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THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART
Fig. 105. — Shot from the film " Metropolis ".
which it placed its ' last shirt ', proved too much for German industry, already drained of its blood. " Metropolis " (Fig. 105), which according to official figures cost more than six million marks, finally undermined the material stability of1 Ufa, and with timely capital investments the Americans took charge of the, German cinema.
The immediate result of the change in business leadership was the introduction of American production standards into the European cinema.1 The course was taken of producing average films, made in the shortest possible time and with the least possible expenditure. The fine craftsmanship of the German camera-man school could find no application here, and the camera-men of high culture, such as Guido Zeber, went to work in the small cinema firms still independent, in order to continue the tradition of the German artistic cinema. One! cannot point to a single really important phenomenon in the sphere of the European artistic cinema during this period. Yet what do the so-called ' standard ' methods; of the American camera-man, which have found wide application far beyond the bounds of the American cinema, really signify ? For a qualification of those methods we make use of the materials of a report by E. K. Tisse on the American; camera-man's work.
The average American camera-man is restricted in his work by the strict limits of the standard. Beyond those limits he does not seek new roads, does not; experiment, and as the result of this attitude he exploits only those methods and technical possibilities which always give one and the same, certain and reliable effect. For instance, one rarely sees a camera-man on exteriors working with' a dense light-filter. So, too, when he resorts to gauzes and lenses in order to achieve softness, applying optical ' retouching ', he always tries to keep within the bounds of ' normal ' photography. The standard has become so widely
1 Protective legislation (of Quota or Kontingent) has not so much hindered American business domination, as forced it to take veiled forms, and has little interrupted the ideological advance dating from this time. — Ed.
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