16
Film in Out Time
The time has come to take up a thread which was left hanging in midair at the end of chapter 9. That chapter closed with the remark that the spectator is not dreaming all the time and that the fact of his awakening naturally raises the question as to what film may mean to his conscious mind.* Relevant as the question then was, there would have been little purpose in pursuing it further at a time when the question was in a sense premature. Only now that the inner workings of film have been dealt with is it possible and indeed necessary to come to grips with this issue, which is the most central of all: what is the good of fjlrn experience?
PRIMACY OF INNER LIFE?
No doubt a major portion of the material which dazes and thrills the moviegoer consists of sights of the outer world, crude physical spectacles and details. And this emphasis on externals goes hand in hand with a neglect of the things we usually consider essential. In Pygmalion the seenes added to the original, scenes which ignored its moral to concentrate on incidental life, prove much more effective than the salient points of "the^ Shavian dialogue, which is drowned in bagatelles; and what the adaptation thus loses in significance is plainly a boon to it from the cinematic viewpoint.** The cinema seems to come into its own when it clings to the surface of things.
So one might conclude that films divert the spectator from the core of life. This is why Paul Valéry objects to them. He conceives of the cinema as an "external memory endowed with mechanical perfection."
* See pp. 171-2. **Cf. pp. 228-9.
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And he blames it for tempting us to assimilate the manners of the phantoms that people the screen: how they are smiling, or killing, or visibly meditating. "What is still left of the meaning of these actions and emotions whose intercourse and monotonous diversity I am seeing? I no longer have the zest for living, for living is no longer anything more than resembling. I know the future by heart."1 According to Valéry then, by featuring the outer aspects of inner life, the cinema all but compels us to copy the former and desert the latter. Life exhausts itself in appearances and imitations, thus losing the uniqueness which alone would make it worth while. The inevitable result is boredom.   In other words, Valéry insists that, because of its exclusive concern for the exterior world, film prevents us from attending to the things of the mind; that its affinity for material data interferes with our spiritual preoccupations; that inner life, the life of the soul, is smothered by our immersion in the images of outer life on the screen. He, by the way, is not the only writer to argue along these lines. Georges Duhamel complains that the moving pictures no longer permit him to think what he wants to but   substitute themselves for his very thoughts."2 And more recently Nicola Chiaro-monte reproaches photography and film with making us    stare at the world entirely from the outside." Or as he also puts it,   the eye of the camera  gives  us  that  extraordinary  thing:   the  world  disinfected  of
consciousness  ^
This argument would be tenable, however, only if the beliefs, ideas and values that make up inner life occupied today the same position of authority they occupied in the past and if, as a consequence, they were presently just as self-evident, powerful, and real as are the events of the material world which film impresses upon us. Then indeed we might with justice condemn the cinema for alienating us from the higher objectives within our reach. But are they? But can it really be said that the relations between the inner universe and physical reality remain at all times essentially the same? Actually, they have undergone profound changes in the course of the last three or four centuries. Two such changes are of special interest here: the declining hold of common beliefs on the mmd and the steadily increasing prestige of science.
Note that these two interrelated developments-they have already been referred to on an earlier occasion to account for the notion of "life as
-This verdict notwithstanding, Valéry has a pronounced sense of the flow of material life, as is illustrated, for instance, by his delightful descnption of Amsterdam streets and canals. Also, he is aware that visible shapes cannot be grasped to the full unless they are stripped of the meanings which commonly serve to tdentify them; and the idea of seizing upon them for their own sake rather appealed to him. See Valéry, "Le retour de Hollande," in Varieté II, pp. 25-7.
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such"*—radically invalidate Valéry's argument. If ideology is disintegrating, the essences of inner life can no longer be had for the asking; accordingly, Valéry's insistence on their primacy sounds hollow. Conversely, if under the impact of science the material components of our world gain momentum, the preference which film shows for them may be more legitimate than he is willing to admit. Perhaps, contrary to what Valéry assumes, there is no short-cut to the evasive contents of inner life whose perennial presence he takes for granted? Perhaps the way to them, if way there is, leads through the experience of surface reality? Perhaps film is a gate rather than a dead end or a mere diversion?
Yet these matters will have to wait. Let me begin at the beginning-modem man's intellectual landscape.
THE INTELLECTUAL LANDSCAPE
".Ruins ot ancient beliefs"
From the ninetenth century on practically all thinkers of consequence, no matter how much they differed in approach and outlook, have agreed that beliefs once widely held—beliefs that were embraced by the whole of the person and that covered life in its wholeness—have been inexorably waning. They not only acknowledge this fact but speak of it with an assurance which is palpably founded on inner experience. It is as if they felt in their very bones the breakdown of binding norms.
Suffice it to select some pertinent views at random, Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, claims that religion has had its day and that there "will never again be a horizon of life and culture that is bounded by religion."4 (The later Nietzsche, though, would try to restore the patient to health by substituting the gospel of the Anti-Christ for abandoned Christianity. But had not Comte too declared religion to be a thing of the past and then made a new one of reason? Le roi est mortl Vive le roil) What Nietzsche sweepingly postulates, Whitehead puts on the record in the manner of a physician consulting the fever chart. "The average curve marks a steady fall in religious tone," he observes within contexts devoted to the decay of religious influence in European civilization,5 Freud on his part diagnoses the decay as a promising symptom. He calls religion  the  universal  illusion  of mankind and,  with  complete candor, compares it to a childhood neurosis. "According to this conception one might prophesy that the abandoning of religion must take place with "See pp. 169-70.
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the fateful inexorability of a process of growth and that we are just now in the middle of this phase of development."6 And of course, to Marx religion is nothing but part of the ideological superstructure, destined to cave in when class rule is swept away.
If the impact of religion lessens, that of common beliefs in contiguous secular areas, such as ethics or custom, tends to become weaker also. Many are the thinkers who hold that our cultural traditions in general are on the decline; that there are indeed no longer any spiritual values and normative principles that would be unquestioningly sanctioned. Here is Spengler with his comparative survey of world cultures; his panoramic analogies culminate in the sad truth that, like previous cultures, ours is bound to die and that, as matter of fact, we have already reached the end of the way. Toynbee indulges in comparisons similar to Spengler's; and he would arrive at exactly the same conclusions were it not for his desire to uplift our morale, a desire which every now and then gets the better of his propensity for ominous historical parallels: he concedes the uniqueness of Western civilization, which in turn permits him to hold out to us a chance of survival (provided we seize it). Others, not given to such ambitious bird's-eye views of history, are nevertheless as strongly convinced as Toynbee or Spengler that ideological unity is in an advanced state of disintegration. Dewey, for instance, has it that the "disruption of consensus of beliefs" is at the bottom of what he considers the diffuse-ness and incoherence of contemporary art. "Greater integration in the matter and form of the arts depends consequently upon a general change in the direction of attitudes that are taken for granted in the basis of civilization. . . ."7 (Ah, the enviable ease with which he makes out this prescription!) It is Durkheim who coins the metaphor of the "ruins of ancient beliefs."8
Vistas
Man in our society is ideologically shelterless. Need it be said that this is not the only aspect under which his situation presents itself? Yet before turning to the other major characteristic of his intellectual makeup, I should like to take a look at the divergent visions and speculations which the breakdown of overarching beliefs calls forth in him.
These speculations can roughly be divided into two groups. There is, first, the liberal outlook» traceable, as it were, to the days of the Enlightenment and strengthened by the surge, in the nineteenth century, of scientific conceptions more or less in keeping with it. Its exponents aspire to the
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complete secularization of public life and, accordingly, welcome the receding power of religious notions as a step forward in the evolution of mankind. They claim that religion should be superseded by reason; and they tend to identify reason with science, or at least were inclined to do so in the pre-atomic age. When speaking of the "ruins of ancient beliefs," Durkheim exhorts those who view them "anxiously and sadly" not to "ascribe to science an evil it has not caused but rather it tries to cure." And: "Once established beliefs have been carried away by the current of affairs [!], they cannot be artificially established; only reflection can guide us in life, after this."8
Guide us in what direction? Liberal-minded thinkers are confident that the human race is amenable to education; that education inspired by reason will launch it onto the way of progress; and that it will progress infinitely in a society which affords its members freedom from oppression, intellectual freedom and, not least, freedom from want, so that they may fulfill all their inherent potentialities. The "classless society" is basically a radical liberal's blueprint of the ideal social arrangement. Whatever the varieties of the liberal creed, they always revolve around the principles of reason, progress, democracy. This is not the place to elaborate on them. The salient point is, rather, that here you have a vision which interprets the loss of "ancient beliefs" as a gain in human prospects, with the ruins being deserted for lively communities where religion retires to the domain of private affairs.
Yet doubts mingle with optimism in the liberal camp itself. Ernest Renan, who had extolled the beneficent implications of science at the time of the 1848 revolution, recanted his youthful enthusiasm over four decades later. Human reason by itself alone, he would then declare, is hardly in a position to provide norms and sanctions able to regulate our moral life as effectively as did religion with its supernatural commandments; indeed, he goes so far as to submit that morality may deteriorate in inverse ratio to the advance of science.10 Or think-of Freud's late writings. True, he does not share Kenan's nostalgia for the ruins left behind, but eventually he too takes a pretty dim view of the chances of reason and progress. Only two years after having expressed the genuinely liberal opinion that "in the long run nothing can withstand reason,"11 he professes a cultural pessimism, in Civilization and Its Discontents, which testifies to a profound change of heart.
Disavowing his hopes of yesterday, Freud now avers that the realm of reason is forever threatened by man's innate tendency toward aggression. He derives this tendency from the "death instinct" and calls it "an overwhelming obstacle to civilization."12 The disturbing function he assigns
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to it gives rise to the suspicion that in reality his instinct of aggression is nothing but an old acquaintance of ours—original sin. The religious definition of evil thrown out by the front door would thus slip in again in the guise of a psychological concept. (Be this as it may, Freud probes deeper than Marx into the forces conspiring against the rule of reason. But Marx, intent on widening that rule, could not well make use of discouraging profundities. When you want to travel far your luggage had better be light.) The misgivings entertained by a few luminaries have meanwhile trickled down to the rank and file. At a time when nuclear physicists worry about their moral responsibilities, people at large cannot help realizing that the science, which once seemed synonymous with reason, is actually indifferent to the form of our society and to progress other than technological. So reason itself eludes them all the more, turning from a substantive entity into an anemic notion. But this does not exactly strengthen people's confidence in its directive power, discredited also by social and political developments which rather vindicate Freud's ultimate forebodings.*
And there are, secondly, all those who plead for the rehabilitation of communal faith in revealed truth or in a great cause or in an inspired leader, as the case may be. In their eyes, the decline of "ancient beliefs" does not usher in a better, man-made future but, on the contrary, atomizes the body social, thereby corroding our spiritual energies. They reject natural reason as a guiding principle because it is unable to meet man's innermost needs; and they are afraid lest liberal reliance on progress, democratic equality, etc., might put a premium on uninformed mediocrity and contentment devoid of content. Whether or not they aim at the rebirth of teligion proper, their messages are meant to kindle religious ardor in shiftless souls. Significantly, Sorel compares his social myth with the apocalyptic imagery that loomed large in the minds of the early Christians. (Instead of new Christians, though, his doctrine bred only Fascists, the syndicalists taking little notice of it.)
That anti-intellectualistic propositions fall on a fertile soil today must be laid to the very developments responsible for the crisis of liberalism. Their psychological effect is, as a liberal writer puts it, "a sense of drift and of drift without limits or direction."13 It is, indeed, as if the atmosphere were impregnated with a feeling of uneasiness about the absence of unifying incentives that would set meaningful goals and thus contour the horizon. (More recently, by the way, this malaise, which no contemporary critic fails to dwell on, is being sustained by the spectacle
* Cf. p. 171.
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of Soviet Russia, where people, much as they may suffer, do at least not seem to suffer from our "sense of drift." Yet were they even spontaneously devoted to the cause of Communism, their faith would be anything but a permanent emotional asset. For assuming Soviet Russia succeeds in achieving a state of well-being comparable to America's, then all the ideological incentives and pressures which now create suspense on the domestic scene are likely to falter for lack of purpose, and the resulting society, classless or not, will presumably be threatened with the same ideological exhaustion as the liberal democracies.)
Hence a will to believe, a preparedness for appeals summoning faith; exposed to the cold winds of emptiness, many a disenchanted intellectual has successively sought shelter in Communist party discipline, psychoanalysis, and what not. Nor is there a.lack of faith-raising campaigns. Toynbee never tires of advising us that we will go to the dogs if we do not place again religion above all secular concerns. What religion? His historical analogies should prompt Toynbee to predict the emergence of a new "higher religion" superseding Christianity. But loath to desert the latter, he prefers to forget his own premises and, in a dizzying turnabout, proclaims flatly that in our particular case a new "higher religion" can be dispensed with because Christianity is not yet at the end of its rope.14 It need not be Christianity. Others, alarmed by the fatal consequences of specialization, champion a renaissance of humanism; and still others refer us to mythology or get immersed in the religions of the Far East. Most of these movements are regressive in the sense that they revert to fashions of thought and argument preceding the scientific revolution. For the rest, it appears that the will to believe is matched by the incapacity for believing. Apathy spreads like an epidemic; the "lonely crowd"15 fills the vacuum with surrogates.
