in the early

movie magazines. She was "the un-

contested sovereign of the screen," the "artist who best knew how to adapt herself to its requirements"; her "oblique, austere and restrained style of acting" was "infinitely more impressive and more intelligent than that of the Italian stars." Through a

whole succession of films

far

more

realistic

and

much more

care

the current product, Asta Nielsen developed a fully the somewhat artificial and even conventional character screen
character of a beautiful and intelligent of destiny. In The GeneraPs Children,

made than

woman

in the clutches

Strange Bird, Vertigo, The Power of to the public all the romanticism of the northern coun displayed of Ibsen and of the suffering but conscientious char full tries,
acter

The Black Dream, The Gold and Poor Jenny she

of the

eighties. intellectual fashions.)

Nordic writers and dramatists of the eighteen(The cinema is always a few years behind the reigning
of real merit

an

artist

In Asta Nielsen, the Danish film gave us whose sphinxlike appeal was to last for

many years. Germany was Nordisk's best market, and several films were made by the firm specifically for German distributors. The Ger man firms Messter, Union, Biograph, Bioscop were of quite
secondary importance in comparison with Nordisk, for at that time Germany was, as regards the cinema, simply a tributary of

Copenhagen.

THE SWEDISH FILM

The Swedish

film also merits attention.

The

first

film

was

produced there in 1909

by

industry until 1928. Oddly songs or talkies such as Melies and

Charles Magnusson, head of the film enough, most of the first films were

Gaumont had introduced. Yet from the beginning there were also attempts at basing films on purely national themes, from which the Swedish film derived its essential originality. We meet this trend already in Men of Varmland, after a famous opera which was to serve again on several

$8
from an

The History

of

Motion Pictures
was
also

occasions and even as a talkie. There

The

original screen story by the novelist Henning Burger, directed by Muck Linden of the Royal Theatre.

censorship already existed and as this film included a rape scene, the banned portion was replaced with a subtitle, "Interval of Minutes," which caused a sensation.

As

Two

industry developed slowly. Magnusson's Svenska Biografteatern built the first studio and, in 1912, engaged the two men who were to carry the Swedish film to its full development

The

Sjostrom and Stiller. Both of them were former stage actors, but they brought to the cinema a quite original if literary "con
ception."

At

first

Stiller as director. In

they worked together, Sjostrom The Black Aiasks there was

as actor

and

a scene with

up in the air. In 1913 which he discovered the Holm^ Stiller made Hilda while actress Gransfolken. Pathe Borgstrom, imported into France a Swedish film based on a sensational novel,
Sjostrom crossing
a street

on a wire,

five stories

Sjostrom directed Ingeborg

in

The Spy

By
some
as

of Qesterland by Georges de Klercker. the time war broke out, Sweden had already developed of her best actors Hilda Borgstrom, who was to play the

heroine of

The Stroke of Midnight, and Lars Hanson as well her two great directors, Sjostrom and Stiller, and had dis covered her typical themes and characteristic atmosphere. Else where in Europe at that time only the Italian film had any real
national flavor, and even so it was of an exaggerated and uncinematic kind. While it would not be true to say that the Swedish
film
in full possession of its powers (for, as in other coun sacrifices were made to the popular idols of farce tries, many

was

and of stage drama), there was already in Sweden a complete realization of the function that national legends and the national
character were to play, as material fitting for translation into visual

imagery and rhythm. The cinema finds

tinue to find
it

it

difficult

and

will

con

out of nothing. When it has done the have often been written by such so, original plots provided and that the result has been deplor ignoramuses nincompoops able. And so, while other countries were also to furnish films of
difficult to build

increasing merit,

it

was Sweden which

first

made

the world

The Prewar Film

realize that there really
it is

is

an art of the motion picture and that

worthy of

respect.

All these developments so far considered were European. In America, they regarded pictures such as those of the Film cTArt with suspicion. As a consequence of the innumerable difficulties

surrounded the industry in its early years, the Americans sought chiefly to please the greatest number of people. At the same time, they developed in a very special way both move ment and a purely visual drama. Though the French industry was extremely prosperous, and her producers well and happily entrenched in the error of their ways, nevertheless France began to look towards the United States with envy and alarm.
that

THE AMERICAN FILM

Hampered in its infancy in an infinite number of ways, the American industry had barely escaped out of Edison's hands when it fell a prey to the attack of much more redoubtable ene miesthe puritans. This war has never entirely ended. On Janu ary 10, 1909 the Chicago Tribune denounced the cinema as a corrupter of youth, and cited the somewhat unfortunate titles of films being shown that very w eek: An Old Man's Darling, Underworld of Paris, Raffles, etc. The producers, much upset, protested through the newspapers that an art which had already given the world Ben Hur (the first one) and a Passion was hardly an immoral one at heart. This nowise deterred the Society for the Protection of Children from raiding any cinema that showed
T

a film not to

its

liking; the

municipal board of Chicago gave

the chief of police full authority to ban immoral films. It was in that gangsterland that American censorship was really born. Another danger lurked at the very heart of the film industry
itself. Though Edison had virtually retired from the scene, a more formidable power had arisen in the producers' Trust, the Motion Picture Patents Company, a dictatorship as dangerous as

that of the inventor himself.

*

Most of this section is based on Benjamin Hampton's Movies, Covici Friede, New York, 1930. q.v.

History of the

60

The History

of

Motion Pictures

consisted of the ten biggest producers, each of Edison paid royalties in exchange for the right to use his apparatus. Peace had thus been secured: by rights the American industry should have gone ahead undisturbed. Actually an even

The Trust

whom

more picturesque war was about

to open.
It

The Trust had

its

in fact created a joint renting business and

intended to dominate the market.

ercising monopoly. fluence, or their lawyers were, small proprietors of cinemas
Its

counted on rigorously ex
in

members were men of considerable

and they despised the countless whom they regarded as so many junk merchants and circus proprietors, entirely under their thumbs. They were in error. The exhibitors had not the slightest respect for the bigwigs of the Trust and cared not a rap for the jurisprudence of chambers of commerce. Besides which, they were ably backed up by fifty or more small producers too modest for the Trust to bother about, who were therefore at war with the Trust. These independent producers or "outlaws" thought nothing of using cameras that bore no Trust stamp, or of distributing films made with such cameras. Thousands of

The outlaws were unimpressed. cameras which had the advantage of beinoThey bought foreign of Edison's but also the disadvantage of work independent patent So took the works out of them, and re ing very badly. they them with Edison At the same time they took placed machinery. direct action by hiring technicians from the Trust and away them twice as much for if offering pay; you employ only one cameraman you can afford to pay him well, whereas the Trust
suits

were entered

against them.

fifty and did not want to raise their wages. By these meth ods the outlaws produced some excellent films which the cine mas accepted all the more readily since to do so was to injure the Trust further.

had

Meanwhile the lawsuits busily and the Trust won

time.

From

piled up, the lawyers were working a lot of injunctions but lost a lot of the due process of law they now proceeded to hire

private detectives,
will.

who

realized immediately that

junction will not stop a

man from making

in earnest.

films, a

though an in broken camera

The

fight

was on

On

the

pretext of taking afE-

The Prewar Film

davits,

61

The small producers migrated to the suburbs of New or York Chicago: the private detectives followed them. Armed were organized at the studios, but the detectives, become guards still managed to break in. There were new conflicts, burglars,
battle.

they gained admittance to the studios and then seized the cameras. Each sally of this kind led to a smashed and pitched

and chases every day. It was with difficulty that the film continued to mature and grow longer under such conditions. Some of the incidents that occurred were really epic, in genuine movie style, and might have been imagined by a scenarist of ad
battles

venture films.
Carl Laemmle, one of the most formidable of the independent producers, carried Mary Pickford off to work under the direc tion of Ince, whom he had put in charge of his studio and who,
later,

was to

direct

one of the

first

really important silent films

all
its

The Aryan. The Trust set all its detectives and on his tracks. Laemmle fled with his cameras and
to Cuba,
theatrical

bailiffs

his

company

much

in the

manner of

L'lllustre Theatre, Moliere's

France.

its peregrinations along the roads of Pickford's mother followed in hot pursuit on a Mary steamer chartered by the Trust, accompanied by a police guard and armed with a fistful of warrants. Happily, Mary Pickford

company, on

and her fortune were beyond the jurisdiction of the United Production was carried on in Cuba without interruption, married Owen Moore and peaceful overtures were made Mary to the venerable Mrs. Pickford. For all their audacity and their ruses, the outlaws faced defeat when salvation suddenly opened before them. At the most criti cal moment, they remembered that Selig, one of the original members of the Trust, had formerly escaped from Edison's the California coast. This was process-servers by moving off to
States.

a ray of

hope

in the darkness.

They

quickly gathered together

their cameras, their painted scenery and their make-up boxes and set forth on an exodus to the West. San Francisco tempted

them for a while. But their attention shortly turned to a nice little town which, in their eyes, had one inestimable advantageit was only a few miles from the Mexican frontier. Los Angeles

&2

The History

of

Motion Pictures

thereupon became the headquarters of the Independents. Here were sunny skies which made elaborate studio buildings unneces sary. A few planks, some trees, a bungalow to sleep in, a cafe for leisure moments were sufficient. If detectives turned up, they could pile actors, scenery and cameras into a car and disappear across the border for a few days. It was under these conditions that an era of commercial stability dawned for the American film. The rivalry between the Trust and the outlaws was now trans ferred to another sphere. The ambitions of the Trust were simple: they had discovered that a lot of money was to be made

by providing the nickelodeons with short films of one reel each, turned out cheaply by a formula. They were quite content to market their goods as though they had been boots or bananas. The Independents, who could not hope to compete with the Trust on such grounds, found it expedient to compete with this
kind of stuff, turned out like sausages, by providing films of another style and attempting to develop the public's taste for something different. They began by luring the best actors away from the Trust and acquired George Anderson, otherwise Broncho Billy, Tom Mix and most importantthe sixteen-year-old Canadian girl who was to become famous as Mary Pickford. Meanwhile, she was known as "little Mary." She had made her debut on the stage as a child in order to supplement the family income, and then on appeared Broadway. In 1909 she went to see Griffith at the

Biograph studio. Griffith was making The Lonely Villa, based on Andre de Lorde's well-known play, At the Telephone. He gave her a small part and paid her five dollars. Three days after wards she played Giannina in The Violin Maker of Cremona
(for in America, too, "artistic" films joined the Independents.
It

were looming).

Later, she

was with her help that the Independents were

of quality against the Trust,

able to

wage

war

who

turned out films in un-

differentiated bulk.

the cinemas in America were

Europe had already set the example. While still showing much the same sort

of movies that had made Pathe's fortune in 1903, the Italians and the French stimulated by the Film d' Art were producing

The Prewar Film

63

which both in length and in content far surpassed the spectacles American current product. The better-informed Independents was what knew going on in Europe and what success had at method of American distribution did not, how The it. tended
ever, lend itself readily to the importation of these films.

The

owners were accustomed to rent a complete program each day, but with a daily change of program it was not possible to show these much more expensive foreign movies, which were where a run of many days was feasible. profitable only All the same, in 1908 and 1909 a considerable number of more ambitious films were made in America. A Faust appeared, then a Carmen. The Italian successes had given Hobart Bosworth the idea of introducing Roman togas and peplums to the Calif ornian scenery. The French films, too, found their imitators. The same Hobart Bosworth produced dramas inspired by Henry Bataille of the Theatre-Francais itself, with against backgrounds worthy officers and gentlemen of fashion strolling through them, gesticu lating and looking extremely grand. Ladies with elaborate lace waists and stuffed birds on their hats fainted on Louis XV sofas. Disgraced businessmen blew out their brains at Empire desks.
theater

of Honor, The Evil Men Do appeared two-reel films, advertised as "first class" in order to embarrass the Trust, whose films thus automatically became "second class."

The Roman, The Code

as

One

of the best directors of that time was already making films

It

were stamped with a certain called one day on Edison had originality. to propose a film adaptation of La Tosco.. Instead, he was in vited to play the role of a mountaineer in a film entitled Rescued fro?n an Eagle's Nest. As the eagle with which he had to do battle was a stuffed one, he accepted, and earned the sum large for those days of twenty dollars. That was his first contact with the screen. Soon afterwards he directed his first film, The Adventures of Dolly, over half a reel long. His wife acted in it. Soon he was regularly making films for Biograph. He brought some new ideas along with him, and began by replacing profes sional actors by very young people whom he could mold as he
that displayed genuine emotions and

was

Griffith.

He

wished and

whom

he instructed

in a simple, direct

and expressive

64

The History
He made

of

Motion Pictures

with the customary methods an important discovery in Alary Pickford. employed. At the same time he abandoned the customary conventions of the screen and tried to create a new method of presenting char acters. He placed them differently in the scene and was just as
style of acting quite at variance
likely to

show his actors in profile or from the back as face on; he evolved more complex situations and a more convincing ac tion. Eventually he found how to make the camera itself into an
actor,

gradually discovering
it

how

to

move

it

about,

how

to

make
it

different points of view and, in a word, to give a creative role in the composition. Griffith quickly turned his see
classical

from

back on Faust, Carmen and such

saloons, the
first

subjects.

The

first

fighting scenes, the first really wicked men and unhappy girls of the cinema owed their existence to him. He seemed to desire to break away from theatrical methods of pres entation, and by looking about him at the everyday world

found settings and situations better adapted to the screen. These experiments began to worry the Trust, which was against innovations of any kind. In 1908 their bolder members had tried to steal the enemy's thunder with a Life of Moses,
a long "art" film after the Italian model, with milling crowds, a bearded prophet, papier-mache scenery, burnt sacrifices and a plump golden calf. This was issued in parts, as a serial, but met

with a lukewarm reception. The Trust

recipes.

fell

back on

its

usual

The

Independents were

all

for experiment.

Under

the direc

tion of William

W.

Hodkinson they organized

a chain of halls

through which they could release their films. They gradually accustomed their public to longer films and better ones. Sub titles had already replaced the commentators who yelled out ex

on the action. The nickelodeons were more comfortable, better-ventilated and more ex giving way pensive theaters. An organ, or if that was not possible, a piano, provided music. There were chairs instead of benches. The Independents were winning ground and the Trust was compelled to make longer films. This was the heyday of the Western film, through which the entire world became familiar
planatory comments
to

The Prewar Film

6$

with Mexican pants, automatics and cowboy hats. Since 1906 at odds with Edison, had concentrated on Selig, making adven ture films for which he hired cowboys, Indians and a circus col
lection of wild animals. His heroes

were equipped with both

likable

re

volvers and lassos, but to

make them more

they w^ere also

appointed always to rescue young and pretty girls from untold dangers. Broncho Billy, who prudently used another and more rider to double for him in the experienced hard-riding scenes, was the idol of that time. Films of this kind were far from elabo rate at first, for Selig had many worries besides film production. But when peace was signed with Edison, Selig was free to de
velop this genre. Between 1910 and 1914 his output was im mense. He engaged a cowboy from Oklahoma called Tom Mix.

Through innumerable
tions of the rodeo, the

films, Mix offered the combined attrac cinema and an auto-da-fe. Across the wide

pampas, through carefully impenetrable jungles, Mix raced his magnificent horse, flirting with death, riding at the head of bands of Sioux Indians, escaping at the last moment from hideous tor
tures at the hands of his enemies. Before

becoming

a film actor

had not Mix actually led the life of a cowboy, captured dozens of bandits and swum countless rivers? The magazines said so.
Greatly upset, Broncho Billy retorted by forming a new company to produce Westerns in Colorado, and took particular pains that everything in these new films should be absolutely authentic
7

save his

own

American

films,

equestrian performances. These characteristically so purely local and autochthonous, provided

audiences in Europe with an enjoyable contrast to the product of their own countries and the stock characters and situations
of the

European movie dramas.

prestige of the Italian films was still very great. In 1913 employed by the Trust, undertook a new kind of

The

Griffith, still

production, Judith of Bethulia, which proved much more to the financial suc public liking than The Life of Moses but was not a
cess because the Trust's

organized. Griffith at this time left Biograph

system of distribution was so poorly and joined the In

to the

dependents.

The

Italians

were to introduce

Americans a formula

66

The History

of Motion Pictures

which was to prove very popular. George Kleine, who had pro duced The Life of Moses five years before, was so much im pressed by Quo Vadls when he saw it in Europe that he bought it for the United States. Back in New York he rented the Astor Theatre and presented Quo Vadis there in April 1913 with as much ceremony as though it were a play. Its success was im mense: the Astor had full houses until the end of the year, and
7

twenty-eight chains of cinemas also presented the film first-run throughout the United States and Canada. This gambit rang the death knell of the Trust. Their system of short films and daily changes of programs was condemned out of hand wiien a second superfilm followed from Europe to reinforce rival methods and

on a new cycle. to go in exclusively for the Zukor decided In 1912 Adolph films. He of big began by purchasing from Mercanproduction
start the

American

film off

sum of eighteen thousand dollars, the Sarah Bernhardt's Queen Elizabeth. Advertised and pre rights of sented in lavish style, the film netted him sixty thousand dollars.
ton, for the unheard-of

Intoxicated with success, he announced that he would thence forward produce a film a week. He bought up the best plays,
S. Porter of Great Train Robbery fame, and a to work under the title of Famous of actors troupe Players. At the end of 1912 the first of these Famous Players films appeared The Prisoner of Zenda. few weeks later Zukor signed up Pickford. Mary

hired

Edwin

At

the same time Jesse

Lasky

(earlier

the producer of a Folies Eergeres in York) went into part with his brother-in-law Goldfish and a nership young man called
Cecil B. DeMille, and arrived in Holly\vood with about twentyfive thousand dollars and some big ideas. The Jesse L. Lasky

New

and rather disastrously

Feature Play

Company had

decided to start off boldly

by

film

ing a stage hit of the day, The Squaw Alan. Five thousand dollars went to Dustin Farnum as star, five thousand for the film rights,

was spent on production. The firm did not have enough money to establish itself in Los Angeles, but had to be content with a barn in a miserable little district on the outskirts where no respectable producer would have been found dead.
and the
rest

The Prewar Film

6j

This dismal place was called Hollywood. But The Squaw Man was a hit. A few weeks later Lasky's capital had doubled and his firm was famous. Both Zukor and Lasky were up against the problem of distri bution. The Trust, which provided programs to the majority of cinemas, refused to change their procedure to make place for films produced by its rivals and offered singly. Zukor approached Hodkinson, owner of a circuit in the West which had already assured an outlet for the numerous films produced by the Inde

He proposed forming a joint renting agency to dis pendents. films of all the important Independents and thus the tribute put
up
competition to the Trust. Hodkinson agreed, worked out a system and a few months later a formidable combination of the
real

Independents, including Hodkinson, Zukor, Lasky and DeAlille, was formed under the name of Paramount and undertook to

weekly or biweekly. Paramount brought the adventurous era of the American film to a close. The American film so far had de
distribute feature films issued

The

birth of

veloped quite independently. Despite the success of pictures such as Quo Vadis, the industry, overoccupied with its own internal had drawn almost exclusively on material ready to struggles,
hand, on its own national mythology. In Europe, American films at that time were esteemed far below those of France and Italy.
It

was only

later

that,

thanks to the war,

its

so triumphantly to invade the neat

European

peculiar fauna was gardens and there

the French and couple with other monsters already spawned by the Italians to produce the numerous and weird denizens of the

make-believe world of the cinema. Cowboys and clowns were to rub shoulders with erring society women and doughty bankers in a grotesque dance at which we still gaze with admiring delight. were to Publicity, posters, magazines and sundry journalism with the world furnish was to which aid this industry,

growing

such plenteous pipe dreams. It is impossible to understand the cinema without taking into account these concomitants the fan stories hatched by journalists, the magazines, the cock-and-bull
See H. L. Mencken's The American Language, Alfred A. Knopf, York, 1937, footnote p. 37, for confirmation of this.
*

New

68

The History

of

Motion Pictures

whole output of gush and nonsense which two hundred different nations were to devour. It was a work of genius to make a whole world film-conscious, to make it impossible for us to open a newspaper or gaze up a street without having thrust at us the image of women all curls and smiles, of men like centaurs, eter nally mounted and armed with rope, without reading yet another
anecdote,
still

about the handsome heroes and lovely

another personal interview, yet another fairy women o f the screen.

tale

People acquired the habit of going to the movies every week to follow the absorbing adventures of these godlike beings. Often the story was familiar in advance, for the daily newspapers had begun to publish these tales of bloodshed and kidnaping, revenge

The Chicago Tribune, first to denounce the im of the films, had also been one of the first to print film morality serial stories. From 1913 on, readers could thus follow The Ad ventures of Kathlyn in their newspaper as well as on the screen.
and
betrayal.

SERIALS

Many a primitive film drama, many a movie adapted from novels and especially from those of Dumas and of Balzac, as well as the little films turned out by Pathe, had prepared a way for the posterity of The Great Train Robbery and its cousin The
Story of a Crime. In September 1908, Eclair began to issue a series of Nick Carter films, about which was written: "Detective stories are perfectly suited to the cinema. With their brisk and simple plots, an absence of complex psychology, their logical

development of events, their rapid jumps, their crimes, way lay ings, kidnapings, and chases they are fundamentally cinemato
graphic."

new fashion had thus been launched, and from that time on audiences were able to follow the same hero and heroine week by week through vicissitudes of every description. Further Nick
Carter
series,

one about Morgan the

Pirate, a

Nat Pinkerton from

Eclair and even series of historical episodes such as The Dragonnades under 'Louis XIV taught the public the habit of regular

moviegoing.

They wanted

to follow the adventures of the char-

The Prewar Film

6$

acters. It was an important step in winning over a permanent audience. The climax was to be reached by the films based on the popular novels of Marcel Allain and Emile Souvestre, under the general title of Fantomas material ideally suited for

filming.

The

length with Fantomas: one episode, "Fantomas the Pseudo-Magistrate", was even five reels long. big three times more posters than usual and publicity campaign,
serial attained feature

twenty

illustrations in

Le Cinema paved

the way.

With

this film,

the battle between the short-endians and the long-endians was o with a Lilliputian concluded for the latter. finally victory

Fantomas made Louis Feuillade

really

famous.

The

future

director of Judex had truly discovered a new type of film, long York.* Earlier, before The Exploits of Elaine came from

New

he had directed Leonce Ferret for Gaumont, and all sorts of films with wild animals and cowboys, as well as a series with a child actor called BibiBebe and the Landlord, Bebe Cures Father,
Bebe's Masterpiece, Bebe's Discovery. Fantomas, with its mys terious bandit, its disguises, its houses bristling with trap doors

and contrivances,
bility,

its

tops and, in short,

its

kidnapings and rescues, its scaling of roof whole marvelous and reckless improba
glory.

crowned him with

To offset the Fantomas films produced by Gaumont, Pathe now issued an equally ambitious Rocambole, based, however, on
material considerably less to the public taste than the books of Allain and Souvestre. But the principles and the length of the longer film had been established: The Exploits of Rocambole was four and a half reels long, and was followed by many others.

People were urged to see Rocambole drag a

to view the victim's struggles to save himself

man

into a cellar,

from drowning and

May and in America in July 1913. The first real serial film America was The Adventures of Kathlyn, beginning December 1913, both on the screen and in the Chicago Tribune. Dolly of the Dailies, Lucille Love, The Perils of Pauline, and The Million Dollar Mystery all came before The Exploits of Elaine, but perhaps were not shown in France until
France in

follows: in 1912 the Edison Co. issued of episodes each complete in itself, not "to be continued" and therefore not a true serial. The episodes also ran concurrently in a magazine. The first episode of Fanto?nas was released in
in

*The sequence was actually as What Happened to Mary, a series

made

later.

yo
scenes

The History

of

Motion Pictures

"the amazing adventures of Rocambole in the watery deeps." Big were always advertised in this fashion a method bor

rowed from America. Train smashes and bridge wrecks all had their own particular devotees who wanted to know what to
look out
sieur
for.

Films in the American manner and those like Gaboriau's

Mon
In

Lecoq were creating

new and permanent mythology.

Fmtomas

rality was tive novels, the extravagant plots

versus Fantomas, just as in Rocambole, a childish mo borrowed from melodrama, the characters from detec

There

from blood-and-thunder stories. no mistaking these films, any more than the posters that advertised them. In The Youth of Rocambole one watches the
is

rapid development of "this Night-Prowler, this Bird of Prey, this Spirit of Evil, the perfect prototype of the cynical adventurer and the 'beau joueur.* " Thick with thieves in automobiles, supercrooks, kidnaped women, mocking laughter and benignant police inspectors, here was a universe, to create which Balzac seems to

have collaborated with Conan Doyle. In this imaginary world the femme fatde is queen and love rules all. We see it not only in Judex and The Exploits of Elaine later, but again, after the coming of talkies, in many of Marlene Dietrich's pictures. This dream world was invented, nevertheless, in the French and Amer ican films along with the early serials.

REALISM

To

find out

how

all

these films

were made, one need only

consult the film periodicals of the time, in which the problems of the directors are freely discussed. Capellani when questioned about methods of production replied:

The great problem is time. While the theater disposes of all the time in the world, we can only use the actors for a couple of hours in the mornings, since the rest of their day is taken up by the theater. Thus in two hours we have to take two or three
scenes, each of them often twice over. What is more, the film is compelled to be absolutely accurate. The public insists on it. Not

only the representation of characters but the settings too must be

The Prewar Film

ji

correct. Real antique furniture was used for Alary scrupulously Germinal was made in a mine. The Assassination of Zola's Tudor.

the Due d'Enghein was taken at Vincennes. In the Chevalier of Alahon Rouge the door which one sees close behind Marie An toinette as she enters prison was one which actually stood in the

Temple prison at the time of her incarceration, since removed to Vincennes where it was filmed. All the costumes are copied from
costumes of the period.
Capellani goes on to say that in one instance alone the cinema was condemned to inaccuracy as regards color. Red and pink photograph black, he says, blue and violet appear whitish. It is white linen or china. If the characters wear impossible to use

yellow or green they seem

is

indistinct.

The

best material to use

touched up with blacks and grays to bring out the values. New clothes must not be worn because they take the light badly. Tights must not be worn in scenes after the antique. Tablecloths, napkins, curtains and draperies must be gray. The patterns on china ought to be red or green. Genuine paintings must not be used because on the screen they look like oilcloth, so engravings or chromolithographs must be

some neutral-colored

stuff

substituted.

In spite of the use of trick photography, many acrobatic feats were demanded which necessitated the actors' being absolutely
fit all

the time.

M. Sablon
in

ences while playing

UOr

has recalled in an interview his experi qui Brule, about the burning of a

with a solitary sailor on board, fishing vessel all his with sea into the clothing on fire.

who

has to

jump

"When

obvious that

the film was in production," Sablon relates, "it was seemed particularly keen to undergo so

nobody

rapid a transition

from hot to cold

as first setting oneself

on

fire

and then plunging into an icy sea (it was December) promised to provide. I offered to take this dangerous role. They prepared
the boat

by pouring

100

liters

and

filling

the hold with straw.

of petrol, 50 liters of tar into it fuse connected the various

the boat. I parts of

wore an oilskin suit weighing 12 kilos and over it I had them wind strips of sacking. They poured gasoline over me and at a given signal the fuse was touched off. Enormous

7^

The History

of

Motion Pictures

flames shot up all over this storehouse of inflammables. Fire and smoke suffocated me as I ran along the boat, a living torch. Un
able to bear it any longer, I finally jumped overboard. The water was below zero and the sea very rough. Numb with cold I at
7

tempted vainly to swim. The boat appointed to rescue me had great difficulty in hoving to and it was a full quarter of an hour which seemed to me an eternity before they managed to haul me aboard. It was none too soon. Hampered by my heavy cloth ing and paralyzed with cold I was about to go under. The fol lowing day the boat was again made ready and I started all over
again.

The

entire

population of

Volendam

(for the action took

was watching from the shore. Women in little bonnets pointed wept, men with wide braces buttoned on with
place in Holland)
silver dollars

shook

their heads ominously.

Fishermen prophesied

my

certain death. Despite their prognostications I burned for the second time without serious injury; but I shall never forget mak

ing that film."

There were exploits even more daring. The audiences liked sensational scenes whether they were faked or not. In Flight

'for Life a woman appears on the top of a flaming tower impos sible for her to escape! At that moment an airplane appears and

begins to circle round, closer and closer to her. The airman throws her a rope, she grasps it and is drawn up into the ma chine. This was said to have been really done, in a Paris suburb. Another scene of the kind was the high spot of Through the Clouds, made in London. A young girl, desperately clinging to

the guide rope of a balloon, is on the point of letting go. At the fatal moment, a rescuer lassoes her round the waist. This was

photographed from

second balloon.

And

in

one American

film,

the actor, after consuming a hearty meal, inserts himself into a rocket ten feet long and a yard wide. charge of gunpowder hurls him into another world, but, at the end of the parabola of its flight, the rocket opens, a parachute with a parachutist emerges and calmly returns to earth, the actor having apparently suffered nothing worse than a little giddiness which might very well be attributable to the big lunch he had eaten.

One

is

hardly surprised, therefore, to read in the "for sale and

The Prewar Film

wanted" columns
this nature:

j$

of a film periodical of the period a request of

firm wishes to purchase three old to use in a naval battle/' In 1913 one company warships, bought two railroad locomotives to stage a train smash. Tickets were
sold to onlookers

"An American

and thousands paid

fifty cents to see

it.

Unhap
people

some miscalculation the pily, through were killed and about thirty injured.
there

boilers burst: seven

There were actors who specialized in accidents. In England was Lieutenant Daring, a past master of catastrophe for

whom

neither parachute descents, high dives, rope climbing nor hairbreadth escapes had any terrors, until one fine-day he was miserably killed by a clumsy "villain" who accidentally hurled
a
precipice.

him down

The

actress

Gene Gauntier was not

merely attacked by Bedouins in the heart of the Sahara, almost buried alive in the quicksands of Florida, laid out by a kick from a horse, hurled into the air by an exploding ammunition dump,
but was finally trapped in one of those extraordinary movie fires and only escaped from the burning house by tearing a hole through the roof with her bare hands.

But actors of

all sorts

known

as Gribouille,

were exposed to danger. Andre Deed, was swimming to safety with two com

a of police dogs at a convenient distance panions pursued by pack behind them. One of the actresses with him was seized with acute Andre Deed dived after her and cramp, gave a scream and sank. found that this unrehearsed but her unfortunately up brought incident had wasted a lot of time and that the pursuing animals were now on top of them, so that Deed was under the necessity of holding up the lady and fighting off the dogs (who of course did not know that they had arrived too precipitately) until help arrived. In one detective film Servas had two ribs smashed. In another costume drama Valbert had half an ear sliced off by a
rapier.

actor had the nerves of one hand severed. During a rehearsal of Richepin's The Snare one scene called for Mistinon the head with a hammer. The hammer guette to be knocked with cotton, but either insufficiently, or the had been

An

padded

actor

who

wielded

it

overdid

his

part: Mistinguette

was knocked

senseless,

74

The History

of Motion Pictures

Films were becoming costly. Each extra got five dollars a day. Three hundred costumes had to be hired for Alary Tudor seven hundred for Fatherland,, at a total cost of $4,000. Settings were
^

expensive. For
built a

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

the Edison

Company

whole medieval town. The building of Rome alone for Nero and Agrippina cost $6,000. For Kalem's From the Alanger to the Cross, in which episodes of the life of Christ were re-enacted in Egypt and in Palestine, forty-two actors were sent out to the Orient for several months. The film cost more than $120,000 and unfortunately appeared just after the Pope had con

demned
crowds

religious films.

Realism was extended even to the selection of actors.

in

The

Indian films, so popular in 1913-14, were said to be entirely composed of Ogolobos headed by their chieftain, Red Beaver. Prince Quirilio Behanzin, grandson of the famous king,

Red

demand to play royal princes. Other good-natured their services free, as when Mutual wanted to offered persons make a film of high society and asked a millionaire to lend them
was
in great
his Fifth Avenue residence. He consented. On the appointed day, the cameramen found themselves photographing not merely his gorgeous drawing room but a whole party of his guests as well,

of the most glittering members of the Four Hundred, and Paderewski, too. They played their parts admi rably, and the film, at least in New York, was a triumph. At the same time actors were already earning fabulous salaries

among them some

as well as international fame.

American
the Italian

stars,

Mary

Fuller and

Everybody in France knew the J. Warren Kerrigan, as well as

Francesca Bertini and Lydia Borelli. Cissie Loftus was earning $2,000 a week in America. Prince, Andre Deed and Max Linder earned over $20,000 a month. Cecile Sorel earned
stars,

$160 a day from Pathe, Rejane and Bartet $200 each and Sarah Bernhardt as much as $360 a day plus a percentage. Asta Nielsen signed a contract which guaranteed her $80,000 a year. Muratore and Lina Cavalieri made Manon Lescaut in Chicago and earned
in salary and percentages all of $200,000. cinema conservatory was opened in Palermo, and there was talk of starting a cinema course at the Paris Conservatoire.

The Prewar Film

75

FRENCH COMEDIES
It was not America but France that first gave us the most pre cious legacy of the prewar days the film comedy. On seeing again many of the prewar comedies it is impossible not to feel sad. They are often crude and the humor rudimentary, as is to

be expected, but they induce regret for what has since befallen a genre which in those days was really genuine film comedy, ca pable of taking trick photography and all the other cinematic
devices in
its

stride.

Melies, a profoundly simple

and good-

humored man, was the first to understand it. But other forgotten directors, between 1905 and 1914, also attempted authentic film
comedies and sometimes succeeded. Actually, much that has brought new inspiration to the cinema has been merely an in

from these early days. What were the settings of Cdliwhich so amazed everyone gari, by their nonrealism, in com with those of Melies, inevitably brought to mind by parison Robert Wiene's Hoffmanesque transcription? Rene Glair's great
heritance
est

merit

is

that he realized the necessity of studying not only

the

American comedies, especially those of Chaplin, but also the French comedies of 1905. The seeds of Rene Glair's Paris qui Dort were already present in a simple little film called Qnesime Horloger, one of a series

widely circulated before the war and recently revived. The actor in it was relatively unimportant, a mere buffoon in the tradition of the circus and cheap music halls. But the subject is one entirely to the taste of those early days when the movies pretended to be no more than a childish amusement. It is the story of a young man who is to inherit a fortune from an uncle in twenty years' time. To shorten the period of waiting, he tampers with the con trols of an electric clock and so arranges it that whole days shall
elapse in a

few minutes.

Life

is

consequently speeded up.

By

means of one of the simplest cinematic devices the contrary of the one used by Rene Glair in Paris qui Dort) which arrested both time and movement a joyous sequence of nonsensical and amus is being built: bricklayers ing conceits was contrived. A house

76

The History

of

Motion Pictures

and upholsterers are Imbued with extraordinary celerity, in the twinkling of an eye the house is up and finished, and beinoequipped with furniture, draperies and engravings in the taste of
the day.
are
still

marriage also takes place at top speed. The happy have couple hardly had time to exchange the nuptial kiss and
in
all

their bridal finery when their first child arrives (still in swaddling clothes and a little into a fine lad six feet bonnet) high. "The joys of family life are

and proceeds to shoot up

always the best," says a subtitle. This example one sandsindicates how the basic feeling for

among thou
despite
its

comedy,

exaggerations and faults, was at that time as truly original and cinematic as any of the films of Melies, of Rene Clair or the Marx Brothers.

Naturally not

all

the early attempts at

worthy. There were hundreds of crude

as comedy praise farces and, in particular,

were

spontaneous Film d'Art attempted to produce "refined" comedies, to which we owe so many subsequent film adaptations. In 1914 it was considered a triumph when Leon Beniere's Papillon dit Lyonnais le Juste was filmed with Polin as Papillon. Briefly, these translations from the stage had no other merit than to help de
edies, the

many with a military tinge. Some of the comedians specialized in this sort of thing, notably one Rigobert, who created the char acter of a stupid recruit who never learns to salute properly, ruins his uniform the first time he goes out and leads a miserable existence of fatigues and of trouble with his sergeant. Moreover, the Film d'Art was to wreak untold havoc in this division of film fare. As "low" com opposed to the

velop film acting; they deflected the film

its

comedy proper from

path.

Very different from those pale theatrical ghosts of films were the pictures of a few comedians of no great talent, perhaps, who confined themselves to genuinely cinematic material. have

We

already cited Onesime and Rigobert, but there was also Leonce, who, under this title, gained popularity and fame long before he

became known

Germany

for a branch of

Qood

Judge,

He had made his first films in Gaumont The Golden Lily, The The Boatman's Sweetheart, The Little Grenadieras

Leonce

Ferret.

The Prewar Film

all

77
1910

half a reel long.

Back

his

own

estimate)

two

in Paris in 1908 he made (according to or three hundred more films. About

he invented a comic character which was sustained through the enormously popular Leonce series, neither very good films nor But people laughed a lot at them and the film particularly witty. "Is there a man alive who does not know the journals wrote, big this podgy fellow?" This is a of face grinning long cry from the
gravity with
standing.
in Dranenfs Shoes for Zecca. he saw himself on the screen he remarked: "I never im agined I could look such a fool." Besides Dranem, there were series of films with Polycarpe, with Zigoteau and Calmo, with Boucot, who appeared in Gavroche, and Andre Deed, formerly an actor at the Theatre du Chatelet, who made two famous series for Pathe, the Boireau and the Gribouille series. Nor must we forget the little fellow they called Bout-de-Zan who was at once the envy and admira tion of our childhoodat three and a half years of age he was one of the most celebrated of actors. An enfant terrible, he terrorized his parents and his nurse. In Bout-de-Zan as a Vaudeville Author., for instance, we see him writing a love letter for his nurse, but he maliciously appoints a rendezvous for 8 A. M. instead of 8 P. M. The nurse is out when her handsome fireman-lover arrives at the

which they wrote later mark fame, when he had become

of Leonce Ferret of Koenigsa director with semiofficial

The comedian Dranem appeared

When

appointed hour. The evil child tells him to hide in the coal cellar and, of course, along comes a coal merchant and dumps a load of small coal all over him. The plot develops in the most far fetched manner, which the uncritical filmgoers of that time

thought perfectly splendid, fancying they were watching a sec

ond Dejazet.* It was also a

Through
caperings
*

series of comedies which made Rigadin's fame. countless shorts, the actor Prince as Rigadin, with his and his lugubrious clown's face and upturned nose,
fate,

with played the helpless Pierrot forever at odds

with men,

famous

actress

who made

her debut at the age of five in 1800. She

died in 1875.

78

The History

of Motion "Pictures

and inanimate objects. Always hopelessly in love, he was all the film comedians like Max Linder, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and even the master,
the forerunner of

women

was not yet ripe for a Charlie his audiences to tears, tried move never to Chaplin; Rigadin only to laughter, and always with the familiar stock in trade of the
Charlie Chaplin. But the time
circus buffoon.

He was

toire medalist of 1896, who film comedy from a scenario

an actor from the Varietes, a Conserva had been engaged first to play in a

by Max and Alex

Fischer,

The

Two

Burglars.

He

scored such a hit that he was asked to act in several

more
tor,

pieces

The Clown
as a

Ridiculous Legacy, Thy Neighbor's Petticoat, and The Pasha (with Mistinguette). Then his direc

Georges Monca (who was later to present Maurice Chevalier, schoolboy, some time before he appeared with Mistinguette in The Reversing Waltz), christened him Rigadin, under which name he appeared in one film per week from 1910 to 1920. Nothing came amiss to him, neither vaudeville nor the trick film (in Rigadin and His Sons he played the father and both of the two sons as well) nor parody. As Napoleon-Rigadin he
the astounded soldiery strolled abroad in imperial array, forcing to present arms as he passed. In Rigadin, Victim of Love he re ceived a letter bidding him to a rendezvous; of course the letter

was intended for somebody

the country,
tries to

walking, but sits insane, he tears off his coat, then his vest, then his pants.
elderly ladies, seeing

In Rigadin and the Ants he visits photograph a pretty girl whom he meets out down unknowingly on an anthill. Driven, almost
else.

Two

him

murder and summon

proves that the young girl lawyer, great Maitre Ciceron's firm. She undertakes his defense and he is ac

attired only in a shirt, scream bloody the police. is arrested. Fortunately, it is a member of the

He

quittedone of the

rare occasions in
his

Rigadin. Admittedly gradually taught the director

the action.

which all ends well for comedies are not very polished, but they

how to tell a story, how to simplify the worst depths of vaudeville and farce they gradually developed a comic style which was pictorial. It is pos sible to see the origins of genuine film comedy in Rigadin Seeks
Out of

The Prewar Film

hamper.

yg

Election, Rigadin as President, Rigadin as Foster-Father, especially in the last-named. The comedian receives a In it he finds

a baby.

He

tries to

return

it

to the post office, without success-

much

Chaplin in The Kid. Occasionally an accident provided unexpected comedy. In Rigadin and the Obstinate Lodger, Georges Monca had already
like

photographed
fell
ill

all

the scenes in the drawing

room when Rigadin

had
lost

Upon

his return to

work

a fortnight later he

twenty pounds.

When

the film finally appeared, the audiences

was was

laughed uproariously to see Rigadin always so plump when he in the drawing room and so thin in the other rooms; the film
a riot.

Rigadin was world-famous.

They

called

him Whiffles

in

Eng

land, Aloritz in Germany, Salustiano in Spain, Tartufini in Italy and Prcoz in the Slavonic countries. Imitators both in France and

renown. One of them was almost as wellwhereas Rigadin had a turned-up nose, the other had a long flat nose like an oyster-knife. This was Marcel Levesque. He had appeared on the stage in Le Petit Caf6, Le KUlllofij Triplcpxtte and other plays, and refused at first to act for the films. In 1910, however, he agreed to appear in The Ar rest of the Duchesse de Berry, under Paul Gavault for the Film cPArt, Impressed by Prince's success, he shortly afterwards went to suggest some ideas for comedies to Leonce Perret, He played in chase films like Tie Station Hotel and under Louis Feuillade
abroad added to
his

known

as himself;

fingouin the Im Marcel Bout-dc-Zan, Here, postor, Spring Levesque and Prince were the bright stars of the prewar comedy. The cinema owes much to them* They taught America a great deal But their
in

The Sleep-Walker, The

Is

Illustrious Boaster,

etc,

was to be dimmed by who was Chaplin's teacher.

luster

more

celebrated actor,

Max

Linder,

MAX UNDER

Max

an actor at the Ambigu, had

Linder, medalist of the Bordeaux Conservatoire, formerly the Varies, just been signed up by

#0

The History

of

Motion Pictures

where he appeared in Aliquette and Her Mother and The King, when he met Pathe, who invited him to make films. This was in
1905.

His

first

film

w as The
r

An
was

Unexpected Meeting and

a bitter
I

Collegian's First Outing, followed by Skater's Debut. The last-named

memory
it,"
I

for him. "This film cost

said. "I tore

me much more
smashed

than

earned by

he

my

hat for which

had paid

$5,

and

I lost

pants, top a pair of gold cuff links."

my

This did not deter him, however, from appearing later in an other skating film, Boxing Match on Skates, which in 1912 ran in the Paris cinemas for many weeks. Under different directors, but especially with Louis Gasnier,
the future director of

The

Exploits of Elaine,

Max worked

for

then asked for a salary of $30,000 a year Pathe for five years. with a three-months contract, and before long was earning even more than that. Pathe built up his reputation by careful pub "We understand that the gilded shackles which bind Max
licity:

He

Linder have attained the value of a million francs a year. One million! The imagination boggles at such a figure!" He was the most famous of them all, this rather prim and ele gant actor whom audiences regarded as such an "aristocratic"
.
.

comedian, and who had something of Andre Brule, of Victor Boucher and of Adolphe Menjou about him. His films, generally

were usually colored. They were the epitome of was then understood. Trick effects, comic situa comedy and falls are measured out skillfully in them; and if chases tions, cannot but be impressed by is the humor most of superficial one the restraint and obliqueness of Linder's acting, especially in con
a reel long,
as it

of his contemporaries. He suggests rather than provokes it. In his best films this merrylaughter andrew in a formal suit, who might have been a mere buffoon,
trast to the frenzied style

seems to prophesy Chaplin's performance and even, in pure com edy, almost to equal him. He made a great many films less perhaps than Rigadin but
still

many:

mous by Chaplin
Maid, Max

Rustic Idyll, which introduced the theme made fa in Sunny side, Max the Pedicurist, Max Earns a

Decoration, Max's Holidays,

Max

Collects Shoes,

Never Kiss

the

Takes Quinine, Max's Marriage. Max's Marriage opens

The Prewar Film

Si

with a subtitle: "Max is getting married, unknown to his uncle." Then one sees Max shutting his wife up in a trunk so as not to be parted from her while he pays a visit to this uncle. In Max at
take the place of a piece of official to the roll of drums and sculpture, calmly listening trumpets, the playing of the "Marseillaise" and the speeches. It is almost
the Inauguration,

we

see

him

with the beginning of City Lights. Just as in vaudeville, built around gags. But, unlike vaudeville, all the the plot gags instead of verbal. That is visual are here why Max Linder was
identical
is

the real creator of screen comedy. In Max Takes Quinine the title is only a pretext. Max is ill and swallows so much quinine that he becomes drunk. He picks a
first with a police commissioner, then an ambassador, then quarrel a general, each of whom challenges him to a duel. He hands the thrust upon him to the who are visiting cards they

policemen

trying to arrest him for drunkenness, and they obediently get him into the homes of the commissioner, the ambassador and the the arms of the general's wife. Max general actually, into
is

thrown out of the window and

falls at

Finally the feet of the three

policemen, who immediately come to attention. This skit is han dled so skillfully, the comic gestures are so expressive that it is amusing even today. The final salute of the police and one or

two other

incidents confirm the belief that

it

was Linder who

the indirect and visual language of the screen. really discovered There is a moment when Max, entangled in a tablecloth, sees a

policeman coming and for one brief moment flourishes the cloth at him like a toreador before a bull. It is only a tiny thing, but Chaplin alone has done anything better. The same lightninglike effects occur in the films of both men. Everybody sees the point

and the laughter is instantaneous. A Dog's Life, The Immigrant^ The Gold Rush, The Pawnshop were later to reveal this same

power of suggestion through symbolical gestures. After the war Max Linder, who had been to America, suffered much from comparison with Chaplin. He said: "Chaplin has been good enough to tell me that it was my films which led him to make films. He called me his teacher, but I have been glad enough was Max who was the myself to take lessons from him." But it

82
initiator.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

would be complete without a number of pictures by this comedian who was popular for so many years but now seems sadly forgotten. At the period under review he had as yet made only short films and it is perhaps in these that
film library

No

for he could not always sustain the pace of his acting, the through a feature-length picture. The nicety his and his of malicious irony expressions make his per gestures

he was

at his best,

shall meet him formances even today seem models of finish. his second of fullness in the flowering, in Be My again later, The and Luck Bad Years' Seven King of the Circus. At the Wife, the two really original were Melies and he time we speak of,

We

workers

in the film.

AMERICAN COMEDIES
In comparison with Linder, the American comedies at first seemed very poor. It was America, however, that, instructed by France's example, was to discover and develop the elements of film comedy as first outlined by Linder, Prince and others. It is true that chase films had been made in France, for one of the very earliest pictures, The Pumpkin Race, was of this type. But
child of the circus parade, developed this purely vulgar element, into something of real importance in the hands of the creator of American comedy, Mack Sennett.
in importance.

had been discovered by Vitagraph,* where he rapidly rose But it was as producer of the Keystone comedies for Kessel that he was to invent his characteristic brief pieces, filled with chases, falls and various diversions. He introduced the
"bathing
films),
girls,"

He

those charming
a

young

ladies in undress

who

al

ways appeared

whole troupe

who

so pleasingly

at a time (like the girls in Melies' kicked up their pretty legs and brought,

for no very good reason, a dash of operetta into all their scenes. Sennett's comedies were always burlesques or else parodies of detective dramas, like those Sherlock Holmes absurdities he made with Fred Mace. His most important contributions lay in the
*
as
It

an actor and then

was Biograph, not Vitagraph, where Sennett learned his metier, first as director. He went thence straight to Keystone.

The Prewar Film

8$

realms of visual humor. In the circus you can make people happy by kicking up a lot of noise. On the screen, sights must replace sounds and so, in place of noisy thwackings, Sennett substituted
the pie, so admirably suited to be spread over the human face. He not only introduced the pie to the screen: he must be said to have

abused

it.

In these lively comedies that seemed to be making fun even of themselves, what most delighted audiences was the atmosphere of nonsense in which the characters moved. The unreality and

heroine carried off by masked bandits, the chase in automobiles, or trains are constant factors. These admirable short
airplanes

comedies embroider simple themes with unflagging inventiveness and the use of every device known to cinematography. Men take of a hundred yards, jump over trains, impale themselves on
leaps

the top of masts. The automobile chases especially, making use as they did of rapid-motion photography, began to take on a
delighted many grotesque quality Lloyd or Buster Keaton picture. Part of the fun consisted in the fact that these films were a parody of the automobile chases

which

has

us since in

a Harold

course in so many screen dramas of the day. grimly serious, of were introduced every few minutes to tickle conceits Then fresh
the audience and save the film

from

its

own

naivete.

traveler's

hat blows

off

when he

looks out a

window.

He

it as it through the train and just manages to grab it sends a rnotorboat at aimed A last coach. hurtling for torpedo A sailor a race. wins it that so double ward at suspends speed, his hammock from the door of a railway carriage, where, swing

runs madly flies past the

ing in the breeze,

it

were ninepins.

The

motorcycles swoop

mows down telegraph poles as though they action inevitably winds up with a mad race, down waterfalls, cars rush down rapids and
good humor blends the
in

a sort of fine critical sense as well as

whole
ica

into an endless delight.

first organized those groups of specialists who have developed film making into an art as precise as clock work. Theirs is the task of thinking up incidents which, when into a plot, will set people laughing-it may artfully introduced

Sennett

Amer

be at something

as

a mere kick shrewdly delivered, a simple as

$4

The History

of

Motion Pictures

pie thrown, a chair which collapses or a crook pursued by his victim. It is up to these men to think up ideas: they are gagmen. Along with Sennett and Keystone some of his collaborators

must be mentioned. These \vere people whom he discovered and developed, for he was an incomparable teacher. They were Alack Swain, Fred Mace, Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle, better known as Fatty. There were also Al St. John, called Picratt in France, and Ben Turpin. Gloria Swanson was one of his pupils. Most important of all, there was Chaplin.

THE COMING OF CHAPLIN

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in the spring of 1889 in a

London suburb. He was the son of a singer and a dancer, Charles and Hannah Chaplin. His father died. His mother was of Jewish extraction. When she found no work dancing she took in sew ing and taught her sons, Charles and Sydney, to sew, too. At ten years of age Charles made his first appearance in the music halls,
doing a clog dance. He became an actor and played Billy, the office boy, in Sherlock Holmes. He learned the rudiments of his art in London with Karno's
tions of circus

pantomime troupe, who faithfully preserved the ancient tradi and pantomime and gave their own versions of old

favorites like The Drunkard''s Return, The Bicycle Thief, The Boxing Lesson, The Clumsy Juggler. Charlie was seventeen when he joined them: they were to be his university. He stayed with them for five years, and traveled to America with them more than once. There are traces of this influence in many of his films, one of which, One A. M., is constructed around the theme of a pantomime produced by Fred Karno in which actors represented

the various props, furniture, carpets, etc.

But

it

was from
his

acquired
I

his mother, so Chaplin says himself, that he all-important gift for observation.

often

wonder

* [he has said]

if it

if I

cess in
*

pantomime

had not been for

should ever have made a suc my mother. She was the

John Lane, London,
1922,

Quoted from Louis

Delluc's Charlie Chaplin,

pp. 56-57.

The Prewar Film

most astounding mimic
I

85

ever saw. She would stay at the window for hours, gazing at the street and reproducing 'with her hands, eyes and expression all that was going on down there, and never stopped. It was in watching and observing her that I learned, not only to translate emotions with my hands and features, but also to study mankind. Her power of observation had something

wonderful about

it.

One morning

she saw

Bill

Smith come

down
his

into the street. "There's Bill Smith," she said. "He's feet and his boots aren't cleaned. He seems

drawing

had a row with his wife, and come away without breakfast. He must have, because he's going into the baker's for a roll" And
of observing people was the most valuable thing my mother could teach me, for it is by this method that I have got to know the things that people find funny.
sure enough, in the course of the day, 1 Smith had had a row with his wife. This

angry. Flf bet he's

would discover

that Bill

way

In 1913 Chaplin

made

his first film. Kessel

hall.

had seen the

little

Chaplin was reluctant to leave the stage, despite an offer of $150 a week. Sennett (still producing Keystone comedies for Kessel) talked him around,

Englishman

in a

Broadway music

and Charlie made The Kid Auto Races. His name was not men tioned in the billing, or indeed until the time of Tillies Punctured Romance, which was anything but his first film though one of his longest for years to come. He gained popularity almost im mediately, though he did not immediately adopt the costume which was to be so peculiarly his. He had seen men in Whitechapel in clothes like that, with bowler and cane.
overlarge trousers,
it is

As

for the

he borrowed them one day from and then Arbuckle stuck to them. At first Charlie wore a Fatty forked beard and a considerable mustache. The beard soon van ished, but right up to the war his mustache remained fairly bushy. He made about forty films with Keystone: Making a Living,
said that

Dough and

Dynamite., Caught in the Cabaret, Musical Tramps Musical Career) one of the best, an uninterrupted flow of (His comicalitiesT/je Kid Auto Races, By the Sea, Caught in the Rain (Between Showers), The Star Boarder, His Prehistoric Past,

The Property Man,

are

pure

farce, in

etc., etc., often with Mabel Normand. They which the poor wretch is the butt of misfor-

S6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

Keystone's decided to tempt him away. They offered him $1,250 a new week, and he began to work for them in His New Job.
rival,

tune, just like the traditional clown. He was a sort of delicately articulated puppet in a disorderly world. The public liked him, so much so that Essanay,

Charlie was gradually to emerge, although the little figure in the large pants had already been established while he was with
stone.

He

Key

was
little

still

others, a

simply a clown, a little more skillful than the funnier, with that touch of humility so
artfully

introduced which was to be his greatest quality. Intelligent mem bers of the industry began to realize just what his merits were. It was not until during the war that Europe went mad over him,
yet by 1914 he had already become an actor of importance and
his own and his own potentialities. gifts farseeing individual might have predicted the important role he was to play in comedy but not, certainly, that he would be for so many years the one all-round genius of the screen.

had realized

THE THIRD INDUSTRY OF THE WORLD

In 1914 it was estimated by the Italian paper La Tribuna that the film industry represented a capital investment of twelve bil lions of francs and had thus risen to third rank in in

importance

international trade, next to wheat and coal. In France alone the cinemas took in sixteen million francs at the box office, and the
Paris cinemas nine million.
It

was the

liked.

films we have just considered that the prewar public The cinema was no longer, as it had been at first, confined

to uneducated or
arts,

humble audiences.

Celebrities of the various

interviewed as to their opinion of the cinema, already displayed a sound interest in it, if not positive enthusiasm. When the Sultan of Morocco visited Paris he was taken to a film studio and left with the ubiquitous Mme. Robinne a written testimonial of his enjoyment. People were already wandering if the cinema would kill the
scientists

famous

when

theater. "I confess," said Courteline * in an interview, "that I like

*

French

satirical

writer,

1860-1929.

The Prewar Film

the films enormously. endanger the theater.
I

8j

do not

see that they

\vill

Good

plays

can or ever will always have an audience

and bad plays will always make money." The popular novelist Leon Sazie repeated arguments already familiar: "The cinema will be the salvation of the theater. It has already abolished in its own halls both ouvreuses and tipping, its seats are comfortable and there are no intervals." And he went time and on to insist that the theater had been dead for a Ions 3 would be revitalized by the influence of the cinema.
noncommittally, in 1914: "Nothing lacks interest for the philosopher. I went to the cinema years ago and have seen films from the start. Obviously this invention
suggests

Henri Bergson

said, rather

many new

ideas to us philosophers.

Above

all,

the

films will be a priceless

document for our successors, whereas we ourselves undoubtedly entertain the most erroneous ideas about what the past was really like." He then continued in well-chosen words to speak of the usefulness of the cinema as a means

whereby

offices in this direction

actors could study themselves, and compared with the revelations that

its

good

photography had

provided for painters. This was a general opinion. The success of actors like Wague and Severin-Mars had also made people suspect that film acting

was
1

October essentially nearer to pantomime than to theater. 8, 1912 Colette, then a music-hall actress still known as Colette

On

Willy, told a newspaperman: "There is no question that the best films, all the really good films, are those in which the scenarist and the actors have conceived and interpreted everything accord

and by its means alone.'* This opin ing to the rules of pantomime the time and even today remains at ion was undoubtedly correct
partly true.

such an extent, then, writers, actors and journalists really concerned themselves about the cinema. It w as not generally considered that it was an art. Few suspected that it was, above both human life and nature all, a new language able to express literature or the stage. But of that and unlike of its own in a
T

To

way

people realized that

it

was curiously appealing.

overlooked,
is

One

fact, hitherto

of considerable importance.

SS

The History

of Motion Pictures

writers and painters of the day who had al ready half-seriously and half-jokingly gone wild over Famontas, so beloved of Guillaume Apollinaire, were profoundly inter

The advance-guard

ested in this
ered. In

work
Point.

of expression which mankind had discov June 1914 Marinetti, the high priest of futurism, began on a futurist film in collaboration with Valentine de Saint-

new form

The settings and the costumes were all to be designed on futurist lines and to introduce the spectator to a quite imaginary world, the world of painters and musicians, a world like that of
outbreak of war prevented its be rough outline undoubtedly constituted the first attempt at an advance-guard film anywhere in the world. The cinema had earned respect. As early as 1911 there was a
Caligari in years to come. ing made, but Marinetti's

The

for the creation of a film library, which we still lack.* realized, however, that almost the only films of real merit produced between 1908 and that time were the comedies,

demand
was

It

little

and particularly those of Max Linder and Mack Sennett. People then chiefly admired the film dramas, which flattered the public with their bombastic poses, famous actors and third-rate literary
flavor.

No need to condemn them further. They were nearer to the theater (and what a theater!) than to the screen. Their in credible plots, the absurd gestures of the actors (of even the

greatest of them, even Sarah) incite us to nothing but laughter. isolated shot, perilously near to the worst kind of picture postcard, yet displaying an effort to

Yet here and there appears an

prove that the film
is

primarily a visual

art.

Gradually the pic

torial compositions, the landscapes and the details of the settings for instance in that final shot of Cabiria) become (as as significant as the actors.

remember
the future.

overpraised Let us forget the actual results, and the intentions. There was hope in them for only good

The
syntax.

film makers
It
is

difficult to set

were searching to discover the rules of a new an exact date, but whether it was in

of Modern Art Film Library, established in New York motion pictures of all types and all periods in its archives and makes them available for study throughout American educational in stitutions. The Cinematheque Frangaise in Paris, founded in 1936, the ReichsfUmkamrner in Berlin, N.I.S. in Moscow also have extensive film archives.
in 1935, preserves

*The Museum

The Prewar Film

89

the struggles of the Film d'Art or In Griffith's pictures, the cinema began to develop from the moment when someone photo graphed a spray of flowers shedding their petals against an au tumnal landscape to indicate the waning of passion, or suggested young love with shots of vernal blossom. These simple artifices, these absurd associations of Ideas, this Imagery already worn

threadbare by poetry and fiction, were nevertheless prime nov elties in the history of an art destined for so long to derive Its
inspiration

from symbolism and ideographs. Through pantomime on the one hand and symbolism on the other, the art of the film developed during the prewar years.

PART THREE
Cinema "During
the 'World

'War

1914-1918

.HE HI outbreak of war in 1914 almost put an end to the history of the film [in France Ed.]. Most of the actors were called to the colors. Audiences mo
mentarily needed no distractions, the studios were commandeered
it seemed as if movies were the one thing which the army did not want. Overnight, the French film lost its pre-eminence. In Germany likewise the industry, struggling feebly against the competition of its Scandinavian neighbors, seemed doomed to ex

and

pire.

For four

those

made

frontiers.
first,

no films were made in France and were not shown outside the national Germany The supremacy passed to the neutral countries to Italy
years, virtually
in

'then to

Sweden and

finally to the

United

States.

Outstand

ing events were the appearance of an Italian film, Cabiria, of a brilliant American film, The Cheat, and the rise of Chaplin's popularity. Meanwhile, despite a few feeble efforts, France really passed out of the picture though it is true she gathered together

some

quite extraordinary newsreels in her military archives.

NEWSREELS

it

During the war, despite initial difficulties and some opposition, was soon realizedlargely through the activities of l\L Prevost

of Pathe
film unit

how
was

important films might be

as a

record of events.
divisions,

established in

most of the army

and cam

eramen, often with extreme courage, ventured everywhere on the field of battle in the most dangerous spots and even into sub marines and airplanes. Newsreels became of the first importance to distributors both in France and abroad. Eclair- Journal, CineGazette and the Agence Generale Cinematographique issued in numerable scenes of actual warfare, of the transportation of sup
the plies to

Army, Army.

Front, of the arrival of the British Expeditionary of the burning of Louvain and the retreat of the Belgian These violent and artless scenes were greatly liked by the

public and were widely shown until censorship stepped in to curtail the activities of the cameramen. Even then they continued
93

$4
to grind

The History
away
as best

of

Motion Pictures
all

they could on

of the fronts.

Today

there are thousands of miles of

war

film stored

away

in the mili

happened montage with added sound trackusually consisting of nauseating commentary in the worst of taste.
recently, to

tary archives which few people have ever seen. and then the authorities permit someone to fragment of this material to insert in a movie or, as has

Now

exhume

make

into a film

The

pictures themselves, covered with "rain" and yellow with age, nevertheless retain a singularly moving quality and lead us to anticipate the time when some future of the screen will

poet

delve into this living record and recompose a visual the past out of what other men

symphony

of

photographed twenty years ago.

a sort of

As they
shot of
as

exist

life.

now, these war records represent Some among them are accidentally

snap

beautiful, such

one film of inundated Flanders with troops on the march splashing through the mud a scene of earth and water which looks, in its contrasting blacks and whites, like a Goya. There
are shots of groups of refugees drearily making their way along the soaking roads, with bird cages slung under their carts and

an aged crone perched on a bale of straw. One of the most

stir

ring of them shows the parade-ground in front of the Invalides where the high old-fashioned taxis are assembled, packed with soldiers, ready to set off pell-mell in the great drive for the

Marne.

The scenes of actual fighting are confusing and all look much The best of them date from 1918, and show a wide pano rama of the Front dotted with tiny men advancing, widely spaced out, under machine-gun fire. The most valuable things these war
alike.
is to preserve small precise detailed shots of a wounded a stretcher, a corner of a trench, little Poincare like a truck driver in his black pants and peaked cap, the fidgety Crown the Czar Prince, hearing Mass with the Czarina at his side in a feathered hat, and Clemenceau the only civilian who escapes looking ridiculous with his enormous mustaches, his balaclava helmet and a fierce gleam in his gray eye. Then there are the aerial fights, the sailing of the Lusitania, Fonck looking like a

records do

man on

mere schoolboy and Guynemer

as thin as a rail, the

Germans

in

The Cinema During

retreat, the troops

the

World War

$5

marching into Strasbourg, the Victory Parades

Here are the Americans, slain by the thousands time first the they went into battle, the turbancd Indians and white war of the Italians in white uniforms amid that strange snows. There must be much else also hidden away in the the Alpine
in
all

the capitals.

archives, awaiting the hand of a master editor. The little that we have seen, usually issued upon the occasion of the death of some

distinguished figure like Albert of Belgium, Alexander of Serbia war-record films, re or Clernenceau, or in one of the

clumsy

mains of abiding and catastrophe,

years.

interest. In these artless reels,

is

born of accident
all

some of the

finest

material of

the

war

i.

The

Italian

7ilm

IN OTHER countries film production continued as before. For the first months of the war Italy was not a participant, and when she did come in, her position was such that she could easily con tinue to turn out those movie spectacles so popular at the time. Each big producing firm in Italy had its own company of actors under annual contract. Actors like Emilio Ghione (who was a director as well as an actor, and has written a brief essay on the Italian film), actresses like Maria Jacobini, Gianna TerribiliGonzales of the unforgettable name, and the pre-eminent star
Francesca Bertini, directors
like Gabriellino

d'Annunzio, Negroni,

a picturesque and lively Righelli and Guazzoni all made up also Augusto Genina and Carmine Gallone, were There group. who were later to direct some fairly good films in France. Ghione's films, such as The Masked Amazon and particularly the series called Za-la-Mort, as well as those of Negroni and of PasBetween Men and Beasts, etc.), all exhibited the quali (Gipsy Love, same emphatic style, the same rather touching naivete, the same overabundance of gestures and declamatory motions. The worst faults of the American film were already apparent here, and on an even larger scale. Film stars in Turin and Rome were far more and exigent than they have ever been in Hollywood,

pretentious

y6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

Francesca Bertini, Hesperia and Pina Menicelli all created tre mendous scenes with their producers and their directors, threat

ened to stop work unless they were given immense contracts, came late or not at all to rehearsals and engaged in bitter feuds with one another. Francesca Bertini insisted on making a Camille because Hesperia had just made one. Each of these ladies was backed by a lawyer, Bertini by Barattolo and Hesperia by Mecheri, both of them millionaires who engaged in a mutual contest of "bigger and better" films and financial coups, to the lasting of the ac injury of the Italian film. Actors too, in emulation insisted on being tresses, all became extremely temperamental,
given contracts and thought up fresh ways of being difficult. Febo Man, while making Attila, refused to wear a beard, where upon Alberto Capozzi, appearing in St. Paul, declared that he

saw no reason why he should sport so ridiculous an appendage and insisted on being clean-shaven too. This war of the beards was typical. Incidents of the kind did not prevent the Italian films from
being very successful. By the time people had got used to the idea of the war, the Italians realized that the war itself could be the Father exploited. They produced The Honor of Dying -for
of Old England. As Maciste was Maciste the Bersaglieri, Maciste the popular, they turned out Alpinist, and dragged the huge furniture-mover through every

land and

The Fighting Blood

big war film, The Survivor, was the presence of the Italian ambas given its premiere in France in the sador. "The public hailed representative of our gallant Ally

conceivable heroic situation.

with unheard-of enthusiasm and applauded the adventures of the valiant soldier to the echo." The scenario of the film was writ ten by Giannino Antona Traversi, the ambassador's brother-inlaw.
Italy

was making three

different kinds of

filmwar

films, of

which The Survivor was an example,

spectacles of ancient times and the Cabiria that followed it which, like production naturally, was Salainmbdj and sentimental films. Two of the best-liked of the third type were Wedded in Death with Lina Cavalieri and

Lucien Moratori, and The Royal Tiger which introduced a

y

new

The Cinema During

star,
life

the

World War
new "modern"

$7
furni

Pina Menicelli. This was one of those dramas of modern

inspired

by Henry

Bataille, full of fine

ture, adultery, veils, bouquets

This tragic piece had a Slavic setting and concerned a mysterious Russian princess. The public loved it; indeed, people at that time were not very criti cal When a film appeared rather freely modifying Othello no one objected, but when the firm Ambrosio made a Julius Caesar in which Brutus appeared as Caesar's son there were some ad
sofas.

and

verse

comments and the Italians were only forgiven because they had managed their crowd scenes so well: the crossing of the

Rubicon was considered marvelous. Otherwise, the Italians were extremely popular and everybody went indifferently to see Quo Vadis, which was always being revived, or Lydia Borelli in some drama like The Moth, The Wedding March or The Daughter of
Jorio (after d'Annunzio and regarded as the very
art), in
last

word

in

original by d'Annunzio), in Carmen or even in Crime and Punishment. None of these, however, was as successful as Cabinet, which people continued to talk about for it had been after years, long supplanted at the Vaudeville by

The Ship (from an

Christus,

which ran

for

two hundred and

fifty nights.

This was

the most complete and for many years the best of the religious films. In some parts of the world, especially in the Orient, this same Christus is revived every Easter: crowds weep and groan

while watching the Crucifixion, women faint and children go into trances. This is perhaps the strangest fate that has ever be fallen a film, to become thus, despite its falsities and its taint of

commercialism, an object of piety and a cause of

tation.

spiritual

exal

few French but otherwise bowed down everyone producers protested feebly, before the "quality" of the Italian films. Thanks to their alliance with Pathe they had a peculiarly favorable position enjoyed by no other importations, for it was not until towards the end of the war that similar facilities were granted to the Americans. Yet
Italians

The

had conquered the film market.

they, too,
oly, screens.

were already on their way to winning a world monop and were gradually establishing themselves on European

The History

of

Motion Pictures

2.

The American 7ilm*

THE INDUSTRY

PARAMOUNT had won its supremacy at a most favorable moment. The war had paralyzed all but the Italian and the American pro ducers. The American firms soon established distributing centers
which assured an outlet for their films, despite the pro of the French producers. Actually, opposition to American films did not reach serious proportions until 1919, and during the two preceding years the Americans, with the valuable help of M. Jacques Haik, had entrenched themselves firmly. In the United States the native films were prospering greatly. The Italian films had attracted a whole new audience of former
in Paris
tests

theatergoers, who were willing to pay good prices to see films which were well presented and well advertised. The day of the nickelodeon was over, and the luxurious temples now being raised to the seventh art made it possible to charge much higher prices of admission. It was estimated that Paramount could make a net profit of thirty-five thousand dollars on an average film, putting

out one film a week.

Paramount was turning out every kind of movie films copied from the Italian spectacles, films like the French -films (forty films based on stage plays, short comedies, travel films both in
black and white and in color, music-hall turns and war films
it

began to vie with French films in their hatred of German barbarism and their expressing enthusiasm for the preservation of civilization. It is even said that
all.

made them

American

films

now

Germany to bolster up hatred of France, the hereditary enemy, and enthusiasm for the preser vation of German civilization.
Meanwhile the American film was developing rapidly, but largely outside of Paramount, just as earlier it had developed out*

similar films of theirs served in

This section,

like the earlier

ones (pp. 59-68, 82-86)

(q.v.).

is

Hampton's History of the Movies

largely based

on

The Cinema During

side of the

the

World War

$$

General Film. Progress was due largely to the work of D. W. Griffith, whose most famous picture, The Birth of j Nation, set out on the road to wealth and glory in 1915. The Birth of a Nation encountered considerable difficulties at the onset. Its story was based on a well-known novel concerning the Civil War. This subject, ever dear to Americans, offered real
scope to a man who had already realized what could be done with cowboys and Indians, and leamt much from the Italian
clearly be a costly undertaking. Griffith, proposed spending a hundred thousand dollars on the film, was stubbornly opposed in his scheme by Mutual, for whom he was now directing. He ran here and there, applied to various bankers and after every kind of difficulty formed a new company called Epoch with one of his friends, 'Harry Aitken. His own master at last, Griffith was now able to put into execution ideas he had long dreamed of and some of which he had already ex perimented with successfully. He had broken away utterly "from theatrical influences, under which films were produced as' a suc
it

spectacles; but

would

who

cession of short scenes played in front of a stationary camera, Melies, or rediscovered for himself, various devices for smoother continuity. He utilized these eagerly, not in order to create an effect, but rather in order to discover a new

He borrowed from

technique, and to interpret the material in a new and original manner. At the same time he used the camera as Melies had

never done
skill,* still

as a mobile instrument, moving it about in order to the most effective of the action. register aspect photographic

rudimentary but daringly original, gave Griffith's work an expressiveness unlike anything hitherto seen. In addition, Grif fith was largely a maker of melodramas of the good old school, and he discovered how to cut his films so as to give the maximum
stress to

the vicissitudes out of which these thrilling affairs were

built up.

success.

These technical elements were not the only reasons for his The subject he had chosen also served him well, and
poor or
trivial

certain
*

elements only served to heighten

by conwho
de

Griffith's

serves a place in the

cameraman for many long years was G. movie hall of fame.

W.

Bitzer,

wo
trast

The History
what was meritorious

of Motion Pictures
in
it.

The

Birth of a Nation

the era of reconstruction in the South in a

light.

showed somewhat romantic

The Ku Klux Klan played

a glorious and active role, while

the Negroes appeared principally as deep-dyed villains indulg ing in acts of terrorism. Was this deliberate? It had an imme
diate result.

The

first

showings of the film were the occasion

for angry brawls. Feeling ran higher and higher until in Boston a riot broke out during which the crowds and the police fought

for twenty-four hours.

useful.

The

Everybody
riot.

in

America wanted to

resultant publicity was extremely see the film which had

caused a

This

first

big "political" film

made

Griffith famous,

and

also

revealed the immense

the medium. potentialities of

TRIANGLE CORPORATION
success of Griffith and Aitken gave rise to great ambi tions. Financiers, dazzled by the sums earned in a few weeks by Griffith's associates,* were now willing to entrust vast sums to

The

make another Birth of a Nation, pro and riots draw more voke correspondingly big profits. Griffith with the alliance two most successful directors of the an formed and Thomas Sennett Ince and, with Aitken, formed Mack day,
him. Everyone wanted to
the Triangle Corporation. Griffith,
cial

who had

always taken espe

pains in selecting his actors, was yet unable to avoid the Euro pean errors which had been responsible for the Films d'Art. The

new

firm immediately set about trying to sign up America's most famous actors. Into this company carne Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart, but even more important were Mack Sennett and
Charlie Chaplin.

The public was all prepared to bless Triangle's efforts, for in the United States the same thing was happening that had hap
pened
in
as the elite

France in 1908. A part of that public which is regarded had condescended to interest itself in the new art.

Now

these people, as usual, believed that good films could only be made by employing well-known and popular actors and em* The Birth of a Nation cost approximately $85,000 and grossed upwards of $15,000,000.

The Cinema During

the

World War

101

ploying them in productions which would be costly and in which, therefore, only the most elevated sentiments could be expressed. special cinema was rented for these people, the Knick erbocker Theatre in New York, in which they paid theater prices and warmly applauded the new films. The common ordinary public, however, which cared nothing for art and tragic emotions and great gestures, proved uncnthusi-

were less polite and much less prejudiced by French public, they simply declared that the "great actors" acted very badly. In any case, an actor who is a celebrity in New York may very well be unknown in Alabama. So it turned out that the large public very quickly learned to avoid these elegant actors and to keep away from Triangle's films. The firm was so well financed that it would have been able to continue awhile but that it was hoist with its own petard. Many film stars were already earning big salaries. In order to sign up the famous stage actors it had been deemed wise to offer them even larger sums. The film people quickly realized that they were better "box office" at worse pay than these stage grandees. They demanded increases, and Triangle was under the necessity of paying two sets of actors at top prices, one set engaged on long contract and no good at all, the other very good indeed but
astic.

As they

also

tradition than the

continually demanding

high rentals demanded, out of existence.

more money. Exhibitors refused to pay the and it was not long before Triangle passed

THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF MRS.

Triangle had done
star system.

PICIvFORD
trie

Every
It

actor

much to enhance salaries and to create now wanted to earn more than his
r

co-

workers.
their

The more

demands.

popular they realized they w ere, the bolder was Mrs. Pickford who set the example. Not

for nothing had this little woman trailed for so many years from theater to theater, under circumstances anything but comfort
able, in the

Thespis' chariot. She knew exactly what an meant how to make the most of it. Her bonnet and engagement and her gentle expression were a mere mask for her exceptional

wake of

2O2
ability

The History

of

Motion Pictures

and her admirable grasp of affairs. As soon as she foresaw her daughter's success, she also foresaw what use it could be put to. Mary's early successes nowise caused Mrs. Pickford to lose her head, and one is torn between admiration of the stub bornness with which she could argue a point and the rapidity with which she came to the point of view that a salary of $1,000
a

week

is

mere

pittance.

When they finally traced Chaplin he was in the bathtub and negotiations had hiding place, conducted through the half-open door. Every now and brother Sydney passed back and forth with fresh proposals.
foot

Mrs. Pickford's ambitions were rivaled by those of Charlie little later Chaplin. He had signed up in 1914 at $150 a week. he joined Essanay at $1,250 and at the end of the year announced that he was free to consider offers. Both Chaplin and his brother were determined to profit by the situ Sydney good businessmen, ation. They a on train and width of a continent hopped put the between themselves and Los Angeles. They were followed hot

by

the producers.

to his

to be

then,

After

some argument, Chaplin agreed to accept a contract of $10,000 a week. The contract was not actually signed, however, and this a enabled rival firm to make another bid. Hardly had oversight to Chaplin agreed accept $10,000 a week when he signed up elsewhere at the same figure plus a bonus of $150,000. So it was
that Chaplin joined Mutual.

redoubtable Mrs. Pickford was still full of fight. She had already obtained $7,000 a week for Mary when she learnt about
Chaplin's new contract. All through 1915 she conducted a war fare of threats, stratagems and ruses to regain the lost ground. She was victorious in the end, and "little Mary" was made happy

The

with $10,000 a week and a substantial percentage. These events were the despair of the various producers, who foresaw demands from all their players for ever larger and larger

The system of distribution commonly practiced at that time did not really permit of such an outlay. The directors of Paramount, and especially Hodkinson, refused to change their methods. This obstinacy shortly proved a godsend to Adolph
salaries.

Zukor.

By means

of a series of complex and highly ingenious

The Cinema

Dirring the

World War

maneuvers he succeeded in getting Hodkinson out of Paramount, and then gained possession of Triangle by offering Aicken, in the
midst of his
difficulties,

some favorable

distribution contracts In

order to get control of Alary Picfcford. So, one fine day, the third industry of the world passed under the control of a patient Jewish
furrier.

ZUKOR AND
Zukor
to

HIS WORRIES

a new planned dictatorship principle of distribution, that of exclusive rights. He had noticed how dearly the American public loved the stars, and decided that if he signed them all up and rented their films exclusively to his own customers then he could control the market. The" passion of the public for the film stars was such that a movie theater
his

found

on

which could show none of them might as well close. This was the weapon Zukor employed against theater owners who re
fused to sign up at his own terms for the films he was produc ing. At the same time he raised film rentals, which of course made

The most powerful of them banded and formed a sort of together co-operative association, First Na tional, and with the help of Zukor's competitors established a hold in several cities. By 1918 Zukor's position was seriously challenged. This fight between the two groups incited the stars to make even bigger demands: Chaplin left Mutual to accept "more than a million dollars a year." Mary Pickford, the keystone of Zukor's power and his trump card with exhibitors, was also
the theater owners furious.

tempted to leave him. At the expiration of her contract demanded remuneration in salary and percentages which would have netted her between $1,200,000 and $2,000,000 a year. If Zukor had agreed, he would have been compelled to increase his rentals beyond a point which the exhibitors would tolerate; yet if he refused her, his competitors would profit thereby. It was a new idea which finally decided Zukor. The directors and the scenario writers and, to some extent, the whole technical
seriously

she

staff

was being attached

of the studios had begun to feel that too much importance to the stars and not enough to the films.

104

e History of

Motion Pictures

Those who had studied

Griffith claimed that his pictures had been successful because of their conception and execution, not on account of the actors. Was not The Birth of a Nation a prime example of a film without stars? This was the attitude to adopt for the future: it would lighten the financial burden, and the films as a result would be more original, better made and at least
as attractive to the

public.

