cinema journal vol. 09, no. 2, spring, 1970

CINE MA

JOURNAL

Richard Kahlenberg tC _ and Chloe Aaron

The Cartridges Are Coming

f._

H. L. Mencken On Hollywood- and Valentino

Ronald Blumer a

The Camera as Snowball I '

Gerald Mast

^- usB m ^

_ The Gold Rush

.....t. and The General

Douglas W. Gallex '

Theories of Film Music

SPRING 1970 Volume IX, No. 2

CINE MA JOURNAL Volume IX, Number 2, Spring 1970

CONTRIBUTORS Richard Kahlenberg is planning coordinator

for the American Film Institute and played an important role in setting up the Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills. A member of the Society for Cinema Studies, he is completing a Ph.D. dissertation about the British Film Institute for the speech department at Northwestern University. Chloe Aaron, who assisted him in preparing the report on the current cartridge evolution, is a media consultant to the AFI and holds a master's degree from George Washington Uni- versity.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), a graduate of Baltimore Polytechnic, wrote for the Baltimore Sun for many years. He was co- editor with George Jean Nathan of The Smart Set (1914-23) and edited the American Mercury from 1925 to 1933.

Gerald Mast grew up in Los Angeles, where he was a child actor for Disney and Goldwyn pictures. He went to the University of Chicago for an A.B. and a Ph.D. in English. He was an instructor in English at Oberlin College (1965-67) and is now an assistant professor in the Humanities Division at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where he teaches modern drama and film history.

Ronald Blumer is a graduate in film from the Boston University School of Communica- tions, where he received a master's degree. He is currently a contributing editor of Take One, the Canadian film magazine, and is studying for a doctorate in film theory at McGill University, where he has been an assistant to John Grierson.

Douglas W. Gallez is assistant professor of broadcast communication arts at San Francisco State College, where he teaches courses in music for the communication arts, broadcast writing, and research. A composer of music for documentary films, he has recently completed a book-length study of the relationships between music and film.

Peter Harcourt is director of the new film department at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Christian Koch, a graduate of the Ph.D. program in speech and film at the Uni- versity of Iowa, will be an assistant professor this fall at Oberlin College. Richard Geary has been motion picture critic for the Univer- sity Daily Kansan while completing his master's degree in radio-television-film at the Uni- versity of Kansas.

CONTENTS

Richard Kahlenberg, Chloe Aaron

The Cartridges Are Coming

H. L. Mencken: On Hollywood-and Valentino

Gerald Mast: The Gold Rush and The General

Ronald Blumer: The Camera as Snowball

Douglas W. Gallez: Theories of Film Music

Cinema Journal Book Reviews

STAFF

EDITOR: Richard Dyer MacCann

University of Kansas

ASSOCIATE EDITORS:

Arthur Knight University of Southern California

Jack C. Ellis Northwestern University

Howard Suber

University of California, Los Angeles

Peter Dart University of Kansas

John L. Fell San Francisco State College

CINEMA JOURNAL is the journal of the Society for Cinema Studies (formerly the Society of Cinema- tologists). Published twice a year, in November and April. Editorial Office: Radio-Television-Film Department, 217 Flint Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66044. Printed by the University of Kansas Printing Service. For subscriptions ($4.00) and additional copies ($2.00) address Professor Gerald Noxon, 21 Maple Avenue, Bridgewater, Mass. 02324. ( 1970, Society for Cinema Studies.

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WHAT DOES

THE PAST FORITT1ELL?

We make no attempt in this semi-annual magazine to keep up with current events. We do not send correspondents to European fes- tivals, for example, to track down the latest avant-garde, nor do we seek interviews from the most promising new directors in Peru. Our focus is rearward, for the most part, and our interests broadly theoretical. Many of our readers are film history teachers who search for standards and for a very real refreshment in the high achievements of the past.

This time we have accepted an article which seems very much concerned with the present -so much so that it will probably be "out of date" by the time our next issue appears. Perhaps we should have left this kind of thing to the SMPTE Journal or the daily trade papers. But we felt that Richard Kahlenberg's survey is actually a look into the future- almost as justifiable, along comparative-critical lines, as scanning the past.

For the art of the film, the implications of cartridge hardware are beyond imagining. For the first time since the beginning of film, a technological change promises to reduce costs sharply and therefore break some of the shackles of the marketplace.

Will the film poet now speak directly to the fireside? Alas, such simplicity is far beyond the grasp of the modern age. Cine-salesmen will vie with each other for the best places in shop windows and supermarket shelves. There will be movie-of-the-month clubs, best-seller lists, cut-rate imitations, porno-pushers. The magicians of the mass market will cast their spell and persuade busy buyers that the newest is the most beautiful, the most expensive the most valuable, the most bizarre the "best investment." Our own professional study of the past warns us of this. Our knowledge of contemporary American reality tempers our excitement about the ideal film future.

Yet we must hope. Surely cartridge films must mean, at least for a while, another new era for the moving image. The arrival of sound brought a feast of picturemaking and good work was done because everyone was too busy to question it. The earliest years of television were glorified with a burst of

activity in original dramatic writing, until the build-up of executive hierarchies, advertising agencies, and audience measurement slowly contracted the creative surge. Once again it is possible that a shortage of executives and a surplus of demand may leave artists and writers free to create beautiful things before anyone notices what is going on-a new era of quantity within which quality may find a corner to be unobserved and therefore be itself.

An academic magazine, bound as it is by the chance submission of manuscripts, seldom is lucky enough to look planned. This issue of Cinema Journal is no exception. Yet there is a curious convergence of tone, as if the contributors were all dissatisfied with the present state of things.

H. L. Mencken is a voice from the past, reprintable chiefly because of the tasty vinegar of his style. Yet note how up-to-date he seems, as he complains of the "irritating technic" of editing in which certain crucial scenes are "dismembered" in order to conceal the in- ability of popular actors. Or observe his head- shaking over moviemakers who are "apparently quite unable, despite their melodramatic announcements of salary cuts, to solve the problem of making movies cheaply, and yet intelligently, so that civilized persons may visit the movie parlors without pain."

It may not be possible to suppose any longer, as Mencken did, that "the first really great movie, when it comes at last, will probably cost less than $5000." But we must take account of the changes in technology, and perhaps the next really great movie will be only 17 minutes long, and sold on some sort of spool at the nearest drugstore.

The great days of the short film, as the history of Chaplin and Keaton reminds us, led also to great landmarks in feature film production. The giddy era of almost-perfect comedies in America coincided with a far-from- perfect experimentalism with subjective images in France (as Gerald Mast and Ronald Blum- er, new young critic-scholars, remind us) but both periods look relatively fresh and fruitful today as we head into the latest Hollywood promise: to remake, cheap, The Graduate and Easy Rider, instead of The Sound of Music.

0 Photographic Credits. Front cover: (1) EVR

cartridge, seven inches in diameter, self-feeding, 50-52 minutes long (CBS). (2) Still from Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush.

Stills of Chaplin and Keaton on cover and on page 27, and of Rudolph Valentino, courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. P. 34, Ronald Blumer. Others by corporations concerned -RCA, Sony, Technicolor.

0 A major part of the publication cost of this

issue has been supported by grants from the William Allen White Foundation and from the University of Kansas.

The Cartridges Are Coming Richard Kahlenberg and Chloe Aaron

The years 1970-71 may be the first years of the cartridge revolution in the film and television industry. By 1974, the annual volume of Super 8 millimeter film distribution in cartridge form may be six times the current volume of 16mm distribution. CBS, RCA, and Sony, on the other hand, have introduced video players which use pre-recorded TV cartridges, intended eventually to be as cheaply available as long-play records.

This report surveys the state of the art of Super 8 and video cartridge systems to examine their immediate potential.

AVAILABLE SYSTEMS

CBS has developed an Electronic Video Recording system whereby sound and image are printed electronically on a master film (black-and- white and color) from which limitless copies can be printed. The prints are packaged in a circular cartridge seven inches in diameter with a maximum 50 minutes of running time for black-and-white cassettes and 25 minutes for color. The cartridge must be rewound after the first track is played and then reinserted in the player for the second 25-minute run. The cartridge can be played only on the EVR player, a briefcase-sized unit with wires that clamp onto the antenna terminals of standard TV sets. The system has no recording capability. The color-capable EVR system was exhibited in March for marketing September 1, 1970.

Selectavision, RCA's answer to EVR, is a holographic, rather than a photographic system.* Original images, in color, are converted into embossed holograms from which a master can be made that presses the copies onto vinyl-a material as cheap as paper and similar to the plastic used to wrap meat in supermarkets. Playback requires that the beam from a low-powered laser pass through the vinyl strip into a simple TV camera. The playback mechanism, the laser and the TV camera are all housed in the player (about

This article is a digest of a special report originally prepared for the board of trustees of the American Film Institute. It is not a statement of AFI policy, but is published here in order to share some important information which has recently come to light. Whenever possible, the information in this report was obtained directly from the firms involved. In the case of conflicting information (costs, marketing plans, etc.) the company's announced intention is reported rather than the speculation of third parties. Copyright American Film Institute, 1970.

* The word "Selectavision" as used in this article must be considered temporary and pro- visional in view of legal action recently brought against RCA which may deny them the right to use this name.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 3

the size of the CBS machine) which is wired to the antenna terminals of a standard color or black-and-white TV set. The system has no recording capability. RCA says it will be on the market in 1972.

The Sony Videoplayer uses magnetic tape packaged in plastic cartridges the size of a Reader's Digest. The cassettes will play on either a color or a black-and-white TV set and the system will have a recording capability with the addition of one accessory recording device. The Videoplayer is slightly larger than a Sony audio tape unit and will be marketed in Japan late-1970 and in the United States early 1971.

Other companies are entering the field. Avco Industries has acquired controlling interest in Cartridge Television, Inc., which has a video player- recorder in the development stage. Shibaden, a Japanese firm, is developing a new player/recorder that will not be compatible with the Sony system. Details on both of these were to be made available before the close of 1970.

Norton Simon, Inc., has also announced its intention to market a video recorder-playback. Significantly, this company is the corporate parent of Talent Associates and would presumably have an in-house source of program material to put into pre-recorded cassettes.

There are six manufacturers of cartridge sound projectors capable of projecting a feature film on 8 millimeter: Technicolor, Fairchild, Bohn- Benton, Jayark, MPO, and Panacolor. Sound film specifications vary as to whether it is optical or magnetic and as to placement of sound with relation to picture.

Every manufacturer makes an "endless loop" sealed cartridge which will fit only his projection equipment. Eastman Kodak and Bell and Howell have developed cassettes (which are mutually incompatible)-non-sealed plastic cartridges which, once snapped onto the projector, automatically thread themselves onto a reel and, when the film is finished, automatically rewind.

MOVES TOWARD STANDARDIZATION

There is no way that EVR and Selectavision can become compatible with each other or with other systems. Anyone with an EVR player will have to stick to software in the EVR format. This will also be true for Selectavision.

Sony has reached an agreement with other future manufacturers of videoplayers-including Phillips Lamp of the Netherlands, Panasonic, To- shiba, and Sanyo of Japan, and Grundig of West Germany-to standardize cassettes so that they will have interchangeability. The Japan Industry Standards Committee has been holding talks about cartridge television. Matsushida, Craig, and Victor are advocating one standard; Sony and its circle, another. According to Matsushida, ten other cartridge TV manufacturers are involved in the talks and are uncommitted.

There is also speculation about a possible combining of TV and Super 8 film. Nordemende, a German firm known in America for its portable short

4 / CINEMA JOURNAL

wave radios, has exhibited an $800 device that can play Super 8 mm movies on a standard color TV set. Another area under consideration is the

development of equipment for the home which can copy Super 8 film onto

magnetic video tape. The debate over the standardization of Super 8 sound film centers on

two questions: Should the sound be optical or magnetic? And what should the sound separation be? That is, how many frames apart should the image and the sound track be? The problem of standardizing sound separation is not a question of the quality of the various systems (which range from 125 frames advance to 38 frames retard) but that the fixing of a specific standard would make a great deal of the existing equipment obsolete.

Manufacturers and users strongly disagree on the pros and cons of optical and magnetic sound. The only 100% general agreement among those

surveyed was that magnetic sound has higher fidelity, particularly in high frequencies, and is less disturbed by dirt than optical.

Those against magnetic claim that it is more expensive and doesn't last as long because the magnetic strip tends to separate from the film. Eastman- Kodak maintains, however, that the magnetic strip came off only in the

early history of Super 8 when it was put on by the labs. Now the film stock comes from Eastman with the strip already on it and does not, they claim, separate from the film.

In addition to lower cost and durability, pro-optical users cited that

optical allows less possibility of tampering with the sound track. This is

particularly important to libraries and leasing agencies who cannot afford to inspect a film each time it's returned, although Cine-Magnetics in New York City claims that only a skilled amateur with expensive recording equipment at his disposal could alter or erase an existing magnetic sound track.

In addition to the problems of standardizing Super 8 film, there is current incompatibility of the various cartridge designs. With the so-called "endless loop" sealed cartridge systems there is a different "pick-up" mechanism for each manufacturer's projector. As previously noted, there are also conflicting designs for the cassette.

Both the cassette and endless loop cartridges will probably stay on the market for some time because of the positive advantages in both categories. The endless loop cartridges stay cleaner longer because they are sealed; they are also essential for short films played without interruption (as in an exhibit, for example) because there is no rewind and no need for a

projectionist. The no re-wind feature will also be attractive to packagers of feature films who will want to eliminate the re-wind time between reels. In this connection, Eastman maintains that Super 8 film resolution and

projection will soon be up to theatrical standards.

Cassettes are favored by users who want to be able to get at the film if it breaks, who might want to reverse the film (endless loop systems cannot be reversed), who might want the interchangeability potential (the cassette

Selectavision, by RCA. A low-power gas laser passes through holographic images on the tape and "bends" part of it into the camera where it is deciphered to produce color pictures on a standard TV receiver. This is what is happening inside the box once the cartridge is introduced. Below: the Sony system.

6 / CINEMA JOURNAL

can be removed leaving a standard reel that could be used on other magnetic 18 frame advance projectors) or prefer the lower cost of cassette packaging. Empty or non-recorded cartridges run from $6-$10 and cassettes from 65? to 95?. Technicolor plans to market an inexpensive attachment for their

cartridge projector which will permit normal reel-to-reel projection of any silent or optical sound Super 8 millimeter film up to 400 feet in length.

Two days of the 1969 fall conference of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers were devoted to Super 8. American Cinema-

tographer reported: 1) The potential of Super 8 as a professional format is staggering-but it will

never realize that potential until standardization is achieved in the area of

projection. 2) Magnetic sound for Super 8 is definitely superior to optical, quality-wise-

but is that extra ounce of high-fidelity worth the extra cost? There was also general agreement that both the cassette and the endless loop cartridge would stay on the market but there was a definite need for an interchangeable one that would work on all manufacturers' projectors. Educational film producers are discussing the formation of a committee

to set down what is really required, at least for school systems and industrial training, and present this to the manufacturers.

"If we are ever going to move in the area of standardization," said Technicolor's Education representative Douglas Fletcher, "the customer has to make the decision and the customer in this case probably will be the educational or the industrial film producer (or distributor). They as a

body must take some kind of leadership position and say this is what they want based upon their experience and their research in the market place."

The Department of Defense formed a study group from all three branches of the armed services which considered presentations from almost

every U.S. manufacturer and distributor and consulted with technical

experts not associated with manufacturers. On August 12, 1969, the committee recommended the following specifications for audio-visual activities within the department:

Picture format: Super 8. Sound format: Magnetic. Sound synchronization: 18 frames in advance of picture.

The recommendations correspond to the standards Eastman and Fairchild have adopted.

Fairchild has purchased the license for the Eastman cassette and this

July will bring out a Super 8 sound projector in the Eastman standard of

magnetic sound and 18 frame advance sound synchronization. The Ameri- can National Standards Institute's Photographic Standards Board PH-22 Committee is expected to publish its recommendations along the lines of the Eastman Kodak standard.

Technicolor has a projector in the research and development stage which will play either 22 frames advance optical or 18 frames advance magnetic. There is no announced date for marketing.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 7

Once, if ever, the debate on optical vs. magnetic sound is settled, there will still be questions relating to the quality of projection, particularly as it relates to feature films. Current TV quality as relayed through the EVR, RCA, and Sony systems will not be up to standard projection images. Two

suggested ways of meeting this objection are: (1) make standard Super 8

projection equipment easily available at a low price to home and schools, and (2) upgrade TV image-lineage. If something akin to the three or four foot TV screen now in the experimental stage becomes available to the home market it would give the satisfactory grey scale necessary for quality viewing. Sony in Japan and Trumbull Film Effects have inexpensive 2000- line resolution TV recording and playback circuits in the advanced development stages. When marketed, these systems would provide visual resolution

comparable to current 8 or 16mm photographic films.

COSTS AND MARKETING

According to Motorola, the first company to be licensed by CBS to manufacture the EVR players, the first shipment will go to the marketplace in September, 1970. The players intended for industrial and educational use will sell for $795, but a scaled-down model for home use is planned at a lower price. Cartridges of one half-hour of pre-recorded programming (black-and-white) will be $14.40. The selling price for color has not been

announced but a rental fee of $5-$6 for a feature film in an EVR cartridge has been suggested by one CBS spokesman.

One marketing possibility for sales (excluding feature films), raised in the CIBA Review, is that CBS-EVR use the two million member CBS record club in the U.S. as a marketing base for EVR cartridges. The Review is a publication of the Swiss chemical firm CIBA, which, along with British- owned Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), is part of the EVR consortium in Europe.

The EVR system appears to offer protection to film producers concerned about unauthorized duplication. "The mechanics of this system," says Darryl F. Zanuck, "provide us with a safeguard against the unlawful copy- ing and bootleg sale of prints-something which has plagued film companies for years."