Highways thiough the void
The other, less noticed characteristic of our situation can briefly be defined as abstractness—a term denoting the abstract manner in which people of all walks of life perceive the world and themselves. We not only live among the "ruins of ancient beliefs" but live among them with at best a shadowy awareness of things in their fullness. This can be blamed on the enormous impact of science. As the curve of "religious tone" has been falling, that of science has risen steadily. How could it be otherwise? Science is the fountainhead of technological progress, the source of an endless stream of discoveries and inventions that affect everyday life in its remotest recesses and alter it with ever-increasing speed. It is not too much
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to say that we feel the sway of science at each move-e ™ke <*, thanks *> science, are saved from making. Small won der «rat«P^» P tive in applications of the first 7**J*SľÄ we know minds even in provinces not directly sub,ect to its rule wrier it or not, our way of thinking and our whole attitude toward reality conditioned by the principles from which ^g^^ction. Most Conspicuous among these principles is that «ffT",^ sciences do not deal with the objects of ordinary experience "^ from them certain elements which they then process " « w^   ^ the objects are stripped of ^ualitie^wl,* ^them      ^ po gnancy and preciousness   (Dewey),    me i                            ;t     ief.
in this direction. They concentrate on "Me etonte or un^s p erably material ones; and they isolate them m an,"™yish any regular behavior patterns and relationships, the go 1 bem   to estbM,^y such regularity with mathemat,=* P"^Hg ^^„a, wnich
£T=JaVÄ n^^tÄ^uantit^ procedures apt to yield testable regularities (which  however   are ot entirely irrelevant); in other words, they aim at ac«,^Xmatíza-exact sciences. And the latter on their part aspire to further matbema «on of the traces of reality they involve.                                                   h
While scientific operations become more an\m°re fsot™'   ht. abstractness inherent in them cannot but influence ouh*^ tho„ght One of the main channels of this -^«^X^ftcfnicians pervasive growth of technology has g.ven taťbto m«^ o trained to supply and ^™e the innumeraUe contavances wrt             ^
modern civilization cannot be imagined. All the*proau                ,
nature of tools which may be used for various P^«^      in not; all of them are mechanisms and  as such, un^«^e    Jnta. terms of particular abstractions; and the essence of all of them mount to their function.                                         ..          tner than ends
The technician cares about means and   m«™™™™^«/ t0 and modes of rieing. This cast of mind * likely to blunt h   sen t„ ty the issues, values, and objects he encounters inthP™c^ * >     g,
;r,ss.r it^ ::«*s~ -
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technical terms, such as "fall-out," "plastics," "automation," etc.; the odds are, in fact, that terms in this vein make up a large percentage of the words which ordinary language is continually assimilating. Words canalize thought: the prominent place which technical nomenclature occupies in common speech suggests that the technician's mentality spreads far afield.
People are technological-minded—which, for instance, implies that the gratifications they derive from certain media oř communications often bear no relation to the quality of the communications themselves. The transmitting apparatus overwhelms the contents transmitted. A case in point is the use which so many people make of canned music; as if tempted by its unlimited availability, they assign to it just the role of a background noise. Presumably the music not listened to satisfies their desire for companionship; when noise drowns the silence enveloping them, they need no longer suffer from loneliness. And why do they feel lonely? Much as they may miss human contacts, their loneliness is also a symptom of the abstractness which obstructs our intercourse with images and meanings.
Indeed, no sooner do we try to get in touch with mental entities than they tend to evaporate. In reaching out for them, we reduce them to abstractions as colorless as the noise to which radio music is commonly being reduced. This is illustrated by two popular approaches to things cultural or spiritual; both effect such reductions and both take their cue from science in a sense. One of them, which feeds strongly on Freud and depth psychology in general, voids all kinds of mental phenomena of their substance by passing them off as derivatives of psychological dispositions. To mention a few familiar examples, religious beliefs are identified as expressions or symbols of man's inborn fears and hopes (but what about the forms these beliefs assume, the degrees of truth to which they may attain?); wars are explained from irrepressible aggressivity (which does not explain historical wars at all); appraisals of the merits and shortcomings of our social order give place to considerations which largely revolve around the problem of whether we are adjusted or maladjusted to that order, no matter what it is like. It is all attitudes, behavior patterns, inner drives. Thus the specific content of the values surrounding us is psychologized away and the realm to which they belong sinks into limbo.
The other approach to this realm consists in what may be called the relativistic reduction. Along with progressive social mobility, the large-scale flow of information, so greatly facilitated by the media of mass communications, makes people realize that everything can be viewed from more than one angle and that theirs is not the only way of life which has a title to recognition. Accordingly, their confidence in absolutes is
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wavering; at the same time the broadening of their horizon challenged them to try to compare the different views and perspectives pressed home to them.* (Incidentally, scientific developments seem to parallel the relativistic preferences at large; it looks as if scholarly preoccupation with comparative studies were on the increase in such areas as religion, anthropology and sociology—all areas which involve various social groups,*
societies, cultures.)
This characteristic of modern mentality is difficult to pin down. Per-*.. haps it partly accounts for the creeping apathy refened to above and also' 'shows in the vogue which cultural comparisons and confrontations áre enjoying; the theme of East and West has become a much-favored topic since World War II. Now the point is that these comparisons—which", for the rest, may spring from a desire for reorientation or such—are bough at a price. As we engage in them, we inevitably run the risk of missing the very essences of the diverse value systems to which we are exposed. Our interest in their comparable elements interferes with our readiness to absorb any such system for its own sake; but only by getting absorbed in it can we hope to assimilate it to the core. The wider the range of valu and entities we are able to pass in review, the greater the chances thaT their unique features will withdraw from the scene. What we retain ô them is hardly more substantial than the grin of the Cheshire Cat.        f"
Artists have a way of sensing and baring states of mind of which th rest of us are only dimly aware; Abstract painting is not so much an an11 realistic movement as a realistic revelation of the prevailing abstractnes The configurations of lines in which it indulges faithfully reflect tlf nature of contemporary mental processes. It is as if modern paintirf aimed at charting the routes our thoughts and emotions are followm These routes have their counterpart in reality itself: they resemble thos" thruways and highways which seem to lead through the void—past untro woods and villages concealed from view.                                            *
Challenge
This then is modern man's situation: He lacks the guidance of biri ing norms. He touches reality only with the fingertips. Now these tv determinants of contemporary life do not simply exist side by side. Rath our abstractness deeply affects our relations to the body of ideology, 'i be precise, it impedes practically all direct efforts to revamp religion a establish a consensus of beliefs.
* Cf. pp. 8-9.
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nhe chimerical character of these efforts is fairly obvious. Those in ivahst vein, as we have seen, are frequently regressive; they revert to Scientific modes of thought and seem prepared to sacrifice the princi-jpon which modem civilization rests. As if we could set back the & of history even if we wanted to! Defending science against its sers, Durkheim remarks that the "authority of vanished traditions l&hever be restored by silencing it; we shall be only more powerless to ace them."17 Unfortunately, he does not supplement his judicious "-tion of romantic illusions by an indication as to how we might man-*to replace the traditional beliefs and yet continue to endorse science, ihis is precisely the snag.
And of course, many candid attempts to renew faith in absolutes are destined to fall fiat because they palpably partake of the abstract spirit ich they try to overcome. Consider Toynbee's, which is representative 'jus fallacy: The facile way in which he arranges and rearranges his 'gher religions" into convenient patterns, now dwelling on the analogies een them, now stressing the uniqueness of Christianity, gives the esston that to him Christianity, Judaism, etc., are indeed nothing but her religions"; he reduces them to abstractions, that is; and as such íaturally lend themselves to being tossed about like coins or pebbles, this detachment from their contents takes the life out of his exhorta-s. "What shall we do to be saved?" asks Toynbee. He answers that in "píritual dimension we will have to "put the secular super-structure onto religious foundations."18 This counsel defeats its purpose; it s*to religion in terms negating it and thus dissolves the coveted goal te our eyes. To repeat, Toynbee stands for a whole trend; the air is vwith the thin preachings of ideologists, anti-liberal or not.
oes all this imply, one feels tempted to ask, that ideological unity rretrievably been lost? But this question is irrelevant and unrealistic; nyites speculations which do not take into account the situation oking them. Nevertheless, now that the question has been posed, one speculation may be offered for what it is worth. It is quite imaginable The radiating power of any value system obeys the second law of odynamics; which means that the energies which the system is losing e'course of time can no longer flow back to it. On this view, the Tent beliefs" will become increasingly cooler. Considering the im-se energies accumulated in them, their temperature is likely to rease imperceptibly. Ideological fervor may continue to soar at inter-^and religious institutions may stay with us for an indefinite period. ;önly that the cooling process is irreversible. (Note that the familiar osite view has a convincing ring also; one might indeed argue that mon beliefs are bound to re-emerge because man cannot breathe and
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live in an ideological vacuum. Speculations sub specie aeternitatis along these lines are rather gratuitous.)
Once again, the question as to whether or not ideology has had its heyday is a sham question which only obscures the issue at stake. This issue concerns not so much our relations to unifying beliefs as the conditions alone under which such beliefs are accessible to us today. We would on principle have free access to them were it not for the abstract-ness of our approach to things in and about us. It is this characteristic of modern man's mentality which frustrates his attempts to escape from spiritual nakedness. So our situation confronts us with a very immediate, very urgent challenge: if we want to assimilate values that delimit our horizon we must first rid ourselves of that abstractness as best we can. In trying to meet this challenge, we may still not be able to cast anchor in ideological certainties, yet at least we stand a chance of finding something we did not look for, something tremendously important in its own right— the world that is ours.
EXPERIENCE AND ITS MATERIAL
"Radiance of the sunset"
Evidently we can limit our all but compulsive indulgence in abstractions only if we restore to the objects the qualities which, as Dewey says, give them "their poignancy and preciousness." The remedy for the kind of abstractness which befalls minds under the impact of science is experience—the experience of things in their concretenesS. Whitehead was the first to see our situation in this light and to comment on it accordingly. He blames contemporary society for favoring the tendency toward abstract thinking and insists that we want concretion—want it in the double sense of the word: "When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its
preciousness."
And how can this demand be met? "What I mean," Whitehead continues, "is art and aesthetic education. It is, however, art in such a general sense that I hardly like to call it by that name. Art is a special example. What we want is to draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension."19 No doubt Whitehead is right in thus emphasizing the aesthetic character
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of experience. The perception of "concrete fact" presupposes both detached and intense participation in it; in order to manifest its concreteness, the fact must be perceived in ways similar to those which play a role in the enjoyment and production of art.
Whitehead himself exemplifies this necessity by pointing to the multiple aspects of a factory with "its machinery, its community of operatives, its social service to the general population . . ." etc. Instead of dealing with it merely in terms of economic abstractions, as is the custom, we should learn to appreciate all its values and potentialities. "What we want to train is the habit of apprehending such an organism in its completeness."20 Perhaps the term "completeness" is not quite adequate. In experiencing an object, we not only broaden our knowledge of its diverse qualities but in a manner of speaking incorporate it into us so that we grasp its being and its dynamics from within—a sort of blood transfusion, as it were. It is two different things to know about the habits and typical reactions of a foreign people and really to experience what makes them tick. (Here, incidentally, lies the problem of the currently fashionable cultural exchanges, with their claim to promote "mutual understanding.") Or take our relations to a city: the geometric pattern of New York streets is a well-known fact, but this fact becomes concrete only if we realize, for instance, that all the cross streets end in the nothingness of the blank sky.
What we want, then, is to touch reality not only with the fingertips but to seize it and shake hands with it. Out of this urge for concretion technicians often fall into playful animism, lending some motor with which they commune the traits of a whimsical person. Yet there are different realities or dimensions of reality, and our situation is such that not all of these worlds are equally available to us. WTiich of them will yield to our advances? The answer is, plainly, that we can experience only the reality still at our disposal.
Reality within reach
Because of the waning of ideology the world we live in is cluttered with debris, all attempts at new syntheses notwithstanding. There are no wholes in this world; rather, it consists of bits of chance events whose flow substitutes for meaningful continuity. Correspondingly, individual consciousness must be thought of as an aggregate of splinters of beliefs and sundry activities; and since the life of the mind lacks structure, impulses from psychosomatic regions are apt to surge up and fill the inter-
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stices. Fragmentized  individuals  act out their  parts  in  fragmentized reality.
It is the world of Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Proust's work rests throughout upon the conviction that no man is a whole and that it is impossible to know a man because he himself changes while we try to clarify our original impressions of him.21 In addition, the modern realistic novel insists on the "disintegration of the continuity of exterior events."22 Erich Auerbach uses a section of To the Lighthouse to illustrate this point: "What takes place here in Virginia Woolf's novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind . . . —that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself."23* The. inevitable result is that the chance happenings narrated for their own sake do not add up to a whole with a purpose."** Or as Auerbach observes, "common to almost all of these novels is haziness, vague indefinability of meaning . . . uninterpretable symbolism."24 (About the same might be said of any Fellini film — prior to his Dolce Vita, that is.)