This attitude was adopted most notably by a director asso ciated with Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille. At the end of 1918 he suggested an experiment to Zukor. He proposed making two films without any well-known actors in them, Old Wives for New and another version of The SquaiD Man. The two films, dis tributed under exactly the same conditions as those of Mary Pickford, proved to be exactly as profitable as hers. DeMille was convinced thereby that the time had come gradually to give up featuring well-known stars, whose increasing demands were bound sooner or later to ruin the producers who continued to employ them. It was the opposite of Zukor's previous system; he did not accept the idea readily. Finally he half-adopted it, by putting DeMille in charge of one part of Paramount, with instructions to experiment boldly with films minus stars, while he himself continued to operate the rest of the concern as before. Mary Pickford and her mother thereupon passed over to First Na
tional.

D.

W. GRIFFITH
had brought into prominence,

The man whom

these events

Wark
man

especially after the success of The Birth of a Nation, was David Griffith. It was through that film, then with Intolerance
all with Broken Blossoms, that this thirty-five-year-old attained his real development. Without positive genius, and entirely lacking in a sense of proportion, Griffith was the real

and above

film, at once its Cimabue and its Dumas number of films besides those mentioned The fils. Through any Great Love, The Greatest Thing in Life, Hearts of the World,

father of the

American

The Cinema Dining

the

World Wjr
to life

/oy
to

A Romance
give the
lyricism.

of

Happy
film

Vjlley\

True-Hwrt S//.w-he labored

most needed: truth

American

what

it

and

His most ambitious effort was Intolerance, which Eisenstein admired so much and which really forms a link between the Ital ian spectacles like Cabiria and the films of Fritz Lang and Abel Gance.* The immense spectacles so beloved by first-nighters, applied to a humanitarian sermon at once childish and tumefied, combined to make this film into something strange and monstrous, as disordered and primary as La Roue or Metropolis, handling crowds t as brilliantly as they and, amid oceans of bad taste, overwhelming us with lightninglike moments of extreme bril liance. The film was based on a single theme repeated and de
veloped through various stages of human history. Four parallel stories are related a Babylonian one, the Life of Christ, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and a working-class tragedy of to
day. The film was eighty reels long; Griffith finally cut to twelve reels.
it

down

The Babylonian spectacles far surpassed the sumptuous carni val of Cabiria, but Griffith's contribution was not confined to
mere
scale.

Where

the Italians had gone wrong, he seems to have

thought, was

in approaching the cinema as though it were an the of outpost stage. Griffith broke completely with the stage.

The pomps and

buildings were not

splendors of his picture, the crowds and great in actual material very different from those of

the Italian films, but they were designed purely for the screen, absolutely indifferent to the traditions, limitations and necessities

imposed by the theater. Griffith had done over again what the Italians had done before him, but more freely, without being con strained by the memory of wings and apron stages, of up stage or exits, and he had avoided the temptation to wind up with a great triumphal ensemble. His crowds looked natural and their movements normal. His may not, in fact, have been any less arti* It is difficult to see any real resemblance between the work of Griffith and that of Lang, though he has much in common with Gance. The real successor to Intolerance was Potemkin. ^Intolerance proves on re-examination to be wholly unlike Metropolis

in every respect.

106
ficial

The History

of

Motion Pictures

than the Italian manner but it provided a totally new kind of spectacle and it pleased people. Griffith was regarded as a keen observer because he was not imitating the style of the Scala
in Milan, because his actors turned their backs to the camera, because they did not extend their arms, palms outward, in the

conventional manner.

He

had

instinctively hit

upon

number

of

devices for achieving a much freer style and everyone was grate ful to him. For years he was regarded as having discovered what
a film should really be. What he had actually done was to free the screen from those theatrical traditions of which he knew

nothing.* It was a great deal to have done and in 1916 was prob ably the most essential contribution any man could have made.

Other of
istic

his films

showed

clearly

which were those character

Ro tendencies that were to add to his fame, especially mance of Happy Valley and True-Heart Susie, in which we saw a timid and lovely girl, the unforgettable Lillian Gish. The film
sells

was about a poor village heroine in love with a young man. She her cows so that he may be educated. She suffers horribly, she does everything in her power to save the honor of her rival
and, eventually, a happy ending leaves her married to the young man. It is only a thin-spun romance, but the gentle Lillian was

wonderful in it, with her hat put on all wrong; and the details were wonderful too, such as the garden and the lamp out of which Griffith drew simple poetry in the manner of the English poets. Later on he was to utilize similar details to achieve his
greatest successes.

CECIL

B.

DEMILLE

Griffith was not the only one who attempted to beat new paths for the cinema through the intimate drama. Another came to share his fame when Cecil B. DeMille made The Cheat in 1915.

When

this film first appeared in France in the middle of the war, audiences were entranced and producers thunderstruck. It seemed to make everything that had preceded it quite meaningless. In
*

Griffith

the theatrical

came to the films from the stage. He unquestionably rejected manner by choice and not from ignorance.

The Cinema During the World War 107 it Ward and Sessue Fanny Hayakawa displayed a new, restrained,
oddly eloquent and Indirect style of acting absolutely unlike any thing to be seen on the stage at that time. A few people criticized

which was a ridiculous affair, but they were soon howled down. It really was a preposterous story: a man had stolen a hundred thousand dollarsmoney raised for charity. His wife promises to become the mistress of a Japanese if he will give her that same sum, and then refuses to fulfill the bargain when by chance she obtains the needed amount otherwise. The Oriental, furious, brands her on the shoulder. The husband is brought to
the plot,

for having attempted to kill the Japanese, The wife bares her branded shoulder in court and wins the husband's acquittal.
trial

Hayakawa

What
its

is lynched. saved the film

(it

would probably not bear

revival)

was

fundamentally cinematic style, the simplicity of the acting, the luxuriousness of the settings and, above all, the impassive mask of Hayakawa. Delluc, who cared little for masterpieces

("Lord preserve us from masterpieces," he wrote), nevertheless recognized the virtues of this film. "The Cheat" he said, "has the merit of being a complete thing in itself. There is no touch of The Cheat is La Tosca of the cinema." genius. Thanks to this film, DeMille won a position to which his fun damental showiness hardly seems to entitle him. He was addicted to melodrama, violence and facile effects all of them sure fire with the public. By the end of the war he had made many films Carmen, Temptation, Maria Rosa and a Joan of Arc in w hich the handling of crowds and the feeling of spaciousness were re markable for that time. Delluc especially admired the entrance into Rheims. Then there were The Little American, with Mary
. .
.
?

Pickford (a protest against German atrocities), The Supreme Rede?nption, and a whole series on marriage and home life, based on D. W. Griffith and blending a strong dose of puritanism with
Can't Have the morality of the French theater. These were, Your Don't or For Better Husband, Worse, Change Everything, sev He also made Female. Male and Your Wife, Change

We

Why

about renunciation and sacrifice with Hayakawa, nor director ever recaptured the effects of The actor but neither
eral pictures

w8

The History

of
it

Motion Pictures

Cheat. That film, odd though cinema a sense of proportion.

may seem now, had

given the

THOMAS INGE
Along with Cecil B. DeMille and Griffith we must make place for another of the early directors who best understood the virtues of the American film Thomas H. Ince. Occasionally he made
were
like Those Who Pay, but his real successes psychological dramas Civilization (a spectacular production in the manner of The Birth of a Nation*), The Aryan and Blue Blazes Rawdenand all

those films which featured the big strapping fellow with the rugged countenance, William S. Hart, best known in France as "Rio Jim." Tom Mix and Broncho Billy had accustomed audiences to

hatchet profile, his cowboy-adventure films. Bill Hart, with his finished and flexible acting, was to create a new type. The Redressor of Wrongs, The Sheriff, Wolves of the Rail, and, later, The Caravan, The Avenger, Branding Broadway, His Last Errand, which he made for Paramount under Lambert Hillyer's direction, all constitute one long screen epic which pleased the discrim masses. Omitting his last films, in which the inating as well as the actor seemed merely to be repeating himself, let us rather con

made for Ince, in which this severe yet impassioned the romantic story of the an entirely new turn to figure gave bad man who does good deeds. Ince understood what cinematography pupil of Griffith,* movement of his the and was, lyricism and the sweeping really films from Punishment and Civilization to The Wolf Inn and
sider those he

Blue Blazes Raivden raised them far above the level of the

Tom

Mix and Broncho

Billy

films.

film. It is the story of a

The Aryan is Ince's most famous man who has become a bandit after be

who carries this ing betrayed by a woman and the desert with a band of his rough companions.
*

woman

off into

One day

little

he made only one Biograph picture, Ince was His New Lid (1910), then became a director for Imp, then for Kessel. There was no association with Griffith until Triangle days, though no doubt Ince may have been influenced by the other man's work. It should be noted that he was regarded as the best cutter and editor in the business.
hardly a pupil of Griffith:

The Cinema During

the

World War

109

group of pioneers on the verge of perishing from hunger and thirst comes by. young girl begs him to give them water 'to save her people." With a sudden flash of comprehension, he agrees

to save the party and then, realizing that there can be piness for him, rides off alone into the desert.

no

real

hap

Obviously, the infil tration of oversimple morality somewhat mars this film "as a whole, but it is compensated for by the spaciousness, the sense of horizons and skies, the romantic and genuine spirit of adventure which it embodies. It is easy to see what a real such a film must
inspiration

have brought to the nascent art and why both Colette and Louis Delluc so much admired The Evil Star, Punishment and Illusion^ in

which brute energy

is

pitted against fate.

The

actual plot

is

never

the important thing in these films, but the outdoors itself, the a wild horse, a bare prairie, gray wall against which

anything might take place. Thanks to the acting of Bill Hart and to Bessie Love, the exquisite little girl with the round head, as well as to Ince's skillful handling of detail, these striking films with the hero were more than mere entertain grim equestrian something
ment.

By the end of the war Ince was more famous than Griffith. Delluc compared him to Rodin, to Debussy and Dumas, even to Aeschylus. "He is the first," he wrote, "to synthesize the confused but brilliant impulses of this art as it emerges from the matrix."
His films brought something that re-evoked the childhood mem ories of Fenimore Cooper and of serial stories in Je Sais Tout which
still

the

first

lingered in the imagination of those who saw Big Brother for time. Writing of Carmen of the Klondike in 1919, Jean
said:

Cocteau

"The

plot

is

nothing extraordinary but

this film

con

tains a little masterpiece: the fight between the two men in the night under a torrential downpour of rain by the light of arc

lamps. In the center of a half-blinded, rain-drenched and horrified crowd the two figures circle round in the mud. To follow them, the

camera draws back, moves nearer, rises higher: we see them with the eye of the camera itself. Raincoats glisten, shirts are ripped bodies slippery with blood take on a sort of phos apart, the naked
phorescence.
other.

They

Two mad creatures are at grips, trying to kill each look as though they were made of metal. Are they

no
Is it

The History

of

Motion Pictures
the

kingfishers or seals or

men from
this

angel? to its knees and dies there like a thousand

not some Buddha,

moon, or Jacob with the great naked figure which falls

little fishes in

a lake of

mercury?" Cocteau concludes: "M. Ince may be proud of him self, for a spectacle such as this seems in recollection to equal the world's greatest literature." It would be difficult to suggest more perfectly the plastic beauty of Ince's large and lively composi

They provided a new, heroic style for the times. Through out 1915 and 1916 his activity was prodigious. He had already made The Battle of Gettysburg, Typhoon, The Wrath of the Gods, The Italian, Portraits of Souls. In those two years he made
tions.

Civilization,

ishment, the breakup of Triangle, Ince became a supervisor and yet still found time to make Blue Blazes Rawden, In the Shadow of Hap piness, Respect the Woman and The Last Frontier. He died in

The Aryan, The Coward, Tempestuous Love, Pun Illusion, Those Who Pay, Carmen of the Klondike. After

1924 at the age of forty-four, in the prime of

life

but having for

some years ceased to produce films of any great interest. Thanks to him the films discovered several basic truths, above
all the fact that in a dramatic film the actors are only a part of the mise en scene and that inanimate objects, trees, roads and winds, can here once more assume their ancient and proper role. The cowboy's horse and his dog are characters as important as himself

and, as Louis Delluc observed, the pail out of which Hart drinks, the dice he throws on the counter, the card he lays down, are all

One must not overlook these dream symbols, nor the stone jug full of whisky, nor the heavy silver belt, nor the huge revolvers, nor the leather cuffs studded with copper on Hart's
significant.

wrists.

"There is something more [wrote Delluc in 1923]. I think that Rio Jim is the first real figure established by the cinema; he is its first genuine type and his life the first really cinematic theme, already a classic the adventures of an adventurer in search of
fortune in Nevada or the Rocky Mountains, who holds up the mail coach, robs the mails, interrupts the dance, burns the ranch er's house and marries the sheriff's daughter. It is already a rigidly
established theme, so

much

so that

we

shall

shortly find

it

tedious.

The Cinema During

the

World War

111

Nevertheless, it is the cleanest-cut and the most attractive theme that has yet been evolved." Deliuc goes on to sum up what one finds in these heroic films, in which Louise Glaum seemed to him

Love another Electra, for the he thinks, in celebrating a ''simplified humanity." "Bare gray plains, mountains as steep and as luminous as the screen itself, horses and men in all their brute strength, the tremendous Intensity of a life so simple that it has all the room in the world for beauty and harmony and contrast, and lends an
a
Bessie

new Clytemnestra and

future of the film will

lie,

incomparable spark of humanity to" the simple sentiments love and duty and revenge which spring from it."

like

Ince and William S. Hart have the honor of having the cinema its first given lyrics of the open air, those crude Iliads so well suited to the taste of young people with their intense love
of
life.

Thomas

Moreover, Ince was

*
infinitely superior

either to Griffith

or to Cecil B. DeMille.

THE FRENCH IN AMERICA

There were others who contested with them in the race for suc As early as 1914 a few French directors fascinated by the

cess.

legendary land of rich uncles and dollarshad crossed the Atlantic, or were sent over by firms like Gaumont and Pathe. During the war these men succeeded in winning important positions for them
selves.

afterwards criticized for not hav the with French Army, was one of these. ing promptly joined up He was a good, sound workman and little more, whose reputation
has

Maurice Tourneur,

who was

much

diminished.

He

directed serials like

The White

Circle

and several quite adequate pictures such as The Isle of Lost Ships, a first Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans. All of them were skillful enough but entirely without originality. As for Leonce Ferret, he made propaganda films (Lest We For get) and modern tragedies (A Modern Salome) about which no more need be said. He arrived in America with a considerable repu*

That Ince was superior

to Griffith

is

an opinion with which few

may

agree, but his reputation in

Europe

is

greater than in America.

ii2
ration,

The History

of

Motion Pictures

though less than that of Capellani, who also crossed the ocean about 1915 and did his best work in the States. It was neither The House of Mirth nor Social Hypocrites which brought Capel lani fame, but a whole series of films in which he directed the fa mous actress and dancer Alia Nazimova. Star and director gained fame together, and it is difficult to know to which of them we

owe

the pleasure that

we

derived from

The Red

Lantern,

Eye

for

an Eye and especially Out of the Fog, made in 1919. Nazimova, with her little face and enormous eyes, with her burning aestheticism, was, like Asta Nielsen, one of the most intelligent actresses on the screen for many years. She managed to inject into rather elementary stories the sort of fire and seductiveness Garbo so often supplies. It must be admitted that Capellani did not neglect, at least in Out of the Fog, to utilize his utmost ingenuity. The story is but some moments make up for this ordinary enough exquisite Nazimova at the deathbed, Nazimova under the lamplight, Na zimova kissing her own reflection in the mirror and, best of all,
the ghostly little figure of Nazimova in the water. lighthouse in the night, the shade of a dead girl against the watery background of the ocean compensate for the conventional characters and the
pathetic plot. Nazimova was never so lovely, nor for that matter did Capellani ever do better.

varying success. Henri d'Abso did Count Jean de but not until after the war. The most successful of the Limur, Frenchmen was Louis Gasnier. emigrating
badie d'Arrast

Others

who went abroad met with

worked with Chaplin and

SERIALS

New dreams far less simple and much more vulgar than those evoked by "Rio Jim" were being provided for young people. The w ar years were, above all, the era of serial films. After the success of the French episodic pictures and especially of Feuillade's Fantomas, the Americans saw a fortune to be made by this formula.* To this end they hired a man who knew Feuillade and his methods extremely well Louis Gasnier, who had been Linder's director.
r

See note on page

69.

The Cinema During

the

World War

Thus it was that the spirit pf Fantomas was unleashed on the Amer ican public, became naturalized and a little later, on the rebound,
engendered Judex
screen,
all

in France.

Twenty

serials

now

appeared on the

them with Pearl White TAe Exploits of Ehhie, The Laughing Afask, The Queen Is Bored, By Force or Trickery. Then came The Red Circle and The Sacred Tiger with Ruth Roland, Ravengar with Leon Bary, The Master of Alystery with Houdini, The Idol of the Circus with Eddie Polo, and many an other. Audiences, because they wanted to find out what happened
of
next, increasingly acquired the habit of regular weekly filmgoing. Gasnier was the author of the most famous of the serials, The

Exploits of Elaine and Ravengar. It was these films that taught the world to revel in new terrors, familiarized it both with the

the

custom of killing men by means of mysterious rays and with man with the red kerchief ever emerging from the shadows, and accustomed it to sympathizing with Pearl White, trapped in an enormous cast-iron pipe in which the water is gradually ris ing and from which she certainly will not be rescued by the de tective until next week's episode. There were fights amid raging torrents, on the top of church steeples, up and down luxurious houses and along the exotic American highways with their early Ford cars. These films scored a hit all over the world. In France The Exploits of Elaine, adapted by Pierre Decourcelle as Les Mysteres de New-York, was published in Le Matin, immense beginning in October 1915, to the accompaniment of an about it was fresh news week Each amount of publicity. given out, there was a Clutching Hand Club, and it was rumored that

Taylor Dodge would pay

five

thousand dollars to the

first

person

to solve the mystery. Barefaced imitations of the film tried to cash in on its success. There were parodies of it, like The Moving Foot and The Mysteries of a York Ham. Their only result was to in
crease the

fame of the

original.

Because of the success of Les

Mys

the Red Kerchief un teres, a sequel now appeared: "The Man with masked by Clarel is no longer a menace. But the great French himself against a detective does not remain idle. Next he
pits

formidable gang of Chinese who plan to seize the immense wealth of the Clutching Hand. At the same time, this man who loves

ii$

The History

of

Motion

Pictitres

France even more dearly than the woman of his choice, sees her menaced by an ignoble enemy and determines to consecrate all shall see his efforts and all his scientific skill to his country. which invention will a marvelous to her he to how present plans is it not but without French to be of untold service the armies, serious risks that he will carry out this patriotic scheme." Thus

We

a dash of patriotism

was added to the customary excitements. Or

the Americans also dinary adventures seeming tame to them, the most with their serials crammed extraordinary catastrophes: trains crashed into raging rivers, automobiles ran into one another

head on, and the cinema became a happy hunting ground for acrobats and athletes.

TOM MIX AND DOUGLAS

FAIRBANKS

There were actors well able to profit by this fashion. Tom Mix and his celebrated horse continued to offer stiff competition to William S. Hart in America, and outshone him in Europe. He had made a fortune for Selig, and in 1915 Aubert took over the dis tribution of a long list of his films on the Continent. He repre
complex version of the romantic tradition than did was much appreciated by the public. Tom Mix and the buffalo as well as the many Nat Pinkerton films were just
sented a
less
it

Hart, and

the stuff for children.

who was

time that there appeared a robust and smiling figure be one of the cinema's greater glories. This was to long Douglas Fairbanks, who came from the theater, where he had already appeared in 1912 as a likable sort of adventurer who leapt off balconies and sprang over walls. His play had scored a hit in
It

was

at this

Chicago.

He

discovered the cinema with

The

Birth of a Nation,

and went to

see Griffith.* After his first film,

The Lamb,

he was

Sennett comedies, but instead he made Double Trouble and a number of pictures based on scenarios by

urged to appear in

Mack

was Kessel and Baumann who got Fairbanks to join Triangle and him to Los Angeles. Griffith advised Fairbanks to go into Keystone comedies. Eventually a unit consisting of John Emerson, Anita Loos and the actor were "packed off together ... to work out their own destiny."
It

sent

The Cinema During

Anita Loos
*

the

World War

7/5

Breed, The Americano and so on. It was about 1916 that he completely established the character of a harum-scarum sort of chap who will fight his way alon^ anv route that leads eventually to a pretty girl: he made Flirting with Fate, The Good Bad Man, The Habit of Happiness, Reggie Mixes In. His biggest success came in 1916, when he made American Aris
tocracy, playing the part of a Southerner of
collects butterflies,

The Half

good family [who becomes acquainted with some snobbish East

erners and gets involved in all sorts of melodramatic adventureslot of Ed.]. airplane work was entailed and even acrobatics on a hydroplane. In the last two years of the war he made a number

of pictures for the Douglas Fairbanks Corporation I F/W and Wooly, He Comes Up Smiling, The Alan from Painted Post, Modern Mus Reaching for the Moon and most
keteer.

important^ Dumas had always appealed to him, and Ince had just made a version of The Three Musketeers. His Picture in the Papers, The Matrimaniac^ The Americano, In Again, Out Again and others made the world conscious of his dashing good humor and perpetually gay animation. There was
depth or humanity in his characterization, but plenty of ani well adapted to American tastes, which, however, in spirits the long run are apt to pall His essential quality was his grace and
little

mal

physical fitness: it was a pleasure to see a man so obviously full of the joy of life. It may be that this is hardly sufficient to entitle him to the name of a great artist, but Fairbanks, even before he had

made his most famous pictures, already in A Modern Musketeer had fully developed his very likable characterization and had done everything in his power to make people realize that the film's most essential quality lies first and foremost in movement.

THE COMEDIANS
Fairbanks

made people

smile because he
smile,

himself. Real comedians very seldom

*

was always smiling and this truth is amply

made wisecracking

And, almost equally important, with subtitles by Anita Loos which a familiar language and also made subtitles shorter.

n6
verified

The History

of

Motion Pictures

when one comes to consider those American comedians, both famous and relatively obscure, who first appeared in Ameri can films during the war. Mack Sennett had discovered a goodly number of these come dians and was employing them in his amazing and crazy farces, packed full of chases and falls. The best-known of them all was Mabel Normand, whom he starred in a delightful comedy, Mickey, a preposterous but witty satire on high society, and one of the first comedies. Another actor as nimble as really important American a cat, who peered out innocently from behind glasses and a small mustache, was frequently seen hurling himself with serene op timism into the most disconcerting of adventures. He was known as Lonesome Luke in America, but the French called him "LuL" His tortoise-shell glasses made him famous. Later on he got rid of the mustache and the nickname and became Harold Lloyd from 1917 on, when he was making burlesque comedies with Bebe DanielsLz/e Joins the Navy, Luke's Fatal Flivver, Fireman Save My Child, Lonesome Luke in Tin-Can Alley, etc. He threw a great deal of zest into these early exercises. Another prentice hand was a little fellow with a frozen face who was to become Buster Keaton. He acted with Fatty Arbuckle at that time. The portly Arbuckle was the most important of them all. He appeared in a whole series of buffooneries with Mabel Normand Mabel in the Park, Mabel at the Party, Miss Fatty on Vacation,
Fatty the Airman, Fatty Makes a Conquest. He brought to the screen the never-failing absurdity of a very fat man but, as with many others of his poundage, there was a certain delicate wit in
his enormous body. In The Butcher Boy he had terrific difficulties with some spaghetti, just as Chaplin was to have later. In The Ga rage, The Bell Boy) Good Night Nurse he sustained a certain im passive calm and a surprising agility throughout a whole series of misfortunes. There are really excellent things now and then, such as the scene in the rain

when

Fatty

tries

unavailingly to light a

who happens along to play the national anthem, thus compelling all the passers-byeven the policeman who is about to arrest him to stand at attencigarette and persuades a one-man orchestra

The Cinema During

tion bareheaded In the
sees
little

the
In

World War

1/7

a \Vestern town. On the outskirts he passes a cemetery, with hundreds of tombstones stretching as far as the eye can see. "Oh, that's the cemetery for sheriffs," "somebody tells him. little further along he comes to a big building at every win dow of which a weeping woman Is seated: it is the home for the widows of sheriffs. Fatty is petrified with terror. It was absurd and often macabre inventions like these that were the salvation of his films. At times he carried them, amusingly enough, to the length of parody, as in A Reckless Romeo, where, when a rival lies in wait for him behind a dark curtain, he fires a dozen shots into him without interrupting for a single Instant the long kiss he is placing on the lips of his girl. The man had a lot of

him arrive, donkey into

The Sheriff Out West one downpour. proud as Punch of his new appointment, riding a

talent.

it is

Along with him were many others, almost forgotten now, whom difficult to realize were once regarded as the peers of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd Al St. John (known in France as Picratt), Clyde Cook (Dudule), Larry Semon (Zlgoto), cross-eyed Ben Turpin with the big mustache, who was forever Involved In the most ridiculous fixes and eventually developed a sort of delight fully insane style, Hank Mann (Bilboquet), Harry Pollard (Beaucitron), and Sydney Chaplin, Charlie's brother and often his screen companion, as in Shoulder Arms* Those who make us laugh but do not know how to change their original recipe are quickly for gotten, though unjustly so. We must remember that the comical inventions and gags with which the old films of Ben Turpin, Larry Semon and others were filled are far from being themselves for
gotten.

They have all been carefully preserved and catalogued, and we see them reappear in contemporary pictures, enlivening the works of Lloyd and even of Chaplin. There Is no gag without an ancestor, and just as the circus is founded in tradition, so the film comedy (possibly the most absolutely successful department In the whole art of the screen) has its traditions too, recorded on
celluloid or listed for the use of

gagmen.

n8

The History

of Motion Pictures

CHARLIE CHAPLIN

But
to a

all

new

the comedians, however gifted, grew dim in comparison star, Charlie Chaplin. Both in Europe and in America he

rapidly earned an unprecedented degree of popularity and fame. Western Import and its representative, M. Jacques Haik, launched the Keystone comedies with Mabel, Fatty and Charlie
in 1915; other comedies of theirs not distributed by house were suppressed. In a very few months Chaplin had replaced Linder as king of comedy, and cinemas had to book A r Night at the Sho a) weeks ahead. Western Import was even com to pelled place photographs of Mabel and Charlie on sale so as to in

Europe

this

make

For there were

their appearance widely familiar and to discourage imitators. imitators galore. The firm of Bonaz had
Billie Ritchie,

brought

over the films of

who wore

the same mustache, the

same pants, the same hat as Chaplin's, and carefully copied his movements. He shared Chaplin's success for several months. There w ere other doubles, not to mention Lloyd, who also sported the little mustache. There was a Jack and, after the war, even a Char ley; then this Charley and Billie Ritchie went to law, accusing each other of plagiarism. Both of them lost. All of this merely added to
r

the fabulous prestige of Chaplin. Naturally enough, so great a success as his was bound to annoy some of the producers. In 1916 there was quite a lot of feeling
against American importations in the film world. Le Cinema pub lished an article signed by Jean Yvel which violently attacked

Chaplin. His Tittle's Punctured Romance had just appeared, an in sane comedy with Marie Dressier and Mabel Normand. "His art,
if

without profaning the word, is more simian is not a comedian, he is a twopennyAfter ha'penny jumping jack." calling on the sacred names of la belle France and of education, this writer concluded: "What a far
call it so
.
. .

we may

than human.

Chariot

cry

is

this

from the

artistry displayed

by Prince

in the Rigadin

films!"

And though not in his sense, it 'was a far cry from Rigadin. Chap
lin's first films

for Essanay, with

whom

he worked during 1915,

The Cinema During

were

the

World War

;/p

infinitely more developed than the rather clumsy clowning of the Keystone films like MabeFs Busy Day or Between Showers. There were fifteen or more that he made for Essanay: His New Job, A Night Out, The Cha?npion, The Tramp, The Woman, Shanghaied, The Jitney Elopement, A Night at the Shov, Work,

By the Sea, The Bank, In the Park, Police, Carmen. Some of these are still mere clowning, like A Night
which
is

at the

Sbow,

technique here is al more it is ready developed; well-nigh faultless, and if some of the comic effects miss fire, they are never Chaplin's. As these are all

simply

a series of

mishaps. Yet

his

short films, the plots are extremely simpleCharlie gets the best of some given situation. He is a boxer, with a horseshoe concealed in his glove, or he is forced to turn sailor much against his wish and
reveals
all

the horrors of being forced into a job for

his partner,

no vocation. Edna Purviance was now

also appears.

which one has and Ben Turpin

Among these early Chaplins are two which suggest future possibilities and hitherto unsuspected traits The Woman
and Cannen.

The

Woman

which Charlie

a rather disturbing piece of broad comedy in disguises himself as a woman and cuts off his mus
is

tache, in order to circumvent the opposition of his sweetheart's uncle. Of course the uncle at once begins to flirt with the supposed
girl;
it

something about Chaplin's face when one sees is unexpected and utterly unfamiliar. One catches a glimpse of one aspect of the man about which volumes could be written, an almost equivocal and feminine quality bom of humiliation, which can be detected in later films. That is why

and there

is

clean-shaven which

is still

is so important, as a sort of curiosity.* Otherwise, it a prentice piece with few first-rate inventions in it, but ex touch at least as impressive as the hibiting a curious sureness of

The Woman

of slightly dubious quality incidents.

some of the humor and some of the

for Carmen, one might dismiss this parody entirely were it not that the comedian's gift for pantomime is revealed here (some but much more ancient, which was to thing not of the cinema, blossom forth anew in The Pilgrim}. Moreover, it contains one

As

Chaplin had previously appeared

as a

woman

in Putting

One Over

(1914).

120

The History
expression becomes

of

Motion Pictures

extraordinary scene, the death of

lin's

tragic,

Don Jose, when, suddenly, Chap with a hint of bitterness, and ex

tremely moving. From that time on, Chaplin wanted to make a dramatic film. Essanay would not consent, but the wish was an
indication.

When he left Essanay, he contracted for twelve films to be made

months for Mutual. They were produced in 1916 and and there is not a single one among them but contains at least one are The Floorwalker, The really remarkable scene. These The A. The One Fireman, M., Vagabond, Pawnshop, The Rink, The Adventurer, The Count, Behind the Screen, The Cure, The Immigrant^ Easy Street. Some of them seem to be a development of the Keystone and Essanay comedies, like The Rink, based on a familiar theme dear to most of the movie comedians and pre
in twelve

1917,

viously utilized

by Max

Linder. Certain incidents in

it

are the

vulgarest buffoonery, as when a whole cat is served on a dish to customers in the restaurant. But the chase on roller skates has a

magnificent swing. As for One A. M., this was a peculiar affair in more ways than one. Adapted from a vaudeville turn, it has no
see a man coming home after a plot whatsoever. spree, in eve and ning dress high hat (not a trace here of Chaplin's usual cos tume) , struggling to open the front door, attempting vainly to pass

We

whose pendulum keeps getting in his way, wrestling with on a revolving table which continually skids under his grasp and then as a finale wrestling with a bed which collapses on top of him, rises up when he tries to sit down on it and has every appearance of being animated by an evil spirit. There is nothing that he does here which Linder might not have done; the film throughout recalls Linder and the primitive films as a whole by its use of trick photography and the importance of the roles played by inanimate objects. There is really nothing invented here at all, nothing original, and yet Chaplin's precision and re straint are such that one realizes how, out of this low farce and out of pantomime inherited from the circus, a really original
a clock

a decanter and glass

screen technique and a new language are being evolved. The strug gle with the bed predicts the struggle with the deck chair in A Day's Pleasure (1919) and the scene with the alarm clock in The

The Cinema During

the

World War

121

Pawnshop. Eventually Chaplin will cease to struggle with inani mate things, no longer match his wits with them but draw comedy
out of himself alone.

He was
ory of

already inventing comic plots, no doubt with the

mem

dreadful monster grabs him, drags him down: it is the escalator. This moving staircase and a lift are really the heroes of this film. As the department head is a thief who closely resembles Chaplin, there are long animated quar rels in which Charlie is accused of having robbed the safe, whereas
actually he was rushing in pursuit of the thieves; this gave occasion for some fierce combats in the elevator and on the movino- stair
are brief af deftly continues to develop his technique. At times the clowning is more subtle, as in Behind the Screen, a sort of parody on slapstick comedies. The little actor is full of bright ideas in this; he gives a and combs and shampoo to a bedside
fairs in

eyes confusion, drenches the bosses in water.

Mack Sennett in mind. In The Floorwalker, Chaplin makes at a wax mannequin, throws the various counters into utter

case.

The Fireman, The Adventurer and The Count

which he

rag

appears carrying a looking like a giant hedgehog, and mows down the various actors as he passes. This is decidedly low comedy, and only the talent of the principal performer makes it significant, but he is perfection itself. It is the same in Easy Street,
arranges

its

hair

with exquisite
his shoulder,

care.

He

later

dozen chairs over

in

which we encounter the

and

first

enters a mission hall

falls in

of his satires on puritanism. Charlie love with the preacher's daughter.

lamps, gas gangster, a thoroughly reformed character, now starts going to church and Charlie marries the preachers daughter. Easy Street is one of the gayest films of this period.

colossal gangster, so powerful that he can bend lampposts like straws, is the terror of the neighborhood, but Charlie manages to shove his head into one of the street turns on the and

asphyxiates him.

The

them which stand out: The Pawnshop, The and The Immigrant Vagabond. The Pawnshop is rather slow in movement and badly constructed, with a great deal of slapstick and a ladder with which Charlie has much trouble, but it contains one superb scene in which a poor wretch of a man brings in an alarm clock to pawn. Chaplin auscultates it with all the gravity of
There
are three of

122

The History

of

Motion Pictures

a doctor, opens it as if it were a can of food, uncoils the springs, which he eyes as if they were wriggling worms, then sprinkles them with an oilcan to "kill" them (for by now the spectator is convinced they are alive) and finally hands the whole mess back to its owner with a peremptory "It's absolutely worthless." His

virtuosity here is stupendous, so exactly is every movement calcu lated to suggest another quite different movement, such as that of a doctor with a a can. This scene patient or

comedy, however. In something more. Here we find Charlie in the steerage of a liner, on his way to seek his fortune in the land of liberty and dollars. It is a brief but charming piece, with few sustained sequences save that of the dinner he eats and cannot pay for, and the fits of terror which seize him when he sees six or seven husky waiters fall upon a customer who had not quite enough money to pay his bill. There is a tender and restrained love story which concludes one day in the magistrate's office. One interesting thing about it is the crowd, which now, for the first time in any of his films, takes on a certain importance: there are Jews in queer

stands comparison with the best moments of are still in the realm of unadulterated

somebody opening The Gold Rush.

We

The Immigrant

there

is

headgear, shabby, suspicious-looking characters, a whole ghetto swarms up on deck. In the midst of them all, Charlie smiles timidly and delicately begins his courtship. In the first scene we see him hiccoughing over a rail: he appears to be seasick, but no, he is really hauling in a big fish. At no time is either the comedy or the sentiment presented quite "straight," and it is one of the first films
in

which

this

glimpse of the Statue of Liberty im followed the brutal examination of the immigrants. mediately by The injection of satire and of sentiment into this film gives it a curious perfection.
startling, as,

subtlety appears. for instance, the

Some

of the incidents are really

We personally like The

is

Vagabond better, for here

first
is

Charlie's
is

own

poetic quality
in love.

expressed for the

time and here he

An

unhappy

enchanting atmosphere of rusticity

established in the

opening scenes: Charlie sits down beside a dying campfire, then leaps up with the seat of his pants on fire. He turns farm hand,
milks a

cow by maneuvering

its tail

up and down

like a

pump

The Cinema During

the

World War

123

handle, waters the trees scrupulously drop by drop and, with the air of a Knight of the Round Table, does battle with tree stumps. There is a wretched young girl for whom he plays music on his cheap fiddle, but she does not return his devotion: she is in love

with the young artist who is painting a picture of her. There is a charming scene in which Chaplin, who longs to be an artist too, also tries to paint her portrait and only succeeds in producing a childish caricature. Finally the girl's long-lost mother turns up and bears her away to a life of riches and ease. At the very last mo ment the girl stops and comes back to fetch Charlie, but somehow this ending does not strike one as very probable. By now the complete Chaplin had been evolved, completely equipped with comic resources and also with his own peculiarly appealing griefs and his quiet bitterness. Very few touches re mained to be added. In 1918 Chaplin joined First National, with whom he remained
until 1922,

making eight

films.

The two

earliest, released

before

the end of the war, were

Dog's Life and Shoulder Anns. At the A issued was it time Dog's Life seemed Chaplin's most complete film. His technique, patiently perfected during most and typical with two the Mutual, now blossomed out in this wellyears flawless piece. Charlie, the penniless tramp, almost and constructed treasure and fights for it with some crooks. discovers He a has dog. He falls in love. Hidden behind a curtain, he disposes of his en emies as they pass with a sharp tap on first one skull, then the
next,

from the

little

cronies are eating lunch.

substantial mallet of his Keystone days. He knocks one of them unconscious and

Two

then, slipping his arms through the vest of his victim from behind, some lively gestures to convince the other man that

pantomimes

the unconscious (or dead) fellow is thoroughly alive: he raps on the table, pours out a drink and raises it to the victim's lips. This is an astonishingly brilliant bit of acting. At the conclusion of the film we see him in the country, with his pretty wife and several
puppies, the proud

which he

is

owner of a small farm set in a holes with his planting wheat by making
at the

vast field in
fingers along
is

the tops of the furrows.

Shoulder Arms, which appeared

end of the war,

even

/2

The History
finer. Charlie is

of

Motion Pictures

better, and, indeed,

anything

one wonders whether Chaplin has ever done an awkward recruit; he has great diffi

culty in forming fours and standing in line because his feet always turn outwards. Then he is at the Front, in the trenches. Everybody
else

another

over the shoulder of gets mail: Charlie gets none. Peeping soldier, he reads his letter and on his face are reflected a

vicarious joy and dismay and amazement in turn. He opens bottles by holding them up over the parapet. He strikes a light by scratch

ing a match on a passing bullet. When he is shooting at the Ger mans from his loophole, he chalks up every direct hit on a plank, as if he were playing billiards or trapshooting. But when one of
the "dead"

men

returns his

fire,

he calmly rubs out the

last

chalk

mark. There is an unconscious cruelty about this which is amazing. Now the wet weather comes and the dugout is flooded. A candle end stuck on a board floats by; a frog sits croaking on the big toe
of a sleeping soldier. Charlie rearranges his blankets, sinks gently

under water and manages to breathe peacefully through the small end of a phonograph trumpet. Next morning he is sent out to reconnoiter. We discover him in the heart of the woods disguised as a tree and quite "invisible." At this point events take an extraor turn Charlie captures both the Kaiser and the Crown dinary Prince, and wins the war. In the original version the Allies give him a big banquet, M, Poincare makes a speech, Charlie rises to reply and the King of England creeps up and sneaks a button off his uniform as a souvenir. Censorship banned this ending and in some places did not permit even the capture of the Kaiser to be shown
for a long time.

This simple but subtle film was unquestionably the boldest of any of the works inspired by the war. It by no means lacks either bitterness or cruelty, and the comical elements in it are transposed, by the most ingenious and rapid use of suggestion, from
simple
incidents into cosmic mirth. It
is

a film

about the courage and the

attains

cowardice of Man, a puppet show of human beings which

the level of high
art.

After Shoulder Arms, or for that matter after

The Vagabond, we can no

A Dog's Life and of longer speak prentice work. Chap-

The Cinema During

lin's

the

World War
Is

125
finally

resources are complete and the world of his invention

created.

This great artist, in order to appeal to all sorts and conditions of has turned himself into a marionette, a marionette who people,
inhabits a

world of somewhat different marionettes. He always by transporting us to a toy theater. The setting in which we begins discover him is roughly a middle-western town, with a sheriff who has a brass star in his coat, a minister with his collar worn behindbefore and a yellow-haired maiden in
it is

distress.

This city

is

never

New York or Chicago, and though presumably an American town

not noticeably Americanized. The period is hardly indicated.* This realm of cardboard and three-ply is inhabited by exquisitely The crooks are fearsome wretches, visibly evil from unreal
people. the soles of their shoes to their hats.

The good

characters are so

that they might serve to illustrate a manual extraordinarily good on piety, or on civic virtue. Friends invariably exhibit the faith fulness of bulldogs, except when the pangs of hunger give them

bad dreams for which they cannot possibly be blamed. Into this little country which has no history there drops from
the skies a tramp.

He walks like
a

an automaton.

He
it.

extends an arm,

then drops
flesh

is no real though a of that than it has no more puppet. His density body, mobile head, his little mustache and curly hair, his bright eyes are those of a doll. Just watch him as he bumps into everything, gets falls down, then vanishes. He raises his caught in doors, runs and hat like a clockwork figure. When he does something clumsily one fancies that it is because the strings have not been properly manipu

it

as

spring controlled

There

on

his

movements are still not those of a to be machinery, or something seems There normal human being. the Notice him. that dances, inside extraordinary use he makes of
lated.

When

he

is

adroit, his

the weight of his

body when he
uses
it as

treats

it

as

an object

like

any other

simple object, especially

in the scene of the

rocking cabin in

The

Gold Rush, where he

forces of gravity.
*

When
is

he

a solid mass that blindly obeys the in some barroom dances with a
girl

His setting actually

partly

Cockney
1915.

in character,

and the period

is

somewhere between Dickens and

126

The History

of

Motion Pictures

does he not seem to be mounted on a pivot, and to be revolving ir an automatic waltz? All Chaplin's short early films are about the adventures of z marionette. Then, gradually, lie evolved an individual comic style based on the conflict between this little figure and a world ruled

by somewhat analogous but

real

radically different laws. Chaplin gets into trouble because he imitates the habits and the customs of

human
is

He

beings, but he imitates without understanding them. a hero who dismays other heroes, a benefactor who pro

foundly shocks other benefactors. In its detail, his comedy arises most frequently from an extraordinary application of familiar gestures and reactionshe sows wheat as a child makes mud pies,
opens a clock
of his shoes as
as
as a
if

person opens a can, sucks the nails in the soles they were chicken bones and swallows bootlaces

though they were spaghetti. In every case he has imitated, with the most scrupulous attention to detail, the behavior proper to quite a different set of circumstances. All this developed from an extraordinary power of observation and from profound reflection,
as he himself has said. Amid the events of ordinary everyday life he seeks hidden comic elements. It was in a store that he realized

how a moving staircase could

fire that

be made use of and while watching a he conceived The Fireman. He knows precisely why his

was
of

acting arouses sympathy or pity. "It was lucky," he says, "that I a small man." He realizes too that it is not enough for a mario

nette to
its

make

us laugh, but that the creature must also have a soul

own.

"One or two custard pies are funny, but when laughter depends on nothing but custard pies then a film soon becomes boring. A knowledge of human nature is the basis for any real success." Shoulder Arms, one of the few genuine masterpieces of the screen, proves how right he is: the future can do nothing but confirm his
.

statement.
It was through Chaplin that the American film won its place in the sun, and Chaplin who continued to be its salvation, all despite the various financial maneuvers and all the bad films. The four

war

years, during

which

it

was undergoing

its

real formation, pro-

The Cinema During

duced that humble and joyous
versal hero of our times.

the

World War
who
is

7,27

little

figure

the only uni

3.

Jk

^French 7ilm

CONFRONTED

first

with the war and then with the competition of

the Italian and the American films, what happened to the French film industry during those four years? In August 1914 production came to a standstill. Little by little the various firms re practically
in France or

organized themselves, and American firms either opened branches made arrangements for French distributors to handle

Various changes were made on the producing side and by 1915 the industry was once more functioning almost nor considerable changes. Western Immally. But it had undergone <s o branch Paris had a in managed by Jacques Haik. opened big port was all its comedies, distributing notably those of Mabel Keystone in France Aubert. Eclair never entirely ceased Normand, through with war but had newsreels, on which it kept going production now continued to concentrate. The Film d'Art had passed into the control of Nalpas: he had reorganized its personnel but kept its character. Other firms, less well managed or less stable, had the one among them most to be regretted entirely disappeared,
their output.

being, of course, that of Melies. The making of war newsreels led naturally to the production films. In 1915 Film National brought out an ambitious of
patriotic

Victor Margueritte's patriotic novel, Frontiers of picture based on the Heart. "Extolling as it does the national sentiment of France,"
so the producers advertised, "this film has been so adapted as to
fit

perfectly

with the following patriotic

airs:

Regiment, The Bugle Call, The and The Charge." The same

Marseillaise,

The Sambre-et-Meuse The Call to the Colors

firm announced A Sacred Love, most the the screen on poignant conflict of emotions "showing that could rend the heart of a young Frenchman today." They also produced The Burgomaster's Daughter and The House at the

128

The History

of Motion 'Pictures

Ferry, not to mention

to
1

914, a piece

The Independence of Belgium from 1830 which was highly edifying as well as historical.

This was right at the beginning. Before long, they realized that films about the war displeased more people than they pleased. What wr as needed was either adventure or love stories, as a relief

from

the fighting and killing which filled the daily newspapers. wanted to forget which was the reason why the American People films were so popular at that time. The industry now adopted as its device "films for relaxation," and it became as patriotic to make as it had been, earlier, to make them cry at Rigadin people laugh over the misfortunes of soldiers and their mothers. The film trade papers of the period are positively indecent on this topic. Nevertheless, some w ar films continued to be made right up to the time of the Armistice, though in fewer numbers, even after 1917 when the government asked the film industry to throw its
all
r
r

weight behind the effort to create "moral support" behind the lines. Gaumont brought out some patriotic comedies in an effort to kill two birds with one stone, and Leonce Ferret, who has a good many other crimes on his conscience, now added that of having made Leonce Loves the Belgians. This was actually sent over to America as propaganda, to induce the Americans to show and to produce big patriotic films there also. Little Bout-de-Zan was made to ap pear in Bout-de-Zan the Patriot. Ulntransigeant might protest
against these histrionic mummeries of the war, censorship might exhibit unusual severity towards overpatriotic films: they still con tinued to circulate in the provinces "to keep up morale behind
films like The Avenging Poihi, Sweethearts of 1914, The Angelus of Victory and Christmas in Wartime, from an origi nal scenario by Felicien Champsaur featuring Leon Bernard of the

the lines"

Comedie Frangaise. Abel Gance, still working for the Film d'Art, also made a pic ture in this vein, Paddy ^s Heroism: a title that speaks for itself. In a number of other films the exaltation of patriotism was spiced with the excitement that a little espionage lends, as in Kit, The Boche's Daughter, and The Ministers Daughter. The most successful of these was Gaumont's Marraines de France and Arthur Bernede's The Heart of a Frenchwoman. big film

The Cinema During

the

World War

Meanwhile, try as they might, the French producers could not prevent the influx of foreign pictures or prevent them from scor were all the more popular be ing a tremendous success, for they and their films paid little attention cause the American producers
to the war. So, gradually, the Frenchmen fell hack on their old evil ways and without a single trace of originality once more be

gan turning out absurd and sentimental films acted by the Comedle
Francalse.

have already seen, The Cheat had arrived from America like a bolt from heaven. Everybody rushed to imitate it. A Japanese actress called Tsuri Aoki was hired and featured In a
In 1915, as

we

film about the earthquake,

The Wrath

of the Gods, in

which she

"with all the more played her role, according to the producers, relatives and friends conviction because she had actually lost many who would find such an in the catastrophe." It Is not everybody
experience inspiring. Others, without actually tapping Japanese resources, fancied that the "treasures" of French literary drama would suitably pro vide material to enable them to compete with the producers of
the close of 1916 Aubert, who had just fin ished L'Aiglon, presented Jane Marnac in a drama designed to put the Hayakawa opus quite in the shade, The Faltering Heart. Alto The Cheat cannot be said to have been gether the Influence of

The

Cheat.

Towards

beneficial:

simply bolstered up the Influence of the films d art and thus encouraged the dismal practice of filming current plays. Louis Delluc observed that The Cheat encouraged producers to model themselves even more closely than before on M. Bernstein
it

and, at the same time, to deck out their films with artistic lighting effects. The French lacked both ideas and enterprise and only made The Faltering Heart because that sort of melodrama was the
fashion.

made many realistic dramas; and Mistinguette's de Paris and Chignon cTOr, date from Fleur biggest successes,

They

also

1915.
efforts to catch the public taste by employ actors. This was a mistake, for, as someone said, celebrated ing "Duse is Duse and the cinema is not of her time." In The Return of

There were renewed

Ulysses Mounet-Sully and

Mme.

Bartet had previously missed

fire.

130

The History

of 'Motion Pictures

Sarah Bernhardt had fainted

away when

she

saw

herself in Camille.

This, however, had not prevented her from continuing to act for the screen, and Delluc even imagined a picture based on the Iliad in which he thought she might do well. But for the time beino O he in an her In admirable "When one sees Mothers wrote, sentence, of France or in Tristan Bernard's Jeanne Dore one cannot but feel that this superb companion of Racine is not really at home in the shadowy, uncertain world of the screen." No more was Suzanne Despres in Germaine Dulac's Enemy Alothers nor Re jane in Al sace nor many another, yet this was the way in which the pro ducers thought to make attractive pictures. As the films they made to realistic failed to appeal to the public, they looked elsewhere drama and then, above all, to material in the nature of Fantowias and of the enormously successful American serials like The Ex ploits of Elaine and The Laughing Mask. While the realistic drama

DO

appealed to the critical because it was comparatively well mounted, the other drew the crowds by catering to their taste for excite

ment.
Exploits of Elaine had a huge progeny. After The Vam which was issued not in weekly episodes but at much longer pires, there was The Mysterious Mr. X. Undeterred by mock intervals, the producers, backed by the big newspapers, ex or criticism ery pected great things from these. Le Matin had published the serial story of The Exploits; Le Journal serialized a novel of Maurice LeBlanc's in 1916 The Red Circle. There was a great deal of in sistence on the fact that The Exploits was really not an original film at all, that it was no better than Fmtomas and that Pierre

The

Decourcelle could easily whip out stuff just

Decourcelle's

as

good. Hurriedly,
also

Two

Little

Kids was filmed and Pouctal

made

Chantecoq, which even quite intelligent people liked. Ultus and The Return of Ultus were in much the same style as Rocambole. Finally the whole trend culminated in the "masterpiece" of all French detective films, which completely obliterated the memory of the Man with the Red Handkerchief from New York and drew in the crowds by thousands the famous Judex serial. It first appeared in 1917, and Louis Feuillade directed it. Today
there are innumerable people alive

who

can

still

conjure up pleas-

The Cinema During

urably the Image of the

the

World War

131

Empire desk at which Rene Creste sat and pondered his problems Creste, that handsome fellow equipped with all the stock In trade of melodrama, Including the broadbrimmed hat and that magnificent black cape which he flung about his shoulders with such a noble gesture. In fact Creste's cape vzjs Judex. The rest of it was unimportant; for all Its kidnaped heroines, Its crooks, fights on precipices, fearful risks, last-minute rescues have been found just as well in The Exploits of Elaine or, could
better
all that endless historv of wrongs mattered but Creste's cape. Because of this righted nothing really cape and Creste's good looks and charming smile every schoolboy In France at the end of the war dreamed of being like Judex. This film really succeeded where The Exploits had failed, where Rostill,

in

Fantomas. In

cambole and Fantomas had succeeded, thanks to the novels on which they were based rather than to the films themselves It evolved a new character, at once symbolical and stereotyped, and stamped a new name on the public mind. There Is no name that one specially remembers in The Exploits. Justin Clarel the detec tive never really became popular, whereas one remembers Judex a little less clearly) Tom Mix and just as one remembers (though
Bill

Hart. Louis Feuillade's films

as

absurd and grotesque as they

were, and much

in the

they disgusted all those who were interested the film as an artreally gave birth to a new of development stock figure which persisted for many years, that of the Redressor
of Wrongs, who, under the name of Judex, mythology born of the cinema.
time. Feuillade later directed

now

entered the crude

This was the most Important of the French productions at that The Two Boys, Vendemiaire, EarV indicia and rabas, Lucette; he died in 1924 while working on The Stigmata, without ever having recaptured his earlier success.
It

was Judex and Judex*

New

Mission which enabled the French

to stem the tide of the foreign film invasion, against which noth ing could wholly prevail despite the marked xenophobia of the

There was no use reviving or remaking old films; there was no use crying out, "Support French films/* cttr trying to pre tend with a straight face that the American films (before 1917) were really "German importations in disguise." The trend of pubperiod.

$2

The History

of Motion Pictures

lie taste

was unmistakable, and when cinemas announced Griffith's The Avenging Conscience they referred to him as the "famous

David Griffith," an adjective which speaks volumes. Had it not been for the immense success of Judex the foreign conquest would have been complete, in the realm of the dramatic as well as the comic films. Mabel and Fatty and Charlie eclipsed everything else, despite the valiant efforts that were made to offer them competi tion. Max Linder, the best of the French comedians, made few pictures during this period: there were only The Little Cafe di rected by Raymond Bernard, Max Medecln Malgre Lui, Max Between Two Fires (a parody on The Clutching Hand) and two films which he made while in the United States, Max in America and Max and His Taxi. The last of these, in which Max appeared with a bunch of cheerful drunks, is full of funny things (the horse harnessed the wrong way round, the taxi which refuses to budge) and even of charming things (the dance of the telegraph wires) which indicate how completely Linder was master of his own technique at that time, and how sure was his touch. Rigadin, of course, remained. For a time, during the first two years of the war, he had no competitor, and now that censorship had called a halt to the production of lugubriously patriotic films "in order to spare people's feelings," distraction was to be pro vided. Actually, since the theaters were closed, the war had done the cinema a good turn, far from injuring it, and had given it a
permanent hold
in the absence of
its

honorable

rival.

At

the be

ginning of 1915, when Pierre Mille went to a cinema for the first time since the outbreak of war, he complained that he could
find nothing but J&.iga.dmRigadin's Deception, Rlgadln's Happy Home, Rigadin This and Rigadin That. He came to the conclu

sion that "people's feelings" could not really have been very sensi
tive.

There was another man whose work stood out among the French output of that time, one for whom despite all his faults the cineastes have always had a tender spot Abel Gance, who
began to blossom forth during the war. The films that he made were, admittedly, both incredible and involved. He made them because he had to earn a living films like The Ten O^Clock Rid-

The Cinema During

die,

the

World War
He

133

and Barberoitsse, which came out

serially.

himself believes

was some merit in The Zone of Death and The Right to he liked his Mater Dolorosa, featuring Gcmier, well and Live, gloomv affair in which we enough o to remake it as a talkie. It is a o
that there

are supposed to get very much concerned at the supposition that a doctor may not save the life of his child in order to punish the

mother, who, he thinks, has been unfaithful to him. The whole thing was composed of a medley of shots so grotesque as to be
of Death and The Tenth Sv?;i~ phony, Gance was busily acquiring the Victor Hugo-like style which was to become his chosen method of self-expression. In

almost magnificent. In

The Zone

order to understand Gance's later

work

it is

essential to

remember

these earlier films, crawling with sentiment, full of melodramatic situations, dense with unconvincing gestures, floods of tears and

symbolism, combining the worst elements of the penny novelette and the serial story, of Hugo, Zola and Remain Rolland. Louis Delluc, who was always favorably disposed towards him, wrote after seeing The Zone of Death "Bravo, Gance! and be sure to
,

manner." After seeing The Tenth Symphony however, he recognized what was Gance's greatest vice, an utter without a tinge of admira inability to be simple, and added (not tion), "He is another d'Annunzio." di Jacques de Baroncelli also made his appearance now and the both Return to and The The the Sea rected Land, King of
stick to the heroic
,

workmanlike pictures in which he expressed nature after his own fashion, which is to say in the facile manner of a designer of picture Dulac also made several films Enemy Moth postcards. Germaine ers with Suzanne Despres, The Mysterious Geo, The Tempest of Fran Life, Souls of Madmen, The Happiness of Others with Eve

cisand while

psychology Elizabeth fame made The Torrent with Signorelli, A Tale of Love and Adventure with Sacha Guitry and Bouclette, all of them wellenough-made films that people complained were too well made. The scenarios for Bouclette and The Torrent were by Marcel
L'Herbier,

into

thus learning her job also tried to inject a little what she was making. Louis Mercanton of Queen

whom we

shall

The main

essentials of the

meet again later. postwar film, when Baroncelli and

The History
Leonce Ferret were

of Motion Pictures

to dominate the scene, were thus all ready the sum total of the French wartime film is prepared. Actually rather a sorry one. There was neither development nor originality

to be found; only the old Film d'Art on the one hand and the serials on the other. In between these there occurred no genuine

contribution to the art of the film, now stemming rather from Chaplin and Ince and Griffith in America. There was in France

only a film industry and the desire to exploit popular taste. The \vas doubtless to blame, but so were the producers, and the writers who lacked courage, and the absolute lack of any stand ards, and the prevailing bad taste. The prophetic words of Louis Delluc might appropriately be repeated here, for though they were written in 1919 they remain true to this day: "I should like

war

shall eventually make good films. It would be for the cinema is not in our blood. There are few very surprising, nations which nurture all of the arts, and France, which has so

to believe that

we

much

to pride herself on in poetry and the drama, in painting and the dance yet has no feeling, no understanding and no love for music. I prophesy we shall see in the future if I am right that

France has no more aptitude for the cinema than for music,"

4.

fhe Qerman film and

the

Danish film

AT THE

outbreak of war the firm of Nordisk of Copenhagen still dominated the German market absolutely. Then, at first, the Ger mans did exactly the same as the French they sat back and waited.

When
in the

the fighting settled down along more or less permanently established lines of trenches, a number of new firms were launched

hope of making a lot of money. Sentimental and heroic films about nurses and soldiers were turned out by the score, but with the Iron Cross playing the part that the Legion (Thonneur played in France. Nordisk, with a shrewd grasp of the situation, also be gan producing pictures about the defense of one's country and so forth, for the German market, and as this firm was by far the most powerful and best equipped, it quickly obliterated or ab-

The Cinema During

sorbed
all its

the

World War

155

firms, eventually

The Union, one of the most important gave up the ghost, and by 1917 the only firms of any importance that remained were Xordisk and Decla-Bioscop.
competitors.

These two houses, knowing exactly how successful the Ameri serial films had become, made up their minds to do without imported movies just as they managed under the blockade to do
can

without so

many other things. Germany began to provide own home-made serials and detective films, in which Alia May

her
did

duty for Pearl White, and all the other actors were carefully chosen so as to correspond to their American prototypes. Since the Allies were producing patriotic films intended for exportation to neutral countries, like Marraines de Guerre, so Ger many in 1917 founded B.U.F.A., which began by producing in structional films for the army, establishing five hundred cinemas on the Western Front and three hundred on the Eastern Front. It was at this moment that Krupp and the big banks chose to recog nize the power of the motion picture: they formed a company known as Ufa with a capital of twenty-five million marks, and within almost no time this new firm, which flourished amazingly, had absorbed B.U.F.A., curtailed the success of Nordisk and thanks to the munition makers became one of Europe's most powerful industrial forces. At the Armistice there were only two companies of any importance left in Germany, Ufa and Bioscop.
In the interval, the
in isolation.

German

No

foreign films

film developed quite independently were shown. The former favorites

Henny Porten, Lotte Neumann and the excep Asta Nielsen. New figures came into prominence tionally gifted Werner Krauss, Emil Jannings, Paul Wegener and Pola Negri. Wegener directed as w ell as acted; so did Richard Oswald, Eichberg and Lubitsch. Eichberg earned much praise for his Let There Be Light and Ferdinand Lassalle; Wegener for his romantic and Hoff mannesque Student of Fragile, in which the German preoccu
vanished,
all

save

pation with the macabre and fondness for occultism mixed with science are already evident. They were also evident in Nordisk's

Homunculus. As for Jannings, he made

his screen

debut in a

Lubitsch film in 1915, then appeared in a version of Daudet's Fro-

mont

Jr.

and Risler

Sr.,

directed

by Robert Wiene

in 1916.

Next

$6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

he was seen In Arthur Robison's terrifying A Night of Horror and Marriage of Louise Rohrbach (1917). These films enjoyed an immense success. Cinemas, many of them quite luxurious, sprang up all over Germany. Max Reinhardt was paid four hundred thousand marks for making a single film. Actors earned as much as one hundred and fifty thousand marks. By the end of 1918, in spite of war, famine and threatening revolution, a profound feeling for the film had been deeply implanted in Ger many and already there was an originality about the German prod uct which was to develop very fruitfully. The Danes, whether in their German productions or in those made actually in Denmark, can be distinguished only with diffi culty from the Germans. Their neutrality at first stood them in good stead. To compete with America, now gradually cornering the European market, Nordisk made more than three hundred
in Lubitsch's

films in the first years of the war films adapted from novels or from plays and a quantity of short comedies featuring the Danish

comedians

Stribolt,

Alstrup and Buch.

newly formed Danish

company made his first

also

brought Benjamin Christ ensen to the fore; he had

film, The Mysterious X, in 1913. But little by little, faced with ever increasing competition, lost its pre Nordisk, eminence and the Danish film on which such high hopes had been

founded was finally defeated in the battle for the European mar ket. Christensen went to Sweden and made his best film, Witch
craft, there.

By

the time the

war was over Ufa had

killed the

Dan

ish film.

5.

The Swedish film

DURING the war

the Swedish film, safely removed from the hostili under ties, really got way. Each year Victor Sjostrom, who was to become the foremost of Swedish directors, made four or five films in which he also acted. In 1914 it was One Among The?n,

Judge Not, The Traitor's Money, Vultures of the Sea. In 1916 it was Therese, Dodskyssen and most noteworthy of them Terje Vigen, after Ibsen's Brand. All of them revealed a photographic

The Cinema During

the

World War

157

sense quite exceptional at that date, a strong national flavor and, at the' same time, a markedly literary content, al! of which indi cated the direction In which Sjostrom was to develop In the near

He was much superior to Stiller, who In the same vear directed Pr'mm Ballerina,, featuring Lars Hanson and the vouncr Jenny Hasselqvist, shortly to become the great Swedish star.
future.

new American films had come was profoundly affected by them, dreamed of conquering the world himself and made a film about the movies which was nevertheless still a refined stage comedy, entitled Thomas Graafs Best Film, in which Sjostrom acted. He also made Their First-Born. Sjostrom, who had fundamentally a much better understanding of the medium, now made The Outline and His
Here
as

elsewhere in Europe the

as a revelation. Stiller

hustru), one of his finest films, in This merits detailed consideration. It is no longer possible today to look at The Outlaw and His Wife with the same eyes with which people looked upon it in 1917, or
1917.
just after the war when it came to France. Its greatest weakness is in the acting: Sjostrom was far from being as talented an actor as he was a director, and the rest of the cast, even more than he,

Wife (Berg Ejvmd och bans

overdo their

facial contortions so that

one

is

uncomfortably con

scious of eyeballs, of sardonic laughter, set grimaces and all sorts of melodramatic excesses, though the tempo of the acting is slow

and entirely unlike the fireworks and frenzies fashionable in film acting at that date. For this reason alone The Outlaw and His Wife constituted a marked step forward. But, as frequently happened in the Swedish film, Sjostrom also fell down over the more dra matic incidents, and when they occur there is a lack of harmony in this film adapted from a play much admired in Scandinavian countries. That explains why audiences who now see this film, twenty years after it was made, regard the second half in a quite different light from the first half. In the first we see a man, re cently escaped from prison, who comes to work on a big farm.
the truth about
it. When she finds out be about to rearrested Ed.] she fol [as lows him into hiding in the mountains. There [where they live as outlaws Ed.] everything gradually goes wrong an old friend

He

earns the love of the

woman who owns

is

him

he

38

The History
them and
falls in

of

Motion Pictures
woman, they are
tracked

joins

love with the

down

and

finally perish of cold in the winter snows. This is almost pure melodrama, though the last scene but one is well handled and even

quite moving: the man and woman recall the happy past and then begin to reproach each other, as they crouch in their miserable

hut "It was

all

your

fault." "It

was

not,

it

was

all

your doing."

But the

earlier scenes, in are really ad spite of some faulty acting, mirable. Not until the Soviet films were to meet again with

we

such beautiful pictorial imagery, such an unfaltering sense of rhythm, so fine a feeling for composition. Sjostrom works on a large canvas, in which a love for light and for the half-tones is evi dent. He throws a golden haze like a nimbus around the outlines of
his figures,

some other
is

and lingers lovingly over simple objects, a hand or familiar but significant detail. The opening of the film masterly: we gradually discern through the grayness some in
shapes moving, a milling about of vaguely animal forms grows lighter, there emerges out of the darkness,

distinct

and, as the screen

half-guessed at first and then distinct, a flock of sheep. Sjostrom uses this device again several times in the film, slowly drawing his out of the like some shadows as if, composition demiurge, he were

from nothing. It is a device which Pudovkin was to employ, notably in Storm Over Asia. To these film makers of the North everything in the life about them had cinematographic value the early-morning rising of the
creating
it

head steward. Sjostrom and of only the national landscape. Usually he emphasizes neither, but with remarkable skill uses the landscapes to provide a vivid background for his simple plot. Now and then some exotic detail catches one's attention, as when the outlaw cooks his food by plunging it into the boiling water of a geyser for the setting, like the play of Johann Sigurjonsson which it follows, is Icelandic. Yet even these details blend naturally, at least in the early part of the film, into this rich and unified work; the cinema was learning how to tell a
servants, their meals, the arrival of the

occasionally betrays his love of the national folklore

story.

At

its

best, this film

it

of Sjostrorn's remains both moving and

freshness.

beautiful. In 1917

was of an extraordinary

Here was

The Cinema During

a

the

World War

what he was doing, loving the film as one the were of noble arts and realizing that it Is, above though the child him of To it seemed to have far more all, light. kinship with painting and music than with the theater and with elocution. Admitted that the acting and the slow pace are open to criticism;
really Interested in
It

man

but there are other essentially important qualities in the film a J ovc of the visible world, a need for simplicity both in the action and
in the characters,

and the

realization that the

medium
in

is

more akin

to poetry than to the other literary forms and,

miliar national epics.
Oz/f/j-ir

poetry, to fa

Sweden produced its first great film in The and His Wife; it was an important event in the history of the cinema and perhaps the most important one since 1895, be cause here for the first time a film consciously invaded the domain
of
art.

The Girl from the Marsh Croft, from a story of Selma LagerloPs, and from this time on Miss Lagerlof exercised a profound influence on the Swedish film. The work of this woman of genius, which curiously blends
In the same year Victor Sjostroni directed
ardent puritanism with a passionate love of nature and the echoes of old sagas, juxtaposing the figure of Jesus Christ with witches and gnomes, is most typical of the Nordic writers. Towards the
also produced films adapted from the her of Jerusalem Ingemafs Sons and Karin, Inparts Stiller also made Song of the Red Mauritz geinafs Daughter. was Selma and it to Flower, Lagerlof that the Swedish film owed

end of the war, Sjostrom

first

two

much

its grandeur, its wide landscapes, its special and winter and the elements. Noth on cold morality, emphasis this had previously been captured on the screen. There had of ing been dramas and farces and a number of relatively successful con densations of novels or, as with Melies, some exquisite fantasy, but

of

its

charm and

its

never before had one seen daily

the
little

to stir

life pictured in a poetic light, or life of a the whole people, employed everyday incidents, our emotions and to interest us as no verbal description of

the same material could possibly do. Through Sjostrom and Stil ler, each in his different way, the film was discovered to be an art

In the next years, which were to witness primarily of atmosphere. the apogee of the Swedish film, the classical standards of the silent

140

The History

of

Motion Pictures

film were, slowly and painfully, to be formulated, and It would be impossible to exaggerate the radical importance of the part

which Sweden played

in formulating this aesthetic.

6.

The Russian 7i

IT

for the is not generally realized that these years spelt prosperity Russian film industry. Though Germany had cut them off from communication with the Allied countries, the Russian people never theless wanted to see films, and the firms Khanzhonkov and Yer-

moliev therefore provided them in large quantities. During this actor-director who was after period Ivan Hitch Mosjoukine, an wards to become famous, first came to the fore. Born in 1889, he had won success in the modern theater both at home and abroad,

and in Kean. He played the Devil in particularly in VAiglon Starevich's Christmas Eve., adapted from Gogol, then appeared in The Terrible Vengeance, also by Gogol, and in Pushkin's Ruslan

and Ludmilla. Next he played in A Tomboy, The ChrysantheTnums, Do You Remember, The Slums of St. Petersburg and sev eral Tolstoy pieces War and Peace and The Kreutzer Sonata. He one of the most productive passed into the hands of Protazanov, of directors, and made seventy films with him, into which all the romanticism of crime and the underworld was packed, all the succedaneum of Stendhal and Dostoevski Raskolnikov even became a sort of hero of the criminal world. Rimsky directed The Darker

was

the Night the Brighter the Stars, about two lovers, one of whom blind and the other disfigured. Meyerhold directed a Dorian Gray and Starevich a "medieval tale" called Jola, also Stella Maris.

Aestheticism and the Apocalypse were the principal ingredients. Between 1917 and 1919 Volkov and Protazanov made their

Protazanov with The Queen of Father with Volkov and Sergei. The latter, who had dis Spades covered the lovely, mysterious Natalie Lissenko in 1917 in Behind the Screen, now evolved Danse Macabre about an orchestra leader

dramas reputation with somber

who

goes

mad

while conducting Saint-Saens' symphonic poem.

The Cinema Durin

the

World

Mosjoukine and Protazanov collaborated in The Prosecuting At torney, an exciting affair in which an attorney falls In love with a
spy, while his Sjt:m Triumphs celebrated the picturesque quali ties of sinister streets and poor hovels. Meanwhile, Tourjanski had made Maupassant's Yvette with Natalie Kovanko, Kuprin's T-ii'Jlight,

The

Pearl Fishers and

Mary Magdalen.

the Revolution dawned, Yermoliev was anxious not to lose all of his money. Mosjoukine agreed to act in a propaganda film, directed by Protazanov, called Andrei Kozkoukov^ about a revolutionary shot by the Czarists. In spite of some fine "panic"

When

was considered too tame. Yermoliev moved his studio to the Crimea and ultimately left Russia altogether, taking Adven along with him the last of the Czarist films, An Agonizing shown had who ture, which he completed in Paris. Tourjanski, his Balin film become Russian was to signs of realizing what the the a film of and outdoors, gospoden (based on popular ballads) Mirages of the S-uvw/p, which reconstructed in the Crimea the scenery of The Broken Dream, now with the firm of Biofilm fol lowed in Yermoliev's footsteps and emigrated. One period of the Russian film thus came to a close. The films of that period were
scenes this film
to be of considerable use to the Soviet directors,
pletely

who, cut
little else

off

com

from the

rest

of Europe and

its

films,

had

to study

films made during their apprenticeship but these gloomy, romantic during the war.

Conclusion
IN FACT, a whole period was drawing to a close everywhere. In France, it is true, there had been no very noticeable change; they had simply continued to exploit the prewar themes in a feeble America way. But Sweden had begun making significant films, had equipped herself to conquer the world and Chaplin had made his appearance. In the years to follow the art of the film was to see also for the first time the rise develop rapidly, and we were to of different schools of cinematography and of rival aesthetic creeds. It was really the end of an epoch, an epoch during which

42

The History

of

Motion Pictures

itself as a part of everyday life and the habit of seeking a weekly opiate in the had the acquired public movie theaters. This fact had been widely observed; M. Doumic in 1918 wrote in the Revue ties Deux blondes: "So prevalent an in fluence merits attention. May we not have entered upon the Age

the film had established

of Cinematography?"

had actually been achieved? Apart from the films of of Ince and Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife, and Chaplin the rest is mere historyall the serials and Judex, DeMille with The Cheat, and Griffith.* Yet just as literature in its beginnings started with the epic, and created supernaturally heroic figures like Achilles and Hector, Roland and Charlemagne or Beowulf, so had the infant cinema stamped itself on the imagination of the
public by creating types. Later on it was to lose sight of this prim itive function, which corresponds to a public need, but, in film after film, certain actors had stamped themselves on the public

What

imagination so that their names had become proverbial. The come dians like Keaton, Lloyd and Fields were to perpetuate this tradi tion, which is of course typically that of Chaplin, but during the

was not the comedians alone who obeyed it. There were Rigadin and Chaplin, but there were also Judex and Bill Hart and Tom Mix. By means of the simplest conventions, these figures adapted themselves to a medium which has usually found psy chological subtleties beyond its capacity. With one or two acces sories and a smile, a cape or a gun, these types were established,

war

it

easily recognizable by their adventures. By 1919 the

the audiences

who

thrilled in

response to

cinema had already created a

my

thology and a collection of gods. which has changed It had also created its own special universe, Elmer Rice perfectly little since that time. A few years later, very
described this universe in a book t which

and a

is rather long-drawn-out of legitimate malice. He de scribes the strange creatures which populate this world. "These workers," he tells us, "are almost invariably young and beautiful

trifle

heavy-handed but

full

cannot follow the authors here.

Griffith's Birth of a

Nation and In

tolerance, for example, are much more than t Voyage to Purilia, Cosmopolitan Press,

mere

New

history,

York, 1930, pp. 83-85.

The
girls, as

Cinejiia

During the World IFjr

yet untouched by the ravages of industrialism and usually destined to escape from the industrial world, at an early asje, by contracting a marriage with a young and handsome man of wealth. (Xor was I ever able to discover the exact nature of their occupa tion, for I found them always absorbed in the disentanglement of some emotional difficulty which seemed to occupy all their time . and attention.) Actually the country is without political in stitutions. In consequence the fortunate land is free from all those complex and perplexing problems of government and politics with
.

which humans are only too familiar. Occasionally one does meet an administrative officer; but these 'Governors,' as they are called, have no other duty than the consideration of pleas for mercy, in behalf of prisoners who have been condemned to death."
In describing the various inhabitants of this strange world El

mer Rice has omitted only the femme

to that of the police inspector, the

fatale. If

we add

her name

the strong, silent man and glean from his book the code of behavior practiced there, we shall have the whole geography of this world clearly before our eyes. This land of the cinema is one in which taxi drivers never give any change, where trains are never seen except when round ing a curve, where no boat sails without encountering a storm, and ships' orchestras always play the national anthem during a ship

cowboy and

wreck, where on every street we always see one society woman in an automobile and one working girl carrying a hatbox, where hotels have no lavatories and a person can regain his lost memory by being given a shrewd blow on the head. Such was the world of the silent films; most of its customs and other peculiarities can still be detected in the world of the talkies. This universe had al ready taken form by the end of the war: the coming years were to add little to our knowledge of it.

PART FOUR
The Emergence of an
4919-1923
J[rt

t.

The Jrench Jilm

.N creative period that followed the Armisticea period which may arbitrarily be re garded as lasting until the end of 1923 the French film played an important part. Much that was produced during those years left a great deal to be desired, but it was at this time that, through the influence of several directors, critics and writers,
the intellectuals began to take a keen interest in the cinema. The Swedish films first, and then the German films, gave rise
to new theories and new concepts. Many of them were er roneous or exaggerated, yet it was thanks to the various enthusi asms and experiments of those four years that cinematography as
a whole managed to seemed to be slipping.
extricate itself

THE

from the rut into which

It

TRADITIONAL ELEMENTS
Films

made

featuring ladies
lous crooks

Things
taste

like

unscrupu and intrepid police inspectors in the Jiidex tradition. that do not disappear in five minutes. Gradually public

for the masses continued, of course, to be ground out, from the Comedie Frangaise and full of

developed; audiences learned to appreciate better-constructed films and more ingenious plots. It is difficult to realize that men like Baroncelli, L'Herbier, Raymond Bernard, Poirier and Tourjanski were once in the advance guard; nevertheless these honest work men were among those who contributed to the development of
the

and it was during this period that they did their best and most daring work. They educated the public, taught it to see and to use its imagination not as Delluc and Sjostroni did but with comparable results. From an historical point of view it would
art,

their

4$

The History

of

Motion Pictures

be wroncr entirely to overlook them. All of them worked amidst hostile businessmen, who were determined at all costs to keep the cinema down to the lowest and most unintelligent level. The So-

Cine-romans was still active, Louis Feuillade continued to produce for it, and it was too much to expect the old type of
ciete des

films to disappear

all

at once.

Antoine continued to keep in suspense those admirers who be lieved in him, and made a rather pleasant adaptation of Mile, de la shots with animals, a farm as Seigliere, in which some landscape
pretty

and some bounding deer were much admired. remained fundamentally a man of the theater, Unfortunately he of Zola's Earth he mustered up the film a directed so that when he
as a picture

whole Comedie Fran^aise Bovy, Alexandre, Herve and the rest for his cast and also considerably tamed down that brutal story.

who had come into the picture during the war as Film d'Art, had the good sense to take Louis the manager of his Delluc under wing. His Sultane de r Amour was well liked. In
Louis Nalpas,
this Arabian Nights' tale the loves of an Arab prince and the Sul tana Daoulah occupied a great deal of footage, and Marcel Levesque played a very unusual role in it. It was all pretty obvious,

even the shots of the shimmering waters of the pool into which
Nas'r was eventually to plunge, but people found
just as
it

they did later his Tristan and Isolde,

this

made

quite pleasing, in the Italian

manner.
Films of
the

kind enjoyed

war

there had been so

of course, in no way ferred UAgonie des Aigles which Dominique-Bernard Deschamps directed in 1921, featuring Gaby Morlay and a great deal of senti mentality about ex-soldiers. They liked even better DiamantBerger's Three Musketeers (1921), one of the biggest postwar suc cesses. Aime Simon-Girard lent the figure of d'Artagnan a great deal of presence, and all the furniture was reputed to be authentic. The cowboy films had taught the French directors how to put

success because during originality. But the large public, interested in aesthetic problems, much pre
all

the

more

little

movement

into their work, and as Fairbanks' Three Musketeers had been denied exhibition everybody thoroughly enjoyed this but rather theatrical and mock-heroic picture with its echoes jolly

The Emergence
of the Theatre de
chet,
like the films of

of an Art

FAmbigu and its melodramatic effects. As PlanArmand Bernard started on his deplorable career. This film,

Antoine and of Mercanton, was really though not very obviously the offspring of the good old Film d'Art. Other directors, able enough and quick to seize upon the discov eries of their more truly creative rivals, also kept the same tradi tion alive. Leonce Ferret now refused to go on playing drunks: he had grown ambitious, and when at the end of 1923 he directed Koenigsmark with Huguette Duflos, it was regarded as a national triumph. The actress bore not the slightest resemblance to Pierre Benoit's heroine, but scenes such as the hunt, the fire or the lake
in the early

morning provided considerable stimulation for all who regarded themselves as responsive to beauty. Undeniably in films like Koenigsmark the commercial film did give evidence of real
progress and better taste. So did The Battle, with Sessue Hayakawa, in which the Japanese actor again gave one of his masterly

and inscrutable performances, while the naval engagement was directed with considerable skill. At the close of 1924 a film came along to eclipse the fame of either the Three Musketeers, The Battle or Koenigsmark, and
brought into prominence a quite able director, Henry Roussel, who had previously made Odette MarecbaVs Mistake and Open Countenances and Secret Souls. It also brought into prominence an exceptional artist who had won fame in the music halls Raquel

by girl ond Empire background: even the more critical people found it in the enchanting. The meeting between Napoleon and Eugenie in 1850, the charming groups a la WinterMadrid sunny Square halter with the Empress surrounded by her ladies in waiting were
really quite ravishing.

little

Meller. This film, Violettes Imperiales, told a charming story of a befriended flower Eugenie de Monti jo against a Sec

As

Jean Tedesco
.

said,

"Raquel

for the lovely pale Spanish heroine, as Meller is the high point of the film

that, she is one of the wonders of the world." She afterwards played in various mediocre films, and then went back again to dance and sing in Spain and comes our way but seldom, pale as ever, huskier of voice and more beautiful than
.
.

she

is

more than

before.