When RCA's Selectavision goes on the market in 1972, players will sell for $400 and one half hour of pre-recorded color tape for $10. (Motorola and CBS claim that the price of EVR's player will be competitive by the time Selectavision reaches the market). According to RCA Selectavision

cartridges will probably be marketed through retailers like records.

Sony will begin marketing a $350.00 Videoplayer in Japan this year and in the United States next year. Empty or non-recorded videocassettes will sell for $20. Since the tape is reuseable, the $20 is somewhat like a deposit on a milk bottle. Putting a program in the cartridge will run from $2-$5, depending on the number of times the program is played (each Video- cassette has a built-in counter to indicate the number of times it has been

8 / CINEMA JOURNAL

played), and the tape can be returned over and over again to a programming center for erasing and recording new material. If current feature films are available for the Sony format, an entire family might see a film for the price of one standard movie house admission. This will require volume sales, however.

For $100 more, Sony offers a video recorder attachment and for another $350 a portable TV camera. They are the only video manufacturing company to date who have announced their interest in capturing the home market that wants to originate its own programming, i.e., make home TV- movies.

The reusable milk bottle principle of the Sony system may answer the frequently asked question: Will people buy a film which, unlike pre- recorded audio tapes and long play records, they will not play more than two or three times? Sony prices seem to be in the range of the home entertainment market when compared specifically to pre-recorded cartridged audio tapes. These audio cartridges, for home and automobile, are selling for $6-$10 and already constitute a $408 million industry. A sales increase of 50% is predicted for 1970. Similarly, the public acceptance of the magnetic audio tape concept (cartridge or reel to reel), seems assured when we consider that audio tape player sales doubled last year (total 7 million) while phonograph player sales went down by 100,000 in 1969 from a 1968 figure of about 5 million.

According to the March 4, 1970 issue of Variety, the marketing appa- ratus for video players and cassettes has already achieved a "global spread." The combined publishing interests of Axel Springer and the publishing firm of the Bertelsmann corporation, according to The London Daily Telegraph, seek to gain control of cassette television, which they regard as the mass communication medium of the future. Variety explains the West German interest in cartridge television as "linked to domestic television's established dominance . . . the producers now see the advent of the cassette as their way around this monopoly (i.e., state owned TV) situation, and they clearly aim to make it pay off." America's Time, Incorporated, has bought into a German combine, now called Windrose-Dumont-Time, Inc., to enter the same market.

TITLES AND PROGRAMMING

Twentieth Century-Fox is ready to send feature films directly into the home. Darryl Zanuck, chairman of the Board, recommended the release of Fox films more than five years old for conversion to the CBS-EVR cartridge format. According to a report in the Washington Post, this might mean that the first movies would be available before the end of the year.

McGraw-Hill is currently putting a collection of theatrical shorts from their Contemporary Films library, including Roman Polanski's Two Men and a Wardrobe and Robert Enrico's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, into Technicolor Super 8 cartridges for rental.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 9

One major feature producer plans to announce this spring that its most

prestigious 16mm feature collection will be available for rental in Techni- color cartridges.

Although CBS-EVR is aiming initially at the educational market, it has already announced that Ustinov's Billy Budd is going into EVR format. They have also entered into a contractual agreement allowing them to put the entire Hal Roach Library (over 500 films that include the Laurel and Hardy series, Charlie Chase, and Zasu Pitts) into EVR. Both Sony and RCA indicate they are negotiating for feature films but are not yet free to announce the details.

California-based National Cinema Systems, Inc. announced March 8, 1970, their program for a franchised distributorship of short films in the Technicolor Super 8 cartridge format. The programming, supplied by NCS, will be aimed at restaurants, bars, department stores, daycare centers, hospitals, bowling alleys, doctors' offices and military bases. Local distribution will be handled by franchisees who will negotiate with and service local outlets.

The industry consensus seems to be that sound 8 mm feature films will for the foreseeable future be available only on a rental basis. If any 8 mm feature sales are to take place they will most likely be based on existing business practices regarding 16 mm feature print sales, i.e. life-of-the-print lease-average cost per feature $900.00. The life of the print, in this case, may be far longer than the present 16mm format, if enclosure in a cartridge protects it from wear and tear.

There are now over 8,000 educational films available for sale or rental in Super 8 cartridges. Nat Myers of Eastman Kodak predicts that in four

years the annual average of Super 8 release prints per educational film will be up one thousand percent. The low-cost, easy-loading Super 8 cartridge projectors are popular with teachers. School libraries are rapidly expanding their collections of cartridged films.

Educational cartridge programming and packaging is becoming more

sophisticated. Chelsea House, for .xample, has just completed a 50-film series on American history edited from 20 million feet of newsreel footage covering the last 60 years. With a minimum purchase of 40 cartridges, they will throw in free a "history machine"-a Fairchild or Technicolor cartridge projector. Newsreel footage may, in fact, assume major importance for educators. The Universal newsreel collection (1924-68) at the National Archives may eventually be made available in Super 8 cartridges.

Already available for sale in Technicolor cartridges by the National Archives National Audiovisual Center are 5,000 U.S. Government-made films. Prices are approximately 70% of normal 16mm cost or around $175 for a 30 minute sound color title in a cartridge.

EVR feels it can successfully compete with Super 8 because of its lower cost-one half hour, black-and-white, for only $14.40. EVR is contracting

5l CARTRIDGED SOUND PROJECTORS, 1970

Technicolor Fairchild Fairchild Bohn- OOO1B MK IV S Eumig 711 Benton Jayark MPO Panacolor

Cartridge Capacity 29 min. 22 min. 20 min. 20 min. 30 min. 15 min. 120 min.

Front or rear screen

projection both rear front rear rear both both 24" image

Cassette or endless

loop endless loop endless loop cassette endless loop endless loop endless loop cassette

Type of sound optical magnetic magnetic magnetic magnetic magnetic optical

Sound separation 22 A 8 A 18 A 125 A 38 R 18 A -

Price $399.95 $585 $380 $300 $399 $445 $595

THE CARTRIDGE COMMUNITY

AVCO-Cartridge Television, Inc. (US)

Axel Springer-Studio Hamburg (Germany)

Bailey Film Associates (US) Bohn-Benton (US) CBS-Electronic Video Recording

(US) Chelsea House (US) Crowell-Collier and Macmillan

(Brandon Films Library) (US) Doubleday Multimedia (US) Fairchild-Eumig (US-Austria) Filmmaker's Cooperative (US) Fleetwood Films (US) Gilbert Kaplan, Inc. (US)

Global Village (US) Grundig (German) Janus (US) Jayark, Inc. (US) McGraw-Hill Inc. (Contemporary

Films Library) (US) Modern Learning Aids (US) MPO, Inc. (US) National Cinema Systems Inc. (US) Norton Simon, Inc. (US) Panacolor (US) Panasonic (Matsushida) Inc.

(Japan) Phillips Lamp (Holland-US) Plaza International Corp (US)

Portcomm Corporation (Hal Roach Library) (US)

Raindance Corporation (US) RCA-Selectavision (US) Sanyo, Inc. (Japan) Shibaden, Inc. (Japan) Sony (Japan) Technicolor, Inc. (US) Teletronics International (US) Toshiba, Inc. (Japan) Twentieth Century Fox (US) Universal Pictures (Education and

Visual Arts Division) (US) Victor Electronics (Japan) Windrose-Dumont-Time, Inc.

(Germany-US)

CINEMA JOURNAL / 11

with a number of program sources and is offering a royalty of 15% of the

gross proceeds on properties which would go into the company's catalog. Initial EVR programming will consist of packaging existing films. There

are plans to commission new TV courses for the home study market as well as schools and universities. "Before that Saturday morning round of golf," says an EVR spokesman, "the EVR owner can drop a cartridge on the

player and get a quick lesson from Jack Nicklaus." Besides "how to" films on golf, gardening, and cooking CBS envisions a new service to the profes- sions-the day when a new cassette is mailed reguarly to doctors or engineers to keep them informed of new developments in their field. Gilbert Kaplan in New York City is already supplying this kind of service on a monthly basis to 1,000 executives in the United States. For an annual fee of $5,000 per subscriber, he mails them a 60-90 minute videotape newscast of all the information they can't get in the Wall Street Journal.

Selectavision has announced similar plans. "We're not looking for audiences of thirty million people for each of our programs," says an RCA

spokesman. "We leave that to the networks. We want to provide programming for many relatively small audiences." The SV programmers say they will cater to minorities everywhere-although they would probably have to be fairly large minorities-to devotees of Wagner as well as country- western, to legitimate theater patrons, art majors, cooks, baseball fans, aquatic adventurers, science enthusiasts, classic film enthusiasts, and so on.

Working titles of categories under consideration at the moment include "Best of Broadway," "Great Moments in Baseball," "Moon Landing," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Indianapolis 500," and "Aesop's Fables."

Perhaps the most important of all the potentialities is the new sophistication that the cartridge method can bring to home television. Censor-

ship would play only the most minimal role. "This is certainly an im-

portant factor," SV spokesman say, noting that "the same constraints that

apply to public broadcasting will not apply here. A controversial Broadway show, for example, could not be aired on the networks, but it could be committed to one of these tapes."

THE UNWINDING FUTURE

Paul Richard, art critic of the Washington Post, predicts that the new video technology will have a major impact on artists. "The most significant innovations," he says in a recent article, "may well be prompted by another sort of object, an object whose distribution bypasses commercial galleries and museums, an object manufactured not of paper, stone or canvas, but of packaged video tape."

Experimental filmmakers will be able to avoid the economic roadblocks in commercial exhibition or the pressure to attract 20 million TV viewers

simultaneously and go directly to their more select audiences. "If only one million people see a TV program it's a disaster," says Richard Leacock,

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currently a visiting professor at MIT, "but the potential of cartridges is that one million people could see a film and it would be successful like a book on the best seller list."

Phono-Flicks, a series produced by Crowell Cinema Productions of Los

Angeles, represent one such effort towards the direct sale of avant garde films for the home market. These silent, abstract shorts are meant to be

accompanied by music from the home phonograph and sell for $4.95 per reel. For an additional 75 cents Technicolor will package the reel in a

Super 8 cartridge. These are only a few indications of the new horizons opened up by

lower production costs for Super 8 and video tape. The Raindance Cor-

poration in New York City plans to start marketing their "video albums" to universities within the next nine months. For a mid-western drama

department, for example, they might send monthly cassettes depicting the latest experimental theatre in New York City ranging from street theatre to encounter groups.

New York's Global Village, described as "the first permanent video environment," plans to use cartridges to set up a communications network of underground news and entertainment. Global Village originates most of its programming and is negotiating to set up a series of "villages" in

Europe and the United States. Each center will generate its own material, package it in Sony Videocassettes, and then trade with other centers for an

exchange of underground information. From the point of view of the producer and the distributor, film and

TV cartridges offer a new source of income. George Gould, president of the New York videotape production company Teletronics International, claims (according to Film TV Daily March 5, 1970) that "the home player will actually increase production of films (tapes) and will bring in a whole new method of distribution, the endpoint of which will be the shopping center supermarket or drug store where rentals can be made."

Before a blanket increase in revenues can be predicted for producers and distributors, however, certain questions will have to be answered. Will

existing copyright law be sufficient to control unauthorized duplication? Will educational film producers, anticipating standardization, adopt a "wait and see" attitude? Will new investments, as was the case with 16mm sub- sidiaries, be required of the distributor?

It is the exhibitor who is least assured of an increase in revenues at this

point. Weekly movie ticket sales dropped from 80 million in 1946 to 15 million by 1968, largely because of television. The National Association of Theatre Owners has responded to the newest competition-the home video

player-by organizing a committee to look into this "genuine menace to the financial future of every exhibitor."

Once again technological change promises to shake the industry. Who knows what will happen to the art of the film?

On Hollywood-and Valentino H. L. Mencken

Having made of late, after a longish hiatus, two separate attempts to sit through movie shows, I can only report that the so-called art of the film still eludes me. I was not chased out either time by the low intellectual content of the pictures on display. For one thing, I am anything but intellectual in my tastes, and for another thing the films I saw were not noticeably deficient in that direction. The ideas in them were simply the common and familiar ideas of the inferior nine-tenths of mankind. They were hollow and obvious, but they were not more hollow and obvious than the ideas one encounters in the theater every day, or in the ordinary run of popular novels, or, for that matter, in the discourses of the average American statesman or divine. Rotary, hearing worse once a week, still manages to preserve its idealism and digest carbohydrates.

What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable ideational content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. The first moving-pictures, as I remember them thirty years ago, presented more or less continuous scenes. They were played like ordinary plays, and so one could follow them lazily and at ease. But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute? Worse, this dizzy jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movies seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoid- ing action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces. One sees a ham cutting a face, and then one sees his lady co-star squeezing a tear-and so on, endlessly. These mummers cannot be said, in any true From Prejudices: Sixth Series, by H. L. Mencken. Copyright 1927 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1955 by H. L. Mencken. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Originally entitled "Appendix from Moronia," pp. 290-311.

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sense, to act at all. They merely strike attitudes-and are then whisked off. If, at the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not sruck, then all

they have to do is to keep on trying until they strike it. On those terms a

chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet. To most of the so-called actors engaged in the movies, I daresay, no

other course would be possible. They are such obvious incompetents that

they could no more play a rational scene, especially one involving any subtlety, than a cow could jump over the moon. They are engaged, not for their histrionic skill, but simply for their capacity to fill the heads of romantic virgins and neglected wives with the sort of sentiments that the Christian religion tries so hard to put down. It is, no doubt, a useful office, assuming that the human race must, should and will go on, but it has no more to do with acting, as an art, than being a Federal judge has with pre- serving the Constitution. The worst of it is that the occasional good actor, venturing into the movies, is brought down to the common level by the devices thus invented to conceal the incompetence of his inferiors. It is

quite as impossible to present a plausible impersonation in a series of unrelated (and often meaningless) postures as it would be to make a sensible speech in a series of college yells. So the good actor, appearing in the films, appears to be almost as bad as the natural movie ham. One sees him only as one sees a row of telegraph poles, riding in a train. However skillful he may be, he is always cut off before, by any intelligible use of the devices of his trade, he can make the fact evident.

In one of the pictures I saw lately a principal actor was George Bernard Shaw. The first scene showed him for fifteen or twenty seconds continu-

ously, and it was at once plain that he had a great deal of histrionic skill -far more, indeed, than the average professional actor. He was seen en-

gaged in a friendly argument with several other dramatists, among them Sir James M. Barrie and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. Having admired all these notorious men for many years, and never having had the honor of meeting or even witnessing them, I naturally settled down with a grateful grunt to the pleasure of feasting my eyes upon them. But after that first scene all I saw of Shaw was a series of fifteen or twenty maddening flashes, none of them more than five seconds long. He would spring into view, leap upon Barrie or Pinero-and then disappear. Then he would spring back, his whiskers bristling-and disappear again. It was as maddening as the ring of the telephone.

There. is, of course, a legitimate use for this off-again-on-again device in the movies: it may be used, at times, very effectively and even intelligently. The beautiful heroine, say, is powdering her nose, preparing to go out to her fatal dinner with her libidinous boss. Suddenly there flashes through her mind a prophylactic memory of the Sunday-school in her home town far away. An actress on the stage, with such a scene to play, faces serious technical difficulties: it is very hard for her-that is, it has been hard since Ibsen abolished the soliloquy-to convey the exact revolutions of her con-

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science to her audience. But the technic of the movies makes it very easy- in fact, so easy that it requires no skill at all. The director simply prepares a series of scenes showing what is going through the heroine's mind. There is the church on the hill, with the horde of unhappy children being driven into its basement by the town constable. There is the old maid teacher

expounding the day's Golden Text, II Kings, ii, 23-24. There is a flash of the two she-bears "taring" the "forty and two" little children. There is the heroine, in ringlets, clapping her hands in dutiful Presbyterian glee. There is a flash of the Sunday-school superintendent, his bald head shining, warn-

ing the scholars against the sins of simony, barratry and adultery. There is the collection, with the bad boy putting in the suspenders' button. There is the flash showing him, years later, as a bank president.

All this is ingenious. More, it is humane, for it prevents the star trying to act, and so saves the spectators pain. But it is manifestly a poor substitute for acting on the occasions when acting is actually demanded by the plot- that is, on occasions when there must be cumulative action, and not merely a series of postures. Such occasions give rise to what the old-time dramatic theorists called scenes a faire, which is to say, scenes of action, crucial scenes, necessary scenes. In the movies they are dismembered, and so spoiled. Try to imagine the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" in a string of fifty flashes-first Romeo taking his station and spitting on his hands, then Juliet with her head as big as a hay-wagon, then the two locked in a greasy kiss, then the Nurse taking a drink of gin, then Romeo rolling his eyes, and so on. If you can imagine it, then you ought to be in Hollywood, dodging bullets and amassing wealth.

If I were in a constructive mood I'd probably propose reforms, but that mood, I regret to say, is not on me. In any case, I doubt that proposing reforms would do any good. For this idiotic movie technic, as I have shown, has its origin in the incompetence of the clowns who perform in the great majority of movies, and it would probably be impossible to displace them with competent actors, for the customers of the movie-parlors appear to love them, and even to admire them. It is hard to believe, but it is obviously so. A successful movie mime is probably the most admired human being ever seen in the world. He is admired more than Napoleon, Lincoln or Beethoven; more, even, than Coolidge. The effects of this adulation, upon the mime himself and especially upon his clients, ought to be given serious study by competent psychiatrists, if any can be found. For there is nothing more corrupting to the human psyche, I believe, than the mean admiration of mean things. It produces a double demoralization, intellectual and

spiritual. Its victim becomes not only a jackass, but also a bounder. The

movie-parlors, I suspect, are turning out such victims by the million: they will, in the long run, so debauch the American proletariat that it will begin to put Coolidge above Washington, and Peaches Browning above Coolidge.

