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OBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVISM 93
GOETHE ON THE FILM
The omniscient Goethe seems already to have been speaking of this great mission of the film when he wrote in his Contributions to Lavater's Physiognomic Fragments :
The things surrounding men do not merely act upon them — men react on their surroundings too and while they allow things to change them, they in return change things. The clothes and household goods of a man permit a sure conclusion to be drawn as to his character. Nature forms man and man forms nature and this, too, is a natural process. Man set down in the middle of an immense world, cuts himself a little world out of it and hangs it full of his own images.
Hangs it full of his own images. This vision of the magnificently rational thinker, Goethe, can be realized in no art more completely than in the film, which can, by means of angle and set-up, choose and stress those outlines of every object which lend it a living characteristic physiognomy.
Such surprisingly live outlines are often unusual. In everyday life it is not thus we see things. But the truth is that in everyday life we usually don't see them at all. Custom spreads a veil over our eyes. Baudelaire wrote in his diary: 'What is not deformed is not perceptible'. Only by means of unaccustomed and unexpected outlines produced by striking set-ups, can old, familiar and therefore never seen things hit our eye with new impressions.
Things may, of course, be deformed to a degree which makes them unrecognizable. In such cases the work of art, consisting of a synthesis of the subject and object, is so heavily weighted in favour of the subjective element that it ceases to be a reproduction of some reality and hence loses its value. The dangers of such arbitrary subjectivity will be discussed later in connection with the avant-garde and 'absolute' film styles.
OBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVISM
Frequently, however, the film aims at demonstrating precisely the excessive subjectivity of a character by showing the