Where are the Movies Moving?

The Brilliant Success of the Cinema in Portraying the Fantastic and Preposterous

ALDOUS HUXLEY

IN THE course of one of his adventures, my favourite dramatic hero, Felix the Cat, begins to sing. He thrums his guitar, he rolls up his eyes, he opens his mouth. A stream of crotchets and semi-quavers comes gushing out of his throat. The little black notes hang in the air above him. Looking up, Felix sees them suspended there. With his usual quick resourcefulness, he realizes at once that these crotchets arc exactly the things he has been looking for. He reaches up, catches a few handfuls of them, and before you can say Knife! he has fitted them together into the most ingenious little trolley or scooter, of which the wheels arc made out of the round heads of the notes, the framework of their tails. He helps his companion into her seat, climbs in himself, seizes by its barbs the semi-quaver which serves as the lever of propulsion and, working it vigorously backwards and forwards, shoots away, out of the picture, towards some unknown region of bliss to which we are not privileged to follow him.

SEEN on the screen, this conversion of song into scooters seems the most natural, simple and logical thing in the world. The cat opens his mouth and the written symbols of sound appear, by a familiar convention, in the air above him. Forgetting their symbolical significance and concentrating exclusively on their shape, we perceive that the notes are circles attached to lines—or, more concretely, wheels and rods, the raw material of the engineer. Out of these wheels and rods, Felix, cat of all trades, makes a scooter. There is no improbability, no flaw in the artistic logic. One image easily and naturally suggests the other. For the dramatist of the screen, this sort of thing is child's play.

As a mere word-monger and literary man, I envy him. For if I tried to do the same thing in terms of words, the result would be very nearly nonsense. I might write like this, for example: "Don Giovanni touched his guitar and began to sing, Deh, vieni alia finestra. The notes floated out and hung in the soft warm air of the Spanish night, like the component parts of a Ford car waiting to be assembled." At a first reading, this simile would seem quite incomprehensible, not to say deliberately and perversely idiotic. Prolonged reflection might at last extract from the phrase its meaning; the resemblance between printed notes and the parts of a motor car might finally suggest themselves to the imagination. But the process would certainly be slow; and, being slow, would be unsatisfactory. A simile that is understood with difficulty is a bad simile. In a good simile or striking metaphor the two terms, however remote from one another, must be made to come together in the reader's mind with, so to speak, a smart click. Now, to the average mind the connection between notes and spare parts is not immediately obvious. (To begin with, the idea suggested by the word "notes" is primarily an idea of sound; it is only on second thoughts that one recalls the printed symbol.) Hence the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of the simile when expressed in words. On the screen, where it is expressed in visual images, it is perfectly satisfactory.

I have dwelt at some length on Felix's song and scooter—but not, I think, unduly. For the example indicates very clearly what are the most pregnant potentialities of the cinema; it shows how cinematography differs from literature and the spoken drama and how it may be developed into something entirely new. What the cinema can do better than literature is to be fantastic. An artist who uses words as his medium finds himself severely limited in the expression of his phantasy by the fact that the words he uses are not his own invention, but traditional and hereditary things, impregnated by centuries of use with definite meanings and aureoled with certain specific associations. To a certain extent, a writer must employ cliches in order to be understood at all. He cannot dissociate long-united ideas, or bring together ideas which have never previously been joined, without appearing to his readers to be talking nonsense.

WE HAVE seen for example, how difficult it would be for a writer to associate, without a long preliminary explanation, the ideas of musical notes and the parts of a motorcar—and how easy for the maker of films, who can almost arbitrarily associate any two ideas, simply by bringing together a pair of suitable images. "Young" writers, especially in France, have for some years been in revolt against the tyrannies of language. They have tried forcibly to dissociate old ideas, to use words in a new and revolutionary way. It cannot be said that the results have been very successful. To the general public their writing seems nonsensical; and even their admirers have to admit that their books make difficult reading. The fact is that these "young" writers are rebelling, not against effete literary conventions, but against language itself. They are trying to make words do what they cannot do, in the nature of things. They are working in the wrong medium. You cannot do silversmith's work in terms of Egyptian granite. In the same way, the most extravagant flights of fancy cannot be rendered in words; on the screen, however, it is easy to give them form. Super-realism is the name of the most recent of these "young" French schools. The aim of the super-realists is to free literature completely from logic and to give it the fantastic liberty of the dream. What they attempt to do — not very successfully — the cinema achieves brilliantly. The adventures of Felix the Cat are super-realistic in the highest degree. And not only Felix. Many of our best films arc super-realistic or dream-like in their phantasy. Think, for example, of those hilarious and subtle nightmares invented by Charlie Chaplin; think of the adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks.

IN FUTURE, I am sure, the tendency will be to exploit this potentiality of the cinema to an ever-increasing extent. It is inevitable; the medium lends itself so well to super-realism that it would be extraordinary if this were not to be the case. On the screen, miracles are easily performed; the most incongruous ideas can be arbitrarily associated; the limitations of time and space can be largely ignored. Moreover, the very imperfections of the cinema are, in this respect, an important asset. The absence of colour is already a bold and arbitrary simplification of reality. The silence in which even the most violent action takes place is strangely nightmarish. (How fantastic it is to look on at some furious fight, in which mortal blows are given and exchanged without a sound! It is like watching a battle of fishes through the glass of an aquarium.) And then the darkness of the theatre, the monotonous music—inducing, as they do, a kind of hypnotic state—enhance in the minds of the spectators the dream-like quality of what they sec on the screen.

In future, then, the fantastic, super-realistic qualities of the cinema will be more deliberately exploited than they are now. This does not mean, of course, that ordinary realism will be ousted from the screen. The cinema will continue to unfold its everyday epics. Realism will persist side by side with super-realism— but a little leavened by it, let us hope, and a little enlivened by its efforts to compete with its fantastical rival.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which a story, depending on human character, can be told on the screen. The first method is what I mav call the Behaviourist method. I he story is told in terms of psychological details. The film abounds in significant close-ups of faces, hands or even feet moving under the stress of emotion. The method is an excellent one, provided that the actors can act. In the hands of unimaginative producers and bad actors it leads to the most horribly dreary results. (Oh, those heroes and heroines who gradually look over their shoulders towards the camera and smile, or make a face that is meant to be one of agony! those huge, close-up smiles of tenderness, eight feet from ear to ear! One shudders at the recollection.)

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The second method, which is favoured by the Germans and, more recently, by the Italians, may be called the Expressionist or Pictorial method. For the producers belonging to this school, the small details of human behaviour under emotional stress are not so important as the general pictorial effect of the scene regarded as an expressive, symbolical composition. Where the Behaviourists would present a close-up of a face gone suddenly rigid, a nervously twitching hand, the Pictorialists build up a more or less fantastic scenic picture, the general effect of which is expressive of horror, fear, or whatever the emotion to be rendered may be. The great defect of this expressionism has consisted, so far, in its pretentiousness, its melodramatic ponderosity. Touched with a lighter fancy, the method might be used much more successfully than it actually is. A study of Felix the Cat would teach the German producers many valuable lessons. My own hope and belief is that the Behaviourist school of producers will borrow hints from the Expressionists, that they will learn to touch their realism with a certain picturesque super-realism. Those dismal stories of millionaires, adultery, heavy fathers, true love and all the rest would become much more tolerable if they were treated in a less prosaically direct way. No five-reel drama would be any the worse for having a little nightmare put into it.