The History
In

of Motion Pictures

perhaps done more than to create a proper understanding of the mo anybody in France a strange film by tion picture-Louis Delluc. Shortly afterwards Machine A for Recreating and Duvivier Lepage appeared, Julien a considerable included which motion the about film a

May

1924 the one

man

died

who had

picture of old movies, from Lunch quantity to Brasier Ardent and even Caligari.
Life,

Woman

of Paris opened in Paris.

Hour at the Lumiere Factory One month later Chaplin's A The period during which the

film as an art

was being developed had come to an end.

EXPERIMENTS

Who
art?

were the men that nurtured the growth of

this

youthful

the important films made in France? First there was a Loi'e Fuller film, based on a story by Elizabeth, Queen of Rumania, Le Lys de la Vie. Superficially it was just a modern with a Prince Charming setting out in search of the fairy tale, this film, which featured a dancer and of flower happiness. But the dance, opened a whole new world of the made use of technique

Which were

to the motion picture. It

use of slow motion, in which the dancers looked like budding flowers, it made use of shadow shows and of negative in place of positive. In the Land of Fear the Prin
cess
is

made

Loi'e Fuller discovered all the

a pursued by bodiless hands against sheer black background. romanticism of the German film

that flowered in Caligari and Destiny in this picture, which the first film to be conceived and carried out as a visual
tion.

was

composi

In the same year, 1920, Jules Remains published his scenario Donogoo* never as yet filmed. This already famous writer now elected to think in terms of cinematography and to make use of
certain technical film devices

almost to invent

themsuch

as the

use of a series of extremely brief shots to indicate simultaneity.

Dono goo-Tonka ou les Miracles de la Science, Conte cvnematographique, Gallimard, Paris, 1920. Donogoo was filmed in Germany in 1936 by Schunzel, with both German and French versions.

The Emergence
Mack
letters

of an

Art

Sennett had played with the idea,* Jules Remains gave it its of introduction into society, Delluc and Gance actually

used

it. Donogoo is only a book, but it helped enormously to make the motion picture aware of itself and its potentialities, and the author of Men of Good Will must be given some credit for this.

But

still

Donogoo was only

book and Le Lys de

la

Vie only a

made the true fantasy. Who

films?

MARCEL L HERBIER

One

of the

first films

to attract the attention of the intellectuals

after the Armistice was Rose France by Marcel L'Herbier, who had been Mercanton's scenarist during the war. Before being con verted to the films, he had been an aesthete-author and published some Wildean volumes like Le Jardin des Jeux Secrets. Rose France had a gloomy and ridiculous story about a young Ameri

can millionaire extremely jealous of the girl he loves because she a loved only la belle France," which did not prevent him, how ever, from giving 100,000 francs towards the rehabilitation of the
devastated areas after the war.

The

film

is

also full of the

worst

kind of overacting, gush and patriotism, but notwithstanding its faults there was something of real interest here, even in spite of

moments in very questionable taste, as when, between two scenes verging on the torrid, there comes an enormous close-up of the mutilated hand of an ex-soldier holding a rose. This was vio
certain

and rightly so, but its daring lently criticized, dicated the liberties that the film was about to take,

Marcel L'Herbier did not do so very much Carnival of Truth, the following year, was admired by a few. It was nothing more than a melodrama tricked out with millionaires and blackmail, a revolver and a masked ball. There was a certain boldness of technique about it, but L'Herbier has always been
* The authors seem deliberately to overlook the fact that Griffith's In tolerance had introduced rapid cutting as, for instance, in a scene near the climax when successive shots measure, in feet, as follows: i, 3, 2, 2,
l

and indecency in though possibly to assist this. His

2,

I,

2, 2, 2,

1/2,

2,

2/2,

2,

4,

/ 2

52

The History

of

Motion Pictures
romanticism and
his undistin

guished plots. UHomne a Balzac novel, was infinitely better, for here his adaptation was and smooth. The simplicity and the love extraordinarily skillful liness of the landscapes despite an overemphasis on the pictur

handicapped by

his rather feeble

du Large, made

in 1920, also based

on

the famous "pardon" scene) esque elements of Brittany (like make it possible to see this production again, even today, with considerable pleasure, though it is perhaps a trifle too smooth and too clever. At the time it helped the French to realize, as

Antoine and the Swedes had also done, how important natural settings can be. Don Juan and Faust, in 1922, was rather different. This was an it evinced a original story, not an adaptation, though strong literary an between Faust and Don about encounter tale flavor with its Juan. Here too some major faults prevented one's wholehearted ad miration, but L'Herbier in his clumsy way definitely established the fact that no subject is taboo to the film, not even symbolism and not even thought itself. He reiterated the same thing in an other fashion in the sketchy Prometheus Is a Banker. This was of his films at that time. really the "message" of most

One

of them, however,

is

of considerably
that
is,

more

merit, better

Eldorado, produced in 1921. It made a considerable hit. What remains of interest about it is not the romantic tale of the dancer Sibylla, who sacrifices herself for her child, but the technical audacity of the
piece,

even than

UHomme

du Large:

the newly fashionable use of soft focus and the many composi tions modeled on Ribera, Velasquez or Goya. In Eldorado, with its picturesque Andalusian settings, the film became a art,
plastic

photographically, either: when Sibylla wanders the walls of the Alhambra, near distraught they become dis torted and dim. Besides these technical experiments the face of Eve Francis and the passionate note on which the action is

and not

just

sustained lend a romantic appeal to this film, which the few really successful this pieces made

is

one of

during

boldly experi

mental but fumbling period. Eventually L'Herbier returned to his literary preoccupations. Towards the end of 1923 he completed Ulnhumaine, based on

The Emergence
a scenario
sets

of an Art

by MacOrlan, with special music by Darius Milhaud, designed by Fernand Leger, Mallet-Stevens and Cavalall more or less cubist. Eve Francis, with her tragic ex canti, tried vainly to inject some life into this abstract and pression,
and
false

the screen.

work, one of the biggest of all the intellectual failures of It was L'Herbier's last experiment: he was compelled for the future to apply what he had learned to commercial films
for the masses.*

made

JACQUES DE BARONCELLI
Jacques de Baroncelli, whose work was much more uneven than that of L'Herbier, also tried to hit the balance between commerce and art. One must admit that commerce won, as al

ways

cases, but for a little while after the war he played some importance, for he brought with him, along with the stock in trade of the ordinary film, some excellent qualities.

in

such

a role of

He

directed

many

Lone Bernstein's The

Secret of

Star.

films, including detective pictures like The made a quite good one out of Henry

He

Squall,

which Delluc did not

really

admire but

considered as competent as The Cheat. Actually it was a good deal less absurd, but it was not the sort of thing in which Baron
celli excelled. What he really liked was to make adaptations of famous books in which a landscape could figure and picturesque emotional sufferings of settings could lend their glamour to the the characters. He did this sort of thing very well. In 1919 he had made Ramuntcho, which caused something of a controversy about adaptations in general. Though Pathe had insisted on numerous cuts before distributing the film, it made a hit; the

of general public responded to the director's sensitive handling

a painter, and landscape and atmosphere as though he had been the picture caused a certain amount of talk about "the impres

sionism of the French film." But Baroncelli was quite without

*This is only one opinion. There is considerable support for the view that Eldorado is pretentious nonsense and that L'Herbier's Late Matthew Pascal (1925) with Mosjoukine and Lois Moran is a film of abiding inter estunquestionably a better piece than Eldorado*

The History
originality,

of

Motion Pictures
does the background play Swedish and the Soviet films:

and

in

none of
it

his films

a really vital role as

it

does in the

at the time, always looks like a nice picture postcard. Yet, what he did was important. Balzac's Le Fere Goriot, Cherau's Champi-Tortu and Zola's

next efforts to attempt the rather thankless task of translating literature to the screenthe visual expression the written work. His is almost always so much less rich than he tried to catch the love until talents were not employed

Le Reve were

his

fully

liness

of Bruges on the screen, in a plot he had

made up himself

about a

bell ringer's daughter, quite respectable effort. But his

The Midnight
two

Carillon, a really best films were to follow

when, after making The Unknown Woman in 1923, he directed Nene and Pecheurs dUslande. As for the first of these, he published a revealing letter to
Ernest Perochon, the author of the novel on which it was based, explaining that he had changed the heroine from a sturdy peasant into a sickly girl because she was unhappy and on the screen
physical appearance must correspond to character. (Elmer Rice has some delightful comments on this in his Voyage to Purilia.)

Despite her delicate constitution Nene did not commit suicide in the film as she had in the book, because, Baroncelli explained

very seriously, people did not like drowned women. Perochon took these explanations as best he could, though sadly, and no body seemed to see the humor of such a correspondence, so
eloquent of the cinema's hatred for nuances. about Baroncelli.
in Pecheurs cClslande that Baroncelli ful
It
tells

us

much

There were some handsome landscapes came

Sandra Milowanoff
as

in

N$ne but
y

into his

it was own. Grace

Gaud, the cloudy

skies,

the young-

woman
which

walking in the cemetery of the drowned sailors with its crosses that mark no graves, the sense of the sea and of death
it

combined to lend this film a quite remark Able though he was, Baroncelli lacked he lacked real talent, he was never able to rise many requisites: above a sort of proficiency born of experience, or to do more
all

evoked

able sureness and power.

than create rather hackneyed or sentimental imitations of literary

The Emergence

of an

Art

755

works rendered even more hackneyed or sentimental by the conventions of the motion picture (as his letter to Perochon shows). Later on Baroncelli, like Poirier and Leonce Perret, was
to catch the public favor without really making many conces sions, since he had little to sacrifice. Yet when one recalls his

Pecheurs
promise

$ Island e

it

somehow seems

pity,

but there

it is:

com

is

always perilous.

FROM LEON
It

POIRIER TO

RAYMOND BERNARD
that

was on the score of landscape scenes

later to

Leon

Poirier, too,

claim to artistry, though he had started out with a mixed variety of productions, a few of which were rather
ambitious. In 1920 Edmond Fleg had brought him the scenario of Le Penseur, a rather oversimple affair which, however, gained

was

make

considerable notice because, as in some of L'Herbier's and Delluc's films, it attempted to express ideas. Its hero, obsessed by the thought of Rodin's sculpture, which provided a theme for
the whole film, discovered how to read people's thoughts. This gave rise to a host of superimposed images revelers turned into
parrots and jazz players into skeletons. The picture was accepted as "a film of ideas," and it actually was an attempt to delineate thoughts, though greatly abusing the fashionable device of superimposed pictures. Poirier afterwards gave up such experiments.

His Jocelyn and his Genevieve, faithfully modeled on Lamartine, proved that he had an excellent sense of the past and a great deal of taste. People were delighted with their period costumes and with their landscape shots, which seemed to flood the screen

with

air.

For

their period they

were two quite successful

at

In 1924 Poirier scored a suc making tempts cess with La Briere, Alphonse de Chateaubriant's novel, in which he did justice to both the desolate atmosphere of La Briere and
at

intelligent films.

Austin's wild adventure, getting into it much more than Baron celli could ever have managed to do, since he was dealing not with charm but with a character of some weight, alternately

with con friendly and hostile, which he succeeded in delineating siderable sureness and skill In the French postwar school of

The History

of Motion Pictures

of Leon Poirier's entitles him to a landscape films this picture distinct place. There were high hopes for him and also for Ray mond Bernard, who had directed Max Linder in Le Petit Cafe in 1920 attempted a psychological com during the war, and now famous father Tristan Bernard, The his edy based on a story by Secret of Rosette Lambert. Today not even Mallet-Stevens' set this "subtle" comedy from boring one. It was tings can prevent Raymond Bernard who also in 1924 essayed the historical spec tacle, The Miracle of the Wolves.
Fairbanks had recently made costume films popular, but his the French is very different from his tory as reconstructed by

Raymond gay tory reconstructed in Bernard's credit must be reckoned his scrupulous care, some handsome scenes such as that of the medieval Mystery play, and deal of skill in narrating a thin plot taken from an un a
good worthy novel. The taking of the city (filmed in Carcassonne) was as well done as the famous miracle in which hungry wolves were seen to crouch down piously in front of a young girl pray

the

American manner.

To

gave an excellent portrayal of Louis XI, radi ant with youth and love of France, so unlike the stereotyped The Miracle of the Wolves, which one can still look portrait. at today with some pleasure and which has become quite a
Dullin ing. Charles
film, has nothing in it of the fire, the wildness of Abel Gance's best work. Everything about it is well managed, it is never ridiculous and there are no serious faults in it, but there is also no great virtue in it either: it is one of those genteel films.

famous

Poirier, Raymond Bernard and Baroncelli were really There were others at this period who tried, some men. literary what timidly, to inject a little intelligence into the motion pic ture. Especially must we note the work of one of the few women directors, Mme. Germaine Dulac. She made a great many films and has disowned most of them, for she turned her hand to almost every kind of material not only a Belle Dame Sans Merci but also a serial called Gossette. She was apparently only really interested in one film, The Smiling Madame Beudet, from a play by Andre Obey and Denys Amiel, filmed in collaboration with Obey. This was a psychological drama, for Denys Amiel

Leon

The Emergence

of an

Art

157

and Jean- Jacques Bernard had made a reputation by sponsoring a new style, giving particular stress to words and gestures ap of no great importance. This play, an example of the parently new "ecole du silence," and modeled on Madame B ovary, seemed an intimate drama that demanded to be filmed. Germaine Dulac proved in it, with extraordinary skill and subtlety, that the mo
tion picture as
it became more refined could exactly reduplicate certain of the effects stage plays. She did not prove that it can

express psychological

subtleties.

LOUIS DELLUC

Yet there were many people who thought that she had done so, among them Louis Delluc the most important figure in the French film world at that time. Delluc was an extraordinary fellow novelist, reporter and His reviews of films, frequently quite crazy, are alive journalist. wit and sense and are extraordinarily prophetic. Passion with in the cinema, he made few films, though he interested ately which other people made into films scenarios several wrote as he had intended them to be. Germaine Dulac much pretty collaborated with him on La Fete Espagnol. He introduced to
the screen ClaudeFs attractive interpreter, Mme. Eve Francis. Through his articles, his conversation, the example that he set and his undoubted talent he did more than any other man in

France to develop an art of the film. But for him we should hardly have learned to appreciate the motion picture. The films that he directed can only be considered in relation to the time when they were made. La Fete Espagnole, one of the
best,

seems today a rambling affair: the heroine, Soledad, is loved by two men, who urge her to choose between them. She says she will accept whichever one "comes back alone." They fight, and kill each other, as Soledad goes off with a stranger. In this and short film, which displays the lingering in

slow-moving fluence both of Merimee and of Louys, there is a certain ad mirable warmth and passion, as well as an individual style. In most documentary films we are shown everything, nothing

/y#
is

The History

of

Motion Pictures

when Delluc and Mme. Dulac want to include a us one small sunny corner of the arena with show bullfight they one or two cruel faces, and yet contrive to suggest all the at
omitted; but

mosphere of Spain. Such conciseness

this film Delluc, quite exceptionally,

is

pure cinema. Also in

to the ballet

came nearer

experi of which were successful, though all of them were useful. Like L'Herbier and Poirier and the Swedes, he was in

than to psychological drama. Afterwards Delluc threw himself into innumerable

all

ments, not

love with superimposed images and with all those tricks that free the film from the laws of the visible world; nowadays they

Noire, a sort of detective story, the film opens with a conversation between a husband and wife, after their mysterious Uncle Patrick has just turned
up.

seem rather clumsy

to us. In

Fumee

They
first

are saying, jokingly,

in

"How

do you

know

that

have

never killed anyone?"

the

man

"And how do you know that you were life?" The uncle dies, the husband and wife my

lose their heads

and each begins to suspect the other. It was not very good though it made liberal use of those things that amateurs of the cinema foreshortened shots, "mental delight
film,

impressions" photographed from above, settings in strongly con trasted blacks and whites, and superimposed images, all very much in Delluc's own style, as were also an excessive interest in

psychological behavior and an exaggerated habit of showing what people were thinking by means of oversimplified images.

The commercial

films

were

later to

abuse this use of superimposed

images to indicate what characters were imagining. In Silence e see a man waiting for a woman.

When

at last

she arrives, he has killed himself, for while waiting he fancied that he saw his dead wife, whom he had killed because he be lieved her unfaithful, come back to protest her innocence. The wife was played with a great deal of feeling by Eve Francis,

and Delluc attempted to tell her story by a liberal use of super imposed images to convey both what the husband was remem bering and what he was imagining. It was of course a mistaken method but one which did much to extend film and
technique

The Emergence
usefully render min cPErnoa.
it

of an Art

more

supple.

So did Le Tonnerre and Le Chein 1922, contrasted the fate of

La Fcmme de Nulle
a xvoman

Part,

made

who had sacrificed everything for another woman who had resisted temptation her husband's home. The first woman has
It

love and that of

and remained
nothing
left

in

but

was a really daring experiment, this purely psy chological story, and some of the shots at the opening, the child's
memories.

When
own

balloon floating into the screen, have a purely cinematic quality. the camera shoots down on the staircase where the hero
ine stands as she recalls the past,
giddiness.
it

catches the sensation of her

the end, when Eve Francis in her flowing dress walks along the deserted road through a wide bare landscape, there is something moving about it even today. So uncompro

At

mising a treatment as he used and a basic approach which is radically wrong are rather disturbing, and one asks oneself

whether the film by relying only on imagery and a succession of shots can really bring a character to life. The conclusion is that it cannot. That is what makes Delluc's films, intelligent and faded. arresting though they be, seem old-fashioned and film made his best he also and However, Fi&vre, perhaps a It is too slow and too insistent, but it film. brought really great to the screen for the first time that atmosphere of low haunts and brief encounters which was so popular after the war. In a
sailors'

bar in Marseilles a group of extraordinarily individual

and convincing characters are gathered the woman Patience, the little clerk* the man with the gray hat. Then sailors arrive from some distant port, laden with curios. There is a brawl, someone is killed, the police appear and a little Oriental girl to creep up to a flower she has been gazing at finally manages
cloud of dis it is artificial. enviously only to discover that illusionment seems to hang over this picture, from which Jean and Cavalcanti of En Rade were to Epstein of Ccwir Fiddle learn so much. It contained any number of devices which were
afterwards to be worked to death but

w ere
r

absolutely

new

then.

Before he died in 1924, Delluc had finished Ulnondation, based

160
on
It

The History

of

Motion Pictures
was ad

a Provengal novel by Andre Corthis. Eve Francis mirable in it as a badly-dressed and bewildered country

woman.

was not the shots of the flood nor the plot that were impor tant; it was the attention given to the expression on people's
and to the carefully convincing grouping and composi realism of Antoine, the poetic realism of the Swedes had taught Delluc a great deal Had he lived he would perhaps have helped the French film to produce the rustic dramas and
faces,
tion.

The

folk films that

it

lacks and
its

which

it is

so well adapted to create.

shadowy interiors, its sharp and lifelike were (which only used as settings, since Delluc cared more about men than about things) one cannot escape this Had he been able to put more vitality into his films, had feeling. he loved the world more, he could have done it. In any event, even if we regard him quite unjustly as merely a theoretician, as one who dreamed of films rather than made them, Louis Delluc is still the most interesting of all the artists born of this new art in France before Rene Clair. His Fete Espagnole and Fievre remain memorable, and in everything that he did, not only in his books, there is the same intelligence, the same restless fire, the same feeling for people and for things. Had he come ten years later Delluc would have found a more developed instrument to his hand and an easier task. As it xwas he had perforce to become a pioneer, always an ungrateful if honorable role. Certainly no one in France before him had set
In Ulnondation with
exteriors
*

the beauty that

out deliberately to reveal the beauty that is in a human face, is in the world about us. No one before had made'

films like these, expressive of the pathos of failure

and the

il

lusory nature of life, and quite ironical It was this atmosphere of disenchantment which really lent a certain unity to his other wise loosely constructed works, that sought to express the diverse elements of our world. To films and dramatic

documentary

adaptations alike such utter disenchantment can lend something both subtle and profound. All existence is painful, all life a
failure, so

La Femne de Nulle Part and Fievre

flowers

we

suggest: all the to to be artificial. Louis Delluc was long pluck prove

The Emergence of an
one of the
first

An
his

161

French directors to stamp his work with and with a sort of pessimistic poetry. personality

own

JEAN EPSTEIN

Among the directors in whom the highest hopes reposed, who seemed best fitted to carry out Delluc's theories and realize
was Jean Epstein. He, too, came from the world rather pretentious world. a is a bad writer, of literature, are better than his recent and his Lyroscopie. Delessays hardly
his ambitions,

He

.luc

and Rene Clair seem to have been the only two film men with
literary ability. in collaboration

any

with Jean Benoit-Levy with a film began about Pasteur, made at the time of the centenary. His real de but was The Red Inn, from one of Balzac's stories. It was not a particularly adroit affair, burdened with period costumes and
wigs
also
as it was, but two scenes earned him favorable noticethe card scene and that of the execution. In the same year, 1923, he

He

Fidele, which many people found delightful, was badly constructed, it annoyed all those who though, regarded Koenigsmark as a masterpiece. It was nevertheless a work of merit, probably made under the influence of Fievre. The sequence of the country fair, where the mobility of the camera made it seem actually to participate in the general move ment, raised the film far above the ordinary level, and its ordi nary everyday characters, its rather squalid atmosphere, evoked a sort of popular poetry such as Rene Clair was later so delight fully to express. But Clair transforms everything into fantasy
as
it

made Coeur

whereas Epstein
special merit

is

addicted to realism, his peculiar forte. His

arises

from an accumulation of

details,

an emphasis

on

truthfulness to life and a considerable technical ability. Cceur Fidele established prostitutes and pimps and low haunts in the

postwar cinema imagery, which Carco had first introduced and MacOrlan had improved upon. The film which at the time seemed so daring today seems very simple, though in a manner which reminds one of A Girl in Every Port and Lonesome.

i6z

The History

of Motion Pictures

the end of 1923 Jean Epstein also directed La Belle Nivernaise, after Alphonse Daudet, and so entered the ranks of the French landscapists. Everyone knows this story of the child

Towards

had been adopted by boatmen, then found by her wealthy relations, who is unhappy at school and only regains happiness when she escapes to freedom and her beloved boat "La Belle Nivernaise." It is a charming story, charmingly handled by Ep stein, with its beautiful riverside settings and that rather melan w hich afterwards was to become one choly feeling for nature of his most appealing qualities. The film was not as important in his development as Coeur Fidele, but it was skillful and moving. There was much to be expected of the young man who had

who

and there seemed little likelihood of his the commercial slickness of a Baroncelli. His hon relapsing into est craftsmanship, his sensitive approach to the object and his frank acceptance of facts would doubtless preserve him from such a course. Epstein was in fact apparently to create a world of his own, a rather harsh world but swept by clean breezes, Alas, in the years to come he often gave the lie to such predic tions: it was a crime to be reckoned against the cinema that it made so gifted a man into what he now is. Yet we must not for

made

these

two

pictures,

get Epstein's early contribution.

JACQUES FEYDER

made his entry was Jacques This into the field with no the of he was job adapting UAtlantide given Feyder, In 1921 Benoit Pierre of novel from the famous (who, incidentally, re

At about

this

time an honest

workman

also

great flourish of trumpets.

ceived a mere 6,000 francs for the rights). The monumental whose body Napierkowska was engaged to represent Antinea, her ridiculous but a of was that young girl. Everyone thought
the film had a sort of vigor, though no wit whatsoever. In much the same style he also directed Raquel Meller in Carmen, but would have dreamed of ranking him above Leonce

nobody

Ferret had he not in 1923 made Crainquebille with Feraudy. This film is still of interest today. In it Feyder employed the

The Emergence

of an

Art

device of the dream which has been such a stand-by to other directors Dr. Mathieu has a sort of nightmare in which he sees
the judges flying about like great birds, and the police court as a sea of eyeballs staring at the bewildered Crainquebille. When the testimony was being given, the screen showed a colossal
a tiny witness for the defense. All this was done policeman with technical with great ingenuity, which Feyder was seldom to the and which somewhat obscured his in of future make use
real gifts, for

w hat
T

here for the

first

gave Crainquebille its abiding merit was that time there was an attempt to bare the mysteries

patient, almost heavy film in which he tried to ex a psychological truth. He is one of the few who later de press veloped fairly complex characters on the screen and by purely

human had made a

of a

soul.

From Anatole

France's

mocking

tale

Feyder

means gave life to a pessimistic but accurate study of In Crainquebille it was realized with some sur nature. human that the director of UAtlantide without in any way sacrific
pictorial

prise

ing his

skill

had evinced

definite originality,

and an originality

which sprang from within.

ABEL GANCE
Unquestionably the most famous of all the directors of this period, the one in whose hands the future of the French film was thought to lie, was Abel Gance. Immediately after the war, already famous by reason of his preposterous Tenth Symphony and Mater Dolorosa, he made his first "superfikn," ] Accuse (1919). He had been planning it for quite some time, as he had too The End of the World, His notebook, so we are told, contained lines such as: "Transfigura tion of a brute into a good and kindly man through war suffer
J

a writer who believed ings." "The birth of religious sentiment in like the Marseillaise are created." in nothing at all." hymns

"How

was in such a mood that he evolved his "modern tragedy" in which Severin-Mars and Romuald Joube took part and Blaise Cendrars too, as Gance's assistant. J* Accuse is really a horribly
It

melodramatic

affair

about a

woman who

is

raped by

German

164
soldiers

The History
and has a
child.

of

Motion Pictures

suspects that it is the child of his best friend, who is, in fact, in love with the woman. All the characters shortly find themselves at the Front, in search of
a heroic death.

The husband

People were staggered

by

this

medley of hu

Delluc

manitarian and patriotic ideas. As for its artistic merits, Louis much preferred the equally absurd Zone of Death, which seemed less stilted and more original because it had some lyrical
quality. In J' Accuse he

pictures,

too

well

saw nothing but some well-composed composed, and compared it also to The

Cheat.

today would seem supremely ridiculous. The cuts which were made in it merely emphasized the clumsier and coarser elements in the film. Also, it should be realized that

P Accuse

Gance had used color in several places. In the opening sequence there was a huge close-up of an enormous red Legion d'honneur.
In the following scene, a soldier with an enormous vermilion wound in his left breast cries out as he dies: "Never thought
color was they'd slap a Legion cPhonneur on me!" This use of of Gance. a device not at all characteristic After F Accuse this same man nevertheless evolved an extraor

and striking cinematographic vocabu which he began to work on in lary such as he used in La Roue, de Voza and the Bossons the Col in 1919 first in Nice, then so was It it long that it cost two and by 1921. glacier, finishing and could francs a half million only be shown in a curtailed and von Stroheim's Greed Intolerance Griffith's version. Like the of the monstrosities of it is one cinema, but an extraordinarily
dinarily suggestive,

vivid

important monstrosity.

The
a
little

story

is

in the girl

unbelievably complicated. An engine driver finds wreckage of a train smash that has killed her

her and falls in love with her, as does also parents. He adopts his son, but he marries her off to an engineer. There are ac cidents and catastrophes galore, the engine driver goes blind, his son and the engineer are killed, leaving the modern Oedipus

and and

his

his

writers,

Antigone together. This gloomy tale, redolent of Zola La Bete Humaine, of Hugo and a dozen other romantic would have been laughed off the screen had not every-

The Emergence
effaced thing else been
ine

of an Art

165

by

its

technical mastery and a very genu

this

and even nobly poetic quality which

technique served

to express.

of the film vividly re-creates the mechanical early part and smoke and steam and tracks. one had re world of steel

The

No

alized before

how

world or to what animate things with soul, with a life of their own. It was because he did this and not because of the plot he developed that Gance's work had real worth. Signals and wheels, pistons and manometers seemed to live. The camera with a hitherto unknown flexibility, with almost startling ubiquity hovers over all of them, revealing them in unfamiliar guises and aspects, lending them an epic qual
ity.

amazingly the film can express the modern extent a new type of pantheism can endow in

Inevitably at times amid a bank of flowers

Gance goes wrong: the engine expiring

is

out the film the

moment he

almost comic. Yet virtually through turns from human beings to the

mechanical world he sweeps us irresistibly along with him. What is more, La Roue was the first work of any real scope to be composed according to an exact rhythmical pattern. "The
film,"

Gance had

said, "is the

poetry of

light."

He

regarded the

long

rhythm of a film as being akin to that of Latin verse, with its and short feet; and La Roue was actually based on a care
ful metrical pattern,

with blank film punctuating the end of

scenes and sequences. In imitation of Donogoo, Gance made use of rapid cutting to give an impression of simultaneous happen ings and discovered how to achieve an accelerated tempo by

means of shorter and shorter shots to give the feeling of flight, of giddy descent and of inevitable catastrophe. The most stir and un ring moments of La Roue are those which this brilliant

was to become. His talent was to be irresistibly applied to undeniable but disorderly a rather vague ideology, to pathos and to improbabilities. He would contrive to redeem everything by his very great gifts, by that inventiveness and vigor which were to make of him one of
the most unequal but one of the most powerful of film in fact, a sort of Hugo of the screen,

hesitating technical ability emphasizes. After La Roue it was clear what Gance

men

and,

66

The History

of

Motion Pictures

MAX

LINDER

While French directors were busying themselves usefully with experiments, the most famous French film actor was making most of his films abroad, and they had little or no relationship to what w as happening in France. Max Linder continued being Max Linder, and the only influence to which he was subject was
r

really

sort of

boomerang, for he was

now undoubtedly

in

Chaplin. Before his tragic death this most charming of prewar actors, the original king of mirth, had appeared to good purpose in several feature films which are positively aston

fluenced

by

ishing to see again today because one so keenly regrets having forgotten them in the meantime. He made Be My Wife (excellent fooling full of gaiety and

of invention), The Three Must-get-theres and Seven Years Bad Luck. Back in Europe he made Help! with Abel Gance (a fan tasy with some almost tragic episodes) and then went to Austria
7

picture, The King of the Circus. The Three a rather coarse was Must-get-theres parody of no great impor it was tance, though amusing to see the three musketeers spring ing out of bed when they are needed during the night and slid ing down a pole like firemen to land plunk on the backs of their steeds. The King of the Circus was much better. All the first part is devoted to the quarrel between Count Max, a confirmed roist erer, and his uncle. One morning after a night's heavy drinking, Max is discovered asleep in bed in the window of a big furniture

to

make

his last

store,

while a delighted crowd gathers to see him.

The

latter

becomes an ani mal trainer, is less attractive, though Chaplin had not forgotten it when he made The Circus. The troubles which A4ax has with
half, in

which Max,

in love

with a circus

rider,

the lion, though often fairly obvious, are extremely funny. Linder's best film was unquestionably Seven Years* Bad Luck.

The opening
mirror, and

Max's servant has broken his master's he makes one of the other servants stand behind the frame and imitate every empty Max does. that It is an old music-hall turn which the Marx thing
is

excellent:

in order to conceal the fact

The Emergence

of an

Art

Brothers have also used, but there is something really delightful about the way in which the consequences of the situation are

Max

developed and the whole thing is carried off so airily. When finds out what is really happening he naturally tries to give his double a shrewd kick, but in the meantime a new glass has
it.

been put in the frame and he breaks

The

rest

is

rather dragged

out, though there are two amazingly funny incidents Max dis the journey he takes while tributing free railroad tickets, and a Negro. disguised as

What

did this first-rate actor lack that prevented

him from

he lacked imagination and also, in order going further? Broadly, to become the equal of Chaplin (whom he closely resembled and so many of whose comedy devices he previously had sketched
ter.

out), he lacked the skill to mingle a deeper emotion with laugh The character that he most commonly played was that of
a reveler or
is

man about town, w hereas

r

the character that Chaplin

a tramp. There is a vast difference here: the plays with his humility and his resignation gets knocked

poor tramp about both

by men and by

things generally, whereas the reveler takes his misfortunes lightly and so we take them lightly too. He is a out of vaudeville, and he has little oppor purely comic figure emotions. But limited though his comedy tunity to touch our have been, Linder's films were nevertheless of very great

may

But for them we should never have come to love importance. Keaton or Lloyd or even Chaplin: he taught them an immense an infinite share of wit. The only real amount. He
possessed

French comedian disappeared when he

died.

In the next years the French directors were to complete their tended to conclude them with com experiments. Actually they nature. Nevertheless, for less regrettable promises of a more or
three or four years the French film had given birth to much that was new and original. It is all the more regrettable that it has
since lost that distinction.

68

The History

of

Motion Pictures

2.

The Russian 7ilm

WHEN

the Russian Revolution had been successfully concluded, the Russian studios were bankrupt and virtually useless. Actors and directors fled first to the Crimea, then to Germany or, more

of them, to France. Everything had to be reorganized, a task

which was not completed until 1925. Up to that time the real Russian films though few recognize it today were those made by the Czarist emigres in Paris, where they continued the work that they had started during the war and with the same person nel, with Protazanov and Volkov and, even more important, with Mosjoukine. Their work was strange and chaotic, sometimes overclever, and destined to die out or to become denationalized in exile, but it produced some attractive films immediately after the war. Meanwhile in the U.S.S.R. other men on the track of new cinematic laws and theories were laying the groundwork for Eisenstein and Pudovkin's future success. Here it is well to consider how it was that this nation, cut in half by the turn of events, nevertheless contrived to express on the screen the unity
of the Russian genius.

THE EMIGRES
It

was

at Montreuil, first

with Yermoliev and then with Alba

tross, that the

Russian exiles tried to preserve both their customs and their ideas about films. It would be foolish to consider them

branch of the French film, since their producers, directors and actors and even at times their financial backing were Russian. Rather were they a branch of old Russia planted in new soil. Of
as a

course, as the genuinely Russian firms disappeared the group was broken up, actors took engagements elsewhere, either in France or abroad, and directors likewise. But for a few years this bit

of Russia-in-France preserved

its

entity.

Naturally the ideas of

French directors influenced these people; in fact it might almost be said that their chief ambition seemed to be (and they were

The Emergence

of an Art

extremely able folk) to imitate and almost to popularize the bold est of French experimental production. They disguised what they were doing, however, with a romantic, or perhaps exotic, flavor

which recalled the more famous of the films which had emanated from the old Russia. Without much question, the most distinguished of the exiles was Ivan Mosjoukine, who enjoyed international fame for a few He had played in any number of films under Volkov and years. Protazanov and was to direct again, as he had formerly done in

The Prosecuting Attorney. He made

Child of the Carnival

and played in Robert Boudrioz's Tempests and Volkov's House of Mystery, then later in Epstein's The Lion of the Mongols, The Late Matthew Pascal, under L'Herbier, in Tourjanski's Mi chael Strogoff, in Casanova and in Le Rouge et le Noir. His films were shown in America, whither he departed in 1926. No mat ter who his director might be, he himself was the person who and controlled the films he played in. His most actually inspired characteristic films were Kean and Shadows that Pass,, both by Volkov, and Le Brasier Ardent, for which he wrote the scenario and which he also directed. His acting was somewhat theatrical, and his favorite expres sion, like that of Sessue Hayakawa, was one of impassiveness or, of stupidity. He had, however, a wide ironically, one variety of attitudes and he loved to and roles. In one play multiple gestures of his earliest pictures, The Parliamentarian, he played two parts, while Le Brasier Ardent showed him in a variety of guises. In Volkov's House of Mystery his characterization proceeded by a
series of explosions separated

by long

intervals of imperturbable

calm. This

was not a bad

film, it

was rather exciting and quite

well constructed, and included a brilliant scene of convicts escap ing from prison. Casanova, on the other hand, with all its scenery

and Venetian splendor was only a star-vehicle without much real action. As for Le Rouge et le Noir, poor Stendhal's book had been changed into an adventure story with much galloping through woods, revolutionary risings, duels, orgies and fights in

Mosjoukine always loved adventure, like Douglas Fair banks, and in Casanova he did battle with twelve enemies at once
taverns.

770

The History

of

Motion Pictures

in the best tradition of Lagardere. In all his best films one finds the same rather wearisome skill, the same passion for surmount

ing

difficulties,

for technical tricks.

Shadows

that Pass, a bur

he attempted to re reminds one of Keaton somewhat of a new veal himself, aspect and of Chaplin but also of Sacha Guitry. As for Kean, this was
in lesque with sentimental additions
T

w hich

them had pure romanticism: Volkov and Mosjoukine between made of Alexandre Dumas' play a skillful and rather sober affair in which the actor could give free vent to his passion for the theater and for make-up. Two high spots are famous: the death of Kean (almost pure melodrama) and the sailor's jig in the Coal
Hole an amazing scene in which the dance, led by Mosjoukine and Koline (w ho played the part of the stage prompter), de
r

rout. The camera caught it first in longshot, then just the heads of the dancers thrown back in abandon, the joined hands, the lively legs. Every known resource was used

velops into a

mad

and for the sake of being remembered.

here,

this bit

of bravura

Kean

is

worthy of

Le Here

Brasier Ardent, 1923, seems entirely a whole series of experiments was

composed of bravura. drawn upon, those of

Epstein and Delluc, those of Loi'e Fuller and of Wiene and even of the old Russian films. (Volkov had made Satan Laughs, an earlier version of Le Brasier Ardent.) It was a really remarkable picture, little understood at the time but full of good things. Not

wholly unlike James Cruze's Beggar on Horseback, it starts off with a nightmare in which out of a confused background a man
materializes, calmly,

now
all

ionable dancer.
tells

When
it

herself that

by
fell

the detective

as a beggar, now as a bishop or a fash the victim of this nightmare wakes she came from the various disguises adopted

in the novel she

is

had been reading before she

asleep. burglary in her home, and her husband to consult this same detective X. The two characters now goes

But there

which correspond to those of the and Natalie Lissenko remembers, each time, the dream nightmare, dancer or symbol (beggar, bishop) which corresponds to her
find themselves in situations

present feelings.

The

slickness of this device

might have made the film seem

The Emergence
childish

of an

Art

it not been enlivened with imagination. For instance, while the heroine thinking about her past life is looking at some of old photos and they come to life, but as negatives, negatives and whites transposed. Some quite lovely shots, blacks with the the of like those lights of an automobile passing through a little

had

town hidden

in darkness, a

goodly number of amusing incidents,

like those of the extraordinary detectives' club, made Le Brasier Ardent very popular both with the general public and with those

interested

in the

resources of cinematography.

Slow motion,

soft focus, negative in place of positive and rapid rapid motion, all utilized in this tale of detectives and were delightful cutting a of Paris and its under sentimental intrigue against background

world.

The
they
lie

faults of

Kean and Le
as

in excessive cleverness

But merits such

Brasier Ardent are self-evident: and an abuse of technical devices. they contain are not so common that we can

somewhat me afford to dismiss the films, faults or no faults. this sort of has its value and chanical fantasy belongs properly with fertile inventiveness. It is a great pity that Mosjoukine soon
abandoned such experiments for films of a more popular order in which he was little more than a talented actor. The other Russian directors, though less ambitious, had already set him an example. Tourjanski made sumptuous films like The Arabian Nights Tales, The Masked Woman or adaptations from de Mau passant (That Pig Morin, The Ordonnance} and finally scored a real hit with Prince Charming and its lavish settings. There was nothing original about any of them, they were simply capably made. Every now and then the exiles, with considerable melan choly, remembered that they were Russians: Strizhinski made a Taras Bulba for Yermoliev in 1923. At other times they attempted
to pay tribute to the country of their adoption, as when Protazanov filmed Bourget's Sense of Death. Delluc reproached him with never having abandoned the theatrical traditions of the prewar Russian film, which he compared rather unfairly to the Italian film. The really interesting thing about this film was a young actor who appeared in it In Le Crapouillot M. Rene Kerdyk

wrote that

this actor "in the part of the

young engineer revealed

172

The History

of Motion Pictures

himself as the Dehelly of the seventh art, or, rather, as an eighth art all of himself." were to learn more of this man, but not

We

as

an actor. His name was Rene Clair. Protazanov * also bid fair to escape Delluc's criticism in

fall in love with the same woman some attractive outdoor scenes, especially one of a grape harvest. Nature was here taking a part in a Russian emigres film as it was to do in so many Soviet pictures. The most interest ing of the exiles, with the exception of Mosjoukine, was one whose work lay outside the usual channels. He had collaborated with Protazanov in Towards the Light and For a Night of Love, but from 1921 he began to work by himself and rediscovered in

rather meritorious piece, The film about two cousins who

Shadow

of Sin. In this simple little

there were

new series of fairy tales the spirit of Melies himself. This man, Ladislas Starevich, holds a quite individual place in the cinema, something akin to that of Disney.
a

As he had done previously

talents to the

in Russia, he consecrated

all

his

The Marriage of Babylas, The Scarecrow, The Frogs Who Wanted a King, The Little Nightingale, In the Spider's Web, The Queen of the Butterflies created an unforgettable and delicious world. Occasionally some human figure, a little girl perhaps, appeared among the flying
making of marionette films.
fish,

the animals that talk, the swollen frog, the extraordinary vegetation. (In The Little Street Singer it was Starevich's daugh

Nina Star.) The pleasure these films afford comes from the charm of these terrestrial or submarine landscapes, from their ballets of beasts and vegetables. A frog made out of cloth or
ter,

paper climbs up a ladder to the top of a toadstool to harangue the crowd. The movements of his lips, the trembling of the leaves and the branches is clearly visible. In The Town Rat and the Country Rat, mice perform a complicated dance during the banquet. Elsewhere demons play cards for souls. Their solidity
it

gives the marionette film a delightful consistency which makes superior as a materialization of dreams to the animated cartoon.

It

brings the genuine world of childhood before us, a world of

dolls'
*

houses and mechanical toys in which

we

can imagine get-

He

returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1925 as a director for Mezhrabpom.

The Emergence
car.

of an Art

175

into a toy train or winning an automobile race in a kiddieting

Starevich

was the most eminent of the Russian

exiles.

His

di

minutive creations, worked by invisible strings, photographed frame by frame, are truly original; it would be impossible to imitate them. But the other directors also made their contribu
tion.

Though they were

finally

absorbed into the commercial

film they nevertheless helped at first to develop the film as art.*

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SOVIET FILM t

During
*

this

time the Russians of the U.S.S.R. were discover

ing the political and visual capacity of the motion picture, setlar art

the authors properly recognize the film as a profoundly popu 14), there are passages here which suggest that they are sometimes misled into confusing would-be "artistic," or highbrow films with examples of genuine cinematic art, which are invariably popular in nature, and not, of course, "artistic." Chaplin and Disney and Eisenstein made commercial and popular films for the general public, not "artistic" ones, but theirs is the art of the film. Avant-garde or experimental films are important because they often hit upon devices which are then incorporated into the commercial films and thus make their contribution to the art of the motion picture. tThis brief section is scrappy and confused, like so much that has been written about the early Soviet film, largely an unknown quantity to other than Russian critics. The only exact account of this period by a non-Russian writer seems to be that of Mr. Jay Leyda in his history of the Soviet film now in preparation. This will undoubtedly be of real service to the student. Meanwhile, it may be helpful to tabulate the main events, and Mr. Leyda has kindly done so.

Though

(see p.

1918

First newsreel experience of Vertov.

first Soviet production group, the Petrograd Kino-Committee, begins work with Lunacharski's scenario Congestion* 1919 Nationalization of the cinema industry. 1920 Kuleshov makes a film at the front, Red Front. iqizPolikushka, a film by Sanin in collaboration with the actor Moskvin, of the Moscow Art Theatre. 1923--Little Red Devils, a popular adventure film made in Georgia by the

The

Goskinprom.
First
issues of Vertov's regular Calendar and Kino-Truth,

newsreel

experiments,

Goskino-

1924 First professional film by Kuleshov and his workshop, of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. Protazanov returns from France and makes Aelita.

The Adventures

The History

of Motion Pictures

ting forth upon the extraordinary, almost monumental adventure of the Soviet film, out of which were to evolve eventually five

or six real masterpieces.

As we have already seen, many directors had emigrated in 1918. The Russian people, always addicted to spectacles and en
tertainment, adored the movies; but as there were none to be had, the cinemas had to be closed. Lenin, however, had grasped the enormous importance of the infant industry. "Of all the arts,"

he

"the most important for us in Gradually the studios were reorganized,

said,

my

opinion

is

the film."

raw stock was purchased

from abroad and new

influence of a

young madman

theories of production outlined under the called Dziga Vertov.

The first films, however, still bore the stamp of theatrical real ism and, when they began to find their way abroad, gave little evidence of propaganda content. This first period of the Soviet
French nor American films exerted upon Possibly some of their directors may have seen some of the more important foreign films not generally seen by the public, but it is worth noting that Russia was the only country in the world w here Chaplin was quite unknown. For that matter Eisenstein is not interested in Chaplin: we have heard him say so. The only influences to which the Soviet films were subject were the German films, their own prer
T

film lasted until 1925. Neither them. any influence

evolutionary
bril

films
It

and that of the Russian theater.* was from the theater that the Soviet film learned so

liantly to handle crowds.

The Ukrainian

director

Dovzhenko,

Kozintsev and Trauberg and thek FEX group enter films with the fantastic Adventures of an Qctoberite.
1925
Eisenstein's first film, Strike.

January $th, an historical reconstruction by Viskovski. Potemkin, by Eisenstein. 1926 Bed and Sofa, made by Room at Sovldno. Mother, made by Pudovkin at Mezhrabpom-Russ.
will be seen from the above, the authors have jumbled the two periods 1919-1923 and 1923-1926 and thek comments here are consequently some what meaningless. * Chaplin was not unknown. American films were closely studied and had enormous influence; Eisenstein would deny that he "is not interested in Chaplin."

As

The Emergence

of an

Art

175

director of Earth, was to write later, "There is no reason to avoid the use of players who are not professional actors. One must re

that every man can play himself on the screen at least * to make films once." This was the attitude that impelled them no actors at all. "In the that employed regular big proletarian

member

films," writes Eisenstein, "like

Shook

the

World, the big

Old and New and Ten Days that crowd scenes were almost entirely

workers who appeared in these scenes by their own played by choice and for no payment. When in Ten Days we filmed the attack on the Winter Palace two or three thousand workers came
with bands and offered to take part every day or every night needed. we The scenes in the shooting in the street was
entirely

volunteers: nearly all of them were men wiio in 1917 played by had taken part in the same action to much grimmer purpose." He adds, "If an actor in order to play the part of an old man needs a day or two to prepare himself to enact the role and to rehearse it, an old man has had sixty years in which to perfect
his characterization.
. .
.

One should choose from

crowd those

faces, expressions and types that one needs and which corre spond to the ideas one has preconceived, and discover among

human beings the characteristic types which are movie imagination. We must plunge into life itself." But shaping it was the Russian theater which had taught him this.t Even the early Soviet films had something of this nature in them. They were closely related to the theater both by the exag actors and even more by their plots, but gerated gestures of the a quite independent expression. towards were struggling they The films of Kozintsev and Trauberg, of Eggert, Tarich's Czar Ivan are highly dramatic and produced with great care but still far from the desired goal. Sanin's Polikushka and Zheliabuzhski's Postmaster were already more expressive. The great actor Moskvin, from Stanislavsky's theater, played the principal role in both films and emphasized their theatrical nature, but an extreme in
these living
terest in visual details, the care given to lighting effects already
*

Two
is

or three directors only.

t It

not the Russian theater but Eisenstein's

this.

own work

in the Russian

theater

which had taught him

ij 6
lent

The History
them
a

of

Motion Pictures
It

and was the first to react violently against the theatrical^ influence his of out cinematic to attempt to draw the essentially quality were theories his successful, material. He was not

genuinely cinematic quality.

was Kuleshov who

though always heeded respectfully and to many he seemed a veritable leader and prophet. He used and abused close-ups, forcefully empha the sized details and stylized the acting in his pictures. Despite Death The and Law Ray of By the faults there are
r

w hich

some ment of the American

In these
first

portions as are as important in the development of the Soviet film the in develop of Griffith's and Ince's films were important
film.

new themes were developed. In productions some the part Polikushka, from a story of Tolstoy's, Moskvin played In conditions. social of a poverty-stricken peasant crushed by recalled Czar Ivan and The Demon of the Steppes* though they earlier historical films, there was already evident a special interest Leon Scheffer, avoiding both in crowds. The latter
especially,

by

a hint of what the really experiments and subtleties, gave people important Russian films (often suppressed by censorship abroad) were to be or were indeed already becoming.

Some of the producers went astray, whose Bed and Sofa was shown abroad.

as
It

did

Abram Room,
a film about the

was

with its housing difficulties, and it early revolutionary period indicated roughly a new sexual morality. The heroine hesitating between the two men, and the general psychological mix-up

seemed laughable to the French, who regarded it as nothing but a vaudeville sketch tricked out in Russian dress. There was something in this point of view. Bed and Sofa is clever, a sad and is still a psy well-photographed film which, despite its moral, The chological comedy and therefore not really cinematic.t
Russians were not often to
until the
fall

into similar errors

is

at least

not
as a

coming of

talkies,

but that

all

the

more reason for

in

commenting upon this film. It was interesting document on the new morality born of new
*

any event

social conditions,

Produced

later, in 1926.
it

"tBed and Sofa was not made until 1926, and understood in France.

seems not to have been

The Emergence
and
its

of an Art

177

oversimplicity does not exclude a certain picturesque

quality.

Other productions of this formative period also have their im such as The Decembrists of Ivanovski and Black Sun portance,
day of Viskovski. Here are genuinely revolutionary films that contain scenes of an intensity that predicts Eisenstein and Pudovkin. As yet, however, there is not a great difference between them and the films of the exiles; and the art of the early Soviet films
derives similarly from theories of stage production and from the same masters, Stanislavsky and Gordon Craig.* The two branches

of the Russian film, divided geographically

rope, were
in a sense united.

by

the rest of

Eu

phy,

shortly to expire and the other to forge ahead towards the discovery of true cinematogra but its roots were nevertheless the same and are to be traced
films of wartime.

One was

back to the chaotic Russian

3.

The Scandinavian

ffilm

years after the war the Scandinavian film and the in particular attained such importance that there film Swedish who believed that the northern countries had become were many

IN THE

first

the chosen land of the motion picture. No and 1921, but there appeared in Paris some

month

new

passed, in 1920 film by Sjostrom

of which the beauties of the landscape and the their of simple plots constantly expressed a love of na nobility ture and a heroic attitude to life. The influence of Selma Lageror
Stiller, in all
lof, most of whose books were filmed during this period, con tinued to be extremely strong for several years. Thanks to this talented woman, both purity of heart and devotion to duty took

on new meaning, and, whether under her inspiration or not, men like Sjostrom, Stiller, Hedqvist, Brunius and Petschler for an all
*

The

from theatrical influences at been put forward by other writers

rived

suggestion that Craig influenced the Russian films or that they de all is manifestly absurd, though it has in equal ignorance of the facts.

ij8

The History

of

Motion Pictures

of solemn and spiritual too short period set before our eyes a sort us again. to give such as the screen was seldom

beauty

VICTOR SJOSTROM

an actor, despite a di and as^ dominated rector was the peer of the very greatest, absolutely he made The Duke's Testament and In
Victor Sjostrom, who was much admired and his faults, because he was good-looking
this entire period.
as
virile,

1919

The Monastery
and
in 1922

of Sendomir, in 1920

The Stroke

of Midnight

a character study,

Masterman,

in 1921 Love's Crucible

and

The Burned an original story by Hjalmar Bergman. He had also from Ship, made in Karin, Ingemafs Daughter a sequel to The Sons of aside The lnge?nar, from Selma Lagerlof's Jerusalem. Leaving The and Monastery of SenBurned House, which was an error,
a highly dramatic Austrian domir, a sensitive transcription of novel by Grillparzer, Sjostrom hardly ever abandoned the Swed its springtime ish scene. It is Sweden and its snows, Sweden and

House, after Pierre Frondaie, and

The Hell

which we
films, all

find again and again in all these very different, unequal of which breathe the same inspiration and the same faith

in the potentialities of the motion picture. At times, as in The Monastery of Sendomir, he essayed,

clum

but energetically, to express the drama of thought and feel sily to inner conflicts. Masterman ing and to give external expression his sober plots with a flooded was rather similar. More often he

with a sort of nostalgia and all that atmosphere for which the Scandinavians have created an untranslatable word -Stemming. Love's Crucible tells a tale of olden days, of an un woman who is planning to poison her husband happily married when he dies suddenly. She -is accused of murder and condemned
sort of radiance,

to prove her innocence

istic

by

the

trial

by

pantheism makes the

fire

itself,

fire. Sjostrom's character the forked and creeping

in other flame, the most important character in the film, just as Hell The In Swedish films water plays the chief role. Ship the

which distinguishes Sjo story evokes the same supernatural quality strom's most famous film, The Stroke of Midnight, based on a fa-

lift*'
llPBllii;
';."...-

.-"4

:"..

V*

''

,,

'':'

.J'v:

The Covered Wagon,

directed by

Severin-Mars in La Roue, directed by Abe)

Owe t

Greta Garbo in the Swedish -film, The Story of Gosta Bcrling, directed by Mauritz Stiller (1923-4).

The Emergence

of an Art

mous novel by Selma Lagerlof about Salvationists. This story of the redemption of David Holm, a drunkard beloved by a pious young girl, was not properly understood in the Latin countries, and many of the Salvationist scenes were cut out, such as the one in which the young girl persuades David Holm's wife to take him back, thus bringing tragedy to them and their children. There was more fatalism and more intelligence in the piece than the cinemas could accept readily. What drew both the general the highbrows to the film, and made it one of the public and most famous of all films, as famous as The Gold Rush and Caligari and Potemkin, were the scenes in which David meets his old boon companion George, who had died on New Year's Eve, and
so

becomes driver of the ghostly

cart that

comes to

collect the

This supernatural figure, who was the focal point of the human story of Selma Lagerlof, also dominated the film to such a point as to obscure its other qualities. The Stroke of Midnight seems rather old-fashioned to us to day, partly because of its somewhat excessive moralizing and
souls of sinners.

partly too because technically it was at the time so very impor tant and so new. It seemed literally dazzling then: now it seems
It was the first time that the supernatural world had been brought to the screen with anything like so much tal ent, but Sjostrorn, like Delluc, had tried to express the super natural and make thought tangible by means of the rather tedious use of double exposure. Later on it was to be realized that this method of showing one rather dim image over another fairly distinct image, in order to convey a hidden thought or spiritual truth, is an extremely material and physical device, and an er roneous one. The moment it is translated into the perceptible the invisible is invisible no longer but just a clever photographic trick.

almost obvious.

Nevertheless, some of the scenes in The Stroke of Midnight are of remarkable brilliance and rare emotional power. Also, the di rector of The Outlaw and His Wife possesses a marked ability
to visualize and to compose, and he loves nature with intense the "vision" scenes, one enjoys most the passion.^ Therefore, in

wide empty road on which,

as in a dream, the strange equipage of the death driver suddenly looms through the fog and the rain.

180

The History

of

Motion

"Pictures

road, the sea, the cemetery carry us to the realms of poetry and of piety as powerfully as when the film was made. And at the same time the grave bearing of the participants makes us realize that the film can really at times attain artistic perfection by the truths it reveals through the human face and the human

The

body.
In 1923 Sjostrom left Sweden to go to America, became Seastrom and carried away with him the greatest glories of the Swedish film. With him went much of the hope for the industry and the art of his country.

MAURITZ STILLER
If the

man who made The Outlaw and His Wife and The

Stroke of Midnight is the greatest of Swedish directors, he never theless shared his glory with his erstwhile companion Mauritz
Stiller.

Less forceful and

also

less

literary than Sjostrom,

more of an

aesthete, he was
closest attention

an

artist

who more

than once merited the

by his original and striking works. It was in made his masterpiece, The Treasure of Arne, after Selma Lagerlof. The following year he made The Vengeance of
1919 that he

Jacob Vindas, in 1920 Across the Rapids and Erotikon, in 1921 The Emigrants and Gunnar Hedes Saga and in 1923 The Story of Gosta Berling.
Erotikon, though pleasing enough, was not particularly origi nal and resembles the slick work which Cecil B. DeMille was

doing at about the same time. The Emigrants was also subject to various international influences. But in his other films Mauritz
Stiller, like

Sjostrom, extolled Sweden,

its

history and

its

national

customs.

He was never to surpass The Treasure of Arne, which, like The Outlaw and His Wife, was a period piece. The Swedes have
never regarded their past history as something dead and gone: have treated it as of an realiz they always part
ing to the
full that

undying legend, it were drama and and the whence all its romance atmosphere snowy landscapes stemmed. Arne's house, the sailing frozen in the ice, the inn
the essential elements in
ship

The Emergence
a host of carefully

of an Art

18 1

and beautifully composed pictures gave to

a

The Treasure of Arne the charm of

little

Breughel.

Today we

care

emphasized compels our attention is the composition: fairs and meals and groups of sailors, the natural backgrounds and the unforgettable funeral procession at the end of the film, with its ranks of black and gray figures bearing a heavy coffin shoulderof high across the snow. What strikes us most is the
their skill.

for the dissolves, the masks, the superimposed images were the instruments by means of which the Swedes

which

What

sincerity these faces: the pastor's aged wife, the woman who keeps the inn, the ship's captain, the fisherman's wife and

pretty

Here Stiller at least equals or, perhaps, surpasses Sjowas always rather too much the actor, too sensitive who strom, to theatrical beauty. Stiller composed his films like a painter, not like a dramatist, and it is this which makes his films so attractive. Gunnar Hedes Saga., though it was not particularly success ful, was nearly as good as The Treasure of Arne. It is the story of a big house, whose master goes insane while he is driving a
Johnsson.
great herd of reindeer into the mountains. The scattering of the animals as they run free, then suddenly pause in alarm, their deli
cately trembling nostrils raised to a branch or a tree or snuffing the air, the light play of their hooves as they move, now swiftly, now leisurely, over the boulders of the narrow path one

Mary

provide

of the loveliest pictures ever incorporated in a film. Stiller determined to attempt the filming of Selma Lagerlof s finest book, The Story of Gosta Berlinga task before which other directors had quailed. It was his last Swedish film. The
original version lasted for four hours, but in

France only an ab

was shown, and even this lasted two hours, a still more condensed version was though widely circulated, lasting only an hour, abominably badly cut and almost incompre hensible. It made it almost impossible to judge what the original version was like. Yet all the faults and all the virtues of the Swedish film as a whole could be detected in this production, which was, in fact, a sort of swan song. Selnia Lagerlof s novel, so richly poetic and so complicated, was probably one of the most difficult of all
breviated version

8z

The History

of Motion Pictures

novels to reduce to the simple action which the screen requires. The film does succeed in telling the story of the clergyman
Berling, torn

between conflicting

loves,

but

it

seems a rather

ordinary story. The aged woman, known

a wealthy middlestrange existence led by as the Mistress of Ekeby, in the great house

We

where she has taken in a horde of merry and drunken ex-officers, the whole atmosphere of wild parties and banquets, the mys terious romantic quality of the book are seldom if ever expressed.
and curiously get only glimpses of the story, compressed threadbare when compared to the strident, sonorous music of the original. Here are only a few weak echoes; not even the magi cal power of nature is suggested. Its violence becomes absurd
because the actors are not convincing with their melodramatic it is difficult to stifle one's laughter while watching the
scene in which the Mistress of

gestures;

Ekeby

is

cursed

by her mother.

it makes the picture radical error of translating the original text picture by picture and scene by scene instead of re-creating it afresh.* This was a

The whole

is

too

literal a transcript,

and

common
Stiller,

fault of the

Swedish

films.

When

nevertheless, displayed considerable skill in this film. the Mistress of Ekeby resolves to burn down her house
it

to cleanse

and

lift

her mother's curse from the place,

it is

really

of no great importance that the fire is too apparently a conflagra tion of fireworks: it is still an impressive spectacle. The scene
in

the great

which the wolves pursue Gosta Berling in his sledge against snowy background captures moments of sheer beauty.
in fact Stiller does at times succeed,

And

by

his artistic discre

tion and by the strange atmosphere which he creates, in catching the essence of Selma Lagerlof. The finest thing about the film is, once more, its choice of types, the faces of its people. The Mistress of Ekeby and her old mother, particularly, are peculiarly convincing with their curi ously real expressions, their time-worn faces; there is an incom parable touch here. The finest, the most striking scene in the film

*The film by no means follows the original faithfully: there are quite radical changes, as well as many omissions.

some

The Emergence
is

of an

Art

183

the one in which the Mistress of Ekeby seeks out her mother, the mother who had cursed her long years ago. She arrives and for forgiveness. The two women, one at either side silently begs now begin slowly and without exchanging a a of great press, like two beasts of bur turn to it, walking round and round word
den, or two slaves at the treadmill. It is a superb scene. The Story of Gosta Berling is not a great film, but it is one which may be seen over again with pleasure, and is quite lovely at moments. One can see how much it must have meant at the

time

it

was produced. The youthful face of Greta Garbo,

al

a tragic, almost hieratic ready at the age of seventeen having Lars the restrained acting of Hanson, and the almost in
quality,

of Stiller make this unequal and conspicuous, painterlike style could hardly have been otherwise) one of disturbing work (it the curiosities of the motion picture. Like Pabst's Don Quixote,
it is

and and

of some of its parts, which are admirable, important because define the limits proper to the film on one hand to it helps
literature

on the

other.

OTHER DIRECTORS

were not the only men to celebrate the In Swedish legends. 1919 John Brunius made his appearance. He of the Swedish film after the two the maintain to was prestige
Sjostrorn

and

Stiller

creative directors had departed. He directed Puss in Boots, really then a delightfully poetic version of Bjornson's Fairy of Solbakken y then Thora von Deken before, the following year, he started a whole succession of historical pictures with The Gay

upon

Knight. Next came The Burning Mill and a few others. In 1923

he began work on Charles XII and also directed a really excel lent piece, Johan Utfstjerna, about the struggle of the Finns the Russians. It was made in Helsingfors, with the col against laboration of the population of Helsingfors, and six cameras at
a time (an extraordinary number for that date) photographed the rioting, which was extremely cleverly handled. Cleverness was trait of Brunius, but occasionally his workusually the dominant

184
manlike

The History
qualities,

of

Motion futures

with the help of some native spirit, lent more than mere competence to such dazzling and dramatic films as

The Burning

Mill.

Besides Brunius, mention must also be

an actor of great
delightful

ability

who became

a director

made of Ivan Hedqvist, and made the

in

Dunungen, adapted from Selma Lagerlof

a

1919.

It

who preferred a frail a photographed play, about girl a young scamp, but it was so skillfully adapted that to graybeard one forgot its theatrical origins. Later Hedqvist was to make and the Pilgrimage to Kevlaar, filled with poetry and mysticism
was only
derived inspiration from Heine, whose the subtitles for his handsome histori poetry provided him with cal scenes, full of life and vitality. Then the director Petschler made a second version of Men of
equal of
Stiller's best.

He

Varmland, with its lively feeling for landscapes and folklore, and the Danish director Benjamin Christensen evoked the rugged fourteenth century in Witchcraft Through the Ages. Even rather

mediocre pictures like Rune Carlsten's When Love Rules, and the films of Gustav Edgren, still maintained a certain literary re finement, an atmosphere and nicety which it is hard to find else
where.

and Stiller the Unhappily, after the departure of Sjostrom financial dif into fell Svenska even and firms various producing and been successful had so films older the ficulties. Though

new

were coming to the fore, the industry began to the foreign go downhill. Renewed efforts were made to capture markets, but the concessions to international taste that were made
directors
acter. In the other

national char only resulted in robbing the films of their peculiar Scandinavian countries it was much the same.
tale

The

of their glory

was lamentably

brief.

THE FINNISH FILM

The
has
its

Finnish film

is

in reality only an offshoot of the

Swedish

film and

was much influenced by it. Finnish culture in any case roots in Sweden and Swedish is spoken in the best society.

The Emergence
Stiller

of an
is

Art

18$
between the

was of Finnish

origin.

There

a strong tie

two

countries.

Films had been produced in Finland since 1908, but no indus try was really organized there until about 1919. They began, in
evitably,

by

filming plays: those of the great Finnish writer Kivi

The
Lisa

from

Betrothal, a play

The Country Boot?7iakersand in 1921 Anna by Minna Canth closely modeled on Tolstoy's
its

The Power heroine was

of Darkness and considered very daring because

a girl-mother

who

killed her child.

Afterwards they

continued adapting plays but also drew on national inspiration after the Swedish pattern, celebrating the life of their raftmen

(The Raftman's Wife), their smugglers (The Fisherman of Stormskar). Compared to the silliness of the current French and American love stories, these were admirable subjects to develop,
which makes us regret
all

the

more

that the Scandinavian films

did not succeed in establishing a world supremacy.

THE DANISH FILM

By comparison
little

with the Swedish

film, the

Danish film was of

importance during the years that the artistic conception of the film was being formulated. The check that Nordisk met with
in

Germany towards
its

the end of the war,

when Ufa was founded,

losing the world market. For the future its output was but undistinguished. Asta Nielsen was to workmanlike to be
led to

work henceforth

in

Germany, and her

favorite director,

Urban

Gad, followed her there. There were, however, two quite gifted directors, Sandberg and Carl Dreyer, who began their careers in their native country with the reorganized firm of Nordisk. Sandberg attempted to transfer to the screen the novels of Dickens, a rich fund of cinemato never been fully exploited. He made graphic material which has Our Mutual Friend,, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit. They were faithful adaptations enacted by leading stage as Paul Reumert, but they contributed nothing new players, such to the art of the film. The best Danish film was probably Four

186

The History

of

Motion

Pictures

and technically bril Devils, made in 1921, an undeniably pleasing love for a fair lady of liant film about a worn-out acrobat dying
but containing some extraordinary trapeze scenes, almost
ing as those in Variety.
as strik

and Meanwhile, Dreyer was learning his job. This honest man Griffith's Americans. the conscientious artist began by imitating Intolerance had greatly impressed him. He directed Leaves -from Satan's Book, then went to Sweden, where he directed The
Fourth Marriage of Da?ne Margaret, but returned home to direct a comedy, Once Upon a Time, for which he dug up from some where an eighty-year-old actor who was magnificent in the role of the king. Here one already divines the stamp of the man: the human countenance is all in all to him, he already knows what use can be made of the most formidable of stage celebrities, whether it be the venerable Peter Jernsdorff, or Silvain, or Falthe human marionette and learn conetti. He is
ing

how

to

make

already studying it obey him.

ministry, but among his many duties he is also obliged to marry the former clergyman's widow, who is over eighty and has already buried three husbands. He in love with a charming girl. goes through with it, although he is end the old lady has the the In and The film is amusing lively. can God man of and the so sense to die marry his beloved. It was an unusual subject for Dreyer but he carried it off admirably a careful attention to detail, by making it convincing because

The Fourth Marriage was an man has applied for the vacant

allegory.

poor wretch of

by

he believed that the legendary past is just as living as the present. the foreign mar Finally the Danes succeeded in breaking into

As was customary, the names of the actors were denationalized and Schenstrom and Madsen were known in France as Doublepatte and Patachon. They were an earlier in carnation of Laurel and Hardy: their facility and their coarse good humor earned them wide popularity. They made a fortune
ket with comedies.

but

for their firm, Palladium, and for their director, it was a matter of business rather than art.

Lan

Lauritzen;

Throughout the four or

five years

when

their zenith, the northern countries like

were at had the made Germany

their films

The Emergence

of an

Art

287

world realize that the art of the motion picture is really an art. It had drawn its subject matter from national sources, thus giving an example which the Russians were to follow. Rather too much costumes and too much literature history, too many picturesque an over romantic air. But a real effort o-ave their films, admittedly, led the Scandinavians at the same and to express thought feeling technical devices which occasionally into also time overstressing and into an excess of morality which is prone wearisome, prove
to

become
For

all that,

disagreeable. in The Outlaw

and His Wife,

Midnight,

The Treasure

of Arne,

in The Stroke of Gunnar Hedes Saga and The

Burning Mill they showed us how to attain a poetical quality which even today is still captivating. Snowy wastes and simple

were brought together in these skillful features in a man ner both astounding and deeply moving. No one before them had shown us nature itself, and natural backgrounds, as part of man's * there was something here very different from very existence; the films of the French landscape school like BaroncellFs or Leon
hearts
Poirier's.

Though

would not be

lost. Its

the Swedish film was to decline, influence was to be detected in

its

teaching
a film

many

to come, even inadequate ones, and

we

shall

always remember,
first

rather wistfully, that Sweden was the country that the visual and emotional beauties of the screen.

revealed

4.

Jhe Qerman

WHEN the last gun had boomed over No Man's Land Germany was
to remain familiar with the noise of

machine guns and hand gre nades for some time to come, even for years. The German film was born of war and revolution. Fortunately, there are some in dustries and some forms of human activity which can proceed heedless of riots and disorders; among them are banking and mu The German film, luckily, was in the hands of nition
making.
*

Except the Wild Western

film,

which undoubtedly influenced the

Swedes.

88
in

The History

of Motion Pictures

Krupp and Hugo Stinnes no danger and were not likely to abandon it. Ufa could go ahead calmly, under this double patronage. Of course, the foreign market seemed rigidly closed. The cinema proprietors of Paris had solemnly decided to ban German films from their screens for at least ten years. The English had followed suit. Yet as soon as it became known that the Germans were producing films of considerable interest, people wanted to see them. Since
the bankers and the munition makers:

were

always possible to adapt one's nobler sentiments to one's in distributors began to offer certain films of no known country of origin. They were German. Others handled some very peculiar Danish films. They also were German. The ban became ridiculous. Journalists took the matter up. Caligari was shown by private societies or clubs, as Potemkin was to be shown later. In the end, the patriotic resolves were thrown over board, though some distributors continued until 1925 to disguise the German films they handled as Scandinavian. Krupp had scored
it is

terests, various

a peaceful victory.

Modern literary and dramatic movements were also to assist the development of the German film. Germany is a country where new theories quickly penetrate to the general public, a country in which the commercial film was strongly influenced by the advance guard, entirely unlike what happened in France. Dur r ing the w ar the theories of Reinhardt and of Gordon Craig about had scenery completely revolutionized the theater, and were followed by those of Georg Kaiser and Leopold Jessner. They stressed the importance of scenery, as playing a role at least as important as that of any character in a play, and needing to be
designed by an artist, not simply to imitate the banal appearance of everyday life. It was to such theories that we owe the ex pressionist films of the German postwar period and, more par ticularly, Caligari. But first the influence of Krupp was to pro duce films of another type.

The Emergence

of an

Art

189

HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA

through which Germany sought expression of none of the spirit of Weimar. nationalistic were works of propaganda. Read strenuously They the Italian whose influenced films, by prestige had not yet de ily
first

The

films

after the

war gave evidence

clined, a

number

of directors turned to historical subjects,

as a

lavish spectacles, but carefully livened them pretext for up with air. controversial a They chose their subject matter from abroad

in order to

throw a disobliging light on the past of their recent Allied nations. Ernst Lubitsch directed Madame the enemies,

Dubarry (Passion) against France, Anne Boleyn (Deception) and Dmitri Buchovetski made Danton (All -for against England a Woman). Jannings, who won renown for his Danton and his Henry VIII, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss as Robespierre and Marat, and Pola Negri all attained prominence. A rather childish kind of sexuality gave color to these films, in which his tory is regarded as a supreme fantasy. Ernst Lubitsch was to add a Loves of Pharaoh, a good match for Cabiria and having
considerable decorative qualities; Buchovetski made Peter the Great and a slightly ridiculous Othello, in which slender Lya de
Putti
at his hammiest gave a performance which have pleased the provincial playhouses. might conceivably Sometimes the propaganda misfired, as when von Czerepy made Fredericus Rex, in which his hero was so ponderously char acterized, in which there was such a complete lack of any sense

and Jannings

of either

what

is

ridiculous or

what

is

distasteful that

able to present the film in Brussels as an anti-German tion. It was quite a success.

they were produc

As
satire.

of the directors turned to history was not enough, some One of Lubitsch's first attempts was The Oyster Princess,

a rather

diences

in which au vulgar satire directed against Americans, a profiteer exposing his posterior, a secretary Tom on his daughter. vomiting, a father playing Peeping see here how much real taste Lubitsch, the future director of The Love Parade, always had. The only interesting thing about

were shown

We

The History
the film was
its

of

Motion Pictures

and the handling of the dancing crowds. These were anything but naturalistic in tendency and showed
settings

influence of the clearly the

new

theories of stage production.

EXPRESSIONIST FILMS
All of this was not really of prime importance. What gave the German film Its importance during the early postwar years was

the productions in w hich new theories were blended with the old Hoffmannesque predilection of the Germans for the macabre. To begin with, stories about madness were admirably suited to for the distortions and unrealistic nature of expressionist films,
r

made sense in such cases and the whole thing could be carried out logically in that manner. The Germans fell into the habit of using somber stories, full of ghosts and vampires
the settings

and haunted

castles.

Robert Wiene's Caligari

is

the best example

of this tradition, but there were others

Morn

till Midnight, Wegener's Golem Wiene's Genuine, H. Kobe's Torgus and Murnau's Nosferatu continued for some time to follow the vogue for nightmares. Through these films the Germans found expression for that pro found romanticism, that fascination with cruelty and fear and
,

C.-H. Martin's From Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse,

horror, that marrying of sex with death so many of her sons after the war.

which were

to intoxicate

its

all of these are equally good. Murnau's Nosjeratii, with haunted castle, its doors that suddenly open, its gusts of wind and its monster, Is as absurd as a melancholy novel of the eighteenhundreds. In Genuine Robert Wiene related the story of a painter

Not

one of his canvases, a picture of the bloodthirsty Genuine. It is a very somber affair, though entertaining priestess with cubist enough, settings which seldom sustain their interest. Yet there are fine things in it, such as the scene, as extraordinary
in love with
as

anything in Poe, in which a

little

black-clad

man with white

climbs up a long steep staircase. The characters seemed gaiters to blend into the settings as though camouflaged and then from time to time stood out against them boldly in an extraordinary
fashion.

The Emergence
Destiny
',

of an

Art

by Fritz Lang, was far superior to these and revealed a really able director, of the talents young girl seeks out Death back from him. Filled with pity for her, sweetheart her to get

Death shows her three lighted candles, each representing a single life span. We see her with her sweetheart in Morocco, in Venice, in China. The young man is killed in each of these lives and each time he dies one candle flickers out. At the end of the film the
girl

chooses to die too.

The opening sequence

Later the film tends to

become

(Death's arrival at the inn) is admirable. a series of big spectacles, though

interesting effects are obtained with real skill, as somebody makes the Chinese Emperor a present of a real

many

when

of tiny soldiers, an effect obtained

different scales.

army by double exposure on two

The heavenwards-reaching staircase of Genuine at the end we were shown Death and used was again, transport two lovers to the top of a bare mountain. There were the ing
probably
all

sorts of

fundamental errors about

to
stir

it,

but in spite of

them

the film had a curious

The sum

the imagination. power total of Paul Leni's Waxworks, of Arthur Robison's

Warning Shadows, of Torgus, The Golem, Genuine and The House of the Dead, with all their necrophagous lords and their monstrous beings, really merited Canudo's opinion that they were
the sheer horror cousins-german to Fantomas. Yet at times, by of certain details and striking pictures of sea monsters and car nivorous plants, a director would far outdo Fantomas and threaten us with an inimical and ravenous creation that was not without
a certain beauty. may pass over the use of fabulous and ter in Dr. Mabuse, which fell to the contrivances scientific rifying
level of the

We

penny

dreadfuls.

is Caligarinot that it is either par a or very frightening. The story concerns ticularly powerful victim of the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who compels the sleep walker Cesare to carry off his sweetheart. At the end we realize that the protagonist is a madman, the doctor an estimable char acter. The madman's hallucinations are admirably rendered not and the actors (Conrad Veidt gave one only by the story itself of his finest performances as Cesare) but also by the settings.

The

film that endures best

192

The History

of Motion Pictures

simply deceiving Melies conception of film decor, which is probably the only sen sible style for use in fairy tales and fantasies. But by 1919 Melies
1

These painted backcloths are stage rather than film settings; they make no attempt to look real. The little town perched on a knoll a geographical reality. Wiene had is frankly a painted city, not carried us right back to us. He no intention of

had been utterly forgotten, and the steep paths along which Conrad Veidt, clothed all in black, dragged Lil Dagover and her the white country fair, the shadows
draperies,

nightmarelike

daubed in roughly with paint, even the badness of the painting created itself, which was no more than a crude, violent daubing, seems to an extraordinarily sharp and lasting impression. Caligari mark one of the extreme limits of cinematography, a point where it merges with painting itself, so that it seems necessary to daub the faces of the characters themselves, to slap on eyebrows with
a brush so that they may harmonize with the settings, so that one or weight and that they regrets that they possess either density cannot be as free and as one-dimensional as the characters in ani

mated cartoons.
it

Actually Caligari was leading the films into a blind alley, for restricted them to a subject matter of madness and nightmare. This did not prevent others from following its lead, though in

vain.

The

influence

which
less

this intelligent

exercised was therefore

and interesting film extensive than has sometimes been

thought, but it had stressed, as no other film did, the importance of settings. The German film was never to lose sight of this.

LITERATURE

Following upon the success of the fantastic films, the Germans proceeded to satisfy their poetic souls by turning to adaptations of famous literary works. There were some of these which kept
alive the traditions of the

very

earliest

of postwar films, that

is

to say of the Italian films, yet even in these the settings were very much more important, as in Helen of Troy or Manfred

Noa's Nathan the Wise.

The

films of Richard Oswald, Carlos

The Emergence

of an

Art

and Elisabeth., Marguerite and Faust were adequate and no more; so was Felner's Merchant of Venice. We had to wait for Fritz Lang's Siegfried, which appeared in 1923, to go beyond the Ital ian models and wed expressionism to literature. It was all a question of propaganda, even then: Germany wanted to make profoundly national films, to bring to the screen the old Germanic legends, Fritz Lang, assisted by his wife Thea von Harbou, whose influence was so often detrimental to him, based the film not on Wagner but on the ancient sagas. The Death of Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge both have the ap pearance at times of some Gargantuan opera. Both of them were entirely studio-made, and it is of course possible to discern that
the lowering castles are made of pasteboard,* but the misty meadows, the forest, the rocky plains, the pool were all also fabricated with the same scrupulous care; these compositions are beautiful enough to be genuinely impressive. Here more than at

any other time Lang gave expression to his love for pictures. The beauty of much of The Nibelungen is a static beauty. At other
times

Lang seems
It is

as addicted to

grandiloquence and gesturing as

at

Abel Gance.
ritating as a

for this reason that one finds these

whole, though they achieve

little

the castle, the hunt, the

two films ir moments (the forest, spring where Siegfried drinks) a

genuinely epic quality. After seeing Destiny and Siegfried one

had great hopes of Fritz Lang. The Nibelungen, however, constituted a period composition in which the freest expression could be given to new theories of decor. At the same period the German taste for what was ab normal or morbid also inclined them to another sort of literature. There are few writers who so stamped themselves on the film at that time as Dostoevski. Robert Wiene made Raskolnikoff as a handsome Caligaresque nightmare, Froelich and Buchovetski made The 'Brothers Karamazov, and others followed their lead. It would have been difficult to film such books without falling down somewhere: the very abundance of Dostoevski, his ro mantic quality, the sudden psychological changes are fundamen*

They were not

pasteboard, but plaster.

