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80 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
itself is bought at a price. True, Dreyer succeeds in distilling camerareality out of a historical theme, but this very reality proves to be unreal. Isolated entities, the faces he lavishly displays resist being localized in time so stubbornly that they do not even raise the issue of whether or not they are authentic; and his unrelenting concern with them more likely than not entails the suppression of a great deal of material phenomena which are no less contingent on the drama than the faces themselves. Joan of Arc evades the difficulties bound up with historical films only because it neglects history— a neglect sustained by the photographic beauty of its close-ups.5 It unfolds in a no-man's land which is neither the past nor the present.
Dreyer in his Joan of Arc aims at transforming the whole of past reality into camera-reality. His film is the only known instance of a radical "solution" in this direction. But does it also mark the only way of attaining the goal Dreyer envisions? A possibility as radical as this one would be the following: one might think of a film which suggests the infinite chain of causes and effects interlinking the historical events as we know them. Such an effort toward establishing a causal continuum— an effort in keeping with the cinematic approach, for reasons indicated in the preceding chapter— would bring to the fore numerous incidents instrumental in the "unfolding of destinies" and thus lure the spectator out of the closed cosmos of poster-like tableaux vivants into an open universe. However, this possibility, which involves critical probing into sanctioned legends, has not yet come true on a noticeable scale.* Conceivably enough: it breeds nonconformity and threatens to substitute enlightenment for entertainment. As matters stand, the historian's quest and history on the screen are at cross-purposes.
Yet if Dreyer's sweeping experiment has not been repeated, there has been no lack of attempts to follow the realistic tendency at least within the given framework of otherwise conventional historical pageants. Many of them include episodes which almost look like camera penetrations of present-day reality (which in part they are, of course). They feature cinematic subjects, such as crowds, acts of violence, chases, treat them or whatever they focus upon in a manner which does justice to the affinities of the medium, and unsparingly avail themselves of specifically cinematic techniques. Think of the mass movements and chases in the historical parts
* In Paris, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the film director Slatan Dudow told me of a project of his: he planned to make a historical film on wars, tracing the changes in warfare to technological changes and changing economic conditions. Significantly, this film, which conforms to the possibility suggested in the text, would have resulted in a documentary.