Meanwhile, they are ruining the ancient and noble art of the dramatist -an art that has engaged the talents of some of the greatest men the world

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has ever seen. And they are, at the same time, ruining the lesser but by no means contemptible art of the actor. It is no advantage to a movie ham to be a competent actor; on the contrary, it is a handicap. If he tried to act, as

acting has been understood since the days of AEschylus, his director would shut him off instanter: what is wanted is simply aphrodisiacal posturing. And if, by any chance, his director were drunk and let him run on, the vast

majority of movie morons would probably rush out of the house, bawling that the film was dull and cheap, and that they had been swindled.

INTERLUDE IN THE SOCRATIC MANNER

Having completed your westhetic researches at Hollywood, what is your view of the film art now?

I made no researches at Hollywood, and was within the corporate bounds of the town, in fact, only on a few occasions, and then for only a few hours. I spent my time in Los Angeles, studying the Christian pathol- ogy of that great city. When not so engaged I mainly devoted myself to

quiet guzzling with Joe Hergesheimer, Jim Quirk, Johnny Hemphill, Jim Tully, Walter Wanger and other such literati. For the rest, I visited friends in the adjacent deserts, some of them employed in the pictures and some not. They treated me with immense politeness. With murderers as thick in the town as evangelists, nothing would have been easier than to have had me killed, but they let me go.

Did any of them introduce you to the wild nightlife of the town? The wildest night-life I encountered was at Sister Aimee McPherson's

tabernacle. I saw no wildness among the movie-folk. They seemed to me, in the main, to be very serious and even gloomy people. And no wonder, for they worked like Pullman porters or magazine editors. When they are

engaged in posturing for a film and have finished their day's labor they are far too tired for any recreation requiring stamina. I encountered but two authentic souses in three weeks. One was a cowboy and the other was an author. I heard of a lady getting tight at a party, but I was not present. The news was a sensation in the town. Such are the sorrows of poor mummers: their most banal peccadilloes are magnified into horrors. Regard the unfortunate Chaplin. If he were a lime and cement dealer his latest divorce case would not have got two lines in the newspapers. But, as it was, he was

placarded all over the front pages because he had had a banal disagreement with one of his wives. The world hears of such wild, frenzied fellows as

Tully, and puts them down as typical of Hollywood. But Tully is not an actor; he eats actors. I saw him devour half a dozen of them on the half- shell in an hour. He wears a No. 30 collar and has a colossal capacity for

wine-bibbing; I had to call up my last reserves to keep up with him. But the typical actor is a slim and tender fellow. What would be a mere aperitif for Tully or me would put him under the table, yelling for his pastor.

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So you caught no glimpses of immorality? Immorality? Oh, my God! Hollywood, despite the smell of patchouli

and rattle of revolver fire, seemed to me to be one of the most respectable towns in America. Even Baltimore can't beat it. The notion that actors are immoral fellows is a delusion that comes down to us from Puritan days, just as the delusion that rum is a viper will go down to posterity from our days. There is no truth in it. The typical actor, at least in America, is the most upright of men: he always marries the girl. How many actors are bachelors? Not one in a thousand. The divorce rate is high among them simply because the marriage rate is so high. An actor, encountering a worthy girl, leaps from the couch to the altar almost as fast as a Baptist leaps from the altar to the couch. It is his incurable sentimentality that fetches him: if he was not born a romantic he is not an actor. Worse, his profession supports his natural weakness. In plays and movies he always marries the girl in the end, and so it seems to him to be the decent thing to do it in his private life. Actors always copy the doings of the characters they impersonate: no Oscar was needed to point out that nature always imitates art. I heard, of course, a great deal of gossip in Los Angeles, but all save a trivial part of it was excessively romantic. Nearly every great female star, it appeared, was desperately in love, either with her husband or with some pretty and well-heeled fellow, usually not an actor. And every male star was mooning over some coy and lovely miss. I heard more sweet love stories in three weeks than I had heard in New York in the previous thirty years. The whole place stank of orange-blossoms. Is honest love conducive to vice? Then one may argue that it is conducive to delirium tremens to be a Presbyterian elder. One of the largest industries in Holly- wood is that of the florists. Next comes that of the traffickers in wedding silver. One beautiful lady star told me that buying such presents cost her $11,000 last year.

But the tales go round. Is there no truth in them at all? To the best of my knowledge and belief, none. They are believed be-

cause the great masses of the plain people, though they admire movie actors, also envy them, and hence hate them. It is the old human story. Why am I hated by theologians? It is because I am an almost unparalleled expert in all branches of theology. Whenever they tackle me, my superior knowledge and talent floor them. In precisely the some way I hate such fellows as the movie Salvini, Jack Gilbert. Gilbert is an amiable and tactful young man, and treats me with the politeness properly due to my years and learning. But I heard in Culver City that no less than two thousand head of women, many of them rich, were mashed on him. Well, I can recall but fifteen or twenty women who have ever showed any sign of being flustered by me, and not one of them, at a forced sale, would have realized $200. Hence I hate Gilbert, and would rejoice unaffectedly to see him taken in some scandal that would stagger humanity. If he is accused of anything less than murdering his wife and eight children I shall be disappointed.

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Then why do you speak for Mr. Chaplin? Simply because he is not a handsome dog, as Gilbert is. The people

who hate him do so because he is rich. It is the thought that his trouble will bust him that gives them delight. But I have no desire for money and so his prosperity does not offend me. I always have too much money; it is

easy to get in New York, provided one is not a professing Christian. Gilbert, I suppose, is rich too; he wears very natty clothes. But it is not his wealth that bothers me: it is those two thousand head of women.

So, failing researches, you continue ignorant of the film art?

Ignorant? What a question! How could any man remain ignorant of the movies after three weeks in Los Angeles? As well continue ignorant of

laparotomy after three weeks in a hospital sun-parlor! No, I am full of information about them, some of it accurate, for I heard them talked day and night, and by people who actually knew something about them. There was but one refuge from that talk, and that was La McPherson's basilica. Moreover, I have hatched some ideas of my own.

As for example? That the movie folks, in so far as they are sentient at all, are on the

hooks of a distressing dilemma. They have built their business upon a foundation of morons, and now they are paying for it. They seem to be unable to make a presentable picture without pouring out tons of money, and when they have made it they must either sell it to immense audiences of halfwits, or go broke. There seems to be very little ingenuity and re- sourcefulness in them. They are apparently quite unable, despite their melodramatic announcements of salary cuts, to solve the problem of making movies cheaply, and yet intelligently, so that civilized persons may visit the

movie-parlors without pain. But soon or late some one will have to solve it. Soon or late the movies will have to split into two halves. There will be movies for the present mob, and there will be movies for the relatively enlightened minority. The former will continue idiotic; the latter, if

competent men to make them are unearthed, will show sense and beauty. Have you caught the scent of any such men? Not yet. There are some respectable craftsmen in Hollywood. (I

judged them by their talk: I have not seen many of their actual pictures.) They tackle the problems of their business in a more or less sensible manner. They have learned a lot from the Germans. But I think it would be stretching a point to say that there are any artists among them-as yet. They are adept, but not inspired. The movies need a first-rate artist-a man of genuine competence and originality. If he is in Hollywood to-day, he is probably boot-legging, running a pants pressing parlor, or grinding a camera crank. The movie magnates seek him in literary directions. They pin their faith to novelists and playwrights. I presume to believe that this is bad medicine. The fact that a man can write a competent novel is absolutely no reason for assuming that he can write a competent film. The two things are as unlike as Pilsner and coca-cola. Even a sound dramatist is not

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necessarily a competent scenario-writer. What the movies need is a school of authors who will forget all dialogue and description, and try to set forth their ideas in terms of pure motion. It can be done, and it will be done. The German, Dr. Murnau, showed the way in certain scenes of "The Last Laugh." But the American magnates continue to buy bad novels and worse plays, and then put over-worked hacks to the sorry job of translating them into movies. It is like hiring men to translate college yells into riddles. AEschylus himself would have been stumped by such a task.

When do you think the Shakespeare of the movies will appear? And where will he come from?

God knows. He may even be an American, as improbable as it may seem. One thing, only, I am sure of: he will not get much for his master-

pieces. He will have to give them away, and the first manager who puts them on will lose money. The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100,000 a year? If so, then you have a better imagination than Beethoven himself. No, the present movie folk, I fear, will never quite solve the problem, save by some act of God.

They are too much under the heel of the East Side gorillas who own them.

They think too much about money. They have allowed it to become too

important to them, and believe they couldn't get along without it. This is an unfortunate delusion. Money is important to mountebanks, but not to artists. The first really great movie, when it comes at last, will probably cost less than $5000. A true artist is always a romantic. He doesn't ask what the job will pay; he asks if it will be interesting. In this way all the loveliest treasures of the human race have been fashioned-by careless and perhaps somewhat foolish men. The late Johann Sebastian Bach, compared to a movie star with nine automobiles, was simply a damned fool. But I cherish the feeling that a scientific inquiry would also develop other differences between them.

Are you against the star system? I am neither for it nor against it. A star is simply a performer who

pleases the generality of morons better than the average. Certainly I see no reason why such a performer should not be paid a larger salary than the

average. The objection to swollen salaries should come from the stars themselves-that is, assuming them to be artists. The system diverts them from their proper business of trying to produce charming and amusing movies, and converts them into bogus society folk. What could be more ridiculous? And pathetic? I go further: it is tragic. As I have said in another place, nothing is more tragic in this world than for otherwise worthy people to meanly admire and imitate mean things. One may have some respect for the movie lady who buys books and sets up as an intellectual, for it is a creditable thing to want to be (or even simply to want to appear) well-informed and intelligent. But I can see nothing worthy in

wanting to be mistaken for the president of a bank. Artists should sniff at

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such dull drudges, not imitate them. The movies will leap ahead the day some star in Hollywood organizes a string quartette and begins to study Mozart.

VALENTINO

By one of the chances that relieve the dullness of life and make it in- structive, I had the honor of dining with this celebrated gentleman in New York, a week or so before his fatal illness. I had never met him before, nor seen him on the screen; the meeting was at his instance, and, when it was proposed, vaguely puzzled me. But soon its purpose became clear enough. Valentino was in trouble, and wanted advice. More, he wanted advice from an elder and disinterested man, wholly removed from the movies and all their works. Something that I had written, falling under his eye, had given him the notion that I was a judicious fellow. So he requested one of his colleagues, a lady of the films, to ask me to dinner at her hotel.

The night being infernally warm, we stripped off our coats, and came to terms at once. I recall that he wore suspenders of extraordinary width and thickness-suspenders almost strong enough to hold up the pantaloons of Chief Justice Taft. On so slim a young man they seemed somehow absurd, especially on a hot summer night. We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table napkins, the corners of the table-cloth, and a couple of towels brought in by the humane

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waiter. Then there came a thunder-storm, and we began to breathe. The hostess, a woman as tactful as she is charming, disappeared mysteriously and left us to commune.

The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were full of it, and that was what was agitating him. Some time before, out in Chicago, a wandering reporter had discovered, in the men's wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-power. That, of course, was not unusual, but the color of the

talcum-powder was. It was pink. The news made the town giggle for a

day, and inspired an editorial writer on the eminent Chicago Tribune to

compose a hot weather editorial. In it he protested humorously against the effeminization of the American man, and laid it light-heartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so happened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that day on his way east from the Coast, fan full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang of reporters who wanted to know what he had to say about it. What he had to say was full of fire.

Throwing off his 100% Americanism and reverting to the mores of his fatherland, he challenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no answer came, to a fist fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been

outraged. To the hint that he was less than he, even to the extent of one half of one per cent, there could be no answer save a bath of blood.

Unluckily, all this took place in the United States, where the word honor, save when it is applied to the structural integrity of women, has only

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a comic significance. One hears of the honor of politicians, of bankers, of

lawyers, even of the honor of the United States itself. Everyone naturally laughs. So New York laughed at Valentino. More, it ascribed his high dudgeon to mere publicity-seeking: he seemed a vulgar movie ham seeking space. The poor fellow, thus doubly beset, rose to dudgeons higher still. His Italian mind was simply unequal to the situation. So he sought coun- sel from the neutral, aloof and aged. Unluckily, I could only name the disease, and confess frankly that there was no remedy-none, that is, known to any therapeutics within my ken. He should have passed over the gibe of the Chicago journalist, I suggested, with a lofty snort-perhaps, better still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away from the reporters in New York. But now, alas, the mischief was done. He was both insulted and ridiculous, but there was nothing to do about it. I advised him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested that it was infamous. Infamous? Nothing, I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has his inner integrity. Can he still look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this world, and ready even for the Devil. We sweated a great deal, discussing these lofty matters. We seemed to get nowhere.

Suddenly it dawned upon me-I was too dull or it was too hot for me to see it sooner-that what we were talking about was really not what we were talking about at all. I began to observe Valentino more closely. A

curiously naive and boyish young fellow, certainly not much beyond thirty, and with a disarming air of inexperience. To my eye, at least, not handsome, but nevertheless rather attractive. There was an obvious fineness in him; even his clothes were not precisely those of his horrible trade. He

began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His words were

simple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Valentino's agony was the

agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity-nay, into a whole series of such situations. It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast-a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The old story of Diego Valdez once more, but with a new poignancy in it. Valdez, at all events, was High Admiral of

Spain. But Valentino, with his touch of fineness in him-he had his com- monness, too, but there was that touch of fineness-Valentino was only the hero of the rabble. Imbeciles surrounded him in a dense herd. He was

pursued by women-but what women! (Consider the sordid comedy of his two marriages-the brummagem, star-spangled passion that invaded his

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very death-bed!) The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered him. But in those last days, unless I am a worse psychologist than even the pro- fessors of psychology, it was revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid.

I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking him off so soon and at a moment of fiery revolt, were very kind to him. Living, he would have tried inevitably to change his fame-if such it is to be called-into something closer to his heart's desire. That is to say, he would have gone the way of many another actor-the way of increasing pretension, of solemn artiness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himself. I believe he would have failed, for there was little sign of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a highly respectable young man, which is the sort that never metamorphoses into an artist. But suppose he had succeeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would have only become the more acrid and intolerable. For he would have discovered, after vast heavings and yearnings, that what he had come to was indistinguishable from what he had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than the fame of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question seems to answer itself. But what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva voce, while he lived, and his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane eloquence, in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walking with Goethe, he heard something that was not unlike the murmur that reached Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly. Valentino turned his face to the wall.

Here, after all, is the chiefest joke of the gods: that man must remain alone and lonely in this world, even with crowds surging about him. Does he crave approbation, with a sort of furious, instinctive lust? Then it is' only to discover, when it comes, that it is somehow disconcerting-that its springs and motives offer an affront to his dignity. But do I sentimentalize the perhaps transparent story of a simple mummer? Then substitute Coolidge, or Mussolini, or any other poor devil that you can think of. Sub- stitute Shakespeare, or Lincoln, or Goethe, or Beethoven, as I have. Senti- mental or not, I confess that the predicament of poor Valentino touched me. It provided grist for my mill, but I couldn't quite enjoy it. Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.

The Gold Rush and The General Gerald Mast

Only Buster Keaton could rival Chaplin in his insight into human relationships, into the conflict between the individual man and the immense social machinery that surrounds him; only Keaton could rival Chaplin in making his insight both funny and serious at the same time. On the one hand, the Keaton canon as a whole is thinner, less consistent than the Chaplin canon; the character he fashioned, with his dead-pan, blank reaction to the chaos that inevitably and inadvertently blooms around him, lacks the range, the compassionate yearnings, the pitiable disappointments of Chaplin's tramp. On the other hand, Keaton fashioned a single film, The General, that is possibly more even, more unified, and more complex in both conception and execution than any individual Chaplin film.

The key difference between Keaton and Chaplin is that Charlie longs to better himself, to accomplish grand things, whereas Keaton merely desires to go about his business. If he fails to reach his modest goal it is not because of his own incompetence or ineptitude but because of the staggeringly huge obstacles the environment throws in his path to keep him from getting there. Objects inevitably play a role in Keaton films, but unlike the objects in a Chaplin film, which are small, manageable, which Charlie can hold in his hand, or lie in, or sit on, the objects in a Keaton film are immense machines which dwarf the little man. Keaton plays against huge things- an ocean liner which he must navigate by himself, a locomotive, a steam- boat. When he runs into trouble with men, it is never with a single figure (an Eric Campbell); he runs into rivers of antagonists, into armies of

opponents-a whole tribe of jungle savages, the entire Union and Con- federate armies. Like Charlie, Buster has troubles with cops, but never with one or a few cops; Buster (in Cops, in Daydreams) runs into the entire police force. Given the size and complexity of his problems, Buster can take no sensible or meaningful action, despite his most sensible efforts. The perfect metaphor for the Keaton man is in the short film, Daydreams, in which Buster, to avoid the police force, has taken refuge in the paddle wheel of a ferry boat. The wheel begins turning; Buster begins walking. An extract from a forthcoming book, A Short History of the Movies, to be published in the fall of 1970 by Pegasus, a division of Western Publishing Company. Copyright 1970 by Western Publishing Company, Inc.

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And walking. And walking. He behaves as sensibly as a man can on a treadmill that he cannot control, but how sensible can life on a treadmill ever be?

Chaplin and Keaton are the two poles of silent comics. Chaplin's great strength is his development of character and the exhausting of a particular comic and social situation; Keaton's strength is the tightness of his narrative structures and his contrast between the numbers one and infinity. Chaplin is sentimental; his gentle, smiling women become idols to be revered. Keaton is not sentimental; he stuffs his females into bags and hauls them around like sacks of potatoes; he. satirizes their finicky incompetence and even raises his fist to the silly lady in The General who feeds their racing locomotive only the teensiest shavings of wood. It was especially appropriate and touching to see the two opposites, Chaplin and Keaton, united in Limelight (1952), both playing great clowns who were losing their audiences and their touch.