The History
tally

of

Motion Pictures
it

opposed to the

art of the

motion picture. Yet

was

adapting his works that Germany to remain her permanent possession.

attained an "inner truth"

was through which

It was much the same in the case of other films, with Phantom, which Murnau adapted from Hauptmann, and The Ascension of Hannele Ahttern, adapted from the same writer's work. Asta Niel sen's former director, Urban Gad, came to Germany with his

star.

tion;

by

She, however, did not appear exclusively under his direc one of her most discussed pictures was her Hamlet, directed had written the scenario for her, Svend Gade. Envin

Gepard

but on the old Nordic basing the action not on Shakespeare he resembled Fritz legends. In this liking for the barbarian past and Asta Nielsen in male attire, overintellectual and over-

Lang;

tried to register a concept of literary in her interpretation,

which

the motion picture

is

hardly capable.

GENUINE CONTRIBUTIONS
Besides literary adaptations territories to explore. Lubitsch
in

and the fantastic there were other had attempted to explore them

Leopold Jessner in Backstairs. The ablest Germany had learnt much from Caligari postwar while tempering the arbitrary and undeviating quality of this very important and uncompromising work. At the same time,

The Oyster

Princess,

directors in

the screen, they also redis perhaps by adapting Hauptmann to the Theatre Libre. of covered the realms Passionately fond of a little still life, bathed make were to of each object objects, they
in light

and shade, with the result that before long German pho tography and lighting became paramount. As they got further away from Caligari they ended up by trying to express the hum blest and obscurest of everyday life on the screen, wringing out
of
it

the fantastic elements which

it,

too, contains, as Dostoevski

had shown them.

at, therefore, that the most extraor and most the expressive of German films of that time dinary were made by the very men who had ventured into the realms

It is

not to be wondered

The Emergence

of an Art

of fantasy and of literary transcriptions. Murnau made The Earth Burns, one of his best pictures, and an intensely dramatic one, in which pictorial qualities are subordinated to psychological con flict; he had apparently abandoned those experiments into fantasy

with which Nosferatu was full. In one of the most famous films of the period, Shattered, Lupu Pick in 1921 used absolutely no subtitles whatsoever, a

making

of telling his story in pictures alone. Nowadays this same a trackwalker's of daughter who is seduced by a company story a little tiresome and somewhat engineer seems ridiculous; it smells
point
of the Theatre Libre. But at the time
as

had never before been

believably beautiful, as walker walks along the tracks in the darkness with his lantern, which serves for a leitmotif for the whole film, as a of

it revealed a simplicity such and some of its scenes seemed un for instance the one in which the track

seen,

symbol

monotony of everyday life. And then Karl Grime in The Streetwhich is no more than a little story of a petty robbery
the
that ends in a murder,

and

in

which the

chief character
film the

is

really

the street itself-introduced into the

the pitiful sexuality shall find this theme

German

and the poetry of the house of ill We with its all the later, again shady characters, meanness of man and woman, and a whole debased and weary humanity, but all transformed by an amazing skill in lighting. The German film was not merely fantastic or morbid. There
something in and The Street:
is

poverty, fame.

common between Cdigari, Siegfried, Shattered it is a common root in painting. For no other
it

nation has the film been a plastic art as

has in

Germany. At

ordinary kitchen or the wide vistas of an epic), their films constantly re mind us that their directors were artists. Murnau, Wiene, Karl

times too deliberately pictorial, too static but always full of lovely and brilliantly composed scenes (whether it be an

Lang is a painter and an architect too. time on nothing was to come amiss to the Germanspsychological dramas, epic, mystery, fantasy, romance, natural ism, or fairy story. They were to attempt all these, and attack

Grune

are painters; Fritz

From

this

them

as

painters. It

was

as

though the Rhenish

artists,

the early

$6

The History

of

Motion

Picttires

lovers of chiaroscuro, had been reincarnated in these businessmen who wanted to give Germany a new art, and who succeeded in doing so for a few years.

5.

Jk

Italian film

THE
war

Italian film

went gradually downhill from the time of the

its

had seemed, however, commercial development. The lawyer Mecheri had just gained control of the Itala Films with its enor mous resources and hordes of actors. A combine had been ef
until 1923. After the Armistice there

considerable hopes for

management of Mecheri's rival Barattolo, the Cinema Union, which gradually bought up all the re of maining studios and actors. Actually this was the beginning
fected under the
Italian

the end.

At

first

by

ally brought the

gradu sacrificing everything for prestige, Union to the verge of ruin. Then the actors and

Barattolo

under the strange dictatorship of this businessman, lost and pride in their work and worked simply to make money. The Union also invented the horrible system of block booking which other firms all over the world were to imitate, be
directors,
interest

familiar enough ginning with Paramount and Pathe-Natan. It is now: films were grouped into lots of ten and were supposed to

consist of three featuring stars

and seven second-class productions.

The whole block was rented for 100,000 lira a district, exclusively. Often a man who found one good film to nine duds was lucky, but
it

It

was impossible to obtain that one without also taking the others. was this system which ruined the Union and endangered the them foreign firms which adopted it if it ruined them, it served

right.

To fight the Union another firm was organized, the F.E.R.T. This firm gave a great deal of liberty to its directors, but one can hardly say that they used it to much purpose: Ghione's films (The Golden Quadrant, The Blue Countess) were about the same as those of Righelli (The Rose Queen, Scarlet Love) or those of

Genina

The Emergence (The Two Cruel-fixes'). All

of an Art
of

them were

in the Italian

melodramatic tradition,

as their titles indicate. It

was with two

bursts of fireworks that the Italian film

was to expire, two bursts of fireworks which really repeated the earlier success of Cabiria. The director Caramba made a superfilm which screamed aloud
that
it

a masterpiece: The Borgias. It would be idle to imagine that either historical accuracy or imagination were to be found in

was

it,

though of course Caramba omitted none of the disputes among the cardinals, the baseness of Alexander VI, of Lucretia and of Cesare Borgia, none of the incest or crime. One sequence, how
garded
it:

ever, appeared sufficiently well handled and dramatic to be re as striking at the time. Enrico Ghione has described

"The

quite cardinals are in full conclave, each one seated in a

huge

whispering
is

chair under a baldachin bearing his family coat of arms: they are to each other, or lost in thought, or dreaming. Borgia
his own way, promising important posts to one, fighting to get threatening another, bribing a third. He leaves no stone unturned. On the various faces fear, or greed or envy is written as Borgia

gradually gains ground. One pallid cardinal, hunched in his chair, alone keeps aloof, watching Borgia's actions with bitterness. As
the other cardinals finally drop their votes, most of them venal and some of them given at pistol point, into the ballot box, this

white-faced

man who

is

Prince Delia Rovere,

rises

to his feet

'Rome! Rome! What infamy will quivering with rage and shouts " be heaped upon you!' there is a glimpse Despite the faults and absurdities of Caramba, here of what the Italian films might have been. Had they been
able to submit to the laws of the

medium, they might, out of the

violence and the turbulence of the passions, have created films of

a

theatrical order but sufficiently transmuted into vis ual imagery to possess the power to move us. The scene of the conclave in The Eorgias remains to indicate what might have

somewhat

been.

The

film raised hopes in

firm of F.E.R.T. hastily

Caramba and in the Italian film. The went into production again, made Enrico

Ghione produce another Za-la-Mort series and even attempted to translate Dante to the screen in Caramba's Vision of Beauty. The

$8

The History
was put

of

Motion Pictures

the firm consequently made quite In the shade; a an heroic effort and launched into Quo Vadis. This film had been made twice before by the then famous
U.C.I,

Enrico Guazzoni,

first in

success of Cabiria and

1912, again a

when

it

had counterbalanced the

later

few years
all

during the war.

efforts.

This time U.CI. wanted to surpass

previous

The

di

rection was entrusted to the German Jacobi, under the super vision of Arturo Ambrosio (who had previously perpetrated a Theodora) and with the collaboration of Gabriellino d'Annunon with each other. zio. Naturally these three men did not get marked degree but of taste with bad Each of them was blessed

of varying kinds, and each of them brought a quite different in the manner of conception to the making of this production the Italian film. that of been a which has manner Sardou, always

There were
a lion ate

also several

up one of the

untoward incidents and a few accidents: extras, which considerably dampened

the ardor of the other actors.

When

was

a great disappointment: it predecessors. But in the role of

seemed

the film finally appeared it less excellent than its

Nero an

actor already famous

won

fresh laurels:
failure of

it

was Jannings.
Vadis hastened the ruin of U.CI.

The

Quo

Then

also feeling the American competition. Internal un rest in Italy was serious. The Fascist victory did little to mend mat ters for the film industry: Mussolini had other things to worry

F.E.R.T. was

until

about at that time, and was not to interest himself in the cinema some years later. Enrico Ghione tried to reorganize the finan cial end of the industry but was unable to do so. He made one more Our film, Country. Augusto Genina presented Carmen Boni in

The Last Lord, which scored quite a hit in Germany. Carmine Gallone took Garibaldi for his hero in A Wild Ride. The end had come. After three or four more years of sporadic efforts the Ital ian film virtually expired with The Last Days of Pompeii. This film, in the familiar tradition of Cabiria and Quo Vadis,
was given much publicity. An enormous number of actors were engaged and a few reels were shot. Then Amleto Palermi ran off to Austria with the negative to sell the unfinished film. In Vienna he found a buyer, who, however, insisted on the cast being

The Emergence

of an

Art

then went on to Berlin, where prospec changed. Palermi agreed, tive distributors suggested a few more changes. On his return to Rome the actors who had been got rid of demanded huge com Several million lira had already been spent. Palermi gave
pensation.

up and asked Carmine Gallone

most costly of
the worst.
all Italian

to finish the picture. It

was the

productions and, need one add, one of

In any case

it

was only
its

industry was
film. It

in

a hang-over, for in reality the Italian film death throes the industry, not the art of the

was really under were to films appear not, in other words, way that any interesting From its in. came until the talkies very beginnings until 1923 the a a was film Italian monstrosity. In it one sees as through really all the worst faults that endangered the course magnifying glass and the American film alike and even endanger of the was not
until the Fascist reconstruction

European

it

chosen domain lay in the garbling of literary works, in influence of Sardou, d'Annunzio and submitting to the pernicious the past, and an and Sienkiewicz, extravagant habit of re-creating
yet.
Its

the history of antiquity. As faults, these were not pe especially culiar to Italy, though there they were indulged to a degree almost were to reappear elsewhere, in that master

phenomenal.
all

They

piece of

the productions in the Italian manner, namely, the

American-made Ben Hur*

6.

Jhe American film

THE END

of the war coincided with a crisis in the American film in of the companies had undergone radical changes dur Most dustry. the end of that year the influenza epidemic Towards ing 1918. and it was diffi the country; many of the cinemas closed, swept cult to get anyone to rent a film. At the same moment, public taste

underwent

a violent change. Overnight everyone suddenly sick ened of the patriotic war pictures which had been turned out wholesale: miles of film had to be scrapped, other pictures taken

out of production. There was a general shift from the heroic vir-

200

The History

of

Motion Pictures

mes of wartime

-comedies and film people it was the end of

of
as if

mood to the light fare more suited to a victorious the of For now. many love stories were In demand
a beautiful dream. in a

The

population
It

Hollywood diminished noticeably

few weeks.

looked

ruin stared the industry in the face. found almost as quickly as the crisis had arisen. The early months of 1919 saw the crowds streaming back into host the movie theaters in almost greater numbers than before. comedians as themselves who fancied of

A remedy was

young people-youths and girls who imagined they resembled Mary Pickford-bore down on Hollywood. It was necessary to establish a special agency to deal with (and send back home) the unwise fortune-seekers who The studios were snowed under in an ava arrived there
penniless.

lanche of scenarios which

it

took weeks to examine,

classify,

dis

ingenious

cover useless and finally return to the various firemen, plumb submitted them. More ers, bank clerks and dressmakers who had rich could souls decided bringing suit for
they

grow

by

for in order to secure plagiarism against the wealthier companies; the firm so accused would, though innocent, some tranquillity times make a settlement out of court. One individual more enter
prising than the others

went so far as to claim one hundred thou Cecil B. DeMille, on the grounds of from sand dollars damages of The Ten Commandments. Ever the scenario him having "lent" un have the studios since then, kept proof of having returned
opened all unsolicited scenarios submitted to them. The growing interest in the cinema was not manifested by these enriched by the gratuitous contributions alone. A large public, war and growing even more prosperous during peacetime, now poured into places of entertainment; they were willing to pay good prices for seats and no theater could be too luxurious. It was a gold mine, and although the producers competed strenuously with one another, there was scope for them all.

Movie directors now began to rival the stars in importance. New York was still the financial center of the industry. A director in
Los Angeles studio could assume the role of dictator, since the quarterly visits of his particular magnate did not really do much to limit his power. As more and more money was being spent on
his

The Emergence
publicity,

of an

Art

201

the directors realized that they

some of

it

on

their

own

would do well to use account and make themselves famous, to

compete with the growing renown of the stars. Actually by no means all of them succeeded, though George Loane Tucker earned
a considerable degree of celebrity

through

his

religious film

The

Miracle Man, which the Christian Scientists helped to make suc cessful. But only two directors attained real prominence, and these, as before, were Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.

D.

W. GRIFFITH

Even more than The

Broken Blossoms which
eminence.

Birth of a Nation or Intolerance, it was earned for Griffith his peculiar definitely

When
Its

whelmed.
as a

came out in 1919 everyone was over a rather was improbable affair as full of uplift story
the film

fils, but in the land of puritanism such usually concerned a delicate girl, the child of a coarse bully, who in her innocent way loves a young Chinaman. (Since the time of The Cheat, Orientals had enjoyed a vogue.) When the father discovered this shocking association, he killed his daughter.

piece

by Dumas

makes a

hit. It

It was not, however, the subject matter which caused this film to be regarded as a masterpiece so much as certain scenes in it which were carried off with really tremendous skill, with such sureness of touch and such serenity that one might have fancied

had the theater's three centuries of experience behind him, not a mere twenty years of cinema. These were the scenes with Lillian Gish cringing before the whip, the flight of the crooks dragging the girl with them along the riverbank through the fog,
Griffith

the poor
ately this

little

heroine shut up in a closet, flinging herself desper way and that and then turning round and round, and

the bully making melodramatic gestures on his deathbed. All of these were strangely convincing, and directed with an attention
to detail
sible to

which occasionally attained real style; they made it pos a martyred accept this Grand Guignolesque story about face and Lillian sensitive Gish's to which maiden, haggard eyes lent so much charm and conviction. It was this loving care for detail and a certain romantic quality that gave Broken Blossoms its im~

202

The History
it,

of

Motion Pictures
of Paris might never have been

portance: but for

A Woman

made. It was not, however, a great success at the box office, and Grif fith, who had almost been ruined by Intolerance (he finished pay seek material more popular ing the bills in 1923), was forced to
than this sensitive and complex story. He made Orphans of the Stonn, against a rather crude late-eighteenth-century Paris set

and The White Rose, which was a frankly commercial ven But he also made The Love Flower, One Exciting Night (a sort of murder mystery, perhaps intended as a parody), America, which recalled The Birth of a Nation and, better still, Way Down East and Dream Street. In Way Down East the heroine was, once more, the timid and
ting, ture.

to suffering. Its climax was the great storm and the breakup of the ice, with the heroine swept away on a floe w hile her sweetheart struggles against the elements
delicate Lillian, eternally
r

condemned

to save her.

The most important

based on a popular melodrama which the action so agreeably blended, so that in a sense they played the same role that an orchestra plays in an opera, heighten
ing the situations without overwhelming them. This is Griffith's great charm, even if time has somewhat faded this touching tale
,of

thing, however, about this film was the natural backgrounds into

and

a forsaken girl-mother, complete with baptism of dying ice floes a la Uncle Tonis Cabin.

baby

Dream

Street

was more complex;

its

naive theme recalls In

tolerance. Really an attempt at symbolism, sometimes clumsy and sometimes moving, it had a curiously rhythmical quality; short
ness.

sequences are opposed to long sequences with astonishing bold Unfortunately, the masked violinist symbolizes evil, and the

crowd which surrounds him symbolizes suffering humanity. One might have been moved by this story of two brothers who listen alternately to the voice of good and to that of evil but for an overdose of moralizing which spoils so much of Griffith's work.
Technically remarkable, it also evinces a certain tender and ro mantic love of humanity. But it is terribly argumentative and ele mentary. One can never quite overlook this, and the years to come

were merely

to confirm the decline of this remarkable

man who

The Emergence
created the

of an

Art
probable that

American

film.

But for him,

tell

it is

we

might not yet tional melodramas

know how

a story in pictures. His conven served to create a style, to create that sort of

to

cinematic eloquence which All honor to him!

still

affects us

today in so

many

films.

CECIL

B.

DEMILLE

efforts of Griffith (not to mention those of Ince) repre an sented attempt to lay down the canons of film art. With Cecil B. DeMille we encounter a man with other preoccupations, more

The

nearly related to commerce than to art. In this figure, who for five or six years enjoyed fame as great as that of the most illustrious
stars, can be detected the origins of much that was to orientate the cinema towards a brilliant mediocrity. He discovered and adapted formulas which were so successful commercially that

miliar cliches

they discouraged research by independent workers. All the fa owe their origin to him sex appeal, wild parties,

highfalutin sentiments, gorgeous heroines and the whole world of luxurious sport and fashion. He shares with the Italian film

producers the responsibility of having been the

the financiers.

spiritual ally of

The discovery which was most peculiarly DeMille's was that of sex appeal. The "vamp" had appeared on the screen as early as 1912, but she had been displayed only dramatically and diabolically
as a temptress, and appeared only in somber dramas that ended in the ruin of the poor man who had allowed himself to be led astray.

DeMille realized that vamping offered a much more fruitful field than did such discreet glimpses into the hinterland of sin. The public liked an appearance of gilded luxury to mitigate the tale of sinfulness, and henceforward we were to meet with heroines dangerous enough to be alarming but still fundamentally decent enough so that all might end well. The addition of a generous share of make-believe could calm troubled consciences without
sented,

disguising the sensual flavor which, if sufficiently respectably pre might be agreeable to many people. As the action invaria
as is

bly took place in high society, where,

well known, really

204

IN SEARCH OF

BEAUTY IN MUSIC
lifework of the musician
is

The

esthetic attitude.

The

crea

tive art.

a world of images, imagination, fiction, and fancy, as contrasted with the rest of the population which, This is to a supposedly, lives in a world of facts and objects. certain extent necessary and commendable, but there is danger
lives in

He

of

its

counting against intelligent behavior.

Insofar as a musician exhibits insight and Poetic intuition. intuition. It is gen learning, he tends to develop a life of poetic truths which erally admitted, that great poets express profound or science of often transcend the realms philosophy. These and truths are reached through inspiration, they are expressed in figurative language, the effectiveness of which depends upon
the outsider's ability to put himself into the artistic mood and to give reality to the imaginative revelation. Insofar as this is to a certain extent true of the musician, it may be justly re

garded as an indication of his superior understanding of some him lonely part of the world in which he lives. It tends to make and to capitalize his feeling of superiority as the keeper and master of great artistic truths.
Musicians as a class are of the emotional Life of feeling. Their job is to play upon feeling, to appreciate, to inter pret, and to create the beautiful in the tonal realm. To be suc cessful, the musician must carry his audience on a wave of

type.

emotion often bordering on ecstasy. While this involves intelli gence and intelligent action, the medium through which he works is feeling, not factual material objects or abstract philos
This, again, is to a large extent necessary and com mendable, for the musical mind comes into the world with a
ophies.

hereditary bent in this direction.

As a result of the above four situations, often found to be impractical, unadapted to business, industry, or logical pursuits which have social sig nificance. He specializes so highly in emotions, both for arous
Social detachment.
is

the musician

ing group responses and in managing his own affairs, that he becomes the butt of criticism from those who regard themselves as successful in practical life. This is one of the penalties of

The Emergence

of an

Art

205

$1,000,000 and having as its principal attraction the Israelites cross Red Sea, proved that the Italians had met their master and ing the
that
it

was possible to graft

sermon onto

a spectacle.

HOLLYWOOD SCANDALS
a mistake to suppose that DeMille provided a new source of inspiration without encountering any resistance. In spite of his prudence and the concessions he made to morality, his in
It

would be

vention of sex appeal quickly alarmed the puritans. DeMille him

careful to appease everybody, but no one master of the fashions he launches. The success of sex appeal was soon realized by a number of fly-by-night producers who were prepared to utilize his discoveries without discretion. It is
self
is

would have been

And
lic,

readily imagined what his ingenious ideas became in their hands. since their efforts did not seem wholly to displease the

there

insisted

pub were bigger firms ready to accuse of timidity those who overmuch on the limits to which good taste and decency

could go.

Clergymen shuddered, women's clubs became exercised. A little would perhaps have appeased these signs of dissatisfaction had Hollywood not at that same moment attracted a regrettable sort
skill
its own private life. the First, newspapers were somewhat severe about the divorce of Mary Pickford, who had now married Douglas Fairbanks. Peo ple were the more severe towards the beautiful but inconstant girl

of attention to

so

because they had admired her so much. But Mary Pickford was charming and everybody liked Douglas Fairbanks so much that

all

would

dent

now

readily have been forgiven. Unfortunately, an ugly inci occurred to upset everything. This was the death of

one of the companions of Roscoe Arbuckle at a party in San Fran cisco* It has never been clear what really happened. Arbuckle was acquitted of the charge of murder over and again, but that sudden
death and,
still

more, the circumstances which accompanied

it

threw

a strange light

on the film people.

The excitement caused by this affair had hardly died down when a director named William Desmond Taylor was found mur-

20 6

The History

of Motion Pictures

dered in his bungalow. It looked as though jealousy had been the cause of the crime. Taylor's private life was investigated: he had had affairs of a more or less serious nature with various actresses.

The murderer was

a stir
cial

not discovered. This mysterious event caused

throughout the whole country: every newspaper sent a spe

correspondent to Los Angeles.

The most

exaggerated

stories,

the wildest rumors circulated. Taylor's murder sold more news than the of the United States into the war had done. papers entry

multiply. Every thing and anything was published. As eagerly as it had followed the rise of the film celebrities to fame, so the public now eagerly drank in stories to their discredit. The fabulous sums of money that the stars earned were recalled. So it was for

Naturally enough, while the hunt for the unknown murderer was on, accounts of Hollywood scandals continued to

Babylonian orgies,

most horrible excesses that those magnificent salaries were spent! Hollywood came to be regarded as a subdivi sion of hell. A crusade was started against the film people.

drink, drugs and the

The

manded government

clergy increased their activities, the women's clubs de intervention and the creation of a national

censorship. powerful wave of propaganda was launched against the industry. The topic became one of prime importance. Scandal sheets reaped a fortune. The scandals were rendered more acute

by
also

the fact that Los Angeles, besides being the film center, was an oil- town and had thus attracted all sorts and conditions of

people.

To evade the strict Californian law, which regards every one unable to prove a regular means of livelihood as a vagabond, most of this floating population from the oil fields had enrolled

themselves as film extras. Reporters did not inquire too closely, and eagerly announced that a ravishing film actress had been ar rested after a night's in a orgy or that she had been mixed

up

shooting affray, and so credited to the genuine film people the misdeeds of women as to whose profession there was no possible doubt.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE

soon became so serious that a dictator seemed nec Will H. essary: Hays, postmaster-general in President Harding's
situation

The

The Emergence

of an

Art

207

cabinet, was Hollywood. Actors who had compromised themselves seriously were abandoned to their fate: Wallace Reid died in a sanitorium. For the other unhappyidols in Los Angeles there now dawned a sort of White Terror a reign of virtue without hope and without compromise. A ruth less organization controlled every gesture, every look (this was the grapefruit had been discovered, or long before the merits of to be sacrificed to beauty through diets stricter young lives began the on and than those imposed aged dying). Hays acquired an were ordered to who establish a model of good assistants army of have suited the would strictest convent of nuns. as such conduct film world became as strait-laced as an old maid's the Suddenly

engaged to restore virtue to

home. Divorce was prohibited temporarily. Famous actresses ac quired homey backgrounds and entertained the parson in the eve film residence was to be found a pious and docile ning. In every life held no whose mystery, unless it were the child young couple had afflicted them. The extra players heaven which with lessness most stories were spread abroad, The the also paid gloomy price.
the horrors of unem emphasizing the sufferings of newcomers, the bitterness of the fight to obtain work. Pretty girls ployment,
in Detroit

and Cincinnati began to think that it was easier to find Klondike than to get a job as lady's maid in Los Angeles. gold Meanwhile, those who disregarded these warnings were dealt with firmly. A central bureau received all applicants. The Czar's would have seemed gentle compared to its officials. First police down the patience of the candidates by continually de wore they birth certificates and baptismal certificates, next their manding before sociologists, a group of which experts held them took they tests had been invented to permanent sittings. Some astonishing reveal the slightest inclination towards violence, drunkenness or love. An applicant, before he was eligible to play a small part, was
in the

subjected to as
this

many

tests as a

knight of old.

And

so, after a time,

had the satisfaction of having pro Hollywood vided the films with a few thousand unemployed as healthy as scouts and sober as Quakers. policemen, pure as boy There remained only the regulation of production. A sort of was promulgated, which all the producers gentlemen's agreement
registry office

208

The History

of

Motion Pictures

was composed of agreed to observe. This formidable document screen this essentials of Code of Mo the interdictions. Here are
rality:

Sex

The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relation ship are the accepted or common thing. 1. Adultery, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be ex plicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively. 2. Scenes of passion should not be introduced when not essential to the plot. In general, passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element. 3. Seduction or rape. (a) They should never be niore than suggested, and only when essential for the plot, and even then never shown by ex plicit method. (b) They are never the proper subject for comedy. Sex 4. perversion or any inference of it is forbidden. White 5. slavery shall not be treated.
6. 7.

Miscegenation is forbidden. Sex hygiene and venereal diseases are not subjects for motion
pictures.

8.

9.

Scenes of actual childbirth, in fact or in silhouette, are never to be presented. Children's sex organs are never to be exposed.
Vulgarity

The

treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not nec

essarily evil subjects, should be subject always to the dictates of good taste and regard for the sensibilities of the audience.

Obscenity

Obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke or by sug

gestion,
is

forbidden.

Dances
Dances which emphasize indecent movements are to be re
garded
as

obscene.

The Emergence

of an

Art

209

Profanity

Pointed profanity or vulgar expressions, however used, are

forbidden.

Costume
1.

Complete nudity
thereof

is

never permitted. This includes nudity in

2.

any lecherous or licentious notice other characters in the picture. by Dancing costumes intended to permit undue exposure or in decent movements in the dance are forbidden.
Religion

fact or in silhouette, or

1.

2.

No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith. Ministers of religion, in their character as such, should not be used as comic characters or as villains.
Ceremonies of any
definite religion should

3.

be carefully and

handled. respectfully

National Feelings
1.

2.

The The

use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful. and citizenry of history, institutions, prominent people other nations shall be represented fairly.

Now the films

for a

were considered to be safe few months the specialists in sadism and

again. In actual fact, sex appeal kept more

as anyone could have foretold, the Code less quiet. Nevertheless, of Morality merely helped to strengthen puritan hypocrisy, to make the films shy about certain serious subjects and, as far as

or

public morality

was concerned,

to prevent absolutely nothing.

NEWCOMERS

new restrictions, a few new Despite the crisis and despite the comers were hewing out a path for themselves in the film world whilst other eminent figures of the war period were doing little but rest on their laurels, like Thomas Ince, who was to die in 1924. and Nazimova, who needed another Capellani returned to France,

210

IN SEARCH OF

BEAUTY IN MUSIC

anatomically and physiologically exceptionally responsive to sound. In other words, quite apart from consciousness of sound or thought of music, his physical organism responds to acoustic
stimuli of
sion.
all kinds, keeping nerve and muscle in a state of ten This tends to create a state of unrest and irritability.

to actual hearing, it may arouse associations of a dreamlike or dramatic nature which may play a large role in the conscious life. It may create a state of well-being and happy associations, or perhaps more frequently, a sense of irri tation and emotional eruptions. The sounds may come from a squeaking chair, the sizzling of a kettle, the song of a bird, the

Without leading

cry of an infant. Most frequently sounds affecting the organism in this way are inconspicuous in the environment but they may
;

'often be strong, as, for instance, the rattling

chattering of a crowd. The musician may of these, although he may be physiologically irritated.

of a train or the not become conscious

TONAL SENSITIVITY
All great musicians are highly sensitive to sound in all its elements. They respond to musical sounds in three ways. First,

carry meaning. words, the great musician hears fine distinctions in tones, he likes or dislikes them, and he tends to give them musical mean
ing.

discrimination naturally/ Second, the recognition of tonal elements or complexes always tends to be affective, arousing of attraction or repulsion. responses Third, these discriminations musical In other

they

make a

definite critical

the issue is not so much true pitch, smooth dynamics, metronomic time, or uniform tone quality. His in terest is in the artistic deviation from these, because his entire
true, the these artistic expressing deviations under fine control, he works in part according to rules, but in larger part to satisfy his own emotional ear for
rigid,

With the musician

arUies in

for artistic deviation the^ capacity the uniform. In judging or

from the

to express his individuality in interpretation. of course, a finer achievement than mere acuity for these tonal elements.

tibe

moment and
is,

This

The Emergence

of an

An

211

on Horseback was one of the few American films to influenced been have by the experiments being carried out at that and in France time in Germany. It is a nightmare story, staged in and extremely solid detail. A poor composer wants to marry great a girl and, in wedded bliss, devote himself to music. The dream all the worry and trouble that lie in store for him. suggests to him all the double exposures and huge sets and grotesque char Despite in the Cruze acters film, only succeeded in creating an extremely
childish effect.
this direction.*
it with an excellent model in 1922 with but his Nanookj unhappily he had few disciples. This story of the life of an Eskimo, attached to his icy surroundings like a peasant to his fields, has an abiding and natural charm. The hunt, the snow,

A Beggar

The

true path of the

American

film did not

lie

in

Flaherty was to provide

the harpoon, the howling of the hungry dogs furnished some ex the struggle with the elements, dogs and men quisite pictures;

huddled inside an igloo lighted only by a square of transparent ice, the bargaining with the fur traders are subjects that we shall meet with again. But, that first time, the resignation of the hero to Kis circumstances, and that perfect combination of documentary film and cinematic fiction seemed irresistibly bewitching. The Americans seem little concerned with the poetry of nature: among them only Flaherty and Van Dyke come to mind,t but the work of these two men is of real originality and power.

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS
In 1919 "the big four," Griffith, Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Fairbanks, agreed to form United Artists through which, as soon as their outstanding contracts permitted, they would release their

own productions. The dashing young Fairbanks, who was to marry Mary Pickford the following year and form with her the typical screen couple, was now reaching the apogee of his fame.
this film,

Europe Cruze was given credit for all the novelty and fantasy of from lack of knowledge that it was really a transcription of the ^ay by Kaufman and Connelly and of the producer's and designer's ideas
In

E? the P lay*. hWhy omit

Schoedsack and Cooper?

212
That

The History

of Motion Pictures

American and the fol year, he appeared in His Majesty the direction of the excellent the two films made under lowing year
Victor Fleming, When the Clouds Roll By, a trick film which oc casionally reminds one of A Beggar on Horseback, and The Molly coddle. Later he appeared in The Nut and a version of The Three Musketeers in which he was superb. Directed by Fred Niblo, it
confined

which

to the episode of the [Queen's diamondEd.] studs, included some furious horseback riding. But in the interests
itself

of decency d'Artagnan was in love with the niece of M. Bonancieux, not with his wife. This was in 1921 and the censors were
alert.

The

fitness

mula
its

as usual, to Douglas' good nature, to put the best of himself and his for into a film of adventure and acrobatics which remains fa
is

film

monument,

and

agility.

He was

mous, The Mark of Zorro,

also directed

by Fred

Niblo.

It

was

in

way

a masterpiece.

Douglas now resolved that the public might tire of such a mo notonous character as he played, and that he must do something fresh. Cecil B. DeMille had shown the way. Without ceasing to be the robust and chivalrous acrobat with the Fairbanks grin, he

now

historical.

adventures against imposing settings, preferably in which the story is garbled so lightheartedly that it would be absurd to take anybody to task new fairyland opened before him: he had won Mary about it.

played

his

He made Robin Hood,

Pickford's love, a great deal of fame and any

number of

dollars.

COMEDIANS

Most of the comedians who had made their debut during the war were now developing their style. Fatty Arbuckle, it is true, was to disappear from the screen for the most regrettable of rea sons, scandal. But there remained, even if we omit Larry Semon and Ben Turpin, two men of decided importance Buster Keaton
and Harold Lloyd. At first, Buster Keaton appeared
(Neighbors, The High
Sign,
in a

One Week)

number of short comedies in which he already op

posed to destiny an impassive face and exceptional agility. Then for First National he appeared in ten pictures including The

The Emergence

of an

Art

213

Electric Home, The Frozen North., Ealloonatics and Cops which were all full of the craziest invention and bore resemblances to many of the prewar comedies. For example, in one of these Buster several parts at once, applauds himself on the stage and dis plays a startling ubiquity. These were short films such as were plays

always shown before the feature: not until 1923 did Buster appear in a film of greater length, The Three Ages, but his prentice work

was already done and the years to come were to give him
place.

his true

Meantime, good-natured Harold Lloyd had developed his charming and facile talent. He was featured in a great many films, Never Weaken, High and Dizzy, Haunted Spooks and then A Sailor Made Man, The Freshman and Safety Last. In all of them he confronts the worst catastrophes with an air at once silly and
cheerful. Admittedly there is little logic in his gratuitous humor, which often seems a trifle forced, but in Safety Last he takes such in his strange acrobatics up and down a building that one pleasure cannot resist his rather obvious comedy devices, some of which are derived from Fairbanks, some from Chaplin, others from Linder and the older comedies: applause comes wholeheartedly. The later films in particular, longer and better made, form a kind of comic allegory on luck, for Harold Lloyd, despite appearances to the contrary, is always lucky and seems protected against misfor tune by some titular deity. That is what makes the public like him. However, he too was to be surpassed by Chaplin.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN

At the end

of the war,

by reason of Shoulder Arms

in particular,

an outstanding place in the Charlie Chaplin had definitely to cease turning films out thenceforth was world cinema. He
r

w on

done in the days of Keystone and Mutual, though rapidly as he had

his films

were fairly numerous as long as he remained with National, which he joined in 1918. It can even be said that
Shoulder

First

after

Arms

learn Chaplin began to

his craft all

over again,

His Job or One though in a manner different from that of for food him Arms Shoulder of M. The success A. thought. gave

New

214

The History
which was
to be

of Motion Pictures
realize his real artfully, to

Now he attempted, patiently and

ambi

tion, something more than a funny man. He tried to extend his repertory, launch out into romance and even into drama. Some of the films which appeared between 1919 and 1923 are far from possessing the exquisite unity of The Tramp. They lack a center of gravity, they are cumbrous with effort and with faults. That is what makes them interesting and what enables one to date from these years a renewal-from-within in the art of

Chaplin. In 1919 he produced

Sunny side and

Day's Pleasure, in 1920

in 192 1 The Idle Class and in 1922 both Pay Day and one of his real masterpieces, The Pilgrim. Finally in 1923, after com pleting his contract with First National, he released

The Kid,

United Artists not

his best

but

his

through most important picture, A

an exquisite thing,

Woman

of Paris.
series, is

Sunny side, which began the new

packed with amazing details. Charlie in the country drives his cows dreamily to pasture, loses them, tries to find them and care lessly prods a stout lady. In the morning at the farm where he is a servant they waken him brutally; he taps on the floor with his shoes without getting out of bed to make them think he is up. When he prepares dinner, he milks the cow directly into the cup, and puts the hen into the frying pan so that she may lay a fried egg. The whole thing is poetical and enchanting: the imaginary
village, the lanes, the ladies going to church, the Sabbath day sanc tified to the Lord. Out in the fields, Charlie has a dream:

nymphs

slightly heavy, slightly sentimental dream there is nothing very ethereal about these healthy American nymphs. Nevertheless, this is probably exactly the way in which
It is a

dance with him.

Charlie imagined them, and here the chromolithograph comes to life. prefer, however, his assiduous courting of a pretty girl:

We

he

ape the elegant young men who own cuffs, spats and canes which contain concealed cigarette lighters, but his spats
tries to

are old

woolen socks

all

frayed out and he has only a candle to put

in his walking stick with which to light his two-cent cigar. Rarely have bitterness and grace been compounded with as much subtlety
as in
tliis

film, at

once so nonchalant and so precise, which resumes

The Emergence
the themes of

of an

An

2/5

The Tramp and of

Dog's Life but uses them here

to extol the pastoral virtues. Day's Pleasure, in which Charlie

is married and the father of reminds one of the older films. a family, merely comedy a boat of Charlie deck with the a chair, as he On struggles fought M. One A. a in It bed is his remarkable exercise with of virtuosity but no more, and so is the automobile ride.

is

it

With The Kid Chaplin attempted something new.

and deceptive
It

It is a

strange

film,

which has aged greatly and

reveals certain of

Chaplin's incurable faults, which, however, have their own charm. begins in the worst melodramatic style with a woman abandon

ing her baby. All this is laid on very thick: Chaplin has seldom ventured so far into bad taste. It is as though, in his joy at finally abandoning pure comedy, he had lost his equilibrium. Fortunately,
at this point, Charlie himself appears

and takes the baby under

his

wing.

The child's part was, of course, played by Jackie Coogan, who was perfection itself with his chubby face and the great cap that came down over his ears. In 1919 Charlie had noticed a child throwing banana peels under the feet of the passers-by. He called
out to him:
a

Hey,

kid,

would you

like to

work

in the movies?"
it."

The
"I

child answered, coldly: "I .might consider "Take me to your father," said Chaplin.

am

five years old," replied the boy. "I

can manage

my own

affairs."

That
gaged.

is

the way, so they say,* in which Jackie

Coogan was en

The Kid was made without any scenario

works
like that,

or script: Chaplin often

his

and the lack of unity

this

in

some of

long films

is

method of improvisation, though it is also true that, since 1920, he has formed the habit of inserting into his which bear little relation to the main plot. pictures episodes The Kid remains one of the most uneven films that he has made.
probably due to

Some
*

of

its

becomes a
The

perfection as, for instance, when Charlie kid throws stones at people's windows the glazier,
details are

story seems to be apocryphal.

216

The History

of

Motion Pictures

and breaks them; then Charlie comes along and mends them. This causes complications with the policeman who has discovered the trick. Later on the kid is ill, Charlie fights with the authorities to to which he goes keep him, and finally hides him in the flophouse for the sake of warmth. The flophouse episode is one of the most
the child's touching that Charlie has ever composed. One day the to a reward offers a now woman, mother, person who wealthy will restore him to her. Tempted by the five thousand dollars, the the flophouse takes the child to her. in Sunny side. He is unhappy. He dreams, as he dreamed where world ridiculous and is angels rock transported to a strange him and even policemen have wings. This famous episode, like the one in Sunny side and the vision in The Gold Rush, is not wholly successful. Chaplin's imagination develops best in the everyday eats or the life of a world of from the meal which a
Charlie

owner of

began

Even if we adept with the imaginary world. naivete own his to scenes his of attribute the clumsiness visionary of character, we are still entitled to find them rather heavy. In any event, he is recalled abruptly, as here, when the kid, now rich, conies back to lead him off with his mother towards a life of ease. This is obviously the artificial happy ending of a romance that in the manner of Camllle. Yet for all its violent changes of
small town: he
is less

reality,

tramp

mood,

its

heavy sentimentality, The Kid

first

is

work

of supreme

time Charlie was wholly himself, with all his perturbation and sadness and an admixture of grotesque Even yet poetical social satire, somewhat in the manner of Griffith. than imitate Griffith, never can do better if we think that Chaplin
importance. Here for the

unique and attractive. and Pay Day he seemed to be treading content to water, attempt comedy alone. In The Idle Class he husband and the tramp who re two parts, the elegant played sembled him so closely. The tramp goes to a fancy-dress dance and persuades the lady, who thinks that it is her husband, to kiss him. Horrors! The husband is not disguised as a tramp but as a knight of the middle ages. He charges at Charlie, armor and all, but when he cannot raise his visor it is Charlie who comes to his rescue with hammer and can opener.
theless the film remains

With The

Idle Class

The Emergence
The end
is

of an

Art

2/7

excellent, in a different key.

The wife's father, having

somewhat maltreated the tramp during the dance, now repents and goes to shake Charlie's hand. Charlie slyly gives him a hearty kick in the pants and runs. It is one of the rare instances in which
Charlie revenges himself. It is not the only time he feels like doing it, for volumes could be written about a certain toughness in

Charlie and the suppressed resentment which often lends a strangely human note to his misfortune: he is less resigned than we some

times imagine. As for Pay Day, here his touch

is

extraordinarily sure: there

is

not one scrap of waste footage in it. As most of the action takes it is an unusually picturesque comedy which (like place at night,

The Gold Rush)

indicates

how

circumstances can dictate an in

terest in pictorial elements, in composition and in lighting, which were usually far from Chaplin's mind. Here we see Charlie

home

going one Saturday night, his cautious arrival in stocking feet and the angry awakening of his wife an old and often-exploited in it is Charlie's climb into the overloaded subject. The best thing car: newcomers trolley gradually push him towards the rear door, he hangs on by a fat man's suspenders but is finally thrust out. It was in this film that he hit upon one of his most touching and most he fears that his foreman will punish him for significant gestures: late for work, and conceals behind his back a flower which being he intends to offer him. Wonderful symbol, both funny and en
late

chanting, worth more than all the sermonizing in the scenes which open The Kid or in the films of Griffith. Such discretion is the sign

of great

art.

restraint distinguishes The Pilgrim. It is a delightful more pantomime than film, and reminds us that Charlie picture, was born into the circus. When he is mistaken for the new parson

The same

and taken to church to preach a sermon, he enacts the story of David and Goliath with his hands, whirling about and gesticulat ing threateningly. That bit of bravura is the masterpiece of a man more mimic than screen actor. There is also the opening sequence in which Charlie as an escaped convict picks out at random the name of a station from a depot placard, and happens to light on more attractive, he grips the Sing. When he finds something

218

The History

of Motion Ticttires

a second with the gesture of a prisoner clutching the railings for he has selected, he holds bars of his cell. arriving at the town

On

hands to the sheriff who awaits him, as he would hold them out to be handcuffed. It is incidents of this kind which give
out
his

the film
as

its

perfection (as well as the simple, straightforward plot),

when Charlie tries to save the girl he loves from one of his former

convict friends, and the

garden gate

when he

is

he makes at the gesture of farewell arrested. Infinitely preferable, these, to the

little

whipped cream, though it is true that Chaplin does not particularly stress this. The end is famous: at the Mexican frontier, the sheriff sends Charlie to
that they pick flowers, then gallops away. Charlie has not realized the horse and want to give him a chance to escape; he runs after

horrible child that covers the bowler hat with

bouquet with the expression of a faithful dog. The him on his way with a kick. Beaming with joy Charlie now runs off, but a bandit with a blunderbuss springs up from behind a Mexican rock. Charlie hurls himself back into the United States. Up pops a second bandit, no less terrifying. The film ends with Charlie loping away, one foot in the States and
offers

up

his

sheriff has to send

one in Mexico, astride the frontier. Just as in Shoulder Arms and Sunny side, in The Pilgrim Chaplin achieved a nearly perfect combination of humor and tenderness.
Unfortunately, the puritans disapproved. At that time the Chaplin divorce case was on. The most unpleasant rumors about him were

and now he had dared to ridicule the clergy. He before, what is more, in Easy Street. The puritans, ex tremely active in the United States, especially since the Holly wood scandals, tried to make of the situation one similar to that
in circulation,

had done

it

which
It

their spiritual ancestors

just missed

had made out of Moliere's Tartuffe.

only

being successful and putting a total stop to

Chaplin's freedom.

Happily, at United Artists he was

1923 he produced

now

A Woman

of Paris.

his own master, and in The comedian does not ap

though Chaplin once crosses the screen in it briefly, porter. Did he want to prove that he too was capable of writing a story and directing a big film without appearing in it, like Griffith and DeMille? Was he afraid to abandon the character
pear in
this film,

as a

The Emergence
of the tramp to
to say.

of an

Art

which he was thenceforth condemned? Impossible

The Important thing is that in this rather naive society drama we can readily recognize the author of Shoulder Arms. A Woman of Paris, whatever its admirers may say, has worn this could have been predicted at the time. The reason badly, and far more is simple: it is the same which made The Cheat, with a
absurd plot, also wear badly. Everything related to the horrible stuff which Augier and Dumas fils brought into fashion in the
theater inevitably ages rapidly. Sentimental dramas and dramas finance alike, they all quickly become covered with about

high

thick dust and

it is

see a ten-year-old play practically impossible to

of the "contemporary drama" without boredom. In copying the theater the films were terribly mistaken, not only because there is no connection between these two arts, but because the films imi
tated a bad

and abominable

theater,

doomed

in advance: that

is

to

the French commercial theater which developed from the say, horrible theater of the nineteenth century. Woman of Paris, if it borrowed some of the faults However,

for oddly surpasses its model. But would Griffith of and film intimate DeMille, the Chaplin plays have thought of making this remarkable if melancholy pic

of

this regrettable style, also

hardly
of
life.

ture, yet

it is

far ahead of
is

The

story

both Griffith and DeMille in its concept and reminds simple, although somewhat facile,
less

one both of Ccmiille and of the

admirable parts of

The Kid.

It

concerns two young people whose parents forbid them to marry. They decide to elope, but through a tragic mishap the young girl awaits her fiance at the station in vain. Thinking herself aban doned, she goes away, and we find her next as the mistress of a fiance rich, middle-aged man, Pierre Revel. Later she meets her suicide and she goes back to Revel. commits he again,
"I treated that subject," Chaplin said, "in the simplest possible manner/' and he mentioned with satisfaction the two details which

seem to have struck the public most and which were most charac
teristic

of his economical style. "First, the fact that I indicated the and departure of a train without showing the train, then the gap of a year in the woman's life which was neither indicated nor explained*"
arrival

220

The History
first

of Motion Pictures

The

scene

is

famous.

It

shows the

lights

from the

train pass

ing across

Edna Purviance's

face.

the scene aroused

(it was the first had been attempted) was actually the result of necessity: Ameri can trains are unlike French trains and A Woman of Paris takes place in France. As there were no coaches of the proper kind at his disposal, Chaplin had the idea of showing only the reflections from the coach windows and, afterwards, realized the effective

emotional response which time that such an indirect method

The

ness of his ingenuity. matter how it occurred, it is highly sig as is also the silence maintained as to the heroine's life from nificant,

No

the time of her desertion until

we meet

her again.

The

details \vere

unimportant: one imagines pretty well what her life must have been. What was important about it was the wearing down of her
resistance, the adjustment she

was compelled

to

make

to

life

and

the gradual disintegration of her pride. Until this time, films had never before shown characters who are neither good nor evil but

who

are doomed to unhappiness and unable even to give expres sion to their finer feelings. Pierre Revel, as Menjou interpreted him, is one of the most exceptional characters portrayed on the
screen.

He is a skeptical but not a wicked man who knows exactly to expect of life. Possibly he loved Marie Saint-Glair. It is probable. But with a scrupulous tact, to which Menjou's perform
what
ance lent real conviction, he never betrays it. Few scenes have as real or as cruel as the one, so quietly played, in which the woman returns to this man,* after the young fiance's suicide.

been

Things like this enable us to accept the characterization of the fiance and other somewhat old-fashioned elements in the film.
an indictment against humanity rather than a prob lem play or an indictment against society and even so it is a pas sionless statement rather than an indictment. Here it is easy to
Chaplin's film
is

recognize the

work

of the

man who made

the comedies, for

what

he had previously suggested through farce he here states clearly. His tramp cannot love, cannot even move without creating ca~
It seems, from this, that the ending of the film as shown abroad was unlike the one we saw. The heroine, far from returning to Revel, devoted herself to good works. *

tastrophes.
all

The Emergence of an Art A Woman of Paris shows us that it is

was important. Henceforth,
as
it

221
the same with

men.
film

The

was impossible to look

upon Chaplin simply an entertainer, or as a more or less imagina tive clown. All that he had been attempting in his latest films blos
somed here in this simple story, the melodramatic ingredients of which we can overlook in order to admire its profound humanity. But at the same time, following as it did upon four years of ex
perimentation in the Swedish, the German and the Russian films, its very simplicity of technique was rather disconcerting. Here

were no difforming lenses, no double exposures just a straight forward narrative. The aesthetes decried it, but soon it was realized

Woman of Paris contained a valuable lesson. The efforts of that the technicians had resulted in smoother rhythms and in a better
use of the camera, but technical efforts should not be obvious: in \vork of real excellence they are imperceptibly incorporated. And
so, despite its faults, which arise from a mistaken attitude towards the theater and the novel but not from a mistaken attitude towards

Woman of Paris provided just that lesson, the film, that of classicism.
Through
the whole First National series which led

which

is

up

to

of Paris, Chaplin had concentrated on something more than pure comedy. He had not abandoned his own particular style, especially the use of reflex actions, but he had attempted in addi tion to express his personal lyricism. He had taken refuge in a dream world of a rather coarse and naive kind; he had moved nearer towards drama of a simple sort, in order to create the tragi
frustration, which is his favorite theme. He substitutes American scene his own small towns still filled with a breeze from near-by forests. It would be a mistake to regard him as a rebel against modern society. There is rebellion in him, which sometimes leads him to fall into artistic errors and makes him seem imperfect and humanfor it would be wrong to think that Charlie is always good. When he meets someone smaller or weaker than

Woman

comedy of
for the

himself he

may very well perk up and

take his revenge

fate.

but almost
is

invariably a most innocent revenge

on

Neither

he brave:

222

The History

of

Motion Pictures
men he
assumes a timid and

In the presence of large

and husky

worth more than all the speeches caressing air. This is what is In the world, the parsimony and bitterness of the existence with which he has endowed the character he plays, and also the less Woman of Paris. After in transposed and less poetical characters this film and after Shoulder Anns Chaplin became the poet of to their misery, which is to say to life men's humiliated

adjustment

itself.

Summary
between 1918 and 1924 that the film as we know it and love it really took shape. America offered few models except the brilliant work
of Chaplin. Elsewhere the film had begun to be regarded as an
"original" art. This
years, there

To CONCLUDE briefly,

it

was

in

America, In Sweden, and in France

was something new.

No matter what false starts were made during these all-important

was a real effort to create a genuine style and a new the war in the realms language. Attempts had been made before of comedy and of fantasy. After the war, the discoveries made in comedy were neglected, and experiments were made along other directions. People everywhere became interested in the new art. in Paris, at the UrSpecial cinemas were established, particularly sulines and more notably at the Vieux Colombier, where Jean Tedesco succeeded Jacques Copeau and tried to establish a reper cinema. Intelligent magazines managed to find a public, such

tory as Cinea-Cine pour Tous. Writers like Canudo, Louis Delluc, Galtier-Boissiere and Moussinac tried to teach the French that the films exist. As early as 1919 Le Crapouillot began publishing ex tremely interesting special numbers devoted to the cinema. The film had entered the common domain of the arts.

PART FIVE
The
Classic

Era of

the Silent

1923-4929

its

own form

of expression.

With

tended by the French (who Germans, the Russian emigres and the Swedes, it was to experience a few too short years of relative tranquillity during which little was to be invented but much interesting work was to be done.

^ a(i created 1924 tne fi^ the range of its technique ex are too frequently overlooked), the

From now on

its

possibilities

and

its

future were clear.

Melies had discovered virtually the whole of its primitive alpha bet. As early as 1908 Griffith had perfected the use of the close-up, the mobility of the camera was an established fact, and in 1915 soft

focus was used for the cradle-rocking figure which links the sev eral themes of Intolerance. The public no longer grew angry, un der the impression that it was being given bad photography, \vhen

Bryant about at the bottom of an immense door perhaps the first pur of scale contrast. Douglas Fairbanks' When the Clouds poseful use Roll By, used diiforniing lenses at the same time as the Swedish films and, of course, double exposure was all the rage. Finally, Jules Romains suggested the use of rapid cutting,* which was to be used by Charles Ray in The Girl I Loved and by Abel Gance in La Roue. Once all these devices had been assimilated and A Woman of Paris had given a lesson in simplicity, it remained only to pro ceed and furnish examples of a serious and complex art.

soft-focus pictures appeared, as in Jocelyn and in Eldorado. In a Washburn film of 1919 a minute person was seen moving

L Jle French ^i
film during the subsequent years has been much criti cized and nearly always with justice. France and America alone had produced films continuously since the invention of cinema

THE French

tography. France and America alone had consumed large num bers of films and made fortunes temporarily for the film industry.
*

See note on page

151.

225

226

The History

of Motion Pictures

But the French industry was so badly organized that in the end everything was subordinated to catering to the lowest and most ridiculous public taste; then came loss of money and finally the dollar Little little the French firms fell under Amer by triumphed.
ican control. Eclair practically disappeared, Gaumont was ab sorbed and the basis of the French industry, the old firm of Pathe, was bought by the Natan brothers, Rumanians who had estab lished a small firm in France before the war. It might be said

truly that the history of the commercial cinema in France between 1920 and 1925 is the history of Pathe-Natan. It is not a pleasing history.

This powerful and well-organized firm hardly produced one good

film and always favored the greatest nonsense, the most outworn ideas, alternating the vulgarest vaudeville with the stupidest sort of historical rubbish.

independent journals, and of cinema pro Tedesco (Le Vieux Colombier), Tallier and Myrga (Les Ursulines), Jean Maucleres (Studio 28) and others, only influenced a small public. Fortunately, that public was to increase in time. The daily press, at first printing no film criticism, became interested in the medium: it would be gradually ungra cious to overlook the excellent fight which Canudo first, then Jean Prevost and next Alexandre Arnoux put up in Nouvelles Litteraires; Leon Moussinac in Le Crapouillot and UHimmnite; Jean
prietors like Jean
in

The

efforts of certain

Fayard in Candide; Pierre Bost in Les Annales; Frangois Vinneuil Action Frangaise. Thanks to these men it became to

possible

purely commercial cinema in at least some minds and to discredit, at the same time, those impudent film criticisms which were nothing more nor less than publicity and which appeared in so many newspapers simply as an adjunct to paid advertising. It would be unfair to dismiss all films along with those purely commercial examples of which no more need be said. The pro ductions of Leonce Ferret, of Diamant-Berger, Andre Hugon, Marco de Gastyne, Ravel and the rest are unimportant and so are numbers of other competent can dismiss the enough pictures. second Les Miserable* and Maurice Tourneur's Equipage, which

discredit the

We

was so warmly

praised.

Of

far

more importance were the

inde-

The
who

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

227

efforts made by the courageous group of young men pendent followed in the footsteps of Louis Delluc and his school.

UNFULFILLED PROMISE

coming years was to see certain abandon their first efforts and begin working for money alone. Such is too often the case. It might have been foreseen in the case of a man like Baroncelli, though he was still to make some distinctive and competent pictures, or in the case of Raymond Bernard, who had a passion for enormous sets. But the future of others was less predictable. About Marcel L'Herbier there is little to be said. After Eldorado, he wavered between commercialism and the emptiest aestheticism. Ulnhumaine was cold and abstract, a sort of desiccated CaligarL By contrast, Le Vertige, after Charles Mere, Feu Mathieu
saddest thing during the
directors
Pascal, after Pirandello,

The

Le Diable au

Coeur, after Lucie Delarue-

Mardrus, are simply commercial films of practically no interest.* Argent, L'Herbier's next, extracted from a novel of Zola's
better.

brought up to date, was rather

The scenes

at the Bourse, the

aviator's departure, the excitement as Paris awaits

news of the

raid,

the party which the banker Saccard gives are all good. In the pres ence of so much regrettably misused skill we can only look back

mournfully to the time when L'Herbier made Eldorado. Jean Epstein has also come in for severe criticism, often justly, though he frequently by a sudden about-face gives the impression that his career is far from ended and that we can still count on him. Le Lion des Mongols with Mosjoukine can be dismissed as disarmingly tame, so can the episodic Robert Macaire, and the extremely boring Sa Tete, wherein Epstein filmed a gloomy mur der story in which an innocent man is accused. He attempted here to create a low-toned and stark film like the one which Germany gave us in Variety. He unfortunately only succeeded in being pro little earlier, he had not greatly amused us foundly boring.

siderable

In the editor's opinion, The Late and abiding interest.

Matthew

Pascal

was

a film of

con

22 <?
either

The History
when

of

Motion Pictures

trying to acclimatize Caligarism in France with his Fall of the House of Usher, based on the famous Poe tale but also the genuine partly on Poe's The Oval Portrait. It is, in spite of and sinister water, mystery of a few scenes and the romantic trees a weak and dull picture.

As

for UAffiche, this

was

a brief

melodrama. A young woman who goes for a trip to the Marne with her sweetheart is afterwards abandoned with a child. The child wins in a beauty contest, a poster of him is made and then he dies. The mother sees everywhere the poster which reminds her of her little one, tears it down and is arrested. In the usual cinema tradition she later meets her seducer again, marries him and
lives

and somewhat pretentious

happily ever after. Unfortunately the beautiful landscapes at the beginning do not outweigh the mediocrity of the whole. In Six et Demi Onze at least the opening was technically ingenious,

with

its story of a man, in love with an actress, who, while develop ing a roll of film, discovers that the mistress of his brother had caused the latter's death. This carried one back to the time of

Le

Ardent and other highbrow films. At more or less the same period La Glace a Trots Faces vulgarized a clever novel by Paul Morand: here a man, seen by three different women, appears under three different aspects. The screen is probably incapable,
Brasier
all appearances, of translating such simple subtleties for, does not suggest them, it shows them. Thus between commerce and literature it seemed that Jean Epstein had slowly been submerged and had lost all of the charm

despite
alas, it

that in the past had given us Cceur Fidele and La Belle Nivernaise. Suddenly, however, he came into his own again and there resulted
a film of great merit, Finis Terrae. It must be admitted right away that Finis Terrae
is

and

documentary form is a difficult thing to attempt if one wants to achieve some thing out of the ordinary, and this story of a fisherman who de velops a septic finger in a lonely part of the world where there is no doctor may be touching but it does not always manage to grip our attention. Despite this and despite an overemphasis on the picturesque, in no other French film have sea and wind and salt

fails

to hold one's interest.

rather boring

film in fictional

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

22$

been so well Interpreted. The little tumble-down village, the weather-beaten fishermen soaked to their skins, the nets set out

rocky roads that lead to the church are presented con scientiously with a precision which compels admiration. Finis Ter ras is not perfect and, but for the Swedes, might never have been
to dry, the

made, but

it is

a film almost alone of

its

kind in France, for

it

ex

what the French usually only admit when it has been presses seasoned with romance nature undiluted, in ail its primitive harsh ness, with all its dirt and its odors. That is the real merit of a film which is sometimes clumsy and ponderous but which enabled us
not to despair too
of Jean Epstein's future. omitted no bid for the public's favor, worked film like Finis Terrae might, nevertheless very conscientiously. at a pinch, have been his. Nevertheless, after La Briere he was to

much

Leon

Poirier, who

side to

abandon the virtually untouched subject of the French country make Amours Exotiques and a quite skillful picture of the

Citroen expedition to Central Africa, La Croisiere Noire. There followed his most important film, Verdun, Visions d'Histoire.
It is a

war

film

and avoids none of the

faults of that species.

The

bombast always so symbolism, the conventional characters, the in such a subject make it well-nigh unbearable. It is really
unseemly
the sort of thing

which the average Frenchman would imagine,

with the addition of a clever admixture of pacifism and of heroism, of Deroulede and, of Erich Remarque, in which the dual cries of "We'll get them" and "Never again" seem to echo alternately. time the French venture Virtually the same thing happens every

on that magnificent but dangerous subject. There is, nevertheless, in Leon Poirier an undeniable talent, a sort of heavy and intense probity and so much conscientious care for detail that his scenes of fighting and of shellfire seem not to have been enacted but to have been taken actually on the battle field itself. Also Poirier had the excellent idea of borrowing from the military archives some real war films: Joffre, Foch, Petain, the Kaiser appear in their own persons. Commandant Driant, who was killed at Caures Wood, is shown only as a silhouette and a uni form; his face never appears. Most of the actors were old soldiers, ex-servicemen who had put on their uniforms again, so that in

230

The History
Verdun
film,

of
its

Motion Pictures
best

its faults spite of

* at

moments became

a sort of
is

an unadorned transcription of reality. It documentary of the few French films which remind one of the Russians.

one

ABEL GANCE

Another man, superior to Poirier, who attained his maximum fame about 1926, also attempted to remind us of the Russians; this was Abel Gance, celebrated director of La Roue. For years he had been working on a film about Napoleon which was to have in cluded the Emperor's whole career, from Brienne to St. Helena; but as time, money and a sense of proportion were all lacking he no further than the Italian campaign, and disposed of his sce
got

on St. Helena to Lupu Pick. As it stands, his film is impres and sums up better than any other the disorderly genius of its maker. It contains no new technical inventions (save one) to compare to those of La Roue, the forceful but jerky style of which he merely repeats. His camera is again extravagantly mobile: Gance
nario
sive

did not hesitate to attach it to the chest of a singer in order to record a scene of a theater audience responding to the exact of "La Marseillaise." He even attached it to the tail of a

rhythm runaway
(it is

horse. In the admirable scene with

which the

film

opens

probably the best thing

Gance

Brienne fight at

where young

has ever done), the snowball Bonaparte's genius for tactics is re

vealed, the camera positively takes part in the battle it is struck by missiles, it runs away, stops, considers and escapes. It becomes

the eye of the principal actor and

is no longer a mere machine. The a masterpiece of rapid cutting, constantly quickening rhythm, shows the Corsican boy's face gradually lighting up with a smile

through a succession of violent images composed with exquisite care. This is still, however, in the style of La Roue. The one new invention in this immense Napoleon was the triple
screen.
*

Gance expected much from

etc.

that device for breaking the

Verdun bears some

Ypres,

The Sonmie,

similarity to the British war-record films, There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about

Mom,

these productions,

which have considerable

historical

interest.

The
monotony of
large scenes or to
his

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film
it

231

a single screen. Sometimes he used image, as in the charges of the

simply to en dragoons or for battle

show
its

the vast panorama of the

Armee
it

d'ltalie

being

triptych, as in the unforgettable episode of the descent into Italy, where the cen tral screen showed the front ranks of superb, ragged soldiers with
as they bawl, "Aupres de ma the while two side screens showed blonde," longshots of the great column of the army on the march through the fields. Never had

harangued by

leader.

Sometimes he used

as a

women

hanging about their necks

the very incarnation of an epic been so magnificently transferred to the screen. Unfortunately that costly process had no future, and

even Napoleon often had to be shown without the lateral screens. There was sufficient power in that unequal and sometimes ab
surd film to interest one in
its

other qualities.

It

is

true that

Gance did not escape the dangers of his own lyricism. As in Hugo, that lyricism was often merely oratorical, and the form which this takes on the screen is inevitably double exposure, most literary of screen devices. A stormy session of the Convention (that famous
scene) inevitably conjured up the image of a tempest, while a glance of Bonaparte necessitated also the image of a ruffled (rather

than imperial) eagle, not to mention the interpolation of terrestrial globes, Josephine's face or the cast-off women who inevitably re

mind Gance of dead leaves. Those perversions of history,

this total lack

of good sense, this

Revolution so palpably created by ruffians and harpies, not one iota of whose picturesque hideousness is toned down, all shock one
a res profoundly. However, there are times when Gance grants so sentimental Violine's adventure, incongruously incorpo pite.

main theme, is far from attractive, but this director of so many tumultuous melodramas at least had the skill to portray the Directorate and its waltzes with brilliance. There are details which are excellentnot the storm in which Bonaparte, admirably
rated into the
uses a tricolored flag portrayed by the thin, feverish Dieudonne, for the sail of his boat, but the siege of Toulon, where compositions show us the holes where the vet as precise as chromolithographs

erans stand

up

to their bellies in water, and the ride

on the

island,

The History
and-best of
d'ltalie's
all

of

Motion Pictures

Brienne, and Napoleon's arrival at the Armee and the unrivaled camp, and the review of the troops,

descent into Italy.

Gance's handling of crowds and mob scenes is prodigious; he and monstrous expressions on all those stamps the most volatile
nameless faces: everything becomes lawful before the passion and the power of the masses. Gance's style is at once learned and barbarous. The skill of his editing and the conscious

unknown and

of science, for Gance is one of a beauty of the shots are product the directors who best knows his craft. But he also believes in in
a of revolutionary guided by creative fire, by sort this way and that resurgence within himself. His camera, jostled the into whirlpool of the by the extras in the mob scenes, drawn the ground, riot, trampled underfoot by the crowd, rolling on bits of seizes amid the confusion some admirable reality to be cut
spiration and
is

into the sequence afterwards; these are to this director what mo ments of sudden inspiration are to a poet. This combination of disorder in the creation and of control in the composition provide

others let it suffice to mention and two thick bloody hands that hoist up to stands a stiffened rope from which the balcony where Bonaparte of the spears and the glimmer a prisoner dangles, while the shadow the future Emperor's face. turn across of the torches flicker in deliberate and so spontaneous, at once so That creative chaos, a sort of baroque masterpiece which is irritating and produced wearisome in its virtuosity, its constantly changing images, its total lack of critical judgment and even, perhaps, of intelligence; but it is the only French film wherein history does not appear stiff and lifeless like a waxwork show. With all its errors and omissions, this epic of Abel Gance's marks the height of his achievement. He had never before attained to such power, even in La Roue; he was never again to have such uncommon good fortune. This man who could work only with millions, this man without taste who sud denly displayed such exquisite inventive power, had at least suc ceeded once in producing a work which, though parts of it were still-born, contained scenes which are among the finest ever
astonishing results. the incident of the

Among many

produced.

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

JACQUES FEYDER
career of Jacques Feyder seems modest beside that of Abel Gance. He is no genius and does not pretend to be one. He works

The

judiciously

and conscientiously like a good workman, with everfor the "job well done." He assimilates the dis concern increasing of coveries others, and he also doubtless wishes to make money. are films His nearly all pleasing. It is only in the long run that one hidden under their rather rugged the and originality discovers C3 OO
./

In simple exterior.
is

originality recall Crainquebille

it is

Ulmage, from a story by Jules Romains, this expressed by fairly obvious technical devices which
and the school of Louis Delluc. Nevertheless

a radical originality, with a feeling for truth and the things of the spirit; it even has a certain secret cruelty. This is clearly visible

in

two

delightful pictures \vhich

somewhat resemble each other

in their mischievous tenderness, their bittersweet sentimentality Gribiche and Visages ffEnfants. Their slightly theatrical realism

(always a fault with Feyder), their echoes of Alphonse Daudet have probably dated them. At that period Jackie Coogan, discov ered in The Kid) was making a success in a number of films about children Circus Days, A Boy of Flanders, Long Live the King; and Andre Hugon also filmed Le Petit Chose. But Gribiche and
Visages d'Enfants are better. It is no cruel stepmother in the lat ter, but simply an indifferent one, who is the cause of the little the prayer to boy's suicide. An overdose of sentimentality (as in
the mother's picture) distresses us, but little Jean Forest is serious and charming, the Valois villages in the snow and the funeral in

the mountains have

the

power

to

make

much simple beauty. Feyder often possesses us overlook the facile attractions of a clumsy
if

his truth-to-life, even plot and pleases us by dint of a little obvious and somewhat too theatrical.

that truth

is

"The most important thing

gestion.
If I

had the time

in a film," Feyder once said, "is sug could put Montesquieu's Esprit des

Lois on the screen." In somewhat similar vein Eisenstein was to

speak later of filming Karl Marx's Capital After he had made Carmen with Raquel Meller, that same art

The History

of

Motion Pictures

of suggestion served Feyder well when he made his silent master Therese Raquin. He made it in Germany, and it is very piece, German manner, with its wonderful lighting nearly a film in the and chiaroscuro. One would have thought it difficult to make a
film of Zola's long novel,* yet Feyder succeeded because he omit that weighs down the book and preserved only the ted

everything

theme of the couple's obsession with their guilt, after the crime. Therese and Laurent are stripped of their peasant qualities, their are simplified and become greed and their passion for money: they symbols of sexuality, damned souls who are all too human. The
opening scene, so curiously reticent, of the heroine's bridal night groom who is not only an invalid but a spoiled child as well, gives the whole key to the pitiable story and raises it to
at the side of a a sort of poetry. complication of plot is provided to sustain one's interest, and yet it was impossible not to be profoundly im

No

pressed

by

the stifling atmosphere of a film which,

much more

appropriately than Pabst's, might have been called Secrets of the

Soul
sieurs

After that powerful study of suffering, Les Nouveaux Mes seemed no more than a soothing comedy, though it alarmed the censors. It was an agreeable and unpretentious film, though

rather slow, and as far removed from Robert de Flers' adaptation of the drama that gave it birth as was the film Chateau de faille.

What
At

adaptation can best mean is brilliantly shown in the scene of the Chamber, as seen by a deputy who is making a speech there.

him

he sees only a Right and a Left, far apart, one cheering the other booing. As he continues to on, speak, gradually the Center takes shape. In many other scenes too, such as that of the
first

inauguration of the workers' city, Feyder's visual humor furnished some delightful effects. After Les Nouveaux Messieurs Feyder was engaged to go to America. Not one French director had been
invited to go to the United States since the war, but Feyder's ro bust simplicity, and that cleverness of his which occasionally puts one in mind of Bernstein, had predestined him for the perilous journey. Within relatively few years he had become important
*

UArgent,

The

novel
etc.

is

not particularly long, certainly not in comparison with

The
enough to
that of the critics.

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film
difficult,

attract the public's attention and,

even more

YOUNG MEN
Feyder, like
directors

the field right after the

Leon Pokier and Marcel L'Herbier, had entered war. When Louis Delluc and a few of the
directors also

had blazed the trail, certain other young work gave considerable promise. whose appeared

Jean Renoir, second son of the painter, had started off with Catherine and La Fille de FEau. These were fumbling efforts, but one fragment of the second, the girl's dream, attracted attention.
It

was enough

at that time to

make

a director's reputation for

him

with head hung low and standing under a tree, declare his love to a mysterious and frail girl. Jean Renoir's wife, Catherine Hessling, now appeared with her lively silhouette, her enormous eyes, her childish and fairylike air. Unfortunately, Jean Renoir did not immediately realize where his gifts lay. He made a rather breathless Nana and some commercial films of no great worth, Le Bled, Le Tournol dans la Cite, and only began to find himself in that uneven but exquisite picture La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes. This is one of the few successful cinema fairy tales, suffused with a light which seems to emanate from Andersen him
to have his hero,

Catherine Hessling in the snow, Catherine Hessling in toyland, Catherine at the feet of a kind policeman, Catherine carried off by a procession of Chinese shadow shapes furnishes many ex
self.

quisite

compositions which suggested that a

new

artist

had been

born to the screen. It was in other directions, however, that Jean Renoir found success. La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes remains his masterpiece,* somewhat slow and precious but perfectly en
chanting. As for Alberto Cavalcanti, his ultimate failure seems by far the most regrettable of anything in French film history. It is true that from the start his work was uneven. Rien que les Heures was the
delight of the advance guard, so
*

was La Ptite

Lilie,

woven around

La

Petite

Marchande was one

deceive so

many

of those deliberately "artistic" films which of today it seems puerile. people; seen in the cold light

236

The History

of Motion Pictures

a sentimental song and parodying prewar films, with Catherine Le Train sans Yeux Hessling in a slightly forced vein of comedy.

from a novel of Delluc's was no more than a skillful imitation of American adventure films. Then Cavalcanti made En Rade. En Rade, which was truly appreciated by very few, is one of the most deeply moving of French films. It reverts, certainly, to the atmosphere of Fievre and of Cceur Fideleto a bar in a large the theme of escape, so dear to the postwar port. It introduced us how it appealed to simple souls. The story showed and mind,

by Philippe Heriat, who also acts admirably in it as a madman, somewhat resembles the future Alarius of Marcel Pagnol the son of a washerwoman dreams of islands and longs to travel. His mother, out of jealousy, prevents him from running away with a little waitress in a sailors' bar. It is a simple tale endowed with a
curious, feverish unrest by Catherine Hessling, while Natalie Lissenko as the mother played her role with admirable simplicity. I admit that the film has faults: the views of ports shot against the
like picture postcards light are too

much

too white. But there

is

the story

and the faces in close-up are a miraculous continuity of feeling, told magnificently, and there are some unforgettable
is

sunlit scenes, compositions of stones, of

washing hanging out

of

windows
tions.

to dry and the purest "poetry of escape." Nothing was forced, there was nothing literary about the young man's emo

and Epstein, Cavalcanti unquestionably hyrnn to the romance of distant lands. Since that time, caught in the toils of commerce, he has produced noth du Barbonille, a comment on a Moliere farce in ing. La Jalousie which a cuckold hatches gigantic eggs, was rather dull, though interesting as an adaptation. Yvette, after de Maupassant, was clever enough. But then came Le Capitaine Fracasse and the talkies of Marcelle Chantal. Director of a few picturesque films and of one near-masterpiece, he seems to have stopped short, though the fault was not entirely his.*

Coming

after Delluc
in this

surpassed them

Among

other

less

talented

able but undistinguished director, as

newcomers was Jean Gremillon, an Tour au Large, Maldone and

work
in

Les Gardiens de Phare showed; Jean Benoit-Levy and Marie Ep*

Cavalcanti has since done excellent

England.

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

237

stein are far superior to him. Among many films not without in terest especial attention is due to their Peau de Peche, a charming

the slums which occasionally story about a child of predicts the La Matemelle. Peau de Peche in the midst of a circle of freshness

on the Place du Tertre, with a straw hat tilted he ear as imitates Maurice Chevalier, has undeniable one over charm. Other young directors conducted their experiments on different grounds, remote from the general public's interest.
of attentive children

THE ADVANCE GUARD

must be reserved for those poets of the screen translate into visual terms the beauties of music. to attempted Surrealism has preached the virtues of absolute freedom, but these
special place

who

are seldom surrealist because they are not free: poets of the screen are organizers. They translate certain fun are logical; they they damental concepts into images linked by the strong bands of anal

The images recur or disappear following a rhythm such as Gance had introduced into La Roue, as exact as Latin scansion. These films which the advance guard bestowed on us so generously
ogy.
its youth cannot properly be regarded as no subject matter; they have no narrative plot, but nearly having all of them have a subject and are occasionally as effective as fan tastic or nonsense poems, and as provocative of ideas. One of the first attempts in this manner was Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique, so reminiscent of his paintings, in which various

in the beautiful years of

metal utensils are

made into an intelligent if frigid composition. One scene goes beyond this intellectual exercise the one in which a charwoman climbs a long flight of steps. It is repeated fifteen
times and gives an impression of the labors of Sisyphus, of a chanical and cruelly repetitious destiny.

me

After Leger, other directors attempted similar exercises: Henri

Chomette made a charming Jenx des Reflets et de la Vitesse* while Germaine Dulac experimented along other lines. She attempted to
translate musical works, notably Chopin's Arabesque,
*

Disque $57

Better

known

as

Of What Are

the

Young

Films Dreaming?

2 38
and Theme

The History

of

Motion Pictures
She
also filmed a surrealist

et Variations , to the screen.

scenario of Antonin Artaud's, the whole it would seem that Germaine Dulac has not entirely ful filled her destiny; her role as critic has been more important than

The Seashell and the Clergyman. On

her role

as creator.

More than anyone

else,

published she helped to establish certain

by what she said and wholesome ideas, fighting

with the commercial people to insist on films without stories, fight ing with the snobs for the rights of films with stories, and stressing the relationship between films and music. Of all the directors of abstract films, undoubtedly the most im portant was Man Ray. Not all his experiments have equal value Le Retour a la Raison, Emak Bakia, VEtoile de Mer Le Mystere du Chateau du De. The last-named shows some rather feeble scenes in juxtaposition with some beautiful landscape shots, UEtoile de Mer is admirable. It is the only film in which surrealism becomes hu man. Even without understanding it, it is possible to be pleased by this poem of love and regret with its magnificently handled pho
y

woman tography, its brilliant use of soft focus and of distortion. seen through glass * takes on the appearance of a miraculous Re noir, the lovers walking together as seen through the same trans lucent veil are as easily understandable and as as the most
moving
romantic farewells in Lamartine. If surrealism has produced some thing of importance it is through the works of this American pho
tographer.

one fancied that it had produced something of importance in the Spaniard, Luis Bunuel's, Le Chien Andalou. The hand swarming with red ants, the eyeball slit the razor blade,
little later

by

the bleeding calf on the piano have an abiding interest still in the same way as in VAge ffOr, which followed it, and which was banned because it shocked morality. The films of Bunuel lack unity. They are made up of a succession of aggressive or startling photographs, many of which are beautiful, but the sexual sadism

which dominates them is not enough to supply them with a satis fying rhythm. Without some interior unity, studies of this kind
defeat themselves and lose interest.

In order to obtain that threatened unity, other

*

young people

Sheets of mica.

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

documentary
film,

elected to interpret the

too

little

esteemed.
Paris-

Andre Sauvage's cold and

subtle studies of Paris, of

which

Port especially was exceedingly clever, deserve mention. George Lacombe in the same vein was successful with La Zone, which displayed much feeling and skill. Lucie Derain and Jean Lods were
also to interpret the beauty of Paris and Claude Lambert that of London. Jean Tedesco strove to interpret the picturesqueness of metallurgy; Marc Allegret returned from a journey with Gide with a quite clever Voyage au Congo. One must not forget, too,

those admirable films of plant

life taken in laboratories with rapidmotion photography which compress days of growth into the space of a few seconds and reveal in terrifying fashion the "intel

ligence" of nature. Colette has written of these miracles, of the "greedy yawning of the cotyledons from which bursts forth the

darting serpent's head of the first bud," of the "formidable disten sion and explosion of the bud of a lily, parting its long flat man dibles to reveal a dark crawling of stamens in a greedy and master
ful efflorescence."

The most
leve,

who

original of these directors was the scientist Jean Painspecialized in documentary films of submarine beasts.

His films of sea urchins, sea horses, plant-animals and carnivorous plants, magnified from one to ten thousand times, provide glimpses of startling beauty. No one could ever forget the courtship of those marine animals like chrysanthemums that caress each other with their petals, or the many tragic or romantic incidents, re corded sometimes in rapid and sometimes in slow motion, that make many of these films into monuments of subtle and terrifying
pantheism which reveal the very soul of nature. These in their own way are undoubtedly the most perfect and the most im perishable creations of the screen, for it is difficult to imagine that they could ever seem old-fashioned.

During the

last

years of the silent film there were also the

ama

teurs with their hired cameras

who

bore

down on town and coun

their emotions and tryside alike trying to transmute into pictures their ideas. Sometimes they made use of a little sentimental plot,

but usually they were content to

steal

from the

sunlight and

from

nature some pleasing compositions afterwards to be lovingly edited

2^0
into a film.

