We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
ART FORM AND MATERIAL 261
nevertheless appear to the individual as being objectively given. The parallel of the dialectic interaction of river and river-bed could again be quoted here as the model for the mutual relationship of material and art form.
Hence, if there is a 'dramatic' theme or subject which appears specific because it already shows the peculiar characteristics of the dramatic art form, then it is already content (which really determines the form it can take) and no longer mere 'material' i.e. merely the raw material of living reality, which cannot as yet determine its art form and could be the content of any of them not yet being content in its own right.
Such specific themes (or contents) are no longer mere fragments of reality — they are an approach to reality from the viewpoint of a certain form of art. One might call them 'semifashioned' for they are already prepared to fit into a certain art form. If we call them 'themes' 'subjects' or 'stories', we are already using a correlative term which cannot be conceived in itself, but only as the theme of something, e.g. a drama, as the subject of a novel, as the story on which a film is based. Such can be found only in a reality already regarded from the angle of one or the other of the forms of art.
What is the conclusion from this? That the raw material of reality can be fashioned into many different art forms. But a 'content', which determines the form, is no longer such raw material.
Are there not writers who write nothing but plays or nothing but novels? They, too, regard the entire reality of life, but only from the viewpoint of their own form of art, which has become an organic part of their approach. There are others who work in more than one art form; writers who regard life now with the eye of the novelist, now with the eye of the dramatist. So it may happen that they see the same bit of reality more than once; perhaps once as a drama and once as a film. But if this does happen, they would not be adapting their own drama for the screen. They would have gone back to their own basic experience and formed the same raw material once as a play, once as a film. It is quite certain that