No two films more clearly reveal the contrasting strengths and interests of the two clowns than The Gold Rush and The General, both of which were released in the same year, 1925. Like the short comedies, The Gold Rush is an episodic series of highly developed, individual situations. The mortar that keeps these bricks together is a mixture of the film's locale (the white, frozen wastes), the strivings and disappointments of Charlie,

and the particular thematic view the film takes of those strivings (the quest for gold and for love, those two familiar goals, in an icy cannibalistic jungle). All the Chaplin features, including those he made with synchronized sound, would share this common episodic structure. The Gold Rush also benefits from the circular pattern of the sequence of episodes: Prologue (the journey to Alaska), the Cabin, the Dance Hall, New Year's Eve, the Dance Hall, the Cabin, Epilogue (the journey home).

The individual sequences of The Gold Rush are rich both in Chaplin's comic ingenuity and in his ability to render the pathos of the tramp's disappointment, his cruel rejection by the woman he loves. Several of the comic sequences have become justifiably famous. In the first cabin scene a hungry Charlie cooks his shoe, carves it like a prime rib of beef, salts it to taste, and then eats it like a gourmet, twirling the shoelaces around his fork like spaghetti, sucking the nails in the soles like chicken bones, offering his friend one of the nails as a wishbone. This is the Chaplin who treats one kind of object (a shoe) as if it were another kind of object (a feast), the same minute observation he used in dissecting the clock in The Pawnshop. In the Dance Hall, Charlie hastily ties a rope around his middle to keep his sagging trousers up. He does not know that the other end of the rope is attached to a dog, who then trots around the dance floor following his dancing master. Charlie, however, must follow the leader when the dog takes off after a cat. But the comic business is matched by the pathos that Charlie can generate, often itself growing out of comic business.

Charlie's saddest moment is when Georgia, the woman he loves, whose picture and flower he preserves beneath his pillow, callously stands him up

26 / CINEMA JOURNAL

on New Year's Eve. When Charlie realizes that it is midnight and that she is not coming, he opens his door and listens to the happy townspeople singing Auld Lang Syne. The film cuts back and forth between Charlie, the outsider, standing silently and alone in a doorway, and the throng of revelers in the Dance Hall, clasping hands in a large circle and singing exuberantly together. But this pathetic moment would have been impossible without the previous comic one in which Charlie falls asleep and dreams he is entertaining Georgia with his "Oceana Roll." Charlie's joy, his naive sincerity, his charm, his gentleness all show on his face as he coyly makes the two rolls kick, step, and twirl over the table on the ends of two forks. The happiness of the comic dream sequence creates the pathos of the subsequently painful reality.

If the reality proves painful for Charlie it is because the lust for gold makes it so. The film's theme is its consistent indictment of what the pur- suit of the material does to the human animal; as in Greed, it makes him an inhuman animal. Charlie, the least materialistic of men, has come to the most materialistic of places-a place where life is hard, dangerous, brutal, uncomfortable and unkind. Unlike the life of Nanook (might Chaplin have been influenced by Flaherty?) in which hardness becomes a virtue in itself, the men who have rushed for gold want to endure hardship temporarily, just long enough to snatch up enough nuggets to go home and live easy. The quest for gold perverts all human relationships in the film. It creates a Black Larsen who casually murders and purposely fails to help his starving fellows. It creates a Jack, Georgia's handsome boyfriend, who treats his fellow men and women like furniture. Just as Charlie's genuine compassion reveals the emptiness of Jack's protestations of love, Chaplin's film technique makes an unsympathetic villain out of the conventional Hollywood leading man. The rush toward gold perverts both love and friendship. Georgia herself, though Charlie perceives her inner beauty, has become hardened and callous from her strictly cash relationships with people in the isolated Dance Hall. And Charlie's friend, Big Jim McKay, is one of those fair-weather friends whose feelings are the functions of ex- pediency. When Big Jim gets hungry he literally tries to eat Charlie; although Jim's seeing his buddy as a big chicken is comic, the implied cannibalism of the sequence is not. Later, Big Jim needs Charlie to direct him to his claim; once again Charlie becomes friend because he is needed. But when Jim and Charlie get stuck in the cabin that teeters precariously off a cliff, the two men turn into dogs again, each trying to scramble out of the cabin by himself, stepping on each other to do so.

Whereas The Gold Rush combines a thematic unity with the episodic structure of exhausting the individual situations, the thematic coherency of The General is itself the product of the film's tight narrative unity. The General is a comic epic in film form. Like every comic epic, The General is the story of a journey, of the road (albeit a railroad). As in every comic epic, the protagonist suffers a series of hardships and dangerous adventures

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before achieving the rewards and comforts of returning home. The protagonist's opponents are both man and nature, particularly those two epic natural enemies, fire and water. There is a comic insufficiency in the protagonist and a disproportion between his powers and the task he is asked to

accomplish; but like every protagonist in the comic epic, Buster triumphs despite his insufficiencies. Everything in the Chaplin film, every gag, every piece of business, every thematic contrast, is subordinate to the delineation of the lonely tramp's character and the qualities that make him both lonely and superior to the men who have betrayed their humanity to keep from

being lonely. Everything in The General, every gag, every piece of business, is subordinate to driving the film's narrative, its story of Johnny Gray's trying to save his three loves-his girl, his country, and, most important of all, his locomotive. The Gold Rush is a comedy of character, The General a comedy of narrative.

The great question that The General poses in the course of its narrative is how to perform heroic action in a universe that is not heroic. Buster, with his typical dead-pan expression merely tries to go about his business while the world around him goes mad. A metaphor for the feeling of the whole film is the shot in which Buster is so busy chopping wood to feed his

engine that he fails to notice that the train is racing past row after row of blue uniforms marching in the contrary direction. Johnny Gray has inad-

vertently propelled himself behind the enemy's lines. Johnny Gray simply wants to run his train; unfortunately, the Union army wants to steal that train and then use it to destroy his fellow Confederates. In the course of

merely trying to save the train, Johnny rescues his lady love and wins a terrific victory for the South, quite by accident.

That heroism becomes an accident in The General is at the center of its moral thrust. It is an accident that the cannon, aimed squarely at

Johnny, does not go off until the train rounds a curve, discharging its huge ball at the enemy instead of at the protagonist. It is an accident that Buster's train comes to a rail switch just in time to help it detour the

pursuing Union train. Whereas wealth, material success, is accidental in The Gold Rush (and an accident not worth waiting for), heroism and successful military strategy are accidental in The General. And just as Charlie's character exposes the folly of the accidents of wealth, Buster's character exposes the folly of the accidents of heroism. For how less heroic, how less aspiring, less grand can a man be than little Buster? Buster merely uses his shrewd common sense against impossible odds, and he is lucky to

get away with it. The denigration of the heroic is as constant an element of The General's

narrative as the denigration of gold in the sequences of The Gold Rush. The plot is triggered by Johnny Gray's rejection by the Confederate Army. He fears he has been found wanting, but the Confederacy needs him vitally at home, running his locomotive. Nevertheless, his girl and her family ostracize Johnny as an unheroic coward, a shirker, and the rest of the film

CINEMA JOURNAL / 29

demonstrates what heroism really is and what it is really worth. Johnny uses the most pragmatic, least heroic of tools for defeating the Northern Army-boxes of freight, pieces of wood from a fence, the locomotive's kero- sene lantern. Hardheadedness, not gallantry, wins the day. The gallant and romantic receive explicit burlesque in the film's final sequence, the battle, in which victory comes as a combination of stupidity and chance. The Northern general, certain that the bridge Johnny earlier set afire is still strong enough to support his supply train, orders it across. The general is wrong; the train and bridge topple magnificently into the river below.

In the pitch of battle Johnny sees the Confederate standard about to fall to the ground. He hastily climbs to what he thinks is a hilltop in a gallant gesture to support the falling flag (a parody of Griffith?), only to discover the embarrassment of feeling the hilltop move. The hilltop is really a disgruntled soldier's back. When Johnny Gray is solemnly in- ducted into the Confederate Army for his bravery, and the sequence uses all the formal rigamarole of military honor, Buster heroically draws his sword only to see the blade fall off, leaving a stubby handle in his up- stretched arm. When the Northern officer surrenders to the South according to all the articles and procedures of war, Johnny Gray accidentally fires his pistol, disrupting the dignified formality of the ceremony. Even the film's ending burlesques the conventions of heroism, war, and romance. Johnny wraps his arms around his girl for the final clinch; since he is now an officer, all soldiers must salute him and he must salute in return. In the midst of his embrace, the entire battalion troops past him. After interrupt- ing his embrace for a while, he, in his pragmatic manner, devises a better method. He continues saluting perfunctorily and mechanically, never taking his lips or his eyes away from hers.

Such anti-heroism is common to all the Keaton films; he is always the sensible little guy who inadvertently runs up against senseless objects that dwarf him. The element that distinguishes The General is that the senseless object, the huge infernal machine of this film, is war. Men themselves have been transformed into a machine (an army), and the business of this machine is murder and destruction. This anti-heroic comic epic must necessarily become an anti-war story too, for the military heroism that The Gen- eral consistently debunks is the Circe that turns men into murdering and destructive swine. Buster never is hypnotized, and his film makes sure we keep our eyes open too.

There is absolutely nothing sentimental in the world of The General. As soon as Johnny Gray gets a bit sad, Keaton immediately slams him with a joke to rip the pathos off him. The film is as shrewd, as caustic, as hard- edged as Johnny Gray himself. His girl, a typical figure of sentiment and romance, is degraded into an incompetent and feeble representative of romantic notions; Johnny Gray ultimately must fight her as well as the pursuing army. There is no place in the world of The General for sentiment, for the same reason that there is no place for heroism. Romance and

30 / CINEMA JOURNAL

heroism are twins, and The General wages war on the whole family. Unlike the Chaplin films, there are no flowers, no roses, in The General. As soon as you admit a rose, you must also admit a gun to fight for it. True, the character Buster plays, Johnny Gray, is a Southerner, a seeming romantic choice. But Buster chose to play a rebel because the South lost the war, because the South was the little-guy underdog (like Buster), and because the South was the romantically blindest about fighting the war in the first place. Though Johnny plays a Southerner the film is impartial; ultimately Johnny must sneak his train (even its name is a military one) past both the Union and the Confederate lines. Despite the film's comic conclusion and inventive gags, The General, with its mixture of burlesque and grim- ness (many men die in this film), is the spiritual ancestor of that recent mixture of laughs and war horrors, Doctor Strangelove.

The ultimate proof of the power of The Gold Rush and The General is that they need not be referred to as great silent films; they are merely great films. They require no qualification of any kind (unlike even Griffith's greatest work). For both of them silence was not a limitation but a virtue. It is inconceivable that the two films could have been any better with sound; in fact, by removing our complete concentration on the visual they could only have been worse.

The power of the Chaplin film comes from the expressiveness of his pantomime. Mime is mute. To reveal the significant gestures and facial flickers, Chaplin, as is his wont, uses the range of shots from full to close. Only expository shots-the opening shots of the men treking North, the establishing shots of the dance hall, etc.-pull farther away from the characters. Chaplin's unobtrusive editing consistently allows the pantomime to play itself out without a cut-for example, the roll dance.

The power of the Keaton film comes from the contrast between his simple efforts and the immense problem surrounding him. Keaton, the character, is as tight-lipped as he is expressionless. His character is essentially mute. His blank stare says everything that can be said about the chaos he sees. To reveal the contrast of man and chaos, Keaton, as is his wont, uses the range of shots between full and extreme long. His camera works farther away from the characters than Chaplin's, consistently comparing them with their surroundings. His cutting is slightly quicker than Chaplin's-to increase the pace and to reveal the different perspectives of man and environment-but never so quick or obtrusive as to make the stunts seem faked. With such control of physical business, of thematic con- sistency, of appropriate structure, of placement of the camera, and of functional editing, neither The Gold Rush nor The General requires speech to speak.

The Camera as Snowball: France 1918-1927 Ronald H. Blumer

One of the most interesting periods in the history of cinema is the last ten years of the silent era. At this time of incredible creativity, cinema, pushed to its technical limits, was searching for its boundaries. The situation in France is of particular interest because of the diverse nature of this exploration. It was here that cinema was just being appreciated as a new means of expression distinct from, and in some ways superior to, the older art forms. What this new means of expression could and could not do had yet to be discovered.

Close study of the works of the highly individualistic directors producing films at this time points towards a grouping into schools or movements having common stylistic concerns. The most important of these movements is a group that has been called the Impressionists. This grouping of directors wished to expand the technical virtuosity of the cinema and use it to create a visual language. The spokesman of the school was Louis Delluc and directors included Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier and Abel Gance. These directors were interested not only in technique but in external glitter and decor: They remained completely conventional from the point of view of plot and cinematic construction. After 1923, these directors became commercially popular, unlike their more extreme brothers in the avant garde who wished to turn cinema into an extension of modern art.

In contrast to the Impressionists were a group of directors which may be loosely described as the Classical school. Members included Rene Clair, Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir and Dimitri Kirsanov. These film makers rejected the trickiness and superfluous frills of the earlier group and attempted to rediscover and apply the basic principles of cinematic construction. They freely used the discoveries of the impressionists but only as a means towards the telling of a story or the portrayal of a situation as clearly and simply as possible. The heroes of the Impressionists were Freud and the cubist painters; the heroes of the classical school were the American directors.

This article owes much to lectures on French silent cinema given by Henri Langlois at Sir George Williams University in Montreal in the winter of 1969-70. The author was also able to see at first hand most of the films, in some cases the original 35mm hand-tinted prints.

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The Impressionists regarded cinema as a symbolic language and set about trying to build up its visual vocabulary. Their search for this sort of abstraction in the cinema stemmed from a desire to give film the potential of other art forms less tied to literal realities. What the Classicists felt was that cinema does possess this power, but in its own way. Peter Wollen

paraphrases Bazin who sees realism as "the vocation of the cinema, not to

signify but to reveal ...." The nature of the medium is to present us with external reality but in truly great cinema "the exterior, through the trans-

parence of images stripped of all inessentials, reveals the interior."' The contrast between the two schools is seen most clearly in this attempt

to put subjective feeling on the screen. The Classicists considered the camera somewhat as Lumiere had viewed it. Theirs was a narrative cinema, the relation of a succession of events. In this cinema there was never any attempt to penetrate into the brains of the subjects-never any dialogue between interior and exterior reality.

The Impressionists did not believe in the transparence of images and introduced what Bazin would consider inessentials in order to indicate to the audience the subjective state of the performers. Abel Gance, referring to just those film makers whom the Classicists admired, is quoted as saying, "Why are people making films which are about nothing but events, when

they have at their disposal such a marvelous medium for psychological stories? They go on making films about people chasing each other, killing each other, or trying to commit suicide, but why not films which show

feelings instead of just action?"2

How, then, did Gance and his fellow Impressionists go about showing internal psychological states? To portray someone who is mad, you place him in a mad decor, as the Germans did in Caligari. If you wish to have someone mentally re-experiencing the past, you show images of the past blurred and tinted as Louis Delluc did in Femme de Nulle Part. At the extreme, the camera itself becomes the actor. To show someone as drunk, you show not the objective reality of him staggering through the streets but

you show instead the subjective reality. In The Last Laugh the images themselves become drunk, distorted and dizzy. To express speed you do not mount the camera at the side of the road but on the hood of a speeding car. To express vertigo you use images shot from rides in an amusement park and actually get the audience sick as Epstein did in 1924 with his succes du scandale, Coeur Fidele.

DELLUC, DULAC, AND L'HERBIER

Looking at the Impressionist films today, one is keenly aware of their

failings but in order to appreciate the value of these movies one must

approach them on their own terms. It is necessary to try and see what these

1. Wollen, Peter, Signs & Meaning in the Cinema, London, 1969, p. 123. 2. Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade's Gone By . . ., London, 1968, p. 529.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 33

early auteurs were trying to do and within this realm, the extent to which

they were successful. The father of French film Impressionism was Louis Delluc. He started

as a critic, then began to write scenarios and finally saw that the only way to get his ideas about the medium onto the screen was to make films himself. As a critic, he edited a film magazine (Le Film, 1917-1919) which fought both for the idea of a distinctly French style of cinema and a cinema free from the influences of the older arts. He reacted against the Cinema D'Art style of films which started in France in 1908. The idea behind this school was to bring culture to the millions by "canning" classical plays (setting up a camera and performing the play in front of it. Delluc's thesis

was that film is an art like other arts possessing laws of its own. In reaction to Film D'Art he demanded that, at the very least, scenarios should be especially written for the screen.

Putting his theories into practice in his best film, Fievre, he chose more to paint an atmosphere than to tell a story: "The decor was the star of the drama and this studio construction took on an intense life of its own."3 Although atmosphere plays a large role in his next film, La Femme de Nulle Part (1923), we see especially the struggle to use cinematic means to express psychological states and inwardly felt emotions. Time jumps and flashbacks used in this film pre-date the work of Alain Resnais. Delluc also used blurred images to indicate past events and there is an effort to unify objects and decor into the substance of the film. The sets designed by Cavalcanti and the props and costumes were carefully constructed to reinforce the mood.

Delluc died in 1923. His critical influence on the Impressionists was extremely important and his work represents the best that the school had to offer. What was for him a quest for laws unique to the cinema as a total experience became, in the hands of others, an exploration of technical trickery.

Part of the split between form and content comes from the attitudes of those directors who did not share Delluc's concern for unity. Germaine Dulac, one of the most influential directors of this period, talking about her film Ames de Fous, made in 1918, said:

"This film made me realize that over and above precise facts and events, atmosphere is an important emotional factor. I realized that the value of a film was more tied to the subtleties coming out of its atmosphere than the mere action in the film. I further appreciated the fact that even though the acting in itself was important, it could only attain fullest intensity operating in conjunction with the play of images. Light, camera angle and editing were more important elements than the straight acting out of a scene only following the laws of drama."4

This fundamental discovery led her work in the wrong direction. In her later films, the concentration was completely on the atmosphere, to the ex-

3. Sadoul, Georges, Le Cinema Francais, Paris, 1962, p. 25 (all translations are the author's). 4. Sadoul, Cinema Devient un Art, vol. ii, Paris, 1952, p. 337.