Now the world portrayed by the modern novel extends from sporadic spiritual notions all the way down to scattered material events. It is a mental continuum which comprises the physical dimension of reality, without, however, exhibiting it separately. But if we want to do away with the prevailing abstractness, we must focus primarily on this material dimension which science has succeeded in disengaging from the rest of the world. For scientific and technological abstractions condition the minds most effectively; and they all refer us to physical phenomena, while at the same time luring us away from their qualities. Hence the urgency of grasping precisely these given and yet ungiven phenomena in their con-creteness. The essential material of "aesthetic apprehension" is the physical world, including all that it may suggest to us. We cannot hope to embrace reality unless we penetrate its lowest layers.
Physical reality as the domain oi film
But how can we gain access to these lower depths? One thing is sure, the task of contacting them is greatly facilitated by photography and film, both of which not only isolate physical data but reach their climax in representing it. Lewis Mumford justly emphasizes photography's unique capacity for adequately depicting the "complicated, inter-related aspects
* Cf. p. 219. ** See pp. 221-2.
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of our modem environment."25 And where photography ends, film, much more inclusive, takes over. Products of science and technology, the two media are our contemporaries in every sense of the word; small wonder that they should have a bearing on preferences and needs arising from our situation. It is again Mumford who establishes a relation between the cinema and one of these needs; he argues that film may fulfill a timely mission in helping us apprehend and appreciate material objects (or "organisms," as he sees fit to call them): "Without any conscious notion of its destination, the motion picture presents us with a world of interpenetrating, counterinfluencing organisms: and it enables us to think about that world with a greater degree of concreteness."26
This is not all, however. In recording and exploring physical reality, film exposes to view a world never seen before, a world as elusive as Poe's purloined letter, which cannot be found because it is within everybody's reach. What is meant here is of course not any of those extensions of the everyday world which are being annexed by science but our ordinary physical environment itself. Strange as it may seem, although streets, faces, railway stations, etc., lie before our eyes, they have remained largely invisible so far. Why is this so?
For one thing, it should be remembered that physical nature has been persistently veiled by ideologies relating its manifestations to some total aspect of the universe. (Much as realistic medieval painters indulge in ugliness and horror, the reality they reveal lacks immediateness; it emerges only to be consumed again by arrangements, compositional or otherwise, which are imposed on it from without and reflect such holistic notions as sin, the last judgment, salvation, and the like.) Yet considering the breakdown of traditional values and norms, this explanation of our failure to notice the world around us is no longer convincing. In fact, it makes good sense to conclude that, now that ideology has disintegrated, material objects are divested of their wraps and veils so that we may appreciate them in their own right. Dewey jumps at this conclusion. He submits that our freedom "from syntheses of the imagination that went contrary to the grain of things"27 is compensated for by our new awareness of the latter; and he attributes this development not only to the disappearance of false syntheses but to the liberating influence of science as well. Science, says he, "has greatly quickened in a few at least alertness of observation with respect to things of whose existence we were not before even aware."28
But Dewey fails to realize that science is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it alerts us to the world of its concern, as he assumes; on the other, it tends to remove that world from the field of vision—aJ counterinfluence which he does not mention. The truly decisive reason
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for the elusiveness of physical reality is the habit of abstract thinking we have acquired under the reign of science and technology. No sooner do we emancipate ourselves from the "ancient beliefs" than we are led to eliminate the qualities of things. So the things continue to recede. And, assuredly, they are all the more elusive since wé usually cannot help setting them in the perspective of conventional views and purposes which point beyond their self-contained being. Hence, were it not for the intervention of the film camera, it would cost us an enormous effort to surmount the barriers which separate us from our everyday surroundings.
Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent. It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera. And we are free to experience it because we are fragmentized. The cinema can be defined as a medium particularly equipped to promote the redemption of physical reality. Its imagery permits us, for the first time, to take away with us the objects and occurrences that comprise the flow of material life.
THE REDEMPTION OF PHYSICAL REALITY
Ait with a difference
But in order to make us experience physical reality, films must show what they picture. This requirement is so little self-evident that it raises the issue of the medium's relation to the traditional arts.
To the extent that painting, literature, the theater, etc., involve nature at all, they do not really represent it. Rather, they use it as raw material from which to build works which lay claim to autonomy. In the work of art nothing remains of the raw material itself, or, to be precise, all that remains of it is so molded that it implements the intentions conveyed through it. In a sense, the real-life material disappears in the artist's intentions. To be sure, his creative imagination may be kindled by real objects and events, but instead of preserving them in their amorphous state, he spontaneously shapes them according to the forms and notions they call forth in him.
This distinguishes the painter or poet from the film maker; unlike him, the artist would cease to be one if he incorporated life in the raw, as rendered by the camera. However realistically minded, he overwhelms rather than records reality. And since he is free to indulge his formative
FILM    IN    OUR   TIME                                           30,
aspirations, his work tends to be a significant whole. In consequence, the significance of a work of art determines that of its elements; or conversely, its elements are significant in so far as they contribute to the truth or beauty inherent in the work as a whole. Their function is not to reflect reality but to bear out a vision of it. Art proceeds from top to bottom. From the distant viewpoint of the photographic media this also applies to works which imitate nature, induce randomness, or, Dada fashion, obstruct art. The scrap of newspaper in a perfect collage is transformed from a sample of extraneous actuality into the emanation of an "idea conception," to use Eisenstein's term.*
The intrusion of Art into film thwarts the cinema's intrinsic possibilities. If for reasons of aesthetic purity films influenced by the traditional arts prefer to disregard actual physical reality, they miss an opportunity reserved for the cinematic medium. And if they do picture the given visible world, they nevertheless fail to show it, for the shots of it then merely serve to compose what can be passed off as a work of art; accordingly, the real-life material in such films forfeits its character as raw material. Here belong not only artistically ambitious experimental films— e.g. Buňuel-Dali's Un Chien ANDALOU—but all the innumerable commercial films which, though completely devoid of art, nevertheless half-uninten-tionally pay tribute to it by following the ways of the theater.
Nobody would think of minimizing the difference between  Un Chien Andalou, a hybrid of great artistic interest, and ordinary screen entertainment along theatrical lines. And yet the routine product and the artist's work coincide in estranging the medium from pursuits which are peculiar to it As compared with, say, Umberto D. or Cabiria, average theatrical films and certain high-level avant-garde films must be lumped together in spite of all that separates them. Films of this kind exploit, not explore, the material phenomena they insert; they insert them not in their own interest but for the purpose of establishing a significant whole; and in pointing up some such whole, they refer us from the material dimension back to that of ideology. Art in film is reactionary because it symbolizes wholeness and thus pretends to the continued existence of beliefs which "cover" physical reality in both senses of the word. The result is films which sustain the prevailing abstractness.
Their undeniable frequency should not lead one to underestimate the occurrence of films rejecting the "lie of 'art.' "29 These range from plain films of fact—newsreels or purely factual documentaries—to full-grown feature films imbued with their authors' formative aspirations. The films of the first group, which are not even meant to be art, simply follow the * See p. 221.
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realistic tendency, thereby at least meeting the minimum requirement of what has been called the "cinematic approach."* As for the feature films, they are the arena of both the realistic tendency and the formative tendency; yet in these films the latter never tries to emancipate itself from, and overpower, the former, as it does in any theatrical movie. Think of Potemktn, silent film comedy, Greed, several Westerns and gangster films, La Grande Illusion, the major productions of Italian neorealism, Los Oltvdados, Mr. HuLoťs Holiday, Pather Panchali, etc.: all of them rely largely on the suggestive power of raw material brought in by the cameras; and all of them more or less conform to Fellini's dictum that a "good picture" should not aim at the autonomy of a work of art but "have mistakes in it, like life, like people."80
Does the cinema gravitate toward films in this vein? In any case, their prominent features tend to assert themselves throughout the body of films and often in places where one would least expect them. It time and again happens that an otherwise theatrical film includes a scene whose images inadvertently tell a story of their own, which for a transient moment makes one completely forget the manifest story. One might say of such a film that it is badly composed; but its alleged shortcoming is actually its only merit. The trend toward semi-documentaries is, partly, a concession to the virtues of dramatic documentaries.** The typical composition of the musical reflects the precarious, if not antinomic, relations that obtain in the depth of the medium between the realistic and formative tendencies.! More recently, attempts are being made, or rather, re-sumedtt, to get away from literature and rigid story construction by having the actors extemporize their lines. (Whether these attempts are likely to introduce genuine incident is quite another question.)
All this does not imply that camera-realism and art exclude each other. But if films which really show what they picture are art, they are art with a difference. Indeed, along with photography, film is the only art which exhibits its raw material. Such art as goes into cinematic films must be traced to their creators' capacity for reading the book of nature. The film artist has traits of an imaginative reader or an explorer prodded by insatiable curiosity.^ To repeat a definition given in earlier contexts, he is "a man who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality—and also by a feeling
* See p. 38, and passim.
**Cf. pp. 259-60.
t See pp. 148-9,213.
tt Cf. pp. 98 (reference to Pabsťs mise-m-scéne of his The Love of Jeanne
NEY),219n. $ See p. 16.
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that he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms—that he ventures ever deeper into the jungle of material phenomena in which he risks becoming irretrievably lost if he does not, by virtue of great efforts, get back to the highways he left."*
Moments or everyday life
The moviegoer watches the images on the screen in a dream-like state.** So he can be supposed to apprehend physical reality in its con-creteness; to be precise, he experiences a flow of chance events, scattered objects, and nameless shapes. In the moviehouses, exclaims Michel Dard, "we are brothers of the poisonous plants, the pebbles .. ."31 Because of the preoccupation of film with physical minutiaet as well as the decline of ideology it is in fact inevitable that our minds, fragmentized as they are, should absorb not so much wholes as "small moments of material life" (Balázs).tt Now material life may be part and parcel of various dimensions of life in general. Query, do the "small moments" to which we surrender ourselves show an affinity for a particular orbit of life?
In feature films these small units are elements of plots free to range over all orbits imaginable. They may try to reconstruct the past, indulge in fantasies, champion a belief, or picture an individual conflict, a strange adventure, and what not. Consider any element of such a story film. No doubt it is intended to advance the story to which it belongs, but it also affects us strongly, or even primarily, as just a fragmentary moment of visible reality, surrounded, as it were, by a- fringe of indeterminate visible meanings. And in this capacity the moment disengages itself from the conflict, the belief, the adventure, toward which the whole of the story converges. A face on the screen may attract us as a singular manifestation of fear or happiness regardless of the events which motivate its expression. A street serving as a background to some quarrel or love affair may rush to the fore and produce an intoxicating effect.
Street and face, then, open up a dimension much wider than that of the plots which they sustain. This dimension extends, so to speak, beneath the superstructure of specific story contents; it is made up of moments within everybody's reach, moments as common as birth and death, or a smile, or "the ripple of the leaves stirred by the wind."$ To be sure,
* See p. 255.
** See chapter 9, passim; especially pp. 165-6.
t Cf. pp. 50, 297-8.
tt See pp. 89,225.
S Cf. p. 31-
304                                                    EPILOGUE
what happens in each of these moments, says Erich Auerbach, "concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is com* paratively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life."32 Even though his poignant observation bears on the modern novel, it holds no less true of film—except for the fact, negligible within this context, that the elements of the novel involve the life of the mind in ways denied to
the cinema.
Note that Auerbachs casual reference to "daily life" offers an important clue. The small random moments which concern things common to you and me and the rest of mankind can indeed be said to constitute the dimension of everyday life, this matrix of all other modes of reality. It is a very substantial dimension. If you disregard for a moment articulate beliefs, ideological objectives, special undertakings, and the like, there still remain the sorrows and satisfactions, discords and feasts, wants and pursuits, which mark the ordinary business of living. Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Films tend to explore this texture of everyday life,* whose composition varies according to place, people, and time. So they help us not only to appreciate our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtually make the world our home.
This was already recognized in the early days of the medium. The German critic Herman G. Scheffauer predicted as far back as 1920 that through film man "shall come to know the earth as his own house, though he may never have escaped the narrow confines of his hamlet."38 Over thirty years later Gabriel Marcel expresses himself in similar terms. He attributes to film, especially documentary film, the power of deepening and rendering more intimate "our relation to this Earth which is our habitat." "And I should say," he adds, "that to me who has always had a propensity to get tired of what I have the habit of seeing—what in reality, that is, I do not see anymore—this power peculiar to the cinema seems to be literally redeeming [salvatrice]"S4
Material evidence
In acquainting us with the world we live in, the cinema exhibits phenomena whose appearance in the witness stand is of particular conse-
* See pp. 71-2.
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quence. It brings us face to face with the things we dread. And it often challenges us to confront the real-life events it shows with the ideas we commonly entertain about them.
THE HEAD OF MEDUSA
We have learned in school the story of the Gorgon Medusa whose face, with its huge teeth and protruding tongue, was so horrible that the sheer sight of it turned men and beasts into stone. When Athena instigated Perseus to slay the monster, she therefore warned him never to look at the face itself but only at its mirror reflection in the polished shield she had given him. Following her advice, Perseus cut off Medusa's head with the sickle which Hermes had contributed to his equipment.35
The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist's imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The.film screen is Athena's polished shield.
