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.
HISTORY AND FANTASY 81
of Intolerance or the superb chariot-race sequence in Fred Niblo's Ben Hur. The spectator may be so thrilled by the chariot race that he forgets history in his actual sensations. All these episodes are plainly intended to overshadow the artificiality of the pictorial reconstructions and re-establish a maximum of immediate physical existence.
CONCERN WITH AUTHENTICITY
Instead of imbuing history with camera-life, the film maker may also move in the opposite direction in order to mediate between the past and the cinema; he may go the limit, that is, in portraying the modes of being peculiar to some historical era. To be sure, such an objective calls for complete immersion in that era and consequently interferes with the cinematic approach at the outset. But if films in this line draw on the pictorial material of the period to be resurrected, they are nevertheless apt to show characteristics which are in a measure cinematic.
Take again a Dreyer film— his Day of Wrath. [Illus. 21] This remarkable film obviously rests upon the sensible premise that the experience of spatial and temporal endlessness is a relatively modern experience and that therefore the attempt to reproduce the declining Middle Ages in terms of a nineteenth-century medium constitutes a violation of historical truth. When the Inquisition tried and burned witches, the world was stationary rather than dynamic, thinly populated rather than crowded; there was not yet the sensation of dizzying physical movement and the amorphous masses were still to come. It was essentially a finite cosmos, not the infinite world of ours.
Dreyer, apparently determined to convey late medieval mentality in all its dimensions, does not even try to instill cinematic life into his film, except for what may have been a slip on his part— the episode of the lovers strolling through the woods. This episode, with its problematic mixture of real trees and period costumes, perfectly illustrates the clash between the realistic and formative tendencies discussed in chapter 2. The trees form part of endless reality which the camera might picture on and on, while the lovers belong to the orbit of an intrinsically artificial universe. No sooner do the lovers leave it and collide with nature in the raw than the presence of the trees retransforms them into costumed actors. But on the whole Dreyer fashions his imagery after paintings of the period and indeed succeeds in keeping out crude actuality. (The touches of modern psychology he adds to the plot are quite another thing.) It is as if old Dutch masters had come to life. And in accordance with their appearance, the characters are like monads; they move slowly about, and there is a spatial distance between them which reflects their resistance to promiscuous mingling.