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MATTERS OF CONTENT 267
become merely an incident. If tragedy acknowledges chance events, it does so by making them serve its own ends; chance is then an involuntary helper, not an independent agent. Yet this appropriation or indeed elimination of the accidental is most certainly against the grain of the cinema. It is again Caillois who exposes the discrepancy between film and the inherent determinism of tragedy: 'The cinema emphasizes . . . the contingency of human relationships. The tragic heroes slay each other only among themselves; one locks them up like wild animals in the arena so that they may tear themselves to pieces. On the screen, as in the street, the passer-by is killed by the gangster because he happens to be there, for this world has no order, it is a place of movement and collision."3
What the difference between hero and gangster, arena and street, implies for cinematic treatment can be nicely demonstrated by a look at Thornton Wilder's novel, The Bridge of San Luis Key, in which the street is passed off as a sort of arena. The bridge collapses, with five travelers being killed, and the account of their lives up to then is to convince us that the catastrophe was actually the work of divine providence. The disaster is thus reincorporated into a cosmos. (The fact that this particular cosmos relates to providence, not fate, is irrelevant here.) Now consider the pivotal event of the narrative— the collapsing bridge. Is it not a cinematic spectacle par excellence? No doubt it is, but only if it is conceived of and introduced as an accident in the dimension of physical reality; then indeed the shots of it will be an indispensable source of information and the nucleus of various meanings. Conversely, in a faithful screen adaptation of the Wilder novel in which the catastrophe is featured as an instrument of divine providence, the potential revealing power of these very same shots would be wasted on a spectator captivated by the catastrophe's predetermined significance. The collapsing bridge, that is, would withdraw from the realm of cinematic subjects into that metaphysical region which, among other ghosts, harbors Moby Dick.
Remoteness from the imagery Like conceptual reasoning, the tragic offers content which, because it lacks correspondences in the physical world, cannot be suggested by representations, however allusive, of this world. It eludes camera-life. An exclusively mental event, it must be communicated in a direct manner in order to come into view at all. But what about films, such as Umberto D., which convey their story primarily through a flow of images and yet manage to include a tragic theme? In the case of Umberto D. this theme is of course not the old pensioner's suffering under humiliating poverty; rather, it should be identified as the alienation which infects the whole world he lives in and manifests itself, for instance, in his relation to Maria, the wretched young servant. Supported