This is not all, however. In addition, the myth suggests that the images on the shield or screen are a means to an end; they are to enable—or, by extension, induce—the spectator to behead the horror they mirror. Many a war film indulges in cruelties for this very reason. Do such films serve the purpose? In the myth itself Medusa's decapitation is not yet the end of her reign. Athena, we are told, fastened the terrible head to her aegis so as to throw a scare in her enemies. Perseus, the image watcher, did not succeed in laying the ghost for good.
So the question arises whether it makes sense at all to seek the meaning of horror images in their underlying intentions or uncertain effects. Think of Georges Franju's Le Sang des betes, a documentary about a Paris slaughterhouse: puddles of blood spread on the floor while horse and cow are killed methodically; a saw dismembers animal bodies still warm with life; and there is the unfathomable shot of the calves' heads being arranged into a rustic pattern which breathes the peace of a geometrical ornament. [Illus. 59] It would be preposterous to assume that these unbearably lurid pictures were intended to preach the gospel of vegetarianism; nor can they possibly be branded as an attempt to satisfy the dark desire for scenes of destruction.*
* Cf. pp. 57-8.
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The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality. In experiencing the rows of calves' heads or the litter of tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination. And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo. Perhaps Perseus' greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa's head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster?
CONFRONTATIONS
Corroborative images Films or film passages which confront visible material reality with our notions of it may either confirm these notions or give the lie to them. The first alternative is of lesser interest because it rarely involves genuine corroborations. Confirmative images, that is, are as a rule called upon not to authenticate the truth to reality of an idea but to persuade us into accepting it unquestioningly. Remember the ostentatious happiness of the collective farmers in Eisenstein's Old and New, the enraptured crowds hailing Hitler in the Nazi films, the miraculous religious miracles in Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments, etc. (But what an incomparable showman was De Mille, alas!)
All of it is rigged evidence. These sham corroborations are intended to make you believe, no^ see. Sometimes they include a stereotyped shot which epitomizes their spirit: a face is so photographed against the light that hair and cheek are contoured by a luminous line intimating a halo. The shot has an embellishing rather than revealing function. Whenever the visuals take on this function we may be reasonably sure that they serve to advertise a belief or uphold conformity. For the rest, it is understood that not all corroborative images lack genuineness. In Diary of a Country Priest the face of the young priest substantiates, with a power all its own, the awesome reality of his religious faith, his spiritual tribulations.
Debunking Of course, the main interest lies not with corroborative imagery but with images which question our notions of the physical world. No sooner do films confront reality, as captured by the camera, with what we wrongly believe it resembles than the whole burden of proof falls to the images alone. And since it is their documentary quality which then counts, such confrontations are certainly in keeping with the cinematic approach; in fact, they can be said to be as direct a manifestation of the medium as is the flow of material life.
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Small wonder that the body of existing films abounds in confrontations of this type. Significantly, silent film comedy, where they are used for comic effect, develops them from the technical properties of the cinema. In a ship scene of Chaplin's The Immigrant a traveler who, seen from behind, seems to go through all the motions of seasickness reveals himself to be engaged in fishing when shown from the opposite angle. A change of camera position and the truth comes out. It is a standardized gag—a shot dissolving some misconception deliberately fostered by the preceding shots.
Whether fun or censure, the principle remains the same. The first one to utilize the camera as a means of debunking was, as might be expected, D. W. Griffith. He considered it his task to "make you see";* and he was aware that this task required of him not only the rendering of our environment but the exposure of bias. Among the many prototypes he created at the time of the first World War is that scene of Broken Blossoms in which he juxtaposes the noble and unassuming face of the film's Chinese protagonist with the close-ups of two missionaries whose faces exude unctuous hypocrisy. Griffith thus confronts the belief in the white man's superiority with the reality it allegedly covers and through this confrontation denounces it as an unwarranted prejudice.
The pattern set by him has frequently been followed for the purpose of exposing social injustice and the ideology from which it stems. Béla Balázs, who knowingly points to the cinema's "innermost tendency . . . toward revealing and unmasking," extols the Eisenstein and Pudovkin films of the 'twenties as the apex of cinematic art because of their concern with confrontations along these lines-36
Need it be said that many of their seeming revelations are actually vehement propaganda messages? Yet as with public opinion, documentary film material cannot be manipulated infinitely; some truth is bound to come to light here and there. In The End of St. Petersburg, for instance, the scene with the young peasant walking past the columned palaces of the Czarist capital illumines in a flash the alliance that obtains between oppressive autocratic rule and architectural splendor.
It'is not the Soviet cinema alone which favors camera exercises in social criticism. John Ford bares the plight of migratory farm workers in his The Grapes of Wrath, and Jean Vigo in A propos de Nice stigmatizes the futile life of the idle rich by depicting random moments of it. One of the most consummate achievements in this vein is Georges Franju's L'Hotel des Invalídes, a documentary commissioned by the French government. On the surface, the film is nothing but a straight record of a * See motto, p. 41.
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sightseeing tour through the historical building; surrounded by tourists, the guides, old war invalids, proceed from exhibit to exhibit, holding forth on Napoleon, armored knights, and victorious battles. Their worn-out comments, however, are synchronized with pictures which void them subtly of their meaning, so that the whole turns into an indictment of militarism and an insipid hero cult. [Illus. 60]
Or physical reality is revealed out of a desire to pierce the fabric of conventions. Erich von Stroheim in Greed and elsewhere has his camera dwell on life at its crudest—all that rankles beneath the thin veneer of civilization. In Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, a film which revels in debunking, the long shot of the lake with the little boat in it conveys a Sunday photographer's dream of peace and happiness; but the dream is exploded by the subsequent close shot of the boat itself in which Chaplin . as Monsieur Verdoux is just about to murder another victim. If you watch closely enough you will find honor lurking behind the idyll. The same moral can be distilled from Franju's slaughterhouse film, which casts deep shadows on the ordinary process of living.
Such exposures have a trait in common with cinematic motifs proper: their contagious power is so strong that even an otherwise theatrical film may be transformed into something like a film by virtue of their presence in it. True, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is essentially a miracle play, yet the medieval beliefs and superstitions it features are questioned throughout by the inquisitive mind of the knight and the outright skepticism of his squire. Both characters manifest a down-to-earth attitude. And their secular doubts result in confrontations which in a measure acclimatize the film to the medium.
From bottom to top
All that has been said so far relates to elements or moments of physical reality, as displayed on the screen. Now much as the images of material moments are meaningful in their own right, we actually do not confine ourselves to absorbing them but feel stimulated to weave what they are telling us into contexts that bear on the whole of our existence. As Michel Dard puts it: "In lifting all things out of their chaos before replunging them into the chaos of the soul, the cinema stirs large waves in the latter, like those which a sinking stone produces on the surface of
the water."37
The large waves roused in the soul bring ashore propositions regarding the significance of the things we fully experience. Films which satisfy our desire for such propositions may well reach into the dimension of
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ideology. But if they are true to the medium, they will certainly not move from a preconceived idea down to the material world in order to implement that idea; conversely, they set out to explore physical data and, taking their cue from them, work their way up to some problem or belief. The cinema is materialistically minded; it proceeds from "below" to "above." The importance of its natural bent for moving in this direction can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, Erwin Panofsky, the great art historian, traces to it the difference between film and the traditional arts: "The processes of all the earlier representational arts conform, in a higher or lesser degree, to an idealistic conception of the world. These arts operate from top to bottom, so to speak, and not from bottom to top; they start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter and not with the objects that constitute the physical world. ... It is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization."38
Guided by film, then, we approach, if at all, ideas no longer on highways leading through the void but on paths that wind through the thicket of things. While the theatergoer watches a spectacle which affects primarily his mind and only through it his sensibility, the moviegoer finds himself in a situation in which he cannot ask questions and grope for answers unless he is saturated physiologically. "The cinema," says Luden Sěve, ". . . requires of the spectator a new form of activity: his penetrating eye moving from the corporeal to the spiritual."30 Charles De-keukeleire points to the same upward movement with an awareness of its implications: "If the senses exert an influence on our spiritual life, the cinema becomes a powerful ferment of spirituality by augmenting the number and quality of our sense perceptions."40
"The Family or Man"
And what about the spiritual life itself? Even though the propositions which films evolve in proceeding from bottom to top lie outside the domain of this book, two remarks on them would seem to be indicated, if only to round out the picture. To begin with, all attempts to establish a hierarchy among these propositions or messages have proved futile so far. Béla Balázs's thesis that the cinema comes into its own only if it serves revolutionary ends41 is as untenable as are the kindred views of those schools of thought, neorealistic and otherwise, which postulate an intimate relationship between the medium and socialism or collectivism.42* Nor
* Cf. p. 274.
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does Grierson's definition of film, or rather, documentary film, as an educational instrument, a means of promoting responsible citizenship, cover sufficient ground.48 The range of equally legitimate propositions is inexhaustible. There is, to name only a few, Fellini's intense preoccupation with the shelterless individual in quest for sympathy and purpose;44 Bufi-ueľs involvement in the cruelties and lusts which fill the lumber rooms of our existence; Franju's dread of the abyss that is everyday life, the kind of dread which befalls an adolescent who awakes by night and suddenly realizes the presence of death, the togetherness of pleasure and slaughter . . .
Among the cinematic propositions one deserves special mention for reflecting and endorsing the actual rapprochement between the peoples of the world. Quite logically, Erich Auerbach hints of it in the wake of his observation that the random moments of life represented by the modern novel concern "the elementary things which men in general have in common."* "In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation," he continues, "we cannot but see to what an extent—below the surface conflicts—the differences between men's ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. . . . Beneath the conflicts and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible."46
Auerbach might have added that the task of rendering visible mankind on its way toward this goal is reserved for the photographic media; they alone are in a position to record the material aspects of common daily life in many places. It is not by accident that the idea of "The Family of Man" was conceived by a born photographer. And one of the reasons for the world-wide response to Edward Steichen's exhibition must be laid precisely to the fact that it consists of photographs—images bound to authenticate the reality of the vision they feature. Because of their photographic nature films are predestined to take up this very theme.46 Some actually do. Thus World Without End by Paul Rotha and Basil Wright demonstrates the similarities between Mexican and Siamese people, demonstrates them all the more convincingly since it acknowledges the limits of the leveling process: the dilapidated village church manages to survive and the ancient Buddha meditates on the speed of the motortrucks.**
Or think of Satyajit Ray's Arapajito, an episode film crowded with scenes such as these: The camera focuses on the ornamental bark of an
* Cf. p. 304. ** See pp. 205-6.
FILM   IN  OUR  TIME
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old tree and then slowly tilts down to the face of Apu's sick mother who yearns for her son in the big city. In the distance a train is passing by. The mother walks heavily back to the house where she imagines she hears Apu shout "Ma." Is he returning to her? She gets up and looks into the empty night aglow with water reflections and dancing will-o'-the-wisps. India is in this episode but not only India. [Illus. 61] "What seems to me to be remarkable about 'Arapajito/ " a reader of the New York Times writes to the editor of^.the film section, "is that you see this story happening in a remote land and see these faces with their exotic beauty and still feel that the same thing is happening every day somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx."47
Much as these propositions differ in terms of content, they all penetrate ephemeral physical reality and burn through it. But once again, their destination is no longer a concern of the present inquiry.
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Notes
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CHAPTER 1
1.  Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 210.
2.  Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 27.
3.  Quoted from Gay-Lussac's speech in the French House of Peers, July 30, 1839, by Eder, History of Photography, p. 242.
4.  Quoted from same speech, ibid. p. 242.
5.  Quoted from Arago s speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, July 3, 1839, ibid. p. 235.
6.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , pp. 17-18.
7.  Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1944, vol. 7, p. 40. This paper is an important contribution to the history of instantaneous photography, which, says Mr. Newhall (p. 40), has not yet been written.
8.  Ruskin, Praeterita, p. 341.
9.  Quoted by Eder, op. cit. p. 341.
10.  Newhall, TheHistory of Photography . . . ,p. 21.
11.  For the references to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Darwin, see Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization/' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1944, vol. 7, pp. 41-2.
12.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , p. 27.
13.  Cf., for instance, Ueberweg/Heinze, Grundriss der Geschickte der Philosophie, vol. 5, p. 27.
14.  Freund, La Photographie en France au dbcneuviěme siedle, pp. 102-7. For the Taine quote, see ibid. p. 103. In her excellent study Gisele Freund traces the social and ideological trends that had a bearing on the development of photography. Her book is not free from lapses into commonplace materialism, but this minor shortcoming is compensated for by a wealth of source material.
15.  Ibid. pp. 49, 53-7.
16.  Häuser, The Social History of Art, vol. II, p. 775. (Translated by Stanley Godman.)
17.  Ibid. pp. 775, 779; Freund, op. cit. pp. 106-7.
18.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . ,p. 71.
19.  Ibid. p. 71.
20.  Weston, "Seeing Photographically," The Complete Photographer, 1943, vol. 9, issue 49:3200.
21.  Newhall, op. cit pp. 75-0; Freund, op. cit. p. 113.
22.  Hauscr, The Social History of Art, vol. II, p. 778.
313
314                                                         NOTES
23.  Freund, op. cit. p. 96,
24.  Ibid. p. 12; Newhall, op. cit. p. 43.
25.  Freund, op. cit. pp. 78-9.
26.  Ibid. p. 92.
27.  Ibid. pp. 83,85,90.
28.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , pp. 71-2.