Coeur Fidele, by Jean Epstein (1923): A superimposition of turbulent water over a woman's face in an attempt to indicate her inner state.

Eldorado, by Marcel L'Herbier (1921): The dancer in the center, who is lost in far-away thoughts, is represented photographically as being out of focus.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 35

clusion of both the story line and the acting. Actors became props and ludicrous plots were mere pretexts on which to hang long strings of technical effects.

Like the other Impressionists, Germaine Dulac was continually searching for a visual language-a language that could be used to express internal emotional states. In her film La Souriante Madame Beudet, a vase becomes the symbol for the breakdown of a marriage. Every time the husband comes into the living room, he moves the vase to one side of the table and every time the wife comes in, she moves it to the other side. As with others of this style, the film had titles but did not really need them, the director having come so close to establishing a completely visual cinema.

Germaine Dulac was one of the first directors to use editing not only to tell a story but to create an effect. In her film La Fete Espagnole, made in 1919 from a scenario by Delluc, she used rapid cutting during a scene with a Spanish dancer in a cafe. The quick series of cuts during this scene serve to paint a pointillistic portrait of the cafe and at the same time to express cinematically the emotional excitement of the dance.

The strain between form and content is most evident in the work of Marcel L'Herbier, who is guilty of the worst excesses of the movement. We see the seeds of his trouble back in 1917 in a piece written before he had begun to make films.

"The ultimate goal of cinema, art of the real, is the exact opposite of using its precise instruments to transcribe a certain phenomenal truth as accurately as possible without any transposition or stylization whatsoever."5

With Wilde, he concludes that all art is a lie and he rejoices that in the cinema we have the ultimate lie-pure phenomenal truth. Thus, he has rediscovered the world of Melies.

His first feature length work, Rose France, came out in 1920. Although, from the point of view of its images, this was a very beautiful film, its photogenic excellence merely served to underline its weaknesses in other respects. Sadoul comments that the subtle lighting was no substitute for non-existent action. For all his sophistication with what the French call la plastique, L'Herbier had no real grasp of cinema. His visual lyricism was lost because he could supply no vehicle in which to carry it. He himself speaks contemptuously of the story line in his best film, Eldorado (1922), as being low melodrama. He did not care because his prime concern in filmmaking was for la photogenie.

Eldorado is exceptional for its occasional sense of atmosphere; shot in a Spanish setting, it becomes almost documentary. On the other hand, it also has notable subjective camera work and subjective cinematic effects. A dancer whose thoughts are elsewhere is selectively blurred when shown in a group among other dancers. A painter, looking at a country scene, sees it diffused and distorted as a painting. In his later films, the influence

5. Ibid., p. 405.

36 / CINEMA JOURNAL

of German Expressionism, a cinema of decor, became more and more evident. Speaking about L'Herbier's Don Juan et Faust made in 1924, Sadoul writes:

"Certain images were composed like a cubist tableau in which the actors, their faces plastered with motley make-up, were immobilized in painted cartons. In his

regard for Caligari, he almost turned cinema into a magic lantern projecting a series of modern tableaux."6

We see here the extent to which Delluc's dream had been perverted. Starting from an exploration of the basics of cinematic language, French film makers found themselves, five years later, immobilized in theatrical

paint. Don Juan et Faust was both a critical and a popular failure. L'Her- bier's solution was to hire more art directors and make the decor even more

impressive. In his next film, L'Inhumaine, not only did Autant-Lara work on the settings but also Cavalcanti, Fernand Leger and the architect, Mallet Stevens. At the time, this film was regarded almost as a propaganda piece for modern architecture and decor. Seeing the film today is a curious

experience, for in front of these futuristic settings stalks a nineteenth cen-

tury femme fatale and there ensues a melodrama worthy of the worst of Dickens. The film was a complete disaster and Sadoul uses it to mark the end of French Impressionism. The split between forme et fond was com-

plete.

GANCE: METAPHOR AND DISTORTION

Abel Gance suffered from the same sort of schizophrenia but he always expressed his illness in a spectacularly cinematic fashion. Gance was a man

existing in the nineteenth century and speaking in the language of the

twenty-first. Gance's obsessions with technical gimmickery make him at once both the ultimate extreme of Impressionism and a demonstration of their worst excesses.

From the very beginning of his career, Gance regarded cinema as somewhat akin to music in its potential for grandeur. In 1917 he wrote that film was "a fantastic synthesis of the movement of space with the movement of time."7 His vision and naivete led him to try things which had never been dreamed of before.

In one of his earliest films, La Folie du Docteur Tube made in 1916, a mad scientist invents a powder that produces hallucinations. The film consists largely of distorted images from the point of view of those under the influence of'this drug. In this film, Gance made attempts at a subjective cinema so far ahead of its time, that the producers refused to distribute it

fearing that it would be incomprehensible. In a later film, La Dixieme

Symphonie (1918), there is a scene in which a composer is playing what is

supposed to be a very moving piece of music to an assembled group of

6. Sadoul, Le Cinema Francais, p. 27. 7. Sadoul, Cinema Devient un Art, vol. ii, p. 319.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 37

friends. In true Impressionist spirit, Gance felt it necessary to 'translate' this emotion into cinema. He dissolves to a pastoral scene with dancing nymphs surrounded by a hand coloured frame. (The scene is much like nineteenth century etchings available in second-hand stores.) Gance then dissolves back to the enraptured people listening to the music. The effect is quite arresting but in it we see both the strength and weakness of Gance. Not limited by conventional notions of what film is supposed to be able to do, he tried, with every technical means at his disposal, to expand the

expressive power of the medium. He continually strove to snatch a grace beyond the reach of the art, but frequently fell flat on his face. Striking as the effect in La Dixibme Symphonie is, it has nothing to do with the action of the film. It is a metaphor, but a literary metaphor and curiously out of

place in a medium which can be that which so often it is made to merely signify.

Gance's La Roue, released in 1923, is probably his best film. The hero of this film is a locomotive driver and the film has long sequences centered around the railway yards. Although the plot is romantic and absurd, the train sequences are impressive even today. They are constructed like a futurist poem-a hymn to pure mechanical power and motion. In some of these scenes Gance shot various parts of the train in motion and cut between them very rapidly. This technique was very much like Dulac's pointillist editing in that it was not used for dramatic effect as in Griffith's cross cut-

ting or for intellectual effect as in Eisenstein's ideograms, but musically, pounding away at the audience with the driving rhythm of the images. Just as Gance used the dancing nymphs to symbolize the spirit of the music, here he is using Brakhage-like editing to symbolize speed and power. It works here where it failed elsewhere because the form is linked to the content. He demonstrates in this film that, at times, cinema can reproduce experience and sensation as well as actions and events.

The culmination of Gance's artistic career was the rambling super- spectacular Napoleon. Shot over a period of four years, involving miles of film and every technique known to the industry, the film magnifies the worst defects of Gance's style. The film is filled with technique for its own sake from large effects-such as three-screen battle sequences tinted red, white and blue-right down to details such as camera movement unmoti- vated by anything in the action. In order to make his newly portable camera as subjective as possible, Gance tied the thing to anything that moved: horses, boats, even onto the chest of an opera singer. During a snowball fight, in the section dealing with Napoleon's childhood, the camera itself became the snowball and was thrown around at the actors.

Near the end of the film, during the large battle sequence, Gance created a triptych screen using triple projection. At times, the audience was

presented with over twenty images by means of split screens and super- impositions. Gance imagined the effect to be like the opening of a flood-

gate which would "s'engouffrer dans le public, le torrent le plus veghe'ment

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et le plus riche de puissance humaine que l'histoire ait vu se dechainer."8 Forty years before Expo, this effect must indeed have been spectacular. His film, however, was released in France at the same time as Battleship Potemkin. Critics compared the two works and Gance lost out. They viewed Potemkin as the culmination of cinematic art while Napoleon was seen as a mere exercise in technique. The irony is that Eisenstein studied La Roue carefully and was greatly influenced by it.

Gance is a director speaking to us not through his story or his characters but through his technique. If decor was the real star of Delluc's Fievre, then technique is the star of Napoleon. Gance often hides his trickery behind heavy handed symbolism. When he wishes to show us the govern- mental chaos before Napoleon took control, he shows confused, swirling images of delegates arguing with each other in the National Assembly and intercuts this with a storm at sea. The camera swoops up and down over the assembly as if it too were a ship at sea. Thus the technique conveys the message-the actors are used only as props-in surging waves of metaphor. In this film, one of the last of the Impressionist movement, the form has become the meaning. Audiences and critics had become bored by the empty sparkle and glitter and hungered for something more substantial.

FRENCH CLASSICISM

"I will distinguish, in the cinema between 1920 and 1940, between two broad and opposing trends: those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality. By 'image' I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything that the representation on the screen adds to the object there represented."9 The Classicists represented the other trend. Around 1924 Impressionism, which had been the avant-garde of French cinema was losing steam artistically and becoming accepted commercially. It is here that we mark the beginnings of a second avant-garde, one that allowed cinema to return to those things which it could do the best.

Classicism is really the synthesis of two schools. Directors wished to apply the discoveries in technique of the Impressionists with the simple action stories of the primitives. Instead of having contempt for earlier film-makers such as Feuillade and Perret, they studied their serials and features in order to learn what made those films work.

It was Rene Clair's thesis that cinema up to 1924 had only a few works that really made use of its unique potentials. He cited Chaplin and Sennett as creators not ruined by the obligation to make art. Clair admired the chase sequences in their films and concluded that film aesthetics can be summarized in one word-movement.

8. Daria, Sophie, Abel Gance, Hier et Demain, Paris, 1959, p. 110. 9. Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, Los Angeles, 1968,

p. 24.

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"To the external movement of objects as perceived by the eye we add the interior movement of the action of the film. .. . When the Lumiere brothers wanted to demonstrate the value of their amazing invention they did not use the screen to present a still life or a silent dialogue between two people; they gave us L'Arrivee d'un Train, Une Charge de Cuirassiers, etc. If we wish to strengthen the power of cinema, let us respect this forgotten tradition and return to this source."10

Even Clair's avant garde film Entr'acte is an abstract expression of these ideas. Completely devoid of any sort of rational storyline or plot, the film consists largely of one long chase.

Like the best American comedians, Clair uses objects not symbolically but as pretexts for action and drama. In Le Voyage Imaginaire (1926) an entire scene is built around a bouquet of flowers that nobody wants to be seen with. The Italian Straw Hat centers around a hat that must be recovered in order to save a lady's honour. In his second sound film, Le Million, the action revolves around the search for a missing lottery ticket. Germaine Dulac used objects to symbolize the drama; in the objective cinema of Rene Clair, the objects are the source of the drama.

The cinematic style of Jacques Feyder had a profound influence on French cinema of the late thirties. His poetic realism is characteristic of directors such as Marcel Carne and Jean Gremillon. In contrast to most

Impressionist cinema, films such as Crainquebille (1923) and Visage d'Enfants (1925) use real backgrounds with real people. Feyder also strove for naturalism of acting. As we have seen, the Impressionists used their actors as props. When many people think of silent cinema, all that they remember are the wild gesturings and theatrical grimaces characteristic of that school. Feyder realized that the power of cinema lies in its power of

synecdoche and that a single close-up of a hand can mean as much as a blood-stained battle field. His technique is similarly subdued. Like the other Classicists, he was not afraid of innovations but he always used them

sparingly and to a purpose. He sought after l'image juste rather than an

image that would attract attention to itself. He searched for just the right lighting and the right camera placement for each particular shot. His

technique was so refined as to become practically invisible. In summarizing the French experience of the 1920's we see that the

great discovery of the era was not the editing or the split screen or the

tricky camera movement, but a simple, direct approach to the reality in front of the lens. Cinema, as we have come to know it does have a language, but it is not the language of the Impressionists. The subjective camera, which they were so fond of using, does not bring people any closer to the minds of the actors or the experience of the situation. It is by and large a distancing device; one which only serves to make the audience aware of the fact that they are watching an artificial construction. Cinema is at one with the source of its power only when techniques such as this one are tied to the action and thus made invisible.

10. Amengual, B., Rene Clair, Paris, 1963, p. 110.

Theories of Film Music

Douglas W. Gallez

Siegfried Kracauer recently brought us up to date on the relationship of music and film, but his treatment of the subject in Theory of Film is primarily a synthesis of salient parts of Spottiswoode, Eisenstein, and Eisler. The familiar kinship of the muses Euterpe and Kinema is not yet so well defined that we cannot profit from a fresh attempt to compare the notions theorists share.

Spottiswoode wrote some thirty-five years ago (during the infancy of sound-film) that

The place of music in films is at present indeterminate and largely unexplored. It cannot be discussed with the precision attaching to the visual components, which have nearly all been given ample opportunity on the screen to form the basis of careful and extensive judgments.1

Nevertheless, Spottiswoode effectively delineated the functions of film music as reflected by usage in the early Thirties. He saw music performing the following roles, independently or in combination:

(1) imitation, in which "the score imitates natural sounds or the tonal use of speech"

(2) commentary, in which "the score takes the part of a spectator commenting on the visual film, usually ironically"

(3) evocation, in which "the synchronized score is given its fullest positive value. Silence as well as sound is deliberate. Leitmotifs act as emotives and assist the visual film towards insight into the characters they are attached to"

(4) contrast, in which "the score contrasts with, and so may heighten the effect of, the visual film"

(5) dynamic use, in which "correspondence of sight and sound brings out the rhythm of cutting rates"2

Exploration of musical potential was continued by Hollywood and other musicians, and by aestheticians in the world film centers. Maurice

Jaubert is a familiar example of the more thoughtful composer who

attempted to codify the use of music in film. Leonid Sabaneev pioneered aesthetic discussion of the evolving technique;3 and Kurt London pro-

1. Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 192-193.

2. Ibid., pp. 49-50. 3. Leonid Sabaneev, Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors,

trans. S. W. Pring (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1935), pp. 15-31.

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duced in 1936 a seminal work in the field, Film Music, which succinctly probed aesthetic and technical problems. Prokofiev and Eisenstein experi- mented further in Alexander Nevsky, and Eisenstein essayed a posteriori a rationale for the results. But it was Hans Eisler who reassessed the aesthetic implications of music and film in 1947, after performing extensive experiments at the New School for Social Research under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Eisler asserted that "to establish aesthetic principles of cinema music is as dubious an enterprise as to write its history."4 Yet, like Spottiswoode, he plucked up his courage and proceeded to take on the task. In doing so, he demolished the good intentions of both Sergei Eisenstein and Albert Schweitzer-no small accomplishment. Eisenstein, it will be recalled, had made a case in The Film Sense for the way he and Prokofiev had integrated musical and visual elements in the Battle on the Ice episode of Nevsky. For the attack, the picture was shot to match existing music; however, post- scoring was involved for a preliminary sequence prior to the battle. The visual pattern, according to Eisenstein, was always complemented accurately by the music. Eisler observed that Eisenstein was concerned with single frames or essentially static scenes and the way that the elements of the musical score formed matching patterns. Eisenstein did not primarily concern himself with the fact that it is movement within and between scenes that captures attention, and that music can imitate this movement and make sense, for both the visual elements and the music are dealing with time.

Eisler faulted Eisenstein for this analytical deficiency and went on to scorn the Russian film-maker's "high-sounding critical arguments," including his citation of Schweitzer's analysis of an excerpt from J. S. Bach's Christmas Cantata to support his aesthetic viewpoint. "Eisenstein," according to Eisler,

speaks of [Prokofiev's music for The Battle on the Ice sequence] as though he were dealing with the most difficult problems of abstract painting, with reference to which phrases such as steep curves, green counterpoints to blue themes, or structural unity, have been used only too frequently. He uses heavy artillery to shoot

sparrows.5

Perhaps Eisler's most significant contribution to film music aesthetics is his reaffirmation of the principle of montage. He emphasized that "if the

concept of montage ... has any justification, it is to be found in the relation between the picture and the music."6 He went on to observe that "the aesthetic divergence of the media [motion pictures and music] is potentially a legitimate means of expression, not merely a regrettable deficiency that- has to be concealed as well as possible."7 Eisler's aesthetic models for film

4. Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 62.

5. Ibid., pp. 156-157. 6. Ibid., p. 70. 7. Ibid., p. 74.

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music were incidental music for drama and music found in musical comedies, which

functioned as stimulants because they were foreign elements, which interrupted the dramatic context, or tended to raise this context from the realm of literal

immediacy into that of meaning.8

He asserted also that the function of music is not, as Eisenstein claimed, to

"express" the movement or rhythm of the motion picture as such, "but to release, or more accurately, to justify movement."9 He saw the unity of music and picture to be attributable to the gestural element:

Its aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion, not a reduplication of motion. . . . Thus, the relation between music and pictures is antithetic at the very moment when the deepest unity is achieved.10

Eisler admitted that he found numerous contradictions in the relationships between film and music, and he asserted "that there can be no question of

setting up universal aesthetic criteria for this music. .. .11 Thus, having persuasively mustered his arguments for a montage theory of film music, he all but threw in the towel:

the criteria of [film] music must be derived in each given case from the nature of the problems it raises. The task of aesthetic considerations is to throw light on the nature of these problems and their requirements, to make us aware of their own inherent development, not to provide recipes.12

PUDOVKIN'S AESTHETIC VIEW

Pudovkin anticipated Eisler's emphasis on montage theory, wherein music that contrasts with the visual elements assists in producing an emotional response that neither stimulus can achieve by itself. In his Film

Technique and Film Acting Pudovkin cited the treatment of music in a workers' demonstration sequence of Deserter (1933) which applied his dictum that music in the sound film "must never be the accompaniment. It must retain its own line."'3 Because Pudovkin felt that an "accompaniment" to the visuals "would give only the superficial aspect of the scene, [that] the undertones of meaning would be ignored,"14 he asked for music "the dominating emotional theme of which [would be] courage and the

certainty of ultimate victory."15 From the very first scene the music was affirmative, and it grew increasingly powerful to the last. As Pudovkin described it:

8. Loc. cit. 9. Eisler, p. 78.

10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 88. 12. Loc. cit. 13. V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu (New

York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 190. 14. Ibid., p. 191. 15. Ibid., p. 192.

