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instance ; is that cinema ? You may blame it on the director, say he should have dominated them, controlled them; but could he? Can anyone interfere with great realistic acting, a patiently constructed edifice, which the removal of one brick would bring crashing down in ruins?
All questions with no answer : and yet it is an important matter : it is, in fact, at the very root of a world-cinema which is basing itself on great realistic acting, or the nearest approach to that ideal which it can manage. Must the actor stay to make only rubbish, and the documentaries and abstractions share between them all the film meaning in the world ?
In Germany, a long time ago as it now seems, they had an Expressionist school, chiefly on the stage but tricking now and then on the screen, where Caligari was its fine flower. It did silly things, and was soon dated, but it produced a theory of film acting which has since been almost lost. It has, in fact, only one successful and influential screen survivor, one actor who works out its principles all by himself — Conrad Yeidt. And Yeidt has developed away from it since the days of Caligari, the days when Reinhardt and Wiene and Galeen and the rest of them believed in light and line, symbol and angle. But he has not developed in the directions of the realists; that is the point.
Its own supporters could not define Expressionism ; you may call it plastic symbolism, if you like; impressionism would be a closer word. Its aim boiled down to this ; the imagination of the audience must be stimulated to do most of the work for itself. The designer gave us a black wall, a grey wall, and a white hole; we saw a sinister attic lit by a rav of hope. The director made us peer from above on a pale slit of an allev, with four scudding figures; we saw a whole town in uproar. And the actor, in his turn, gave us the minimum ; a single wide gesture, a shoulder, a back, replaced all the painstaking close-ups in which great realistic acting gets itself across.
And it worked — that was the miracle. It matched a principle inherent in the cinema — the principle of suggestion. For we know that after the very early days when the cinema was praised for showing us evervthing where the stage could show only a part, it was found that the real advantage of the cinema was to show only a part where the stage showed everything. It is, in fact, a highly eclectic form, and thus leaves to* the imagination the extraordinary scope which makes a great film our most stimulating intellectual exercise. It is essentiallv austere ; it gives us the minimum : we do the rest for ourselves. The Russian cinema is one long sermon on this theme.
This, perhaps, is why we feel that realistic acting will not do. It goes counter to this idea of suggestion. It takes us step by step, pedantically, along a road we could travel alone. The Expressionist actor matched his medium. Conrad Veidt matches it to-day. In spite of his development towards an inevitably more human and personal technique ; we never, even