Motion Pictures—An Art ??!!

A Plea for the Classification of the Films as a Separate Form of Expression

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS

PREPOSTEROUS as it sounds, the motion picture producer sometimes sits down and thinks. This article is written to explain, granted this incredible premise, what on earth he thinks about. Now I cannot parade these thoughts with the skill of the sophisticated critics. They can analyze what

I am doing (I intend no satire) so much better, with so much finer a weighing of values and judgment of effects that I hesitate to enter the arena with them, even if the arena be the pages of Vanity Fair.

As a matter of fact, 1 believe that if it were possible to assemble a congress of representative producers and critics, it would be surprising to find how little disparity in opinion—on the contrary, what a unanimity and concord would prevail. And if the two factions changed places,—producers became critics and vice versa—the producers, provided they were sufficiently articulate, would be saying about the same things about motion pictures as the critics, and these latter, if suddenly confronted with some of the unseen difficulties in production, would make pictures almost as bad as those now being made by the producers.

I HOLD sanguine hopes that the screen will in time surpass all other forms of expression as a medium for emotional drama, but to expect it to reach, in a single bound, the high level of arts practised for thousands of years and enriched by tradition and experience, is manifestly absurd. So far it has been hampered by very serious mechanical problems, (not even surmised by the general public), and by deep-rooted misconceptions as to the real properties of the screen, born of the notion that motionpicture making is an off-shoot of other forms of expression, having no distinct entity of its own. Let it lean for support on the art of story or novel writing and attempt to do what words can do better, and it is lame and halt. Let it stand alone, and it will thrive and grow strong. Only by denying its dependence upon other forms of expression, can it come into its own.

The art of the screen is almost purely emotional,—as a painting, an opera, or a church service is emotional. Without sacrificing this most value, it cannot teach, analyze, philosophize too much, or, in short, attempt to address itself, as words do, to the thought processes. It should not aim to make people think any more than Michael Angelo painted to make people think. It should make its appeal to the eye and through ocular contact affect the emotions. It should make people fee/. The moment a producer becomes intellectualizcd (1 cannot,

to be sure quote a specific instance offhand),— I mean the moment he sees with the mind rather than the emotions and begins to follow the more laboured methods of the written story, he approaches dangerous ground. The novel (even the stage play, at times) can convey a message, a doctrine, a philosophy or what you will, but the screen is too light a medium for anything so heavy.

But wait. I do not wish to make the screen appear for the purpose of contrast, a more feeble vehicle than it really is. It can support a moral, wrestle with social problems, and even propound a religion or philosophv, but this it must do purely in terms of action. There can be no halting of this action, no staying of the machinery of movement, as one lapses into an argument on moral issues. If the conduct or behaviour of the players carries an object lesson, it is not whittled to a fine point by comment or analysis. The motion picture does not attempt to explain itself. Perhaps, for this very reason, the lesson it carries, is more powerful, being spontaneous, and not considered, the outgrowth of visualized action and not argument. 'I'his opinion is, of course, purely an arbitrary one—purely my own impression— but it is with my own impressions that I am now occupying myself.

This does not mean that the motion picture art has a higher or lower capacity for expression than the art of writing. Simply a different one. It exerts a different appeal. It is as futile to compare them as it is to compare the facultv of reason with the feeling for beauty; or to say that logic is more or less desirable than emotion; or to say that literature is a higher or lower form of expression than painting or music. The motion picture has no sister arts. If I were to attempt a comparison, I should say that its method is similar to that of the impressionistic painter, who gathers an impression and then paints that impression. It must do more than reflect what the eye secs under emotional stress. It must select what is dramatic and significant and be blind to everything else.

When the spectator is swept from one scene to another of a motion picture with bewildering abruptness, there is no reason why he should consider this propulsion artificial, for, without the assistance of the camera and outside the motion picture theatre, his mind leaps from image to image in exactly the same manner. Let me explain. I am sitting in an office in the studio, talking with a visitor. To bring an clement of mild drama into it, let us say that there is some conflict between us. I see him and everything about him with great vividness, but to the unimportant details of the room the eye of the mind is blind. There are some books on piracy, a file of newspapers and a water cooler in the room. They hit the retina of the eye but they do not register with the mind or emotions. The visitor arises and goes into another room, but as I follow him I am not conscious of the intervening corridor or anything in it. The next visual image I have is of this man in another room, against a different background. It is like the process in picture making of "cutting" from one scene to another. What occurs in the transformation period is of no consequence.

The motion picture camera, then, must not record, but see through a selective, impressionistic eye. Simple photographic reproduction is not enough. The lens of the camera must be trained to capture moods, as an impressionistic painting does. It must select, eliminate, interpret and beautify. If it can do all these things,— and it can,—one will be able to speak of the art of the motion picture, as I have done, without risking the guffaws of the supercilious.

But I am expected, I know, in this article to say something about myself and my work, and I do not know how I have avoided this congenial topic so long. To show that I am in earnest in what I have said about the direction which motion pictures must take m the future, we are building our next picture to conform to it. I do not mean to hint that when this new picture is complete, it will signify the dawning of a new era in the motion picture industry, or that a glad chorus of voices will immediately proclaim that the motion picture has at last come into its own.

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For reasons before stated, we have for some time ceased as much as possible from the practice of taking stories from books. A book has sometimes given us an initial idea or impulse, but in only three of our last eight pictures have we followed any written story. The fact that a story has been successful in its literary form gives no guarantee whatever that its effectiveness can be translated to the screen. In fact, I think the presumption is more commonly against it.

