Hollywood Spectator (1937-39)

Page Ten December 10, 1938 incident, and place emphasis on the incident at the exact moment when the story demands it be most emphatic. It can knit simultaneous action so closely we have the impression of being in several different locations at the same time. By sharp cutting from a boy caught in a beleaguered Spanish city, to his mother in California and his father in Hong Kong, both anxious for his safety, we feel we are with all three simultaneously by having overcome time, space and causality. This one power alone separates the screen so widely from the stage that the two still would belong to totally different schools of art if in all other respects they were alike. Good Devices Abandoned . . . HEN, with talkies, the screen abandoned silence, it abandoned devices of value to it. The “flashback,” “iris-in” or “iris-out” never is seen now and rarely was seen during the decade preceding the coming of sound, yet all of them were potent instruments for making it easier to follow screen stories. The reason for the abandonment casts an interesting light on picture producer psychology. The flash-back and iris are considered to be old-fashioned. No other reason has been advanced. No intelligent reason can be advanced. The motion picture makes no social demands. We can enter and leave a picture house when we please, and we do not have to go far in our search of one. In the silent days we developed the attendance habit; it did not matter greatly what our favorite house was showing. Our imagination fashioned our entertainment from the material the screen provided, and the picture had to be a poor one indeed to lack sufficient stimulation to make imaginations function. Since the talkies came, we have learned to shop, our attendance is less regular and boxoffice receipts show greater fluctuation. Such is the result of our being deprived of the enjoyment of entertaining ourselves. We have to accept a talkie as it is presented to us. It is factual. It offers nothing to the imagination. Screen's Most Potent Element . . . UT as yet we have not put our finger on the factor mainly responsible for the screen’s supremacy, have not segregated the element more potent than any other in establishing it as the world’s leading entertainment medium. This element is intimacy. We are thrilled by a play; we lose ourselves in a book; we stand back and imagine ourselves walking in the cool shades of a sylvan glen an artist has put on canvas: we forget ourselves, and our emotions control us as we listen to the playing of a great symphony — all are arts which parade in front of us to compel our emotional response, which flaunt their attractions with words, paint and sound; they are not intimate arts which completely take us from our outer world to their own inner one, which embrace us. which place chairs for us at the table upon which they spread their feasts. Screen art makes no pretensions. It does not parade for our inspection, beats no tomtoms to attract our attention. It creates nothing. It simply hooks its arm in ours and takes us places with it that we may see what it sees; it leads us into the palace of the king and the hovel of the beggar, it places us beside the bride and groom at the altar; beside the murderer as he climbs the gallows steps and the shipmaster as he guides his vessel through the storm; it takes us to the lowest level of a coal mine, and places us in the first line of attack in a football game. Screen Art Creates Nothing . . . EOPLE in studios build the palace and the hovel, the gallows and the ship. That is not screen art. The palace is an expression of the art of architecture and is but an element of screen art, as ultra-marine is an element in a painter’s color combination. The man on the throne is not a king. He is an actor expressing the art of acting. Thus screen art creates nothing. It absorbs the creations of all other arts, blends them, and makes their unreality seem real. It derives its strength as an entertainment medium from its power to achieve a more nearly perfect illusion of reality than any of the older arts are capable of. The camera is the instrument which expresses screen art, thus it is the art of photography which gives screen art its visual beauty. Here let me make even more clear what I mean when I say screen art creates nothing. A painter sets his easel on a hilltop and records on canvas his interpretation of the valley below; a sculptor works in his studio and out of cold marble carves the head of a beautiful child; a weaver expresses his art in a majestic tapestry. A motion picture artist composes an arresting interior in which the painting, the marble and the tapestry play an important part. But even his composition means nothing, is not screen art, until it is expressed by still another art, that of photography. Perfect Illusion of Reality , . . HE camera is screen art's instrument for leading us into screen scenes, for placing us in immediate contact with a story’s characters until we lose all sense of being spectators and become participants in the drama; it enables us to overhear intimate conversations and to look into the eyes of characters to learn thoughts which do not need to be told us in words. It is the camera which makes the screen the least aloof of all the arts, the only art which permits us to have a hand in fashioning its creations, for it is what we put into a true motion picture which makes complete its power to entertain us, not what it itself has to offer. We are participants in motion pictures. We are spectators of talkies. Everything we see in a motion picture is real to us because there is nothing real to disturb the perfect illusion of reality. On the stage the actors are real, as I already have said, and the scenery is make-believe. On the screen the actors, the scenery, the land beneath and the sky above are of the same quality, neither tangible nor plastic — merely shadows which float across the screen, and we float along with them on the stream of fancies they create, are enveloped by them, are part of them, so