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YOU CAN 'T KILL A PHOTOGRAPH 189
FILM COMEDY
The secret of the true film comedy is that in it the phenomenon parts company with the object and leads a sort of ghost-like life of its own, free of all meaning and content. Comic films played by human actors have an inner law of their own, consisting in a complete lack of logic which is in itself comical. Even the most realistically photographed nature can suddenly be rendered funny by some optical trick. In Hans Richter's Haunted Morning there are six gentlemen whose hats are blown off by a wind. The hats circle in the air like a swarm of birds and cannot be caught. The same six gentlemen then steal away and hide behind a slender lamp-post and disappear as completely as though the lamp-post was a wall. Then we see a long perspective shot of a garden; suddenly a door opens in the middle of it, as though the garden had been a papered wall and the six gentlemen turn up again, coming through it. All this has no sense whatsoever and contains no other intention than to be funny through being nonsensical.
In another film men who are having a fight are caught up by a whirlwind and go on fighting in the air without appearing to notice that they are no longer on the ground. All this seems the work of the whirlwind, not of the camera. The camera does nothing but shoot. Its work is discreet and invisible. The film merely makes use of its technical facilities in order to show us a fantastic happening.
YOU CAN'T KILL A PHOTOGRAPH
When a picture is no longer a copy of something and the image no longer evokes in us a reference to some object independent of it, which it represents and which might just as well have been represented in some other way — if thus the picture appears to have an autonomous existence, a final reality, to be as it were self-contained, then it acquires that grotesquely immaterial lightness which makes even the most terrible happenings seem entirely harmless. The hero of such a film comedy may lie down on the rails in front of an express train and we shall not be afraid, for what can happen to a picture if it is run