The History

of

Motion

"Pictures

These pictures were shown in specialized theaters like L'Oeil de Paris, Studio 28, and the Agriculteurs. They gave hope for the motion picturea hope of putting it within everyone's of money. grasp and freeing it from the power with the film industry; familiar were amateurs Some of these was that The or were assistants important thing journalists. they their own im with concerned were and free expressing only they in A quoi Revent les Bees de agination. Albert Guyot in Mon Paris, Gaz, in UEau qui Coule sous les Fonts composed some charming Mireille Severin of the pictures in which he featured his wife, childlike face. Michel Game's Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche was the best of these amateur films. Since money was lacking, all of them attempted to endow objects with life, because objects do not demand salary, and thus they made certain discoveries. A
simple room in UEau qui Coule, a public dance in Nogent, a street in the early morning, a soldier asleep in the fields provided them with their subject matter. It was discovered that water provides

an admirable subject and that nothing is more beautiful than an oar striking the surface of a lake, nor more lovely than the furrow a plow makes. The wine harvest, about which Georges Rouquier

and the animals were discovered. They provoke strong emotions, but these films at to the tempted express poetry of simple, even ridiculous, things
a

made

picture, the crops

it is

could not,

true,

like picture postcards, hurdy-gurdies, lovers in a field, couples a little was dancing, working girl all alone. Of such

ingredients

Nogent composed, and

despite poor photographic quality and an excessive use of odd or distorted images it displayed an exquisite freshness and naturalness. UEau qui Coule sous les Fonts with its

splendid automobile ride and its rather forced sentimentality dis played more art but also more artifice. No matter; all these films and those of Pierre Chenal and of Claude Autant-Lara had one thing in common youth. Some of
these young men attempted to introduce other elements: Jean Vigo, who died all too early, made a documentary film about Nice, romantic but full of magnificent cruelty, in which the absurdities of amorous and of the decadent bour elderly ladies, of

gigolos

geoisie

were

fiercely stigmatized.

For lack of money these films

The
lected.

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

242

boldly attempted themes which the cinema

as a

regrettable than the dearth of experiments of this kind since the advent of the talkies.

Nothing

is

more

whole has neg

Finally, besides Man Ray, the names of a few Russian directors must be mentioned. Ladislas Starevich, that good old magician, remained apart, patiently his miniature miracles with

constructing

their unforgettable submarine adventures, fantastic animals,

am

bulant plants and a wonderful fairyland in which his exquisitely fashioned marionettes dwelt. Unfortunately he produces less and less and lives in retirement. There was also Eugene Deslav who composed La Nuit Electrique out of the illuminated signs of Paris
at night, and made La Marche des Machines and Parnasse. There were also Dmitri Kirsanov's charming films, unequal but delicate Vlronie du Destin, Menilmontant (made with the most loving care), Sables and Brumes d Auto?mie. The first dates from 1924. The actors were Nadia Sibirskaya and Kirsanov himself, and it had no subtitles. The plot was ex
>

desperate and alone. They encounter one another on a park bench and find that happiness has passed them by. The rather obvious symbolism the stream, the turning wheel

tremely simple just the old and of a man equally

tale of a

forsaken

woman now growing

might seem displeasing today, but the film displayed great deli cacy of feeling and a profound love for Paris as seen from the roof tops, for the streets, the busses and that whole urban life which it approached with an affection as great as that of Rene Clair. Brumes d Automne is a sort of poem to Nadia Sibirskaya's face, around

which images

crystallize the angle of a roof, chimneys, a pond, a the woods of Seine-et-Oise. woman recalls the past, fireplace, and her memories are shown on the screen. She is burning old

there is rain outside, and puddles; leaves fall to the ground. This may be cheap Lamartine, but it is redeemed by the beauty and skill of the photography of the gray skies, the poplars mirrored
letters;

in the water, the tops of aspens falling obliquely and dimly across the screen. In a muddy lane, puddles reflect the branches of trees

and bits of tree trunks. Elsewhere there is a battered old willow, and more water, then more treetops and more puddles. A pro digious use of reflections and of miniatures makes one think" of

242

The History

of Motion Pictures

Van Eyck's paintings:

a whole extraordinary Lilliputian landscape the center of a sort of lunar landscape cre in a in appears puddle ated by the close-up of a ditch. Such effects have been all too rare in the cinema-such a new

use of the camera would have been impossible but for the experi are indebted to it for these ments made by the advance guard. of an us to show everyday objects, bringing epic aspect attempts is the it. Such us closer to nature and

We

interpreting

interpretation

whole art of the film. Brumes ffAutomne proves it, as do the films most characteristic of any made in France those of Rene Clair.
RENE CLAIR
and powerful are some of the French Gance's Napoleon films, and notwithstanding the fact that Abel Clair is unquestionably the Rene of is the most them, important

No

matter

how

effective

most interesting of France's film Rene Clair, whose real name

personalities.
is

Rene Chomette, was born

in

Paris in 1898. He started out in journalism and literature in 1919, became interested in films, began haunting the studios and ap

peared

as

an extra in Parisette.

It is

The experiments of the American woman and the Russian emigre were not to be without their influence on him.
Protazanov's films.

Loie Fuller played, too, in the

Le Lys de

learn that he interesting to la Vie and in some of

Then he became

Baroncelli's assistant.

In 1923, at the age of twenty-five, he produced his first film, Paris qui Dort, or The Invisible Ray. It was a fantastic and satiri
cal affair

which

recalled the lively

American

serials

and

also the

prewar comedies. But here comedy was transformed by imagina tion, as we see in the scenes of deserted Paris, which suddenly

on a curiously impressive air, and by the unusual aspect as sumed by the most commonplace objects. Paris qui Don, a fairy
takes

suspended animation, mingled irony with its fantasy. following year he made Entr'acte, with music by Erik Satie and a scenario by Picabia. It was a great succes de scandale
tale of

The
it

and

miraculously preserves the whole

spirit

of a

now

vanished

The
in
its

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

243

and delightfully crazy period, for

this classic of

absurdity was

own way

a real classic.

In appearance it is merely a sort of dream without a subject and without a plot, in which the most incongruous images freely succeed one another, linked only by haphazard and arbitrary see a head of hair, a handful of matches, some associations.

We

which suddenly turn into the about the Place de FOpera, a ballerina Parthenon, spots floating who bends and stretches and relaxes in a lazy rhythm, an egg on a jet of water in a shooting gallery, a pigeon-shooting target, a funeral oddly like a wedding with a hearse drawn by a camel
cylinders resembling cigarettes

which

later rolls

frenzied chase.

down a long incline as the film concludes with a The images succeed one another without any ap

parent connection; each one simply gives birth to the next, yet amidst this seeming incoherence it is not difficult to follow the

The events are taking place in the mind of someone sleep the ing sleep of exhaustion after an evening at the fair. The se the opening pictures is jumbled, as though the dream of quence
clues.

were fumbling and not knowing where to begin. The matches, the scanty locks on someone's head seen from above, the row of cigarettes in their box, the Place de FOpera and the sheet of water are seen on a horizontal plane. The ballerina, who reap
pears persistently as though to mark a rhythm and give the dream its form, and the egg on the jet of water are both seen on a ver
tical

when

The two planes occasionally mingle, as for instance the box of cigarettes slowly straightens up and becomes the colonnade of the Parthenon, or when we see the dancer from
plane.

beneath like an enormous flower opening out horizontally. These associations serve to establish throughout the film an order which,
it is, is nevertheless subtly grasped by one's there is a recognizable progress in the succession of imagination; a sort of and harmony. It is too elusive to describe, but images to a spectator who lets himself go with the film that ingenious

mysterious though

interlacing of impressions provides a soothing cadence. Towards the middle of the film there is a break, or, rather, a
definite orientation of the dream.

The egg on

the jet of water

244

The History

of

Motion Pictures

the shooting gallery suggests death, suggests the shooting gallery, death suggests the funeral, which now becomes the principal sub The associations here are much less original but the style be
ject.

comes quite
is

different.
its

While

in a sense the first part of the film

the second part is full of play on slow motion, out slowly, gravely, then starts movement. The burlesque funeral a slope, people run down slides the pace quickens, the hearse race the and from running turn into sprinters, goes faster and
static

with

connected with speed a brakes road flashing by, crossroads, being put on, sharp curves, a bicycle race, roller coasters at a fair and finally all ends with a the conjurer, who crash, the people vanish one by one, even his wand. The with himself makes himself vanish by touching
faster, its

pace evokes

all

sorts of ideas

whole burlesque race has an admirable technical precision and,

thanks to
its

sure, almost mathematical, cutting, gives increas

dizziness produced solely by the purely ingly an impression of characters take part of speed. Here living physical acceleration for they are only of extensions as in the action but objects,

regarded

only the procession with the being objects themselves; in which they take part dance a in measure a becomes hearse and mingle with the objects.
as

Entr'acte

is

macabre poem without a story,

is

set in

an imagi

nary world. Something more than a farce, it themes which are droll rather than comical.

a succession of

The whole sums

up to a very special sort of burlesque: cold, calculated and com be called a work of imagination be pletely detached. It can
its atmosphere of unreality and fantasy, it is the work of an exact mathemati But rhythm. especially cian, as though some Vaucanson with a passion for mystification had produced it: there is not a trace of emotion or of selfrevelation, only the precise technique of an engineer, a strange practice of weighing every object coldly and judging what weight of comedy can be got out of it much as in Le Dernier

cause of

its

freedom,

its

its

Milliardaire, later on.

All its amusing images are strongly characteristic of a period not without daring. The film has an astonishing unity the only one of Rene Glair's save Quatorze Juillet to have such unity

The
which
it.

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

245

is

the basis of film construction as

is

Rene

Clair understood

born of pantomime for Chaplin, of painting for German the school, of music or even of the novel (for no real film ever be born of the theater) for Rene Clair, can the director the film seems to spring from dance and the ballet. after Entr'acte, The whole atmosphere of the Russian Ballet, not merely that of Parade and of the Maries de la Tour Eiffel., must be remem bered in connection with his films. Though his work had been known before the war, Diaghilev was now supreme. Rene Clair, coming into a world enraptured by the dance, worked at first for the Swedish Ballets. Though he was willing to make use of actors and actresses, it is probable that he still considered them merely as objects; this was something he learned from the Rus sians, and he manipulated the strings of the enchanting puppets
If

the film

much as the machinery of the Strasbourg famous figures. Though he was to enrich and modify his formula later, the principle remained that of the dance of the objects in Entfacte, for which, later on, the music of Georges Auric and of the Groupe des Six was to provide a col laboration which might almost have been predicted from the
in his compositions

clock animates

its

start.

Le Fantome du Moulin-Rouge, a story of a which separates itself from its body, is at times a burlesque, and showed that Clair did not yet know how to tell a story and that his fantasy fitted in ill with a plot. There is no feeling in this film, except ridiculous feelings, and for this he was criticized;
In the same year
soul
it should have been criticized for its dullness. However, Le Voyage Iwaginaire came along to console us. This, too, is a fairy tale, more danced than acted by Jean Berlin, with some wonderful exterior shots, mellow lighting, some wonderful

actually in 1925

a character who, at the touch of a fairy's glimpses of Paris and a small becomes wand, dog, as well as some amusing chases in the Mack Sennett manner. Especially in the waxworks museum

Le Voyage Imaginaire do we find both Vaucanson and the The poor hero, condemned to death by the wax works revolutionary tribunal, almost touches our hearts. In spite of appearances, Le Voyage Imaginaire is linked to Entr'acte by
in
ballet again.

2^.6

The History
la

of

Motion Pictures

Between the objects of Picabia's which were to come later, these wax figures with eyeballs painted on their eyelids and their jerky motions, their mechanical and macabre humor, form a dis tinct link. Soon now the lovers will be smiling at one another in the shade of cardboard trees, and the dance which sweeps them
Les Maries de poem and the
Eiffel
half-real characters

Tour

along will include both real people and puppets, so that one can no longer tell which is which. But was there ever to be more

than intelligence in these gay little diversions? Rene Clair seemed to have much more affinity with the eighteenth century, so reasonable, so charming and so arid, than with the postwar pe riod. This was evident later, too, at the time of Le Dernier Milllardaire.

La Proie du Vent of 1926 was a rather odd film in Glair's out put: based on a novel by Pierre Vignal, UAventure Amoureuse, it combines many rather intricate plots not one of which is fully
developed.
Its

which reminds

only interest lies in a certain technical ability us of Kirsanov. When a character takes a walk

we

do not see him walking, we see instead what he sees during The image of a woman is reflected in a pool, a triangle of light disappears, a door closes and, at the beginning, there is a ride in an airplane with a good deal of pitching and motion. Later on, far too many nicely dressed people were to go for walks amid beautiful surroundings and too many strange adven tures were to remind us of newspaper serials. But Clair never
the walk.
again attempted to adapt a novel or a play to the screen in that manner.
ballet. Despite the plot and despite the of that period, Glair's only novel, Adams * (which, by the way, is about the movies), already indicates this. It shows all the characters Adams had portrayed,

He

returned to the

style, so characteristic

circling

about their creator until all ends in the colossal comedy of the finale where even religions are ridiculed. The idea was better than the execution, and the book is not to be compared with The Italian Straw Hat. In this the ballet motif appeared again, in formed the entire picture and became the very center and reason
*

Published

much

later in

English as Star Turn, Chatto, London, 1936.

The
for
its

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

mischievous puppetmaster drew upon his character, giving a shirt front to one, a single glove to another, a paper cap to Paul Olivier, his uniform to the captain. At the end of the film there is a delightful meas
existence.

The

property box for each

ure during which these objects take back their independence and, in turn, the glove, the paper cap and the hat reappear and then disappear before our very eyes. The director was pulling his

puppets apart.

When

them up on

a nail,

genuine; nothing is Having chosen, of all things, that enormous chromolithograph which is Labiche's farce, Rene Clair set to work to bring it to
gifts which served him in creating the Entr'acte were now applied to the situa of burlesque machinery tions of a farce. Each character is the occasion for a bit of deli
life.

our backs were turned he would hang head downwards. None of the emotions are to be taken seriously.

Those mechanical

cate composition: he makes a father-in-law out of a shirt front, an angry expression and new boots which pinch; then he makes a female cousin out of a guimpe, eyeglasses, a velvet waist trimmed with passementerie, high boots, a meager chignon and the long face of Alice Tissot. The Hussar is costumed exactly as in one of those colored plates of soldiers which one can buy for ten centimes, or those photographs which adorn family photo graph albums, with an exquisitely adjusted dolman, a waxed mus tache turned up against his cheek like a tusk and a terribly fierce

cuckold calls for pronounced obesity, bushy mus bovine head, bathing drawers and a mustard bath for his tache, feet. Customs and manners are studied with the minute care of
expression.
a

watchmaker, and so are the settings. There is a typical Henri II dining room, a typical bedroom, a standard apartment for newlyweds in which not a vase, not a china figure, not one clock or candlestick, not one lamp or tidy or occasional table is missing: the whole thing is reconstituted with canny and ferocious joyeven the wallpaper is absolutely correct. Satisfied with having at tained the maximum of conventionality and of absurdity in both his story and his settings, he only had to fit these meticulously fashioned cogs into one another. Did farce really interest him? It is to be doubted. He preserved

248

The History

of

Motion Pictures

the essential structure because that was necessary, but every time he turns to the plot the interest lags. When it is forgotten, mar vels burst forth. The exquisite and wicked care with which
Clair

composed

prove only balletthe story of the lovers surprised by a horse which eats the lady's hat is transformed into the theatrical rodomontade of
a

the best

moment in

his apartments, the celebrated quadrille which once more that this too is the film,

is

a provincial production of 1895. The dream in which Albert Prejean sees his furniture being moved out of his house by men
in evening dress comes straight out of Entr'acte. This is once more a ballet of objects, of inanimate or of human objects, and the return of the various themes at the end indicates this, as if

have not already suspected it. With considerable wit, the director amused himself by giving the film the rapid, jerky rhythm of those prewar films which had only sixteen frames to
the second.
of.
It is

we

the only experiment of this kind that

we know

inevitably reminded of Stravinski, incorporating fair tunes like "Elle avait une jambe de bois" into the fair in ground and can imagine what "La fille de Madame Angot" Petrushka, become if Ravel took the notion to rewrite it. There can might be no pleasure more intense or more exquisite though Le Chapeau de Faille has bored many people than that provided by this Ballet Russe of the French bourgeoisie. It is unimportant that The Italian Straw Hat is episodic or that,
is

One

in spite of the general movement which the extraordinary dyna mism of the old farce imposes on it, the film is somewhat lack ing in unity. What delights us is that each character, dressed
in stylized

costume a

little

"off" the period and "off" reality,

is

ready to enter the dance. There is nothing conventional about this ballet but the determination to provide poetry to a period which was most lacking in it. ballet need not be danced

costume; the bourgeoisie of the Third a has to this honor too, and Le Million will show Republic right that the grocer, the dairymaid, the janitress, the taxicab driver

nymphs

in Louis

XIV

by

and the policeman can

nier Milliardaire
its

also join in. Isn't the best thing in

Le Der

dances?

Stravinski's magician thoughtlessly

gave

life

to creatures with

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

24$

he hurled Petnishka, the Moor and the ballerina feelings when into the vivid tumult of Carnival. Would this hardhearted Glair
not eventually
secrets?

The

who

one day dainty sentimental adventures. For a while longer he amused himself with the play of objects. His poetic documentary film La Tour,

to their pitiful puppets intellectual ballet could not long satisfy the man was to reveal himself as a subtle amateur of
listen

come

to love his

and

"that big, iron girl," is a delicate marvel of editing; he succeeded in giving us the impression of something rich and whole out of a few scraps of iron; and the arrival of the elevator takes on a

genuine emotional value. Nevertheless, here still we are dealing only with the inanimate. The most widely known Clak, the Glair who likes popular romances, only really came into existence with

Les Deux Timides. This short film, quickly made, with no pretensions whatever, has been insufficiently appreciated. It is a minor work, no doubt, must even but one in which even the faults are masterly. congratulate it on being imperfect, on seeming here and there

We

to hesitate a
tact

little

and proportion

which proves that Glair's dominant gift of arises not from any lack of power but from

a striving after perfection.

tricks,

Les Deux Timides undeniably overdoes editorial and technical but the two courtroom scenes, whether they use reverse

motion or still photography, are nevertheless remarkable. They remind us that in all of Rene Glair's work we must never forget either the theater scene from The Italian Straw Hat, or Entr'acte, or his love of technical tricks and quips, or his irony, for if the form a triptych it is because that year delightful closing pictures had seen the triple screen of Abel Gance's Napoleon, and Glair
is

not averse to parody. Yet for all the irony and the parody,

this

Vaucanson

listens to

what

his marionettes are saying. fashions of 1895; a few period touches suffice rich troupe of minor characters continues to perform its^ ballet. In order to costume Pierre Batcheff, or to manipulate the strings

He

has turned

away from the now, though the

that control the

ness

young man's
detail.

and care for

The

aunt, he relies again on mischievousmischief dissolves in a gentle smile

2 yo

The History
his

of

Motion Pictures
exquisite appear in Les

when
Deux
Glair's

principal characters

go out of doors. The most

French landscapes, the

loveliest villages ever seen

gifted pupil.) the lawyer and the sunlight, pin paper fish to the suitor's pants; constable run along the hedges. delightfully fresh breeze and else diffuse this little film. nowhere seen such we have as light Pierre Batcheff and a young Here are the two lovers,

Timides. (Julien Duvivier in Foil de Carotte was merely most Children, at play in the springtime

poor

girl

in a big hat,

the

who walk timidly towards the French hills. The faintest touch of irony
girl

sunlit bridge

and

underlines the in

and the timidity of the boy; Pierre Batcheff lays trembling hands on the girl's shoulders. A breath of fresh air fills the screen and seems suddenly to ventilate the whole auditorium. No doubt someday Clair will follow up his experiment in Les Deux Timides, and this man whose choice of subjects has gen more lead his reawakened erally required studio settings will once marionettes through similar landscapes. Greater experience will have furnished him with greater magic, but we shall never forget
nocent boldness of the
that the
first

Nous

la

of Rene Glair's great love scenes andwith those in Liberte and Le Millionthe most beautiful, occurred
his ballets

in the rustic scenes of Les Detix Timides,

Henceforth aim or raison

have a motive and are no longer the sole

The cook, the country cousin, the fat lady who so happily appears in all of Glair's pictures, the lawyer, the village constable now draw back a little so that we may see two children in the center of the circle, and catch the
ffetre of his films.

refrain of their songs, "II court le furet" or "La belle qui voila." were soon to hear those songs in actual fact.

We

Rene Clair completes the considerably interesting make-up of the French film around 1930. With this imaginative and witty man, with the lyricism unleashed by Gance, with Feyder's care
for detail and the evanescent poetry of

En Rade

there

was no

reason to despise the French output, even though too many farces and dramas regrettably recalled the era of the old Film
d'Art.

With

the best of her directors and those of the advance

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

251

guard, France had assembled an imposing array of talent at the time talkies were invented.

2.

Jhe Qerman

DURING the

creative years, Germany played an important part; she continued to do so during the period in which once experi mentation had resulted in a degree of stability the cinema was

to produce its finest works. The German contribution is difficult to assess, particularly after 1925, for this country turned out a number of films without any meritlight comedies which were

very heavy and society dramas exactly like similar films pro duced in France. These were made for purely commercial rea sons, but a few of the men who had really contributed something now conscientiously continued their work with striking results, and, since at the time little was known of the Russian films and

Sweden was producing hardly anything of

interest,

they ap
field.

peared to be the most notable figures in the European

THE END OF CALIGARISM

The

elements which had

made

the fame of the

German prod

uct were nevertheless to vanish with the posterity of Caligari.

Emaciated Conrad Veidt was still to appear in terrifying and Hoffmannesque films, one of which was, inevitably, a Dr. Jekyll made to rival John Barrymore's, in which Veidt's slender sil houette was extremely effective.* But the primary interest of these attempts to endow the screen with fantasy was dissipated amid the banality of their too obvious effects. Directors who had
established a reputation along these lines themselves or sought fresh fields.

now

merely repeated

Robert Wiene was to try to terrify us once more in The

Der Jamiskopf, directed by Mockery, was made in 1920.
*

F.

W.

Murnau, shown

in U.S.A. as Love's

252
Hands
an
assassin

The History

of

Motion Pictures

of Orlac, a story about a pianist on whom the hands of had been grafted. He did not succeed, and threw him

more commercial pioductionsRosenkavalier and The Duchess of the Folies Bergeres which were as sumptuous as they were insipid. Karl Grune momentarily abandoned the realistic drama so dear to him, in order to make Two Brothers with Con rad Veidt, in which the famous actor played dual roles. Henrik
self into

Galeen, author of the scenario for Nosferatu, relapsed into Alraune first and then into a romantic tale of a young man whose

shadow had been

garism's

stolen

childish but filled with nostalgic Viennese charm. This

from him, The Student of Prague* often was Califilms, so

swan song. Mention must be made of the famous abstract

popular

Richter, Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann.t Marbles rolling along slopes, studies of forms and of rhythms were combined into visual in

for a time

among

the intellectuals, created

by

symphonies

which the

repetition of patterns in black and white attempted to create the same pleasing effect as the repetition of sounds in a

musical composition. These strange productions were not with out their uses, although their mathematical coldness lacked the emotional quality characteristic of French films of the
period.

Walter Ruttmann, however, was to liberate himself from for mulas and produce a much freer work, Berlin, the Symphony of a Big City, which traces the life of Berlin from dawn to
midnight
all-important factor was it was to wait for the advent of the rhythm, though necessary talkies before Ruttmann was able to work out his theories com
pletely.

in a series of well-chosen shots.

Here the

G.

W. PABST

After Lupu Pick and Murnau, Germany was actually growing more concerned with putting realism onto the screen than in allying it to dream and fantasy. Here G. W. Pabst occupies a
place in the front rank.
*

Always an

excellent craftsman and some-

The Student

tThe

of Prague preceded Alraune. abstract films of Eggeling also

belong to an

earlier period.

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

times an artist of real merit, this man has the distinction of having produced, right from the start up to the present time, an output

which forms
value,

though not always of equal without making overmany concessions. His debut was a

a continuous whole,

Joyless Street* In

triumph: there are few German films more celebrated than The it Asta Nielsen, in her decline, with her regal

beauty and magnificent acting, crossed the path of a young girl on her career and newly come from Sweden Greta just starting Garbo. Pabst threw into contrast in this film the pleasures of the rich and the misfortunes of the poor in famine-ridden Vienna
inflation. As often happens, the pleasures were rather represented, but the miseries inspired Pabst to tragic and vio lent overtones. It was in The Joyless Street that we first saw queues of poor people waiting under the livid lamplight in the can forget the amazing face of Asta Nielsen,t icy streets. frozen to marble stillness amid her feathers and her pearls when,

during the

ill

Who

determines to send her lover to the gallows; or the horrible procuress, or the disgusting butcher who rules over the entire street and gives meat only to whom he pleases?
as the prostitute, she

The most summary

ideology did not entirely spoil

this film, for

though the story was overpathetic Pabst saved everything by his screen as vividly as any painter the lights ability to put on the drowned in fog, the leprous houses, slimy staircases, poor dwell
ings

prostitution, far more complex than bring to the screen psychological truths are usually admissible. Censorship slashed these films, with their

and a whole downtrodden humanity. Later on Pabst attempted something different. In Secrets of the Soul, a study of sexual impotence, in Pandora's Box, about in Crisis, in The Love of Jeanne Ney he tried to

rather puerile applications of Freudian theory, yet so undeniably honest. The Diary of & Lost Girl carried these experiments fur
ther.
his servant

This drab Balzacian story of an old man kept a prisoner by had power to move one, though all the false romanti cism of Hugo's Fantine and Cosette were packed into it. Pabst
* He had previously made The Treasure) so it was hardly a debut, tin the version shown in this country Asta Nielsen was unfortunately

omitted.

254

The History

of

Motion Pictures

was evidently unable to avoid falling into errors of this kind. This Freudian period came to an end with the silent films. Per but his work had con haps not all of it is worth remembering,
siderable influence.

From

the time of

The

the

maker of

these tormented

and elementary

Joyless Street it placed films in the front

rank of

his contemporaries.

THE

NEW

REALISM

him and to a few other men, a new realism estab on the screen. It was the realism of a psychologist and also of a painter, in its care for the humble and significant details of life. This was what gave to certain adaptations from in which the old Theatre Libre lived on, a sort of melan plays, choly and brutal poetry in which it had been singularly lacking as in The Weavers, directed by Friedrich Zelnik, and Mother

Thanks

to

lished itself

and Child by Carl Froelich.

Instinctive revolt, a

more or

less

de

clared socialism, the unrest of conquered Germany dreaming of revenge and shaken by revolution were expressed here with a humility and a materialism which were enormously attractive.

The Tragedy of the Street, directed by Bruno Rahn, revived the theme of The Joyless Street and Asta Nielsen was again ad
mirable in

woman no way

Yet, in this heavy, mournful story of an aged attracted to a young boy, the romance of low life is in
it.

comparable to that of Delluc or of Epstein. It offers no glimmer of hope, no dream of escape, and if it attracts us in some obscure way it is through its very heaviness. Man is almost al

ways crushed by

fate in the films of this period. Expressionism,

now
is

forgotten, had served to show to what extent the back

life is

ground of man's

important, particularly
explains

if

that

background
shots taken

to destroy him.

That

why we

see so

many

by the camera (which itself seems endowed with feeling and the power to suffer) of walls or windows or dirty kitchen sinks or
shabby furniture; that
is what explains, too, so much oppressive insistence on, so bitter an obsession with despair. Lupu Pick in his all too rare films was often the victim of

The
revelation

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

theatrical realism, yet

if New Year's Eve seemed to us a sort of which could never again be equaled, it was just be

cause

it

human and even humdrum.

represented dramatic action which, however, remained mother-in-law and daughter-ino

law hate each other almost without realizing it, attempt to the husband, insane with grief, kills him strangle each other, and self. In this brief hour of film with only three characters and no subtitles, there is a continuous contrast between intimate scenes and scenes taken outside the home, such as that of the violent the woman and the daughter-in-law which is quarrel between
followed by the scene of people coming out of a night club early on the morning of New Year's Day. It must be admitted that this film still displays a regrettable dependence on the theater, even
to respecting the unnatural conventions of time and place. Yet its tension and its even brevity are still striking.

today

oppressive

At the very
spirit

house, the of bad taste enters with them and the realism turns into
end,

when

New Year's revelers invade the

expressionism.

from The Armored same gift Vault, for understatement and the same significant settings. That is why Pick was so successful in adapting The Wild Duck, in which the heavy and magnificent drama of Ibsen with its human degrada

The

other films of
is

which

Lupu Pick (apart a detective picture) again display the

tion

is

and Fiacre No. 3

The Doomed Pinnace expressed with real intensity, while also grip us with their deliberate and intelligent

to atmosphere in which every gesture is profoundly calculated express the utmost possible. Murnau, equally deliberate and quite as solid, went off at He tried to bring Tartuffe up to date and to various
tangents. direct a Faust as impressive as the Nibelungen.

What

one re

members him for

Last Laugh. it is the tale of a hotel porter, proud enough: simple plot of his uniform, who one fine day, because he is growing old and because he has been drinking, is put in charge of the washrooms and considers himself the most degraded of men. Thanks in part
is

The

The

is

to the powerful

and eloquent acting of Jannings, Murnau ex-

2$6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

this film all that disillusionment with life, the bitter pressed in sense of time's passing, in which one can see symbolically re flected the picture of Germany at that time. It was perhaps a

rather dull film,

its

even

insisted

upon,
it

technical effects are very obvious and are much in it had been borrowed from the work

Germanic concept of life. expresses a markedly But its very heaviness served Murnau, as Jannings' faults also served him; and the scenes in the street where everybody ad mires the old man, and in the restaurant, not to mention that
of others and

door to the washrooms which swings to and closes on the distress of the old porter, all became widely significant. Other less ambitious films were nevertheless successful in their wayNju, in which Paul Czinner, like Germaine Dulac in La
Souriante
Beudet, told the story of a good-natured hus band and a romantic wife. There was no striving after technical it was effects in that apparently the most scrupulously
picture;
it

Madame

had an admirable cast (Jannings, Elisabeth Bergner and Veidt) who acted it with extraordinary sureness. One might have deduced from it, probably, that Czinner was later to make commercial films, but his affection for psychologi cal truth and his skill would always remain. The new realism was feverish, unhealthy, excessively precise, haunted by sensual obsessions and sometimes profoundly touch Froelich's The Tragedy, Rich ing. Karl Grune's Jealousy, Carl
realistic film;

but

ard Oswald's

Feme (once again the story of demption), Joe May's Homecoming, and actors
Krauss
all

a prostitute's re
like

Jannings and

world upon it, we were never allowed to forget the hidden symbolism, the ignominy and bitterness of man's fate. Pabst did not forget it when, for once, he abandoned the city streets to give us The White Hell of Pltz Palu, nor did his collaborator Arnold Fanck forget it in Peaks of Destiny. These two pictures, with their glaciers, mountain winds and innumerable scenes in a hut (one remembers best the
thrust the image of a violent and unhappy us. If at times we were permitted to escape from

amazing shots of the skiers bearing away at full speed the body which they had gone to find), were attractive; but so much fresh air was not customary in German films.

The

Classic

Era of the
E. A.

Silent

Film

,257

DUPONT

summed up eventually in German silent films, Variety. E. A. Dupont actu ally made only two first-rate films, The Ancient Law and this one. Like Nju, The Ancient Law was a film of no apparent bold ness, a simple story simply told of a young Jew trying to break away from his race. The aesthetes pulled long faces at it, as they
All that had gone before was to be
the greatest of

had done with A Woman of Paris, and failed to perceive that The Ancient Law was entirely the offspring of the Chaplin pic ture. But everybody was agreed about Variety. The story by Felix Hollander is the most banal imaginable: a man is betrayed by another and kills him. But the action takes place among a troupe of acrobats, and this permits Dupont to
include scenes of unexcelled virtuosity. Moreover, the agility of the camera when it wants to show us the theater audiences, as

seen from the trapeze

is

eyes, paralleled by tor wishes to show the emotional reactions of his characters. This

by the protagonists, like a carpet of living a similar but subtler agility when the direc

the blinking of an eye, the quiver of an a hand, the least movement of a foot. of contraction the eyelash, It becomes merged with the actors, who no longer seem conscious

camera

sees everything

of

most secret impulses it, and steals in upon their very life, their and thoughts. Without ever resorting to the methods formerly
sanctioned, the slightest nuances are expressed by the director. Because of its very perfection it is difficult to discuss this film.

In reality it introduced nothing new; five or six years of experiments and

all it

maybe

did was to crystallize film thirty years of

more than any other, revealed experience. But to many people it, the art of the film. The vulgar music-hall scenes attained a sort thanks to the camera's magic. The vision when the of
beauty,

husband imagines the catastrophe, the extraordinarily discreet murder of the lover, whom we do not actually see killed, and
in this film

the back of Jannings are quite unforgettable. None of the actors was ever again to display as much sobriety or such restraint neither Lya de Putti nor Jannings. At the time Variety

seemed a complete work of

art. I

do not

know

if it is

effectually

258
one, but
is

The History
we may
whole
its

of

Motion Pictures

apply to it what Delluc said of The Cheat; it and the most complete work that the screen has produced. For that reason one was somewhat shocked
a thing in itself,

to learn of

Jannings, just Gish.

as

being remade as a talkie, without Dupont or Way Down East was remade without Lillian

Dupont
ica.

did nothing particular after it and went off to Amer Jannings continued to be interesting because he is a great

actor with something of Harry Baur and of Lucien Guitry in him. In Variety he acted with a sort of meticulous brilliance; the

amiable face of "The Boss," his expressive back, his hands, his awkward gestures these he was never able to repeat. Elsewhere

he was to be

Way

theatrical, exaggerated: in Lubitsch's Patriot, in of All Flesh (a pretentious affair about a middle-aged

led astray

by

vamp) and

in his first talkie,

The man The Blue Angel As

Boss Huller in Variety he touched perfection.

DIFFICULTIES

halt for a while,

After Variety, which dates from 1925, Germany came to a and began exporting purely commercial films

without any particular interest. Many actors and directors had gone to America. Lubitsch had been there some time, Murnau and Lupu Pick * followed, then Dupont and Jannings the glory
of the
rious.

German

studios.

The

situation

was rapidly becoming

se

The reasons for this were fairly simple. After the immense success of Variety, America was disturbed t and tried to acquire as many directors and actors as possible in order to ruin a rival industry. This method had worked with Sweden. At the same
time a considerable number of foreigners had rapidly crept into the German studios and denationalized them; they obviously
Paul Leni went to America, but Pick does not seem to have done so. would be more accurate to say that America was anxious to acquire for her own productions the directors, actors and technicians who had combined so brilliantly to make the outstanding German films.
t It
*

scene from the most -famous of films from the U.S.S.R., Potemkin, directed by S. M. Eisenstein (1925).

Charlie Chaplin in

The

Circus (1928).

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

25$

cared for nothing but making money. The Russians had tried to establish an emigre school there as they had done in France,
tal though these Russians were admirable people and, moreover, ented. But a host of other people of dubious nationality had also decided to entrench themselvesas they had done in France and in America and succeeded in doing so. It was they who intro duced the vogue for vamps, ingenues, "girls," and night clubs,

and who were freest with the picturesque and of the Bavarian landscapes.

qualities

of low

life

With the German output of this period one must include the films made by those directors who emigrated to America. These
were not particularly good. Paul Leni found a means to combine detective story in strange films which oscil Caligarism with the late between parody and seriousness The Cat and the Canary and The Last Warning. It was the only way of serving up horror to the Americans. The failure which one most regrets was that of Lupu Pick. He made a rather human Napoleon at St. Helena from Gance's scenario and then directed The Four Vagabonds not even his (a sound film in German and French versions):
ability solider stuff,
rise,

could produce much of interest. Murnau proved to be of and something of his old power was seen in Sun from a Sudermann novel, despite a great deal too much

storm, a vamp and a dose of Anglo-Saxon morality in spite, top, of its obvious denationalization. His last film, Tabu, made in and the no less Polynesia with the customary harpoon fishing ritual dance, was hardly better than other films in the customary manner. When they left home the German directors

Polynesian
audience.

their originality in trying to cater to an international clearly lost

The

situation

was

so grave that

it

called for a dictator.

This
firms,

dictator

was Erich Pommer, who

had amalgamated the

two

the old Decla-Bioscop and Ufa. It was he who permitted Variety to be made, who protected Pabst and Fritz Lang. Since a man must live, there is no doubt that he likewise permitted a number

of stupid or hackneyed films to be made, but one must admit all that was produced of interest in Germany after 1925 was made

26'o
under

The History
his control

of

Motion Pictures

and would have been impossible but for him.*

FRITZ LANG

After the departure of Murnau only two famous directors re mained in Germany Pabst and Fritz Lang. Czinner directed Queen Louise, Karl Grune made Waterloo,, Arthur Robison made

Looping

the Loop, Richard Eichberg directed Song, a rather in which the little Chinese girl, Anna May Wong, affecting piece loved a miserable outcast. But it was in Lang that the entire

to reside. hopes of the German film seemed set to work on a story con he Following The Nibehmgen Frau Thea von Harbou: the redoubtable ceived by his wife, the of Villiers de Flsle Adam's echoes its with result was Metropolis, and of some of Abel Gance's Intolerance of novel, UEve Future, film is the At times profoundly ridiculous: one can

experiments. of a mysterious evil woman who only smile at the manufacturing in this city of the future. All closely resembles a pure young girl are film the tricks of the horror used, but to little effect, and the

confused ideology of Lang, the contrast between the fortunate who live in the sunlight and the unfortunate ones who
beings
live in the darkness, are disconcertingly childish.

There

are about

two

reels of the film,

however, which

are

worthy of being re

membered.
Metropolis creates a
are admirable. Just as
his

cardboard

cities

world, and the first twenty minutes Lang succeeded in making us believe in in Siegfried, so he gave to his models of a

new

an unbearable and terrifying vitality. It was city of the future inconceivable that these tall buildings, rising a hundred stories
into skies traversed

were

by airplanes and machines as yet unknown, in fact small models no higher than a man. Certain details

in the sharp contrasts were both useful and striking, as for in stance the procession of workmen lined up and marching silently
* Pommer was hardly a "dictator"; as production supervisor he seems to have been particularly successful. Directors working under him achieved results they never obtained elsewhere. Pomrner went to America in 1926, but returned to Berlin in 1927. He is now in England.

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

261

towards the elevators. This provided a perfect image of a me chanical and inhuman world. The flooding of the city at the end
of Metropolis contained some beautiful things which permitted us to overlook the basic confusion of ideas and the impossible as well as all the false romanticism. Fundamentally Metrop story,
olis

was the

last

gasp of expressionism, which

it

incorporated

into a film not without beauty.

Subsequently Lang was to make The Spy, an extremely wellhandled detective film which showed him to be one of the best craftsmen in the whole industry.

CZECH FILMS

Germany was not alone in associate with her output the one must and producing films, the German in under from time to time made films also being
At
the end of the silent-film era,
fluence in neighboring countries. Particularly in Austria there were a small number of studios, more or less controlled by Ufa,

which produced some extremely carefully made pictures. Ludwig Berger's success, The Waltz Dream, had launched a vogue
for Viennese subjects. Austria contributed several examples to that passing fashion, which, naturally enough, did not assume real significance until after the coming of sound films.

The Czechs have always been

it

admirable photographers, and

was

tography. They produced what was being done in Germany. One strongly influenced by that it was almost a caricature, by reason of labored so of them, it was what was then called a study of boldness its timid (for a certain success abroad: this was Gustav Machearned sexuality)
aty's

therefore natural that they should be attracted to cinema some interesting films in various styles,

Erotikon.

It

was not

really

very good.

The

Czechs,

how

ever, also

that sums up the whole produced a sort of masterpiece the lessons of the Rus besides German the of film, profiting by sians and the Swedes: Such Is Life was one of the last of the silent
films and,

more than any other among them, made us

regret

that

charming and forceful medium.

director, Carl Junghans,

The

unknown

before and forgotten

262
since,

The History
made
it

of Motion Picttires

under the worst of financial conditions, barely

escaping being sold out at every moment and with unpaid actors urging him to finish it quickly. It was admirable. Apparently, it is a about an old washerwoman's life and simple realistic
story

But from the very beginning the magnificent face of Vera Baranovskaya suggests that this parable of a workingwoman con
death.
tains

much more

than the individual anecdote.

is

The

pictorial

com

incomparable: the kitchen full of steam, the position especially and the are treated with that respect for the fields courtyard
that feeling for light and shadow which the German directors suggested but which none of them had rendered with so much effect. The washerwoman's party with its gay

medium,

repast,

boy who falls asleep, the cobbler who brings along his gramophone with its amplifier, create moments of rather amused but touching beauty which are perhaps unique. No doubt this film had faults and sometimes verged on melodrama, but these were redeemed by its prodigious truth to life. After the heroine's
the
little

death, Junghaus gave us a funeral of extraordinary power with all the people stiff in their black clothes and a funeral repast

which ended

in

as if the silent film

song in the cemetery wine-shop. It seemed here (much as in America with The Docks of New

its swan song. In that region of strict realism into and bitter familiar transposed poetry, the theater had always remained impotent, and literature itself falls short of the screen, which can attain to that plastic beauty by which a great painter transforms at will the humblest objects and the lowliest scenes.

York) was uttering

Is Life, the German film school had fulfilled its of destiny transmuting realism into poetry. To that the expres sionist experiments had contributed as much as the realism and the love of psychological truths which the adaptations from Dos toevski and Pabst's films had into favor, or the efforts brought

With Such

towards tragic simplicity made by Lupu Pick, Dupont and MurThe films of other countries contributed their magic during that period of the silent film's blossoming, but none were more human or bolder, even in their very faults, than those of Ger
nau.

many.

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

263

3.

Jk

Scandinavian 7ilm

THE FILM IN SWEDEN

DURING the period which might be called the golden or classic which had contributed so much age of the silent film, Sweden,
to
its formation, no longer produced outstanding pictures. Sjostrom had become Seastrom in America; Stiller was about to him there. Svenska still made films and in 1924 actually pro

join

gren's

duced twenty, among which Life in the Country, directed by Charles XII had some merit, while EdHedqvist, and Brunius' The King of Trollebo, was not without peasant picture,

interest.

Yet in imitations lacking vitality or in a colorless natu vein seemed exhausted. The actors, too, were leaving the ralism,

Sweden Lars Hanson, Einar Hanson and Greta Garbo. Before Hanson had played in a somewhat bizarre and leaving, Lars
rather characteristic film of Molander's, a sequel to Seastrom's unfinished Jerusalem. Conrad Veidt also acted in it. Despite cer
tain real qualities,
it

made no progress
a talented pupil

since Sjostrdm

seemed, however, that the Swedish film had and Stiller: it was the work of
finishes the picture of a master,

who

and

it

lacked

both originality and life. Olaf Molander, brother of Gustaf, committed radical
a

errors.

He

and play of Strindberg's, The Republic of Women, adapted even made a Camille, turning again to the theatrical form from

which the films had taken so much trouble to escape. There were mistakes and hesitations everywhere. Runeberg attempted in an
unsuccessful Gustavus Vasa to revitalize the historical picture. Theodore Berthels essayed the life of the Vikings. Gustaf Molander also filmed Strindberg. Others undertook to give Sweden comedies. Everywhere what had contributed to the profound
originality

In America,
fessions of a

of the Swedish film was vanishing. Stiller did not feel at home, and neither his

Con
film,

Queen nor Hotel Imperial had

Seastrom fared better. After

the merit of his native

productions.

his first

American

2 64

fh e
the

History of Motion Pictures

Man, he made The To<wer of Lies, and also He Who Gets Slapped, in which he managed to recapture on the screen something of the charm of the original play by Andreyev. The Scarlet Letter and The Wind, both starring Lillian Gish, almost equaled his former work, the latter particularly, where the desert sand and the wind played so powerful a role that they seemed to be the real actors in a film which was undeniably impressive. Mauritz Stiller died on returning from America in 1928. The

Name

same year the aged Magnusson left Svenska. In 1929 the first u sound film appeared, then the first hundred-per-cent Swedish talkie," which was, alas, A Hole in the Wall. For several years the history of this country, once so important, seemed to have come to a stop. Sweden, like Italy, will doubtless be born again, but her great period was that of the formative years.

NORWEGIAN FILMS
Production in Norway, quite unlike that of Sweden, had been chance. At the end of the war the first real com pany, Christiana Film, had to start from the beginning. Ama teurs had interested themselves in the film; there was no lack of
left entirely to

good

will,

and the example of the Swedes inclined the

Norwe

gians to draw upon national tradition, local color and the beauties of nature. They made Growth of the Soil from the Knut

Ham

sun book, and filmed the lives of sailors and fishermen, but these * and in the opinion pictures were not shown outside Norway
of the critics
it

was better

so. It

was only

in 1927

and 1929 with

Furst's Trolldlgen and the Finnish Laila that Norway succeeded in

Walter

Georges Scheevoigt's providing any such response as

the Swedes had evoked.

THE DANISH FILM

It

rectors in

was during the classic years of the silent film that two di Denmark, Sandberg and Dreyer, came to the fore. The
of the Soil was

former, after having tried to imitate the Swedish films in Heaven's

*

Growth

shown

in America.

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

265

Revenge (1922), which included some beautiful landscape shots, become international, engaged foreign actors, pro aspired to duced in Italy, and remade old films such as Marriage Under the Terror and The Maharajah's Favorite. He was a capable director.
Despite his efforts to please the public, his firm declined and Most of the other firms had disappeared by finally he left it.

was

1929, and only Nordisk kept reorganizing in a poor way.

itself.

The Danish

film

Dreyer, nevertheless, had directed in 1925 a film which at the time seemed of unusual interest, and which was shown all over the world The Master of the House. This well-knit and sad love

demanded too much of the medium, overestimating the film's power to express individual psychology. The eternal mor the Nordic people also marred it, but the film was so alizing of
story
reticent

and so honest, the actors were so restrained (actors are always excellent under Dreyer), the director displayed so much taste in the settings, in the atmosphere, in the details of everyday life and, above all, displayed so much humanity in handling this tale of an unhappy marriage, that many filmgoers were enthusi astic about it. The influence of the Theatre Libre, so great among all the Nordic peoples, was evident throughout The Master of the House in its excessive naturalism and an overregard for truth fulness. The beauty of the photography and a very considerable skill, however, saved this realistic study from the slight degree of tedium which might have been expected. While it was not a very great film, The Master of the House was a model of sober and well-measured craftsmanship and of profoundly human bit
terness;
its

gravity,

its

consistent avoidance of the dramatic (so

reminiscent of the

work of Jacques Feyder) compelled respect. in Sweden, in Germany, in France. It worked on Later Dreyer was in France that he produced his masterpiece, The Passion of

Joan of Arc, with a French cast. This curious film, composed almost entirely of faces in close-up in which everything is al lowed to depend on the performance of the actors, is neverthe
a genuine film and a complete thing in itself. Under the severe direction of Dreyer, Silvain gave a prodigious perform ance, while Falconetti exhibited a restraint and power which she
less

266

The History

of

Motion Pictures

was never to attain again. Whether she portrayed a convincing Joan of Arc may be debated. Physically she did, in the scene in which she appears haggard and tormented before the execution ers. But her mood throughout is one of suffering; there is noth
the insolence of the real Joan ing here of the optimism or of in the trial scene. Here she is revealed Pitoeff Madame that only a young, martyred saint and this arbitrary limitation of the char
acter cannot be denied.

Once

it

has been admitted, her perform

ance provides some prodigious moments the childish gesture by which Joan reminds her executioners that justice exists, her glance at a tuft of daisies trembling in the breeze, her expression as they

with thorns and arm her with a mock above everything else, the moment at the stake when scepter and, she stoops to pick up the rope which has fallen and offers it with

crown

her, like Jesus,

divine complaisance to the executioner. This extraordinary film was extremely daring; it could prob ably not be repeated. It offers a fine contrast to Gance's Na

poleon, as a spiritual epic opposed to a physical epic. No doubt it was a dead end, an oversimplification of drama, but it was one of those magnificent failures which provide much food for

thought.

Russian fi
AFTER
the inevitable years of experimentation, Russia succeeded and created in 1925 the big central

in organizing her industry

organization of Sovkino. Two masterpieces had already been made, Eisenstein's Potemkin and Pudovkin's Mother.

THE SOVIET FILM

In his essay on the Soviet film in which he seems more inter ested in economic conditions than in films, Leon Moussinac ex
plains clearly Russia. Each

why
year a

production was quite quickly organized

in

scheme of film production

is

drawn up by

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

26"7

Sovkino in agreement with the commissariat of public instruc tion, deciding upon the number and character of educational and of entertainment films, and of documentaries, to be made. Films for peasants, films for children, educational films and "artistic"
films (which, at least until recently,
all

were

also "social" films) are

considered separately. scenario office seeks subjects drawn from literary works, from topical subjects or imaginary events. As the public likes historical films and the study of the Revolu tion is always to be encouraged, they select, Moussinac says, some well-known historical event and give it the treatment which a

Marxist approach imposes. Each category of films is carefully studied; thus films for peasants are cut less rapidly, the acting is

and more emphatic, since the peasants are not educated visually. yet completely

more

theatrical

Once the subject is chosen, the scenario itself is completed and submitted to the central committee for the control of rep ertory, which acts both as artistic direction and as political cen a soviet of sorship. This committee then appoints the director, collaborators is assembled and what is called the Group is formed,
comprising the director, the assistants, the cameraman, the art director, the actors and an administrator who has absolute control
over the budget assigned to the group.

Work

begins.

first, production was carried on under rather difficult con ditions. First the Revolution, then the Whites had destroyed the studios and the equipment. Cameras had to be bought from France, sunlight and spots from Germany. When Moussinac went to the U.S.S.R. in 1927 he says that there was only one ultra-

At

rapid camera.

The

studios of

Wufku,

the great Ukrainian or

ganization, had just been destroyed by earthquake. Gradually, however, things were organized and Sovkino, at the time talkies came in, owned large studios equipped with the latest apparatus.

When a film is finished, it is again submitted to the censorship of a committee, then to societies of Friends of the Cinema, to and afterwards to the committee of control, which journalists
pronounces upon
it.

Under such

conditions,

it is

evident that a

film cannot well be other than orthodox.

The

societies of Friends

of the Cinema are particularly powerful and have done

much

to

26'8

The History

of

Motion Pictures

popularize films in the rural

that Russia has

districts. It is owing to their care to create a Film managed Library such as the capitalist countries vainly await.* Five years after being pro duced, every film shown in Russia must be examined to deter
if it is suitable
is

mine

of the Ukraine
rather a
lot.

for preservation or not: the Film Library preserving more than 2,500 films which seems

Sovkino's powers were augmented in 1928: it became Soyuzkino, and has the exclusive right to distribute films in Russia proper. It distributed Eisenstein's films and Vertov's. Mezhrabon pom also produces films (those of Pudovkin) but

depends Sovkino for their exploitation and even for raw materials. Other wise, though subject to the Communist Party and severely con

trolled

by the

state,

these organizations function exactly as in

capitalist countries. In the Ukraine the Wufku of Kiev; in White Russia to the

monopoly belongs to Belgoskino and so on. But it is Soyuzkino which has the monopoly of exportation and of importation throughout the U.S.S.R. In addition there
exist

schools for training technicians, actors and directors. In of Arts there is a course Leningrad at the Institute of the

History

on the theory of
film are studied.

art in

which the history and technique of

the

organization of the Soviet film industry is obviously both complex and at the same time well unified. The State Cinema
state. It is not astonishing that the films produced with the stamped purest spirit of propaganda. In our aged Occident, which no longer believes in itself, what we cannot understand is that such constraint is not felt as constraint, at least not in its initial impulse. Eisenstein may not be a member of the Party, but he knows that he is expressing his era and that this

The

works for the

are

era

is

a revolutionary one.

Even

if

he

is

hampered

in a

few de

tails,

he

is

profoundly

in

organization of the Soviet film indus framework for a faith. The excessive amount of the propaganda, stupidity of certain themes, the low intellectual level and even the lies which shock us so
try, alive

and

necessities.

The whole

agreement with revolutionary demands

and

plastic, serves as the

See note on page 88.

The
much
it,

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

26$

are
it

all

part of this faith.

We

can

criticize it

but

would be

foolish to believe that so formal

it

and condemn an organiza

tion can be purely mechanical, or that

tion.

has suppressed inspira

Whether we

like

it

or not,

this

inspiration exists.

THE
Apparently the

IDEAS OF VERTOV

man who

has had the greatest influence

on

the Soviet film was neither Eisenstein nor Pudovkin, but Dziga Vertov, who as a very young man founded the Kino-Eye group

Kauffmann, Kopalin and Beliakov belonged to it and it assumed a place in the vanguard of production. Vertov's films October Without Lenin, A Sixth Part of the World, The Man 'with the Movie Camera and The Eleventh Year with its striking scenes of the life of the miners of Donetz, have counted for less despite their qualities than the ideas of the man who made them. Vertov was the first to declare war, with his whole soul, on
in 1921.
all theatrical influences. He decided that the essential thing in the film, as its founders believed, is documentation, that is to say, the unrehearsed scene not composed with art but seized by the

eye of the camera just as the human eye involuntarily seizes everything before it. Hence the name of Kino-Eye adopted by his ma group. Documentation constitutes the basic and unalterable
terial

from which the

theories of

artist

then constructs

his film

by

selection

and arrangement.

The

Kino-Eye

are obviously very important.

The

Walter Rutta as is an editor for and, mann, disciple of Kinowholly example, has selected camera what the with himself contents arranging Eye, no more drama, no more history, nothing but the composition
role of creation henceforth devolves

on the

editor:

of given elements. Carried to the extreme, this theory singularly limits the scope of the film; not one of the great Russian directors has adopted
his films, even those which entirely and each one "romances" seem to be simple documentations. Vertov, as Moussinac has ad
it

mirably
ality.

said,

tends to substitute reality for the sentiment of re

270

The History

of

Motion

"Pictures

In any case, every effort is concentrated on the editing, which in a film. What did Vertov conceive Is clearly the essential thing It to be? He conceived it in an extraordinarily scientific manner, and here his teaching has been understood by everyone, even by Pudovkin, who is so remote from the theories of Kino-Eye, and
theatrical elements. quite close to certain

The

footage of each

in relation to the total length sequence is rigorously determined time thus of the film. The unity of acquires enormous value.

Every

film in the

Vertov manner can be broken up into a

se

quence of figures indicating durations. The trouble probably lies in the fact that the quality of the movement of film images does not readily permit the eye to

few very simple for grasp this inner construction apart from a which Vertov theme mulas: The main (of actually makes very little use) is rendered much more perceptible by repetition than
through the abstract notion of duration. This is what causes the own work. His films sometimes con stitute magnificent picture albums, but what they lack is pre The Eleventh Year there cisely a perceptible rhythm and form. In economic effort theme of the of his country. But is the general in The Man with the Movie Camera, the crux of his whole theory, it is the whole of life itself in all its forms that the cam eraman is supposed to seize; it is not surprising if Vertov has failed with this vast subject. Nor is it surprising if the execution is sometimes unfaithful to the theory and if the director (an absurd title according to Vertov) sometimes trims up and "ro mances" what the visible world offers him.
relative failure of Vertov's

The importance
associates of
realized. It
is

that the films, the ideas, the writing and the Vertov had for the Russians can be Dziga

hardly

partly due to him that the Russian film orientated itself towards a sort of poetic documentary, the style to which

Potemkin, Earth, Old and New and Turkslb. He is re sponsible for the making of films without professional actors, for

we owe

the use of

unknown

interpreted by picturesque. It

players or whole crowds, for roles being anyone whose face was considered beautiful or

is because of him that the learned and rigorous of Eisenstein and of Pudovkin have prevailed experiments every-

2j2

The History

of Motion Pictures

doctor, already stand out clearly. The doctor inspects the In edible meat: the screen is filled with putrefaction, where worms

swarm in a vast, gray, leprous expanse a symbol readily grasped and shown with the audacity of a visionary. From that instant
the revolt
is

a foregone conclusion

and the rhythm of the film

becomes
is

clear,
little

again a

long periods of quiet. The actual revolt confused, but we are shown one magnificent mo

with

its

ment when

the discontented sailors, condemned to death and covered with a tarpaulin, are lined up before their comrades, who have been given orders to fire. The tarpaulin heaves, the con

demned men cry, "Brothers! Brothers!" The sailors throw down rifles. Here we see the very essence of Eisenstein's method, with its two phases of calm separated by frenzy and movement;
their

the whole structure of brief and breathless images gradually forms itself into a great emotional whole.

What follows is admirable. The whole ship seems to vibrate with joy. Meanwhile a sailor has been killed, his body is carried to Odessa, and there, before this corpse, the revolutionary im pulse is born and increases. Eisenstein selects a group, a single figure, an old woman, men with hard, silent faces, women to

whom understanding suddenly comes, a vociferous suffragette, an inquisitive bourgeois. The theme swells gradually; suddenly the whole town is caught up by it and embarks with tears of
joy in a fleet of small boats to take provisions, meat and live ani mals to the cruiser. For a time this crusade of joy fills the screen. Then the rhythm changes again; the militia enter the scene and fire on the crowd.

few scenes more famous in the whole history of the the great flight of in Odessa men and women steps flee; a crowd in confusion screams; a perambulator goes bumping
There
are
film.

Down

by; pitiful groups hold out imploring hands. Slowly, mechani cally, inexorably the soldiers advance towards them; the meas ured pace, the rigid line, this terrifying mechanism of misfortune interrupts the inorganic disorder of flight. Nothing can with stand this fatal advance, this regular march, this rectilinear
of steps.

flight

Later the tension

eases;

we

await an attack on the cruiser. But

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

275

battleships will not shoot. The word "Brothers" again fills the screen as the Potemkin passes through the fleet with honors to take refuge in Rumania.

the other sailors in the

The unequaled
its

amazingly dramatic moments

is

alone. It

concentration and conciseness of this picture, all owe their power to the film a reconstruction which attains the direct truthfulness
it is

of a documentary film, but a work of art, created

also a

deliberately,

document w hich becomes in which propaganda itself

T

disappears before the eternal humanity of the true story of a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Pudovkin, thinking of Potemkin, was to write of Eisenstein, "One can neither de

work nor represent it on the stage; one can only show on the screen." A total absence of visible ideology, the care taken to show only facts and more facts, make this statement
scribe his
it

strictly true. Eisenstein himself was, of striking words: "It is a

moreover, to write these

creating a series of images

question

composed in such a way that it provokes an affective movement which in turn awakens a series of ideas. From image to senti ment, from sentiment to thesis ... I think the film alone is
tellectual

capable of making this great synthesis, of giving back to the in element its vital sources, both concrete and emotional."

This is what Potemkin so magnificently achieved. It might be added that Eisenstein's cameraman was Edward Tisse, who had learned his craft in Sweden and brought to the Eisenstein group a great deal of and experience experiment in photography and Dawn in Odessa in the lighting. fog was obtained by stretching a little muslin in front of the lens. As the Russians owned no studios as yet, almost all the film was taken in daylight without
artificial illumination.

The

Russians themselves did not at

first

for their masterpiece: it was the Germans who made its fame, and for a long time Potemkin was announced in the Moscow cinemas as "the great success in Berlin."
care very

much

Neither Strike nor October attained the same force or concise

October contains some magnificent scenes of crowds and of panic; of men dragging cannons against the light, which prove that Eisenstein is always a master of imagery; of nocturnal biv
ness.

ouacs half-revealed

by

the gleam

from

wood

fire in a

landscape

274

The History

of

Motion Pictures

of iron under metal pillars and great cranes. But the brevity of Potemkin had imposed an admirable contraction upon its maker, where October, larger and more ambitious, loses itself in details and seems confused. A subject so sprawling and formless was to prove fatal to more than one Russian director. Also, Eisenstein
tells

work at From
is

a story badly; he needs the same level.

more

exterior unity to maintain his

said that he

that time on, however, his technique was perfected. It was converted to the cinema by Griffith's immense
is

Intolerance. This

to bring to the

medium

spite possible, a discretion and

but in

of his violence he was

good

taste

always lacking in Griffith and the Americans. contribute his collective lyricism, his love for crowds.
is

He

which were was also to

No

story

needed to express this, or only a story so recent that it seems to be the present time itself. He is at ease only when this present time can reveal its emotional reality; then he grows enthusiastic and with his cold head and warm heart sets to work to compose
a film.

Nothing
fire

is

more curious than the

contrast

between the epic

of his films and the cold science of the man, his care for craftsmanship, his love of detail, his taste for a beautiful compo

sition.

When

he wishes to make us admire an immortal moment,

Pabst stops to become a painter. This devil of a Russian never makes his pictures dance and drags them into the gen stops; he

movement, yet they are just as beautiful as those of Pabst. uses no actors, choosing his characters from the crowd, seeming to aim at that rhythmical documentation of which Vertov dreams. He selects characteristic details, seldom presenting a vast panorama in which all the tones are gray and contrast is lost; thus he avoids the danger into which Gance often fell. But he economizes raw stock no more than Gance does, shooting the same scene many times over from different angles and by differ ent methods. In this way he collaborates with fate and tames
eral

He

the savage and independent Kino-Eye, Afterwards this

madman

grows

lucid, difficult

cuts, edits his

he judges, eliminates, destroys, free images, measures their footage, shuts himself
critical:

and

The
feet.

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

275

up and from a heap of

celluloid obtains a

few

vivid and perfect

Thus Eisenstein: who taught him? He cannot be said to have had no masters, since he admired Griffith and perhaps Ince, too. When he comes to deal with more pacific themes he reminds us of the Swedes. But this is of little importance. No one else has focused on the world a camera so precise or so deliberate. No romantic (for he is a romantic) has been more severe with him self, no sensualist (for he is the greatest sensualist in films) has
been more profoundly intelligent. Abstraction and sensuality are mingled in him, as in the greatest artists. He would have become an artist anywhere, in America or in Germany, but he found his climate and his time in Russia. Later he was to prove that even that was not necessary to him and that the artist, even a revolu tionary artist, carries his own universe and his revolt within him
self,

even across the world.

THE REVOLUTION ROMANTICIZED: PUDOVKIN

Much
film,

as Eisenstein
as

temkinj resembling

and Vertov might wish it, a film like Poit does a superior form of documentary

could not establish a school.

The

habits of the public, capi

talist and communist alike, which the early revolutionary direc tors had not dared to break, were still to be reckoned with. The

a thread to hold its interest. Russia there public needs a story, fore began to imitate everyone else, and, after having discovered in Potemkin the true essence of the film for their purpose, quickly

forgot

it

in order to tell us stories.

The

task of adapting the

Revo

lution to the public's taste was given to Pudovkin. Less downright, less absolute than Eisenstein and definitely less is nevertheless an extraordinary artist. He is great, Pudovkin
closer to the theater than
is

his rival, less interested in the

docu

mentary film; even Dziga Vertov could not bring him to heel

Pudovkin willingly uses professional actors like Vera Baranovskaya and Inkizhinov, though it is true they are great actors trained to the harshest realism, the most extreme naturalness".
here.

27 6

The History

of Motion Pictures

They

enable Pudovkin to concentrate

characters, just as the studio enables

and his lighting. seems to submit himself to divine chance and to the inspiration of the famous Kino-Eye. Nevertheless, Vertov was not without influence on the director of Mother and Storm Over Asia. It was he who taught Pudovkin that rhythm can be contained in a
mathematical statement; that every sequence of images can be a duration in seconds expressed by a figure corresponding to whole. the of the duration Pudovkin, a man proportionate to

on the inner nature of his him to control his settings Pudovkin composes, invents, where Eisenstein

who composes

his

work with extreme

care, a

man

of the theater

concern with rhythm and the study, was as a and his another way to dominate medium, consequence his films are always extraordinarily orchestrated and their construc tion is often emphasized by the use of a dominant theme or by
able to envisage in this

the repetition of themes. In

flicting

The End

of St. Petersburg three con

themes

are readily identified at the beginning,

and are
are far

united finally with the triumph of the Revolution.

We

film here. Everything has been selected and the ordered actors, the sentiments, the settings, the lighting and one has given more importance than marked the rhythm.

from documentary

No

Pudovkin over his work.

self

to the permanent

and profound control of the

artist

Unfortunately, his ideology is summary and, as it expresses it through a story, seems still more summary than that of

Eisenstein.

willingly narrates plots which are heavily underlined and even improbable; he calls adventure, crime and sentiment to his aid. Melodrama comes second to Marx. The

Pudovkin

sometimes awkward, and unfortunately it was to give the martial revolution was now succeeded by a romanticized revolution which ended up by becoming rather tire some. But Pudovkin avoided all serious errors in Mother, his master
is

method

rise to a school:

piece, as well as in the best scenes of

The End

of St. Petersburg

and of Storm Over Asia. Nevertheless he remains somewhat the atrical, in a manner which is not always of the best theater.

Mother is magnificent.

Eisenstein has described Pudovkin's char-

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

277

acteristic method: "In his films the spectator's attention is not concentrated on the development of the plot, but on the psychic change undergone by some individual under the influence of the social process. Pudovkin puts real living men in the center of his work. His films act directly through their emotional power." Mother, inspired by a famous novel by Gorky, is the best example of this. We see a poor woman leading a miserable life under the Czarist regime up to the time when class consciousness awakes

in her.

the opening of the film she is beaten by her husband, at the end of the film she bears a stupefied, unhappy; flag at the head of a procession, her face radiant with faith. Vera Baranov-

At

skaya, one of the greatest artists in the world, interprets the mother's role with prodigious humanity. Thanks to her and to the meticulous art of Pudovkin, it is this humanity which strikes one, rather than any social propaganda. In The End of St. Petersburg, attacking the same subject as October, Pudovkin touches us more deeply than Eisenstein, by methods analogous to those in Mother.

At the beginning

of the film

we see

downtrodden workman who

understands nothing of his true destiny. The revolution of Octo ber is explained to us by that one central figure, by that one man

who
by

suffers

and

rejoices.

similar
it it

Soviet directors. In Pudovkin

trite

ardor with which he developed or hackneyed element.

theme was to be used often was full of novelty, and the was a guarantee against any

Mother and The End of St. Petersburg are simple; not so Storm Over Asia, in which nationalism and propaganda are curiously
mingled. It is the story of a Mongolian who is thought to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, and drives the English invaders out of his country. The film swings between melodrama, symbolism,

document and the simple adventure

Parts of
it

film

at times

dangerously.

are extraordinarily beautiful, like the trenchant carica ture of the General preparing for the ceremony (that Oriental

ceremony

in

which Pudovkin perhaps gave way too much

to his

love of the picturesque) and, still better, the wonderful fair at the beginning of the film. Light seems to cling to the furs, the

crowd is disposed on the screen positions which loom up slowly from the
seething

in a series of vast

com

darkness, in the

manner

2j8
first shots,

The History

of

Motion Pictures

so dear to the Swedes.

We are immediately captivated by the very

so softly and gently gray, which gradually bring us nearer by three removes to a hut lost in the immense plains. The revolt of Bair, whom the English merchant tries to cheat out of his furs, the riot in the market, are handled with a brio and an films come short of. Through impetuosity that the best American care on faces, on facial contours molded out he lavishes the
greatest

Russians are so responsive. The profes positions to which the sional actor, Inkizhinov, is wholly worthy of these natural artists and no greater praise is possible. The rest of the adventure the and Bair's ride in the wind which carries
great symbolic tempest off the invaders and the dead leaves
is

by time and worn by

grief

and

toil:

those admirable

human com

manner of Gance. What

ereign skill in interpreting and the great love for peasant epics

in the verges on melodrama sov the the is memorable opening, a and customs ancient and folklore

human

face.
it

Most of the Russian

directors have

similar tastes, be

Room,

fol Trauberg, Kozintsev, Protazanov, Tassin. All of them have the romanticized revolu in lowed in Pudovkin's footsteps exalting

his fellow workers go outside and draw upon their imagina their beloved Russia and Mongolia film about the Paris Com tion, as in Kozintsev's and Trauberg's

tion.

Now and

then Pudovkin and

mune, New Babylon.

Among modern subjects they are particularly

attracted to the dramatic contrasts possible in the material of im the roles of oppressed and oppressors are very perialism, where directed by Leonid clearly defined. One such film, China Express, Trauberg's younger brother, Ilya, is one of the rare Soviet films

to be permitted public showing in France.* Leonid Trauberg and Kozintsev enjoyed their first success with an adaptation of Go The Cloak, afterwards making a modern drama, The Devil's gol's

Wheel, and a Russian historical film, SVD. As well as of his dramas, Protazanov filmed some of the most successful Soviet satires. So that at this period we find, produced by him, dramas such as
and one or two others, the few Soviet films French have had the opportunity of seeing have been ex clusively rural and pastoral which accounts for the authors' curious con clusions about the Russian obsession with nature.
Aside from audiences and
this film
critics

The
The Alan from

Classic

Era of the

Silent 'Film

the Restaurant and The Forty -First, as well as T&ree comedy-satires Thieves, The Festival of St. Jorgen etc.
y

Whether making tragedy

or comedy, however, the Russian di rectors have always displayed a distinct taste for ethnic types and for realism. In Strike, Eisenstein cut into the scenes of the

massacre a shot of an ox in the slaughterhouse, then an enormous in The close-up of the eye of the ox in its death agony. Room, and was bodies dead children the of showed some Bay of Death,
so scrupulous as to procure some from the morgue. As for China Express, this is a good example of the average
is missing from its capitalist Punchpropaganda film. Nothing the neither frigid proconsul nor the servile gen and-Judy show, nor the missionary enslaved by capital tradesman the eral, ignoble like cattle in their third-class herded the we Chinese see When ism.

carriage

we

feel

by

contrast that

Trauberg here

is

obeying a

sentiment of fraternity which inspires him to better advantage. The fight in the train may not be well handled, for corridors are

bad place for a picturesque battle, and we are not really made to wish for the victory of the third-class passengers over those in the first class: the symbolism is a little too simple. But there is a about the uprising, and the film has the col savage impetuosity most Russian pictures. infuses that lective spirit
a

The Russians actually concern themselves less with individuals than with masses of men, ask for no individual sentiments or but demand of them, of all of them, only a sort of expressions which is, in a sense, the or suffering or collective rage stupor soul of the whole herd. It chooses actors because of the deep
faces reveal, and not for their individual features, kinship their a sort of choir destined to intone a very simple them in seeing and almost animal plaint. Men of whom we distinguish almost and multiple voice we hear, provide nothing, but whose mighty with their bodies as the entire group sways cadence and

rhythm

to the song of toil and of misery. If Soviet films attain depth and truth it is not in the conventional expression of their propa handsome young proletarian heroes, but ganda, or by inventing eternal tendencies of Russian "Asiatism" the by rediscovering in its national expression. So in a film like China Express, since

280
it is

not one

The History of the best, we

human
as

of

Motion Pictures
in unison.

can rightly enjoy those somber and

distress

beautiful pictures of

hymned

by the earli The Living Corpse, directed by Ozep and acted by Pudovkin, and The Yellow Pass, also by Ozep, which represent curious attempts at drama rather in the German manner, and The Sold Appetite by Okhlopkov. This rather in
est Soviet period,

Other

films continued the tradition inaugurated

such

genious satire

tells

of a proletarian with an excellent digestion

who

sells his

suffers

when

the other

appetite to a gastralgic millionaire. Afterwards man stuffs himself and writhes in

is

he

agony

on an empty stomach. The moral films were harmless enough, but a

easily divined. All of these

little

heavy-handed.

THE PACIFIC REVOLUTION

at that, from considering men as the almost as if were animals, the Soviet group they film at one stage in its evolution should have come to take nature
It is

not to be wondered
a

members of

Here the Soviet effort, whatever its and whatever its ideology shortcomings, must overwhelm us Westerners with shame. Here too, of course, the primary aim was propaganda, and Eisenstein before making Old and New quite clearly said what he intended to do. He explained that the revolu tion would continue not only in warfare but in peace, too, and that in order to fight one does not need a flag and a gun. "After the emotions of the great revolutionary struggle," he wrote,
as its principal character.

"after the blaze of revolt there

comes the

and of the farmyard. must inspire our audiences with enthusiasm and passion for the daily humdrum work of the peasant, for the fertile bull, for the mechanical steam plow with the bony little horse harnessed in front." There is "emotion in a cream separator," he says, and concludes in his spirited fashion: "What emotion, after that, can one expect to derive from the Chanson de Roland*? Why should the hearts of spec tators beat when, amid the rolling thunder of Wagner's fanfare,
ants
. .

We

daily life of the peas

the chalice of the

Holy

Grail lights

up with the

fires

of

its

The
to us?"

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

281

thousand diamonds?

What

can that Spanish vessel possibly mean

Without going

into the merits of the Spanish vessel, let us

retain only the positive side of Eisenstein's affirmation. It is cer that nature, that agricultural labor, are noble themes tainly true which literature has forgotten for two thousand years. It is not

the novels of peasant life which carry on the tradition of Hesiod and of Virgil: they lack that mixture of precision and of poetry which constitute the true Georgic. Eisenstein and Dovzhenko are

the true Virgils. In the Russian films of the pacific Revolution, nature is no longer a setting, but a character. The backwardness of the Rus
sians in agricultural

development permitted them to find nov in things that are taken for granted by Occi elty and beauty dental men. The struggle with the soil, the need for water, the effort to plow a furrow provide a dramatic conflict with its

own
see

victories

it,

and
is

it is

not

known

defeats. In truth all that is needed is eyes to the disgrace of the Occidental cinema that It has how to see. The building of a bridge is dramatic, sea

and

fishing

a drama, but Jean Epstein alone in France has at

tempted to show this. Pretty photographs such as we have been the ancient given are not enough, for the director has not evoked
the contempo poetry within himself, he has not been the singer, the with soil. man's of struggle rary Hesiod, What worries us in Eisenstein's Old and New is the basic

moralizing

w hich
r

lies at

the roots of this "educational film."

The

many comparisons between men and animals, the disdain for any
are also spiritual life,
a annoying, but the film contains
series of

which compose a great bucolic poem in which there pictures The introduction of machinery to are no actors, only
peasants.

the countryside ends

by becoming
its

man

struggle.

The

film has

a stirring episode in the hu bad taste, as for instance when the

dream cow fills the heavens, peasant dreams and a monumental the sensual precision of this unique art it also shows us with yet the fields and the clouds. There are some admirable composi
tionsthe procession, the masterly scene when the communal
bull

282

The History

of Motion Pictures

goes to mate with the gently trembling heifer, the rugged faces of the peasants round the separator, the ignorance, the dirt, and sud

denly triumph

as the

cream begins

to form.

Here

all

the elemen

tary teaching is left behind; tractors and the beauty of the

we

with modern world.

are left

a song, an epic about

In Turin's Turksib the subject is the building of the TurkestanSiberian railroad through a poor and waterless region. Everyone is waiting for water; the spectator himself begins to wait for it too, just like the men in the dried-up villages, just as the director
himself waits for
it.

The

earth

is

dead; then dirty trickles spring

and form a stream to appease the drought. This story of irrigation, which might have been so ordinary, be comes a poem about water and suffering and joy. Continuing the lesson of Vertov, documentation has become lyrical. Finally, in the most beautiful of the Soviet's nature films, Earth* by the Ukrainian Dovzhenko, love of life and the theme of the rain are mingled. (The Ukrainian studios had already con centrated upon legends such as Taras Shevchenko by Chardynin, or dramas such as Two Days by Stabovoi.) A simple story serves to support the documentation of Earth. We see the village with its young men and girls. At night, when all are sleeping, Vassili,
into existence, increase a

young man who symbolizes

the

new

life

of the country, goes to

a love tryst, and on the road, alone, dances the Dance of Happi ness. It is one of the most moving things the cinema has ever given us. Later, the whole village carries Vassilf s bier shoulderhigh through the bushes and growing things which cling to the

magnificent body of the dead

man as it passes. It is spring: life rain falls and on. goes hangs upon the fruit trees and the of branches. has much poetry been mingled with so tips Rarely

Warm

such simplicity.

Other directors have

also

animals to the screen, as in in the lovely Peasant cially

The Yellow

Women

brought nature, the plants and the Pass of Ozep and espe
of Riazan

by Olga Preobrasmiling

zhenskaya, a charming film full of dancing, the simple magic of folklore and the beautiful faces of women, and

plump

under
*

their

embroidered and pointed headdresses.

Soil,

somber

Release^ in the United State? as

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

283

enough plot served as the groundwork for the film the story of a woman, seduced by her father-in-law, who bears a child by
him. Yet
it

was not the naturalism which struck

us, it

was the

of the harvest in the midst of which suddenly tolls the pictures bell of the war of 1914; the wedding of Ivan; the beautiful peas
ant

women

bundled up

in their skirts

washing In the

river;

and

censors mutilated this film, leaving it only its simple charm, but we must not complain too it provided are powerful enough without bitterly the images the Fete of the Assumption.

The

propaganda or
In
all

antitheses.

these poetic documentations, men count less than the four seasons and the eternal earth, the collective effort, the beauty of the world. Here the Russian genius, Independently of social

and

sort of grave

has expressed with magnificent amplitude a political forms, nature in which youth and are perfectly good

hope

blended.

They have put new

because they have become because they believe in them. ple; innocently, to the first age of the

into the Sunday-school lessons a matter of life or death for these peo
life

w orld
r

They have

carried us back,

and to

Adam

digging

the fruitful earth, and this is the most extraordinary adventure that has befallen the cinema.

5.

The American fi

AFTER 1923 the American film enjoyed an untroubled prosperity. That happy time disposed it to all sorts of adventures: stars earned unheard-of salaries, fortunes were spent on sets, on land for a week or two, on orgies that were seen only scapes created for a moment. These were the whims of a nouveau riche, but what was their real value?

ART AND COMMERCE

Except for the comedies, it is astonishing to find how insig American production was during that period of pros-

nificant

2 84

The History

of

Motion Pictures

the death of Ince perity which lasted until about 1926. After and the semiretirement of Griffith, little creative genius inspired to discovering the it. Perhaps even Griffith had confined himself ever best methods of having had a really expression, without films were imported few as forceful personality to express. Also, into the United States, the American film was not fertilized or renewed by what it might have drawn from French, German, Swedish or Russian experiments.* Working in a vacuum, the and to Hollywood directors tended to repeat the same formulas use the same stories, all the more confidently since the financial
success of their product encouraged
this.

Two

reasons strength

ened

this attitude.

of a purely commercial nature. In the fight waged by by Paramount and First National in particular, the method most o'ften employed was the wholesale purchase of
the big firms,
theaters,

One was

Within

which assured them of an outlet for their productions. few years three or four big firms became the owners

of nearly all the large theaters in the United States, or at least of first-run theaters, which present to their audiences films never shown before. The result of this strategy was practically to close
these outlets to independent producers, who gradually disap the peared or considerably reduced their output. Except for
special

group

at

United

Artists,

which occupied

a place apart,

up and finally ceased work. This situation, moreover, had repercussions on production at United Artists. During this period this group produced what was least mediocre among American films, but it more or less con sciously underwent the influence of the ban on everything not
the independents slowed
initiative

resembling current productions. Men who did not lack ideas or seemed paralyzed by the fear of seeming original and of beginning to displease.

*An enormous number of foreign films were imported at this period. Moreover, there has hardly ever been a Swedish, French, German or Russian film of interest that Hollywood has not seen and studied, often before the public saw it. As the authors suggest further on, if the same plots and same methods are repeated by the Hollywood people it is because they believe that this is the way to please the greatest number of people and to make the most money: it is not from ignorance of other methods and other ideas.

