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WAGNER AND FILM
DALLAS BOWER
Hugh MagDiarmid's article in the Spring issue of Cinema Quarterly gives me a cue. A cue moreover, awaited with growing impatience, for, with my belief never disturbed, I have been waiting a long while in the wings. One memorable evening in Bloomsbury (such a fitting environment!) I outlined to Miss C. A. Lejeune my ideas upon the obvious association of Wagnerian music-drama theory and soundfilm. Those of my friends, or persons whom I choose so to call, who may read this know that the subject is my favourite pastime; and many in varying degrees of production eminence have suffered. Or so I feel. For never do I appear to have convinced anybody worth convincing. Even the distinguished critic of " The Observer" merely said "Yes" to everything I said. Here, I thought was a candidate fitted for inefficient continuity keeping, not the Omniscient Critic of my imagination. But, in retrospect, I thought how wrong I had been in my estimate, for quite obviously the lady knew nothing about Wagner. Nor do the majority of film theorists — not even a little bit. Which gives my case an added significance, I feel; for if they did, they would see how simple it is.
Now, MacDiarmid, as a poet, will have pity on me maybe; at least, he will listen. And MacDiarmid, dropping as he does on bended knee as T. S. Eliot passes, will probably think Wagner just too too much; but I would have him bear with me for a short while. The quintessence of his article is a plea for the poetic film. That if a film has aesthetic sensibility it cannot therefore be a "proposition for showmen" is slowly losing weight with the better filmtrade critics, because the box-office is beginning to show to the contrary. Let us then, accept the commercial desirability of the poetic film, using the term poetic in MacDiarmid's sense. Accepting also, the rather obvious premise that the poetry, the music and the film must be specially composed, synthesized as a co-operative whole, may we not ask if such a film potentially does not exist? Inevitably, said Wagner, the poet's art, in its sublimest moments, becomes music. And he chose to write his epic poems (forget how bad they may be as pure poetry) in a medium which asked for visual representation, physically free. That he needed visual representation he could not substantiate; essentially and primarily a man of the theatre, wish
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