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The image's progress curves like a sick man's temperature chart; while the music in direct contrast is firm and steady . . . and when the workers hoist the flag at the end the music at last reaches its climax, and only now, at its conclusion, does its spirit coincide with that of the image.16

Finally, Pudovkin observed:

It will be appreciated that this instance, where the sound plays the subjective part in the film, and the image the objective, is only one of many diverse ways in which the medium of sound film allows us to build a counterpoint, and I maintain that only by such counterpoint can primitive naturalism be surpassed and the rich deeps of meaning potential in sound film creatively handled be discovered and plumbed.17

Pudovkin's use of asynchronism, of course, is the classic application in film music of the manifesto issued earlier by him, Eisenstein, and Alexan- drov-a statement concerned with asynchronous sound in general. Yet Pudovkin's attempt was not altogether successful. Some observers found the music confusing and assumed that its rising exultation referred to successful repression of the workers' demonstration, rather than to proletarian victory.

It took most Hollywood composers at least twenty years to add asynchronism to their technique. They preferred illustration, mirrored scoring, parallelism-whichever term one prefers-to counterpoint. Even when the more sophisticated among them, especially an adventuresome generation of

composers skilled in jazz improvisation or trained in forward-looking con- servatories and university music schools, made use of the counterpoint principle, they by no means embraced it exclusively. While they recognized its value to psychological implications not evidenced by the visuals or the remainder of the sound track elements, they retained the traditional

principle of underscoring which often seems merely to reinforce what is already evident on the screen, but which also makes for continuity, helps maintain momentum, and propels the film at climactic sequences.

Kurt London warned in 1936 that if music "is employed to strain after effects which the film itself cannot induce, then it degrades the film and itself."'8 His admonition was regularly ignored by Hollywood producers and the composers they hired. Often the music was called on to obscure filmic flaws and save productions at the box office. Film sophisticates were never fooled; the mass audience, not concerned with aesthetic subtleties, accepted the easy pleasure of theme songs and "mickey-mouse" underlining of the action.

Today we find regular employment in film music of direct and indirect

techniques of enhancing filmic meaning with music-that is, parallel and

contrapuntal scoring. In both methods, as Eisler has noted, structural unity

16. Loc. cit. 17. Pudovkin, p. 193. 18. Kurt London, Film Music, trans. Eric S. Bensinger (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.,

1936), p. 125.

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is retained, and articulation of the music usually corresponds to the articulation of the film sequence.19

Despite decades of pragmatic demonstration that both principles are

aesthetically viable in the sound film, we discover without surprise that

John Howard Lawson still opts for the Eisler-Pudovkin dialectical notion about film music, and that Paul Rotha primly urges-at least as far as realist story-films are concerned, that music be discarded unless justified by a logical source.20 Rotha's austere recommendation seems unnecessarily restrictive, and few practitioners are willing to limit thus their resources of

expression. Lawson's view is by now the familiar hue and cry:

Since the organization of sight and sound is almost totally neglected in today's commercial production, music is employed mainly as a means of underlining the plot .... The subordination of music to "theatrical" situations which have no musical interest has obscured the role that music is destined to play in cinematic composition. ...

There has been no general improvement in film music in the past fifteen years [roughly, since about 1949]. The experimental work initiated by Eisenstein and Prokofiev in Alexander Nevsky has not been appreciated in theory or utilized in practice. However, the most creative contemporary artists are beginning to recog- nize that music is not a passive accompaniment of the action, but a living force which is part of the pattern of contrasting values and interacting tensions.21

Counterpoint, the rather limited notion of Eisler, Eisenstein and others, constitutes but one item of Kracauer's taxonomy.22 It falls under the broad

category of "commentative" music, and rests alongside parallelism. Kra- cauer's second broad category is "actual" music, under which he places "incidental music" and the "production number." His final broad category is "music as the nucleus of the film."

Study of Kracauer's arrangement of aesthetic functions of film music reveals the difficulty of being functionally comprehensive while maintaining logic and retaining semantic neatness. It must be said that, to his credit, Kracauer is virtually all-embracing in his categorization of music in film. But because he uses terms such as "incidental" music as a discrete category, without concern for its long-established meaning in drama-he tends to be

confusing. It is also difficult to accept, for example, Kracauer's niceness of distinction between "incidental" music and the "interlude or part of the environment" which he lists as a sub-category of "integration" under "production number."

19. Eisler, p. 70. 20. John Howard Lawson, Film: The Creative Process, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang,

1967), pp. 343-344; Paul Rotha, Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings About the Cinema (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1958), n. pp. 22-23.

21. Lawson, loc. cit. Italics supplied. When the present article was delivered before the Society for Cinema Studies, Mr. Lawson commented that he does not insist upon film music being limited to the contrapuntal role. He also recognizes its synchronous function of parallel- ing screen action and/or heightening the cutting rhythm. Nevertheless, he tends to emphasize the important notion of conflicting elements in the sound-film.

22. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press [Galaxy ed.]), 1965), pp. 133-156.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 45

Kracauer's discussion of the physiological function of silent film music is excellent, by the way, although Kurt London predated him by twenty- five years. Whereas Kracauer asserts that the function of music in silent film was "to adjust the spectator physiologically to the flow of images on the screen,"23 his predecessor, London, wrote that music was needed because of "the rhythm of film as an art of movement. We are not accustomed to

apprehend movement ... without accompanying sound, or at least audible

rhythms."24

THE VIEWPOINT OF COMPOSERS

Besides the contribution of aestheticians, we find attempts by composers (other than Eisler) to come to grips with the problems of combining music

and film. We have already alluded to the work of Maurice Jaubert, who

deplored the use of music to annotate film action, synchronism for the sake of synchronism, music as sound mucilage. "The function of the film musician," he said, "[is] to feel the exact moment when the image escapes from strict realism and calls for the poetic extension of music."25 Jaubert felt that music should "make physically perceptible . . . the inner rhythm of the image, without struggling to provide a translation of its content, whether this be emotional, dramatic or poetic."26 In his canon, music was psychologically useful for transitions and allusions; its task was to serve the film, not to call attention to itself.

Other composers, such as Constant Lambert27 and Virgil Thomson,28 have dealt with film music with wit and perception; but it remained for Aaron Copland to take a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to the subject. He particularly noted five functions of music in film: (1) assisting the establishment of atmosphere of time and place, (2) psychological under-

lining, (3) neutral filling-in of dialogue gaps, (4) maintaining continuity, and (5) building climaxes and providing "a sense of finality."29 We can see at once that Copland and Jaubert share some notions, but that they disagree on others. The common thread they share with the aestheticians is the psychological function of music.

The main areas of agreement among theorists and practitioners appear to be those which Kracauer identifies as parallelism and counterpoint. There is a further body of opinion that supports the notion of music as an aid to continuity; another affirms the idea that music can heighten the

23. Ibid., p. 134. 24. London, p. 35. Italics in original. 25. Maurice Jaubert, "Music on the Screen," in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film

(London: Lovat Dickson Ltd., 1938), p. 109. 26. Ibid., p. 112. 27. See "Mechanical Music and the Cinema," in his Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline

(Hardmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 185-195. 28. See the section "Music and Photography," in his The State of Music, 2nd rev. ed.

(New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 1962), pp. 157-171. 29. Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music, rev. ed. (New York: The New American

Library [Mentor ed.], 1963), pp. 154-155.

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visual rhythm of the film. Nobody seems to deny the naturalistic use of music in dramatic films or documentaries. Terminology varies; semantic problems occasionally intervene. The foregoing principles appear to be established.

Yet there may be others. The world of film is so varied that one would indeed be bold to circumscribe the possibilities for music. There are all kinds of films, many kinds of music. Theatrical pictures are increasingly experimental, and film music styles are having to keep pace. We are in a period of neo-Dada, of anti-rationality. Because the arts of music and film are heavily involved in the game of chance encounter, it may be that the aesthetic principle for our time is no principle at all. Random happenings will be sought-or rather, allowed. To some of us, this means chaos. Maybe it is because the possibilities are so great we cannot comprehend them.

Hans Keller, the British musicologist, once said of film, "this complex medium of aesthetic expression is far too young and uneducated to issue any artistic commandments at all...."30 His remark points up the groping experienced by those who have attempted to set bounds on the aesthetics of music for film. As the possibilities for both film and music multiply, as cross-media approaches enable us to realize total experiences incomprehensible a short while ago, perhaps it is futile for us even to try to establish limits. But, even as we peer over the new threshold, we must continue to see where we have been and where we now stand.

TOWARD A NEW FUNCTIONAL SYNTHESIS

It seems useful to summarize the many approaches to film music by attempting a new analysis, essentially based on Kracauer's taxonomy, while allowing for the contributions of other authorities in the field. The following outline is offered as a reasonable beginning.

It will be observed that the six categories as charted do not include Kracauer's "music as nucleus of the film," for in the author's judgment this category is not truly part of a functional taxonomy. Nevertheless, it is an aspect of film music which Kracauer and others have discussed under aesthetic implications. Such a nuclear role may occur when the picture reinforces the music, reversing the usual realtionships-that is, performed music is visualized by realist photography or by animation or other graphic design. Nuclear music also includes filmed opera, ballet, concerts, and the musical film. Nuclear music essentially determines the visual continuity of the film; in the six categories of the outline, the visual and aural portions of the film determine the kind and amount of music to be included in the soundtrack.

Close examination reveals that the categories can overlap-categories I and II, for example. Again, category III music can simultaneously establish mood or retreat to a mood-setting function. Categories IV and VI

30. Hans Keller, "Film Music-British Music: Perspective," in Eric Blom (ed.), Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1955), III, 102.

CINEMA JOURNAL / 47

might be combined, if one would grant that a lack of pace (in terminal

music) can ever be called dynamic. The fact is that functional music does not lend itself to nice categorization, but it is helpful to sort out the com-

plications as a basis for production decisions and critical judgments.

A FUNCTIONAL TAXONOMY OF FILM MUSIC

I. INTRODUCTORY AND DESCRIPTIVE MUSIC A. Psychologically adjusts audiences by establishing general moods. B. Provides information as to initial and succeeding settings:

1. Period. 2. Location.

II. MooD (BACKGROUND) MusIC A. Intensifies apparent mood of sequence by synchronous:

1. Imitation (Mickey-Mousing). 2. Evocation (overall treatment).

B. Provides ironic contrast of sequence mood by asynchronous counterpoint.

III. REALISTIC (SOURCE) MusIC Provides musical realism by: A. Using justified incidental music. B. Integrating production number(s) in the film story.

IV. DYNAMIC MUSIC A. Emphasizes cutting rhythm. B. Provides continuity by:

1. Connecting dialogue sections with neutral filler. 2. Carrying on development of thought.

C. Psychologically advances action by: 1. Providing transitions. 2. Building climaxes and preparing further action.

V. IMITATIVE (ONOMATOPOEIC) MusIC A. Imitates mechanical or natural sounds other than human. B. Imitates human speech or utterances (screams, sighs, moans, etc.).

VI. SUSPENSORY AND TERMINAL MUSIC A. Suspends action. B. Terminates film.

Cinema Journal Book Reviews

Angelo Solmi. Fellini. Translation by Elizabeth Greenwood. New York, Humanities Press, 1968.

Gilbert Salachas. Federico Fellini. Translation by Rosalie Siegel. New York, Crown Publishers, 1969.

About ten years ago, when there was virtually nothing published on the cinema in English, many of us looked with envious eyes at the situation in Italy and France. In Italy, allied to the Centro Sperimentale and under the direction of Luigi Chiarini, Bianco e Nero published the kind of production documentation that still is without parallel (to my knowledge) in other countries of the world. There was, for example, a scholarly, two-column script, taken from the film's original Sicilian dia- lect and translated into Italian, for La Terra Trema (Nos. 2-3, Feb./March, 1951). In France there seemed to be all kinds of comment on the cinema, both in book and periodical form. To be sure, for those of us that attempted to read it, much of the writing in French was of a decidedly low level, gossipy in impulse and critically im- precise. But it existed nevertheless. It seemed part of that French enthusiasm for all things cinematic which had, among other things, made Henri Langlois and his Cinematheque such a centre of excitement and which had given birth to the rival critical camps of Positif and Cahiers du Cinema and through Cahiers to the films of Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard.

That was ten years ago. Nowadays, the scene has shifted. One must still search in vain amongst the pages of Sight & Sound or Film Quarterly for the kind of docu- niented information one could find in the best of the Italian or French (or even

German) sources. In France, the four rival monograph series represented by Se-

ghers' Cinema d'Aujourdhui, Le Septieme Art, Ltudes Cinematographiques, and from Lyons, Premier Plan, have virtually ground to a halt. Yet in English, at the moment, we are in the midst of a publishing boom. Great Britain now produces three rival series of monographs on the cinema: Peter Cowie's series, published by Zwemmer in England and Barnes in New York; Ian Cameron's "Movie" paperback series, now handled by Praeger in New York; and the British Film Institute's "Cinema One" series, currently published by Thames & Hudson in England and Indiana Univer- sity in Bloomington.

In the United States, publication policy, though increasingly prolific, has remained rather less settled. Fired by an enthusiasm for the cinema but rather less favored in terms of resources than one might be in Paris, American cinephiles (and to a certain extent their British counterparts) have naturally thought in terms of translation, of making some of this first-hand comment in Italian and French available in English. Admirable though such an impulse may seem, it is doubtful if, as a policy, it can ever be completely successful. We have had, of course, the helpful fiasco of Cahiers in English, erratically edited for us by the ubiquitous Andrew Sarris, but abominably translated and (like the original) pro- hibitively expensive. But even before the Cahiers experiment, Simon & Schuster had begun to turn the Edition Seghers publications into English. From all reports, the books met with financial disaster. Perhaps the venture was simply mistimed, coming a year or two too early; perhaps, more plaus- ibly, they made the mistake of choosing the wrong directors-that is to say, wrong at that time for the American public: a book

CINEMA JOURNAL / 49

on Bufiuel before the commercial success of Belle de Jour and one on Antonioni before the even greater success of Blow Up. Yet finally, it seems to me that there are great problems in turning critical writings in one language into another, problems which may prove insuperable, no matter how much care is taken.

This pessimistic note must precede consideration of two recent books on Fellini, one of them translated from Italian, one from French. To begin with the Solmi: its date of writing is withheld from this Eng- lish edition, but as the text stops with only a few preliminary comments on 8?1, it must have been written about 1962. This in itself is a small disadvantage, even for a text that is more biographical than critical; for some of the most crucial biographical speculations (with Fellini, there are apparently no biographical facts!) are re- quoted from Solmi by Salachas, whose book was written in 1963, just as some of the most crucial anecdotal material found in Salachas, like Fellini's encounter with the ailing zebra, is re-told again by Suzanne Budgen in the appendices to her book for the British Film Institute in 1966. In this parasitical situation, then, to come first is to be at a slight disadvantage, unless you have other qualities to offer.

What are the qualities that might recom- mend Signor Solmi's book today? Certainly not the qualities of perceptive criticism. Although Solmi offers in the first third of his book to sort out the basic thematic pre-occupations of Fellini, when he can see Sylvia-the Anita Ekberg figure in La Dolce Vita-only as "the incarnation of primitive lust" who nevertheless "is desperately in need of love, like Cabiria and Gelsomina" (p. 39), we realize that, although Italian, Signor Solmi is not really attuned to the resonances of the films at all. Whereas Miss Budgen, a critic of rare sensibility, took pains to recreate for us her experience of the films as she has both felt and understood them, Signor Solmi, on the other hand, is a journalist whose chief merit seems to be that he is on the scene. Though he makes great claims for the films of Fellini-"Federico Fellini is the most significant figure of present-day cinema" is his opening remark-there are no excep-

tional comments about the films themselves that could make us feel he knows what this claim might actually entail. He is less hostile to Fellini's world than John Francis Lane, who offers inside knowledge to the British press, or Gideon Bachmann, who has been responsible for so many of those mythologizing interviews that have appeared in the American press. Like them, however, Angelo Solmi seems imaginatively outside of Fellini's world, even though he has access to all sorts of knowledge that could be an aid to sensitive spectators who wished to understand Fellini's films from Fellini's personal if ever-shifting point-of- view.

Solmi's book is most valuable for all the little stories it contains that pertain to Fellini's life, for scraps of letters that Fel- lini has written, for scattered comments about the relation between events in his life and scenes in his films. We learn from Solmi about the actual swindler source for the Augusto figure in II Bidone (p. 69), about how one of Fellini's producers, "a fiery, picturesque Neapolitan . . . is supposed to have drunk the ink which was to be used to sign a certain clause he considered ruinous for himself" (p. 142). And sometimes, more helpfully, we get insights into the respective roles that Pinelli and Flaiano (Fellini's constant scriptwriters) and the then apprentice Pier Paolo Paso- lini played in Le Notti di Cabiria.

Yet even at its most anecdotal, Solmi's Fellini is a book I mistrust. My mistrust springs largely from the tone and from the many slight inaccuracies in it, both of which might be the fault of the translator. The translator, for instance, insists on calling II Matto-the Richard Basehart figure in La Strada-the madman, rather than the simpleton or fool; and there are countless examples of proper names mis- spelt. The book comes to me as through a fog, one of the problems often experienced in rendering mediterranean expository prose into English. Unless done with exquisite care, everything said can seem so unclear, as if still partly in a foreign language.

