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222 III. COMPOSITION
to the spirit of a medium privileged to capture "the ripple of leaves in the wind."* There is a nice observation by Bela Balazs to the effect that children linger over details while adults tend to neglect the detail in some big design. But since children see the world in close-ups, he argues, they are more at home in the atmosphere of film than in the long-shot universe of the theater.10 The conclusion, not drawn by Balazs himself, would be that the theatrical film appeals to adults who have suppressed the child in themselves.
ATTEMPTS AT ADJUSTMENT
The "most marvelous things7
feyder's dictum
Jacques Feyder, the French film director, once postulated that "everything can be transferred to the screen, everything expressed through an image. It is possible to adapt an engaging and humane film from the tenth chapter of Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois as well as ... a paragraph of Nietzsche's Zoroaster." Yet to do this, he cautiously adds, "it is indispensable to have the sense of the cinema."11
Assuming for the sake of argument that Feyder is right, the theatrical story would certainly not resist cinematic treatment. But how can it be transformed into authentic cinema? In narrating such a story, any film maker who has the sense of the medium is obviously faced with two different, if not incompatible, tasks. He will have to put across the story as the purposeful whole it is— a task requiring him to reproduce its complex units and patterns of meanings in a straight manner. At the same time he will have to follow the realistic tendency — a task which prompts him to extend the story into the dimension of physical existence.
STRAIGHT REPRESENTATION OF THE INTRIGUE
Many theatrical films, among them some executed with consummate skill, live up to the first task without even trying to pursue the second. They adequately impart the intrigue, with all its inherent, meanings but, as if completely absorbed in its straight representation, fail to explore the world around us. The Informer, Glass Menagerie, Mourning Becomes Electra, Death of a Salesman, Rouge et Noir, etc., are hardly more than custom-made adaptations of tightly composed stories detachable from the medium; they fit the story like a well-tailored suit. Hence an atmosphere
*Seep. 31.