So far as I know, the screen has never caught and reflected the real spirit of piracy,—as one finds it, for instance, in the books of Robert Louis Stevenson, the paintings of Howard Pyle, or the models of Dwight Franklin. The romance of buccaneering, with all its colours and odours, its breath of the sea, its swinging, crooning, shrieking rhythm has escaped. Our story may do no better, but it is at least born and cradled in the ocean. It is not a land story carried out to sea. The action, with the exception of one sequence which runs along the sands, will.all take place on the water.

Very well, you may say, but what of it? What has piracy got to do with the development of motion pictures, and how is all this going to give to pictures the impressionistic quality, for which we are striving? Having asked myself this searching question, I am not sure now that I can answer it. Hut I will try.

In the first place by colour. This ingredient has been tried and rejected countless times. It has always met overwhelming objections. Not only has the process of coloured motion picture photography never been perfected, but there has been a grave doubt whether, even if properly developed, it could be applied without detracting more than it added to motion picture technique. The argument has been that it would tire and distract the eye, take attention from acting and facial expression, blur and confuse the action. In short it has been felt that it would militate against the simplicity and directness which motion pictures derive from the unobtrusive black and white. These conventional doubts have been entertained, I think, because no one has taken the trouble to dissipate them. A similar objection was raised, no doubt, when the innovation of scenery was introduced on the English stage,— that it would distract attention from the actors. (A very handy distraction at times, too.)

Personally I could not imagine piracy without colour. If I had chosen a different kind of a story, a Dickens' story for example, using anything but black and white might have been a distinct impropriety. But this pirate story seemed to cry Tor colour. I suppose that is the reason why we gave ourselves up, with renewed vigour, to experimentation with a colour process. Wc have been at work on it now for several months, and it has proved entirely satisfactory. (Without any desire to magnify the labours involved in making pictures, I wonder what th..t portion of the public who believe that motion pictures are ground out in a slap-dash, hit-or-miss fashion, would think if they could watch the infinite pains in preparation, the hundreds of ideas conceived and abandoned, the technical devices, the research, the combing of the world for specialized talent of various sorts,— the vast energy that go into a single picture. These unfortunately do not always show in the completed product. For we are still bunglers. But we are trying.)

In experimenting with this colour process, we have made some interesting discoveries. One is that the sensitized camera picks up colour so avidly that the problem is not to feed it enough colour, but to tone this down to soft neutral shades. To furnish it with strong colour is to embarrass it with riches for it catches all kinds of tints that escape the human eye. To reproduce vivid, flaming colour would have, besides, all the objections that have been mentioned. We are dealing, then, in dull greens, in silver, and in chrome yellows, in backgrounds of gray-green seas, gray sand dunes and skies washed in neutral tones that reflect and harmonize with the effects below. The total effect is rather warmth than colour. More glow than actual pigmentation. There is nothing flamboyant that leaps out to inflame the eye.

But this is the really important discovery: the camera under the influence of colour acquires a softer lens, blurs sharp edges and contours, and instead of recording pitilessly what it sees, beautifies and glorifies like the eye of the idealist. In short, we are achieving that effect of impressionistic painting which I have mentioned. We are seeing with a little more than the physical eye.

To ask myself another question, why do we want to blur boundaries, soften effects, lift men and scenes a little way from the solid earth, deal in fantasy rather than in fact, and in brief, interfere with the stark and merciless realism of the ordinary camera?

Simply because this is what the motion picture can do better than any other medium of expression. When it deals in realism, in the plain record of events, or in analysis, it is likely to suffer in comparison with other forms of expression better equipped to handle realities. But when it comes to fantasy, to imagination running riot and invoking images which deny homage to words and their uses, to a reflection of life not precisely as it is but as we would like to see it,— this is where the screen excels.

The very nature of screen projection is illusory and fantastic. On the stage, we have solid, flesh-and-blood people, whom we can see, hear and touch, it we had an opportunity. They must therefore obey certain conventions of behaviour, and their actions must proceed from cause to effect almost with the inevitability of a mathematical formula. They are so hemmed in by restrictions of common sense and plausibility, but our screen apparitions suffer no such imprisonment. The very fact that they are before us at all has in it a suggestion of unreality and magic. They are quivering phantoms in a land of make-believe, and we know that one little obstruction in the machinery of projection will reduce them to nothing. They are of the air and not the earth, and we cannot circumscribe them with ordinary rules and regulations.

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But all this takes me far afield. Colouration, if properly applied, may heighten effects, strengthen the emotional value of screen imagery and bring it closer to the art of painting. Except for this manner of treatment, The Black Pirate, which is the name we have given our next picture, is neither particularly fantastic or unreal. I prefer to confine fantasv to outward treatment. Down below there is always some basis about as new and revolutionary as "Truth crushed to earth will rise again" or "Happiness must be earned." The Black Pirate is a simple romance of piracy, moving against a coloured background, and trying to capture the real spirit and flavour.

I suppose I shall always be making romances which run toward the extraordinary and extravagant rather than "realistic" pictures woven out of the homespun of every day life. Not onlv do I think that the romantic province particularly belongs to the screen, but that in the human mind there is alwavs a flickering revolt against the stifling actualities of life and a desire to escape from them. The screen offers as pleasant an outlet for this spirit of rebellion as any. You can say, if you like, that the real things of life are bread and how to win it, real estate, subway trains and the vicissitudes of domestic life. But I prefer to think they are the dreams we live with. If you will take the stolid business man, whore whole concern seems to be with the stock market, or whatever it may be, I will be willing to bet that in hi; moments of guarded leisure, lie unlocks some secret chamber in his mind, and becomes a vagabond or adventurer, walking the high road of romance, making love and slaying foes with the best of them. This takes me to the not undiscovered truth that we are all at heart children. At any rate I know that when a picture is complete, L like first to show it to an audience of children. If they like it, I am satisfied enough.