29.  Ibid. p. 76.
30.  Ibid. p. 81.
31.  Ibid. p. 75.
32.  Ibid. pp. 71-2; Freund, La Photographie en France . . . , pp. 69,101.
33.  Freund, op. cit. pp. 107-8,110-12.
34.  Ibid. pp. 117-19.
35.  Ibid. pp. 108-9.
36.  Ibid. pp. 116-17.
37.  So the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler in 1914; quoted by Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , p. 152.
38.  Weston, "Seeing Photographically," The Complete Photographer, 1943, vol. 9, issue 49:3202. See also Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, p. 22.
39.  Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, pp. 206-7, 210.
40.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 218. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, p. 27.
41.  Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, p. 178.
42.  Ibid. p. 178.
43.  Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, p. 22.
44.  Katz, "Dimensions in Photography," The Complete Photographer, 1942, vol.4, issue 21:1354.
45.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 131.
46.  Moholy-Nagy, op. cit. p. 24.
47.  Feininger, "Photographic Control Processes," The Complete Photographer,
1942, vol. 8, issue 43:2802.
48.  Schmoll, "Vom Sinn der Photographie," in Steinert, Subjective fotografie 2,
p. 38.
49.  "Reaction to 'Creative Photography,'" The New York Times, Dec. 16,
1951.
50.  Quoted by Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , p. 78, from H. P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), p. 109.
51.  Newhall, ibid. pp. 157-8.
52.  Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, p. 285.
53.  Eisenstein, FiZm Form, p. 16.
54.  Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art ......, p. 54. (Translator not named.)
55.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 218. Cf. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, p. 177.
56.  Freund, La Photographie en France . . . , pp. 105-6.
57.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, pp. 814-15. (Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.)
58.  Sherif and Cantril, The Psychology of Ego-Involvements, passim; e.g. pp. 30, 33, 34. Amheim, "Perceptual Abstraction and Art," Psychological Review, March 1947, vol. 54, no. 2.
59.  Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 339.
60.  Freund, op. cit. p. 59.
61.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . ,p.47.
NOTES                                                         31S
62.  Ibid. p. 150.
63.  Weston, "Seeing Photographically," The Complete Photographer, 1943, vol. 9, issue 49:3205.
64.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 91.
65.  Ibid. p. 139.
66.  Moholy-Nagy, "Surrealism and the Photographer," The Complete Photographer, 1943, vol. 9, issue 52:3338.
67- I am greatly indebted to Mr. Edward Steichen for having this photograph brought to my attention.
68.  Cf. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 339.
69.  Cf. Hajek-Halke, Experimentelle Fotografie, preface; p. 14. See also the above-quoted articles by Katz, Feininger, and Schmoll.
70.  Quoted by Newhall, TheHistory of Photography . . . ,p.213.
71.  Mumford, op. cit. p. 340.
72.  Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1944, vol. 7, p. 40.
73.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , p. 40; quoted from H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), p. 40.
74.  Quoted by Newhall, ibid. p. 144, from John A. Tennant's 1921 review of a New York Stieglitz exhibition.
75.  Albert Londe, La Photographie instantanée (Paris, 1886), p. 139. I owe -   this reference to Mr. Beaumont Newhall who kindly let me have some
of his notes on instantaneous photography.
76.  Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1944, vol. 7, p. 41.
77.  McCausland, "Alfred Stieglitz," The Complete Photographer, 1943, vol. 9, issue 51:3321,
78.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . ,p.l26.
79.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, p. 815.  (Translated by CK. Scott Moncrieff.)
80.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 91.
81.  Benjamin, "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 1939, vol. VIII, nos. 1-2:82.
82.  Cf. Newhall, op. cit. pp. 140,143.
83.  Quoted by Newhall, op, cit. p. 182, from H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), p. 52.
84.  Delluc, "Photographie,  in Lapierre, ed., Anthologie du cinema, p. 135.
85.  Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, p. 209.
86.  Newhall, The History of Photography . . . , p. 198; quoted from Morgan & Lester, ed., Graphic Graflex Photography (1948), p. 218.
316
NOTES
CHAPTER 2
1.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 8, 49ff., 61-81 (about Marey). This book is a "must" for anyone interested in the complex developments that led up to Lumiěre. For Muybridge, see also Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1944, vol. 7, pp. 42-3. T. Ra., "Motion Pictures," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1932, vol. 15, pp. 854-6, offers a short survey of the period.
2.  Newhall, op. cit. p. 40.
3.  Ibid. p. 40.
4.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, p. 38.
5.  Herschel, "Instantaneous Photography," Photographic News, 1860, vol. 4, no. 88:13. I am indebted to Mr. Beaumont Newhall for his reference to this quote.
6.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 36-7, 86, 241-2.
7.  It was Ducos du Hauron who, as far back as 1864, predicted these developments; see Sadoul, ibid. p. 37.
8.  See, for instance, Balázs, Der Geist des Films; Arnheim, Film; Eisenstein, The Film Sense and. Film Form; Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting; Rotha, The Film Till Now; Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film and Basic Film Techniques (University of California Syllabus Series No. 303); Karel Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing, etc.
9.  Caveing, "Dialectique du concept du cinema," Revue internationale de ßmologie (part I: July-Aug. 1947, no. 1; part II: Oct. 1948, nos. 3-4) applies, in a somewhat highhanded manner, the principles of Hegel's dialectics to the evolution of the cinema; The first dialectic stage, he has it, consists of Lumiere's reproduction of reality and its antithesis—complete illusionism, as exemplified by Méliěs (see especially part I, pp. 74-8). Similarly, Morin, Le Cinema ou I'homme imaginaire, p. 58, conceives of Mélies's "absolute unreality" as the antithesis, in a Hegelian sense, of Lumiere's "absolute realism." See also Sadoul, Histoire ďun art, p. 31.
10.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 21-2, 241, 246.
11.  Langlois, "Notes sur ľhistoire du cinema," La Revue du cinema, July 1948, vol. Ill, no. 15:3.
12.  Sadoul, op. cit. p. 247.
13.  Ibid. pp. 249, 252, 300; and Sadoul, Histoire d'un art, p. 21.
14.  Gorki, "You Don't Believe Your Eyes," World Film News, March 1938, p. 16.
15.  Bessy and Duca, Louis Lumiěre, inventeur, p. 88. Sadoul, op. cit. pp. 23-4.
16.  Quoted by Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, p. 208. See also, ibid. p. 253.
17.  Sadoul, ibid. pp. 242-4, 248. .Vardac, Stage to Screen, pp. 166-7. Vardac emphasizes that an ever-increasing concern with realism prompted the nineteenth-century stage to make elaborate use of special devices. For
NOTES                                                         317
instance, Steele MacKaye, a theatrical producer who died shortly before the arrival of the vitascope, invented a "curtain of light" so as to produce such effects as the fade-in, the fade-out, and the dissolve (p. 143).
18.  Sadoul, op. cit. p. 246.
19.  Bessy and Duca', Louis Lumiěre, inventeur, pp. 49-50. Sadoul, Histoire d'unart,p. 23.
20.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 222-4, 227.
21.  Sadoul, ibid. p. 332, and Sadoul, Histoire d'un art, p. 24.
22.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 322, 328.
23.  Ibid. p. 332. Langlois, "Notes sur ľhistoire du cinema," La Revue du cinema, July 1948, vol. Ill, no. 15:10.
24.  Quoted by Barděche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, p. 10.
25.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, p. 332.
26.  Ibid. pp. 102, 201; esp. 205.
27.  Ibid. pp. 324-6.
28.  For Mélies's technical innovations, see Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinema, pp. 52-70.
29.  Langlois, "Notes sur ľhistoire du cinema," La Revue du cinema, July 1948, vol. Ill, no. 15:5.
30.  Sadoul, op. cit. pp. 154,166.
31.  Sadoul, VInvention du cinema, pp. 330-31.
32.  Cf. Meyerhoff, Tonfilm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 13, 22.
33- Clair, Reflexion faxte, p. 96; he made this statement in 1924.
34.  Ibid. p. 150.
35.  Vuillermoz, "Realisme et expressionisme," Cinema (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, pp. 78-9.
36.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 240.
37.  Berge, "Interview de Blaise Cendrars sur le cinema," Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, p. 141. For the problems involved in the staging of actuality, see also Mauriac, VAmour au cinéma, p. 36, and Obraszow, "Film und Theater," in Von der Filmidee zum Drehbuch, p. 54.
38.  Scheffauer, "The Viviřying of Space," The Freeman, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1920.
39.  Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 181-2.
40.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 68.
318
NOTES
CHAPTER 3
1.  Quoted by Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 119.
2.  "Core of the Movie—the Chase," The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 29,1950. (An interview with Mr. Alfred Hitchcock.)
3.  See Langlois, "Notes sur ľhistoire du cinema," La Revue du cinema, July 1948, vol. IH, no. 15:6. Sadoul, LesPionniers du cinema, pp. 264-5.
4.  Rosenheimer, "They Make Documentaries . . . ," Film News, April 1946, vol.7, no. 6:10. (An interview with Robert J. Flaherty.)
5.  Knight, "Dancing in Films," Dance Index, 1947, vol. VI, no. 8:195; see also 185-6, 193. Among the best-known Astaire films are Top Hat and Swing Time.
6.  Rotha, The Film Till Now, p. 370. Cf. Dard, Väleur humaine du cinema,
p-17.
7.  Cf. Arnheim, Film, p. 121.
8.  Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 189.
9.  Léger, "A New Realism—The Object," The Little Review, 1926, p. 7.
10.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes d'une philosophic du cinema, p. 100.
11.  Quoted by Henry, "Le film francais/' Cinema (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, pp. 197-8.
12.  Doniol-Valcroze and Bazin, "Conversation with Bunuel/' Sight and Sound, Spring 1955, vol. 24, no. 4:185.
13.  Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 103. Referring to the close-up of Annie Lee, Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinema, pp. 555-7, compares Griffith's approach with that of Méliěs.
14.  See Jacobs, op. cit. p. 197, and Pudovkin, Firm Technique and Film Acting, part I, pp. 118-19.
15.  Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 238. Similarly, Pudovkin, op. cit. part I, p. 65.
16.  Eisenstein, op. cit. p. 238.
17.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, pp. 978-9. (Translation by
C.K.Scott Moncrieff.)
18.  Benjamin, "L'Oeuvre d'art ä ľépoque de sa reproduction mécanisée/' Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 1936, vol. V, no. 1:59-60.
19.  Pudovkin, Film Technique andFilm Acting, part I, pp. 60-61.
20.  See Tyler, "The Film Sense and the Painting Sense," Art Digest, Feb. 15,
1954, p. 27.
21.  Benjamin, "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 1939, vol. VIII, nos. 1-2:59-60, 64-7,68 n.
22.  Cf. Faure, "Cinema," in Le Role intellectuel du cinema, pp. 220-21.
23.  Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinema, pp. 414-15.
24.  Cf. Benjamin, "L'Oeuvre d'art . . . /' Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 1936, vol. V, no. 1:65 n.
25.  See Epstein, Cinema, Paris, 1921, pp. 99-100.
NOTES                                                         319
26.  Pudovkin, op. cit. part I, pp. 53-4. See also Wright, "Handling the Camera," in Davy, ed., Footnotes to the Film, p. 49.
27.  Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes . . . , pp. 117, 123-4, identifies the sequence long shot—close shot—long shot, etc. as a typically scientific procedure.
28.  So Alexandre Arnoux, as quoted by Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 103.
29.  Aragon, "Painting and Reality: A Discussion," transition, 1936, no. 25:98.
30.  Epstein, "The Reality of Fairyland," in Bachmann, ed., Jean Epstein, 1897-1953; Cinemages, no. 2:44. For slow-motion pictures, see also Rotha, The Film Till Now, p. 370; Pudovkin, op. cit. part I, p. 153; Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art . . . , p. 47.
31.  Cf. Epstein, Le cinématographe vu de l'Etna, p. 18; Deren, op. cit. p. 46.
32.  Maddison, "Le cinema et Information mentale des peuples primitives," Revue internationale de filmologie, 1948, vol. I, nos. 3-4:307-8.
33.  See Kracauer, "Jean Vigo," Hollywood Quarterly, April 1947, vol. II, no. 3:262.
34.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, pp. 630-31. (Translation by C.K.Scott Moncrieff.)
35.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 77. (The quote dates from 1924.) See also Rotha, The Film Till Now, pp. 367-8.
36.  Cf., for instance, Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, p. 120.
37.  Cf. Bachmann, "The Films of Luis Bunuel," Cinemages, no. 1.
38.  Quoted from Laŕfay, "Les grands thěmes de ľécran," La Revue du cinéma, April 1948, vol. II, no. 12:13. Cf. the reviews of the French film, We Are All Murderers, in The New York Times, Jan. 9, 1957; New York Post, Jan. 9, 1957; and Cue, Jam 12, 1957. The reviewers unanimously praise this film about capital punishment in France for its grim realism and "pitiless candor" (N.Y. Times); and all of them clearly imply that it falls to the cinema to show horrors as they really are.
