Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

232 CLOSE UP specialised, to a certain degree formalised, patterns which are in no sense natural reactions to external stimuli, but a special modification of the material provided by these real-life reactions. I foresee the objections here of manv actors and actresses, who will insist that seven times a week they genuinelv weep and become terrified on the stage, but to argue with them would be as difficult as to argue with a child who, astride on a chair, is convinced that he is riding horseback. The objective logic of the facts declares that the behaviour of the actor on the stage is not a series of genuine reactions to genuine stimuli, but a conventionally constructed formalised pattern. Let us now pass gradually to the film. Let us imagine that the theatre, in its ever increasing tendency to come nearer to its mass audience, acquires new and extraordinary technical means. Let us imagine that, in its tendency to embrace new material, new technique and new possibilities, the theatre invents a means of overcoming the distance that separates the audience from the stage. A cup of genuine china was valueless on the stage because the only thing that could be perceived was its general shape ; the characteristic delicacy of its texture, its design were alike imperceptible. Now comes an inventor and invents a process by which the audience can be automatically brought closer to the stage at any given moment. The audience is no longer fixed. The constancy of the distance between it and the stage, which previously conditioned the transformation of all material in stage use from natural to specially conventionalised, vanishes. Immediately an enormous amount of new material becomes available for introduction to the stage. Real, or natural-seeming material was in no sense bad in itself. It was simply unutilisable on the stage until its richness had been theatrically schematised. But by this new technical discovery stage and audience can automatically come together and this impossibility of using the full richness of real material with its formerly barely perceptible details disappears. Persons whispering can come close to the spectator, a hand but slightly trembling can be set immediately before his eyes, he can hear breathing or discern the flicker of an eyelash, he can distinguish a coat only slightly shabby from one brand new — and draw the necessary conclusions. Everyone has recognised, of course, in this ingenuous description of a stage technically improved — the film, with its close-ups and its long-shots, the angles of its set-ups and its camera panning or tracking round the scene or person photographed. The naturalness, even reality, of the material photographed in a film is not a whim of a particular director's style, but the perfectly logical development of an art in its embrace of ever richer and more abundant material. Let us proceed further. In its striving to gain ever greater audiences, the theatre invents new means of multiplication and repetition of its performances. This again, the film achieves by its technique, fixing the performance once and for all upon the negative that enables an almost unlimited number of positive copies, and then showing these in numberless places again and again. The mass audience of the cinema is infinitely greater than that of the theatre. The new technical basis introduced by the cinema, that is, the enabling of automatic fixation of the image of an emotional moment on a piece of film,