Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

THE REVIVAL OF NATURALISM 217 vice and virtue were (chemical) products like sugar and vitriol. Here, then, we may remember the constructivism of Pudovkin; the composition of filmic reality out of photographically-recorded natural material. Throughout his long series of Naturalistic novels, Zola governed his conception by the outlook of Hippolyte Taine. Convinced that man could not be separated from his milieu, that he leaves his imprint upon his exterior life, his house, his furniture, his affairs, his gestures, and that to express everything one must express this multitude of effects and assemble this multitude of causes, Zola ultimately held that a state of environment determines and completes the human being. Thus, when Gervaise, the laundress in " L'Assommoir," is happy, the street is gay and bright with sun; when she is despairing, the gutter-stream is black and filthy; when she is meditative, the water reflects the blue, the deep azure of the summer sky. The extreme significance of this emphasis of environment in filmic representation of mood on the screen is too obvious to need comment. There are a thousand instances of it in the films of the German middleperiod. Further, note that the underlying motive of Flaubert's " Madame Bovary " was that of a given personality, conceived as a unit in a mass, pitted against its environment and the milieu into which it is born. Here we may recall the earlier films of Griffith, who placed his characters in their natural sympathetic environment; and Seastrom, whose characters are pitted against their environment. But Zola diverged from Taine's thesis in his selec