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216 III. COMPOSITION
An uncinematic story form
To begin with uncinematic story forms, only one such type stands out distinctly— the "theatrical story/' so called because its prototype is the theatrical play. Uncinematic stories, then, are patterned on a traditional literary genre; they tend to follow the ways of the theater. Significantly, the literature on film abounds with statements which place all the emphasis on the incompatibility of film and stage, while paying little attention, if any, to the obvious similarities between the two media. Thus Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov in their 1928 manifesto voice misgivings lest the advent of sound might engender a flood of " 'highly cultured dramas' and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort."* In Proust the narrator compares the impression his grandmother makes on him after a long absence with a photograph picturing her as the sick, old woman she is. But this is not the way, he continues, in which we usually perceive the world, especially things we cherish. Rather, "our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help us to make its purpose intelligible." He concludes by calling his lapse into photographic perception a chance event which is bound to happen when our eyes, "arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically like films."** This passage is important because it specifies the sort of theater least amenable to cinematic treatment. Proust identifies it as the classical tragedy. To him the classical tragedy is a story form which, because of its tight and purposeful composition, goes the limit in defying the photographic media. By the way, the Eisenstein of 1928, who had not yet succumbed to the pressures of Stalinism, may have referred to this very compositional entity when he predicted an increase of "highly cultured dramas" in the wake of sound.
ORIGINS AND SOURCES
The trend in favor of the theatrical story was initiated as early as 1908 by Film d'Art, a new French film company whose first production, the much-praised and much decried! Assassination of the Due de Guise, represented a deliberate attempt to transform the cinema into an art medium on a par with the traditional literary media. [Illus. 40] The idea was to demonstrate that films were quite able to tell, in terms of their own, mean
* See pp. 102-3. **Seep. 14. t Seep. 179.