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270 PROBLEMS OF STYLE
and tied, or in other words are stylized. Nevertheless stylization and realism are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of great realists among the poets who write in verse. For the truth and law resident in nature can be reproduced not merely by a servile imitation of nature but even more faithfully by a stylization which exaggerates and stresses certain points. The natural presentation may perhaps reproduce reality, but the stylized image expresses the truth.
This problem of style interests us now only inasmuch as it concerns the film. Is stylization possible in the film? Can photography give a picture of life which would correspond, say, to a story told in verse? In other words, can the film tolerate a presentation the formative principle of which is not mere similarity to nature but some abstract law of rhythm and form? Can we make people talk in verse in a film without causing a disturbing contradiction to arise between stylized speech and the unstylized naturalness of the picture?
We know that the film began seeking possibilities of stylization from the very beginning, photographic technique notwithstanding. The directors strove to achieve the picturesque by composition, light effects, close-ups, soft focus, distortion and especially through the medium of angle and set-up. Swedish films especially sought poetic pictorial effects. Fritz Lang, Murnau and Robert Wiene, the creator of the expressionist Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, did much fine work in this direction in the days of the silent film and in Russia. Moskvin, the greatest pictorialist among cameramen, created together with Eisenstein (whose guiding artistic principle was precisely stylization) the most interesting and valuable stylized film in Ivan the Terrible. The real content of this demoniacally monumental musical-pictorial symphony is not the story of Ivan the Terrible but a revelation of the terrifying medieval PravoslavOrthodox Gothic spirit and superstition in pictures that are like old icons come to life. In this film the stylization has reached a culminating point.
Nevertheless there is something that always requires to be natural in the film and which does not tolerate stylization. This does not apply to forms, which have often been successfully stylized, but it does to movement. On the stage we accept