The soul of the moving picture (1924)

138 The Soul of the Moving Picture is always threatened with an imminent exhaustion of means. Even to-day, on this account it seems, he is trying to effect a compromise between himself and the world, though it cannot be said that he is going into convulsions over his effort. He is not in a hurry. He is trying his skill at historical films which hardly become him either as a creative genius or a trained spectator. He is snatching his figures out of the earth and giving them, at the expense of verisimilitude, and following the bad example of the German social film, the rather rootless and precarious existence that attaches itself at all times to mondaine as distinguished from mundane life. It is a case of change from / to We which connotes a changed attitude toward the world in general; and it is a change which the film of Sweden has not entirely escaped. But it was to be expected : the Swede and his film are both much too strong and healthy either to avoid or neglect this transition. The Swedish film is the reflection of a people that depends upon itself, that rests within itself, on whose shores the tempestuous waves of other nations break but gently : they have already been broken before reaching that point. The German is the great experimenter. Fate has struck Germany many a telling blow in the last decade; much has been destroyed forever.