39.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 194-6. For an adequate rendering of such special modes of reality film makers may also have to draw on pictures belonging to "reality of another dimension."
CHAPTER 4
1.  Stern, "D. W. Griffith and the Movies," The American Mercury, March 1944, vol. LXVIII, no. 303:318-19.
2.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 69-70.
3.  Cf. Kracauer, "Silent Film Comedy," Sight and Sound, Aug.-Sept. 1951, vol. 21, no. 1:31.
320
NOTES
4.  Eisenstein, FÜm Form, p. 199.
5.  Leget, "A propos du cinéma," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du cinémat- <-
ographe, p. 540.
6.  Laffay, "Les grands thěmes de ľécran," La Revue du cinéma, April 1948,
vol. II, no. 12:7,9-10.
7.  Kracauer, From Caligarí to Hitler, p. 185. For Vertóv, see also Rotha, The
Film Till Now, p. 246.
8.  Cf. Rotha, ibid. pp. 364-5.
9.  Laffay, op. cit. pp. 10-11.
10.  Cohen-Séat, Essdi sur les principes . . . , p. 100.
11.  Cf. Tyler, "The Film Sense and the Painting Sense," Art Digest, Feb. 15,
1954, p. 12.
12.  Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 99,103-5,106.
13.  Sěve, "Cinéma et métnode," Revue internationale de filmologie, July-Aug. 1947, vol. I, no. 1:45; see also 30-31.
14.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Füm Acting, part I, p. 140.
15.  Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l'Etna, p. 13.
16.  Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 64-8.
17.  Scheffauer, "The Vivifying of Space," The Freeman, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1920. See also Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 106. Rotha, The Film Till Nov, p. 365,.characterizes Feyder's Therese Raquin as a film in which content grows out of images indulging in "subtle indirect suggestion."
18.  Eisenstein, op. cit. p. 199.
19.  Benjamin, "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung 1939, vol. VIII, nos. 1-2:60 n., 67, 88.
20.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 121.
CHAPTER 5
1.  Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:37.
2.  Laffay, "Les grands themes de ľécran," La Revue du cinéma, April 1948, vol. II, no. 12:8.
3.  Cited from Faure, VArbre ďEden, 1922, by Mauriac, Ľ Amour du cinéma, p. 213. Morin, Le Cinéma ou Vhomme imaginaire, p. 68, also refers to
Faure's idea.
4.  Dreville, "Documentation: the Basis of Cinematography," Close Up, Sept.
1930, vol. VII, no. 3:206.
5.  Cf. Rotha, The Füm Till Now, p. 377.
6.  T., H.H., "The Screen: 'Emperor and Golem,'" The New York Times,
Jan. 10,1955.
NOTES
321
7.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 79. Lindgren, The Art of the Film, p. 45, expresses himself in similar terms. There are exceptions, though. For instance, Ob-raszow, "Fiim and Theater," in Von der Filmtdee zum Drehbuch, pp. 57-8, blames fantasy for being incompatible with the medium.
8.  Pierre-Quint, "Signification du cinéma," L'Art cinématographique, 1927, vol. II, p. 24. Among the recent champions of this doctrine is Kyrou, Le Surrealisme au cinéma, passim.
9.  Cf. Johnson, "The Tenth Muse in San Francisco," Sight and Sound, Jan.-March 1955, vol. 24, no. 3:154.
10.  Gibbon, The Red Shoes Ballet, p. 12.
11.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 61-76.
12.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 38. (This statement dates from 1922.)
13.  Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 203.
14.  Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. 1, no. 1:38.
15.  Neergaard, Carl Dreyer . . . , p. 29. (Translation by Marianne Helweg.)
16.  See Clair, op. cit. p. 24.
17.  Cf. Huff, Charlie Chaplin, p. 112.
18.  Ibid. p. 133.
19.  Cf. Kracauer, op. cit. pp. 77-9.
20.  Cf. Lindgren, The AH of the Film, p. 28.
21.  Cavalcanti, "Comedies and Cartoons," in Davy, ed., Footnotes to the Film, pp. 77-8, points to the near-documentary character of silent film comedy and its little dependence on cutting for pace.
22.  NichoII, Firm and Theatre, p. 169; see also p. 93.
23.  Quoted from Balázs,Der sichtbare Mensch, pp. 46-7.
24.  Neergaard, Carl Dreyer . . . , p. 27. (Translation by Marianne Helweg.)
25.  Ibid. p. 30.
26.  Griffith, "The Film Since Then," in Rotha, The Füm Till Now, p. 604.
27.  Neergaard, op. cit. pp. 27-8.
28.  Sadoul, Histoire ďun art, p. 180.
CHAPTER 6
1.  See, for instance, Lindgren, The Art of the Film, pp. 156-7; Barbaro, "Le cinéma sans acteurs," in Le Role intellectuel du cinéma, p. 227; Barjavel, Cinéma total . . . ,p. 81.
2.  Quoted by Lyons, "The Lyons Den," New York Post, June 5,1950.
3.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 187.
4.  "Film Crasher Hitchcock," Cue, May 19,1951.
5.  Cf. Barjavel, op. cit. pp. 84-5-
322                                                         NOTES
6.  Clair, op. cit. p. 187.
7.  Quoted by Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 143, from Pudovkin, "Acting— The Cinema v. the Theatre," The Criterion, vol. VIII, no. 1.
8.  Sachs, "Film Psychology," Close Up, Nov. 1928, vol. HI, no. 5:9.
9.  Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 192.
10.  Rossellini, "Dix ans de cinema (I)," Cahiers du cinema, Aug.-Sept. 1955, vol. IX, no. 50:9. See also Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, pp. 55-6.
11.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part I, p. 109.
12.  Cf. Cooke, Douglas Fairbanks, p. 6.
13.  Barjavel, Cinema total . . . , p. 81.
14.  Cited by Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 149. See also Rotha, The Film TillNow, p. 363.
15.  Quoted by Marie Epstein, "Biographical Notes," in Bachmann, ed., Jean Epstein, 1897-1953; Cinemages, no. 2:8.
16.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 175.
17.  Chiaromonte, "Rome Letter: Italian Movies," Partisan Review, June 1944, vol. XVI, no. 6:628.
18.  Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 148. See also Nicholl, Film and Theatre, p. 172.
19.  Reynolds, Leave It to the People, p. 147.
20.  Miles, "Are Actors Necessary?" Documentary News Letter, April 1941> vol. 2, no. 4:71.
21.  Rossellini, "Dix ans de cinema (I)," Cahiers du cinema, Aug.-Sept. 1955, vol. IX, no. 50:9.
22.  Chiaromonte, op. cit. p. 623.
23.  Zinnemann, "On Using Non-Actors in Pictures," The New York Times, Jan. 8,1950.
24.  Ferguson, "Life Goes to the Pictures," films. Spring 1940, vol. 1, no. 2:22.
CHAPTER 7
1.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 141. (A statement of 1928.)
2.  Cf. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 205.
3.  Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 257-9.
4.  Clair, op. cit. p. 116.
5.  See, for instance, Charensol, "Le cinema parlant," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du cinematögraphe,j>. 170; Adler, Art and Prudence . . . , p. 541; Lindgren, The Art of the Film, p. 106.
6.  Clair, op. cit. p. 43.
7.  Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:29.
MOTES                                                   323
8.  See Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 77. Leech, "Dialogue for Stage and Screen," The Penguin Film Review, April 1948, no. 6:100, likewise rejects stage dialogue because "the epigrams, the patterned responses, the set speeches need the ceremonial ambiance of the playhouse and the living presence of the player . . ."
9.  Barjavel, Cinema total . . . , p. 29, remarks that the imagination of the spectator watching a dialogue film "builds from the words showered down on him and replaces the images on the screen by those which the dialogue suggests to him." See also Clair, Reflexion faite, pp. 146, 150, 158, 188.
10.  Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.-Feb. 1947, vol. I, no. 3:9.
11.  Nicholl, Film and Theatre, pp. 178-80.
12.  Cf. Balázs, "Das Drehbuch oder Filmszenarium," in Von der Filmidee zum Drehbuch, p. 77.
13.  For instance, Balázs, ibid. pp. 76-7; Arnheim, Film, p. 213; Leech, op. cit. pp. 99-101.
14.  Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:31.
15.  Cf. Meyerhoff, Tonfilm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 75-6; Arnheim, Film, p. 213.
16.  Ruskin, Praeterita, p. 106.
17.  Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary, pp. 115-16.
18.  I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Knight for having this film brought to my attention.
19.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part L pp. 157-8.
20.  Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing, pp. 278-9.
21.  Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 258. Cf. also Pudovkin, op. cit. p. 143.
22.  Pudovkin, ibid. p. 157.
23.  Arnheim, Film, p. 251, cautioned against this confusion as early as 1930.
24.  For instance, Reisz, op. cit. passim.
25.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part I, pp. 159-60; part II, pp. 86-7.
26.  Griffith, "Documentary Film Since 1939 • . ■ ," in Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 332, has it that the Canadian World in Action films followed a pattern which "already existed in the form of the March of Time . . ."
27.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 220.
28.  Knight, The Liveliest Art . . . , p. 178, observes that some of Hitchcock's "surprise effects on the sound track . . . such as the woman's scream in Tfte 39 Steps that merges with a shriek of a locomotive's whistle, have become classics in the field."
29.  Clair, Reflexion fdite, p. 159.
30.  Cf. Arnheim, Film, p. 267.
31.  Cf. Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.-Feb. 1947, vol. 1, no. 3:16.
32.  See Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:36-7.
33.  Ibid. p. 37.
34.  So Clair in 1929; see his Reflexion faite, p. 145.
35.  Quoted by MacDonald, "The Soviet Cinema: 1930-1938," Partisan Review, July 1938, vol. V, no. 2:46.
36.  Clair, op. cit. p. 145.
37.  Huff, Charlie Chaplin, pp. 256,258.
324
NOTES
38.  Rosenheimer, "They Make Documentaries . . . ," Film News, April 1946, vol. 7, no. 6:10, 23. At the beginning of the sound era, Walter Ruttmann in his Melody of the World delighted in recording the din of traffic, the screech of a saw. These reproductions were as many discoveries.
39.  Epstein, "Sound in Slow Motion," in Bachmann, ed., Jean Epstein, 1897-1953; Cinemages, no. 2:44.
40.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 152.
41.  Ibid. p. 152.
42.  Rosenheimer, op. cit. p. 23.
43.  Cf. Lindgren, The Art of the Film, pp. 104-5.
CHAPTER 8
1.  Lindgren, The Art of the Film, p. 141, mentions that, "when the Lumiěre films were shown at the first public exhibition in this country [England] in February 1896, they were accompanied by piano improvisations on popular tunes." See also Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:25.
2.  Sadoul, LesPionniers du cinema, p. 485.
3.  London, Fi7m Music, pp. 27-8. Cavalcanti, op. cit. p. 27.
4.  Landis and Bolles, Textbook of Abnormal Psychology, p. 68.
5.  Cf. Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 75.
6.  Murphy, Personality . . . , p. 115 n. See also Meyerhoff, Tonfilm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 63ff.
7.  Eisler, op. cit. p. 78. Cf. Vuillermoz, "La musique des images," L'Art cinématographiqúe, vol. HI, pp. 47-8, and Lindgren, op. cit. pp. 144-5.
8.  Epstein, Cinema, p. 106; Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, p-143.
9.  Cavalcanti, op. cit. p. 39.
10.  Copland, "Tip to Moviegoers . . . ," The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 6.1949.
11.  Dahl, "Igor Stravinsky on Film Music," Cinema, June 1947, vol. 1, no. 1:8.
12.  Mr. Paul Rotha tentatively advanced this interesting assumption in a personal discussion with me.
13.  Lindgren, The Art of theFUm, p. 141.
14.  Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 69.
15.  Miláno, "Music in the Film . . . ," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Cňticism, Spring 1941, no. 1:91.
16.  Copland, op. cit.
17.  Cf. Lindgren, op. cit. p. 147.
NOTES
325
18.  See Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art . . . , p. 40. Of course, such familiar melodies or visual cliches may be justified as short cuts in cases in which, were it not for their intervention, clumsy elaborations would be needed to advance the action.
19.  Example volunteered by Marc Blitzstein in "Music in Films: A Symposium of Composers," films, 1940, vol. 1, no. 4:10.
20.  Copland, "Tip to Moviegoers . . . ," The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 6,1949.
21.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part I, pp. 162,164-5.
22.  London, Film Music, p. 135.
23.  Lindgren, The Art of the Film, p. 146.
24.  Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 70.
25.  Copland, op. cit.
26.  Miláno, "Music in the Film . . . ," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Spring 1941, no. 1:90.
27.  Sargeant, "Music for Murder," The New Yorker, Oct. 30,1954.
28.  Cavalcanti, "Sound in Films," films, Nov. 1939, vol. I, no. 1:36.
29.  Cf. Griffith, "The Film Since Then," in Rotha, The Film Till Now, pp. 443-4,478.
30.  Think of such musicals as On the Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Les Girls, etc.
31.  Knight, "Dancing in Films," Dance Index, 1947, vol. VI, no. 8:193.
32.  Eisler, Composing for the Films, pp. 73-4.
33.  Cited by Benjamin, "L'oeuvre d'art . . . ," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialfor-schung, 1936-7, vol. V, no. 1:50-51, from a digest in Lu, Paris, Nov. 15, 1935, of Franz Werfeľs article, "-Ein Sommernachtstraum: Ein Film von Shakespeare und Reinhardt," Neues Wiener Journal. Eisler, op. cit. pp. 72-3, quotes this passage from Benjamin.
