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Chaplin and Disney, nearly everyone agrees, alone are in the great tradition. The former now works upon emphasis rather than upon new statement. He has said. But he must be sure that what he has said is understood. So he repeats himself. This, however, is the necessary limitation of any " art " as it is of dogma and revolution, and will surely be one of Clair's faults. It is perhaps too early to make statements about Disney. This phenomenal young film worker seems able to do what he pleases, and do it well. Certainly the poetic quality of his work is matched only by Chaplin.
To this melange comes Pabst. He comes upon a film epoch in which the director has almost died. New writers' buildings on every studio lot in Hollywood— some of them pretentiously built in the likeness of country chateaux, with dovecotes in the gables and gilt axioms on the walls — tell this story of capitulation to the spoken word, which the innocents of Hollywood believe only writers can supply.
For actors, Pabst will have those who have largely found their success first upon the stage. Therefore, he will doubtless be given a dialogue director. Mass photography has come to seem so inconsequential in conferences here when there are witty lines to be spoken and laughed at. It will be interesting to hear how Pabst asks for that same mass photography — as certainly he will. Dieterle, you may or may not know, asked. Lubitsch asked, and to a certain extent received permission to use it. But will anyone compare the late Tubitsch pictures to the earlier — even to such a little thing as Montmartre — to say nothing of the spectacles ?
Pabst's hope lies in his great admiration for the American newsreel. As a tacking ship, he may make a course from it to his objective. He calls this the picturization of " life " as opposed to the " art " of Disney and Chaplin. Anyone who has ever handled those two terms will know the difficulty involved in trying to separate them, but roughly they express what Pabst is aiming at.
I say his hope lies in the direction of the newsreel because it happens also to be the darling of the American producers and the American public, and not because I am fooled into believing that the newsreel has added anything to the development of films for the past ten years.
If Pabst can begin with mass as spectacle, even if almost excluding it as material for social theory, he will find his way easier than if he attempts to put social theory first and spectacle next. Griffith achieved great success along this line, and at the end of his productive era had attained almost to a genuine " art " — if the term may be excused. But Griffiths had an easier way than Pabst will have because he worked within sentimental national limitations while the German plans, and wisely, to strike at the international view.
Pabst's War of Tomorrow , on which he worked so long in France, should not be inappropriate material for an American picture, granting, of course, that it is made before the NRA or its subsequents fire national feeling to too high a pitch. But whether he intends making this in America is entirely speculative.
It is interesting, the way Pabst reasons along film avenues of the Russian revolution. For the first time in the history of the world, he says, a mass