Motion Picture Classic (1923, 1924, 1926)

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Here is Harold (center) with his brother, Gaylord, and Joe Reddy, his publicity man Masters of the Motion Picture (Continued from page 53) the slap-sticks or the Western pictures ; or, they gave us a huge, eye-filling spectacle ; and finally they had begun to realize that they were not merely translating books or plays into a sort of dumb play of what happened in a book or a theater, but that their business was to catch the "movie way" of representing life, so that it was quite clear enough and forceful enough without the words. Compared to what we choose to call the modern era of films, they were still, however, giving us a "lot of photography." There was a great deal of unnecessary and unimportant detail in even the best pictures. And as for the handling of the camera itself, their technique might be likened to the thin tone of the harpsichord of two hundred years ago, before Bach invented the piano with its immense range and richness. Flexibility of Today "The modern film as we know it today, which may be compared to a full orchestra, with its variety of shade or tone, its deepened graphic power, its lightness of touch, its complete flexibility to the will or whim of the director, was ushered in by the foreign invasion of about five years ago. . "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," which I saw in 1921, made a profound impression on the film people here. Its weird continuity, which might have been taken from one of Poe's alcohol nightmares, prompted the director, a certain Herr Wien, to seek the most uncanny and fantastic effects. He did this, on the one hand, by using "expressionistic" studio sets that transmitted the exact degree of insanity he wanted to put over ; then by keying up his players to chime with the "expressionistic" sets ; and, finally, by the multitude of camera angles which he resorted to in order to get a startling effect of unreality. It was a marvelous experiment if we consider merely the manipulation or control of the camera. I had often heard direc tors here complain about the "babylike" mind of the movie camera. It was maddening, the way it included and featured things that had simply escaped the director's eye as he shot his sequence — things that had nothing to do with his scheme. And if you blurred or touched up the film, the whole thing looked rotten. And now came "Caligari," with all its "distortions" and its completely sustained atmosphere of unreality. The inspired acting of Conrad Veidt as Cesare, the somnambulist, and Werner Krauss as Caligari, was easily superior to any work we had yet seen. And as for the staging, a police station was a mad dream of leaning walls and masked officials sitting on absurdly high stools; a prison cell was a high, vaulted room, whose toppling pillars seemed to be falling eternally upon the prisoner bound in massive chains to a painted disc on the floor. There were bursts of poetic motion in it : Cesare carrying off the girl, leaps thru an arched window, her dress opening like a great fan and describing an arc, as they disappear; Cesare dancing across the jaggedly pointed roofs of the village, with her swooned body in his arm. . . . Thruout there was the perfection of related movements. "Caligari" suggested immediately the amazing degree to which you could control the camera to secure any desired effect of fantasy or suggestion. It suggested also a complete control over the material photographed: the use not only of artfully selected background, but of synthetic background, this latter stunt being taken over bodily from the modernistic German theater of Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt. In its use of artificial studio sets. "Caligari" went too far, in the opinion of many keen observers, from the genius of the motion picture. The completely artificial sets have the same effect as trick photography, and become after a while very stuffy and boring. With the immense improvement of the (Continued on page 79) 72