34.  Cf. Erskine. "On Turning an Opera into a Film," The New York Times, Feb. 4,1940.
CHAPTER 9
1.  Clair, Reflexion faite, pp. 111-12.
2.  For instance, Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes . . . , p. 92, assumes a continuity of effect, optimistically arguing that words, it is true, may partly "sterilize" the images but are powerless to overwhelm them.
3.  Clair, op. cit. p. 112.
4.  Wallon, "L'acte perceptif et Ie cinema," Revue internationale de ßmolo-gie, April-June 1953, vol. IV, no. 13:107.
326
NOTES
5.  Quoted by Meyerhoff, Tonfilm und Wirklichkeit, p. 39, from Fr. Copei, "Psychologische Fragenzur Filmgestaltung," Film und Bild, 1944, Jahrgang 10, nos. 9-12.
6.  Cohen-Séat, op. cit. pp. 154-5.
7.  Barjavel, Cinéma total, p. 68, expresses ^himself in similar terms: "In the theater the spectator attends the spectacle. In the cinema he incorporates himself into it." See also Licart, Theatre et cinéma: Psychologie du spec-tateur, passim; especially pp. 19, 20, 57. Licart discusses at length the different psychological effects of stage and screen, summarizing them graphically in two picturesque diagrams. The small volume is a curious mixture of shrewd and quaint observations. On the one hand, Licart fully acknowledges the cinema's unique impact on the senses; on the other, he frowns on it because of its alleged failure to "enrich" the mind (p. 57). This verdict is visibly in keeping with his exclusive devotion to the theater and traditional culture.
8.  Wallon, op. cit. p. 110.
9.  For the effects of darkness, see Mauerhofer, "Psychology of Film Experience," The Penguin Film Review, Jan. 1949, no. 8:103; Clair, op. cit. p. Ill; Barjavel, op. cit. p. 68.
10.  For references to the dragging effect of the cinema, see Maugé, "Qu'avez-vous appris au cinéma?" Du cinéma, May 1929, Série I, no. 3; Cranston, "The Prefabricated Daydream," The Penguin Film Review, 1949, no. 9:27; Epstein, Cinéma, p. 103; Wallon, "De quelques problěmes psycho-physi-ologiques que pose le cinema," Revue internationale de filmologie, July-Aug. 1947, vol. I, no. 1:16.
11.  Epstein, op. cit. p. 107; Wallon, op. cit. p. 16.
12.  The hypnotic power of films is frequently mentioned and commented upon. See, for instance, Meyer Levin, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," in Cooke, ed., Garbo and the Night Watchman, pp. 124-6; L'Herbier, "Puissance de ľécran," in Ford, ed., Bréviaire du cinéma, p. 76; Epstein, Cinéma, p. 107; Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes ... r p. 28; Quesnoy, Littérature et cinéma (Le Rouge et le Noir: Les essais, no. 9), p. 31.
13.  Cf. L'Herbier, op. cit. p. 76.
14.  See MacDonald, "The Soviet Cinema: 1930-1938," Partisan Review, July 1938, vol. V, no. 2:40; Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part II, p. 44.
15.  Hardy, ed., Grierson on "Documentary, p. 77.
16.  Waddington, "Two Conversations with Pudovkin," Sigftt and Sound, Winter 1948-9, vol. 17, no. 68:161.
17.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 284, and Kracauer, "The Conquest of Europe on the Screen," Social Research, Sept. 1943, vol. 10, no. 3: passim.
18.  Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 280.
19.  Cf. Rotha, Documentary Film, pp. 176,195-6.
20.  Kracauer, op. cit. p. 297.
21.  Rotha, op. cit. p. 58.
22.  Marcel, "Possibilités et limites de ľart cinématographique," Revue internationale de filmologie, July-Dec. 1954, vol. V, nos. 18-19:171. See also Meyerhoff, Tonßm und Wirklichkeit, pp. 81-2.
;/                                           NOTES                                                        327
23.  Leboyici, "Psychanalyse et cinéma," Revue internationale de filmologie, vql^íLno.5:54.
24.  Mauerhofer, "Psychology of Film Experience," The Penguin Film Review, Jaii. 1949, no. 8:107, says: "Film experience supplies countless people with
acceptable material for their daydreams . . ." In their Movies; A Psycho-/lögical Study, Wolfenstein and Leites stress throughout the daydream // character of films.
^25. This term, which of course applies to all centers of film production, even emerges in the titles of two books, Die Traumfabrik: Chronik des Films (Berlin, 1931) by Ilja Ehrenburg, a piece of tendentious, if clever, journalism, and Hollywood: The Dream Factory (Boston, 1950) by Hortense Powdermaker.
26.  See Kracauer, "National Types as Hollywood Presents Them," Tfte Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 1949, vol. 13, no. 1:72.
27.  Sěve, "Cinéma et méthode," Revue internationale de filmólogie, July-Aug. 1947, vol. I, no. 1:45-6.
28- Dard, Valeur humaine du cinéma, p. 10.
29.  Berge, "Interview de Blaise Cenďrars sur le cinéma," Cinéma (Les cahiers dumoivl6/17), 1925, p. 140.
30.  Cf. Schachtel, "On Memory and Childhood Amnesia" Psychiatry, Feb. 1947, vol. X, no. 1, passim.
31.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Der Ersatz fuer Traeume," in his Die Berueh-rung der Sphaeren, passim.
32.  For the relations between audience desires and film content in the Germany of thelate 'twenties, see Kracauer, "Derheutige Film und sein Publikum," Frankfurter Zeitung, Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 1928.
33.  Pordes, Das Lichtspiel: Wesen—Dramaturgie—Regie, p. 22.
34- Beucler, "L'homme cinéma," La Revue du cinéma, Nov. 1, 1930, vol. II, no. 10:20.
35.  For further details of the research design, see Wilhelm, Die Auftriebswirk-ung des Films, pp. 6-9.
36.  Ibid. pp. 19, 33, 34, 35.
37.  Ibid. p. 47-
38.  Chaperot, "Henri Chomette: Le poěme d'images et le film parle," La Revue du cinema, Aug. 1,1930, vol. II, no. 13:28.
39.  Hofmannsthal, op. cit. p. 267.
40.  Wilhelm, op. cit. p. 22.
328
NOTES
CHAPTER 10
1.  Maurois, "La poesie du cinéma," Vart cinématographique, 1927, vol. Ill, pp. 34-5.
2.  Seve, "Cinema et méthode," Revue internationale de ßmologie, Sept-Oct. 1947, vol. I, no. 2:172-3, and ibid. Oct. 1948, vol. I, nos, 3-4:352-3. See also Caveing, "Dialectique du concept du cinéma," ibid. Oct. 1948, vol. I, nos. 3-4:348. Valéry, "Le cinéma," in Les techniques au service de la tiensée, pp. 161-2, too feels uneasy about the story film which he considers an awkward mixture of fiction and observation.
3.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 68 n.
4.  See Mekas, "The Experimental Film in America," Film Culture, May-June 1955, vol. L no. 3:16, and Knight, The Liveliest Art, pp. 278-85.
5.  Epstein, "Le sens 1 bis," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du cinématographe,
p. 259.
6.  Dulac. "La cinégraphie integrale," in Lapierre, ed., Anthologie du cinéma,
pp. 159-60.
7.  See Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinéma, p. 541.
8.  Cf. Brunius, "Experimental Film in France," in Manvell, ed., Experiment in the Film, pp. 68, 84-5.
9.  See Dulac, "Le cinéma d'avant-garde," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du
cinématographe, pp. 346-7.
10.  Clair, R^exion fdiŕe, p. 53.
11.  Dulac, op. cit. p. 348. According to Brunius, op. cit. p. 97, a 1924 screening of forgotten old science films at the Vieux Colombier, the famous Paris avant-garde moviehouse, greatly stimulated the trend in favor of documentaries. Cf. also Dulac, "L'essence du cinéma: Ľidée visuelle," in Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, p. 62.
12.  Brunius, op. cit. p. 69.
13.  Ibid. p. 95.
14.  Barděche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, p. 243. (Translated by Iris Barry.)
15.  Clair, Reflexion fäite, p. 78.
16.  Quoted by Brunius, op. cit. p. 71.
17.  Chaperot, "Henri Chomette: Le poéme d'images et le film parle," La Revue du cinéma, Aug. 1,1930, vol. 2, no. 13:29.
18.  Dulac, "L'essence du cinéma: Ľidée visuelle," Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, pp. 65-6.
19.  Dulac, "La cinégraphie integrale," in Lapierre, ed., Anŕhoíogie du cinéma,
p. 165.
20.  Dulac, ibid. p. 165.
21.  Iris Barry, Film Notes . . . ,p. 47.
22.  Cf. ibid. p. 47.
NOTES
329
23.  Quoted by Richter, Avantgarde: History and Dates . . . , p. 5. I am indebted to Mr. Hans Richter for having put at my disposal a copy of this unpublished manuscript.
24.  See Mekas, "The Experimental Film in America," Film Culture, May-June 1955, vol. I, no. 3:18, and Knight, "Self-Expression," The Saturday Review of Literature, May 27,1950.
25.  Cf. Mekas, op. cit. passim; Knight, op. cit. passim, and his The Liveliest Art, pp. 280-85; Jacobs, "Avant-Garde Production in America," in Man-veil, ed., Experiment in the Film, passim.
26.  Dard, Valeur humaine du cinéma, p. 11.
27.  Artaud, "The Shell and the Clergyman: Film Scenario," transition, June 1930, nos. 19-20:63.
28.  Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art . . . ,p. 46.
29.  Artaud, op. cit. p. 65.
30.  Quoted from "Sang ďun poete (Le)," Film Society Programmes, April 2, 1933.
31.  Allendy, "La valeur psychologique de ľimage," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du cinématographe, p. 318. (First published in 1926.) In the same year 1926 appeared the Pabst film, The Secrets of a Soul, whose dream sequences seemed to implement Dr. Allendy's idea. But their semblance of surrealism is deceptive, if only for the reason that they form part of a story which could not be more realistic.
32.  Poisson, "Cinéma et psychanalyse," Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, p. 175.
33.  Brunius, "Experimental Film in France," in Manvell, ed., Experiment in the Film, p. 100.
34.  Morrison, "The French Avant-Garde: The Last Stage," Sequence, Winter 1948/9, no. 6:33. Wallis, "The Blood of a Poet," Kenyon Review, Winter 1944, vol. 6, no. 1, passim, goes still far beyond Morrison in reading symbolic meanings into the Cocteau film.
35.  Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet: A Film by Jean Cocteau, p. 51. (Translated by Lily Pons.)
36.  Richter, "The Avant-Garde Film Seen from Within," Hollywood Quarterly, Fall 1949, vol. IV, p. 38.
37.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 107.
38.  Cf. Brunius, op. cit. pp. 102-5; Knight, The Liveliest Art, pp. 108-9.
t.
330
NOTES
CHAPTER II
1.  Read, "The Film on Art as Documentary," FUm Culture, Oct. 1957, vol. Ill, no. 3:6.
2.  Cf. Rotha, Documentary FUm, pp. 88,117.
3.  Ibid. p. 123.
4.  For sociological comment on the typical U.S. newsreel, see Kracauer and Lyford, "A Duck Crosses Main Street," The New Republic, Dec. 13, 1948, and Meltzer, "Are Newsreels News?" Hollywood Quarterly, April 1947, vol.
II, no. 3.
5.  Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, p. 202, means precisely this, but be is interested only in what happens to a painting if it is shown on the screen. "Pictorial superpositions," he argues, "are more effective on a projection screen than on paper or on canvas, because in a painting or drawing the visible flatness of the ground plane will counteract the three-dimensionality of the pattern."
6.  Cf., for instance, Tyler, "The Film Sense and the Painting Sense," Art
Digest, Feb. 15,1954, p. 10.
7.  Read, "The Film on Art as Documentary," Film Culture, Oct. 1957, vol.
III, no. 3:7.
8.  Tyler, op. cit. p. 12.
9.  Ibid. p. 12.
10.  So Herbert Matter's film, Works of Calder, and the Calder episode of Hans Richter's Dreams That Money Can Buy.
11.  Bolen, "Films and the Visual Arts," in Bolen, ed., Fiíms on Art; Panorama 1953. (Translated from the French edition of this UNESCO publication, p. 6.)
12.  Ibid.
13.  Read, op. cit. p. 7.
14.  Tyler, op. cit. p. 12.
15.  Cf. Iris Barry, "The Film of Fact," Town 6- Country, Sept. 1946, vol. 100, no. 4288:253-4.
16.  Greene, "Nutrition," in Cooke, ed., Garbo and the Night Watchman, p.
228.