I have few such misgivings about the main text of the Salachas book. I have long considered the French original (along

50 / CINEMA JOURNAL

with Genevieve Agel's Les Chemins de Fel- lini) the most helpful study of Fellini's work in French, and Miss Siegel and Crown Publishers have adniirably succeeded in bringing out this edition which has retained something of the feel and format of the French original. It has also partly been revised to bring it more up to date, allowing comments on Giulietta della Spiriti to appear. The central critical essay is divided into sub-headings like "The Poet," "The Ambiguity of Satire," and "In the Name of the Holy Ghost"-sub-headings that encourage a rather rambling, discursive treatment of the man and his films in the best French tradition.

The difficulty about translations of expository prose, even when well done as with this particular volume, is that French, on the whole, works at a greater distance from the scene-by-scene details of the actual film than English criticism tends to. Indeed, the French language and syntax seem to encourage a greater air of gen- eralization than the English language does. This can make for problems in the course of translation, problems of finding specific English equivalents for what is in the original French rather less precise. Neverthe- less, Salachas recognizes in detail how

'ellini builds up his sense of wonder in the strange world he creates for us, how isolated moments apparently tangential to the plot of a Fellini film can, in essence, contain the atmosphere of the whole. For example (pp. 38-39):

... in I Vitelloni I retain a dazzling image of a short sequence that showed a kind of village idiot lost in admiration over a religious statue that had been given to him to guard. In no film have I ever felt so acutely the generous sympathy of a cineaste for a happy imbecile, this sort of sharp, deliberate curiosity for a picturesque stranger.

And Salachas recognizes that even in an apparently formless film like La Dolce Vita Fellini uses recurring images as a poet uses rhymes (p. 40), and that the precision of detail is also, contrary to the responses of Sight & Sound critics, a precision of thought (p. 75).

The Salachas book on Fellini is one of a series that Crown Publishers are now translating from the French, from the same Cinema d'Aujourdhui series that Simon & Schuster began translating a few years ago. The format of each book consists of a main critical essay which is fol- lowed by three sections of snippets-interview and script material, reviews, and personal testimonials about the director by people who have known him. Finally, in each volume, there is a bibliography, a filmography, and an index.

All in all, it is quite a useful format; for even when the central essay is wrong- headed (as I would argue about the Simon & Schuster Antonioni book, in which Pierre Leprohon's political convictions led him to hail II Grido as the finest film that Antoni- oni had so far made), the bits of interview and review material can be useful. Again, we have a problem, however, when we are faced with them in English: they are all drawn from sources so unfamiliar to most of us that there is a void surrounding the comments where there should be an intellectual context that would intensify their meaning. Nevertheless, it is useful to have them, whether we understand them fully or not; and I suppose it wiser to keep to the original French sources in such compilations of material, rather than to include as well some British and American sources as the Simon & Schuster series attempted to do.

The only real concession made for the English-speaking reader in this particular volume is that the bibliography lists Eng- lish texts rather than the original French ones, although the selection seems somewhat random. For instance, it is embarrass- ing for me to have to point out that, while the bibliography lists from Film Quarterly reviews of a number of Fellini's films as far back as 1958, it omits my own extensive article which appeared in 1966. And it fails to list Miss Budgen's book at all. Compared to the books under review, her challenging insights and extensive analyses of Fellini's achievements constitute one of the most sensitive and perceptive critical studies of the cinema ever published. It would be a service to film teachers if Suzanne Budgen's Fellini (1966) could be

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reissued by the British Film Institute as a part of its Cinema One series so that it might be more professionally distributed and better known.

-Peter Harcourt.

Peter Wollen. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969 (paperback, in cooperation with British Film Institute).

Robert Richardson. Literature and Film. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969.

Film critics need to find new ways to talk about the complexity and uniqueness of the cinema experience. Serious film scholarship has, in the past, relied heavily on the methods and traditions of literary criticism. This practice has not been entirely successful in dealing with the fact that (1) film as a communication system is immediately expressive at a primary level of articulation (i.e., it does not need a special dictionary or grammar to get a message across); (2) the "creator" of a film is generally a team, not a single person; and (3) affective changes or reactions in the

mind of a particular person viewing a film (as well as a person reading a book) are

difficult, yet important, to talk about.

Recently, the so-called "general science of signs" (semiology or semiotics) has given promise of shedding some light on these and other difficulties associated with film study. Peter Wollen leads the reader to expect that semiology will be used to deal with at least some of these difficulties. Unfortunately, the book only in part ful- fills the expectations set up by the extremely enticing and timely title.

Wollen has divided his book into three major parts: "Eisenstein's Aesthetics," "The Auteur Theory," and "The Semiology of the Cinema." (In addition, there is a three-page appendix on "Style and Stylis- tics" which presents a most helpful typol- ogy of various ways to deal with the problem of style.) The three sections relate to each other in that they constitute various approaches to what Wollen somewhat vaguely refers to (but never clearly de- limits) as film aesthetics. Eisenstein is featured prominently in the book because in Wollen's opinion Eisenstein is still per-

reissued by the British Film Institute as a part of its Cinema One series so that it might be more professionally distributed and better known.

-Peter Harcourt.

Peter Wollen. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969 (paperback, in cooperation with British Film Institute).

Robert Richardson. Literature and Film. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1969.

Film critics need to find new ways to talk about the complexity and uniqueness of the cinema experience. Serious film scholarship has, in the past, relied heavily on the methods and traditions of literary criticism. This practice has not been entirely successful in dealing with the fact that (1) film as a communication system is immediately expressive at a primary level of articulation (i.e., it does not need a special dictionary or grammar to get a message across); (2) the "creator" of a film is generally a team, not a single person; and (3) affective changes or reactions in the

mind of a particular person viewing a film (as well as a person reading a book) are

difficult, yet important, to talk about.

Recently, the so-called "general science of signs" (semiology or semiotics) has given promise of shedding some light on these and other difficulties associated with film study. Peter Wollen leads the reader to expect that semiology will be used to deal with at least some of these difficulties. Unfortunately, the book only in part ful- fills the expectations set up by the extremely enticing and timely title.

Wollen has divided his book into three major parts: "Eisenstein's Aesthetics," "The Auteur Theory," and "The Semiology of the Cinema." (In addition, there is a three-page appendix on "Style and Stylis- tics" which presents a most helpful typol- ogy of various ways to deal with the problem of style.) The three sections relate to each other in that they constitute various approaches to what Wollen somewhat vaguely refers to (but never clearly de- limits) as film aesthetics. Eisenstein is featured prominently in the book because in Wollen's opinion Eisenstein is still per-

haps the major film theorist and his writings are in need of reinvestigation. The auteur material is presented as a way of critically talking about Hollywood films.

Only in the last section does Wollen finally treat directly the topic-semiology- which one would assume, from the title of the book, should be the informing principle of the entire work. It might be argued, in retrospect, that all three sections are tied together by the implicit assump- tion that semiology is a way to meaning, as are all the sections. Or it might be argued that the first two sections are simply prep- arations for the third. To me, however, the relations among aesthetics, meaning, auteur theory, Eisenstein's "montage of at- traction," and the term "semiology" need more explicit delineation than they get in this book.

The section on Eisenstein is excellent. Wollen very carefully and precisely "places" Eisenstein in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. I can't think of any better or more concise statement of Eisenstein's importance for film theory and criticism. Meyerhold, Joyce, Kandinsky, Scriabin, Brecht, constructivism, futurism, symbolism, Kabuki theatre-they're all there.

When Wollen deals with auteur theory, he does so by applying the theory primarily to the films of Howard Hawks and John Ford. His analyses are generally illuminat- ing-even, at times, exciting-a cut above the usual auteur exuberance. Whether, however, auteur theory (with its doctrinaire distinctions between auteur proper and metteur en scene) causes more problems than it solves is, to my mind, still an open question. For those interested, Wol- len offers his "Pantheon of Directors" (a la Sarris) in an appendix.

Wollen's discussion of the semiology of the cinema is important if for no other reason than it is just about the only intelligently written treatment of the subject available in English. Unfortunately, Wol- len makes unusually heavy demands on his readers. Without some understanding of what semiology is all aboiut, the average film student will probably put the book down with a feeling of frustration. Wollen simply does not develop his subject clearly

haps the major film theorist and his writings are in need of reinvestigation. The auteur material is presented as a way of critically talking about Hollywood films.

Only in the last section does Wollen finally treat directly the topic-semiology- which one would assume, from the title of the book, should be the informing principle of the entire work. It might be argued, in retrospect, that all three sections are tied together by the implicit assump- tion that semiology is a way to meaning, as are all the sections. Or it might be argued that the first two sections are simply prep- arations for the third. To me, however, the relations among aesthetics, meaning, auteur theory, Eisenstein's "montage of at- traction," and the term "semiology" need more explicit delineation than they get in this book.

The section on Eisenstein is excellent. Wollen very carefully and precisely "places" Eisenstein in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. I can't think of any better or more concise statement of Eisenstein's importance for film theory and criticism. Meyerhold, Joyce, Kandinsky, Scriabin, Brecht, constructivism, futurism, symbolism, Kabuki theatre-they're all there.

When Wollen deals with auteur theory, he does so by applying the theory primarily to the films of Howard Hawks and John Ford. His analyses are generally illuminat- ing-even, at times, exciting-a cut above the usual auteur exuberance. Whether, however, auteur theory (with its doctrinaire distinctions between auteur proper and metteur en scene) causes more problems than it solves is, to my mind, still an open question. For those interested, Wol- len offers his "Pantheon of Directors" (a la Sarris) in an appendix.

Wollen's discussion of the semiology of the cinema is important if for no other reason than it is just about the only intelligently written treatment of the subject available in English. Unfortunately, Wol- len makes unusually heavy demands on his readers. Without some understanding of what semiology is all aboiut, the average film student will probably put the book down with a feeling of frustration. Wollen simply does not develop his subject clearly

52 / CINEMA JOURNAL

or extensively enough for the reader to know what questions Wollen is answering when he introduces a wealth of new terminology or makes far-flung allusions to linguistic research. An article by Wollen in a little publication of the British Film Institute-Working Papers on the Cinema: Sociology and Semiology-is far more lucid and helpful in understanding film and its relation to semiology.

Semiology, or semiotics, is the study of patterns abstracted from the observation of communication processes. How are these patterns abstracted? How significant are they? These are complex matters which cannot be dealt with adequately in this review, nor in the brief space allotted to it in the book. For an insight into the problem, the interested reader might read Roland Barthes' Elements of Semiology or, for a somewhat different approach to the subject, Harley Shands' "Outline of a Gen- eral Theory of Human Communication" (Social Science Information, VII, August, 1968). It should be noted that semiotics- the study of communication as pattern- does not necessarily refer to a specific method of analysis (the structuralist approach of Levi-Strauss, for example) but can encompass other patterning emphases (as the Shands article should make clear).

The chief reason, however, that semiology seems so well suited to a study of the cinema is that it can deal with systems of communication whose primary units of articulation are not artificial or symbolic signs, as is the case with verbal language. Wollen goes to some length to point up the ways in which the primary units of articulation (signs) in a non-verbal communication system can be talked about. The ways in which he relates an understanding of sign functions to the theoretical writings of Bazin, Eisenstein, Von Sternberg, and others makes for most interesting reading.

An important aspect of Wollen's section on semiology is the mention he makes of the work of the French film theorist and semiotician Christian Metz. While I don't believe that Wollen gives a particularly clear, nor at times accurate, presentation of what Metz is up to (Wollen is much better on this score in the British Institute pam-

phlet) he does bring Metz' work to the attention of a large audience. At the moment, I know of no published English translations of Metz' theoretical writings on film; however, Metz' major work Essais Sur La Signification Au Cinema (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968) is in the process of being translated for publication into English. To my way of thinking, Metz is an extremely important film theorist and one from whom we will be hearing a great deal in the future.

Many people are certain that what the cinema needs least is a closer tie with that "wordy" body of expression called literature. Although Professor Richardson may be accused of having something of a vested interest in the matter (he is chairman of the University of Denver's English Depart- ment), it does seem to me that he has succeeded in pointing up relationships between literature and film that are of con- siderable interest.

The book's major theme is that the cinema is the one modern art that has been most interested in the human-ness of man and in man's ability imaginatively to give significance to the situations in which he finds himself. Film, chiefly by virtue of its narrative form, finds itself closely allied with literature in this concern. Richardson even goes so far as to suggest that since both literature and film are concerned with helping men see who they are and who they might become, the study of film might well be carried out as a branch of the study of literature.

An obvious question arises in this connection: What about the fact that the cinema presents images and sounds directly while literature must work first through words on a page? Richardson deals with this problem by focusing attention on the matter of imagination. The problem, he says, is in getting images and sounds past our everyday unseeing eyes to the "inner eye of imagination." The crucial problem for Richardson is then not: Was the stimulus to my imagination a representational image or was it a symbolic verbal sign? The question of interest is rather: Have the conditions in which man finds himself been imaginatively ordered (in a film or a


work of literature) so that we can "see" what man, in all his particularity, is and might become?

A large share of the book is devoted to describing particular ways in which film might be said to be like literature and literature like film. The traditional Dickens-Griffith-Eisenstein comparisons are there, to be sure, but there is also much that is fresh-Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Fellini, Varda, and many more. The clue to ap- preciating many of the relationships pointed out by Richardson is to regard what he often calls "connections" between literature and film less as "influences" (to be judged as right or wrong) and more as formal patterns interesting in their own right. Understood in this way, the many allusions to, and quotations from, specific works of literature and film become a delight if for no other reason than as a sheer display of Professor Richardson's ingenuity in seeing relationships in a complex group of elements.

Literature and Film is unlike many books on film currently being published. It branches out. In a day in which a nar- row "auteur" approach to film study is becoming more and more prevalent it is refreshing to see film placed in a context larger than itself, worthy of being examined in the broad context of the humanities.

-Christian Koch.

Richard S. Randall. Censorship of the Movies. Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1968.

Robert Hamilton Ball. Shakespeare on Silent Film. New York, Theater Arts Books, 1968.

Film study continues to profit from the scholarly contributions of other disciplines. Richard S. Randall, assistant professor of political science at the University of Ne- braska, has given us a definitive analysis of American film censorship-orderly, readable, accurate, up-to-date. From Robert Hamilton Ball, professor of English at Queens College, New York, we have what must surely be the total picture, as far as anyone will ever care to pursue it, of the uses and misuses of Shakespeare during the silent film era-affectionate, meticulous, fas- cinating, and funny.

The Randall book begins with history,

work of literature) so that we can "see" what man, in all his particularity, is and might become?

A large share of the book is devoted to describing particular ways in which film might be said to be like literature and literature like film. The traditional Dickens-Griffith-Eisenstein comparisons are there, to be sure, but there is also much that is fresh-Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Fellini, Varda, and many more. The clue to ap- preciating many of the relationships pointed out by Richardson is to regard what he often calls "connections" between literature and film less as "influences" (to be judged as right or wrong) and more as formal patterns interesting in their own right. Understood in this way, the many allusions to, and quotations from, specific works of literature and film become a delight if for no other reason than as a sheer display of Professor Richardson's ingenuity in seeing relationships in a complex group of elements.

Literature and Film is unlike many books on film currently being published. It branches out. In a day in which a nar- row "auteur" approach to film study is becoming more and more prevalent it is refreshing to see film placed in a context larger than itself, worthy of being examined in the broad context of the humanities.

-Christian Koch.

Richard S. Randall. Censorship of the Movies. Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1968.

Robert Hamilton Ball. Shakespeare on Silent Film. New York, Theater Arts Books, 1968.

Film study continues to profit from the scholarly contributions of other disciplines. Richard S. Randall, assistant professor of political science at the University of Ne- braska, has given us a definitive analysis of American film censorship-orderly, readable, accurate, up-to-date. From Robert Hamilton Ball, professor of English at Queens College, New York, we have what must surely be the total picture, as far as anyone will ever care to pursue it, of the uses and misuses of Shakespeare during the silent film era-affectionate, meticulous, fas- cinating, and funny.

The Randall book begins with history,

including an interesting defense of certain aspects of the 1915 Mutual film case. Its early forecast of one basic issue remains relevant: prior restraint is justified by the special capacity for evil believed to lie in the film's communicative power. Although the 1952 Miracle case firmly placed cinema under the protection of the first amend- ment, the Times Film decision (by a Su- preme Court majority of 5-4) continued to uphold prior restraint for moving pictures. The decision in Freedman v. Maryland has modified this stance only by insistence on speedy procedures, initiated by censorship agencies and concluded by the courts.

Obscenity is the remaining substantive issue. Professor Randall manages to give the Supreme Court doctrine in this area some perspective by analyzing the position of each of the justices since the time of the Roth case. It is a skillful bit of interpretive navigation and it shows how far the court has gone in assuming that almost any communication may have "redeeming social value" and cannot therefore be called obscene.

Social value may not be enough to re- deem a publication, however, if it is leer- ingly advertised. The Ginzburg case seems to have come too close to publication date for the author to give it lengthy examination, but his own discussion of future alter- natives is somewhat parallel. What he calls a "variable" concept of objectionable erotica relates to purpose and audience. If excessive publicity geared to prurient interests can make merely erotic materials obscene (per Ginzburg) then A Stranger Knocks, although acceptable to the Mary- land Court of Appeals as an adult work of art, would undoubtedly be judged obscene if offered to children.