The
From
in actual content:

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

*

28$
it

then on, the only differences In American films were

Westerns were abandoned

when

was ob

1920 to 1922 the faithfulness of Bill Hart's public was abating. Films of the DeMille kind multiplied when it became apparent that movies based on sex appeal attracted

served that around

were essayed again after Vidof s The Big market could also be speculated in profit The older directors had nearly all become supervisors, ably. which is to say that they no longer worked.t After the success
the public;
films

war

Parade proved that

this

of

A Woman

in technical experiments, but only achieved dullness

of Paris Griffith essayed a simpler style, less fertile neither The

White Rose nor That Royle Girl nor Sally of the Sawdust nor Sorrows of Satan, not even Drums of Love was of much value. There were fine things in them occasionally, but there was also the old, familiar moralizing no less irritating than before. The Battle of the Sexes, better constructed and more interesting, threw the two sexes into contrast in a series of simple situations; but the creative function had almost ceased. Cecil B. DeMille had temporarily abandoned his social dramas
to devote himself to vast Italianate spectacles of the type that
his

Ten Commandments had proved to be financially successful. The King of Kings, a religious film, and The Volga Boatman were among his emptiest and most eminent films. He was fol lowed into that territory by Rex Ingram, director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, of Scaramouche and The Magician,

who

proved to be

as

good

as his master.

He was

surpassed

by

the able Fred Niblo.

Niblo had been Fairbanks' director, notably in The Mark of Zorro. Then, after DeMille's example, he made a film with

Blood and Sand, and finally in 1925 produced his the famous Ben Hur. This film best summed up all masterpiece, the ideals of the American public and still holds a record for success unequaled in film history. It marked the height of film

enormous

sets,

production both in

its

mediocrity and in

its

demands.

It is

more

* Westerns have been made continuously since the war, though some times only as "quickies." t This must be unconscious humor, but it is hardly true.

286

The History
fact,

of

Motion Pictures
cinema success, for
;

than an historical

more than

it

con

the centrates the taste of a period, the standards of a public, and it see to went who again mentality of millions of spectators satisfaction. In it Ramon Novarro proclaims with endless again but it also reduced him to the horrid of the the

ji

but a lay figure, handsome and curlynecessity of being nothing in a store haired, 'inexpressive and ordinary enough to figure of that sentimentality window. It appealed precisely to degree that every average heart holds within itself, to that degree ^of soul contemplates within itself with religiosity that every average satisfaction. The love of spectacle, of dressing up, of history il
lustrated in pictures, of spurious grandeur and false archaeology, in short all the elements of movie trash, are here co-ordinated,

prestige

actor,

the agreeable feeling it heightened, legitimized and crowned by artistic in an world, and of display gives the onlooker of living evoked are which only by the duet usually ing those faculties Thais. Actually, from Meditation le Diable or the from Robert
five years later an American film historian wrote that "it is prob able that it will stand permanently as the highest point of film

discover a way to preserve production, and, if chemists should on the photographic coating celluloid, may be considered by future historians, together with Douglas Fairbanks' superb fan
tasy,

The Thief

of Bagdad, as

American

civilization

dared to go to these speaks, that harsh judgment

noteworthy achievements of the which inspired them." We should not have an American who lengths, but since it is

may

be allowed to stand.

Ben Hur, Ramon Novarro took his place in the of stars, where he succeeded the handsome Valentino, pantheon for whose sake women killed themselves and whose funeral was
Thanks
to

The power of the stars Future generations will be amazed that an entire globe should have attached itself to the picture of a good-looking boy or oftener of a pretty girl, who had only to appear in some foolish film to make hearts beat faster and induce hundreds of men and women to make involuntary gestures. The
the occasion for world-wide mourning.

now

attained

Its

zenith.

history of that extraordinary craze, to which America has con tributed twenty examples, ought to be written down. The names

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

287

of Valentino and of Novarro and of twenty women would not exhaust the list: the talking films were to extend it. some times forget to what lengths the folly of the fans can There go. are actresses who owe their success not to their ability, but to a aura which sets them from like Greta mysterious

We

apart

humanity,'

Garbo, the young Swedish girl brought to Hollywood by Aiauritz Stiller, who loved her and perhaps died because of 'her. model of the femne fatale or vamp, in Seastrom's Divine perfect Woman, in Clarence Brown's Flesh and the Devil, in Anna Karen-

ma

was both mysterious and alluring. Gradually she has emphasized both her faults and her qualities. It would be
she
to see her in the

hands of a good director

its

who knew how

pleasant to

make use of those

veiled eyes, those disquieting mannerisms, that

undeniable power. But Greta Garbo ap and her real talent as an intelligent actress cannot be judged, not even by analyzing all the frightful litera ture about her which her admirers have poured forth.
in miserable films, pears

sad, secret face with

FOREIGNERS
ameliorate the visible dullness of American films, certain producers called in foreign directors. Some of them had been in

To

America for
there.

a long time

The

first

of

and were to make their whole careers them was the German, Ernst Lubitsch, who

began by directing Mary Pickford in Rosita, and afterwards Pola Negri in Forbidden Paradise. A Woman of Paris caused this canny businessman to prick up his ears, and Lady Windermere's Fan gave much promise. It was a rather trenchant picture of English society produced with surprising discretion and economy of means. Later it became clear in The Marriage Circle * and The Patriot that Lubitsch was little more than a clever craftsman ready to make any concession, though he is evidently seized with remorse at times and then performs miracles by way of
compensation.
*

Presumably the Lubitsch films were released

in

France in

this order,

but

actually The Marriage Circle preceded Lady Windermere's Fan, the influence of The of Paris much more clearly.

and showed

Woman

288

The History

of

Motion Pictures

But the foreigner who did most for American films before It was the Austrian actor, Erich Sternberg was not Lubitsch. von Strohcim. He had started out by playing antipathetic Ger man officers, as in Hearts of the World. The ability to be anti was his most powerful and most original asset. His
pathetic
intelligence rapidly haughty bearing, his ugliness, his made him one of the most prominent actors in the United States. It is said that women adored him; he was "the man you love to hate," and he continued to be so even after he became a director. His output was somewhat uneven. Blind Husbands was stamped with a prudent and not unpleasing brutality; von Stroheim as the officer-villain created a personality definite enough to make this repugnant character acceptable. This same person

diabolic

more marked, in Foolish Wives, set in Monte bold Carloa study of morals in the German manner which aroused the anger of the censors. Aieny -Go-Round so alarmed the producer that its direction was taken away from von Stroheim.
ality appeared,

Then he

started

the purest tradition of naturalism, and derived

upon Frank Norris' novel McTeague, written in from it his most

impressive film, Greed.

Von
his

Stroheim began spending

film people realize that he

was

money freely: this a real artist. With his

made

the

monocle,

contemptuous manner,

his Oriental savor, this

man was an

alarming emanation. Greed was made in an atmosphere of ven eration, regarded from the time the first shot was taken as the
masterpiece of masterpieces and crowning jewel of the cinema; it took months to make and cost millions. One fine day von Stro

heim, haughtier and more Byzantine than ever, brought to the producer with great ceremony a film twenty-eight reels long which would have taken seven hours to run, and indicated au

no cutting or changes. Noth could this. him alter to ing persuade Unfortunately we shall never know that what probably strange and powerful film was
thoritatively that he could permit
like:

in

Greed which were shown in America and and which called forth the admiration of the best Europe critics were disowned formally by von Stroheim. The director had concentrated in that masterpiece of film
the portions of

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

28$

sadism every imaginable violence and brutality.* Several scenes, such as the wedding with a funeral passing by outside, and the scenes in which two men handcuffed together kill one
closing another,

to what an extent this pamphleteer could hate them. So much odium became magnificent. But men and despise never has von Stroheim recognized as his work anything but

showed

the

immense negative probably destroyed by now which the

for the public's use. The firm es unimpressed cutters adapted a million dollars and the eternal of loss dead the caped with
suspicion Later, in

of intelligent directors.

The Wedding March, a very uneven film, that rugged to come to terms with business neces individuality attempted
sity.

Von

Stroheim acted in

it,

and occa exquisitely arrogant,

succeeded in evoking the memory of imperial Vienna sionally waltz-time charm, its excesses and its miseries. The slow its with is a work of hatred, but it is also a work of March Wedding
love and of imagination. This, rather than the concessions it made to the public taste (for which it is clear that von Stroheim has

nothing but contempt), makes

it

occasionally disconcerting.

ATTEMPTS TOWARD ARTISTRY

and the very relative success of Despite the failure of Greed, the films entrusted to foreigners brought over from Europe on there were other attempts to make American princely contracts, films a little more intelligent. It was a formidable task. Miss June
Mathis, who had just made a reputation with her work on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was put in charge of a whole series of films. She conceived the idea of submitting the scenarios

and rough cuts of these films to a group of writers, artists, dra matic and film critics. This curious collaboration succeeded in or overmelo dramatic elements from eliminating the overromantic them, but the public seemed little interested in Miss Mathis' met with no more success when he had his films films.

Goldwyn

supervised
*

Another pro by a committee of critics and writers. ducer chose the opposite method: he invited his chauffeur and

He

filmed the novel scene

by scene with scrupulous accuracy.

zyQ
tradition of

The History

of Motion Pictures

with him, which was at least in the American production. These experimentsuare to be explained by the conditions of film production. The director, Usually overworked, no longer exercised complete control over his films. Actually there was a move to take away from him what authority he still possessed. Most of the producing firms were alarmed at. the extravagance in the studios, but it was difficult to stop it. The heads of the firms usually lived in New York, which was their headquarters, and their visits to California were infrequent. They struggled for
his friends to collaborate

w ith the situation before entrusting the control of the various processes on each film to a supervisor endowed with absolute authority over the producing staff.
a long time
all
r

The

industrial organization of the studios explains

how

it

is

that a director

who

has

made one good

film can

make another

which is not merely dull, but also without any individuality. Those who can continue to be creative are rare. Just as in mak ing comedies special teams work on the story, the cutting, the
real author of a film

gags, so for dramatic films there are teams, too. As a result, the the star it features as the is as likely to be

humble director. This is always true of the comedies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and is sometimes true of dramatic films, too. But whereas a comedy can easily depend on the one
actor

who

gives unity to the plot,

it is

difficult to

achieve the

same unity and the same effect in serious films. It is not surpris ing, therefore, if American films manufactured wholesale have
little

They only display any when a director is strong to enough stamp his personality on them; almost always such a director is a foreigner, like von Stroheim or in their
originality.

Sternberg

early days. Otherwise the only original creations in America, because of the method employed, will be found among the

comedies.

COMEDIANS

The American comedies grew less in number during the years under consideration. Douglas Fairbanks even, despite his success,

Al Jolson

in

The

Jazz Singer (192-,).

Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney

in

Smart

Money

(1931).

scene

pom The

Italian

St:aw Hat (7^27), directed by Rene

Clair.

The
first

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film
been the

was obliged to slow up production. Robin

Hood had

of those pictures in which his jolly personality was com bined with immense sets. He made a sequel to his most celebrated film, Don Q, Son of Zorro. Even better, he conjured up the
of Bagdad, about a young man who he wants can everything except love. His performance, as was not effective as the never varying, big cities, the flying the trick work and the whole gigantic machinery of illu carpet, sion, which bore certain resemblances to Ben Hur, and in which Fairbanks almost succeeded in burying himself under the sets
Oriental legend of
steal

The Thief

and the props. Adolphe^ Menjou, brought into prominence by A Woman of Paris,* now assumed a special place among American actors, and
a appeared in

number

of screen plays

Gentleman of

Paris,

The King of Alain Street, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter

but unfortunately he succeeded in being little more than a re markable actor. It is a pity that he could not have been put to better use, for his subtlety, his admirable characterization of

man about town at once skeptical, blase, cynical and wittydeserved more than films in which they are merely sketched in. Once, in the role of a lovesick maitre d'hotel, he succeeded in
a

carrying

the purely theatrical form it was that Service for Ladies, directed by Henri d'Abbadie delightful film,

comedy beyond

d'Arrast,

who

assisted

Chaplin on
as

The Gold Rush. But he never

of Paris. good for a time was set up as a eccentric who the Harry Langdon, was a newcomer. Langdon Competitor of Chaplin's, like Menjou has since disappeared, which is a pity. An able student of Chap film of a somewhat melan lin, he made at least one delightful
as

found another vehicle

A Woman

in which he used to good effect choly humor, Three's a Crowd, from The Kid. One of his first pictures, directed by Sennett sometime before 1925, also deserves to be remembered.

ideas

There was an admirable scene difficulties of cod explains the

wall.

in

it,

where

madman

in prison

Langdon, puzzled, joins characters and begins to take an interest in that disquieting dia*

a figure drawn on the fishing to in gradually, plays up to the

Menjou had been

in films for

some time: vide The Sheik

(1921).

292

The History

of

Motion Pictures

that one was going mad, too. logue. It gave one the impression "There is no doubt that the two names which dominated the
field

of

comedy

at that

time were those of Harold Lloyd and of

Buster Keaton. Lloyd had definitely perfected his technique, which is that of an accumulation of gags. Four gagmen were at

tionably pattern dear to Sennett succeeded in giving unity to the whole picture. With the gags, unity seems to be lacking in Lloyd's films: they

tached to him with the task of hunting up amusing incidents to adorn plots, usually ordinary enough, in w^hich Lloyd fell in love with a girl and finally married her. Some of these gags were of an immense virtuosity, as for instance the white mouse hid den inside a white glove which walks, ghostlike, in the black of night in A Rich Family. Lloyd made many films at that time (Grandma's Boy, Safety Last), but the best of them is unques of chases and races so Speedy, in which the old

seem to proceed in fits and starts, and the good-natured hero is not always able to sustain our interest. That he is a gifted come dian there is no question. It was Jean Prevost who observed one day that all of Lloyd's expressions are arranged vertically: his
hair sticks up, his eyebrows go up, the corners of his mouth come down. Often when one fancies that the story is slowing up, some excellent gag sets things going again; but though his pic tures are gay and enjoyable, their complete lack of humanity

and their emptiness always strike one. Lloyd will only be per fectly successful when he realizes that his salvation lies in an in tensive accumulation of gags, and when he does not hesitate to insert one every thirty seconds. At the present moment he is too
economical.

Buster Keaton has an attractive but quite different person He also works with gagmen, but he imposes his own will ality.

on them from the

start and knows clearly what he intends to do. His full-length features began in 1924 with Our Hospitality,

which

set the model for a series of films which are perhaps rather mechanical and deliberate but extremely and subtly intelligent. This intelligence is visible in The Navigator, Go West, The General, College, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Cameraman. The actor himself is extraordinary: his head is quite rigid and

The
looks as though

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

it had been carved out of a chestnut; his eyes and are large staring and his face is immobile. The entire head be an inarticulate organ, expressionless and calm as a appears to seems to have been stuck or foot and grafted onto his lively and like some addition made of stucco or papier niache. elastic body The body is never still, but skips and jumps about with enchant ing suppleness. The head follows it, without really understand

ing the adventures it participates in. This master of acrobatics finds the basic element of his comic genius in this contrast. But

something even more important: The Camer&nan, Our Hospitality, The General and The Navigator all have one thing in common their principal character is not a man but a ma chine. The drama lies in the relationship between the comedian and this machine. The General is about Buster being chased by
there
is

a locomotive during the Civil War. The Cameraman has for hero a strange monster composed of Buster and his camera. The

Navigator, his masterpiece,

is about an engaged couple alone on a huge liner, making their coffee in pots big enough to serve five hundred people. When a central object is absent, Buster seems

lost. first

Hospitality is only really successful in its delightful a journey on a train around 1850. In Stea?nboat about part, makes us laugh when he tries on the hats, but not so he Billy Jr. much as when he is struggling against the flood, a new kind of monster. In Go West, the monster is a herd of cattle. In this formula which he almost always follows we find once more the

Our

contrast between immobility and suppleness which distinguishes his own acting; it is the well-known comic device in which in
ertia counteracts action. In this, Keaton's

comedy

is

perhaps even

more

deliberate than Chaplin's, but it is less human since he relies chiefly on exterior elements. Every film of Keaton's seems to be at once an essay on bad

luck and a mathematical problem. Granted the physical necessity which directs the machine, granted the means by which man controls it, what can be made of the contact between them? to observe the most grotesque as well as the Keaton's

power

most

an inflexible line of action on his logical details imposes his his films of that In period, after having developed gagmen.

2$4

The History

of Motion Pictures

and maddest fantasy in the short technique through the wildest comedies, Keaton really became a relatively abstract personality, a mathematician highly gifted in calculating laughter. That is to one in his films, and why towards the end of the what
appeals

was hope that he would produce a masterpiece by quite seriously opposing machine to man in a profoundly modern comedy whose underlying intent would have gone far
silent era there

beyond our

laughter.

CHAPLIN
of producers, Definitely successful and completely independent Charlie he had thanks to the money made, Chaplin throughout the classic era of silent films produced only two pictures, The
1925, after two years when nothing of his ap in 1927. The Gold Rush is one of the peared, and The Circus films and is perhaps the masterpiece of the all most famous of

Gold Rush

in

whole cinema. It is not so much that Chaplin surpasses here what he had done in Shoulder Arms, but that this is his first really in The Tramp long picture. Everything that had been indicated or The Pawnshop is made use of in it, and carried to comple tion within a complex composition where we pass uninterrupt edly from laughter to sympathy, where the various episodes do not seem like separate fragments but as the unified parts of a whole. When The Gold Rush made its appearance we had just seen The Covered Wagon and had not yet forgotten Bill Hart, so that the atmosphere of this gold rush seemed familiar, even if it were a parody. There was unquestionably an element of critical comment in it which added to its immense charm. Today this implication no longer exists, and The Gold Rush is simply
a magnificent poetic-comic picture.
It presents a whole series of famous scenes: the long trail of seekers after gold in the mountains among suddenly ap

whom

pears a strange wayfarer, with a bear following him; the bliz zard in the hut; Charlie on the his of starvation

verge

devouring

boots,

and

his

giant rooster;

companion going insane and mistaking him for a the saloon where people far from home sing Irish

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

295

or Scottish songs and Charlie falls in love with Georgia; New Year's Eve, when he awaits the girl he loves and, dreaming, makes two forks shod with rolls dance a polka; the return to the cabin swept away by the storm and perched on the edge of an abyss. That dance of the rolls is the crowning point in the art of panto mime which Chaplin had revealed in The Pilgrhn^ just as the
eating of the boots is the crowning point of his gift for comical transpositions as revealed in The Pawnshop. Here his gentleness of spirit carries us further and further into a realm of tenderness

and drollery.
Circus is less well constructed, and not as good as The Rush. Some of its incidents are rather labored, as when Gold
Charlie

The

on the tightrope

is

pursued by monkeys

who

tear his

clothes apart, or when he finds himself face to face with the lion. But there are some breath-takingly lovely and funny scenes which might have come from The Tramp Charlie cooking an

egg in an old can; Charlie chased by a donkey into the ring where the audience, bored up till now, bursts out laughing and clamors for more of the "funny man." Best of all is the admirable closing
scene of Charlie in the center of the ring of sawdust which a circus leaves behind on the site it has occupied, as he picks up a paper star before going on to seek his fortune.

These two

films, in the silent days,

if

Chaplin's work, even

the most characteristic.

were most praised of all were not, the last one particularly, they a breath of criticism was heard, Hardly

though

1925 Andre Suares ventured to say: "I confess that me to death. He is the sort of hero which that bores Chaplin awful America would create and I should enjoy crushing that
in

base heart of his as though it were a bug." Francis Carcot com pared him to Villon, finding him more genuine and more au thentic, but Andre Maurois probably hit the truth as well as the

when he declared that "three hundred years hence Chaplin will have become what Villon is to us now, a great
general opinion
archaic artist."

In The Gold Rush and The Circus Chaplin completed what he had begun in The Tramp and continued through Shoulder Arms, The Kid, The Pilgrim. He had bestowed a soul upon his
,

2$ 6

The History

of

Motion Pictures

marionette, had transposed the contrast between Charlie and the rest of mankind onto the plane of the sentiments and made of him a creature utterly touching and convincing who has gone world. The soul of a marionette is a delicate thing. astray in our It must be sincerely naive, well-intentioned at every moment, must have immense confidence in life and faith in mankind, must

and think that everyone else does likewise. In this extraordinary creation (in which tougher char r acteristics which the w ear and tear of life had conferred on the marionette are also to be detected) Chaplin follows the same

wear

its

heart on

its

sleeve

rule of contrasts as guided

him

in his early films. Just as Chaplin's

body apparently does not obey the same physical laws as the res/ of the world, so now the soul which inhabits this singular the emotions; but body also belongs to some foreign world of
contrast aimed exclusively at creating laughter, the second one arouses in us a deep affection for the simple hero

where the
at

first

whom we
And
so

are laughing.
shall

always remember Charlie in the snow, so that New Year's Eve when he has spread and ingenuously brave, with a fine cloth and his best cutlery, has cabin the table in his
in the tumblers, prepared gay candles, written the on each of their gifts and then sits dreaming the of names girls and the success which he is about to enjoy and the the of gaiety so trusting, so ut that is actually never to be. He is happiness a child, as on the that of is His sadness, even, terly charming. at the big circle left behind by the circus he when morning gazes

we

put favors

which has gone away.

No matter one of those

how
little

life

belabors him, he

is

always an "innocent,"

to other children

boys who give their marbles and their candy but who never make any friends. The only
is

friend he ever finds

to love him. Otherwise he

With
led

the Kid, for he alone is innocent enough is always out of luck, poor fellow. that same simplicity with which he allows himself to be

alights from the train in The Pilgrim, he ac the fact that some reason he is suddenly amid the snows for cepts of Alaska. He is astonished neither by his misfortunes nor by

away when he

his strokes

of good luck, but gazes with the same great doll-like

The

Classic

Era of the

Silent

Film

2517

eyes when climbing up to stake his claim in the opening scenes of The Gold Rush, as he does at the end on the boat which is

taking him back to civilization, a millionaire. The fine and simple love that awakes in him is the sort of passion one experiences at the age of ten for some beautiful queen whom one will never
set eyes on.

When

"she" has gone away, he makes for the

hun

dredth time that gesture of resignation with which he accepts the inevitable, and sets off again on his journey, towards some other adventure of the same kind to which he will abandon him-

with similar fervor and just as little result. must never forget that a period so lacking in poetry and truth to life was nevertheless one which, thanks to Chaplin, in to this hero, an unknown man of an extreme anonym birth gave without passport and without means, without nationality or ity, friends. Because of his inner simplicity, he barely criticized this world which had no reality for him. He simply accepts the fact
self

We

that he

is

not destined for success any more than, in glory or in

love, the best and worst of mankind are destined to succeed. He typifies that wry but appealing destiny which is perhaps
I wanted to do," he said once, really the destiny of man. "What "was to create an imaginative tramp." This tramp is a true hero

made

of our times, despite the concessions which Chaplin to public taste, or those which his background

may have may have

suggested to him, such as his love for clowns and that effective but undeniable vulgarity which creeps out in the least admirable
of certain films, as for example in The Circus and in City Lights. It is almost always so sufficiently controlled as not to
parts

embarrass us seriously, and can be disregarded because of his

completely

human

truthfulness.

THE END OF THE SILENT FILM

The

last

films besides comedies.

years of the silent film provided audiences with other can forget Clarence Brown's success

We

with Flesh and the Devil, Victor Fleming's with The Way of All Flesh, for which Greta Garbo and Jannings were responsible. But Flaherty, the director of Nanook, created in Moana an ad-

2$8

The History

of

Motion

"Pictures

mirable documentary film which gave rise to a whole succession: after it came ten other films celebrating the beauties of harpoon of paring faros, and the innocent lives of the poor Poly fishing, nesians troubled by the advent of the white man. Few of them
simple Rousseauism with as much skill as the man who assembled such lovely pictures while re a plot, contenting himself with com jecting the enticements of the glory of the sky, of labor and of posing a pictorial ode to to the Sea in Ships made a ro repose. Elmer Clifton in Down mantic picture without great merit, though it was enlivened with fine scenes of mutiny, of fishing, of the sailing of a ship and a

managed

to

do homage to

this

with a whale, creating a pleasing hymn to bravery and the ocean. Van Dyke in The Pagan followed the same model. Borzage adapted a few skillful pieces before he became,
fight

through the talkies, a really excellent director. Vidor finally achieved a triumphant success with The Big Parade, actually a rather unbearable picture, and then made The Crowd. This opens charmingly with the story of two young people of modest means who fall in love and marry after meeting at a fair, but the contrast thereafter made between the one man and the crowd gave evidence of a singularly primary and dull imagination. No one would have guessed that soon Vidor was to make the master
piece

and then a picture appeared by some unknown director which seemed extraordinarily perfect, so well had the technique of film making been established. Howard Hawks gave us A Girl in Every Port, a simple story of sailors and their flirtations, ad mirably acted by Victor McLaglen, which took us to Amster dam and Buenos Aires and Antwerp. Really an adventure story with lots of fun and fisticuffs, it employed such perfect economy of means and such admirable straightforwardness that this un pretentious picture was one of the best that came from America. There was also Lonesome, which introduced us to the Hun garian, Paul Fejos. A young workman and a little telephone girl at a fair fall in love with one another, then meet again. Around
this simple courtship blares

Now

among

talking films.

the noise of the merry-go-rounds, the

skill in

of the crowd. gaiety

It

exhibited a singular

camera angles

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

and curious photographic foreshortenings, somewhat reminiscent of Epstein's Coeur Fidele, but beyond its technical merits it pos sessed a fresh simplicity which permitted one to overlook cer
tain

romantic contrivances and even the occasional horrid pas

sages in color.

Last

w e became
r

acquainted with the name of the

German*

Josef von Sternberg, certainly the most interesting personality in America at that time. The Last Command,, which

working

featured Jannings, did

this

little

more than

exhibit the actor's re

sources, though story about a Russian ex-general become a his former spirit when he once more recovers film extra who

dons

his old

uniform,

is

not without an emotional quality.

Un

derworld and The Drag-Net were both crime films, and launched a new fashion which was firmly established by Dressed to Kill) made at about the same time. Here were no mystery films, but realistic stories about armed gangs tough, grim and surprisingly of crooks. Unfolding smoothly and unsentimentally, they took murder and all sorts of adventures in their stride with a gradu accentuated rhythm that eventually rose to some terrific ally conclusion, such as a raid on a heavily garrisoned house. The introduction of sound was to increase their effectiveness, but Underworld and Bancroft's brutal and expressive physiognomy had set the model which benefited in this case by the almost and extreme care with which it was con mathematical
precision
structed.
It

was The Docks of

New

York.,

however, which put von

as Such Is Life was the swan Sternberg in the front rank. Just York did The Docks of so in film the silent Europe, song of the logical conclusion of a whole range of technique represent in which American skill was combined for the first and last

New

time with the pictorial perfection of the Germans. In this grip characters were brought to life with rugged truth ping tale, the saves a woman from drowning; she is accused Bancroft fulness.
of murder; he confesses that he
*
It
is

guilty.

These two suddenly

or of

New

seems uncertain whether von Sternberg is actually a native of London York, but he is not a German. His name was originally Joseph

Stem.

500

The History

of

Motion Pictures

discover an abiding sentiment: they are no longer alone. Olga Baclanova lent to the role of the murderess a passivity and a

hidden energy, a sort of parsimony of effort which made the character singularly real; but more than anything else The Docks of New York was notable because of its photography. Seldom have we seen anything more beautiful than the scenes

with which the film opens, the glistening bodies of the stokers in the oily steam, the smoky port with its fog, or than the low
bar where,

woman

Bancroft decides to marry his drowned and, in the midst of an incredible uproar, sends for the
as

a joke,

the vitality clergyman. As in Underworld, in half-hidden shadow. faces In and of beauty of misty outlines reached a kind film of silent the York The Docks of New per
is

American

added to

fection evermore to be regretted, which gave hope that through this German the American film was about to become humanized.

He

created

two or

vided a dramatic model

studios

three stirring and powerful films and pro full of verve and vigor.

In a different realm some remarkable technicians outside the had perfected the animated cartoon: Max Fleischer had

transported

created Koko, and Pat Sullivan had given us Felix the Cat, whose absurd adventures, which seldom obeyed the laws of reason, us to Alice in Wonderland's world. These animals

with their quaint bodies created a sort of grotesque poetry, half fable and half nonsense, which had the charm of a child's dream. These films had real value and were to have further uses.

6.

The Death of an Art

is impossible to restrain a feeling of melancholy when one comes to the end of reviewing the chief events in silent-film history. Between 1927 and 1930 this form gradually expired, first in America and then in Europe. It is difficult to regard what came to take its place as a sufficient consolation, despite any

IT

number of
was

excellent films.

Not

everything about the

short
life it

silent film

perfect, but at the end of

its

possessed an enor-

The

Classic

Era of the Silent Film

301

mous number of resources and had attained that relative degree o of stability without which no renewal-from-within is possible. In short, it had almost completed its technical development. No doubt the cameras could have been improved, subtler methods of lighting might have been found, but by this time the technical development of the film was so complete that there had already been a swing towards simplification. Here was something of real importance, for henceforward cleverness of technique could be concealed. The telling of a story was no longer marked by as in La Roue and the expressionist films, perceptible devices, whole a now flowed smoothly. People had realized as and films that the discoveries of which everyone had been so proud in 1923 were those which made a film age more rapidly; that double photography was not a remedy for every ill; that La Roue and The Stroke of Midnight were themselves rather old-fashioned, whereas certain very simple films like those of Chaplin, and Berg-Ejvindy and a few Bill Harts, seemed just as fresh, or almost as fresh, as the day they were made. This new simplicity w as perhaps carried too far in some cases, but it was characteristic
r

of the period.

Without question it was carried too far: it was inevitable that comedy, for instance, reduced to the capacities of one single actor in a burlesque situation, would necessarily become rigidly set in a pattern and would completely neglect the comedy of inanimate objects which the film alone can handle and which was so popular in prewar days. It was easy to foresee, too, that narrative films were in danger of becoming little more than
late

an extreme technical ability, content to re polished exercises of constructed ably plots by a series of exquisite photographs.

were always the Russians to fling themselves upon epic subjects, but they were far away and Abel Gance was intoxicated with his own success. There were dangers as well as virtues in the form that the medium had taken at the time it died a sudden death. Was the invention of sound and talking films to solve this problem? It was impossible to tell, but cer all those who loved the cinema tainly when movies began to talk, to and the clung desperately past expected no good of the future.
course, there

Of

$Q2
Even today

The History

of Alotion Pictures

It Is questionable whether It is possible to love the film sincerely unless one knew It In the silent days, In those last years which are inseparable from the days of one's youth. The

pos Recalling all that it promised, we are left with the melancholy regret one feels for a thing foredoomed.
sibly also have seen
it

Germans, the Russians, the French, the Americans and the Swedes had etched unforgettable shadows on the screen. Thev had robbed the sunlight of its brightness and the shadow of its secrets. The faces of men and women had learned to be expres sive in those mute dramas by the aid of no more than an eyelid, the flicker of a glance, or a shadowy flush which mantled their cheeks. We demanded emotions and dreams, passion and suf fering of them, and felt no need for words. There were quite ordinary films in which the extinguishing of a lamp at some window, a figure emerging from the mist pale and formless as a drowned body, the bend of a river revealing a road between two row s of trees, furnished us with that unique sensation of shock which a glimpse of an unknown world provides. Those actors, so well adapted to express subtleties, those plots which were of necessity so clear and so brief, may all be forgotten in the future. But 'we who witnessed the birth of an art may
7

die.

PART

SIX

The talking Tilms

1929-i935

i.

The American

CFilm

INVENTIONS

to the talkies

had started almost immediately

JLHI .HE

experiments which led up after the war. The

development of electrical devices, the multiplicity of laboratories and the progress of radio had constituted a set of favorable con ditions. By 1924 the principles that were to serve as a basis for
sound-on-film recording, as opposed to the use of phonograph discs, had been clearly established and important solutions of the various problems had been discovered, though none of the results were capable of practical applications.* The electrical or radio

concerns which had chiefly devoted themselves to these experi ments were RCA, General Electric, Westinghouse and Bell Tele
film

phone Laboratories, as well as numerous private inventors. In the world William Fox alone commissioned an engineer to pur
sue experiments of this kind. At the beginning of 1926 the Bell Laboratories had perfected a synchronizing -process called Vitaphone.t The inventors ad dressed themselves to Zukor and to his principal competitors, urging the purchase of their patents. These rulers of the Ameri can film world pondered, conferred and decided that the
finally

invention was of no interest.

*

The

Bell Laboratories

approached

were known to physicists, Europe and America, well before 1900. Due, however, to the in finitely small amount of sound energy available for audio reproduction, this knowledge was no practical use. It was not until the decade following the World War, when the vacuum tube amplifier was perfected, that the art of sound-on-film recording and reproduction became commercially pos
basic elements of sound-on-film recording
in both
sible.

The

t This was a method of sound reproduction utilizing the disc mechanically coupled to the film projector to insure synchronization with the audio out put electrically amplified.

305

306

The History

of

Motion Pictures

several other magnates of less importance but met with the same a demonstration in Hollywood, however, Sam reception. During Warner, a producer of secondary importance who, moreover,

no very secure position, became interested in the new in vention and made an offer to the firm, which, tired of the strug Sam Warner had started out modestly in partner gle, accepted. three brothers as Warner Brothers. By dint of his ship with energy and ingenuity they had managed to create a good posi tion as independent producers by about 1921 or 1922. It was just at this time that Paramount and First National had gone in for

was

in

the mass purchase of theaters, in order to assure themselves con trol of the industry. Warner Brothers soon found their market

them from putting disappearing; their lack of capital prevented more no was Sam Warner enthusiastic about a possibly up fight. talkies than the other producers had been, but, on the verge of ruin, he thought he might as well take this final gamble. It was
his difficulties. Banks advanced money only re no Theater owners eagerness to install the displayed luctantly. first sound The recording, timidly reminis necessary equipment.

not the end of

cent of the
little

first

dramatic efforts of the silent cinema, aroused

enthusiasm

among

audiences.

The

critics

were

entirely

against them: even those who had had least praise for the "sim the silent films now suddenly became plistic" technique of apostles

of silence.

And

it is

true that these

first talkies fell far

short of

the vulgarest contrivances of the old movies. Newspapers and

this new discovery and to con Sam Warner, overworked and unhappy, died during these months of struggle. The times, however, played into the hands of Warner Brothers. The public, intoxicated with sound

magazines continued to examine

demn

it.

the radio, was coming to feel that noise was now inseparable from entertainment. The crude music-hall sketches of the earli est days were now followed by much better-made sound films, in which only the noises of trains, machine guns, airplanes and the like were recorded. The public took to these much more readily and the theater owners began to think about installing

by

the

new

William Fox,

equipment. Success finally arose out of competition. who had perfected his process of sound recording,

The Talking Films

507

Movietone, in 1927, launched a campaign for popularizing the talkies at the same time as the Warners. For three years Fox, en had been buying theaters after the example tirely reorganized, and now controlled quite a number of them. After of Paramount the new field, many theaters were wired Fox of into the entry
for sound and the public acquired the habit of regarding films as an audible medium. As sometimes happens, the two systems
instead of doing each other harm actually conspired to establish a new habit. What neither Fox nor the Warners could have done
alone,

Fox and the Warners achieved together. Towards the end of 1927 the public began clearly to demon strate its preferences. Now was the moment to strike a decisive blow, and the Warners conceived the most monstrous and
the public interest devastating of ideas. They decided to catch bv having some actor sing, and selected Al Jolson. The Jazz

Singer was the

first

of big talking film,* and the forerunner

many. Under
ditty.

infantile pretexts dignified by the name of plot, a colored man moved up into a semiclose-up and reeled off a

Plaintive and mild as the songs which small children make the crooning of the excellent Jolson might have harmlessly up, charmed all those who enjoy a dreamy state of semiconsciousness,
this not been the source of a perfect flood of nonsensicalities, of blackface minstrels, of singing acts, love duets and relentless continue to work havoc even today. Be that sopranos, which which recalled the The Jazz Singer scored a as it

had

may,

triumph

fortunes
ies

head of Warner William the In men richest the of one became country. Brothers, Fox moved his armchair over, chummily, beside Mr. Zukor's

made by The

Birth of a Nation and

Ben Hur. The

talk

had

won

a victory.

Harry Warner,

now

throne, and the population of five continents of hand to hearing the movies prattle.

was condemned out

results.

The

introduction of talking films had

side,

many

On

the

commercial

power Zukor owned the handsomest and biggest American

he readily adapted himself to the
*

Paramount saw

its

absolute

vanish. Since
theaters,

new

situation,

but not before

with brief scenes in which Jolson Actually it was largely a silent film sang and spoke a few words.

308

The History

of Motion Pictures

other competitors had challenged his supremacy. The remaining independent producers had to abandon the field because of the

made

were capital necessary to engage in this new contest. Big changes in the larger firms. First National, which had been a

dangerous rival of Paramount's for ten years, now became the property of the Warners. By 1929 most of American production was concentrated in the four big firms, Fox, Warner, Paramount

and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There w ere even greater changes and upsets in the machinery of film production. The first to suffer were the actors: more stars came to grief than one would have believed possible. This was no great loss, for many of the players in silent films were really quite third-rate actors, and their disappearance hardly merits at
r

tention.

few

survived.

Newcomers

selves to the entirely different technique

quickly submitted them demanded by the talkies.

more varied and much less con no longer necessarily resembled fashion plates. Characters with marked temperament and from broader walks of life made their appearance on the screen, and the public now began to bestow on character actors the favors they had formerly reserved for leading ladies and gentlemen. One admi rable actress, Marie Dressier, who had been one of Chaplin's earli est scored a with her partners, triumph loquacity, her air of au her and turbulence and her extraordinarily thority, abrupt vulgar She was one of the rare film players who was powerful acting.
Acting became more
flexible,

ventional. Sweethearts

more than
It

a public idol.
artistic

remained to be seen what the effects on the

qualities

of the

medium would

be.

NEWSREEL
to the newsreels, the silent films had set out early days by filming cur rent events and the celebrities of the marveled at period. certain amazing effects which were accidentally secured, as dur ing some topical picture of horse racing when the thud of hooves rang out, then vanished amid the clamor of the crowd to
just as in
its

Sound now began to be added cautiously

We

only

The Talking Films

ring out again, sharp and distinct, on the turf. Vast possibilities seemed to open before us. Putting aside entirely for the moment all films that attempted a degree of artistry, it is possible still to
recall

vividly, as a cinema, a film

one of the most affecting things ever given in about India in which Rabindranath Tagore ap
his

peared in black draperies with

white hair and immensely pene

trating eyes, reciting a poem in praise of his country. not understand a single word, but somehow received the

We

did

im

pression of having heard and seen a Homer. Impressions such as these are so intense that

it was not long before those in control of the public's destiny pricked up their ears. It may be all very well to see a dictator or a riot, but it

becomes dangerous to hear them

official

as well. Censorship, whether or officious (in France, by some admirable hypocrisy, censorship is theoretically not supposed to apply to newsreels),

got

its

that while

claws on the producers of newsreels. So it came about the world was being shaken by catastrophes, the

showed us only dull boxing or tennis matches, bicycle the cultivation of the grape in California, harvesting in races, Denmark and in every country in the world local beauty con
screen
tests

at

the seashore, local dog shows, but never the truth.

where Occasionally some political figure appeared on the screen, as a rule he was vociferously hissed and the theater pro upon the safety of his hall. As it was not always prietor trembled for to foretell how audiences would receive Mussolini or
possible

the President of the United States, such figures were shown less and less frequently and the newsreels were deliberately turned
into a magazine for children. It must be admitted that in provid items the newsreels are most successful ing these perfectly safe and that it is occasionally agreeable to gaze upon charm

today,

ing

will be forgotten tomorrow, or even more agreeable to see them They have succeeded in presenting time-asit-flies in pleasant fashion; it is impossible to recall without pleas or summer sports, with their ure certain shots of winter
girls,

new

fashions
it

which

pretty children but twenty years hence.

will be

sports snow or striped sands, even a mere fleeting pose or a crisp hard frock as caught on the screen by some unknown artist. Yet we

5/0
daily in years to

The History

of

Motion Pictures

should have liked to see the tragedies as well as the pleasures of life. Even so there have sometimes been surprises for us:

come we

shall

gaze with considerable emotion

upon

New cyclopean and harvest festi denburg's ashes, Tempelhof and Nuremberg men are standing, air where a million a over vals where, plain
planes
trail

the amazing scenes of the National Socialist ceremonies, the architecture of Germany, the removal of Hin-

swastikas across the sky.

SOUND FILMS
Compromises were already being reached, at first by simply omitting dialogue, as in Borzage's The River, a creditable film
containing much natural poetry, which was shown in France as a silent picture. little later on they essayed musical films largely

composed of singing and dancing in the manner of a revue, which, it was supposed, no one needed to understand, like Broad way Melody and Fox Movietone Follies. Audiences hissed, and yelled, "In French!" which brought great sadness to the hearts
of theater owners.

Afterwards they made several versions of each film, in various languages, but this was horribly expensive and the method was gradually abandoned. Finally some ingenious person invented
"dubbing," in which after the film has been made in one lan guage, dialogue in another language is composed which calls
for approximately the same lip movements, and is then spoken by another set of actors. There is always a faint difference and one feels somehow that the character who is saying "oui"

or "ja." Nevertheless, most foreign films shown in the provinces are dubbed. In Paris we have become accustomed
said

had

"y es

"

really

to seeing films in the original version accompanied by (over printed) subtitles which summarize the dialogue, but these did not appear for some time, and for a long while it seemed that

only straightforward

talkies

would be accepted.

The

success of

seemed to

Van Dyke's White Shadows in the South Seas justify those who were timid about using dialogue.

The Talking Films

$n

In this film, which Flaherty was to have made and had actually started, the sweetness of Moana, the unvarying Polynesian cli mate, dramatic incidents such as and a rather
pearl fishing,
pleas

ing Rousseauesque romanticism were again to be found, though it was less "pure" than Moana. Polynesian charm now met the
public's taste for Hawaiian guitars and other trite elements. The Pagan, also by Van Dyke and starring Ramon Novarro, erred further in this direction. Yet a few was to years later Van

Dyke

Eskimo which again used the method indicated in White Shadows. The film is not without faults; it continually throws the natives and the white men into contrast, though less harshly. A tale of murder and of race antagonism, it contains scenes like those of the walrus hunt and the attack on the caribou which are as touching as the finest things in the
a beautiful film called

make

Under a pallid sky each man or animal stands out in silhouette against the great expanses of white snow. The sharp actors speak Eskimo, which does not disturb us in the least, for
Georgics.
the dialogue
is not meant to be understood but, like the music of White Shadows, blends with the images. The important thing about the film is the way in which sounds and images are thus

blended and combine to create a

start of the talkie era,

definite

rhythm. Right
in Bifur:

at the

"Dia and to should be fulfil the function sound content logue formerly entrusted to double-exposure and to take its place." With Van

Benjamin Fondane wrote

Dyke

this

is

what happened.

Flaherty, too, to whom we later documentary film Man of Aran, also

its hay and chickens and rabbits.) A similar procedure was fol lowed by the directors of the various nature films which appear now and then, among which the most delightful was Sequoia

a versatile person, has detective films and an enchanting picture, Hide-Out^ including in which a gangster made the discovery of the countryside, with

(Van Dyke,

owed the beautiful poeticmade a similar use of sound. since made all kinds of films,

with

its

wonderful animals and the almost human friendship be

tween a puma and a deer. In White Shadows the right way to make sound films had been indicated, though lightly, if charm not followed for long. ingly. It was

572

The History

of

Motion Pictures

KING VIDOR
In spite of appearances, the experiments which many directors made all tended towards the same solutions. Many an otherwise of using ordinary film indicated a new and appropriate way

sound, as in Eroad<way Melody, where we heard an automobile drive off, though the camera remained on the heroine's face* or in The Wolf of Wall Street, where the roars of a crowd swelled

or diminished as a door opened or closed. Films already had be but a contrast gun to use not a juxtaposition of sight and sound, dozens of were there Of course two. of the or counterpoint we nevertheless but and screened plays photographed operettas,

began to have

faith in the talking film.

it

We

believed in

utterly

when

the director of

The Crowd

and numerous rather ordinary films suddenly in 1929 produced a real masterpiece, one of the four or five most important films ever m&dtHallelujah which made Vidor famous overnight** There is probably too much dialogue in the film, especially at the beginning; this constant fault with talkies was unimportant in view of the general richness and mastery of the whole. To
begin with,
it

achieved pictorial miracles:

the bodies of the

Negroes seemed to give out a soft, rich light which contrasted with the light shimmering on the tufts of cotton* Rhythmically it was also quite remarkable: the slow-moving story of life love and death is interspersed with Negro singing; of violence and drama are alternated with quieter scenes* A film could have given us pictures as beautiful as those of the cotton picking, or of the colored children's bedtime and the saloon, but it could never have conveyed the strong emotion* evoked by the death of the small brother, the most real ever shown on the screen, with its accompaniment of broken sobbing. The mood changes as the Negroes begin to and sing, and gradually attains a sort of savage ecstasy. NCI film could have possessed the terrifying quality of
in the river,
*

when

the colored people adapt Christianity to the

in
fte

Hallelujah was
States. It

United

ran in a Paris theater for

much more warmly admired in France two years.

The Talking Films

laws of their
in

own

people expressed Russians have never expressed it. The love story, so plausible and convincing, and the famous sermon about the two trains

which the

hysteria through a succession of frenzied scenes collective soul of a is as even the

which
film.

leave daily, one for hell and one for heaven, are both fine, but they are mere incidentals in the turbulent swing of the whole

What was more

an
us,

important than

all else

was

that

Vidor made
brought

essential contribution to the

medium when

this film

for the

first

time, silence. Silence attained an emotional value

here for the

first

one heard

silence.

We

time, because it was contrasted with sound: are referring in particular to that extraor

dinary ten minutes at the end where one man follows another through the swamp. One hears hardly anything but, now and
then, the rustle of a branch, the sound of water and, gradually, the labored breathing of the hunted man. In the midst of a
silence

more protracted than the

rest,

a bird utters three cries.

its

The sound film has never come

is
is

closer to

true function of creat

ing a universe subject to the laws of music,

transitory

where everything which

and intangible (a

flickering light, a sigh, a

murmur)

caught for eternity. Vidor, apart from his other very con siderable qualities, performed a service here as great as that of Gance in La Roue, but where La Roue was copied by others
Hallelujah

was an isolated masterpiece without posterity. Vidor never quite attained such heights again. Street Scene was not without interest in spite of revealing
and again amid on which it was based. those protracted conversations through which it attempted to indicate the life of a whole house, Vidor sometimes recaptured
traces of the play

Now

the virtues of Hallelujah. What gave the film its merit was that he treated the film as a composition in which the voices, the faces
of the characters, the glimpse of some wretched old woman sweeping were all blended to convey values less readily discern
ible

because they were profounder than those suggested

by

the

Negroes around their pastor. Street Scene in retrospect is seen to be a very strange transcription of a play into terms which are occasionally purely cinematic, though not very obviously so.

5/4

The History

of Motion Pictures

Later, after making a few disappointing commercial films through which he hoped to obtain independence, Vidor at tempted once more to compete with the Russians in Our Daily Bread. It was rather sermonizing and oversimplified, particularly at the beginning, but once the colony had been organized, the wicked characters reduced to silence and the good ones become better than before, there followed fifteen minutes of pure film. Water bubbled up and coursed through the ditches, giving birth to a whole genesis of plants and men and natural elements which carried all before it in exultant joy. This conclusion of Our Daily Bread, composed as a triumphant fanfare of images and sounds, shows that the man who made Hallelujah had not entirely for

gotten his masterpiece.

DRAMAS AND
Beside Hallelujah

STORIES

all the rest looks dim. Von Sternberg had gone to Germany and made a film on which high hopes were founded, The Blue Angel, bringing back with him Marlene Die trich of the husky voice, magnificent legs and weary glance. He made a film about the Foreign Legion, Morocco^ in which she was lovely and alluring, in company with Gar}'- Cooper and Adolphe Menjou. There followed a succession of deplorable films, each one more lavish and stupider than the others, in which this magnificent creature, laden with feathers and jewels, became a mere clotheshorse. Von Sternberg made the welkin ring with his oaths and disputes as he continually vowed he would have nothing more to do with such a fiend, yet returned to her again and again, losing his skill at film making apparently forever. His imitators, however, were not easily discouraged. Even the end of prohibition did not put a stop to the making of gangster films, in which America continued to exploit an at

mosphere familiar since the days of The Great Train Robbery. There were so many of these that it would be difficult even to list them, and one must admit that a great many were excellent both in construction and in acting. An Armenian, Rouben Mamoulian, in City Streets directed a film constructed with mathe matical precisionslow, pitiless, stifling which suddenly burst

The Talking

Films

5/5

forth into a magnificent automobile chase. People

hoped that fill von Dr. The absurd would he Jekyll and Steinberg's place. made he next that this was not to be the case, Mr. Hyde proved
and Mamoulian's stock
fell

with

a crash.* in

An

ambitious attempt was

made

The Big House,

of which

George Hill directed the English version and Paul Fejos a French one. The attack on the prison with tanks and machine guns was
extremely impressive, but an unfortunate sentimentality spoiled most of this picture. There was not, however, a trace of senti mentality in the masterpiece of gangster films, Scarface, which

we owe

In this brutal fictionized story about are shown as they really are, coldly, as the Al Capone gangsters So was it that in certain States it truthful and brutes. cowards
to

Howard Hawks.

was forbidden exhibition, perhaps for fear of reprisals. For those of us who were in no position to judge of its truthfulness, Scarface seemed a magnificently constructed and splendidly acted film, a triumph of the American style. Its impressive monotony was relieved by human and ineffectual gestures, as when Guido,
Scarface's friend and brother-in-law, is killed by the gangster under the mistaken impression that he has betrayed him. George Raft's last glance as he falls to the floor, gently shaking his head

was one of the most affecting touches in that uncompromising film. This was our first encounter, in France,
to signify "no,"

with an actor of great power, Paul Muni, who now succeeded Bancroft. This sterling actor has not always been successful, be cause of the unskillful direction of some of his pictures; but
/

Fugitive -from a Chain Gang, a film based on actual fact an innocent man, unjustly convicted, who escapes from about him full op prison and is caught again through treachery, gave

Am a

portunity.

was a film of unparalleled brutality, almost as good which the escape of the convicts and the scenes to as Scar-face, an even more natural and striking accent. Then lent of cruelty films featuring James Cagney which showed us were other there
It

somewhat
*

differently the

war between

gangsters and the law,

As

in the case of the authors' estimates of other foreign (to

rectors, criticism has

them) di been based on scattered and often unrepresentative

works.

316

The History

of

Motion Pictures

such as The Public Enemy, TJAV, and so forth. Moreover, it was the gangster films which revealed a personality even more strik ing than that of Muni, when Edward G. Robinson appeared first
in Little C::cs:n\ Little

Glint and, thanks to the director John

Ford, gave,
satirical

Talking, a model of gay a free hand and the Granted of comedy virtuosity. there was that that little opportunity, sturdy and choleric figure
in
full

The Whole Town's

could not do.

looked as though John Ford * were one of the cleverest and one of the most dependable. In the same year as The Whole Town's Talking, with Its deafening chatter and extraordinary misunderstandings, he also gave us The Lost Patrol and The Informer. The first of these, a simple film made without sets and avoiding all facile exoticism, was a finely heroic

Among newcomers

It

picture in praise of man, prey of hostile nature and of human enemies, yet it seemed a trifle deliberate and artificial, smelling somewhat of the workshop. The Informer, on the other hand,

New

reminds one of von Sternberg at his best, as in The Docks of York. That simple tale of shadowy houses and squalid streets, about a man who betrays another for money, Is, despite an element of melodrama and an absurd ending, one of the most powerful talking films yet made. McLaglen gives an astonishing portrayal of a low brute, and we shall not soon forget his tearing down the poster which offers a reward of twenty pounds to any one who will give up his friend, and which seems to pursue him and cling to him as though It were alive. Despite its rather studioair, It was as Impressive as Scarface, or anything in the whole powerful literature redolent of fog and grime and dreari ness which the Germans introduced to the Americans. But if in the early days of the talkies these gangster films were the best that America produced, another vogue which also spread to Europe must be mentioned a special type of period film, with late-Victorian settings and costumes. We now saw opulent creatures like Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. Set in a sim ilar period was Back Street, a somewhat melodramatic affair about a woman who lives on the fringes of society because she

made

*Ford

has been directing films since 1915.

The Talking
is

Films

517

theatrical

in the public eye. It was a bad film, and crammed with dialogue, full of errors of taste, but now and then it succeeded in being effective and it also brought to the fore Irene Dunne, equipped with a peculiar gentleness and convincingness. It was almost the first time one had the impres sion of seeing a real woman on the screen. Eventually this kind of period film brought us in 1934, with George Cukor's help, the extremely successful Little Women, which sanctified the baroque

the mistress of a

man much

talent of Katherine

ing and brought Louisa M. Alcott story, it hardly avoided all the book's faults, for it was overpathetic and overmoralizing, but Cukor made an

Hepburn, launched a new style of hairdresstears to the eyes of thousands. Based on the

extremely effective use of the costumes of a touching period. In reviewing the best of the dramatic films made in America after the introduction of sound, we come to one in which dialogue was of little importance, which introduced no novelties in the use of sound and which disturbingly resembled some of the best
films at the

end of the silent era. It was One Way Passage, which a fine feeling for pictorial narrative and the same re contained
adorned A Woman of Paris, Lonesome and certain German films, and two admirable players, William Powell and Kay Francis. Its story of a condemned gangster and a dying woman, who meet and fall in love during a sea voy one another farewell with a smile when the voy age, who bid have turned into pure melo age ends, could, heaven knows, it evoked a sort of melancholy of the most agreeable drama,

straint

and delicacy

as

yet

not a single moment of bravura in the piece, variety. There was which offers only simple, straightforward images rather in the manner of the Austrian film Liebelei. One wonders, however,

what sound

to it and whether it might not just as really added the films were really silent a been well have picture. Perhaps we as much so not making imagined. progress

COMEDIES

What was the effect in the realm of comedy? may dis miss the innumerable filmed stage comedies and operettas which

We

318
the

The History
new

of

Motion Pictures

invention led to. They brought fame to Maurice Che and Jeanette AlacDonald, paired in The Love Parade. Lubitsch, who directed that sumptuous but inane piece, made several highly profitable pictures of the same kind. In screening Noel Coward's Design for Living, however, he produced some
valier

thing charming and exquisitely humorous, far superior to the play itself, for he avoided the use of extravagant settings and

concentrated instead on small, amusing details which evoked a

genuine bohemian atmosphere. Instead of recording conversa tions he told the plot pictorially, including the past of the prin
cipal characters, the

way

they had met and the whole back

ground of their lives. But how were the old masters of American comedy to adapt themselves to the talkies? Buster Keaton came to grief almost at once. Spite Marriage,, which repeated some of the themes of The Navigator, was rather entertaining, but in Hollywood Revue of i $2$ the unfortunate comedian, surrounded by stars and bab bling women, seemed quite dim and pathetic. What! No Beer?, though Jimmy Durante talked like mad in it, had something of the earlier Keatons: here he was at grips with a beer-making machine that could be worked only by a stuttering man who is prevented from explaining it, and so once again there is a glimpse of his mathematical genius. Unhappily, What! No Beer? was
the exception rather than the rule. Harold Lloyd, on the other hand, took gladly to the talkies and, after Welcome Danger (a repetition of Safety Last), made

two

irresistible pictures, Movie Crazy and The Catspaw: they are perhaps his most satisfactory films. Welcome Danger had cer tain bucolic elements which remind one somewhat of Chaplin.

The high

point of the story

is

a fantastic night spent in a Chinese

bandit's cellar,

where some quite extraordinary effects are pro duced by lighted candles stuck on the back of tortoises which crawl hither and thither, and by Lloyd's mistaking rockets for candles, to which he consequently applies a match. In Movie Crazy the big scenes are those in which Harold makes horrible mistakes while a scene is being shot for the twentieth time, and the one in which he accidentally puts on a magician's costume

The Talking Films

issue rabbits and mice. Not all the gags are firstis a new but there rate, gag ever}- thirty seconds and it is im to withstand this aggregation to which the possible cheery smile

from which

of Harold, always fortunate amid the worst catastrophes, lends undeniable charm.

Chaplin hesitated to make a film and produced nothing for five years before making City Lights, which was really a silent
picture.

when the statue is being unveiled, upon a delightful device: we saw the orator speak Chaplin ing but heard only inarticulate and ridiculous noises. This was rejecting realism with a vengeance in masterly fashion. Other
the beginning,
hit

At

wise, except

when Chaplin swallowed a whistle or had hiccups, used little sound. It was not City Lights Chaplin's best film by it lacks and any means, unity, seeming to be made up of inde pendent segments Charlie as a boxer, Charlie as a street cleaner, Charlie with the millionaire who adores him when he is drunk but fails to recognize him and chases him off when he is in his
all rather labored and ponderous. The emphasis in is for once not on City Lights comedy: the accent is deliberately the love It is story. charming; Charlie is in love with a put on

sober senses

blind flower seller, who thinks that he is a fine gentleman. At the end of the film, after he has contrived to have her cured, she meets him but naturally does not know who he is. Just for fun she gives the poor fellow a flower for his buttonhole. He

gazes at her, and somehow, when she touches his jacket, the girl seems to realize who he is, looks up at him puzzled and disturbed.

He gives her an extraordinary glance in which grief is mingled with joy: the scene ends before we find out what is going to happen or what they say to one another. Chaplin had never gone
so far emotionally as in that closing scene. If the comedy of City Lights is a little heavy, at least the ro

mance does not obtrude.

It

seems to be true that fear of displeas

ing the public and respect for the character he has created have prevented Chaplin at least in films in which he himself appears

from doing

all

that his

own

bitterness

might have dictated.

It

appears that Chaplin, who is constantly trying out this or that, keeps these bits of film and sometimes shows them, though not

$20
publicly. So of his called

The History
it

of

Motion Pictures
little

was that

in 1927

Robert Florey saw a

is

picture

about to kill himself. Charlie sweet life is, but the man, tell him how tries to comes along, without paying any attention, ties a rope round a rock and pre
Suicide.

The

man

it. Now this incident naturally carries Charlie with in the original it but included in and was remade City Lights, in bewilderment, stared a man first rescue. The end with not did out what had burst then, realizing laughing and walked happened, course to drown. Of Charlie off, leaving Chaplin would hardly kill off his main character in a film made for public exhibition. After City Lights he began on another picture, said to be one in which he would not himself appear, a sort of talkie Woman of Paris; but meanwhile he has completed a new comedy rather along the lines of Glair's A Nous la Liberte. It may well be that his career will prove to have been confined to the silent films.

Charlie hurls pares to fix the other end round his own neck. himself upon the man and, in the struggle, gets tied onto the rope instead of the would-be suicide, who hurls the stone into

the water;

it

NEW

COMEDIANS

Neither Buster Keaton nor Lloyd nor Chaplin made any change in their customary characterizations, nor did Fairbanks, who made a modern Mr. Robinson Crusoe and then a rather
cruelly aged Private Life of Don Juan. Two new comedians, Laurel and Hardy, admirable in short comedies and disappoint ing in full-length films, attempted to arouse laughter by familiar

means, but

it

finding fresh

Crackers a
canvases

was others upon whom devolved the necessity for comic inventions. When people saw in Animal professor in a top hat who shot at clocks and used

yet the

by great painters to keep himself warm they protested, Marx Brothers with all their deliberate absurdity were

only leading the films back to the extravagant atmosphere of pre a novelty is often merely the revival of something forgotten. This quartet, who first appeared in Co conuts and grew famous through the fight in the stable in Mon key Business, definitely became the champions of absurdity and

war comedy: what seems

The Talking Films

nonsense in Horse Feathers. Buster Keaton might have fallen from the ceiling into a ladies' tea party, like Chico, but neither Keaton nor Lloyd would ever have exhibited Harpo's calm sav

agery
tirely.

when he None of

use of trick photography so since the days before Max Linder and
is

tasted the telephone and finally devoured it en the other comedians would have so calmly made or of improbability; no one had done

Mack

Sennett.

A certain

needed before one can accept the Marx degree of tolerance wisecracks are insupportable (Harpo Their Brothers wholly. he is the best of them), yet their type and alone does not speak,
of

comedy
is

is

really based

on

a technique of silence.
reality the

What

they

say
deal

mere foolishness, though and with considerable vulgarity.* In

as their

unfortunately they talk a great

Marx Broth

costumes and their antics prove. In Duck ers are clowns, were greatly Soup (these meaningless titles are charming) they for the scene in which two of the comedians in disguise
praised

meet one another and fancy they are looking into a mirror. Peo had forgotten that this was how a Max Linder film began ple and that, for that matter, it can be seen any day in the circus. Another circus trick is the scene in which one of the brothers, turns on the radio and cannot is opening a safe, thinking that he
contrive to turn

it off, much as Chaplin in The Pawnshop could clock. Far superior are those sudden, all too alarm the not stop as when a shell passes the warriors of touches rare imagination, or as when and circumspectly, slowly, knee-high; courteously one of them sets out to make his fortune and, next morning, the

camera opens on

his bedside, beside

which

are his riding boots, a

female slippers and the four horseshoes of his steed. Such pair of and conceits make up for a lot of tomfoolery, for hoary jokes taken to have snobs the whom idols these in flaws the all for
their bosoms.

Other actors and other directors were to push absurdity still a mythical country further. In Million Dollar Legs we entered W. C. Fields is and where sprinters run faster than automobiles W. C. Fields rides same In International House this the
president.
the Marx Brothers' dialogue no better Apparently the French understand films. the of the "meaningless" titles of their than they grasp significance
*

5 22

The History

of

Motion Pictures

a staircase in an autogiro; if he takes a pot shot at a picture of an armored cruiser, that cruiser immediately sinks. Now there was considerable promise in films of this kind, but unfortunately

up

If 1

sort were lost in a flood of dialogue. In a Million only the most tenacious fans could tolerate Fields when he called his plump lady friend "my bird" or

comic inventions of the

Had

"my

chicken." Later on, he was to abandon this sort of thing and find better employment for his talents than in those mingled delights and errors. This leering, elderly man who resembles both Bab
bitt

and the Mr. Micawber

whom
They

performance as a traveling recent films are excellent.

showman

he has portrayed, gave a fine in Poppy; most of his more

raillery, occasionally quite witty and garity of his earlier vehicles. Fields has

are lighthearted affairs full of wholly lacking the vul

greatly changed.

Yet after these little excursions into the regions of insanity the American films generally speaking became more orderly. The
celebrated If I
ingredients,
its

Had
far

was

a Million, a sort of hodgepodge of various from meriting the success it obtained and

has already been forgotten. There were happy things in it, but verbal comedy was tiring, as was also the film about the

Eng

manservant in America, Ruggles of Red Gap, despite that remarkable actor, Charles Laughton. Comedy on the screen can not depend on dialogue alone, though America, like France, has
lish

gradually forgotten this fact. Both seem unable to avoid using dialogue culled from ancient books of jokes, or from almanacs.

ANIMATED CARTOONS
Meanwhile, America had discovered

new

marvels.

Animated
time

cartoons had been popular before, but now for the heard the sound that a mouse makes when it is
the

first

we

caught in a trap,
it

yawn which

a clock gives

when

its

cuckoo wakes

by

strik

ing midnight. Sound in the animated cartoons became quite nonrealistic: a loud noise went with a small movement and a little

one with a big gesture in the most absurd fashion. Pianos bared their teeth and laughed aloud, amorous elephants accompanied their

The Talking Films

love-making by twanging the tresses of their loved ones Mouse had arrived. guitar. Mickey
like a

On the surface, Mickey was just another animal, a sort of mouse with certain doglike traits who walked like a man and was always good-natured. This offspring of Walt Disney's shortly made us aware that an artist was at work. Possibly Disney over does the use of animal jazz and animal songs, as his rival Max Fleischer does too, but when he relates some familiar story or blends into it the most comical inventions and cre fairy tale he ates something truly miraculous. He did not do his best work,
however, until he began making colored films. Then he rediscov ered Melies' secret. The crude and simple colors of old-fashioned
children's

books lend

his films

an

infinite

enchantment.

Some

of

them

are world-famous, such as

The Three

Little Pigs in terror

personally prefer Funny Little Bunnies who the Easter eggs, while the blind rabbits in spectacles plait paint rush baskets, hens lay to a distinct beat, and paintpots are put

of the bad wolf.

We

under each

rainbow to collect the drops that fall. like the superb Pied Piper, where the children are led towards a mountain that opens just wide enough to let them through and give us a glimpse of the land of toys and of eternal holiday. Then the little cripple, always behind the others, halts for a moment on the very threshold before dropping his crutches and running in. It was one of the most adorable things the cinema has ever given us. Noah's Ark, King
stripe of the

More than

all

of them

we

Neptune and a few of the others should be permanently pre served as monuments to this art of Disney's, which promises so

much

for the future.

Before finishing with the American film we must also add a word about the English film, because it is difficult to tell the difference between them and certain films with a definitely Eng
lish

character

made

in America.

The

silent days only intermittently in operation during

English studios had been * and turned

out only relatively mediocre pictures; they reorganized and are

*

That

is,

since 1914. Until then

London

rivaled Paris as a film-producing

center.

324.
destined to

The History

of

Motion Pictures

become increasingly important. The Private Life of Henry VIII, which Alexander Korda directed with Laughton, launched a new wave of historical films conceived not as vast
decorative frescoes but in intimate and even ironic vein. It was
a well-made

and well-acted picture, though

less

valuable than

people imagined; Korda

will in all probability

become one of

the foremost producers and is already making color films. With the exception of The Constant Nymph, an uneven film
its first sequences full of an enchanting freshness, the most notable are the films which extolled the greatness of England.

but in

Cavalcade,

made
is

in

America by Frank Lloyd from a play of

the story of an English family over a period of Coward's, thirty years. Unfortunately films seldom represent the passage of time very adequately, but content themselves with doing up
actors in toupees and white wigs. The first part of Cavalcade, however the departure of the troops for the Boer War and the

funeral procession of Queen Victoria, which is not shown, and the passing of which is indicated only through the expression of the spectators had a quite remarkable dignity. The same blend

of gaiety and heroism was to be found again in Lives of a Bengal Lancer,* in which the officer who praises his country does so with feeling and sincerity but uses the words of his colonel, and
the lancers

who

decide

which of them

shall

undertake a dan

gerous mission do so by betting on a cockroach race. Whatever the faults of these films, they possess a natural bonhomie similar
to the books of Kipling. Having managed to express such senti ments, we may hope for much from the English film in the future.

*
\

Despite the fine films

it

sent us, the

American output on the

whole proved somewhat disappointing. Hallelujah gave us the highest possible hopes, but they were not fulfilled. There has been too much mere talk, there have been too few experiments with the use of sound. Films remained static while conversations were carried on between two or three characters, until even the impression of movement was thrown overboard.
*

Lives of a Bengal Lancer

is

also

an American film.

The Talking Films

As
a result of the bewilderment into
all

525

which the invention of

peculiar things happened. There were all sorts of peculiar practices, all sorts of dodges, and so forth, but this was not all. Even in the quotas, dubbing of actual making films, things much funnier than the screen has

sound threw the producers,

sorts of

were taking place. Films were made by wandering Slavic directors, Germans who spoke no English, Frenchmen who spoke no German, actors whose voices their own mothers could not recognize, singers with tiny voices whose songs were
ever
us

shown

magnified by the microphone, Austrians who assumed Holly wood accents when making French versions of pictures. Just as Elmer Rice has written a satire on the silent films in Purilia, so

Morand has provided us with one on the talkies in France la Doulce. Here we see what becomes of a scenario by Joseph Bedier when it has been rewritten by d'Annunzio, edited by a German schoolmistress, put into dubious French by someone
Paul

newly arrived from the Ukraine and from which all of a sudden it is necessary to remove every "b" which occurs in the dialogue, as one fillets the bones from a fish, because the leading lady from London pronounces them unpleasingly. Such things really do
a commonplace in every country, and happen; they are actually in them generously it was not without if America indulged the laid scene of his satire in France, which, reason that Morand in films as in everything else, has become the concentration camp

of the world.

2.

The French 7i

IF

resisted

America resisted the sound and talking films for years, France them even longer, and the new invention, regarded as a occasion for any number of stratagems, of catastrophe, was the dishonest tricks and dubious schemes. The idea was to delay as would be com long as possible the moment when the producers
talkies. As the public violently refused to accept pelled to make films in foreign languages, of course this moment was imminent.

326
Gaumont
in

The History

of

Motion Pictures

1928 produced UEau du Nil, in which he had date the old system of synchronized phonograph to brought up * which he had already "perfected" before the war. Ev records

eryone

direct Les Trois Masques, based

Hugon was asked to melodrama by Charles Mere which had already been filmed in the silent days. It was
on
a

now

admitted the inevitable: Andre

perfectly dreadful. Stairs creaked like a clap of thunder, glasses

clinking together sounded as though armored giants were in combat, the gurgle of a bottle resembled the noise of a waterfall

and the most absurd dialogue emanated like the crack of doom, not from the lips of the actors, but from the center of the screen. The three masked figures, their vengeance accomplished, went off down a pasteboard street singing "Carnival is dead!" So it was that the talkies came to France. In vain the best writers and best directors besought the pro ducers to be careful: the big French firms were determined that
the talkies should

Rene
done

Glair said,
in

become "the theater of the poor," which, as made pretty poor theater. Was something being
in

did they care, nobody and tariff laws were Censorship strengthened. It would never do for the French public to realize that Les Trois Masques and Henri RousseFs La Nuit Est a Nous were not all that the new invention had produced. The "Blue Angel was banned; so, later on, was Dreigroschenoper; Hallelujah was shelved. Not for two years were we allowed to see those successful early sound

America or

Germany? What

knew anyhow.

films.

After

it

was too

late to

stop the foreign films

coming

in,

quotas

were

dubbing startedthese hideous words speak for themselves. Then the French film hurled itself into adaptations of plays and brought to the screen the whole of modern drama, distorting wherever possible both the characters and their inter

established and

and Francis de prevent anyone from repeat the same mistakes. The commercial film became more ing abysmal
*

few dramatists like Henri Bernstein pretation. Croisset protested, but this did not
See p.
26.

This, of course,

was the method used

in

The

Jazz Singer and

many of the

early

American

talkies.

The Talking Films

than ever.
in the

From this

time on the French film seemed to be typified

director,

work of one

Rene

Clair.

RENE CLAIR
It

may be

admitted that the

les

first

French

talkie

of any real im

Sous portance,

that period, for it haphazard fashion.

Toits de Paris, displayed faults inevitable at made use of music and also of silence in rather

The

introduction of the street singer,

who

keeps the film perfectly static while he sings his lines, was almost obligatory at the time. Clair, however, through the expression on
a better performance), con Prejean's face (and he never gave a trived to keep the action going to degree even through the sing These faults are so slight and so unimportant that even today
ing.

we

can look at Les Toits with the same pleasure we took in it in accompanied by a blind accordion player, sings a delightful popular song which Rene Clair must have had the great
1930. Prejean,

fun in composing. Neither the general public nor the librettists suspected how ironical it was. Around Prejean our old friends
est

group themselves the fat lady sings out of tune, the policeman in plain clothes looks on, the old woman and the lovers gaze at each other. evening comes, the thin clerk takes a foot bath

When
II

in his
in

Henri

dining

room

just as the deceived

husband had done

Chapeau de Faille. Later on during the night we see the im mense concierge buried beneath a comforter automatically turn real life, the ing over to pull the cord. Every detail is based on this realism with if we But life. compare vulgarest incidents of real
that of the settings in German pictures we see that in them the realism was dignified by a loving care for lighting and by a pro

Theirs was the realism of a digious use of the pictorial medium. but Rene Glair's realism is, as before, that of the ballet. He painter; his characters in fancy dress and provides them with the puts at the same time he stylizes them, appropriate accessories, but their outline and leads them into that world which is
simplifies

when we see a procession of clerks, or a peculiarly his. At times, too typical baker's wife, we almost feel that it is life itself which

$2 8
has copied

The History
Rene
Clair, for

of Motion Pictures

against a real artist That is the universe. the with a quite special manner of perceiving how matter No real value of this truly creative worker. great their has created a nor Eisenstein Vidor neither Pabst nor

here

we come up

ability,

King

world of

Chaplin world, created it. Independently of the actors there Rene Clair world.
his

own.

If there is a

it is
is

the actor

who

a quite definite

Clair really been trying simply to tell us a story we should not come upon those sequences that drag, those moments when

Had

are given a series of pictures rather the plot refuses to develop. in Les Deux Timides its technical a as than true narrative, for just discoveries were more important than the whole, so SOILS les Toits

We

introduces the ingenious tours de -force to which Clair was to devote himself right up to the time of Quatorze Juillet. The quar
rel

between Albert and Pola

in pitch darkness

was

genuine in

vention in those early days: images and words no longer ran side by side but intersected one another in a sort of pattern. The mag nificent fight with knives at night near the railway embankment,

with the slow noises of freight trains and mist rising the length of the fence, owes its existence to a love of the medium alone: the main story is forgotten. In none of Rene Glair's films has the lighting been so perfect, and this extraordinary episode is there fore justified. He was much more concerned with beauty than with reality here. The tendency indicated in Les Deux Timides is
continued, for the ballet no longer takes
first place: it becomes Greek tragedy, where one by one the principal characters detach themselves from the group and the

an accompaniment
chorus
is

as in

ever, as witness to the

reduced to the role of commentator. It remains, how drama; and Rene Clair was never to aban don these onlookers, among whom his films had found their orig

inal inspiration.

Le Million affords striking proof of this. In turning again to an adaptation of a play, Clair created the most successful if not the richest of all his pictures. It derives from a whole succession of operettas which had followed Thiele's delightful Drei von der Tankstelle, though Clair was to perfect the formula, whereas Thiele relapsed into machine-made and valueless spectacles. The

The Talking Films

original model, however, provided an opportunity for all the in dications in Entr'acte and Cbafeau de Faille to be developed fully:

the ballet troupe

tumult.

takes possession of the entire stage in joyous Michel and Beatrice's love blends into the gen eral movement, the lovers are now members of the ensemble along with the grocer, the dairywoman, the policemen, the lunatic

now

The

tale of

in running pants, the drunkard, the tenor, the lady singer run after each other in and out of the wings "He
calling,

who
went

that
It is

way," and,

"We

can catch him

as

he comes back along here."

the gayest of Glair's pictures, rich in minor characters con ceived without a trace of exaggeration and seeming, against those luminous backgrounds, as fresh and unruffled as dolls in a shop

window. As

in Le Chapeau de Faille, the whole composition moves forward with appropriate animation, and there is also a similar technical experimentation and a similar tendency to chop the thing up into distinct sequences. Here creative invention has func tioned completely, and we are as infinitely far away from every day life as Entr'acte was. This world of police stations and of the Opera and its backstage life is an exquisite but purely imaginary realm. Even the characters have little real connection with the

story: their

movements

inscribe a sort of
if

cryptogram whose

real

meaning can be guessed

characters in

Le

Million

we who

hold the key to the cipher. Those are fighting over a coat suddenly

take on the appearance of a football team whose play is accom panied by whistles, scrimmages, passing the ball and so forth, as

the tubes in Entr'acte gently rise up to assume the form of the most celebrated Doric columns in antiquity. The madman in pants

belongs to either film indifferently, and Entr'acte key to all Glair's work.

is

clearly the

Or
les

rather

it is

the key to his technique, for the lovers

from Les
Sous

Deux Timides from now on

will be constantly with us. In

Toits a third one appears: Pola hesitates between Albert and Louis as Michel hesitates between Wanda and Beatrice, or as Jean
hesitates

between Anna and

Pola. Delicious emotions

now

suffuse

the marionettes.
bella,

Who could ever forget that first glimpse of Anna-

board arbors

or the lovers' duet in that stage landscape under the card artificial rose as stagehands fill the air with a rain of

33

The History

of

Motion Fictures

huge opera tenor sing out of of Michel and Beatrice sight while the wooing lends which to factitious the they are screaming reality passions at the the picture post for can no Beatrice public. longer resist, card decor itself becomes Michel's even the spec and accomplice
tator falls victim to the atmosphere of make-believe
utilized

abandoned the open air of Les Deux Timides and has returned to the artifice of Le Voyage Imaglnaire^ inventing freely and creating a new form of poetry such as others of his generation and the generation previous, Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, had foreshadowed. The singer and the absurd
petals? Glair has

with unfaltering good gracious and smiling irony.

taste

and garlands, and underlined with the most

Nous nature suffuses the best part of of Glair's most the complete expression unquestionably genius and which a number of cinema theaters consequently sup pressed. Here the subterfuges of the stage have vanished: we see,
la Liberte,

The same gracious good

very thought irony barely possible, excuse for introducing us to this universe, vaguely ninetyish with its bridges of artificial wood like those in the Pare Montsouris and the Buttes-Chaumont, its artificial forests and artificial water
as the
falls. Henri Marchand, subtlest of Glair's lovers, looks around, smil ing like a child in ecstasy. He seems a little clumsier than the others, for Glair knows very well how to interrupt a dream when

though only vaguely, the Luna Park where the workers from factory are strolling. This setting, where Rolla France takes her sweetheart and where Henri Marchand will follow them, is clearly an unreal and enchanted place, a playground for birds that have flown out of picture postcards and figures from a merryOne is reminded of Alice in Wonderland, in which pre go-round. tense and are absurdity presented with such naturalness, for this is the world on the other side of the mirror. Birds speak, flowers are and stuffed birds celluloid flowers. Nowhere sing-but they has the cinema us so created a world as in this brought perfectly and dream innocent some tune from a imaginative inspired by hand organ. The is of unless
the

necessary, and the disillusionment of the unfortunate fellow in this landscape of romance is one of the most delicately bitter mo ments imaginable. The traditional cruelty of the artist, who suffers

The Talking Films

with
his characters

Clair akin to Racine and to Marivaux,

yet enjoys making them suffer, which renders is underlined by the mock

ery of the setting, by all this pasteboard world of simple happi ness. When Henri, standing in the shadow, thinks that the girl
is

smiling at

this old trick

it

did in

him though in reality she is smiling at someone else, borrowed from Chaplin affects us just as deeply as the most famous scenes of The Gold Rush or City Lights.

is rather imperfectly constructed, and it overboth the similarity between the factory and the prison as well as the numerous chases, but it is undoubtedly the film in which Rene Clair put most of himself. Memories of many celebrated such as The Pilgrim, The Gold Rush and City Lights, are pictures, added to the creative qualities of Le Million., to themes repeated from Entr'acte, to atmosphere borrowed from Les Deux Timides or Chapeau de Faille. Yet Clair had never before penetrated so far into the world of pure imagination. By the time we reach the have risen magnificent confusion of the end, he seems actually to above his subject, his characters, his personal experiences and even

A Nous la Liberte

stresses

would be an error to consider that extraordinary scene which the breeze scatters a bagful of bank notes over the heads of the crowd as a mere piece of fertile invention, like that which Le Million. If the mem suddenly suggested the football match in bers of the crowd at the inauguration were simply running after .the bank notes, that would be the end of them: they would vanish here and along with their booty. As it is, they reappear, running
life itself. It

in

there

over the factory without apparent as for order, they thread in and they form skillful dance designs It is good, after the grief of are in fact and out; dancing. they Henri Marchand and the voyage to the land of tinted
all

aim but not without

imaginary

back again in a realm postcards, to be this penultimate scene in With king.

where pastime

is

your only

A Nous

la

Liberte Clair re

news
as

his youth and sings he had in Entr'acte.

hymn in

praise

of pure movement, just

like this ambitious and perhaps badly con impossible not to in film structed which, twice over, Clair so fully expressed him love amid the beauties of in both self, delineating the sorrows of this in and the make-believe landscapes, game which has no other
It is

55-2

motive than

The History of Motion Pictures utilized everything, even his play. He

early novel

Adams,

in this satire

acters escaped
clear, lively

on Americanism. from other films link everything together, and the music of Georges Auric preserves the unity which
tackle after this, unless he completely and basis he had hitherto selected, and

Two

or three minor char

seems so often in danger of being broken.

