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CONCLUSIONS AND POSTULATES
than are yours. Yours, after all, are but images of idols, mere shadows of glory. Those others were their own selves, creatures of flesh and blood, there, before our eyes. They were performing in our presence. And of our presence they were aware. Even we, in all our humility, acted as stimulants to them. The magnetism diffused by them across the footlights was in some degree our own doing. You, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the performances of which you witness the result. These performances — or rather those innumerable rehearsals — took place in some faraway gaunt studio in Hollywood or elsewhere, months ago. Those moving shadows will be making identically the same movements at the next performance, or rather at the next record; and in the inflexions of those voices enlarged and preserved for you there by machinery not one cadence will be altered. Thus the theatre has certain advantages over the cinema, and in virtue of them will continue to survive.'
Shadow and a living relationship between actor and audience is indeed the formula which defines the structural difference between cinema and theatre. Yet theatrical art — all art — is not life. It is rather an interpretation of life. The greater art is, the more intense and deep is its interpretation of life. Art is more than life. It is a symbolic expression of life. And only symbolic art is real art.1 While, in principle, the cinema may become art — and there are undoubtedly examples of film classics — and thus interpret or condense life, yet most films are, to use Sir Max's brilliant formula again — shadows.
I hope this book comes into the hands of many of those who so generously and trustingly helped me with collecting its material. To them (and to my other readers) I should like to say: In my mind, though I may have seen as many pictures as you have (good and bad ones), not one film star is present in the sense in which Hamlet, or Goethe's Princess (Torquato Tasso) or Rilke's Make Laurids Brigge live in me. This permanent spiritual ever-presence film cannot give, because our eye is weaker than our mind. It does not hold sight impressions as our imagination does. You get shape, form, but very rarely profondeur, depth. If you get depth from film, you must use your mind to hold it.
(2) The second conclusion at which I have arrived, a conclusion which has increasingly hardened in me, is that the majority of films
1 Cf. Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, New Haven (Yale University Press 1945), where the reader will find an exposition of the significance and implication of the term 'symbol'.
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