Film Culture (Winter 1955)

places at the same time, this is accomplished by a mechanism which does not confine itself to multiplication alone. This mechanism not only distributes the actor like popular dolls turned out wholesale, but it actually makes those dolls look as if they could move and speak by themselves. A child, a shark or a horse is made to act the same way as a great actor—easier, as a matter of fact, since they do not resist so much. But whether children, animals, or actors, they are invested with an intelligence that apparently stems from them. In film cartoons, when a tailwagging duck goes into action, the audience knows at once that behind it there is someone that causes it to move and squawk. When the ventriloquist takes a puppet out of a box, it also is accepted as a unit of intelligence, but the audience is not for a moment deceived about its being a dummy, though it may not care whether it 1s or not. But when a film actor, who undergoes much more manipulation than a duck or dummy, begins to function, he is judged, praised and condemned, even by our best critics, on the basis of being a self-determining and selfcontained human being. This is not so. Actors are usually tricked into a performance not too dissimilar from the process employed by Walt Disney or Edgar Bergen. In films we have a large assortment of actors with a variety of looks and talent, but they are as powerless to function alone as is the mechanical dummy before he 1s put on his master’s lap and has the strings pulled that move head and jaw. I doubt if many are intensely interested in the mechanism that moves an actual dummy, and it is possible that no one is interested in the strings which move the stars of our day, but I am going to discuss the strings anyway, though they are tangled up badly, pulled by many, and laboriously concealed, after the movements have been made. Though not wishing to imply that the result may be favorable, it is possible for the actor on the stage to select his material and to appear directly to the audience without any distortion of purpose. But this is impossible in films. Here a complicated machine extracts an essence from the actor, over which the actor has no control. He can be superior to another in proportion to his personal superiority, but his ultimate importance is regulated by manipulators who demand and receive a pliability which, given graciously, results in his advancement, and given reluctantly, causes him to be discarded. In Paris, the artists lovingly employ a phrase of Cezanne’s “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail.’’ May that be my justification for going into detail, even where detail may be unpopular. The more I ponder on the problems of the artist, the less they resemble the problems of the actor. Though the actor in the theatre and in films is interchangeable, and can even be active in both mediums at the same time, there are some generally observable distinctions. On the film stage, in contrast to the theatre, the actor rarely knows where the audience is going to be nor usually cares. Often three cameras are aimed at him from three different directions. He can note (to his surprise) a camera leveled at him from ten feet above and a camera looking at him from the ground, both from opposite directions and both recording his movements simultaneously. If he communicates with the camera attendant, he can persuade him to define what parts of AGM Josef von Sternberg putting character make-up on Emil Jannings for The Blue Angel. UFA his person will be included. He, himself, can never judge whether he is close or if his whole body is seen, since the determining factor is not his distance from the camera, but the focal length of the lens used. His face is so enlarged that its features may no longer be viewed without discomfort. An inadvertent light can make his nose look like a twisted radish, or it can completely obliterate the expression of his eyes, which usually is a mercy. Though the actor normally is made to look better than he is, the bad use of a lens or the camera placed at a bad angle can produce an effect over which he has no control. His voice can be garbled beyond recognition by the sound apparatus, (unfortunately, it usually is only reproduced) and he can be made voiceless by the dangling microphone swinging in a direction in which he cannot aim his words. No accumulation of emotion or continuity of thought is easy, if at all possible, to the film actor, as the technique of making a film is such that it sometimes requires the player to enter his house from the street three months after he made the street scene, though afterwards the action on the screen takes place in sequence. The exigency of film production may require the street scene to be taken on the sixth day of October and the scene of the house which we see him enter a second later on the fifth of January the following year. (That shrewd arrange 3