Another remaining issue, therefore, is the procedural one of audience classification. This approach was openly proposed by the Supreme Court in a paragraph of dicta in Jacobellis v. Ohio. Since then, the Motion Picture Association has reluc- tantly capitulated to the worldwide facts of life by setting up a four-letter classification system for the U.S. Censorship of the Movies was published before that commercial decision, but the author readily foresees a growing interest in audience classification as a means of social control.

including an interesting defense of certain aspects of the 1915 Mutual film case. Its early forecast of one basic issue remains relevant: prior restraint is justified by the special capacity for evil believed to lie in the film's communicative power. Although the 1952 Miracle case firmly placed cinema under the protection of the first amend- ment, the Times Film decision (by a Su- preme Court majority of 5-4) continued to uphold prior restraint for moving pictures. The decision in Freedman v. Maryland has modified this stance only by insistence on speedy procedures, initiated by censorship agencies and concluded by the courts.

Obscenity is the remaining substantive issue. Professor Randall manages to give the Supreme Court doctrine in this area some perspective by analyzing the position of each of the justices since the time of the Roth case. It is a skillful bit of interpretive navigation and it shows how far the court has gone in assuming that almost any communication may have "redeeming social value" and cannot therefore be called obscene.

Social value may not be enough to re- deem a publication, however, if it is leer- ingly advertised. The Ginzburg case seems to have come too close to publication date for the author to give it lengthy examination, but his own discussion of future alter- natives is somewhat parallel. What he calls a "variable" concept of objectionable erotica relates to purpose and audience. If excessive publicity geared to prurient interests can make merely erotic materials obscene (per Ginzburg) then A Stranger Knocks, although acceptable to the Mary- land Court of Appeals as an adult work of art, would undoubtedly be judged obscene if offered to children.

Another remaining issue, therefore, is the procedural one of audience classification. This approach was openly proposed by the Supreme Court in a paragraph of dicta in Jacobellis v. Ohio. Since then, the Motion Picture Association has reluc- tantly capitulated to the worldwide facts of life by setting up a four-letter classification system for the U.S. Censorship of the Movies was published before that commercial decision, but the author readily foresees a growing interest in audience classification as a means of social control.

54 / CINEMA JOURNAL

In four pithy pages, Randall summarizes court responses to the various Dallas classification ordinances-accepted in principle, but always limited to clear control of obscenity-and notes various problems of en- forcement. He does not rule out the possibility that classification statutes might eventually deal successfully with brutality and other extreme situations considered injurious to children.

Maryland alone retains a state censor board, but police power still operates everywhere. Pressure groups rise and fall, along with sudden storms of disapproval within communities. The author examines all these forces and then adds one of his wisest warnings: post-premiere criminal action, though preferred by doctrinaire liber- tarians, may not be as equitable as expert handling of prior restraint. Four and a half years of popular and police persecu- tion were heaped on the hapless theater manager in Cleveland, Nico Jacobellis, while his arrest and conviction for showing The Lovers was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and finally reversed.

Randall has given us full value, including the story of Hollywood's self-regulation and the current history of the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures. The method of operation of the federal Bureau of Customs, which examines imported films, is explained in detail. All this is supported by an impressive battery of cases, extensive references to Variety and Boxoffice, and an excellent index. It would be hard to imagine a more thorough or incisive treatment of the subject within the scope of some 250 pages.

Every student of film and its socio- political involvements owes Professor Ran- dall a debt of gratitude not only for his research and his felicitous legal reporting but also for his willingness to point to future value judgments his own book is not designed to cope with. He says in his introduction:

The movies have never been freer in the law nor more provocative in content. The new liberties and economic imperatives have made possible films of quality and maturity that were all too uncommon before, but they have also produced un- precedented excesses in the detailing of

erotica, nudity, and violence. . . . The desire to protect the public-the viewers- from depiction of excessive erotica or violence is a concern held reasonably by many reasonable persons.

Professor Ball's book is equally scholarly, but it offers minimal social significance. In fact, Shakespeare on Silent Film represents a rare form of escapist reading. Who would have dreamed that 378 closely printed pages could have been wrought out of those few early flickers that attempted to picture, silently, Shakespeare's poetic metaphors and stage-bound dialogue?

Few? There were hundreds of them. Although Ball does not give us a grand total, his index (which includes proposed films, fragments, and burlesques) shows 25 Hamlets, 18 Othellos, 12 Merchants of Venice, and multiples of most of the other popular titles. Romeo and Juliet was un- dertaken 20 times seriously and scoffed at in a dozen ways under such titles as Romeo in the Stone Age and Roping Her Romeo, the latter a Mack Sennett production.

James M. Barrie wrote a double-barreled spoof of Macbeth for a charity show for British troops in 1916. As a "Scottish Mur- der Case," the story parodies not only Shakespeare but American film melodramas of the day, careening on to the final title: "The Macbeths repent and all ends hap- pily."

The earliest version of Macbeth (Vita- graph, 1908, one reel) was more serious- and touched a familiar nerve. It was censored by a police lieutenant in Chi- cago, who approved of Shakespeare but not of gory close-ups:

The stabbing scene in the play is not predominant. But in the picture show it is the feature.... On the canvas [sic] you see the dagger enter and come out and see the blood flow and the wound that's left.

Shakespeare is art, but it's not adapted altogether for the 5-cent style of art.

The author has fun, in one way or another, with all the pictures, describing them as closely as his research made possible, confirming over and over that Shake- speare on silent film was "inadequate, even ridiculous." But he is also aware that these


early efforts showed how close Elizabethan scenes were to the time-scale of motion picture sequences-and how much exhilara- tion was to be drawn by both film and Shakespeare from action and spectacle.

We discover Harry Baur as Shylock, Theda Bara as Juliet, Dolores Costello as a child in Midsummer Night's Dream. Asta Nielsen, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Melies, and even Buster Keaton (in Daydreams, 1922) had a go at Hamlet. The famous stage performance of Sir Johnston Forbes- Robertson was recorded and somewhat adapted for film in 1913, lasting an hour and forty minutes and playing to packed houses in England. Reviewers felt that locations "on the seashore and in the woodland glade" made up somewhat for the absence of spoken words.

The whole chronicle, from 1899 to 1928, is crammed with festive facts, and Ball makes the most of them. The style of the telling is as gracious, polished, and laced with humor as any Elizabethan could ask. What endless comparing of credits, what patient searching for lost prints all over the world, what combing of early trade papers for reviews worthy of sly ripostes! What subliminal pleasure to slip in, without quotation marks, so many Shakespear- ean asides, and especially to save for the very last page: "the rest was not silence."

The author has promised us a second volume on the major sound films based on Shakespeare. The first one took him twenty years. It is safe to predict that the next one will not be so long in coming: the sound era will not pose such a chal- lenge to his detective skills. For the silent film scholar, this book is a

treasure house of meticulous scholarship. For the general reader seeking a rarity, it is a marvel of patient archeology and a model of delectable prose.

-Richard Dyer MacCann

Dwight Macdonald. Dwight Macdonald on Movies. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris (editors). Film 68-69. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1969.

The long-awaited critical collection by Dwight Macdonald has finally arrived, and gives us a varied and exhaustive picture of one of our most incisive and enjoyable film scholars.

early efforts showed how close Elizabethan scenes were to the time-scale of motion picture sequences-and how much exhilara- tion was to be drawn by both film and Shakespeare from action and spectacle.

We discover Harry Baur as Shylock, Theda Bara as Juliet, Dolores Costello as a child in Midsummer Night's Dream. Asta Nielsen, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Melies, and even Buster Keaton (in Daydreams, 1922) had a go at Hamlet. The famous stage performance of Sir Johnston Forbes- Robertson was recorded and somewhat adapted for film in 1913, lasting an hour and forty minutes and playing to packed houses in England. Reviewers felt that locations "on the seashore and in the woodland glade" made up somewhat for the absence of spoken words.

The whole chronicle, from 1899 to 1928, is crammed with festive facts, and Ball makes the most of them. The style of the telling is as gracious, polished, and laced with humor as any Elizabethan could ask. What endless comparing of credits, what patient searching for lost prints all over the world, what combing of early trade papers for reviews worthy of sly ripostes! What subliminal pleasure to slip in, without quotation marks, so many Shakespear- ean asides, and especially to save for the very last page: "the rest was not silence."

The author has promised us a second volume on the major sound films based on Shakespeare. The first one took him twenty years. It is safe to predict that the next one will not be so long in coming: the sound era will not pose such a chal- lenge to his detective skills. For the silent film scholar, this book is a

treasure house of meticulous scholarship. For the general reader seeking a rarity, it is a marvel of patient archeology and a model of delectable prose.

-Richard Dyer MacCann

Dwight Macdonald. Dwight Macdonald on Movies. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris (editors). Film 68-69. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1969.

The long-awaited critical collection by Dwight Macdonald has finally arrived, and gives us a varied and exhaustive picture of one of our most incisive and enjoyable film scholars.

Those who are familiar with Macdon- ald's work in Esquire will find a large number of those reviews here, along with critiques, essays and snips from Partisan Review, Film Heritage, Politics, and out- of-the-way publications like The Sympo- sium, Encounter and Miscellany. The material covers a large span of time: included are a group of "Revivals"-some notes on Hollywood directors as of 1933 and other articles dating back to 1929-and his famous 1940 treatise on Soviet cinema.

At the very beginning, in his "Fore- notes," Macdonald makes clear his criteria for a good motion picture:

(A) Did it change the way you look at things?

(B) Did you find more (or less) in it the second, third, nth time? (Also, how did it stand up over the years, after one or more "periods" of cinematic history?)

Always gentlemanly and even fatherly in tone, he then launches into a series of at- tacks upon all that he considers false and vulgar in contemporary cinema. He de- rides the auteur theory, most of the Amer- ican underground, the false "realism" of the Kazan-Inge-Williams milieu, and the anti-rationalism and moral detachment of shock films like Psycho, Repulsion and The Birds. Though his definition of a work of art-"something all of a piece and consistent with its own assumptions"-seems rather loose, the bulk of the reviews in the volume are unfavorable. Macdonald de- plores "late" Hitchcock, recent Antonioni, and everything Orson Welles has made since The Magnificent Ambersons; new wave British pictures like The Knack and Morgan!, and all Godard has done since Breathless.

His one important defense, that of 8/2, is all that a favorable review should be: thoughtful, detailed and forceful-though not entirely convincing. In addition, though he never states them outright, it is possible to put together a list of his all- time favorites: Children of Paradise, Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane, Zero de Conduite, The Birth of a Nation, and possibly Blood of a Poet and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Like most responsible critics, Macdonald has a wealth of idiosyncrasies which some-

Those who are familiar with Macdon- ald's work in Esquire will find a large number of those reviews here, along with critiques, essays and snips from Partisan Review, Film Heritage, Politics, and out- of-the-way publications like The Sympo- sium, Encounter and Miscellany. The material covers a large span of time: included are a group of "Revivals"-some notes on Hollywood directors as of 1933 and other articles dating back to 1929-and his famous 1940 treatise on Soviet cinema.

At the very beginning, in his "Fore- notes," Macdonald makes clear his criteria for a good motion picture:

(A) Did it change the way you look at things?

(B) Did you find more (or less) in it the second, third, nth time? (Also, how did it stand up over the years, after one or more "periods" of cinematic history?)

Always gentlemanly and even fatherly in tone, he then launches into a series of at- tacks upon all that he considers false and vulgar in contemporary cinema. He de- rides the auteur theory, most of the Amer- ican underground, the false "realism" of the Kazan-Inge-Williams milieu, and the anti-rationalism and moral detachment of shock films like Psycho, Repulsion and The Birds. Though his definition of a work of art-"something all of a piece and consistent with its own assumptions"-seems rather loose, the bulk of the reviews in the volume are unfavorable. Macdonald de- plores "late" Hitchcock, recent Antonioni, and everything Orson Welles has made since The Magnificent Ambersons; new wave British pictures like The Knack and Morgan!, and all Godard has done since Breathless.

His one important defense, that of 8/2, is all that a favorable review should be: thoughtful, detailed and forceful-though not entirely convincing. In addition, though he never states them outright, it is possible to put together a list of his all- time favorites: Children of Paradise, Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane, Zero de Conduite, The Birth of a Nation, and possibly Blood of a Poet and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Like most responsible critics, Macdonald has a wealth of idiosyncrasies which some-

56 / CINEMA JOURNAL

times try the patience of his readers. Not the least of these is his curious moralism concerning filmed violence. He takes a libertarian stance on the use of nudity and eroticism in the cinema, but he assails Psycho as nasty and indecent and worries about what effect Cape Fear would have on children.

Another eccentricity is his propensity to compartmentalize his observations by making lists. He has a set of guidelines for a good comedy, a roster of precepts for a good Biblical film, and he neatly itemizes the defects of West Side Story, The Birds and Hallelujah the Hills!

Macdonald can be gentle and warm, as in his affectionate remembrance of James Agee, and then turn clinical in his critique of Monsieur Verdoux, and downright cold in his "The End" article for Esquire. Occa- sionally it takes a lot of imagination to see him going to the movies out of anything more than a cultural duty, but, at other times, his love for the medium sings from every sentence.

In any case, Macdonald is eminently readable and always entertaining, with a dry edge to his wit that is sometimes so sharp that the injury it inflicts is not always noticeable right away. He is forever calm and rational, with remarkable insight into the problems and myths surrounding the movies and with taste that has "im- peccable" written all over it.

Macdonald retired from film criticism in 1966, seemingly out of ordinary discourage- ment. The postwar film renaissance, he claimed, had become hopelessly corrupt and empty while, at the same time, attract- ing more and more followers. That was one year before Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, two years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, three years before Medium Cool and The Wild Bunch. It is our loss that he denied himself the chance to tear into these imposing targets.

The second critical anthology from the National Society of Film Critics is probably a more welcome sight than the first one, because it signifies that the Society has received the message to continue their publication on a yearly basis.

The value of a critical collection such as this, especially to students, is difficult to

overstate, and the reading is pleasurable and occasionally important, even if one has not seen all the films.

Despite its obvious joys, Film 68-69 does not compare favorably to its predecessor. The primary reason, of course, is that 1967 was a much more spectacular year for films; and flowering public interest was reflected by various critics in their lively arguments over Bonnie and Clyde, Falstaff, The Grad- uate, and Persona. The new edition contains the same number of side-by-side con- frontations as the previous year's, but the same sense of active debate is not present. The only film to have excited the tiniest spark is 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the three reviews covering it here are irritat- ingly middle-of-the-road.

Many of the volume's weaknesses can also be attributed to the editors, who have made some errors in arrangement. Why, for instance, choose Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, in reviews of the same general opinion, as the only critics to comment upon three important films in a row? Mr. Sarris, as co-editor, seems to have given his own work a little too much space. Also, the section devoted to documentary film is missed. Mr. Alpert and Mr. Sarris can be thanked for including more material under "Reflections" and for indicating a critic's name at the beginning of a review, rather than at the end.

There are more critics writing this time on fewer films. Brendan Gill and Brad Darrach have been replaced by Penelope Gilliatt and Stefan Kanfer respectively. Added this year are Harold Clurman and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Worth particular attention are: Pauline Kael's brilliant essay on La Chinoise (her defense of Weekend is curiously weak); John Simon's well-deserved deflation of The Lion in Winter; and Stanley Kauff- mann's review of The Charge of the Light Brigade, which has a good deal of aesthetic perception.

Film 68-69 is an immensely valuable collection, even if a slight disappointment to seasoned readers of film criticism. Its im- perfections owe more to the state of the movies themselves than to the critics represented.

-Richard Gearn

THE SOCIETI1Y FOR CINEMA STUDIES

OFFICERS FOR 1970-71:

President, Jack C. Ellis Northwestern University

Secretary, Donald W. McCaffrey University of North Dakota

Treasurer, Walter Stainton Ithaca, New York

Council:

Sol Worth, 1971 John Kuiper, 1972 Lewis Jacobs, 1973 George Amberg, 1974 Richard MacCann (ex officio)

A learned society founded in the spring of 1959, the Society for Cinema Studies (formerly the Society of Cine- matologists) is composed of college and university film educators, film makers, historians, critics, scholars, and others concerned with the study of the moving image. The Society seeks to serve its members by stimulating an exchange of ideas, by encouraging and publishing research, by providing international relationships whereby like- minded people may know each other, and by assisting students and young people in their endeavors to engage in research, writing, and film making. Activities of the Society include an annual meeting at which papers are read, films viewed, and business transacted, and the publication of a members' newsletter and the Cinema Journal.

BACK ISSUES OF CINEMA JOURNAL AVAILABLE

Volume IX, Number 1, Fall, 1969

Philip G. Rosen: The Chaplin World-View Donald S. Skoller: Praxis as a Cinematic Principle in the Films of

Robert Bresson Richard Dyer MacCann: Film and Foreign Policy: The USIA, 1962-67 John L. Fell: A Film Student's Guide to the Reference Shelf

Volume VIII, Number 2, Spring, 1969

Joseph Adamson: The Seventeen Preliminary Scripts of A Day at the Races Chuck Jones: The Roadrunner and Other Characters Howard Rieder: Memories of Mr. Magoo Allen K. Schwartz: The Impressionism of Elvira Madigan

Volume VIII, Number 1, Fall, 1968

Jerzy Toeplitz: Cinema in Eastern Europe Jack C. Ellis: The Young Grierson in America, 1924-1927 Peter Harcourt: What, Indeed, Is Cinema? Herbert G. Luft: Carl Mayer, Screen Author

Volume VII, Winter, 1967-68

Lewis Jacobs: World War II and the American Film Paul Falkenberg: The Editor's Role in Film Making Gerald Noxon: The Bayeux Tapestry

Volume VI, 1966-67

Donald Staples: The Auteur Theory Reexamined Donald McCaffrey: The Mutual Approval of Keaton and Lloyd Robert Steele: The Two Faces of Drama Robert Gessner: Studies in Past and Decelerated Time Walter Stainton: The Prophet Louis Ducos du Hauron

A strip of double- track 8.75mm EVR film, actual size, and a Technicolor 8mm sound projector, considerably reduced. How large will they loom in the future?

cinema journal vol. 09, no. 2, spring, 1970

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