Film Culture (February 1958)

cial film, as partly a “poster” art, had to advertise famous Broadway successes, classic actresses—even Sarah Bernhardt—and literary classics as well as name novelists. For prestige or ballyhoo, whichever, the latest Cinemascope epic utilizes now the same prestige devices, but whatever the intrinsic artistic worth of prestige sources, they put no more than a deceptive gloss on the hybrid product of the film as it has evolved through its expanding technical phases to that synthetic sum of techniques, passing as “the film art,” on popular screens today. To get more people into the theaters—that is, to uproot them from their comfortable living-room chairs in front of the Television screen—the movies have been overreaching stage and novel to call upon the dynamic sensations of kineaesthesia through the third-dimension effect and the illusion of being surrounded by the area of vision instead of, however cozily, being seated before it. In the case of Cinerama, the gimmick is to use the theater as a substitute for interior stations of actual flight—the airplane and the automobile or any rapidly moving vehicle—and to take the spectator to far places on a flying-carpet of maximum illusion; thus, the Cinerama screen has two “arms” perpetually stretched out to lure the viewer into the illusion that he is experiencing a true third dimension because he seems to pass through it; that is, all the visual help possible to science is brought to bear toward the illusion of passage through space. Vain delusion! Because “italicized” physical passivity, in conjunction with illusory flight through space, merely isolates the watcher from “reality” without necessarily consolidating him with “dream.” He exists only in a gelatinous state of wish-fulfillment . . . like the man in the stratosphere who, for a while, was nowhere in particular. The creation of space (a sense of dimension and all it may signify in terms of human and even superhuman experience) is, of course, an objective of all the arts. and each art has developed special means of attaining specific effects of “grand” space. The stage itself, in the hands of men such as Reinhardt, felt the need of involving the audience in the dramatic action as though the theater were a kind of church; hence a spectacle such as “The Miracle.” This theater-piece united the space of the spectator with that of the spectacle. The modern stage has utilized the aisles of the theater, and various stations in the theater, as well as specially constructed stairs, aprons, and ramps, to create the feeling of mobility, so that the spectator should feel the witnessed action more keenly by the sensation of being involved with it. Now, whatever the technical virtues of such procedures, however mechanically clever and however much they may help weak productions of good plays and desperate productions of weak ones, the fact remains that the first law of projection exercised by a work of art is its appeal to the imagination and the sensibility. In other words, no matter what the means, the “space” ultimately created is situated subjectively; i.e., it exists in the hearts and heads of the audience, and if it doesn’t. art has failed. But head and heart are not precisely the nerves. Unless the elaborate devices of mobility and depth-allure, regardless of what art form be involved. assist serious motives in the makers and appeal to important feelings in the spectator, they are no more aesthetically significant than seeming to chute-the-chutes at 6 Coney Island or fly over the Alps in a balloon while actually sitting in a theater before Cinerama or Todd-A-O. I think the mobility theater, as a matter of fact, is a clever mechanical toy that can work both ways, for or against solid illusion, depending on exactly what is done, when, and how. As a modish aesthetic, a director may get away with it and incidentally add a little shock value —Jjust as though the arm of your theater chair were suddenly to become electrified and give you a mild shock. I felt such a shock, with an accompanying puncture of illusion, when watching Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic production of “Troilus and Cressida” that played in New York recently. It was at the moment when Thersites, characterized as a cynical spot-photographer of the Nineties in Guthrie’s modernization of Shakespeare, gets fed up with the Trojan War and its mock heroics and makes his escape up the aisle. On this occasion, it happened to be the aisle by which I sat, and I recall thinking, as he passed me, not of Thersites and what he meant to the action on the stage, but of the visible make-up of the actor playing the part and thus of the fact that, as a repertory actor, he also played Romeo, and that he seemed really tall rather than illusorily tall. At this moment, everything either Shakespeare or the performance had tried to create went for nothing but a shock of dislocation. In a different way, the complex “depth,” “space,” and “mobility” theater of commercial movies accomplishes the same dislocation of illusion: a shock that may help would-be tourists to reconcile themselves to being in a New York theater rather than in Spain or Bali but that amounts, by aesthetic computation, exactly to zero. Such commonly available experiences as these emphasize but one point in relation to my theme: the whole shebang of the commercial film’s “space devices” amounts to a pricked balloon when set next to the most elementary poetic step in an Experimental Film. Once this equation is understood and borne in mind, the virtues of the socalled “professional” as against the defects of the socalled “amateur” (or, as the professional world calls it, the “arty”) become radically compromised and subject to severe reversals of value. It is perfectly true that the Experimental Film also is immature, but it is honestly so, and its pretentiousness is the pretentiousness of raw youth, inexperience, and the subterfuges of a scarcity budget. On the other hand, the pretentiousness of the commercial film is that of success-intoxication, vulgar worldly sophistication, and being just purse-proud. Experience can never help the commercial film. Quite the opposite—the more experience it has, the smugger it gets and the more careless of serious values. If it “succeeds,” it sits on its laurels and expects to hatch more of the same; if it fails, it becomes hysterical and panicky and resorts to desperate measures in the direction of old-fashioned corn or new-fashioned gadgetry. Of course, there are always exceptional directors, exceptional actors, exceptional “art” films—but the vicissitudes attending genuine talent in the film world, if told iruly step by step up to its status ten years after it first clicks, would make the blood run cold, if not also the hair stand on end. For one Bicycle Thief, there are ten alleged masterpieces of Italian Neo-Realism; for one Cabiria, sneered at by Bosley Crowther—the film critic for “The New York Times”—there are a hundred American, British, French, and Italian films that are no better