What was left for Glair to

changed the very form where would the ballet of dancing shapes lead him in the future? There have been those who said that Quatorze Juillet was a sort

of turning back or period of repose in his work. His admirers and friends thought so. I do not feel that they were right. Quatorze Juillet is probably the most ambitious of any of Glair's ventures, with outward ap only in this case instead of concerning himself with inner content. "Nothing could pearances he was concerned Alexandre Arnoux said, "than perfection at first be
simpler
sight,"

fable by La Fontaine." (It simple as writing a think of the classical writers when is extraordinarily difficult not to a member of their family, considering the work of Glair, for he is and makes it easier for us to understand them.) His avoidance of

such

as this: it

is

as

exterior shots, his wish never to surprise or astonish us (and he has traveled far since Entr'acte) enabled him now to make his best-

constructed picture. There are richer things he has done, but none internal unity. Even Le Million was a summing up

having greater of one particular cinematic method only: Quatorze

Juillet

sums

up

all

the

Rene

Glair films.

well be that Glair will be compelled later on to abandon his most noticeable traits and much that lay at the roots both of
It

may

his popularity

and of

his

charm. But in

this film it

seems that he

wanted to perfect a formula, to clear it of extraneous matter, to transmute it into classicism and to avoid all else. With a severity

which must surely have

cost

him

vious technical tricks and set himself

formerly interested us so greatly.

good deal, he avoided all ob none of those problems which There is not one single scene

which

stands out particularly, as the quadrille in Chapeau de Faille, or the fight in Les Toits, or the football match in Le Million, or the lovers' stroll in A Nous all stood out. This film is simple, almost

unadorned,

like certain

German

films

and especially Maedchen

The Talking Films

in

Uniform. The
all

fete here

is

expected

sorts of delightful touches

almost disappointingly brief, for we which his love of garlands

and picture postcards might have suggested, as in the former film. But this fete is merely indicated, with a few charming and brief details. It was the first time he had not permitted details to over burden the main body of the film. The simple, beautiful story develops quietly, smoothly, with infinite discretion, and the end comes without our having been particularly struck by anything,
unless
it is

perhaps the few moments

when

the lunar

M. Irnaque

cleans his revolvers in the dance hall, or the even briefer moments when Annabella weeps while wiping away the tears qf the little

boy who had

fallen

down, or the death of the mother. Nothing

stands out, the film drags a little, all the gestures in it are a trifle overrefined and emphasized. Yet at the same time we are enveloped
in a sort of

harmony which

carries us

back to the joys and

griefs

of adolescence.
the dance of inanimate objects to Quatorze Juillet is a have still not long way, yet this development is a natural one. left the world of the dance. The love troubles of the earlier films

From

We

are essentially choreographic, like those in so

many

folk dances.

Watch M. Imaque

is dancing. Paul Ollivier moves constantly to the rhythm of some unheard music, just as he did in Le Million and A Nous la Liberte. Rene Clair does not need music. His characters are ever ready to take

as

he goes by: he

isn't

walking, he

their places in the dance, the prodigious concierge

and the

mem

bers of the provincial-Parisian family as well as the bistro owner, the taxi driver, the dance-hall managers and cloakroom attendants.
It

almost gives one the impression that he is holding them back, not to break the spell of this forbidding them to dance in order tale where Annabella laughs through her tears. pitiful After Quatorze Juillet Rene Clair abandons Paris Paris, the

Le Dernier Milliardaire was only thing in which he really believes. a disappointment to his admirers, and with some reason. Just quite as after Les Toits, Le Million and A Nous la Liberte took refuge in an imaginary world, so after Quatorze Juillet, Le Dernier Mil liardaire abandoned Paris for burlesque and satire. Unfortunately, because the actors are mediocre and theatrical, this
principally

The History

of Motion Pictures

ambitious farce hardly succeeds in making one laugh. The best things in it are again the dance figures and the two or three comedy

Everybody was struck by the scene where, in this land without money where barter is the rule, a customer in a restau rant pays for his drink with a duck and gets back, as change, two little chickens, and an egg which he leaves as a tip; while the man
inventions.

who

lets his

gun

fall

volvers. Nevertheless, even those

onto the roulette table wins thirty-six re who do not admire the Marx
it

much fuller of movement seems to me that in Le Dernier Milliardaire there is a dryness and overintellectualization which already threatened the earlier films and A Nous la Liberte. There is nothing here about love, unless it is something ridiculous, noth
Brothers must admit that their films are

than Rene

Glair's.

What is more,

ing of that poignancy which gave so

much value formerly to back

time offered us a feast of but and touch is recognizable but his nothing intelligence irony: it sometimes a little. If the future grates brings him back to im worlds and bittersweet music, romance, ballets of loveaginary
ballets alike. Clair this

grounds and to

we shall forgive him. It would be fool what on he may do. put He was the only film man in France whose work displayed both purpose and progress. There is no other such group of films as these, apart from the work of Chaplin, Eisenstein and Pabst. His delicately shaded style with its thin but strong line suggests far more than it actually shows. Clair is one of the very rare directors
making and anxious
ish to try to

lovers

limits

of whom it can be said that their films gain by being seen twice and cannot be understood until that second time, like certain music and poetry.

FAILURE AND PROGRESS

talkies helped Clair to develop, it block for certain other directors. Abel Gance, proved stumbling who virtually ruined all his backers, managed to find money to make Fin du Monde, which he subsequently repudiated. There was little in this grotesque melodrama of the qualities which had the immense mistakes of this director. outweighed Only the mis-

Whereas the advent of the

a

The Talking Films

355

takes remained, because, according to Gance, the film had been savagely cut, but they were undeniably his faults. Afterwards he

sound version of Mater Dolorosa no better than the earlier one, supervised some undistinguished films and seemed to be floun dering helplessly. Finally he had the idea of making a talkie of Napoleon, using bits from his earlier picture: the poverty of the new scenes only reminded us of the tumultuous vitality of the earlier version, of which he had not preserved the best portions. Yet he really hit upon something when he scattered microphones all over the hall so that the sound issued now in front, now be hind, now from one side, mingling with the action and almost compelling the audience to join the Convention in singing the "Marseillaise." The idea was not perfected but it gave us faith in
a
this

made

modern

Ucello, despite his faults.

Jean Renoir showed two or three times that the teaching of the German school had not gone unperceived. From an execrable novel by La Fouchardiere, La Chienne, he made an excellent pic
ture

where a rare pictorial sense came to the rescue of naturalism and where Michel Simon, playing for the first time on the screen

the role of an old man persecuted by his wife, recalled the ad mirable performances he had given with the Russian players. The use of sound, especially the little girl playing wrong notes on the an open window, gave further piano whom one hears through indications of intelligence and of integrity. La Nuit du Carre-four,

based on a novel by Simenon, had one unpardonable fault in a detective film it was incomprehensible. Madame Bovary, alas, was merely a careful and tedious illustration without a trace of creativeness.

However, under the supervision of Marcel Pagnol, Renoir made in Toni a peasant film full of violence and of ability, with a remarkable feeling for nature though also with some very evident
faults.

He

is

has perhaps yet On the other hand,

a painter, a connoisseur of forms and of tones, he is capable. not given us the best of which
it

who

seems that Jacques Feyder has given us of his best more than once: there is much to be hoped from him. Of the films he made in America he prefers not to speak; he re

them. The Unholy Night was a clever detective film, but pudiates neither The Kiss with Greta Garbo nor His Glorious Night (from

The History

of

Motion Pictures

Molnar's Olympid) had much merit. It was on his return to Paris that he found himself again in Le Grand Jeu. On the surface it was simply a French film about the Legion with the customary a love story which might have marching, discontent, cafes, and been dreadful, about a man who thinks that he has found again the woman he once loved, though the singer is darkin a
singer haired and the other one was a blonde.

Out of this rather absurd film. To begin with, an human made a profoundly plot Feyder women were, of course, two The ingenious device was employed.
but Feyder had the excellent notion played by the same actress, of dubbing in a heavy, hoarse voice for the character of the singer, so that the hero's uneasiness at hearing a voice which does not seem to belong to the person it emanates from became really com Le Grand Jeu is one of the few films to have made
prehensible.

use of a

new

idea since talkies

came

in.

This might not have been

plot.

sufficient to

hold our attention but

for a certain vulgar brutality Though the film was overromantic,

which

sustained the interest of the

of seeing real
derfully
silly

we had the impression won a was pitiful creature, people. The poor singer that it was obvious and touching: eventually she

would be deserted by the hero, despite the public's love for happy of truthfulness which always saves a endings. There is rare quality
characters exude a strange atmos Feyder, and his rather vulgar
death. phere of destiny and of came Pension Mimosas next, the story of a woman who has and who, as he grows older, gradually comes to adopted a child feel not the jealousy of a mother but something less admirable. It is not a faultless film but nowhere has the cinema given us a living

human being

so

complex

created here with extraordinary intelligence and the film aims too hard at pleasing the public but

as the character that Franchise Rosay skill. As a whole,

it is impossible to what so pleased us meet real merit of Feyder. the again deny in Crainquebille, the difficulties that beset humanity, the difficulties

We

which the major human sentiments

create.

Even with

the best in

tentions in the world, it is difficult to love that was Le Grand Jeu. It is difficult to be a mother that's Pension Mimosas. Genuine

tragedy

is

born of the antagonism between the grandeur of love,

The Talking Films

537

the grandeur of motherhood and the pettiness of human conduct. Under certain conditions there are people who though pure of heart degrade everything they touch, for, borrowing from theol ogy one of its most mysterious terms, they are lacking in grace. many people realized that the fate of this character, so much admired by the ignorant public, was dictated by this tragic lack?

How

Inevitably as in a Greek tragedy, degradation awaited. It would be well, no doubt, if Feyder freed himself from the influence of these ideas borrowed from the prewar theater, but it is rarely that ideas on subjects like these are provoked by films.

DISCOVERIES

Among newcomers we must mention first the most gifted among them, Jean Vigo, that anarchic and vigorous spirit who died at
the age of twenty-nine after making a film full of bitterness which the censorship banned, Zero de Conduite& work of true merit rich with youthful veracity. Then there was Pierre Chenal, who

attempted to recapture a German atmosphere in La Rue sans Nom, which started off magnificently amid squalor the equal of any thing in Pabst or Junghans, though as a whole it was not a success. Crime et Chdtiment, in excellent taste and cleverly directed, was
really nothing but an exercise in book illustration anything but Dostoevskian in spirit, though well acted by the admirable Harry Baur. Another young man, Marc Allegret, pleased many with his Lac aux Dames a slow-moving, charming film which was too lack full of exquisite photographic images sadly pretty, too slick, and in which a lovely little girl with in movement cinematic ing
y

plump cheeks made her appearance Simone Simon. The most important director to emerge during these last few no means unknown, but years was Julien Duvivier. He was by had as a matter of fact made any number of undistinguished pic tures which placed him definitely among the commercial directors. Then one fine day he made David Golder, not precisely a good film but a clever one, in which Harry Baur created an extraor
characterization recalling dinarily truthful

and even surpassing

Maudits,

anything by Jannings.

Then came Les Cinq Gentlemen

53 8
he produced

The History
first

of Motion Pictures

which made one anxious

to see

what he would do

next,

whereupon

Allo Berlin!

Id

Paris! slightly long-drawn-out

and reminiscent of both Wilhelm Thiele and Rene Clair, but hav it, and then, much more important, Poll de Carotte. Now Poll de Carotfte y which Duvivier had previously made as a silent film, was not, either, exactly what one means by a good film, and the acting in it was* extrernely bad, save for Harry Baur and Robert Lynen, the good-looking little boy with an artificial manner of speaking but enchanting gestures.
ing several excellent and original things in

Though
it

the picture lapsed into melodrama occasionally, though was marred by unimaginative music during the most pathetic

scenes, it contained one really magnificent momentthe marriage of Foil de Carotte and his little five-year-old sweetheart. As Jules Renard had written it, the incident was a vile parody. Duvivier

transformed

it

poetry, as the

from something slightly questionable into bucolic two children wreathed in flowers walked through a

lovely landscape with the retinue of animals following them. Such charm and such fresh air had never emanated from the screen since
Glair's

Les Deux Timides.

Duvivier's other films unfortunately seemed comparatively cutand-dried: Le Petit Roi had little merit; Marie Chapdelaine offered us some pleasing landscapes and actresses from the TheatreFrangais; Golgotha displayed marked ability and a most discon certing lack of faith. La Tete (fun HoTmne, an excellent detective
film,

was preferable to Golgotha. Pott de Carotte itself was to be

also

though

overshadowed by a film which somewhat uneven was so full of variety and of emo
it.

tional force that

compared Marie Epstein. There were people who refused to praise it, and perhaps they were right: the beginning is quite bad, the whole cabaret sequence is thrown in gratuitously with its dull song, and the scene with the drunkard is overstressed. Everybody agreed that the end of the film leaves much to be desired, where there is an effort to repeat the attempted suicide of Maedchen in Uni form. There is also an excess of sentimentality, and a trace of clumsiness here and there. This may aH be true, but there is no

to

it is unique; nothing else done in France can be This was La Maternelle, by Jean Benoit-Levy and

Marx. GrouchO) Harpo and Chlco

La Kermesse Heroique, directed by Jacques Feyder (193

Die Dreigroschenoper, directed by G.

W.

Pctbst

(1931).

The Talking Films

denying that in comparison with the extraordinary vitality, the emotion and the intelligence of this film, its faults are unimpor tant. Compared to the hundred or more children in this film, it is evident that Robert Lynen as Foil de Garotte was only an at tractive child spoiled by the Conservatoire. Little Paulette Elambert in the chief role exhibits what can only be called genius her concentrated passion, her expression, her intelligence and her fire remind us of Ludmilla Pitoeff Even she is less important, how ever, than the swift rhythm which makes this film so delectablejoyous and sad scenes succeed one another with magical simplicity and speed, there is a wealth of both touching and humorous inci dent and we have barely stopped weeping over the death of the little-boy- who-wouldn't-smile before we are laughing at the swal lowing of the penny and the revolt in favor of saving the f abbit's
.

life.

are also those extraordinary faces: the small colored who had eaten rabbit before, the convict's son, little girl, Marie (acted by Paulette Elambert) and almost as childlike as

There

the child

Marie the kindly Rose, played with extraordinary grace, subtlety and humanity by Madeleine Renaud. What might the Russians have made of such a subject? It is a shown us how question worth asking. No doubt they would have education classes and brought happiness to the obligatory evening saw something of the kind in The children at La Maternelle. Road to Life. This primary philosophy would have been set off by quite a degree of fire, of faith. Our French directors have no

We

faith whatsoever. They know perfectly well that in this nice school (for it really is nice) where the teachers love the children, the children will nevertheless continue to be unhappy, and in a sort of way. Even little Marie gets over her great grief,

middling

which of

itself is a bitter

that in this film of

little faith

thought and a true one. I myself regret the bitterness was not more stressed,

though it is sufficiently redolent of despair for us to recognize it, and restraint and discretion are rarely a fault. But I wish that there were no possible room for mistake, that people had been able to realize more clearly the profoundly skeptical and almost nihilistic character of the film, which is also a realistic film, since it resembles life as it actually goes on today in the world.

The History
Here for the
first

of

Motion Futures

time the French film, which previously had

excelled only in fantasy and in interpreting humanity, attained success through simple, straightforward means in a film made for

the masses.

The few

faults in this fine

it

be overlooked, since

and tragic picture can easily that we had seen for a surpasses anything

very long time.

CANNED THEATER
Imagination and artistry were not what the French film public wanted. It might be as well to recall that, long after talking films

were introduced, there was a

serious

argument in which theoreti

cians got very excited over the merits and demerits of various simple ideas which did not possess even the qualities of novelty. Marcel Pagnol, a dramatist who had enjoyed three big successes,
his mind to do something for the films. According to kind of experimentation or research was so much hair him, any The theater, with its painted sets, was doomed to extinc splitting. the cinema was a mere mechanical invention, a printing-works tion,

made up

for the theater, and the future alone would decide whether the directors who had insisted on the autonomy of the film would not

come

to look as absurd as

Gutenberg would have looked had he

invented an art of typography without any concern for the copy ing of texts. In their literal application there is nothing to be upset about in

such theories.

Why

certainly enjoyable to see Louis Jouvet in Knock and in Topaze, though they were not cine matic in the least. Marcel Pagnol photographed Marius and Fanny,
just as much dialogue in the latter as in the original the he said, merely permitted him to change the set film, play:

as well as truly creative films? At least teaching of a few good actors. It was

should there not be films for copying plays they would preserve the

and there was

tings oftener.
teline

He

also

made Le Gendre de M.

Poirier,

and Cour-

Pretieuses Ridicules with the Cornedie Frangaise. Unfortunately, badly acted or ineffectual, they had nothing what ever to do with cinema.

made Les

Pagnol realized

this

and

tried

something

else.

Though he always

The Talking Films

remained faithful to his France some nature films
text,

in Jofroi

he nevertheless attempted to give and in Angele. They were well

worth seeing for the beauty of the landscapes, a certain fresh and hard sensuality, the way in which a horse, a house, a wall or a tree is photographed. Pagnol continued to contend that the most im portant thing in a film is its text and published the scenario of his next film in La Petite Illustration. It was all too evident that the text was without merit. He was responsible for the fact that we
have almost forgotten how relatively unimportant dialogue is in a film. Otherwise, how would it be possible to enjoy films in a language we do not understand, such as Van Dyke's Eskimo? Nev ertheless to this pass was France rapidly coming: it had been for forty years her secret ambition, and right through from the Film
d'Art down to Pagnol the same desire is evident. What France wants on the screen is theater, and bad theater at that. We may well recall what Louis Delluc said: Good films will perhaps be made, but they will be the exception.

In 1935 something quite important happened: the French film industry practically disappeared. Controlled by Americans or crip neither Eclair nor Gaumont was any longer pled by the depression,
of importance. Pathe-Natan, already ruined by a thousand extrava vanished amid an obscure financial scandal: only its gances, finally
films which appear distributing system is left. The few are produced independently. As the history of the United States teaches us that it has always been the independents who have car

French

ried

on the development of the film in opposition to the big will spring from so much evil. perhaps some good

firms,

3.

The Qerman

JPilm

IN

Germany

same hesitations
erful

management

the early days of talking films were marked by the as in America and in France. Ufa, under the pow of Erich Pommer, was chiefly anxious to guard

The History
against competition,

of

Motion Pictures
from the

tried to recall certain directors

United States, compromised with synchronized scores and finally, like the rest of the world, took the final plunge. Almost at the the Germans had the good fortune to produce two
very beginning
successful films,

of the World. The Blue Angel, adapted with considerable freedom by von Heinrich Mann, turned a heavily Sternberg from a poor novel by ironical story into a coarse melodrama. Jannings was rather the atrical as the professor who falls into the clutches of a wicked woman and ends by strangling her while yelling, "Cockle-

The Blue Angel and Melody

up

bad generous proportion of for light by its lively dramatic sense, by an incomparable feeling and shadow (von Sternberg had not yet quite forgotten The
doodle-doo."
Its

taste

was redeemed

Docks

and, beyond all else, by Marlene Dietrich, so with her lovely extraordinarily beautiful in her suggestive undress, voice. her hoarse legs, her cigarette, of

New York}

Melody

mann

Walter Ruttof the World offered no such delights: he had ex the formula here carried through completely
in Berlin.

perimented with
in Bravo:
"It
is

added sound, which

said that

the careful editing of his images he Morand wrote gave the film its real value. Paul
is

To

Ruttmann

a musician.

Had Kfe not been he

could

never have woven into this headlong flight of images the hoot of sirens (I still hear their three mounting notes); the rattle of chains

on the windlass; the screams of mechanical saws; the panting of

railroad engines (notice the six locomotives waiting one behind the other, steaming and puffing, ready to set off round the world)
.

The howling of dervishes, the throb of Negro war-drums, the flat voices of American orators, the thud of wrestling Japanese bodies, the hoarse cries of Arab riders, the lamentations of Jews, the thun
der of waves against rocks, the hammering of engines in the bowels of a liner, the gunfire, the bugle-calls as Ruttrnann orchestrated

them held me and

week."

my

nerve-centers in thrall every evening

of the

last

The

associations in

Melody

World were

at times rather

elementary, but the film opened new vistas of film editing and of screen beauty. Unfortunately these new paths were not followed,

The Talking Films

for that
is

the fate of everyone

who discovers something in this new

art, whether Vidor, Ruttmann or the Marx Brothers. And the rest of the better German films of the period were really not very dif ferent from what they would have been without sound except,

that

is,

for the dialogue.

ADVANCES

talkies a

There were a few directors, however, who found through the means to develop their talent. Fritz Lang was never to

power of The Nibelungen and Metropolis again, though Rocket to the Moon was not uninteresting. It starts off like a By detective film, and the departure of the first interplanetary good rocket is remarkably handled. Thanks to his direction of the crowd and to the admirable Gerda Maurus' acting, we really have the
attain the

impression of taking part in it. The rest of the picture, with its amatory complications on the moon, was altogether ridiculous. The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, a sequel to one of his earlier suc
cesses, was entertaining, rather Caligaresque and well constructed. His M> based roughly on the Diisseldorf murders, was far better, can still hear the and had some magnificently grim things in it. murderer panting when he breaks the penknife with which he is he create trying to pick the lock. Not until Liliom, however, did a film of real worth. It is based on Molnar's beautiful play about

We

With the exception of a well-handled remains ordinary enough until Liliom dies and as village the screen spread before us a lighthearted cends to Heaven. sort of Paris, with clouds and stars and noisy picture-postcard choirs of angels, cherubs escaped from some circus who look rather like mechanical rabbits, and bells, more and more bells as lovely as the best ringing out during this vertiginous ascension
a poor but charming crook.
fair, it

Now

things in Melies.
If

Lang's

work was uneven,

Pabst's robust

and workmanlike
Kameradschaft,

talent enabled

him to accept the

talkies readily.

quite in the silent days. Abandoning psychoanalysis for cinematography,

Quixote, even Atlantide Westfront 1918, Dreigroschenoper, evident. He had never done such good work all make this

Don

The History
he

of

Motion Pictures

now developed only the simplest emotions and states of mind, while at the same time the socialistic tendencies evident in Joyless Street brought him to a concept of the film akin to that of the Rus
he would rival Eisenstein. Westfront i$i8, appearing at about the same time as the American-made All Quiet on the Western Front, almost launched a new wave of war films. Though the American picture gave a greater impression of skill, the actual fighting in it often looked rather theatrical and orderly. Pabst's film was intricate, obscure, sometimes confused and perhaps only really excellent at certain moments, but these moments were extraordinary. Concentrating it entirely on the desolation and asphyxia of war, he presented for light naturalistically, yet with a feeling for composition and which was almost magnificent. ing, in a mood of bitter pessimism One became acutely conscious of the mud, the rnist, the rain shrouding his anonymous heroes and of the deadly yellow cloud of gas creeping over the land like some living creature. Trivas, an
sians.

For

a time

it

seemed

as if

his

excellent pupil of Pabst's, tried later to repeat Westfront 2918 in Man's Land, but despite some excellent photography it was

No

bombastic arid nowise comparable to Pabst's somber and hopeless picture of war.

Kameradschaft, inspired by an actual catastrophe at Courrieres during which German miners went to the rescue of French min can overlook ers, is likewise a striking and provocative film. the melodramatic incident where the old grandfather goes down into the mine to look for his buried grandson. Magnificent and

We

utterly natural things are throughout followed by forced and even disagreeable things. There can be no criticism of the scene in which

the

Germans

in trucks cross the frontier to

is

come

to the rescue of

But a little later a member of the rescue party, wearing a gas mask, makes his way towards one of the Frenchmen, who makes an involuntary movement of terror. It could not be clearer (for this is a film of modern times) that the buried miner momentarily fancies he is back in the war, that the Germans are advancing. It is a gripping moment. Un fortunately, Pabst spoils it completely by going on to add horrible and grotesque superimposed shots to remind us about the war, as
their fellow workers. It

a fine scene.

The Talking Films

if

Pabst, the

Moreover, at the end of the film he is, before anything else, a German. Police come to the mines to re-erect the bars which, in
point.

we had

failed to see the

good

Socialist, reveals that

Treaty.* Despite his ideology, Kameradschaft is nevertheless a striking film. Pabst has never made use of more skillful lighting: all the scenes in the mine are extremely beautiful. Dreigroschenoper was another attempt to make a proletarian film, and when Pabst introduced into this somewhat heavy fantasy his famous procession of beggars he achieved a kind of brutal

this underground world, replace actual frontiers. the bars is affixed a date, "Frontier 1919." In other words, Pabst is not con cerned with frontiers in general but with the Versailles

On

power which was highly

effective,

though lacking the profound

rest contained

significance of the Russian epics.

The

too

songs and was too long, though the scenes of Mackie with the girls in the brothel were colorful, and the shots of misty old-time London with which it opens are very beautiful. A street musician is singing an extraordinary ballad (Kurt WeilTs music did much
to popularize Dreigroschenoper), pointing meanwhile with a stick at which also narrate the crudely painted pictures exploits of

many

Mackie; we glimpse through him the ancestry of the talkies. Like that amazing quadrille in the Moulin Rouge in 1900 which is the one great moment of Atlantide, some invention of the sort con
stantly reminds us that Pabst
is

truly an

artist.

disap pointing. The merits of the film lie elsewhere. It leads one to im agine that someday Pabst may make a film without a plot and without characters, a sort of hymn to the visible world. Each

Quixote, which Pabst made in France; it was received. True enough, the action is constantly inter very badly to rupted permit Chaliapin to sing one of his songs, and the way in which the episodes are loosely strung together is quite

Then came Don

single

admirable, perhaps a little too perfect, but the seerns to caress the sunny villages, the Spanish light priest's hat, the gleaming jars, the grass in which each single blade sparkles,
is

shot in the film

the pebbles in the roadway, the

*

girl asleep in

the straw, with her

Pabst was deeply concerned with frontiers and that was the whole point of this scene which the authors seem to have totally misinterpreted.

The History

of

Motion

Pictures

firm breasts and torn bodice. It is impossible not to respond to such frank and manifest sensuality. This decorative obsession

from its too obvious kinship with painting, and becomes genuinely cinematic. From the moment Don Quixote is caught up by the sails of the windmill the story, which until now has done nothing to move us, suddenly becomes utterly con vincing. Though there is the same care for pictorial composition, now it becomes transformed by emotion and by movement. At the end the books are burned and there is a long, a very long scene during which the screen is filled with the curious flowerlike form which the fire and the burning pages compose together. Slowly
finally escapes
this

striking

the sorrows of

image fades away, vanishes, as Chaliapin's voice sings Don Quixote. It is one of the most genuinely

cinematic things ever achieved on the screen. Thus far has Pabst's love for his craft carried him:
its

by

dint of

technical laws, by honesty, by a passion for composi obeying tion it is possible for a good workman, even if he is not a genius, to attain success, and that is his reward.

OPERETTAS AND VIENNESE FILMS

Films as serious as these were not Pommer, master of the German film
to everyone's taste. Erich industry, realized this and

having pondered the new invention decided that it was first and foremost ideally suited to deal with operetta. There is nothing wrong with this idea. When Wilhelm Thiele directed German,

French and English versions of his Drei von der Tankstelle we were all delighted. This commercial film contained a few
quite
surprises as well as a lot of singingamong them the birdlike charm of Lilian Harvey, the four little notes which announce the arrival

view of

of her automobile, the dance of the furniture-movers, a sprightly life and an exceptional gaiety. The three friends in their
gasoline station

seemed to be the very symbol of carefree youth;

which aroused one's tenderness than this effectively simple operetta which ended up by fun at in the music-hall revue. itself, poking

there has never been a picture

more

We were destined to be flooded with films of the kind, and they

The Talking Films

quickly became insupportable. Drei von der Tankstelle was a stylization of contemporary life, it was too original, so there was a wholesale departure for the artificial paradise of Viennese oper etta. Among so much waste footage there was one film of interest,

extremely lavish but never in bad taste, Eric CharrePs Congress Dances, in which occurred Lilian Harvey's enchanting drive through the market place and the washerwomen, as she sits in her carriage and sings of her happiness. It was a facile enough picture, but an exquisitely enjoyable one.

The

fashion for period films soon

made other

uses of Vienna.

and then Maskerade * attempted to touch our hearts. In the former, Max Ophuls really succeeded in doing so with his delicate, melancholy love story with its prewar costumes, its at mosphere of Imperial Vienna, and an unforgettably lovely sleigh ride in the snow touched with all the magic of youth and of win ter. Here we found no technical innovations but instead a sureness in the narrative, a sort of recitative style which knew exactly how
First Liebelei

to catch one's imagination as well as tell a story. No other film in the Viennese manner, not even Unfinished Symphony nor Maskerade, had the same intoxicating quality. The original

play

by

and we realized then that the play is far subtler, for films always seem to coarsen everything. The point of the play was that it concerned only a light love affair, a Liebelei which only one of the characters takes seriously, whereas on the screen it was a question of mutual Yet the film had its own charm, a sort of fugitive poetry, passion. costumes and settings and an indescribable melancholy. exquisite It showed clearly what makes the cinema distinct from the thea

Arthur Schnitzler was subsequently staged

[in Paris]

ter, since it

constantly links the ephemeral to the eternal.

YOUTH FILMS
fairy godmother of Liebelei, and continued for the to be German film's guardian spirit. This trend was many years affirmed about 1932 by a first-rate picture, Maedchen definitely
in
*

Youth was the

Uniform. Here for the

first

time, if

we

except the experiments

Remade

in

America

as

Escapade.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

of Mme. Germaine Dulac and The Peasant Women of Riazan, we saw the work of a woman film director.* Made by a woman and acted by women and schoolgirls, the film depicts in extremely moving fashion the life of a German girls' boarding school, and achieves a curious perfection. It develops a difficult subject the
excessive affection

which

a too good-looking

young

mistress in

In Leontine Sagan's hands it is spires in the hearts of these girls. treated with restraint, with tact, with a sense of proportion that

contribute no small part of its merit. There is only the barest trace of the German mania for moralizing in the conversation between
the headmistress and the

young

unduly censorious,

it is

difficult

teacher, though, without being not to feel that the former was

wrong in keeping
is

so dangerous a young woman at the school. That what Leontine Sagan thought, and it need not not apparently this ro us worry unduly, borne along as we are by the magic of

mantic piece which makes the filmgoer feel sixteen years old and of wanting to die of quite capable of taking up poetry again or love. The adorable Manuela smiles through her tears; she and all these other children in their impossible uniforms, with their hair
scraped back, transport us to an absurd and miraculous world. They hide photographs of actors in their bureaus, sing ridiculous

on Mademoiselle's birthday they perform Schiller's Don little lisa in a big beard as the friar. Manuela gets more and more worked up: when they decide to expel her from school she wants to die, and goes upstairs saying the Lord's Prayer to herself. Only her little companions can save her from flinging herself into the basement: what a joy to hear their terrified young voices calling "Manuela" all over the house. Tragedy is avoided only by a hair's breadth, but during that one hour we have been shown the very spirit of youth and of tragedy. There are no technical originalities; the film flows along
songs;
Carlos, with

smoothly and simply through a succession of images each one of which is a masterpiece of delicate ingenuity the girls going to bed, the conference in the headmistress' room with the giggling French teacher, the party where Manuela looks so pretty in her

Don Carlos
*

costume, the

visit

of the royal personage which would

all

Dorothy Arzner, Lois Weber, June Mathis had

directed films.

The Talking Films

have delighted Marcel Proust. The whole thing
is

acted

by un

tutored, natural girls who are genuinely convincing, and who compose with total success a study full of utter grace and fresh ness, in which gaiety and sadness are mingled.

wonderfully
fire

Leontine Sagan ventured her Men of Tomorrow, but

later to
it

interpret life at

lacked the

of

Oxford with Maedchen in Uni

were, however, to see the two principal actresses, Hertha form. Thiele and Dorothea Wieck, again, especially in Anna and Elisa
beth, made by Frank Wysbar, an unknown director a far from successful effort, though it indicated to what a marked degree

We

Germany

has ventured to film the most difficult subjects, has

refused to admit that there are limits to what the film can do. It

attempts to treat the case of a little girl who is unconscious that she has the power to perform miracles. He confines himself to
contrasting the tyranny of Dorothea Wieck with the young Hertha Thiele, and once or twice (when the young saint's brother is brought back to life, and when Dorothea is cured) this really achieves the desired effect. This strange, unsuccessful film is one of the most unusual that has ever been attempted. The serious, gentle face of Hertha Thiele and of other fresh,

young German

girls

recur in any number of filmsEight Girls in

a Boat, Reifende Jugend, Musik im Blut, Hermine und die sieben Aufrechten as well as in certain Czech films such as Life at Eight
rather different one about youths in military Kadetten. school, Maybe there is an excess of romanticism in these an even and films, greater insistence on moralizing, but sometimes this moralizing is characteristic of the age of the characters,
een,
is

Reka and the

very must remember something they will lose as they grow older. how at the end of Eight Girls in a Boat, one of the more charming

We

that they hate

group of feminists who sincerely believe completely bowled over when a man ap and a trifle ironical. The is delicious, This quite touching pears. moment the man comes marching along, these girls betray them selves, betray how young they are. So the companions of Manuela, too, will betray themselves someday as is all very right and
of these films, the
little
is

men

are charming because they allow us proper. These films of youth to perceive this fact, constantly to sense the brevity and evanes-

5 jo

The History

of

Motion Pictures

cence of time, the preciousness of each single, fleeting moment while these young girls are still young girls, before the fragile bark of youth gets shipwrecked amid the rocks of family demands, of

human

and of life itself. All this is evident in the ending of Reifende Jugend, and much can be forgiven these films because of their romanticism, because they perpetuate this fleeting moment of bliss granted by the gods and reveal the beauty of human ex
struggles
istence.

Sometimes they attempt to show us more than this: one or two them stand out. Kuhle Wampe, for instance, a study of unem ployment and distress, has certain qualities which remind one of The Joyless Street. Despite certain imperfections it is one of the best German talkies, and makes excellent use of the outdoors, of woods and the love of nature and healthy young bodies, though well aware that all these things are subordinated to the necessities of a world in despair. Kuhle Wampe is a film about Germany be
of
fore Hitler.

Hermine und

die sieben Aujrechten,

on the other

hand,

is

a film about Hitlerian

build a house themselves, national gods they do it with such grave enthusiasm that we be lieve wholeheartedly in the virtues of hard work and of social
reconstruction.

Germany. The young people in it and when their class parades before the

Hermine und

One is not surprised that Herr Goebbels liked die sieben Aujrechten. Finally, to these rather mo

notonously charming pictures must be added an extremely simple and really exquisite oneEmil and the Detectives, with a plot de
rived from a

book for boys and

a cast of

schoolboys

who

give an

astonishingly convincing performance.

NAZI FILMS

When

that the film plays in our

Hitler seized power, he realized the important function modern world. the German film

Now

industry was largely Jewish. When the anti-Semitic crusade was launched, the most famous German directors were gradually driven out. Fritz Lang found himself among them, but left his

wife Thea von Harbou behind him as a hostage. Pabst went to France and then to America. Erich Pommer, even, was exiled.

The Talking Films

There was
establishing

a clean sweep,
itself

and

at the

firmly in foreign countries

same time Ufa succeeded and especially

in
in

France.

Ufa, which had always been subsidized by the German govern ment, by magnates such as Hugo Stinnes or by powerful industrial
firms such as

G. Farben, during recent years had fallen into the hands of the National-Conservative Hugenberg. Hugenberg not
I.

only controlled most of the big German newspapers (he owned sixteen hundred) but also the lion's share of radio and cinema. The Munich firm of Emelka, affiliated with the firm of Phoebus, had offered him strenuous competition, but the depres sion rid him of Emelka, and by the time the Nazis came into power few years previously this firm had pro Ufa was all-powerful. duced a big propaganda film, Behind the German Lines, not seen

more than

in France but destined for the United States. It attempted to dem onstrate pictorially that Germany was not guilty of causing the

World War,

the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty and the suf Germanic people. In Paris the A.C.E., a branch of Ufa, took over the distribution of German films and, more than that, the moment talkies came in also began to make films in
ferings of the

French. It is estimated that one-third of Ufa's income was drawn from France and from Belgium and that it was therefore French money which financed anti-French propaganda films such as Der Schwarze Husar and Die elf Schilhchen Offiziere. particularly violent campaign, and really a perfectly justifiable one against

dubbing, was carried on by Ufa,

who hoped

in this fashion to

dominate the European market

easily

without even having to

bother to make films in French. Hitler placed Goebbels in charge of the film industry, as a
division of the Ministry of Propaganda.

He

created the Reichsfilm-

kammer, one of the seven departments in charge of culture in Germany, and took over the daily film newspaper, Film-Kurier. Moreover, in order to belong to the Filni-Fachschaft, a corporative to join, it became necessary organization which it was compulsory of over four hundred mil A credit descent. one's to prove Aryan
lion francs

was

The

films

made before

allotted to purchase theaters abroad. Hitler came into power and

even those

The History
made
at the

of

Motion Pictures

dis beginning of his dictatorship rather skillfully in them. For instance, F.P.L element the of propaganda guised Does not Answer (in three language versions), a good adventure

film of

Pommer's (he had not yet been exiled), bore the appear ance of a simple straightforward advertisement for Lufthansa and had never ceased to make use its airplanes. Nevertheless, Germany
of the direct propaganda so dear to her during the war and
in

interallied com 1920. During the Occupation of the Rhine the was exhibition films whose mission listed fifty prohibited, begin with Black Shame, which attacked the Negroes, down to

ning

U-p and The Rhine. Other

films of the kind

were made

in France,

like The Dreyfus Affair directed by Richard Oswald. Gradually the propaganda grew more outspoken. It was not merely a ques tion of certain semihistorical films like those made around 1920,

though Jannings in 1935 returned to the screen in Der alte und der jimge Konige, an admirable and skillfully made picture to which there could be no real objection. Nor was it merely a question of films which extolled the prowess of Germany in the past or to
day, like

The End

of the

World or Morgenrot,

so markedly

unamiable towards England. There

appeared propa ganda for the new party, stamped with the new-fashioned ideol ogy, such as Horst Wessel, Blutendes Deutschland and Hitlerjunge

now

defitiite

Quex.

The history of Horst Wessel was

bels forbade
its

extremely complicated. Goeb-

Nazi newspapers announced that it was unworthy of the hero whose life it attempted to recount. Actually the difficulty seems to have revolved around some ob scure quarrel between Goebbels and Goering; not long afterwards the film reappeared severely re-edited and under a new name as Hans Westmar. Its scenario had been written by the mysterious Hans Heinz Ewers, a maniacal anti-Semite. Paul Wegener played
exhibition, the

the evil Bolshevik.

Though the ideology of the film was quite the scenes of the horrors attributed to the Jews summary, though were both brutal and untrue, though technically it was clumsy, nevertheless there was about this film something of the rough vigor
and
stirring
faith of the Russian films of 1925.

So there was, too,

The Talking Films

555

about the film made to the glory (the very dubious glory) of Leo Schlageter, shot by the French in 1923.
Hitlerjunge Quex, an infinitely better film, tells the oft-repeated story of the son of a Communist workman who becomes a Nazi

and

dies for the cause. In his

dying moments he sees the heavens

film, so characteristic

diapered with swastikas. This

of

new Ger

many
it

but seems to be the most important of the recent pictures. In 1935, rather as the Russians with Eisenstein and Dovzhenko
in
its

fervor, has provisionally been

banned

in France,

ultimately discovered "the pacific front of labor" after the war like fervor of the Revolution, so the Germans with a flourish of

trumpets produced a very curious film, dedicated to the glory of

the labor camps. Monotonous but often impressive, Triumph des Willens is a film without a narrative plot, a film of massed crowds

and processions (some of which are magnificently handled) which presumably expresses the climax of mass emotion inspired by Hit ler. Its ideology is opposed to that of Marx but produces a similar
effect.

Goebbels has definitely taken control of the destiny of the Ger

man film. What will be the result? It is impossible to say, as yet. What we must hope is that Germany will not entirely forget what she owes to the Jews and to the Aryans who labored to create her industry. If German films lose their passion for morbidity, so much the better, but it is to be hoped that the films of the future
will retain the best things of Pabst, of Lupu Pick and even of Fritz Lang especially their sense of pictorial composition, their rare must hope that will forget mobile and
plastic qualities.

We

they

neither Variety nor Such Is Life nor Maedchen in Uniform nor what was finest about the product of this country their irre

placeable humanity.

4.

*fhe

Russian 7ilm

THE

derwent no

Soviet film industry because of its peculiar constitution un crisis upon the advent of sound. Very few foreign

The History
films
state

of Motion Pictures

were imported, there was no danger of competition, and this of independence made it possible gradually to replace silent films with sound films exactly as desired and to the public taste.

talkies became a necessity: in Russia they were a from the gods of the Soviet paradise. Physicists and engineers had by now constructed cameras as good as the American ones; and to the production of from one to

Elsewhere the
free gift

two thousand
Year Plan

silent films

annually allowed for under the Five

as

until 1937,

were now added almost

many sound

or

talking pictures. Naturally, the theoreticians set to work immedi ately, the state schools examined the various problems and it is
interesting to reread a manifesto of 1930 signed

by

Eisenstein,

Pudovkin and Alexandrov, who had been Eisenstein's assistant on Potemkin and was to make the film known in America as Moscow
Laughs
in the future.

They

stated:

the spectator. In examining each new discovery from this point of view it is easy to demonstrate that color films and stereoscopic films are relatively of little interest in comparison with the im mense significance of sound.
2. The sound film is a two-edged invention and will probably be used according to the laws of least resistance, which is to say simply to gratify the curiosity of the public. First we shall see the commercial exploitation of that merchandise which is easiest to manufacture and to sell, i. e., of speaking films of those in which the record of the sound will coincide in the most exact and realistic manner with the movement on the screen, and will convey the "illusion" of people speaking, of the sound of ob jects and so on. This first period of sensations will not prejudice the develop ment of the new art, but there will be a terrible second period, which will come with the fading of the first realization of new practical possibilities, and in its place will be established an epoch of automatic utilization for "high cultural dramas" and other photographic performances of a theatrical nature. Utilized in this way, sound will destroy the art of montage.

1. In the future development of the film the only important factors are those calculated to reinforce and to develop the pres ent discoveries about editing, in order to produce an effect on

The Talking Films

555

For every addition of sound to portions of the montage will intensify the portions as such and exaggerate their independent significance, and this will unquestionably be to the detriment of the montage, which produces its effect not by pieces, but, above all, by the conjunction of pieces. the 3. Only utilization of sound in counterpoint relation to
piece of visual montage affords and perfecting the montage.

new

possibilities

of developing

its

first experiments 'with sound must be directed towards pronounced noncoincidence with the visual images. This method of attack only will produce the requisite sensa tion, which will lead in course of time to the creation of a new orchestral counterpoint of sight images and sound images.*

The

This theory of visual counterpoint was shortly illustrated by in Life Is Beautiful (The Story of a Simple Case), which took as its subject the crisis undergone by one household during the civil war. He aimed at making a highly stylized sound film in which he used not real sounds but imaginary sounds destined to

Pudovkin

a mother suggest audibly the thoughts of the characters.! Thus, mourns the loss of her son, a big strapping fellow who has long since attained manhood, but instead of letting us hear her sobs,

Pudovkin conceived the idea of letting us hear the voice of a child in order to suggest by direct means that the man she mourns is
still

leans out of a carriage

a "little child" for the mother. In another scene a woman window to bid farewell to her husband.

some Suddenly she remembers that she has forgotten to tell him it is. What we hear is the noise what remember cannot but thing, of the train, quicker and quicker, though actually the train is still sound is only the symbol of her anxiety. Un stationary and the as one might have foreseen, experiments and aspirations of happily, this kind were gradually abandoned by the Russians, as they were them from the start. The by everyone else who had not neglected
films history of the Soviet talking of its silent films.
is

much

less

glorious than that

paratus

* Close Up, III, No. 4 (October 1928), pp. 10-13. tThis was Pudovkin's aim, but due to the quality of Soviet sound ap at this early stage, the film was released silently.

The History

of

Motion Pictures

FROM SILENCE TO SOUND

Just as before, the impetuous Dziga Vertov led the way. In Enthusiasm (The Symphony of the Don-Basin} he mixed an ac companiment of traditional music, the magnificent Russian folk music, with sounds, and especially the sound of machines. Sound with him was seldom disassociated from imagery, certainly not in the richest parts of Enthusiasm, but incorporated with it. As al ways with this Delluc of the Russian cinema, his theories were much better than his practice, though he really contributed some
ideas in 1930. Fedorov in
tains

House of Death and Yutkevich

attempted to follow his indications but

tried to

Golden Moun made the mistake

in

the sound film music as an they compose original accompaniment. In Rapt, for instance, a French film by Kirsanov, storm music was added to pictures of a storm irrespective of the fact that, contrary to general belief, the two arts are incommunicable.* Visually a storm is necessarily realistic, while storm music is necessarily not, and there can be no real unity. Like the Germans, the Russians were reluctant to abandon the use of a musical accompaniment
it is almost always useless and, when the characters actually seems musical accompani speak, definitely distracting and false. ment was used in The Road to Life by Nikolai Ekk, who recalled

often committed

by musicians when approaching

though

memories of the great days of the silent film. This picture about the reclamation of stray children was uneven and at times as
as a

boring of the drama, the revolt of the children, the raid on the brothel by these young champions of virtue, was worth very much. What one remembers is the smile of the ringleader, and the charms of Russian faith and charity. Lit

Sunday-school

lesson.

None

Mustapha is sent to fetch provisions: will he come back or will he run away with the money? This was exciting. Mustapha re turns, triumphant, with the provisions, and what is more, he also
tle

brings a sausage
*

a stolen one.

That was genuinely

delightful;

entirely divorced

Although Kirsanov was born Russian, his work, all done from the development of the Soviet film.

in France,

was

The Talking Films

so

357

installing of the children in the old convent, and the deeply touching ceremony of the locomotive's arrival at the end, bearing on its cowcatcher the body of Mustapha, who had given
his life to the building of the line.

was the

lyricism,

Here was the old, familiar social which the introduction of sound had neither increased

nor diminished.
Patriots (Okraina), which came later, was a sort of proletarian Cavalcade the prewar period, the war, the Revolution. Semi-

symbolic figures pass the soldier, the profiteer, the patriot, the well-behaved prisoner, the workman. Parts of it, especially the war scenes and the romance between the prisoner and the girl

from the
however,

village,
it

were both forceful and charming. As a whole,

Some

disappointing. of the directors had abandoned the Soviet paradise for re

capitalist purgatories.

was

munerative

Ozep made

Karamazov abroad

we

quite ordinary. Then one day had seen a rather undistinguished (we little talkie of his, full of songs and leaves and springtime, called Romance Sentimentale *) had gone to take a job in the United States. Removed from the Russian atmosphere, what would he do?

which was rather confused and

learned that Eisenstein

EISENSTEIN

The tale of the difficulties he had with the American firm for which he worked soon echoed round the world. Like Griffith and von Stroheim, he had ruined his backers, he had produced a film could never be shown anywhere, from sixty miles long which which adroit specialists had managed to edit a reel or so which he solemnly repudiated. Finally we saw a mutilated version of the film in Thunder Over Mexico. No question about it, here was a Potemkin had displayed no less talent masterpiece. The director of
in a

country than he had displayed in the U.S.S.R. evident that the subject matter of this film is stamped with the Bolshevik genius for propaganda gentle and virtuous Indians are oppressed by pitiless white men. Except during the last three
capitalist
It is
*

having

This was made in France by the Eisenstein group, Eisenstein himself little to do with its making.

3 $8

The History

of Motion Pictures

minutes of the film, when a proletarian revolution breaks out, the absurd theme does not really bother one. The adventures of Sebastian, the charming Indian who is the victim of greedy Span iards, might have taken place anywhere actually have taken place.

Every colonization has

on its conscience, and what to seem con individualized happens to Sebastian is sufficiently the essential is not thing. What is im vincing. That, however, the of is the photography of these plastic perfection
similar crimes

portant

do not seem to be inanimate, these temples, these stones which scene so funereal an aspect, Mexican lend the fleshy plants which
in

which man and nature

are perfectly in accord.

How theatrical,

how melodramatic Lawrence's Plumed Serpent seems beside this all else, how far such a film, over gifted Russian's work! Beyond burdened as it is with beauty, carries us from filmed dramas.
a wordless film with musical ac to the silent technique out back companiment, which But at the same time it also us. had delivered of which Hallelujah autonomous the to carries us back reality of cinematography. what has been cut out of this pic of the Tormented by thought
is

We are quite aware that this

carries us

ture,
it

everybody has regarded Thunder Over Mexico as though were not truly a film, but a collection of stills. This is a pro found injustice. The ideal thing would be to own this film, as one owns a book, so that its construction and its rhythm could
be examined in
detail.

We

only signalize the brief instant

us the

when

Eisenstein, having just

shown

monuments

of

Pre-Colum

bian Mexico, then attempts to provide a rapid and bold synthesis of Mexico today, choosing only the most familiar elements, al most the cliches of that romantic landa bullfight, beautiful
in mantillas fanning themselves and smiling, monks more hideous than those of Ribera, a grave in which a bunch of flowers lies beside a skull. Each one of these images is of a prodigious

women

and sensual sharpness, boldness and

color. Looking at the texture of the materials, the plaited straw, one has the impression of having touched them, just as in a painting of Manet's or in Pabst's Don Quixote. All these images, each so beautiful in itself,

vanish and reappear the senoritas smile at the skull, the gloomy monks seem to be watching the bull ring in the mounting ere-

The Talking Films

scendo of a composition like music which is one of the purest things we have ever seen in the cinema.* Many others could be quoted, such as the death of the wounded men among the dying and torn cacti, the hunt, the ghastly and almost unbearable sights which give birth to the whole genius of Spain, not through imitation but through kin here ship of inspiration. Here is Berruguette and his auto-da-fes, when the young girl arrives in her jingling trap is Goya and his cartoons, here at almost every instant are Zurbaran, Valdes, Leal
Ribera. When Sebastian is being tortured against of stormy skies between two half-naked com background is so with bound striking as to ropes, the resemblance panions

and above
a

all

be overwhelming.
It is

the

memory

the peculiar quality of this novel, new-born art to evoke will not repeat here of such names as these.

We

that the film stands at the crossroads

ing.
it:

between music and paint

After Thunder Over Mexico

it is

Pabst's

it is not necessary to repeat obvious. Eisenstein's plastic qualities are not isolated as often are; they are combined in conformity to the

rhythm. This, despite anything that

may

be

said, is significant.

DRAMAS AND COMEDIES

film,

While Thunder Over Mexico carried us back to the silent what was happening to the orthodox sound film in the U.S.S.R.? Some quite extraordinary things were taking place: the directors were heeding a popular demand for adaptations of the great Russian classics, among which they looked to find some condemnation of the bourgeoisie. These films were well made and well acted in the tradition of the Russian theater Thunder
Storm, after Ostrovski, Judas Golovlev (House of Greed), after Saltikov-Shchedrin, and of course fetersburg Nights, after Dos toevskibut one sought in vain for any glimmer of the former
artistry.

Curious praise for a film which Eisenstein regards as a travesty of his and which from the context is being judged here largely from stills which bear no correspondence to any image in the film such, for in stance, as the skull.
intentions

360

The History

of

Motion Pictures
of a festival or a celebration,

Now and then, upon the occasion

as Chapayev, in which propaganda films were still is woman a there is an admirable scene where taught to handle woman a machine gun (all of a sudden this peasant smiles, nods and Three of her head and bursts into a torrent words), Songs About Lenin, in which the memory of the father of the Revolu tion is extolled in an heroic manner, and the story of his life is related by simple people, each telling what he did for them in the accent of his own province or craft and composing a sym phony which is incomprehensible to foreigners, but which might well produce valuable results. But Chapayev and Three Songs

made, such

are rare items in the bulk of production. Today the neonationalism of the Russians goes so far as to exalt the past of the holy

land of the Czars, and the big film for 1936 is to be Peter the First, which can hardly be very proletarian but which one hopes
will be extremely Russian. It is a pity that the Russians

demanded romance, for much

it is

of

Moscow

Latighs is ing and flirting in the worst style of

theless, it
is

unbearable since

hodgepodge of sing

German

novelties.

of Mr. O. F., is about an was extremely heavy. The soldiers maneuver imaginary person)

among The Czar Wants to Sleep German comedy, The Thirty Trunks

these errors that

we have

operettas. Never to seek some genuine (which, like an excellent

ing in front of the Czarist Kremlin, however, moved like mario little later nettes to a delicious little tune played on the fife.

Gulliver, a film with propagandist tendencies, though likewise heavy, contained some charming sets; there were pleas

The

New

ing elements in this puppet Metropolis. Realistic comedy was abandoned in favor of a puppet play in the spirit of an animated

cartoon in which
this
faults, its

humor was intended

its

to

become

fanciful

but
its

was no more than

indicated. Alexandrov's film, despite

interminable romances, its overemphasized heaviness, much was effects, better, and if about half of Moscow Laughs could be cut we should have a sort of masterpiece. It would be

a masterpiece in

which

thirty years of film

making were summed

up

in a bold synthesis.

Marx

unquestionably something of the Brothers and of Chaplin and Lloyd in Moscow Laughs.
is

There

The Talking Films

There
is

361
of Congress

a walk to music which might have

It also

come out

Dances.

A shepherd

and delightful love of destruc battles which evoke the great days of 1915 with tion, pitched Max the first Linder, Fatty, Chaplin comedies and those of Mack Sennett. Here and there one is even reminded of Rene Glair. What is even more extraordinary, there is real imagination, too.
displays a childish

mistaken for a celebrated musicianthat's pure farce. his pipe, and lo and behold, his flock appears. The cow puts her nose in the powder box on the dressing table, the sheep lies down like a rug on the floor, the sucking pig arranges
is

But he plays

himself on a bed of parsley and herbs, oxen in pairs drink cham pagne nose to nose out of the ice bucket and guzzle water out of the fish bowl. Here was a frenzy of absurdity such as had

A little while before we had seen birds sitting on telegraph wires like notes of music on staves. The shepherd and all of a sudden plays the tune which their little bodies make, one of them flies up an octave and becomes a high note. Here we join hands with Melies and the films of 1900 with their in genuous illustrations, their side-show fantasy and their inventive fecundity. At the end, when the musicians want to rehearse their music without bothering the neighbors, they rent a hearse and walk singing behind it, knowing that no one will venture to in terfere with them. This grotesque scene reminds us of both Melies and of Entfacte. Each time the cinema takes on new life shall we always meet with this vehicle coming to bury what is outworn and prepare for a new order of things?
never been seen.

5.

'World Industry

FILMS

shown all over the world today. The and Russia have maintained un France States, Germany, the very first days or at least either from interrupted production since 1914. Other countries where production formerly flour ished but afterwards declined, have also begun to make films
are

made

as well as

United

again.

362

The History

of

Motion Pictures

ITALIAN FILMS
already saw, had virtually come to of Lenin and of the U.S.S.R. a standstill in 1925. how to Mussolini soon suggested important the cinema was, both

Production in

Italy,

as

we

The example

socially

and

culturally.

Once Fascism had been

firmly estab

lished, the studios in Turin and Milan, almost shut

down

or only

producing very sporadically, were reopened. At first they con centrated on dubbing films, particularly French films. That is still a major activity in Italy. At the same time, however, they also began actually producing. Carmine Gallone, back home failed to avoid all the faults of again, directed Casta Diva, which the older Italian product. Camerini on the other hand turned out an amusing, rather casual comedy somewhat in the manner of Rene Clair, entitled What Fools Men Are! Then followed some
historical films,

such

as

but slightly
Italy

stiff,

based on a scenario

The Hundred Days, historically correct by Mussolini himself.

was naturally anxious to provide a Fascist counterpart of Potemkin and Triumph des Willens. Black Shirts, celebrat ing the march on Rome, and The Old Guard thereupon ap peared as monuments to national pride and the Fascist reconstruc tion. Neither of them possesses the turbulent beauty of the Russian films; both of them contain too much dialogue and both of them seem almost too restrained, too smooth, too anxious to
avoid the emphasis of the older Italian pictures. This is particu larly true of The Old Guard. This simple story contains some
scenes of village life, though the director's desire to scrupulous provide us with beautiful compositions some how defeats its own ends his pictures are so beautiful that one
striking

comedy

becomes bored by them, though the end of the film

is

fine.

The

concluding scenes show the men of the village leaving to join the militia on the march to Rome. see only the profiles and the helmets of these men as climb the trucks. The head into they

We

lights give out a small, pale

beam

in the rising

heard but the slow throb of the engines, interrupted then by the distant crowing of a cock. This and
parture
is

dawn. Nothing is now and

silent de chilly with the road stretchsingularly impressive, long, pale

The Talking Films

363

ing out under the gray of a hesitant dawn no songs, no triumph, no glory only some tracks on their way to the city, and the
leader's

printed in big type like an advertisement for patent can still look forward with considerable hope, medicine. film this suggests, to Italy's providing us with its own epic of

name

We

modern

life

and endeavor.

THE NORDIC COUNTRIES

Sweden, another country of which little had been heard lately, never entirely ceased producing films. Men of Varmland, a countrified affair overburdened with trills and music, pleasantly somehow suggested that the old originality had been lost. Its landscapes no longer emanated that national emotion which swept through the films of Seastrom and Stiller, and there were no in novations in the use of sound in this straightforward transcrip
tion of opera. What is important, however, is that a new outburst of activity had hit Sweden, Denmark and Norway and that Fin
land, a newcomer, had also started to make films. It is difficult to see how these countries with such restricted populations can afford to make talking films. Take the case of Holland, with a

million Dutch-speaking people, which population of only eight nevertheless does not prevent it from making talkies, or from era having its own Hollywood. Towards the close of the silent

Holland had produced

new

director of real ability, Joris Ivens,

Bridge and the even better Rainz simple docu extreme photographic perfection and pos achieved that mentary sessed a rhythm the equal of Germany's best pictures. Moreover, Ivens has since made a remarkably daring and impressive film,

who made The

New Earth,

though censorship did

its

best to ruin

it.

AND

ASIA,
is

TOO
supplies

land and

As seems natural enough, it Denmark with most

all

Germany which
is

Hol
its

of their films and takes into

significant,

embrace

the Central European cinemas. It

how

ever, that studios

have been opened in Bohemia and in Austria

The History
as

of

Motion Pictures

which have never now are before beginning to do so. gone in for film production the field. entered both have Greece and Rumania Perhaps some have we as these to see allowed too, lately been day we shall be
well as in

Hungary and

in Poland. Countries

allowed to see Czech films and those English films which so

films. seriously rival the American of 1935 roughly four hundred newsix months first During the in the United films were exhibited States, of which 133 were

foreign-made 44 German; 26 English; 24 Spanish; 16 French; 10 Russian; 7 Hungarian; 3 Swedish; 2 Polish and i Italian. The spread of film production, which alone can counteract the monopoly now held by the United States, is undoubtedly destined to succeed less rapidly than it could have done in the This need not be silent days, because of the language difficulty.

an absolute impediment, and before long there is little question that every country will have its own national production. It is to be hoped that by that time the various quota laws and import restrictions will have been adapted to permit of our seeing them.

know virtually nothing of the Asiatic film, though every aware that Japan produces an immense number of pictures and, throughout the Pacific, offers the United States the keenest competition. From the little we have seen and from what re
one
is

We

turning travelers
distinct types.

tell us, it

appears that Japanese films are of

two

are the purely national films, which bring to the screen national legends and old heroic dramas. Impeded

There

by

a highly stylized and traditional manner of acting, these seem, nevertheless, to be of great documentary value, and might ul timately give rise to an entirely new kind of film. There are

very different films which are actually a free translation of the American films, with violent plots full of fights and chases, produced with that amazing genius for imitation that the Japa
also the

nese have always possessed, and displaying undeniable cleverness. If the figures are accurate, in 1929 Japan produced 780 films,

whereas America produced 800. In 1933, out of the 2,100 films produced throughout the world, America only produced 510 as against Japan's 750. Some of the biggest Japanese firms produce as many as ten feature pictures a month.

The Talking Films

Since 1930 the cinema has been largely taken over
gandists.

by propa

Nazi and

Fascist films are

Hitlerjunge

Quex

cordially in Japan. scored a tremendous success there. It is not

welcomed

surprising that, in a country where eighty-five per cent of the films shown are home-produced, the producers should attempt to
imitate the films of those

consciousness.

European countries which

films

exalt race
recall the

number of

have undertaken to

ancient Japanese virtues and to extol the deeds of the Japanese armies in China. Some of these were based on actual newsreels,
Soldier. One of them outthe The Wife of Lieutenant Yanoy, made Japanese Japanesed in 1931, in which the heroine commits hara-kiri in order that her

such

as

Three Heroes and Yamada the

peacefully off to war without any This family responsibilities. actually had occurred, however, and Montherlant has written a beautiful account of it. Firms like Sotsikou, Mikadzou, Sinko are flourishing; famous

lieutenant-husband

may go

actors like
as the

outshine the greatest American stars. Nakano very pattern of sailors in The Pacific, as a lieutenant in The Parade of Manchuria, is eternally brave and ever the patriot. Other films, which depict the feudal life of the ancient samurai

Nakano

in

which hara-kiri plays an ever-important part, extol those self same virtues. The Japanese learnt much from American tech and heroic chases enliven these historical nique: sword fighting
reconstructions. Just like the more modern films, they too seek to preserve Japan from the contagions of the Occident and to
restore
tions
it

to the true spirit of the fatherland. Influential organiza

and the press attempt to keep this spirit alive within the films are an instrument industry. As in Russia or in Germany, of government. It seems regrettable that we do not know more
about
all this.

But the Japanese are not the only people to love films. Shrewd businessmen armed with anything but the best type of equip ment bore down long ago on China, on India and the Archi is far more film production in India and in Cey pelagoes. There lon than is generally realized. Henri Michaux, author of Un Certain Plume, found the Indian films intensely interesting ac to his own account. They appear to be based on ancient
cording

366

The History

of Motion Pictures

legends, badly photographed and extremely slow-moving. It does not sound as though European filmgoers would take much pleasure in them. According to Michaux the films of northern India display a most extraordinarily persistent, wanton and in

nate cruelty and brutality. This same writer found the films of southern India, populated by Bengalis (and we must remember
that Tagore is a Bengali), entirely different in character. Despite their extreme slowness, they reveal the same gentleness, the same love of nature and of mankind as characterize the poetry of this

region. Whatever the films of this land of monstrous legends and interminable dramas may be, one would like to see them.

PART SEVEN
"years of film

_N I
day was
celebrated. This seemed a

1935 the film's fortieth birth good moment to examine the

little-known history of this still embryonic art. From Arrival of a Train to Kermesse Herdique, from The Great Train Robbery to The Informer, from A Bicycle Ride in
the Forest to
far.

gressed discovered

of the Will the motion picture has pro to the general opinion, however, it quickly Contrary

Triumph

its

own
in

particular vocabulary and technique;

its

real

becoming an independent art. difficulty It is usually regarded as having found its true identity at about the time of the war. Chaplin's comedies and Sjostrom's BergEjvind lend authority to this opinion. It was in Berg-Ejvind that we first became aware of the beauty of its moving images; of the slow, flexible and vivid manner in which it presents charac
ters

was

and makes them materialize gradually from shadows; the im it endows forms and all the common de portance with which tails of everyday life, whether inanimate objects or animals or the human face. It was Berg-Ejvind that made us conscious of the of the medium and of the emotional content peculiar vocabulary in light and shade, where truth and beauty of its
compositions

become one. It was at that

that the basic nature of the screen period, in fact, was discovered; that is to say, the peculiar manner of seeing, of scenes which differentiates it from the feeling and of presenting Swedes that the autonomous char the theater. It was

through

acter of the film

was

established.

history of the prewar discovery of many of

film
its

in looking back over the that credit for the perceive, too, be attributed to must original qualities

Yet

we

the earliest

workers

in the field.

There seems to be reason for

achievements of this art, its richest believing that the highest most and creations, have lain in the realms of comedy;
vigorous

and that the most fertile, the most profound work of explora tion was possibly that done in the earliest French comedies and Max Linder, by the first French directors and in
especially

particular

by by

Melies.

The

experiments they made, though frag369

The History
mentary,
ill

of Motion Pictures
ill

co-ordinated and

developed, served
Griffith built

as

the founda

tion for Griffith's work.

When up tem of devices on which he relied for years to come, he reaped the benefit of what they had already done. He had the merit of of developing them in a manner definitely unifying them and The Swedes enriched this opposed to a theatrical technique. intellectual it new method by contributing to preoccupations un
a complete sys

known

to Griffith

lighting,

a love of the external world, a passion for a care for the image itself all of which conspired to

from mere promise to near-mastery. carry the film on From then on the film, in the hands of the best directors, aban doned its futile rivalry with the theater. The fatal years of mis the part of the Film d'Art and of the Italians guided efforts on were relegated to the past. By the end of the war, there had come
into existence a cinema

which proclaimed
its

its

own

independence

and proceeded to undertake

own

creative tasks.

followed a great period, a period of immense hopes. Outside the regular channels of production, individual experimen

Then

tation
its

was carried on from which the cinematographic art drew most precious treasures. Favorable financial conditions made

it

without regard for public possible to undertake experiments There came into existence fruitful. tast e the results were always of a limited fol the had who of workers a small

body lowingsuch
sufficiently

support

had recently rendered so great a service to lit erature and the drama. These men were boldly ambitious and
as

to en independent of the current accepted technique art the new extend to new a dow it with copious, vocabulary, tell of business it. The closed to had seemed which into realms

formed the basic material for all ing a story in pictures, which of to a films, was relegated secondary importance by some place trans was made these men. of sufficiently flexible to Technique late into images, or into a sequence of images, subtle or delicate the exclusive domain of concepts which previously had been musicians and poets. In this pioneering movement the
painters,

French had the good fortune to win a place in the vanguard, side by side with the Russians, the Swedes and the Germans. Only this had been lacking to give the film true dignity. Be-

Forty Years of Film

tween 1920 and 1928 the most
considering
it

377
paid
it

critical

spirits

an

art

equal in promise to any.

The

film

homage, was in

vogue among the

intellectuals during this period. Similar ex citement prevailed throughout the fertile era of the silent film. For some no doubt it was a snobbish enthusiasm, but for others this act of recognition had the value of a sincere act of faith in

the destiny of a

newcomer among

the

arts.

on the whole body of film production. More rapidly than one would have believed technical discoveries possible, peculiar to the work of the advance
guard were adopted generally, and the very directors

These experiments had

a definite influence

who had

made

a reputation

by

films

munerative, were hired by stance it is true that they afterwards ran into obstacles which completely changed the character of their work, but neverthe less there was a constant exchange between the advance

daring, rather than re the producers. In more than one in

which were

guard and the commercial film makers, and it seemed obvious that such continual penetration must benefit regular production.

When the

talkies

came

in,

inclined the film towards

of the two opposed tendencies which commerce on the one hand and at

tempted to bear it successfully through the early stages of its artistic development on the other, the second seemed to be pre vailing. The new discovery was to change all that. It so radically affected the cost of production that independent effort now be

came
it

quite impossible. In adding language difficulties to the film, gave the advantage to the great Anglo-Saxon firms, which had

always exhibited a marked dislike of innovations. Corning as it did at the same time as the world depression, it induced pro ducers to concentrate on what would certainly make money, and to sacrifice quality to box office. It also revealed that, what ever illusions we may have to the contrary, the film was a slave

and to the vulgarest of influences, whose dominance was suddenly made apparent by these new circumstances. In less than one year everything that had given the film its claim to be an art was thrown overboard. Once more the film was tied to
to fashion

the coattails of the theater.

It is also

true that the film conceals within itself a hidden ele-

372

The History

of

Motion Pictures

ment whose effects have not been fully realized. More than any other medium, it appears to be inextricably linked with the ideas and the ideals of its time and, moreover, with those which are
the vulgarest, the most superficial, the most ephemeral. that most films are dressed in contemporary costume
cruelly outdated within a

The

fact
is

which

weakness readily cut to the of a coat or Nor is this confined merely apparent. the length of a dress. In order to catch the popular fancy, films also limit themselves to sentimental and emotional fashions which become old-fashioned quite as rapidly, and just as hideously be tray the year which gave them birth. Better than any fashion magazine or illustrated weekly, films provide us with an abiding record of their period. Future historians will no longer have to seek in novels and magazines for those characteristic details, often so hard to discover, which stamp each decade with its own peculiar quality. They will only have to look through a group of box-office successes, and will need little critical judgment for their work. There they will see our pitiful gestures, our current mannerisms, our false sentiments an unmistakable reflection of the poverty of our era. In its way every film is a documentary film. Film actors, al most all of whom are undistinguished and lacking in resources,
this

few years makes

rarely inject into their characterizations any personal truth. They are, all of them, little but "a girl of 1930," "a gigolo of 1923,"

"a society man of 1913," "an officer of 1916" and represent even these restricted types with a superficiality which amounts to
caricature, like that of a fashion plate.

Thus they bear

witness

to our social modality as unmistakably as a drawing room of 1927, a house of 1900 or an automobile of 1915 bears witness to the decor and spirit of a period. The basic material of the films
themselves, their plots and the manner in which these are out, the very color of the sentiments they reveal, are

worked uncon

sciously dated too, so that it is as impossible to mistake the film sentiments of 1920 for those of 1930 as it would be to mistake a model Ford for a Packard straight eight. For this very rea as one son, try may, there is always something shallow and even

grotesque about film psychology.

Forty Years of Film

one
that a film attacks the subtler or finer emotions * sure to detect a fairly distinctly commercial flavor, a sort of compromise with current popular fashion or, at the best, a
is

The moment

coating of some equally objectionable modern sauce. The on which the bulk of films are based bear a close

plots relationship to the stories printed in daily newspapers; emotionally they are

about

as true to life as the

films destined for the small cinemas

popular magazines. Between the cheap and the superfilms intended

for the big theaters there is really, all said and done, a difference more of skillful only production and more care for details. The
inspiration in both
is

equally vulgar in

all

but a very few ex

ceptions.

majority of films made between 1918 and 1929 a rather ingenious system was often adopted. It consisted in borrowing from the experimental films in order thereby to disguise an un derlying worthlessness. It all worked very simply. The producer himself or his assistants retain absolute control over the scenario
In the

and the main outlines. It is they who control the main thread of the film and whatever ingredients are deemed necessary for the sacred task of "pleasing the public." For the director, who has
little

best solution

choice between agreeing with them or getting out, the is usually a compromise. He accepts the general but eliminates as many as possible of the worst groundwork
stupidities.
sistants, often

Upon such a compromise the men whose taste and talent

few
illusions,

director and his as

are

but

who

entertain

beyond question attempt to create a film in which

technical brilliance and certain original ideas will assure success with the public. Thus the big firms profitably diverted to their
uses the discoveries

made by such

directors as

worked independ

ently or for something more than mere money. This had the unhappy effect of causing people to confuse the
really individual

work of artists working with limited resources and those commercial films which borrowed the methods and sometimes the collaboration of these artists. The commercial film became tainted with "art" to such a degree that it was impossible
*

On

the

Motion Pictures"

this topic, too, Dr. Erwin Panofsky's article "Style and Medium in in Transition No. 26, 1937 is extremely revealing.

The History
to
tell

of

Motion Pictures
arts

where

sincere

encouragement of the

ended and shrewd

business instincts began. The critics, eager to applaud where they could, only added to this confusion. Everyone admitted that the film experienced certain difficulties when confronted with psy r ere best over these difficulties chological problems, and that looked. formed the habit of not being too critical about

People From closing something which was probably very important. their eyes to these extremely evident failings, they then pro ceeded to hail as masterpieces all sorts of films which, though
well enough made, lacked precisely those qualities that a master
piece must possess.

The willingness of the public not to demand too much of the film during the silent era created a general tendency to exag gerate the potentialities of the medium and to overestimate its
Only when dialogue was added did it be necessary frankly to face its deficiencies. Even if the first talkies had been as good as the last silent films, they would still have been a giveaway. What really happened was something far more serious. It became all too apparent that the spoken word
actual achievements.

come

is

medium, and that it revealed in all its frightfulness the mediocrity which silence had hitherto disguised. Had one
a formidable

time they might have on the contrary, the ideas period, of the producers alone and unimpeded found expression. There is little point in saying more. Itinerant carpet vendors, strange men from Poland and Rumania, adventurers of every sort who had already gained partial control of the cinema now made matters worse by methods which would have endangered the future of any industry and which orientated the whole of pro
or
gifted artists
at that

two

come along
at that

found a remedy, but

duction, but particularly that of France, towards a permanent mediocrity. This aspect of film history has been referred to be
are to regard the film as an independent art and trace its gradual evolution we must never lose sight of the fact that it has so far been primarily an industry, and often the basest
fore; if

we

of

them

all.

Forty Years of Film

THE MUSIC OF IMAGES

375

that arise from this false situation may be, to take thought and, in concluding a study necessary in which we have traced the slow evolution of this art-industry from a peep show, to consider what it may bring us in the future

Incurable as the

ills

it is

now

and on what, in spite of everything, its value and its magic lie. This is no place to outline an aesthetic of the film, for every art by its very development traces out its own aesthetic, and
the

works of

any

discussion of

art themselves are infinitely more valuable them can be. In the output of the cinema

than

dur

has seemed to possess ing the past forty years, everything that the characteristics of a work of art has exhibited one of two

tendenciesone of which
erties of

is

to accentuate the

most

realistic

prop

the photographic image, the other to escape as far as

it

possible

To

from reality. escape from reality and give

a figurative interpretation

sometimes poetic, sometimes comic or fantastic this was the direction along which Melies impelled the budding film. In this he differed from his contemporaries. Influenced no doubt by
circumstances as well as by his own instinctive preferences, rather than by any calculated plan, he inclined the film towards the
unlikeliest impossibilities.

He made

us realize that this

form of

entertainment, since

created in secret and remotely, is thus What of nurturing irreality and make-believe. peculiarly capable to do, can be done and set before for men it is impossible The film sets no limits on the imagination of its their
it is

eyes.

and the most rigid laws can be upset by it with im of utter freedom was limited only by the punity. This realm bounds of imagination. Yet Melies shared the predilection com mon to most pioneers for the bizarre rather than for the impres sive. The unreal world which he created differed little from that of stage spectacle and illusion. Later on others were to follow this same path, within the limitations imposed by the development of the film industry and which this entailed. So Caligari and the other the new
creator,

obligations

37 6
fantastic

The History
German
films

of Motion Pictures
into existence. In France this tend

came

ency best adapted itself to the requirements of public and of he began producers alike in the work of Rene Clair.

When

with Entr'acte, Clair clearly displayed

his desire to achieve the

purest fantasy, to create a sort of visual poetry. When he after wards made use of plot or narrative he also made free use of

the director's right to interpret

them according

to his

own pe

expressive fancy. In the simplest and most con ventional plots, he sets into motion characters which might have stepped out of a family photo album, real human beings to whom,

culiar vision, to interpose between reality and himself tinted spec tacles which lend it an unexpected and personal aspect,

of

his individual

mood and

however, some skillful touch has added the old-fashioned or awk ward or romantic look they will have acquired in a faded snap shot twenty years hence. We are far from unreality, because
these characters, and the backgrounds they inhabit, are pictures

of something actual; yet they form part of an interpreted or

transfigured reality, idealized as memory can idealize it by pre serving the exact details, while utterly changing the general im

pression and atmosphere. He had abandoned the desire to apply the film's resources to free fantasy, but created instead a new

aspect of the world in some subtle fashion which often makes us think of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, though it is less labored and careful. He discovered a penetrating and photo

graphic vision of the world, which

vision furnished

is

the exact antithesis of the

by

"artistic"

that

it

liberates the film

from

photography. reality, but

We
it

can hardly say

certainly subjects

reality to respectful obedience.

method was markedly different and followed a much His interpretation was based on the creation of a simpler character so palpably free from the common necessities that it created round itself a new and different reality, unlike that of
Chaplin's
line.

the everyday world. Once you admit the existence of this char acter, there is no question of expecting him to adapt his be havior to common, human logic. Chaplin's films are,

more than any

is

perhaps independent of reality. This because they stem from pantomime and not from a careful
others, completely

Forty

Yean

of Film

imitation of the theater. Their origins He in a singularly abstract and imaginative interpretation of human impulses and gestures. The world in which Chaplin dwells can, if necessary, limit itself to the purely figurative world in which a dancer mimes. That
explains

why

Chaplin avoids dialogue, which has no place in his

technique.
Chaplin's influence on the other comedians has been sufficiently strong to stamp all their work with a similar distaste for reality, though in this they followed him timidly and only because it made things easier for them. As comedians had

to gain

they

by surrounding themselves with

mosphere: both Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd availed them selves of it but without much real imagination. Actually the most interesting experiments along this line occurred in the cycle of "absurd" films that made the Marx Brothers and W. C.
Fields

everything crazy sort of at

seemed for a moment appeared as if comedy were taking on a new lease on life. Violent and tumultuous fantasy broke every known custom and even threat ened the usual pious adherence to a more or less consistent plot. Confusion reared its head; fancy spread its wing. For a brief moment it seemed probable that comedy was about to join hands with the animated cartoons in joyous liberty, that brilliant and ludicrous inventions were going to free men and animals alike
first
it

world-famous.

When these

from

laws save those imposed by the director. Films, we become like jazz music, gags will fancied, explode like rockets amid a veritable festival of in which all the ingenuity
all

will

riches of the circus, the cock and bull fight, the municipal parade, music-hall farce and acrobatics will unite.
It

was, after

all,

only a

flash in the

pan.

We

soon realized that

comedy was only a framework for the multiple and individual stunts of the Marx Brothers, and that Fields' in coherence arose rather from an overabundance of material than from any intention to break with tradition. There was something to be learned, nevertheless, from the appearance of these clowns on the scene. It pretty well demon
this

new type

of

strated that the public is only too delighted to follow those who offer it fantasy, fresh and effective conceits, even if mixed with

The History
wishing that the film,

of

Motion Pictures

At heart, the public is always and especially the film comedy, would rid itself of its bonds. Admirable instrument though the film is for overthrowing reality and drowning it in folly, it has never been used for the purpose except timidly. Anything can be shown on the screen: but all they have shown us is the same familiar story
other elements of debatable merit.

highly significant success of Walt the of sufficient proof homage which the masses will Disney always render to creative imagination, to powerful and unstint

over again.
is

The continued and

ing inventiveness. There may, there must, someday be films which will make brilliant and masterly use of unreality and im

Was

welcome them enthusiastically. end that the most intelligent and most successful attempts of the first few decades of the cinema were directed, though confusedly and under the various compulsions imposed by commercial necessity? The contrary trend can also claim to have produced some equally important films. The Soviet Union had produced pic tures of a realistic order so powerful and so well balanced that they inclined one to the opinion, at first, that theirs was the only true approach. Their success was all the more disconcerting be cause there was no question here of the, work of any particular director, but of the style of an entirely national output which differentiates it immediately from anything that has come out of any other European country, or from America. Germany and Czechoslovakia, two countries which may have had some in fluence on the Soviet films, also produced realistic films whose sincerity and power placed them in the forefront of contempo rary productions. This distinct group of films does exist and has
agination: the public
it
is

sure to

not towards

this

exhibited such incontestable superiority that only with difficulty can one prevent oneself from regarding it as the source of all
sincere strivings after beauty. In this connection

we must

not

forget the origins of this school

Ejvind.

among

the Swedes and in Berg-

Has
teristic

the

opposed

currents,

development of the film been confined, then, to two two irreducible methods of approach charac

of

two

different

creative

temperaments?

