Hollywood Spectator (1937-39)

Hollywood Spectator Page Nine must be alert in looking for the direction and following it to the desired spot in the composition. A moment of inattention may make us miss the story value of a scene. We cannot be aware the initials on a handkerchief protruding from the pocket of a player is the clue which finally reveals him as an impostor. Our attention must be drawn to it. The rest of the composition cannot be blotted out to leave it as the only object within our range of vision. Further Demands of Stage . . . STAGE play can proceed in only one direction — forward. It cannot back-track from the third act to the first to emphasize a point not stressed upon its initial appearance. If the incident of the handkerchief had no significance until the third act was reached, its presence in the first act — too trivial then to have attracted our attention — would have to be recalled by dialogue and action in the later scene. OfF-stage action — a disturbance in the street which a player sees by looking out a window in the set — must be described to us in words. The geography of a play is rigid: the audience is stationary. When we view a play, our attention and imagination must function competently if we are to get the full dramatic significance of off-stage incidents related to us, and the functioning of our memory is essential to their proper placing in the drama as it unfolds. It will be seen, then, that the stage is purely intellectual entertainment with a mixture of real and unreal elements. The players are real people: the forest in the background is a painting. The social demands of the stage are arbitrary. We must be in our seats before the play begins. Owing to the centralization of theatres, almost invariably in business districts, we have to go a considerable distance to reach the one of our choice. The play consumes the entire evening. Attending it is not a mere incident in our social routine: it is an event, perhaps the inspiration for a dinner party or supper afterwards. What Is a Motion Picture? . . . HEN we regard the theatre from the standpoint of physiological psychology, and if there be any logic in our reasoning thus far, we cannot escape the conclusion that the reason for the stage drama’s failure to establish and maintain an audience as great as that assembled by the screen, is its failure to provide the relaxation of mind we can enjoy only by patronizing a form of entertainment which takes us from the outer world of our daily interest to an inner one of its own. The stage is an aloof art whose footlights and proscenium arch bid us stand back and regard it from a distance. We can enjoy a stage presentation as much as we can a photoplay of equal merit, but owing to the theatre’s lack of the desirable restful quality, we have no inclination to patronize it as frequently as we do the cinema. Now let us compare the components of the motion picture with those of the stage play. At the outset we encounter a major difficulty: what is a motion picture? Is it the photograph of a stage play we are getting now in every picture house we attend, a form which tells its story in dialogue? Or is it a creation which speaks to us in pictorial language, with the smallest possible reliance on audible dialogue as its medium of expression? If we regard it as the former, further discusson would be bootless, for the talkie is not art and the laws of no art can be applied to it. It is a misshapen, illegitimate offspring of a misalliance between the stage and the motion picture camera. When Sound Came to Pictures . . . OUR quest is for a form of screen entertainment which, by meeting most completely the public’s demand for mental relaxation, will yield the greatest box-office revenue. As the screen’s vast supremacy over the stage as a box-office attraction was established when the mechanical limitations of the former forced it to tell its stories visually and without resort to audible dialogue, it should follow that when sound came to pictures it should have been handled in a manner to cause the least possible disturbance to the elements of established box-office value, that Hollywood should have continued to make motion pictures, with reliance on audible dialogue only sufficient to expedite the telling of their stories. But the screen went over wholly to talkies. As we proceed with our arguments we will differentiate the two by referring to them as motion pictures and talkies. The fundamental differences between the two are what we are seeking to discover for the purpose of determining their relative box-office values. The talkie speaks the language of the stage, the limitations of whose appeal we have established. When we set the screen apart and examine it, we find it has nothing in common with the older art. To argue they are alike because both use actors is as unreasonable as arguing that a building and a pavement are alike because both use concrete, or that money and newspapers are alike because both use paper. We have to look further than the externals of the talkie and the motion picture if we are to discover their differences. Camera Has No Limitations . . . rHE appeals of the two arts are as far apart as it is possible for them to be. The stage demands intellectual response, the screen purely emotional response: the former makes its appeal through the aural sense, the latter through the visual sense. What we see is less strain on our faculties than what is conveyed to us in words; listening is more exacting than seeing. The screen’s demands on our attention and memory are reduced to a minimum by its mechanics. When the initials on the handkerchief are the clue to the situation, the camera moves forward until all the rest of the composition disappears and we see only the corner of the handkerchief: when our attention should be on one actor in a group, the camera picks him out for us. When it is necessary we should know what the player at the window sees in the street, the camera takes us to the street and we see for ourselves. The screen annihilates time and space. It can take us from the last reel back to the first to rid memory of the task of recalling an earlier