Certainly

it

Forty Years of Film would be impossible honestly

to regard the

work

of Eisenstein

and that of Chaplin as springing from the same inspiration or having the same point of view. The film is a medium of expres sion to both of them, but their methods of using it are different. Yet we must not overstress this difference; there is much in com mon between the realistic school's approach to the medium and the manner in which the imaginative school weaves far fantasy
out of moving images.
Eisenstein brings the Czar's troops marching so chanically and grimly down the steps at Odessa he knows

When

me
very

well that actually they did not keep this cynical and lordly rhythm. He is well aware that the revolt at Odessa did not
us.

actually take the form of the huge, austere composition he shows His realism goes to the extent of using as actors people who

had actually taken part in the real event, but it also permits him to invent when he composes and arranges the images which are to form his visual symphony. Realism carried to the utmost point
in every photographic detail is relegated to a place of secondary importance in the actual conception of the film and in its final
editing.

There

is

because the

artist

no such thing as absolute realism in any imposes form on his material, and because

art,

this

precisely his creative work. In the film more than else the creative man is he who submits strict where, reality to the laws of his own vision. Eisenstein is not the servant of
is

form

but

organizer. He even organizes preconceives his film and afterwards

its

reality,

it

twice over

first

when he
it

when he

orchestrates

dur

ing the editing period, blending fragments of reality together and arranging them in a certain order. Here reality, or the bits of
reality, is like the frozen words that Pantagruel encountered. true creator, be it Chaplin or Clair or Eisenstein, must make them undergo a process of transmutation. Epic transmutation in the

case of Eisenstein comes in the long run to the same thing as the fanciful transmutations of Clair or the comic transmutations

of Chaplin. All three of them are men who work with little pieces of photographic images. All of them have to start with a certain of the world which they wish to bring into interpretation being,

and to photograph according to

this

interpretation. Afterwards,

380

The History

of Motion Pictures

have a meaningless copy, mere photography, a total absence of style. As in any other art, style is everything in a film, which is to say the individual creation expressed according to the in dividual type. None of the innovations which the cinema has had to undergo since 1929, nor those which still await it, will, we
think,

we

this selfsame thing, they detect the hidden laws that govern the construction of a film, which they apply no doubt according to their own instincts but which they all pos sess, like some inner feeling for the music of images. Despite appearances, the old, naturalistic definition is illustrated nowhere better than in films art is nature seen through a temperament. It is the temperament which is all-important. Where it is lacking

while making

make

us change that opinion.

Editorial Postscript

1935-1938

.HE HI motion picture is so much reflects its inconstant moods and of life, parcel contemporary part so closely and draws so immediate and superficial a response from it, that any attempt to weigh and classify current productions ac
curately is almost impossible. It is true, of course, that any current evaluation of contemporary novels and plays, also, provides an unreliable measure of their permanent worth. But a lapse of several

years
its

is

essential before

place in the

any film can be "seen" properly, or assigned main stream of production. The most cursory

was doubtless natural

survey of the history of the art-industry at least proves this. It in 1916 that Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Macbeth should have been regarded as correct" "archaeologically a worthy and momentous undertaking, but films of a very different and much vulgar er nature being made by Mack Sennett at the same time proved, as we can now see, to be working a richer vein. The Phantom of the Opera and The Lost World, two "big" films of than did Potem1925, made it a less memorable year in retrospect a far keener and entertain kin and The Last Laugh. already

We

more

Happened One Night, A Day Races and Black Legion than of Midsmmmer-Nighfs Dream, which the future may come to consider as flat and unrewarding as the equally sincere and equally misdirected efforts of the Film d'Art, long ago, to elevate the motion picture. In any attempt to bring up-to-date this lively but controversial it follows, therefore, that a plain record of facts and of
affectionate recollection of It
at the

history events would be

tation to
script
is,

more in place than theory or criticism. The temp comment on the text that immediately precedes this post
silence.
last

Brasillach's history I

MM. Bardeche's and found myself, frankly, in almost total dis and particularly with their evaluation of agreement with them
In translating the

however, too great to be borne in

few chapters of

American films. In reviewing, for instance, the last of the silent so highly, one seeks in vain for the ele pictures which they praise ments which their memory (for I think it can only be memory) cherishes. The Docks of New York and Underworld were really
383

The History

of Motion Pictures

not so stupendously good as they fancy, though even at the time they appeared these two pictures had an exotic air and a bravado of toughness, as well as a fine but conscious photographic gloss, which combined to make them enjoyed abroad to a degree out of propor
tion to their merit.

The

equally at fault. Historically

survey of the American talking film seems to me, 'likewise, The Assassination of the Due de Guise

was an important film, though a bad one, and this their book ap of The Jazz Singer is minimized, preciates. But the importance it was also of the utmost account though historically. It is perhaps
inevitable that the language barrier should confuse critics in countries when any account of the talking film comes into
tion. Certainly it is very difficult to understand the authors' thusiasm for a film like One other Passage on
all

ques

en

Way

any

grounds.

What

is

more important, however,

is

their inference that in

some

sort of

way the best days of cinematography were over by 1930, and that the films of today cannot compare with those of the previ
ous decade. Actual examination of the product suggests no such conclusion. There are many filmgoers who will always recall the ipio's with particular affection, but this need not blind them to the fact that little real justification can be found for the subtitles on which at that time the medium so largely depended for its expres sion. Spoken dialogue at its worst can hardly be a worse evil. Actually, a really vital medium such as the film can absorb (and
its history has absorbed) all sorts of apparently ex traneous elements, of which in 1930 sound still appeared to be one. Yet we must remember that from the time of Edison's earliest ex

throughout

periments, on through the films of the Paris Exposition of 1900,

mechanically reproduced sound and dialogue had constantly been on the verge of acceptance as an integral part of motion pictures.
It is difficult to reject the suspicion that the sad state into which the French film industry had fallen at the time this book was writ ten may account to a very large extent for the pessimistic note on

which the authors

closed.

broken over the French

Happily a new wave of activity has since studios; and this alone might excuse a more

cheerful outlook today. During the past three years, as often during the previous forty,

Editorial Postscript: 1935-1938

the film has been declared moribund and also said to be still in its infancy, while audiences in increasing numbers have gathered in cinemas and there enjoyed themselves. The film has
heavily upon the stage biography, history and musical comedy as well as upon contemporary occurrences, but in all of its products it has inevitably continued to reflect contemporary judgments and opin ions and it has also created much that is spontaneous and original American-made films continue to be shown all over the world,

meanwhile continued, and fiction, upon

everywhere

as before, to

draw

wood for signs of talent. Well-intentioned groups have endeavored to improve or reform the film on any of a hundred grounds and other equally well-intentioned groups have attempted to suppress its freedom of expression and exhibition.
Color films have grown more numerous and more pleasing. Pop its new form in skillful fashion by the Disneys in their Silly Symphonies and later in their Mickey Mouse films, color has been adopted more and more other and
ularized in
is

though under some difficulties and against considerable opposition! Some two hundred foreign films have been imported annually into America, a few with success, and all of them eyed sharply by Holly

frequently by producers, discussed endlessly by critics and filmgoers. Russia made use of it in the not-wholly-admirable Nightingale^ Little Night ingale: England contributed Wings of the Morning with France's own Annabella, who has since been to The

today

imported

Hollywood.

manner

in

which color
it

conscious of
in films as

used has continued to make us unduly sometimes, as a slightly distracting presence, even
is

relatively restrained as Marlene Dietrich's Boyer's languid Garden of Allah. Nevertheless today rived at a point when somehow we rniss its
films, particularly in

we

and Charles have ar

Dwarfs any other terms: for in this, as in their short subjects, the Dis neys with their free and imaginative use of color continue to lead the way. The public was slow to unnatural accept the
in

landscape shots, granted in others, as in A Star Is Born. It would be quite impossible to conceive of the enchanting Sno<w White and the Seven

and take

it

presence in certain almost wholly for

apparently

and of all living movement on the screen when motion pictures first appeared forty-odd years ago. It is posgait

appearance of

human

The History
sible that in the

of

Motion Pictures

end we may come to correct our opinion as to the the world about us, through the same medium. colors of at the moment that film stars no indications are some There
longer rank quite so high in importance, in relation to the other a film is composed, as formerly they did. ingredients of which have favorites disappeared, others have sacrificed a deal Many old
of their popularity: new figures have, generally speaking, failed to excite the frenzied admiration provoked by their predecessors.

Many actors and

work and
would

less in their fan-mail:

actresses are obviously taking more pride in their several highly paid stars

today

rather interpret an interesting role than continue the vapid tradition of beauty and banality which at one time seemed to be im posed on the screen's favorites. More importance is being attached
in

instances to plot and to a cinematic kind of plot-develop than to the provision of "star-vehicles." Directors are once ment more being publicized: some of them have apparently won the full

many

right to self-expression, for there are a dozen directors today well known to the public who possess so individual a style that it is easy to recognize their handiwork from internal evidence alone.

Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Koster, Fritz Lang, Mervyn LeRoy and W. S. Van Dyke are among them, though it is true that in the language of the industry Capra and Hitchcock would be described as producer-directors, and that the hand of David Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn or Darryl Zanuck is as a rule also clearly evident in the pictures they produce, although they do not profess to "direct" them. So was the touch of the late Irving Thalberg, whose death in 1936 was such a loss to the American industry. It

would seem,

in any case, somewhat of an advantage that larger and larger numbers of the public are inclined to go to see a film because it is about an interesting subject or made by an interesting

director, rather than for the reason that

it

stars this

or that person

alityespecially since experience over a period of many years has clearly indicated that a film actor is largely what his producer or his director makes him.

The American film industry continues to produce ever longer and costlier films many pictures released during the past two years have been advertised as costing two million dollars or more. It is

Editorial Postscript: 1935-1938

all cases that "every nickel shows," for the cost of a film has never at any time been commensurate with its merit, and along with this high expenditure there have also been films which cost

not true in

relatively little

reward.

None has

and nevertheless very rightly reaped a substantial ever earned so huge a profit, of course, as D. W.

Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

in public taste which has been evident in the increased popularity of non-fiction, of biography, autobiography and books about "real" life of the past or present, has also expressed itself to some extent in the world of motion pictures. There has lately been an unusual number of biographical films of an unsensational and

The trend

agreeably unroinantic variety The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola, Rembrandt, Chapayev* They have come from various parts of the world. Other films have reproduced historical
events, usually minor ones, in straightforward fashion and, while not intending to instruct, have (despite some wrong emphasis and stupid compromises) agreeably reflected a graver and more intelli gent approach to fact than in the past was customarily regarded as
tive in nature,

either acceptable or profitable. Yet other films, primarily imagina have nevertheless touched, almost boldly at times, on

profound social importance such as hitherto the screen eschewed films about lynching, or usually prison reform, or hous
topics of
ing.

America has meanwhile seen the

hearted
pictures

rise

of a

new

type of light-

comedy

of a rather novel kind, in the whole succession of

stemming from It Happened One Night and The Thin Man. Here a compound of slapstick and chase, of light social com

edy and pleasantly colloquial dialogue has been blended with a shrewd and salty acceptance of human nature as it is, rather than as make-believe would have it be. Pictures like Nothing Sacred and their kind have reintroduced a breezy and characteristically American element that is as much to the taste 'of the day as Mack Bennett's diversions were a couple of decades ago.

much in the air. In Amer new liveliness to the jaded of The firm effected this revivi become. had newsreels that our thing
Discussion about films of fact has been
ica

The March

Time

has brought a

fication in part

by a sharply journalistic approach to

current events,

388

The History

of

Motion Pictures

and in part by a return to the methods of Melies and other "news" makers of the early days for (just as Melies filmed the coronation of Edward VII in his greenhouse, and Amet created a naval dis aster in a bathtub) what The March of Time's cameras cannot re-enacted for them in their suitably record on the spot they have somewhat a if and so studios, lively confusing view of provide the world about us. Since the advent of sound, feature-length travel and documen tary pictures produced commercially have been less evident than formerly. Instead, several governments have seized upon this facet
of cinematography in order to set before their peoples a glimpse of government undertakings, and explain in some part upon what
activities the ruling

power

is

spending the national wealth

at

its

has followed suit, more particularly in the disposal. Big business British Isles where government control of radio has prevented the

major

industries

from seeking
it is

to build

up good- will over the

air.

What results may accrue from this only a rash commentator would
hazard to predict:
remarkable, however, that

many

talented in

dividuals in several countries

who, otherwise, would presumably

have been diverted into journalistic channels, have as a consequence entered the ranks of film production. Their influence is already considerable, and may become greater than we now realize. It has often been said that it is not the function of the motion" picture to preach or to instruct or to spread opinion, but merely to enter tain and distract. Actually, even while entertaining, the motion cannot also and help preaching picture instructing and spreading and few will that it therefore be well, in cases deny opinion, may where it is frankly and openly intending to do so, that it should employ alert and intelligent minds to direct its undertaking. MM. Bardeche and Brasillach have regretted the decreased activity among amateur or experimental cinematographers during recent years. What has apparently happened is that the experimen talists have been drawn into the field of documentary propaganda. That was the road Vigo had taken in France before his untimely death. The Frenchman Cavalcanti in England, the German Rutttnann in Italy, the Dutchman Ivens on his to besides
trip

Spain,

Grierson and Rotha in England and the promising young

men

Editorial Postscript: 1935-1938

along with them, have
all

389

been concerned with training the peculiar of the eye motion-picture camera on actual problems of the world
of today. Highly significant, I believe, of this response of the motion picture to the public demand for reality are the two short pictures made for the American government by Pare Lorentz The Plow That Broke the Plains and The Riverfor they have be gun to do what the film industry of the greatest film-producing country had never quite succeeded in doing. They have begun to set before the Americans in non-romantic and therefore impressive fashion a glimpse of their own historical wealth with its full com plement of grandeur and tragedy and hope.

Curiously enough, the U.S.S.R., which first made us alive to the peculiar propensity of the film for this kind of production, has
lately

film industry

seemed to be borrowing a leaf, in turn, from the American and to have turned to a Hollywood-struck romantical vein. Of Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov we hear no more: or they have sent us no films these last years. Films
like Peter the First are hardly a substitute. Very recently, we learnt of considerable changes within the industry there, of charges of past extravagance, and of a new order of things to come.

Repressive influences have been at work, as ever, throughout the world industry. Censorship the film has known from its earli
it was children and and very simple people enjoyed popularized the movies, there has always been a tendency to protect simple people and children from them. The indictment of the gangster films, which was followed by an attack on the Mae West films and had the ef fect of modifying even the behavior and appearance of some of

est

days. It

is

curious to reflect that although

who

first

the animal characters in the Disney cartoons, proved (as censorship

sometimes can) to be a blessing in

creative wits,

disguise.

Opposition sharpens

and the necessity to avoid what would distress in fluential if restricted numbers of persons, led to the discovery on the part of the film makers of newer and livelier ways of provid ing entertainment for the vast public which might perhaps grow accustomed to do without much, but hardly to give up its movies.
Since the general public has little occasion to compare the qual and sound-reproduction in current films ity of sound-recording

The History

of

Motion

Pictures

with that of films made some years ago, it has not been fully realized how considerable an improvement has been achieved in this direc tion. The best films of 1937, as compared with those of 1933, are
in this respect as superior as electrically recorded phonograph rec ords are to the now generally obsolete variety of disc. It is readily however, that in many quarters a very considerable

apparent, progress has been achieved also in the use of dialogue. In quite a number of films there is, today, far less talk, and what there is of
it is

infinitely less literary, far more spontaneous, colloquial and effective: moreover, it is delivered in considerably less elocution

ary and

much more

sionally to dialogue uttered

natural manner. This has even applied occa by children and to libretto rendered

by

singers.

And

whose primary
telligently

original music, used as a background for scenes interest is visual, has more often been written in

and modestly. Technically, the film has always its ability to harness new technical more penetrating, funnier, or more it has utilized at any given moment. at the moment of writing and, in been more hope for the future.

been somewhat in advance of resources to the expression of significant subject matter than This has never been truer than consequence, there has never

Index of

Mm

Titles

A Nous la Liberte, 250, A quoi Revent les Bees

Abbe

330-334

Arrival of a Train at Vincennes Sta

tion,

de Gaz, 240 Constantin, The, 44

Abyss, The, 56 Across the Rapids, 180 Adrienne Lecouvreur, 52 Adventurer, The, 120, 121

Aryan, The, 61, 108, no, 210 Ascension of Hanneie Mattern, The,
194 Assassination of the
71

Due

d'Engheim,

Adventures of Dolly, The, 63 Adventures of Kathlyn, The, 68, 69 Adventures of Mr. West in the Land
of the Bolsheviks, 173 Adventures of an Octoberite, 174

Assassination of the
42, 45, 52, 384

Due de Guise

Assassination of President McKinley,

16

Assassination of the Serbian Royal

Adventurous Automobile Trip, An,

19 Aelita, 173 L'Affiche, 228 Age for Love,

Family, 16
Assault,

The, 52 L'Assommoir, 47

The,

25, 47

At At

Agonizing Adventure, An, 141

Agrippina, 50 Alchemist, The, 55

the Barber's, 7 the Prison Gates, 56 Athalie, 47 Atlantide, 343, 345

Attila, 96

Mike Moran, 210 Alice in Wonderland, 330

Alias

Avenger, The, 108

Alraune, 252
Alsace, 130

Avenging Conscience, The, 132 Avenging Poilu, The, 128 Awakening of Chrysis, 17
Baby's Breakfast, 5 Backstairs, 194 Back Street, 316

All Quiet on the Western Front, 344 Allo Berlin! Ici Paris!, 338

American Aristocracy, Americano, The, 115

115

Amours

Exotiques, 229

Ancient Law, The, 257 Andrei Kozhoukov, 141

Angele, 341

Balgospoden, 141 Ballet Mecanique, 237

Balloonatics, 213

Bank, The, 119

Barberousse, 133 Barrabas, 131

Angelus of Victory, The, 128 Anna and Elisabeth, 349

Anna Karenina, 287 Anna Lisa, 185 Anne Boleyn, 189

Animal Crackers, 320
Arabesque, 237 Arabian* Nights Tales, The, 171
Arlesienne, The, 47 Armored Vault, The, 255 Arrest of the Duchesse de Berry,
'

Bathing Beach, 5
Battle,

The, 149 Battle of Gettysburg, The, 1 10 Battle of the Sexes, The, 285

Bay of Death, The, 279 Be My Wife, 82, 166

Beast in

Human
69

Shape, A, 47

Bebe

Series,

Bed and

Sofa, 174, 176

The, 79
Arrival of a Train at the Station,
30,
5,

369
391

Bedtime for the Bride, i<5 Beggar on Horseback, 170, 210-212 Behind the Screen, 120, 121, 140

39*

Index of Film Titles

By By
the Law, 176 the Sea, 119

Bell Boy, The, 116 Belle Dame Sans Merci, 156 Ben Hur (1909), 59; (1925), 49, 199,
285, 286, 291, 307

Berg-Ejvind, 301, 369, 378

Berlin,

The Symphony

of a Big City,

Cabinet Maker at His Bench, A, 7 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 46, 75, 88,
150, 179, 188-195, 2 5i. 375 Cabiria, 48-50, 93, 96, 97, 105, 197* !98

252 Betrothal, The, 185

189,

Between Showers, 119 Bewitched Inn, The, n Bicycle Ride in the Forest, A, 369 Big Brother, 109 Big House, The, 315 Big Parade, The, 285, 295 Birth of a Nation, The, 99, 100, 104,
108, 114, 142, 201, 202, 307, 387

Cameraman, The, 292, 293 Camille, 96, 130, 210, 263

Camille Desmoulins, 52 Canoe Trip, A, 7
Capital Punishments in Various ropean Countries, 15, 16 Caravan, The, 108

Eu

Sunday, 177 Husbands, 288 Blood and Sand, 285 Blue Angel, The, 258, Blue Blazes Rawden,

Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Blind

Diamond

Express, The, 30

Dream, The, 57
Legion, 383 Masks, The, 58

Carlos and Elizabeth, 192, 193 Carmen, 52; (1909), 63, 97; (1915),
107;

Carmen of

(1916), 119; (1921), 162, 233 the Klondike, 109, no

Shame, 352
Shirts, 362

314, 326, 342

108,

no

Carnival of Truth, 151 Casanova, 169 Casta Diva, 362 Cat and the Canary, The, 259 Catherine, 235 Catspaw, The, 318 Cavalcade, 324

Bluebeard, 19 Blutendes Deutschland, 352 Boatman's Sweetheart, The, 76 Bouclette, 133

Borgias, The, 197 Boulevard des Italiens, 7 Bout-de-Zan the Patriot, 128

Champion, The, 119

Chantecler, 18

Chantecoq, 130 Chapayev, 360, 387 Chapeau de Paille d'ltalie, 234, 246249. 327-332 Charles XII, 183, 263 Cheat, The, 53, 93, 106-108, 129, 142, 153, 164, 201, 204, 219, 258 Chevalier of Maison Rouge, The, 52,

Boxing Match on Skates, 80 Boy of Flanders, A, 233 Branding Broadway, 108 Bridge, The, 363 Broadway Melody, 310, 312 Broken Blossoms, 53, 104, 201 Broken Dream, The, 141 Brothers Karamazov, The, 55, 193 Brumes d'Automne, 241, 242 Burgomaster's Daughter, The, 127 Burned House, The (1922), 178 Burning Mill, The, 183, 184, 187 Butcher Boy, The, 116 By Force or Trickery, 113 By Rocket to the Moon, 343

7i

Chignon d'Or, 129

Child of the Carnival, A, 169 Children of Edward, The, 52

China Express,

278, 279, 280

Christmas Eve, 140 Christmas in Wartime, 128

Christus, 97

Chrysanthemums, The, 140

Cinderella, 19 Circus, The, 294, 295, 297 Circus Days, 233

Index of Film Titles

Citoyen Simon, 48 City Lights, 81, 297, 319, 320, 331 City Streets, 314
Civilization, 108,

393

Demon

no

Claw, The, 52
Cloak, The, 278

Der Schwarze Hussar, 351 Design for Living, 318

Destiny, 150, 191, 193 Devil's Castle, The, 11, 18 Devil's Wheel, The, 278

Decembrists, The, 177 of the Steppes, The, 176 Der alte und der junge Kdnige, 352

Clodhopper, The, 210 Clown and The Pasha, The, 78 Clutching Hand, The, 3 Coconuts, 320 Code of Honor, The, 63 Coeur Fidele, 159, 161, 162, 228, 299
Collegian's First Outing,

Diary of a Lost Girl, The, 253 Die Elf Schillschen Offiziere, 351
Disque 957, 237
Divers, 7

The, 80

Divine

Woman,

Confessions of a Queen, 263 Congestion, 173 Congress Dances, 347, 361 Conquest of the Pole, The, 34, 39 Constant Nymph, The, 324

Do You Remember,
Docks of

287

New

140
299,

York, The, 262,

300, 316, 383

Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

251;

Hyde

(1920),

(1932), 315

Cops, 213 Count, The, 120, 121 Country Bootmakers, The, 185 Covered Wagon, The, 210, 294

Coward, The, no, 210

Crainquebille, 162, 163, 336 Crime and Punishment, 97 Crime et Chatiment, 337 Crime of a Grandfather, 45
Crisis, 253

Dr. Mabuse, 190, 191 Dodskyssen, 136 Dog's Life, A, 81, 123, 124, 215 Doll's House, The, 210 Dolly of the Dailies, 69 Don Juan and Faust (1922), 152 Don Juan de Serra-longa, 52

Donogoo-Tonka, Don Q, 291

150, 151, 165

Don

Quixote, 183, 343, 345, 346, 358

Crowd, The, 298, 312 Cure, The, 120

Cyrano, 27

Cyrano and d'Assoucy, 45 Czar Ivan, 175, 176 Czar Wants to Sleep, The, 360 Czar's Arrival in Paris, The, 7

Don't Change Your Husband, 107 Doomed Pinnace, The, 255 Dorian Gray, 140 Double Trouble, 1 14 Down to the Sea in Ships, 298 Drag-Net, The, 299 Dragonades Under Louis XIV, The,
68

Danse Macabre, 140

Danton, 189 Darker the Night the Brighter the Stars, The, 140 Daughter of Jorio, The, 97 David Copperfield, 185 David Golder, 337 David and Goliath, 52 Day at the Races, A, 383 Day's Pleasure, A, 120, 214, 215 Death of Pope Leo XIII, The, 16 Death Ray, The, 176 Death of Robespierre, The, 52

Drama

at the Chateau d'Acre, 45 Dranem's Shoes, 77

Dream

Street, 202

Drei von der Tankstelle, 328, 346, 347 Dreigroschenoper, 326, 343, 345 Dress, The, 27 Dressed to Kill, 299
Affair, The, 352 of Love, 285 Duchess of the Folies Bergeres, The,

Dreyfus

Drums
252

Duck

Soup, 321 Duke's Testament, The, 178

394
Dunungen, 184

Index of Film Titles

27

Duos from Carmen,

Fashionable Lady at Father Sergei, 140

Her

Bath, A, 17

Earth, 148, 175, 270, 282 Earth Burns, The, 195 Easy Street, 120, 121, 218

Fatherland, 74 Faust (1909), 63, 64; (1926), 255

Feme, 256

Femme

Fatale, 53

Edward VIFs

Coronation, 16

Ferdinand Lassalle, 135

Festival of St. Jorgen, The, 279 Fete Espagnole, 160

Eight Girls in a Boat, 349 Eldorado, 152, 225, 227 Electric House, The, 212 Eleventh Year, The, 269-271

Feu Mathieu

Pascal, 169, 227

Fievre, 159-161

Emak Bakia,

238

Emigrant, The, 58 Emigrants, The, 180 Emil and the Detectives, 350 En Rade, 159, 236, 250 Enchanted Lake, The, 40 End of St. Petersburg, The, 276, 277 End of the World, The, 163, 352 Enemy Mothers, 130, 133 Enthusiasm, 356 Entomological Studies, 42
Entr'acte, 11, 242-249, 329-332, 376 Equipage, 226

Fighting Blood of Old England, The, 96 Fin du Monde, 334 Finis Terrae, 228, 229 Fireman, The, 120, 121, 126 Fisherman of Stormskar, 185 Flesh and the Devil, 287, 297 Fleur de Paris, 129 Flight for Life, A, 72
Flirting with Fate, 115

Erotikon, 180, 261

Eruption of Mont-Pele, The, 16 Escapade, 347 Escape from the Tuileries, 52 Eskimo, 311, 341 Evil Men Do, The, 63 Evil Star, The, 109
Excursion, 7 Execution of His Murderer, The, 16 Execution of Mary Queen of Scots,

on the Train, 17 Floorwalker, The, 120, 121 Folly of Doctor Tube, The, 46 Foolish Wives, 288 For Better or Worse, 107 For the Crown, 44 For a Night of Love, 172
Flirting

Forbidden Fruit, 204 Forbidden Paradise, 287

Forty-First,

The, 279

Fountains of Versailles, The, 7

The,

12
16, 24, 69, 70,

Exploits of Elaine, The,

80, 113, 130, 131

Four Devils, 56, 185, 186 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The, 285, 289 Four Vagabonds, The, 259
Fourth Marriage of Dame Margaret, The, 186, 187 Fox Movietone Follies, 310 Fredericus Rex, 189 Freshman, The, 213

Exploits of Rocambole, The, 69 Eye for an Eye, 112

Does not Answer, 352 Fair Spy, A, 25 Fairy Bell, 40 Fall of the House of Usher, The, 228 Faltering Heart, The, 129 Fanny, 340
F.P.I.

From the Manger to the Cross, From Morn till Midnight, 190
Fromont,
Jr.,

74

and

Risler, Sr., 135

Fantomas,

40, 69, 70, 88,

02,

113, 130,

Frontiers of the Heart, 127 Frozen North, The, 213 Fumee Noire, 158

Funny

Little Bunnies, 14, 323

Index of Film Titles

Garage, The, 116 Garden of Allah, 385

395

Hamlet
194

(1900), 45; (1914), 51; (1920),

Gavroche, 77 General, The, 292, 293 General's Children, The, 57 Genevieve, 155 Gentleman of Paris, A, 291
Genuine, 190, 191 Germinal, 71
Girl in Every Port, A, 161, 298 Girl I Loved, The, 210, 325 Girl from the Marsh CroK, The, 139

Hands Off the Flag, 54 Hands of Orlac, 252

Happiness of Others, The, 133

Haunted Spooks,

213

He Comes Up Smiling, 115 He Who Gets Slapped, 264

Heart of a Frenchwoman, The, 128
Hearts of the World, 104, 288 Heaven's Revenge, 264, 265

Go

West, 292, 293 Gold Rush, The,

Helen of Troy, 192 Hell Ship, The, 178

Help, 166

81, 122, 125, 179, 210, 216, 217, 291, 294, 295, 297, 331

Hermine und
349> 350

die sieben Aufrechten,

Golden Lily, The, 76 Golden Mountains, 356 Golem, 190, 191

Golgotha, 338

Good Bad Man, The, 115 Good Judge, The, 76 Good Little Shepherdess, The, and the Wicked Princess, 40
Good-Night Nurse,
Gossette, 156
116

Grand Duchess and the Waiter, The,

291

Hide-Out, 311 High and Dizzy, 213 His Glorious Night, 335, 336 His Last Errand, 108 His Majesty the American, 212 His New Job, 119, 213 His New Lid, 108 His Picture in the Papers, 115 Hitlerjunge Quex, 352, 353, 365 Horst Wessel, 352 Hole in the Wall, A, 264

Grandma's Boy, 292 Grandmother's Lamp, 48

Gransfolken, 58

Hollywood, 210 Hollywood Revue of

1929, 318

Homecoming, 256
Homunculus, 135 Honor of Dying for the Fatherland, The, 96 Horse Feathers, 321 Hotel Imperial, 263 House of the Dead, The, 191, 356 House at the Ferry, The, 127 House of Mirth, The, 112

Grasshopper

and the Ant, The, 55

31,

Gray Knight, The, 183 Great Bank Robbery, The,

39

Great Expectations, 185 Great Love, The, 104 Great Train Robbery, The,
68,
3 14,

30, 66,

369
in Life,

Greatest

Thing

The, 104

Greed,

164, 288,

289

Gribiche, 233 Growth of the Soil, 264

House of Mystery, 169 Hunchback, The, 47 Hundred Days, The, 362

I

Gunnar Hedes

Saga, 180, 181, 187

Gustavus Vasa, 263

Am a Fugitive from a Chain

3i5

Gang,

Idle Class,

The,

214, 216

Habit of Happiness, The, 115 Half Breed, The, 115

Hallelujah, 312, 313, 314, 324, 326, 358

Idol of the Circus, The, 113 If I Had a Million, 332

IUuipn,

109,

no

396
Illustrious Boaster,

Index of Film Titles

The, 79
Karin, Ingemar's Daughter, 178
81, 120-122

Immigrant, The,

Kean,

169, 170, 171

Impossible Voyage, An, 19, 34 In Again, Out Again, 115 In the Park, 119 In the Shadow of Happiness, no

Independence of Belgium from 1830 to 1914, The, 128 Indiscreet Maid, The, 16 Inferno, The, 51 Informer, The, 316, 369 Ingeborg Holm, 58
Ingemar's Sons, 139, 178
International House, 321 Intolerance, 104, 105, 142, 151, 164,
186, 201, 225, 274 Invisible Ray, The

Kerrnesse Heroi'que, 369 Kid, The, 79, 214-219, 233, 291, 295 Kid Auto Races, The, 85 King, The, 80 King of the Circus, The, 82, 166 King of Kings, The, 285 King of Main Street, The, 291

King Neptune, 323 King of the Sea, The, 133 King of Trollebo, The, 263
Kiss,

The,

335:

Kiss of Glory, The, 51 Kit, the Boche's Daughter, 128

Knock,
(see

Dr., 340

Paris

qui

Dort)
Iron-Master, The, 44 Isle of Lost Ships, The,
It

Koenigsmark, 77, 149, 161 Kreutzer Sonata, The, 140

Kriemhild's Revenge, 193 Kuhle Wampe, 350
L' Argent, 227 La Belle Nivernaise, 162, 228

in
383, 387

Happened One Night,

The,

Italian,

no

JP Accuse, 163,

164

January

9th, 174

Jazz Singer, The, 307, 326, 384 Jealousy, 256 Jeanne Dore, 130 Jerusalem, 263 Jeux des Reflets et de la Vitesse, 237 Jitney Elopement, The, 119 Joan of Arc, 107
Jocelyn, 155, 225
Jofroi, 341

La Briere, 155, 229 La Chienne, 335 La Croisiere Noire, 229 La Femme de Mille Part, La Fille de 1'Eau, 235

159, 160

L'Age d'Or, 238 La Glace a Trois Faces, 228 L'Agonie des Aigles, 148 La Guerre du Feu, 52
L'Aiglon, 129

Johan Ulfstjerna, 183

Jola, 140

Joyless Street, The, 56, 253, 254, 344, 350

Judas Golovlev, 359 Judex, 69, 70, 113, 130-132, 142 Judex' New Mission, 131 Judge Not, 136

La La La La La La La

Jalousie du Barbouille, 236 Marchc des Machines, 241

Maternellc, 237, 338

Nuit du Carrefour, 335 Nuit Elcctrique, 241 Nuit Est a Nous, 326
Petite

Marchaadc d'Allumettes,

*35

Judgment of

Paris, 17

Judith of Bethulia, 65
Julius Caesar, 97

La Proie du Vent, 246 La P'tite Lille, 235 La Roue, 46, 105, 164,
232, 237, 301, 313

165, 225, 230,

Kadetten, 349 Kameradschaft, 343, 344, 345 Karamazov, 357

La Rue Sans Nom, 337 La Souriante Madame Beudet, 256 La Tour, 249
L'Atlantide, 162, 163

Index of Film Titles

La La La La
Fete Espagnol, 157 Tete d'un Homme, 338 Tosca, 44, 45, 63 Zone, 239 Laboratory of Mephistopheles, The,
ii

391

Leaves from Satan's Book, 186

Leonce comedies, 13 Les Cinq Gentlemen Maudits, 337 Les Deux Timides, 249, 250, 328-331,
338

Lac aux Dames, 337 Lady Windermere's Fan, 287

Laila, 264

Lamb, The, 114

Last Last Last Last Last Last Last Last

Command, The,

299

Days of Pompeii, 43, 50, 198 Frontier, The, no Laugh, The, 255, 383 Lord, The, 198 of the Mohicans, The, 1 1 1 Warning, The, 259 Will of Dr. Mabuse, The, 343 Laughing Mask, The, 113, 130 Le Bled, 235 Le Brasier Ardent, 150, 169-171, 228 Le Capitaine Fracasse, 236 Le Chemin d'Ernoa, 159 Le Chien Andalou, 238 Le Dernier Milliardaire, 244, 246, 248,

Les Les Les Les Les Les Les

Gardiens de Phare, 236 Maries de la Tour Eiffel, 245, 246

Miserables, 47, 226

Mysteres de

New-York,

13

Nouveaux

Messieurs, 234 Precieuses Ridicules, 27, 340

Less Lest

Trois Masques, 326 Than Kin, 210

We

Forget,

in

L'Homme du

Let There Be Light, 135

Large, 152 Liebelei, 317, 347 Life in the Country, 263 Life of Christ, 40, 51

Life at Eighteen, 349 Life of Emile Zola, The, 387 Life Is Beautiful, 355 Life of Moses, 64, 65, 66
Liliom, 20, 343

Le Diable au

333 : 334

Cceur, 227 L'Eau du Nil, 326 L'Eau qui Coule sous les Fonts, 240 L'Etoile de Mer, 238

L'Image, 233 L'Inhumaine, L'Inondation,

L'Ironie
Little

152, 227
159, 160

Lion of the Mongols, The, 169

du

Destin, 241

American, The, 107

Le Fantome du Moulin-Rouge, Le Fetard (1908), 18 Le Gendre de M. Poirier, 340 Le Grand Jeu, 336 Le Jardin des Jeux Secrets, 151 Le Lion des Mongols, 227 Le Lys de la Vie, 150, 151, 242 Le Million, 248, 250, 328-333 Le Penseur, 155 Le Petit Cafe, 132, 156 Le Petit Chose, 233 Le Petit Roi, 338 Le Retour a la Raison, 238 Le Rouge et le Noir, 169 Le Tonnerre, 159 Le Tournoi dans la Cite, 235 Le Train sans Yeux, 236 Le Vertige, 227 Le Voyage Imaginaire, 245, 330

245

Little Caesar, 316 Little Dorrit, 185 Little Giant, 316 Little Grenadier, The, 76 Little Red Devils, 173 Little Women, 317

Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 324 Living Corpse, The, 280 Lonely Villa, The, 62

Lonesome,

Long Live

161, 298, 317 the King, 233 Looping the Loop, 260 L'Or qui Brule, 71 Lost Patrol, The, 316 Lost World, The, 383 Lottery Man, The, 210 Love Flower, The, 202

Love of Jeanne Ney, The, Love Parade, The, 189, 318

253

39$

Index of Film Titles

Mask
of Horror, The, 45

Love's Crucible, 178 Loves of Pharaoh, 189 Louis XI, 44 Lucette, 131 Lucille Love, 69 Lunch Hour at the Lumiere Factory,
4, 5

Masked Amazon, The, 95 Masked Woman, The, 171

Maskerade, 347

Masons

at

Work,

Lunch Hour

at

the

Panhard and

Master of the House, The, 265 Master of Mystery, The, 113 Masterman, 178

Levassor Factories, 7

Mater Dolorosa,

133, 163, 335

Lyons Mail, The, 47

Matrimaniac, The, 115 Melody of the World, 42, 342

of Tomorrow, 349 of Varmland, 57, 184, 363 Menilmontant, 241 Merchant of Venice, The, 193 Merry Frolics of Satan, The, 19, 20,
34

M,

343

Mabel's Busy Day, 119 Maccabees, The, 51

Men Men

Bovary, 335 Dubarry, 189 Sans-Gene, 44, 45 Mademoiselle de la Siegliere, 148

in Uniform, 33 z, 333, 338, 347. .349. 353 Magician, The, 285 Maharajah's Favorite, The, 265

Madame Madame Madame

Macbeth, 383 Machine for Recreating

Life,

A, 150

Merry-Go-Round, 288 Merry Microbes, 18

Metropolis,
12, 105, 260, 261,

Maedchen

343

Maldone, 236
107, 204 of Aran, 3 1 1 with the Movie Camera, The, 269-271 Man from Painted Post, The, 115 Man from the Restaurant, The, 279

Male and Female,

Michael Strogoff, 169 Mickey, 116 Mickey Mouse, 34 Midnight Carillon, The, 154 Midsummer-Night's Dream, 383
Million Dollar Legs, 34, 321 Million Dollar Mystery, The, 69 Minister's Daughter, The, 128 Miquette and Her Mother, 80 Miracle Man, The, 201 Miracle of the Wolves, The, 156 Mirages of the Swamp, 141 Misadventures of a Piece of Veal,
a

Man Man

Man with White

Manon
March

Gloves, The, 45 Lescaut, 74 of Time, The, 387, 388

Marguerite and Faust, 193 Marie Chapdelaine, 338 Maria Rosa, 107
Marius, 340

Mr. Robinson Crusoe, 320 Moana, 297, 311

Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Mark of Zorro, The, 212, 285

Marraine de France, 1 28 Marraines de Guerre, 135

Modern Musketeer, A, Modern Salome, A, 1 1 x

51

115

Mollycoddle, The, 212

Mon

Paris, 240

Monastery of Sendomir, 178

Monkey

Business, 320

Marriage Circle, The, 287 Marriage of Louise Rohrbach, 136 Marriage Under the Revolution, A,
5<$

Marriage Under the Terror, 265 Mary Magdalen, 141 Mary Tudor, 71, 74

Mons, 230 Monsieur Lecoq, 70 Moonlight Under Richelieu, 45 Morgan, the Pirate, 68 Morocco, 314

Moscow

Laughs, 354, 360

Moth, The, 97

Index of Film Titles

Mother,
174, 266, 276, 277

B99

Mother and

Child, 254

Mothers of France, 130

Movie Crazy, 318 Moving Foot, The, 113 Mozart and Salieri, 55 Musik im Blut, 349 Mystere du Chateau du De, Le, 238 Mysteries of a York Ham, The, 113
Mysterious Mysterious Mysterious Mysterious

Old Old Old Old Old Old

and New, 175, 270, 280, 281 Guard, The, 362 Man's Darling, An, 59 Sergeant, The, 54 Swimmin' Hole, The, 210

Wives

for

New,

104

Oliver Twist, 44

Geo, The, 133 Mr. X, The, 130 Piano, The, 48 X, The, 136

Name

Once Upon a Time, 186 One A. M., 84, 120, 213, 215 One Among Them, 136 One Exciting Night, 202 One Glorious Day, 210 One Man Band, 11 One Way Passage, 317, 384
Onesime Horloger, 75

the

Man, 264

Nana, 235

Open
46, 230, 231, 242, 249, 266,

Countenances

and

Secret

Nanook,

211, 297

Souls, 149

Napoleon,
271, 335

Operations by Dr. Doyen, 40

Napoleon at St. Helena, 259 Nat Pinkcrton, 68, 114 Nathan the Wise, 192 Navigator, The, 292, 293, 318 Nene, 154 Nero, 50

Ordonnance, The, 171 Orphan's Secret, The, 47 Orphans of the Storm, 202
Othello, 48, 97; (1922), 189 Our Country, 198 Our Daily Bread, 3 14

Nero and Agrippina, Never Weaken, 213

50,

74

Our Hospitality, 292, 293 Our Mutual Friend, 185 Out of the Fog, 112
Outlaw and His Wife, The,
142, 179,

New New New New

Babylon, 278
Earth, 363 Gulliver, The, 360 Year's Eve, 255

137, 138,

180, 187

Oyster Princess, The,

Pacific,

189, 194

Nibelungen, The, 255, 260, 343 Night at the Show, A, u8, 119 Night Out, A, 119
Nightingale, Little Nightingale, 385 Nju, 256, 257 No Man's Land, 344

The, 365

Paddy's Heroism, 128 Pagan, The, 298, 3 1 1 Pandora's Box, 253

Papillon dit Lyonnais le Juste, 76 Parade of Manchuria, The, 365
Paradise, II, 51 Paris qui Dort, 75, 242 Paris-Port, 239
Parisette, 242

Noah's Ark, 323 Nogent, Eldorado du Dirnanche, 240

Nosferatu, 190, 195, 252 Nothing Sacred, 387

Notre

Dame

de

Paris,

47

Nurse, The, 45

Nut, The, 212

October, 273, 277

October Without Lenin, 269 Odette MarechaFs Mistake, 149

Oedipus, 45

Parliamentarian, The, 169 Parnasse, 241 Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 265 Passion Play (1908), 40, 59; (1914), 40; (Oberammergau) , 30 Pastime in the Family Circle, 8
Patriot,

The,

258, 287

Patriots, 357

400
Pawnshop, The,
321

Index of Film Titles

81, 120, 121, 294, 295,

Putting

Puss in Boots, 183 One Over, 119

Juillet, 244, 328, 332,

Pay Day, 214-217

Destiny, 256 Pearl Fishers, The, 141 Peasant Women of Riazan, The, 282, 348 Peau de Peche, 237

Peaks of

Quatorze

Pecheurs d'Islande, 154, 155 Pension Mimosas, 336 Perils of Pauline, The, 69 Perjury, 48
Peter the First, 189, 360, 389 Petersburg Nights, 359 Phantasmagoria, 18

Queen Elizabeth, 45, 66 Queen Is Bored, The, 113 Queen Louise, 260 Queen of Sheba, The, 52 Queen of Spades, The, 140

333

Quo

Queen's Necklace, The, 52 Vadis (1902), 26; (1912),

66, 67; (1924), 198

48, 51,

Raffles, the

Gentleman Crook (1905),

3*

59

Phantom, 194

Phantom of the Opera, The,

Raftman's Wife, The, 185

181

Rain, 363
Sabines, The, 48 Rapt, 356 Raskolnikoff, 193 Ravengar, 113 Reaching for the Moon, 115 Reckless Romeo, A, 117

Phedre, 48 Pied Piper, 323 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 74

Pilgrim, The,
296, 331
119, 214, 217, 218, 295,

Ramuntcho, Rape of the

153

Pilgrimage to Kevlaar, 184 Pingouin the Impostor, 79 Plow that Broke the Plains, The, 389 Poil de Garotte, 250, 338
Poincare's Visit to Russia, 42 Police, 119

Policeman's Patrol, 7
Polikushka, 173, 175, 176 Poor Jenny, 57 Portrait of Souls, no
Postmaster, The, 175

Red Circle, The, 113, 130 Red Front, 173 Red Inn, The, 161 Red Lantern, The, 112 Red Lily, The, 45 Red Riding Hood, 19 Red Robe, The, 44

Potemkin,
2 75

105, 174, 179, 188, 266, 270354> 357, 3^2, 383

Power of Gold,
Priestess of

Redressor of Wrongs, The, ro8 Reggie Mixes In, 115 Reifende Jugend, 349, 350 Reka, 349

57

Tank, The, 51

Prima

Ballerina, 137

Prince Charming, 171 Prisoner of Zenda, The (1912), 66 Private Life of Don Juan, 320 Private Life of Henry VIII, The, 324 Prodigal Child, The, 47 Prometheus Is a Banker, 152 Prosecuting Attorney, The, 141, 169 Public Enemy, The, 316

Rembrandt, 387 Republic of Women, The, 263 Rescued from an Eagle's Nest, 63 Respect the Woman, no Return to the Land, The, 133 Return of Ultus, 130 Return of Ulysses, The, 42,
129
1

Reversing Waltz, The, 78 Rhine, The, 352

Pumpkin Race, The,

Punishment, 108-110
Purgatorio, 51

Rich Family, A, 292 Richard III, 51

Ridiculous Legacy, A, 78 Rien que les Heures, 235 Right to Live, The, 133

82

Index of Film Titles

Rink, The, 120

401

Rip Van Winkle, 19, 43 River, The, 389 Road to Life, The, 339, 356 Roaring Road, The, 210 Robert Macaire, 227 Robin Hood, 212, 291 Robinson Crusoe, 19 Rocambole, 70, 130, 131 Roman, The, 63

Seven Castles of the Devil, 46 Seven Years' Bad Luck, 82, 166
of Sin, 172 that Pass, 169, 170 Shanghaied, 119 Shattered, 195

Shadow

Shadows

Roman

d' Amour:

Drama Re-

She Done Him Wrong, 316 Sheriff, The, 108 Sheriff Out West, The, 1 17 Ship, The, 97 Shoulder Arms, 117, 123-126, 213,
19,^222, 294, 295 Siegfried, 193, 195, 260
^

218,

Lived, 25 Roman d'un Spahi, 52 Romance of Happy Valley, A, 105, 106

Romance

Sentimentale, 357
Juliet, 51

Romeo and

Silence, 158 Six et Demi Onze, 228 Sixth Part of the World, A, 269 Skater's Debut, A, 80

Rose France,
Rosita, 287

151

Sleep-Walker, The, 79

Rosenkavalier, 252

Slums of
Smiling

St.

Madame

Petersburg, The, 140 Beudet, The, 156

Royal Tiger, The, 96

Snare, The, 73

Rue de

la

Republique, 5

Snow White and

the Seven Dwarfs,

Ruggles of Red Gap, 210, 322 Ruslan and Ludmilla, 140

Rustic Idyll, A, 80
Sables, 241

385 Social Hypocrites, 112

Soil (see Earth)

Sold Appetite, The, 280

Sacred Love, A, 127 Sacred Tiger, The, 113

Safety Last, 213, 292
Sailor

Soldier's Honor, A, 54 Something to Think About, 204 Somme, The, 230 Son of Zorro, 291

Made Man, A,
96
48, 51, 96

213

St. Paul,

Song, 260 Song of the

Souls of

Red Flower,
133

139

Salammbo,

Sorrows of Satan, 285

Sally of the Sawdust, 285 Salome, 210

Madmen,

Sous
333

les

Toits de Paris, 327-329, 332,

Satan Laughs, 170 Satan Triumphs, 141

Speedy, 292
Spirit of the

Sa Tete, 227 Scaramouche, 285 Scar face, 315, 316

Chimes, The, 40

Spite Marriage, 318

The, 264 School of Adversity, The, 25 Seashell and the Clergyman, The, 238
Scarlet Letter,

Spring Is Here, 79 Spy, The, 261

Squall,

The,

153
66, 67, 104

Squaw Man, The,

Steamboat

Secret of Lone Star, 1 he, 153 Secret of Rosette Lambert, The, 156 Secrets of the Soul, 253 Sense of Death, The, 171
Sequoia, 3 1 1 Service for Ladies, 291

Star Is Born, A, 385 Station Hotel, The, 79

Bill, Jr., 292,

293

Stella Maris, 140

Stigmata, The, 131 Storm Over Asia, 138, 271, 276, 277

402

Index of Film Titles

Thief of Bagdad, The,
286, 291

Story of a Crime, The, 15, 24, 30, 31, 39i*8 Story of Gosta Berling, The, 180-183 Story of Louis Pasteur, The, 387 Strange Bird, The, 57
Street,

Thin Man, The, 387

Thomas

The,

195

Street Scene, 313 Strike, 175, 273, 279 Stroke of Midnight, The, 58, 178-180, 187, 301 Student of Prague, The, 135, 252 Such Is Life, 261, 262, 353, 399 Suicide, The, 320 Suicide Club, The, 55

Thora om Deken, 183 Those Who Pay, 108, no Three Ages, The, 213 Three's a Crowd, 291 Three Heroes, 365 Three Little Pigs, The, 323 Three Musketeers, The, 115;
148, 149, 212

Graal's Best Film, 137

(1921),

Sultane de

1'

Amour,

148

Sunny side,

80, 214, 216, 218

Sunrise, 259

Three Must~get-theres, The, 166 Three Songs about Lenin, 360 Three Thieves, 279 Through the Clouds, 72 Thunder Over Mexico, 271, 357-359 Thunder Storm, 359

Superhuman Sacrifice, A, 47 Supreme Redemption, The, 107

Survivor, The, 96 SVD, 278 Sweethearts of 1914, 128

Thy

Neighbor's Petticoat, 78

Tillie's

Punctured Romance,
at

85^

n8

Tolstoy

Home,
140

42

Tomboy, A,

Tabu, 259 Tale of Love and Adventure, A, 133 Taras Shevchenko, 282
Tartuffe, 255 Taxi, 316

Toni, 335 Topaze, 340 Torgus, 190, 191 Torrent, The, 133 Tour au Large, 236

Towards

Tower

Tearing Down the Spanish Flag!, 29 Teasing the Gardener, 5, 7 Tempest of Life, The, 133 Tempests, 169 Tempestuous Love, 1 10 Temptation, 107 Ten Commandments, The, 200, 204,
285

the Light, 172 of Lies, The, 264

Street,

Tragedy, The, 256

Tragedy of the
Tragic Love of

The,
Lisa,

56, 254

Mona

The, 45
294, 295

Traitor's Money, The, 136 Tramp, The, 119, 214, 215,

Treasure, The, 253 Treasure of Arne, The,

80, 18 1, 187

Ten Days that Shook the World, Ten O'clock Riddle, The, 133
Tenth Symphony, The,
133, 163

175

Terje Vigen, 136 Terrible Vengeance, The, 140 That Pig Morin, 171

18, 19, 34 Tristan and Isolde, 148 Triumph of the Will, 353, 362, 369 Trollalgcn, 264 Troop of Hussars, 7

Treasure Island, 1 1 1 Trip to the Moon, A, n,

True Heart

That Royle

Susie, 105, 106

Girl, 285

Theme

Their First-Born, 137

et Variations, 238

Theodora, 44
Therese, 136

Th6rese Raquin, 234 Thief, The, 52

Two Brothers, 272 Two Burglars, The, Two Days, 282

Turksib, 270, 282 Twenty Years of Hate, 47 Twilight, 141 Two Boys, The, 131

78

Index of Film Titles

4-03
289

Two Little Kids, 130 Two Orphans, The, 47

Typhoon, no
,

Wedding March, The, Welcome Danger, 318

Werther, 44 Westfront 1918,

352

Ultus, 130

What What
299, 300, 383
Paris,
1

343, 344 Fools Men Are!, 362 the Forest Said, 55

Under

the Sea, 19
6, 24, 31,

Underworld,

Underworld of

59

When the Clouds Roll By, 212, When Love Rules, 184 When Matches Struck, 18

225

Unexpected Meeting, An, 80

Unfinished Symphony, 347 Unholy Night, The, 335

Unknown Woman, The,

Vagabond, The,

154

White Circle, The, in White Hell of Pitz Palu, The, 256 White Rose, The, 202, 285 White Shadows in the South Seas,
310,311

120-122, 124

Whole Town's

Valley of the Giants, 210 Vampires, The, 130

Variety,^ 86, 227, 257-259, 353 Vendemiaire, 131 Venetian Drama, A, 25

Why Change Your Wife,

Vengeance of Jacob Vindas, The,

1

80
229, 230

Verdun, Visions d'Histoire,

Vertigo, 57 Vindicta, 131 Violettes Imperiales, 149 Violin Maker of Cremona, The, 62

Wife Wild Ass' Skin, The, 47 Wild Duck, The, 255 Wild Ride, A, 198 Wild and Wooly, 115 Wind, The, 264 Wings of the Morning, 385 Witchcraft Through the Ages,
184

Talking, The, 316 107, 204 of Lieutenant Yanoy, The, 365

136,

Wolf Wolf

Inn,

The, 108
Street,

of

Wall

The, 312
25

Visages d'Enfants, 233 Vision of Beauty, 197

Wolves of the

Rail, 108

Volga Boatman, The, 285 Vow of Hatred, The, 51

au Congo, 239 Voyage Vultures of the Sea, 136

Woman Woman
320

in Despair,

A,

of Paris, A, 150, 202, 214,

218-222, 225, 257, 285, 287, 291, 317,

Women, The,
Work, Wrath
r

119

19

Waltz Dream, The,

261

of the Gods, The, no, 129

and Peace, 140 Warning Shadows, 191 Waterloo, 260

War

Yamada
Yellow
297
107

Pass,

the Soldier, 365 The, 282

Waxworks,

191

Way of All Flesh, The, 258, Way Down East, 202, 258
Weavers, The, 254

Ypres, 230 Yvette, 141, 236

Za-la-Mort, 95 Zero de Conduite, 337 Zone of Death, The, 133, 164

We Can't Have Everything,

k Death, 96

Wedded

Qeneral Jndex
A.C.E., 351 Aitken, Harry, 99, 100, 103 Albatross, 168

Bernard, Armand, 149 Bernard, Leon, 128 Bernard, Raymond, 132, 147, 155, 156,
227, 263

Alexandre, 45, 52, 53, 148 Alexandrov, 354, 360

Allcgret, Marc, 239, 337 Alstrup, 136

Bernede, Arthur, 128 Bernhardt, Sarah, 43, 45, 52, 66, 74,
130
_

Ambrosio, Arturo,
198

21, 43, 48, 50, 51,

Bertini, Francesca, 74, 95, 96 Bilboquet (see Mann, Hank)

Billy,

Amct,

30, 388

Broncho

(see

Anderson,

Anderson, George, Andreani, M., 52

62, 65

George), 108
Biofilm, 141

Annabella, 385 Antoine, 148, 149, 152, 160 Aoki, Tsuri, 129 Arbuckle, Roscoe, 3, 78, 84, 85, 116118, 132, 205, 212

Biograph, 57, 62, 63, 65, 82, 108 Bioscop, 57, 135 Bitzer, G. W., 99 Bonaz, firm of, 118
Boni, Carmen, 198
Borelli, Lydia, 74, 97

Armat,

4, 28,

32

Artaud, Antonin, 238 Arzner, Dorothy, 348

Astaix, 23

Borgstrom, Hilda, 58
Berlin, Jean, 245

Aubert, 114, 127, 129 Autant-Lara, Claude, 240

B.U.F.A., 135 Baclanova, Olga, 300 Badet, Regina, 43 Bancroft, George, 299, 300, 315 Baranovskaya, Vcra, 262, 275, 277
Barattolo, 196 Baroncelll, Jacques de, 133, 147, 153156, 187, 227, 242

Borzage, Frank, 298, 310 Bosworth, Hobart, 63 Boucher, Victor, 80

Boucot, 77 Bout-de-Zan, 77, 79, 128

Bovy, Berthe,

45, 148

Boyer, Charles, 385

287, 297 Brule, Andre, 44, 80 Brunius, John, 177, 183, 184, 263 Bryant, Charles, 210

Brown, Clarence,

Buch, 136
Buchovetski, Dmitri, 55, 189, 193 Bunuel, Luis, 238

Barrymore, John, 251

Bartct,

Mme.,

74, 129

Bary, L6on, 113

Batcherf, Pierre, 249, 250 Baur, Harry, 49, 337, 338 Beaucitron (see Pollard, Harry)

Behanzin, Prince Qulrilio, 74 Beliakov, 269 Ben-Kaled, see Delac, Charles

Benoit-Levy, Edmond, 47 Benoit-Levy, Jean, 161, 236, 338 Berger, Diarnant-, 148 Berger, Ludwig, 261 Bergner, Elisabeth, 256
405

Cagney, James, 315 Calmettes, Andre, 43, 45 Calmo, 77 Capellani, Albert, 45, 47, 70, 71, 112, 209, 240 Capozzi, Alberto, 48, 96 Capra, Frank, 386

Caramba, 197 Carlsten, Rune, 184 Carmi, Maria, 51

Carne, Michel, 240

^o 6

General Index
Gastync, Marco, 226 Dehclly, 52, 53 Dclac, Charles, 44 Delluc, Louis, 107, 108, no, 129, 130,
134, 147-151, 153, 155, 157-161, 164,

Carre, Michel, 46, 47 Caserini, Mario, 50 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 159, 235, 236, 388 Cavaiicri, Lina, 74, 96
Chaliapin, 345, 346 Chantal, Marcellc, 236

De

170-172, 179, 227, 235, 236, 254, 258,

78-81, 84-86,
132, 134,

Chaplin, Charlie,
93, 100-103,

3, 75,

35*

U2, 116-127,

141, 142, 150, 166, 167, 170, 173, 174,

DC Limur, Count Jean, 1x2 Dclvair, Mine., 45, 52

210-222, 245, 257, 291, 293-297, 301,

308, 318-321, 328, 331, 334, 360, 369,
37<5,

De Max,
in,
2 85

45, 47
B., 66, 67, 104, 106-108,

Demcny, 4
DcMille, Cecil
142, 180, 200-205, 212, 218, 219,

377> 379

Chaplin, Sidney, 102, 117 Charrel, Eric, 347 Chenal, Pierre, 240, 337 Chomettc, Henri, 237 Chevalier, Maurice, 78, 237, 318 Christenscn, Benjamin, 136, 184 Christiana Film Company, 264
,

De Morlhon, Camille, De Putti, Lya, 189, 257

Derain, Lucic, 239

46,

47

Deschamps, Dominique-Bernard, 148 Deslav, Eugene, 241

Despres, Suzanne, 130, 133 Diamant-Rerger, 226 Dickens, Charles, 185

Cines, 21,48, 50, 51

Clair,

Rene, n,

54, 75, 76, 160, 161,

172, 241-250, 320,

3^-334

338, 376,

379
Clifton, Elmer, 298 Cocteau, Jean, 42, 109,

no, 330

Dieudonne", 231 Dietrich, Marlene, 70, 314, 342, 385 Disney, Walt, 14, 20, 172, 173, 323,
378, 385 Dostoevski, 193, 194

Cohl, Emil, 18
Colette, 109 Coogan, Jackie, 215, 233

Cook, Clyde, 117 Cooper, Gary, 314 Copeau, Jacques, 222

Coquelin, 43
Courteline, 340
Craig, Gordon, 177, 188 Creste, Rene, 131 Cruze, James, 170, 210, 211

Dovzhenko, 174, Dranem, 17, 77

281, 282, 353

Dressier, Marie, 118, 308 Dreyer, Carl, 185, 186, 264, 265

Dudule

(see

Cook, Clyde)

Duflos, Huguette, 149

Dulac, Gcrmaine, 133, 156, 157, 237,

238, 256, 348 Dullin, Charles, 156 Dunne, Irene, 317

Cukor, George, 317

Czinner, Paul, 256, 260

Dupont, E.

A., 257, 258, 262

Dagover,

Lil, 192 Daniels, Bebe, 116

Durante, Jimmy, 318 Duse, 129

Duvivier, Julien, 150, 337, 338
48, 49, 95, 198, Eclair, 42, 43, 68, 127, 226, 341

D'Annunzio, Gabriele,
199

Daring, Lieutenant, 73 D'Arrast, Henri d'Abadie, 112, 291 D'Arsonval, M., 54

Decla-Bioscop, 135, 259 Decourcelle, Pierre, 113, 130

Edgrcn, Gustav,
Edison,
Eggert, 175

184, 263

4, 12, 28-32, 54, 59-65, 74,

384

Deed, Andr6,

73, 74, 77

Eichbcrg, Richard, 135, 260

General Index
Eisenstein, 105, 168, 173-175, 233, 266281, 328, 334, 353, 354, 357-359, 379,

407

Fuller, Loi'e, 150, 170, 242 Fuller, Mary, 74

389

Elambert, Paulette, 339

Elfelt, P., 8

Gaboriau, 70

Emelka, 351 Emerson, John, 114 Epoch, 99

Epstein, Marie, 237, 338 Epstein, Jean, 159, 161, 162, 169, 170, 227-229, 236, 254, 281, 299 Essanay, 86, 102, 118-120

Gad, Urban, 56, Gade, Sven, 194

185, 194

Galeen, Henrik, 252 Gallone, Carmine, 95, 198, 199, 362 Gance, Abel, 45, 46, 105, 128, 132, 133,
151, 156, 163-166, 193, 225, 230-233,

237, 242, 249, 250, 259, 266, 271, 274, 278, 301, 313,334. 335

Garbo, Greta,
287, 297, 335

3,

56, 112, 183, 253, 263,

Fairbanks, Douglas,
286, 290, 291, 320

3,

100, 114, 115,

Gasnier, Louis, 80, 112, 113

148, 156, 169, 205, 211-213, 225, 285,

Gaumont,
326, 341

7, 9, 13, 18, 21, 26, 29,

43,

45-47, 54, 57, 69, 76,

in,

128, 226,

Famous

Players, 66

Fanck, Arnold, 256 Farben, 1. G., 351

Gauntier, Gene, 73 Gavault, Paul, 79

Farnum, Dustin, 66
Fedorov, 356
Fcjos, Paul, 298, 315 Felner, Peter P., 193

Gemier, 133
Genina, Augusto, 95, 197, 198 Ghione, Emilio, 95, 196-198
Gish, Lillian, 106, 201, 202, 258, 264 Gloria, Artistica, 50 Goldwyn, Sam, 289, 386

Fcraudy, Maurice,

44, 162

F.E.R.T., 196, 197, 198 Feuillade, Louis, 47, 69, 79, 112, 130,
131, 148

Goskinprom,

173

FEX,

174
162,
163,

Gremillon, Jean, 236 Gretillat, 45

233-235,

Fcyder, Jacques,
335-337
Fields,

W W.

Gribouille, see Deed,

Andre

Grierson, John, 388

Griffith,

C,

Film d'Art,

142, 321, 322, 377 44, 76, 89, 100, 127, 128,

D. W.,

13, 62-65, 89, 99, 100,

134, 148, 149, 250, 341, 370, 383

104-111, 114, 132, 134, 142, 151, 164, 176, 186, 201-203, 211, 216-219, 225,
274, 275, 284, 285, 357, 370, 387

Film Esthetique, 43
Fihn-Fachschaft, 351 Film National, 1 27 First National, 103, 104, 123, 212-214, 222, 284, 306, 308 Flaherty, Robert, 211, 297, 311
Fleischer,

Grune, Karl, 195, 252, 256, 260 Guazzoni, Enrico, 95, 198
Guilhene, Jacques, 40 Guitry, Sacha, 133, 170

Guy,

Alice, 7, 13

Max,

300, 323

Guyot, Albert, 240

Haik, Jacques, 98, 118, 127 Hale's Tours, 31

Fleming, Victor, 212, 297 Florey, Robert, 320 Ford, John, 316 Fox, William, 31, 305-308 France, Anatole, 45 Francis, Eve, 133, 153, 157-160
Francis, Kay, 317 Froelich, Carl, 193, 254, 256

Hanson, Einar, 263 Hanson, Lars, 58, 137, 183, 263 Hart, William S., 100, 108-111,
131,

114,

142,294,301
Lilian, 346, 347

Harvey,

408

General Index
Keith, B. F., 28

Hasselqvist, Jenny, 137 Hawks, Howard, 298, 315 Hayakawa, Sessue, 107, 149, 169 Hays, Will H., 206

Kerrigan, J. Warren, 74 Kessel and Bauman, 82, 85, 108, 114

Keystone, 82,
127, 213

84, 86, 114, 118-120, 123,

55, 140

Hedqvlst, Ivan, 177, 184, 263 Hepburn, Katherine, 317

Khanzhonkov,
Kinetoscope, 4

Herve, 148
Hcsperia, 96 Hessling, Catherine, 235, 236 Heuze, Andre, 47
Hill,

Kino-Eye,

269, 270, 274, 276 Kirsanov, Dmitri, 241, 246, 356 Kleine, George, 66

George, 315 Hillyer, Lambert, 108 Hitchcock, Alfred, 386

Kobe, H., 190

Kopalin, 269
64, 67, 102,

Hodkinson, William W.,

103

Korda, Alexander, 324 Roster, Henry, 386

Kovanko,

Natalie, 141

Houdini, 113 Hugon, Andre, 226,

Hurd,
Imp,
Ince,
1

W.

233, 326

B.,

30

Kozintsev, 174, 175, 278 Krauss, Werner, 135, 189, 256 Krupp, 1 88

Kuleshov, 173
08
100, 108, 115, 134, 142,

Thomas,

176, 203, 209, 210, 275, 284

Lacombe, George, 239 Laemmle, Carl, 31, 61

Lafitte brothers, 42, 43

Independents, 62-67 Ingram, Rex, 285 Inldzhinov, 275

Itala Films, 48, 196 Italian Cinema Union, 196

Lagerlof, Selma, 178-182, 184 Lallement, 23 Lambert, Albert, 45

Lang,
2 6i

Ivanovski, 177
Ivens, Joris, 363, 388

Fritz, 12, 20, 105, 190-195, 259343* 35<>, 353* 38o

Langdon, Harry, 291

Lara, Mile., 52

Jacob, Max, 330

Jacobi, 198 Jacobini, Maria, 95

Lasky, Jesse, 66, 67, 104

Jannings, Emil, 135, 189, 198, 255-258, 2 97 2 99> 34* 35 2

Jefferson, Joseph, 43 Jessner, Leopold, 188, 194 Jolson, Al, 307

Latham, 4 Laughton, Charles, 210, Laurel and Hardy, 320 Lavedan, Henri, 42
Le*ar, 16, 18

322, 324

Joly,9 Joube, Romuald, 163

Jouvet, Louis, 340

Le Bargy, 42, 43, 45 Leger, Fernand, 237 Lemaitre, Jules, 42 Leni, Paul, 191, 258, 259
Leonce
(sec Ferret,

Leonce), 77

Junghans, Carl, 261, 337

Kaiser, Georg, 188 Kauffmann, Mikhail, 269 Keaton, Buster, 3, 78, 83,

Lepage, 150

Le Roy, Mervyn, 386

Levesque, Marcel, Leyda, Jay, 173
79, 148

n6, 117, 142, 167, 170, 212, 213, 290-294, 318, 320, 321, 377

L'Herbier, Marcel, 133, 147, 151-153,

155, 158, 169, 227, 235

Linden, Muck, 58

General Index
Linder, Max, 44, 45, 53, 74, 79-82, 88,
Menicelli, Pina, 96

409
80, 220, 291,

HZ,

120, 132, 156, 166, 167, 213, 321,

3^9 Lissenko, Natalie, 140, 170, 236 Lloyd, Frank, 324

Menjou, Adolphe, Mercanton, Louis,

Mesguich, Felix, 18
Messter, 57

314

133, 149, 151

Lloyd, Harold,
377

78, 83, 116, 117, 142,

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 308
Meyerhold, 140

167, 212, 213, 290, 292, 318-321, 360,

Mezhrabpom,
Michaux,
23

172, 268

Lods, Jean, 239 Locw, Marcus, 31 Loftus, Cissie, 74

Mickey Mouse
Mikadzou, 365
Milly, Louise,

films, 323, 385

Lonesome Luke

(see Lloyd, Harold) Loos, Anita, 114, 115 Lorcntx, Pare, 389 Love, Bessie, 109 Lubitsch, Ernst, 135, 136, 189, 194, 258, 287, 288

16, 17

Milowanoff, Sandra, 154

Mistinguette, 73, 78, 129

Mix,

Tom,

3,

62, 65, 108, 114, 115, 131,

142

Lui (sec Lloyd, Harold) Lumierc Brothers, The, 4-6,

Lunacharski, 173 Lynen, Robert, 338, 339

8-10, 28

Molander, Gustaf, 263 Monca, Georges, 78, 79 Monti, Paola, 51

Moore, Owen,

61

Moratori, Lucien, 96

MacDonald, Jeannette, 318 Mace, Fred, 82, 84

Machaty, Gustav, 261
Maciste, 96

Morlay, Gaby, 148 Mosjoukine, Ivan Hitch,

168-171, 227

55, 140, 141,

Moskvin,

173, 175, 176

Motion Picture Patents Company, 59

Mounet-Sully, 44, 129 Moussinac, Leon, 266, 267, 269

Magnusson, Charles, 57 Mamoulian, Rouben, 314, 315 Mann, Hank, 117 Marcy, Eticnne, 4
Mari, Febo, 96 Marinetti, 88

Muni, Paul,

315, 316

Muratore, 74

Murnau,

F.

W.,

190,

194,

195, 252,

255, 256, 258-262

Maniac, Jane, 129

Martin, C.-H., 190 Marx Brothers, 3, 76, 320, 321, 334,
343, 360, 377 Mathis, June, 289, 348 Maucieres, M., 34, 226

Mutoscope, 43
Mutual,
74, 99, 103, 120, 123, 213

Myrza, 226

Nakano, 365
Nalpas, Louis, 45, 47, 127, 148 Napierkowska, 45, 47 Natan, Brothers, 226 Nazimova, Alia, 112, 209, 210

Maurus, Gerda, 343

May, Joe, 256 May, Mia, 135

McLaglcn, Victor,
Mechcri, 196 Melics, Georges,
33~35
39'

298, 316

Ncgri, Pola, 135, 189, 287

Negroni, 95
7, 9-12, 15-23, 26, 29,

Neumann,

Lotte, 135

4'

44> 4^

53

57i 75>

7^

82, 99, 127, 139, 172, 192, 225, 323,

Newsreels, 40, 41, 93-95, 308-310 Niblo, Fred, 212, 285

Nielsen, Asta, 56, 57, 74, 112, 135, 185,
194, 210, ijj,

361, 369, 375, 388

Meller, Raquel, 149, 162, 233

254

General Index
Noa, Manfred, 192 Nordisk Films, 56,
265
57,

134-136, 185,

Normand, Mabel,
132

84, 85, 116, 118, 127,

Porten, Henny, 135 Porter, Edwin S., 30, 66 Pouctal, 45, 130 Powell, William, 317
Prejean, 327

Novarro, Ramon,

286, 287, 311

Preobrazhenskaya, Olga, 282

Prevost, Jean, 93, 292 Prince, 74, 77, 79, 82 Producers' Trust, 59, 60-65, ^7 Promio, 6, 7

Okhlopkov, 280
Olscn, Olc, 56

Ophuls, Max, 347 Oswald, Richard, 135, Ozcp, 280, 282, 357

192, 256, 352

Protazanov, 140, 141, 168-173, 277 Pudovkin, 138, 168, 266, 269, 273, 27528 354. 355. 3 8 9 Purviance, Edna, 119, 220
,'

Pabst, 183, 252, 253, 256, 260, 274, 328, 334. 337* 343-346 350, 353. 35 8

Pagnol, Marcel, 335, 340, 341 Painlcve, Jean, 239 Palcrmi, 199

Raft, George, 315 Rahn, Bruno, 254 Ramsaye, Terry, 28,

30, 31

Paramount,
306-308

98, 102, 103, 108, 196, 284,

Raskolnikov, 140 Ravel, Gaston, 226

Pasquali, 48, 95

Ray, Charles,

210, 225, 238, 241

Pastrone, 49 Pathe, 7, 9, 13,

15, 18-26, 29, 32, 39-43, 46-48, 50-52, 58, 67, 69, 74, 77, 93,

in,

154, 226
52, 196, 226, 341

Pathe-Natan,
Paul, 4 Paulus,
r

r,

26
13
13, 69, 76, 77, 79,

Peguy, Robert, Perret, Leonce,

in,

128, 134, 149, 155,

162,226

Reichsfilnikammer, 351 Reid, Wallace, 207 Reinhardt, Max, 136, 188 Rejane, 45, 74, 430 Renaud, Madeleine, 339 Renoir, Jean, 235, 335 Reumert, Poul, 185 Reynaud, Emil, 4 Rice, Elmer, 142, 143 Riche, Daniel, 47
Richter, 252 Rigadin, 77-79, 118, 128, 132, 142
Righclli, 95, 196

Pctschlcr, 177, 184 Phoebus, 351 Phonos-Scenes, 26

Pick, Lupu, 195, 230, 252, 254, 255, 258, 259, 262, 353 Pickford, Mary, 61, 62, 64, 66, 102104, 107, 200, 2O5, 211, 212, 287 Pickford, Mrs., 101, 102 Picratt (see St. John, Al)

Rigobert, 76 Rimsky, 140

Rio Jim

(see Hart,

William

S.), 112

Ritchie, Billie,

nB

Piron,

PitocfT, Lndmilla, 266, 339 Poirier, Leon, 147, 155-158, 187, 229, 2 35

Polin, 76 Pollard, Harry, 117 Polo, Eddie, 113

Polycarpe, 77

Robinne, 45, 52 Robinson, Ktiward G., 316 Robison, Arthur, 136, 191, 260 Roch, Madeleine, 45, 53 Roland, Ruth, 113 Remains, Jules, 150, 151 Room, Abruni, 174, 176, 278, 279 Rosay, Franchise, 336 Rostand, Rdmond, 43, 45 Rotha, Paul, 388
RotKjuIer, Georges, 240

Pommer,

Erich, 259, 260, 341, 350, 352

General Index
Roussel, Henry, 149, 326 Runeberg, 263

411

Ruttmann, Walter,
343, 388

42, 252, 269, 342,

Hugo, 351 Stinnes, Leopold, 188 Stribolt, 136

Stinnes,
Strizhinski, 171 Sullivan, Pat, 300

Sablon, M., 71 Sagan, Leontinc, 348, 349 Sandberg, 185, 264 St. John, Al, 84, 117 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 88 Sanin, 173, 175

Svenska, 184 Swain, Mack, 84

Swanson, Gloria, 84
Tallier, 226

Sauvagc, Andre, 239

Scheffer, Leon, 176

Tarich, 175
Tarlarini,

Mme., 48

Tassin, 278

Schunzcl, 150

Seastrom (see also Sjostrom, Victor),

287, 3^3
Sclig,^6i, 65, 114

Sclznick, David, 386 Seinon, Larry, 117, 212

Sennett,

Mack,

82-85, 88,

100,

114,

n6,

120, 151, 291, 292, 321, 383, 387

Serie d'Art Pathe, 43

Taylor, William Desmond, 205, 206 Tedesco, Jean, 222, 226, 239 Terribili-Gonzales, Gianna, 95 Thalberg, Irving, 386 Theatre Optique, 4 Thiele, Hertha, 349 Thiele, Wilhelm, 328, 346 Tourjanski, 55, 141, 147, 167, 171 Tourneur, Maurice, in, 226

Servas, 73

Sever in-Mars, 45, 87, 163

Severin, Mireille, 240 Shakespeare, 51 Sibirskaya, Nadia, 241 Sienkiewicz, 199
Signorelli, 133

Trauberg, Ilya, 278 Trauberg, Leonid, 174, 175, 278 Traversi, Giannino Antona, 96 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 383

Trewey,

Triangle Corporation, 100, 101, 103,

108, no, 114 Tucker, George Loane, 201

Sigurjonsson, Johann, 138 Silly Symphonies, 385 Siivain, 265 Simon, Michel, 335 Simon, Simone, 337 Simon-Girard, Aime, 148 Sinko, 365 Sjostrom, Victor, 58, 137-142,
177-184, 369 Sorel, Cecile, 74

Turin, 282 Turpin, Ben,

84, 117, 119

U.CJL, 198 Ufa, 135, 136, 185, 188, 259, 261, 341,
147,

35i

Union, United

57, 135

Artists, 214, 218,

284

Sotsikou, 365

Sovkino, 266, 267, 268 Soyuzkino, 268

Stanislavsky, 177 Star, Nina, 172 Star-Films, 21, 22, 34, 35 Starevich, Ladislaw, 18, 55, 172, 173,
241
Stiller,

Valbert, 73 Valentino, Rudolph, 286, 287

Van Dyke, W.
341, 386

S., 211,

298, 310, 311,

Vaucanson, 245 Veidt, Conrad, 189-192, 251,

263

252, 256,

Mauritz, 58, 137, 139, 177-185,

Vertov, Dziga, 173, 268-271, 274-276,

282, 356, 389

263, 264, 287, 363

412
343

General Index
Western Import,
118, 127

Vidor, King, 285, 298, 312-314, 328,

Vigo, Jean, 240, 337, 388

Viskovski, 177

White, Pearl, 40, 113, 135 Wiene, Robert, 75, 135, 170, 190-195,
251

Viragraph Company, 29, 31, 35, 82 Volkov, 55, 140, 168-170 Von Czerepy, 189 Von Harbou, Thea, 193, 350

Wong, Anna May, Worms, Jean, 45

Wufku,
Wysbar, Frank, 349
Yermoliev, 140, Yutkcvich, 356
Za-la-mort, 197

260

Studios of, 267, 268

Von Von
359

Sternberg, Josef, 288, 290, 299,

141, 168, 171

314-316, 342

Stxoheim, Erich, 164, 288-290,

Zanuck, Darryl, 386

Wague, 87 Ward, Fanny, 107 Warner Brothers, 29, 306-308 Warwick Trading Company,
Washburn, Bryant, 225 Weber, Lois, 348 Wegener, Paul, 135, 190, 352 West, Mae, 316

Zecca,

13, 15, 19, 24, 30, 40, 46,

77

16, 21

Zelnik, Fried rich, 254 Zheliabuzhski, 176 Zigotcau, 77

Zigoto {see Semon, Larry)

Zola, 5

Zukor, Adolph,
3<>5*

31, 66, 67,

102-104,

307

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