17.  Ivens, "Borinage—A Documentary Experience," Film Culture, 1956, vol.
II, no. 1:9.
18.  Reynolds, Leave It to the People, p. 144.
19.  Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, p. 357. Pudovkin, FiZm Technique and Film Acting, part I, pp. 133-34, also claims that nature should be adjusted, or indeed subordinated, to the film maker's compositional designs.
20.  Grierson says of Flaherty that his "screen is ... a magical opening in the theater wall, through which one may look out to the wide world . . ." Quoted from Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary, p. 60.
NOTES                                                   331
21.  Rotha, "Presenting the World to the World," FUms and Fuming, April 1956, vol. 2, no. 7:17.
22.  Dyke, "How 'Valley Town' Was Made," Program Notes of Cinema 16, Jan. 1950. (Reprinted from U.S. Camera, Winter 1940.)
23.  Rotha, "It's in the Script," World Film News, Sept. 1938, vol. Ill, no. 5:205.
24- See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 182-81
25.  Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 62.
26.  See Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 175; Eisenstein, op. cit. p. 58.
27.  Quoted by Kracauer, "The Conquest of Europe on the Screen," Socioi Research, Sept. 1943, vol. 10, no. 3:347-8.
28.  Griffith, "Documentary Film Since 1939," in Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 335.   -
29.  Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary, p. 215.
30.  Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 106 n.
31.  Ibid. p. 166. n.
32.  Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary, p. 261.
33.  Rotha, op. cit. p. 142.
34.  Ibid-4). 147.
35.  Ibid. p. 18!?. Road, "Documentary Film Since 1939," in Rotha, op. cit. p. 218, likewise submits that "maybe the individual human story has been rated too low."
36.  Miles, "Are Actors Necessary?" Documentary News Letter, April 1941, vol. 2, no. 4:73.
37.  Clair, Reflexion faite, p. 53.
38.  Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art . . . , p. 80. (Translator not named.)
CHAPTER 12
1.  Cf. Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinema, p. 540.
2.  See ibid. pp. 540, 542; Langlois, "Notes sur ľhistoire du cinema," La Revue du cinema, July 1948, vol. Ill, no. 15:13-14.
3.  For this passage, see Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 9; Sadoul, op. cit. pp. 541-3, 573; Clair, "Le cinématographe contre ľesprit," in Lapierre, ed., Anthologie du cinema, pp. 175-6.
4.  Cf. Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les pňncipes . . . , pp. 94-5-
5.  See Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 321-3.
6.  Ibid. p. 548.
7.  See Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 7,14,17.
8.  Ibid. p. 92.
332                                                  MOTES
9. Ibid. p. 254. It should be noted that Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film. Acting, part I, p. 90, advances a similar opinion: "A film is only really significant when every one of its elements is firmly welded to a whole."
10.  Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, p. 115.
11.  Feyder, "Transposition visuelle," in Cinéma (Les cahiers du mois, 16/17), 1925, p. 71.
12.  Griffith, "The Film Since Then," in Rotha, The Film Till Now, p. 483, characterizes The Informer as a melodrama whose "pretentious, adolescent symbolism continued throughout the film."
13.  Quoted by Barděche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, p. 46, and Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinéma, p. 530n.
14.  Turner, "On Suspense and Other Film Matters: An Interview with Alfred Hitchcock," Films in Review, April 1950, vol. I, no. 3:22, 47.
15.  Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures," transition, 1937, no. 26:125.
16.  Quoted from Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 182.
17.  Lusk, "I Love Actresses!" New Movies, Jan. 1947, vol. XXII, no. 1:28, 30.
18.  Ferguson, "Life Goes to the Pictures," films, Spring 1940, vol. I, no. 2:21.
19.  Lewis, "Erich von Stroheim of the Movies . . . ," The New York Times, June 22,1941.
20.  Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, pp. 46-7. Cf. also Greene, "Subjects and Stories," in Davy, ed., Footnotes to the Film, p. 69, about incidental life in We from Kronstadt. Similarly, Ferguson, op. cit. passim, emphasizes the importance for films to incorporate fleeting moments of physical life.
21.  Cf. Caveing, "Dialectique du concept du cinéma," Revue internationale de ßmologie, Oct. 1948, vol. I, nos. 3-4:349-50.
22.  Rotha, "A Foreword," in Eisenstein, 1898-1948.
23.  Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 162-3.
24.  Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, pp. 74-5.
25.  Eisenstein, op. cit. p. 132.
26.  Marcel, "Possibilités et limites de ľart cinématographique," Revue internationale de ßmologie, July-Dec. 1954, vol. V, nos. 18-9:170, applies the term "useless" in this sense. See also the passage on Moby Dick in Blue-stone, Novels into Film, p. 206.
27.  Cf. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, pp. 105-6.
28.  Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, part I, p. 19, believes the Griffith chase fully to live up to the significance of the action whose climax it marks. As for Eisenstein's oblique interpretation of this standardized chase sequence, see his Film Form, pp. 234-5.
29.  Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.-Feb. 1947, vol. 1, no, 3:11.
30.  Rawnsley, "Design by Inference," The Penguin Film Review, 1949, no. 9:34. Lindgren, The Art of the Film, p. 38, expresses a similar view.
31.  Ferguson, "Hollywood's Haifa Loaf," in Cooke, ed., Garbo and the Night Watchman, p. 257.
32.  Longstreet, "Setting Back the Clock," The Screen Writer, Aug. 1945, vol. I, no. 3:12.
33.  Kronenberger, "Meet One Day, Mate the Next," PM, May 4, 1945. There was the same division of opinions on occasion of Murnau's Sunrise (1927),
NOTES                                                         333
with some critics enjoying the film's loose composition and others complaining about its lack of consistency.
34.  Cf. Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing, pp. 24-5; Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, pp. Ill, 199.
35.  Jacobs, ibid. pp. 185, 192.
CHAPTER 13
1.  Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 45.
2.  Ibid. p. 45. Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art ... , pp. 60, 74, too considers the story something like a necessary evil.
3.  Forster, op. cit. p. 133.
4.  Ibid. p. 55.
5.  Ibid. p. 55.
6.  Ibid. p. 118.
7.  Ibid. p. 118.
8.  Ibid. p. 142.
9.  Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans, passim.
10.  Förster, op. cit. p. 145.
11.  Ibid. p. 152.
12.  Souriau, "Filmologie et esthétique comparée," Revue internationale de ßmologie, April-June 1952, vol. Ill, no. 10:125-8.
13.  Ibid. pp. 129-30.
14.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, pp. 459ff. (Translation by CK. Scott Moncrieff.)                                                                        y
15.  Ibid. vol. I, pp. 543-45.
16.  Cf. Lefranc, "Radiguet et Stendhal ä ľécran," in Astre, ed., Cinéma et Toman,-pp. 170-72.
17.  Bluestone, Novels into Film. pp. 152-61, 163.
18.  Ibid. p. 164.
19.  Quoted by Moskowitz, " 'Gervaise': from Zola to Clement," The New York Times, Dec. 8,1957.
20.  This point is made by both Moskowitz, ibid., and Croce, "Gervaise," Film Culture, Dec. 1957, vol. Ill, no. 5.
21.  Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 488. (Translated by Willard R. Trask )
22.  Ibid. p. 547.
23.  Marcel, "Possibilités et limites de ľart cinématographique," Revue internationale deßmologie, July-Dec. 1954, vol. V, nos. 18-9:168-9.
334
NOTES
CHAPTER 14
1.  Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 106.
2.  Quoted by Rosenheimer, "They Make Documentaries . . . ," Film News, April 1946, vol. 7, no. 6:9.
3.  Flaherty's words. Quoted by Rosenheimer, ibid. p. 23.
4.  See, for instance, Grierson, "Robert Flaherty: An Appreciation," The New York Times, July 29, 1951; Rotha, op. cit. p. 107; Manvell, Film, p. 84.
5.  So Grierson, op. cit.
6; Quoted by Rosenheimer, op. cit. p. 10.
7.  Grierson, op. cit. (His italics.)
8.  Goodman, !<Pioneeťs Return . . . ," The New York Times, Aug. 31,1947.
9.  Jacobs, The Rise of the American Füm, p. 173.
10.  See, for instance, "Rossellini," The New Yorker, Feb. 19, 1949, p. 25.
11.  Bachmann, "Federico Fellini: An Interview," in Hughes, ed., Film: Book I, p. 103.
12.  Rotha, "The Last Day of Summer," Sight and Sound, Autumn 1958, vol. 27, no. 6:315.
13.  Manvell, Film, p. 107.
14.  Rotha, Documentary Film, p. 195. Cf. also Road, "Documentary Film Since 1939," in Rotha, ibid. p. 250.
15.  Agee on Film, p. 299. See Road, op. cit. p. 271.
16.  Laffay, "Les grands themes de ľécran" La Revue du cinema, April 1948, vol. II, no. 12:8.
17.  Cf. Bachmann, "Federico Fellini: An Interview," in Hughes, ed., Film: Book 1, p. 97.
18.  Ibid. p. 101.
19.  Agel, "Du film en forme de chronicle," in Astre, ed., Cinema et román, p. 151.
20.  Ibid. p. 150.
21.  Ibid. p. 149. Cf. also Katulla, "Die Antwort des Moenchs: Bemerkungen zu Federico Fellini," Film 1958, vol. I, no. 2:150.
22.  Quoted by Bluestone, "An Interview with Federico Fellini," Film Culture, Oct. 1957, vol. Ill, no. 3:3.
23.  Quoted by Goodman, "Pioneer's Return . . . ," The New York Times, Aug. 31,1947.
24.  See Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.-Feb. 1947, vol.1, no. 3:11.
NOTES
335
CHAPTER 15
1.  Marcel, "Possibilités et limites de ľart cinématographique," Revue internationale de ßmologie, July-Dec. 1954, vol. V, nos. 18-19:168-9.
2.  Caillois, "Le cinéma, le meurtre et la tragédie," Revue internationale de ßmologie, vol. II, no. 5:91.
3.  Ibid. p. 91.
4.  Ibid. p. 91.
5.  SeerKracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 100-101, and passim.
6.  Quoted by Bachmann, "Federico Fellini: An Interview," in Hughes, ed., Füm: Book 1, pp. 101-2.
7.  Cf. ibid. p. 100.
8.  See Sadoul, Les Pionniers du cinéma, p. 392.
9.  Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 13.
10.  Poe, "The Mystery of Marie Rogét," in The Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 212-13.
11.  Conan Doyle, op. cit. p. 13.
12.  W. K., " 'Trade Marks' That Identify Men," The New York Times, Jan. 2> 1949, quotes Dr. Francesco Ronchese, then dermatologist in chief at Rhode Island Hospital, as saying this.
13.  See Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 150.
14.  Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, pp. 301-2.
15.  Hitchcock, "Direction," in Davy, ed., Footnotes to the Film, pp. 13-14.
16.  Agee on Film, pp. 71-2,179,295.
17.  Hitchcock, op. cit. p. 12.
18.  Knight, The Liveliest Art, p. 197.
19.  Tyler, Rashomon as Modern Art (Cinema 16 Pamphlet One).
20.  Personal communication to me.
21.  Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.~Feb. 1947, vol. l,no. 3:12.
336
NOTES
CHAPTER 16
1.  Valéry, "Cinématographe," in L'Herbier, ed., Intelligence du cinématog-raphe, p. 35.
2.  Quoted by Benjamin, "L'oeuvre ďart ä ľépoque de sa reproduction mé-canisée," Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 1936, Jahrgang V, no. 1:62, from Duhamel, Scenes de la vie future, Paris, 1930.
3.  Chiaromonto, "a note on the movies," instead, June 1948, no. 4.
4.  Nietzsche, Human, AlUToo-Human, p. 217. (Aphorism no. 234; translated by Helen Zimmern.)
5.  "Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 187.
6.  Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 77-8, 96. (Translated by W. D. Robson-Scott.)
7.  Dewey, Art As Experience, p. 340.
8.  Durkheim, Suicide, p. 169. (Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson.)
9.  Ibid. p. 169.
10.  Renan, The Future of Science, Preface, p. xviii, says: "The serious thing is that we fail to perceive a means of providing humanity in the future with a catechism that will be acceptable henceforth, except on the condition of returning to a state of credulity. Hence, it is possible that the ruin of idealistic beliefs may be fated to follow hard upon the ruin of supernatural beliefs and that the real abasement of the morality of humanity will date from the date it has seen the reality of things." (No translator named.) Written as early as 1848, UAvenir de la science was published only in 1890, when Renan added the Preface.
11.  Freud, op. cit. p. 98.
12.  Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 61, 75, 103. (Translated by Joan Riviere.)
13.  Frankel, Trie Case for Modem Man, p. 20.
14.  Cf. Toynbee, "Christianity and Civilization," in Toynbee, Civilization on Trial ..., pp. 207,209.
15.  David Riesman's term. See his book, The Lonely Crowd.
16.  Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 338.
17.  Durkheim, Suicide, p. 168. See also Dewey, op. cit. pp. 340-41.
18.  Toynbee, "Does History Repeat Itself?" in Toynbee, Civilization on Trial
. . . , p. 45.
19.  Whitehead, Science and the Modem World, p. 199.
20.  Ibid. p. 200.
21.  Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, passim; see, for instance, vol. I, pp. 15,656.
22.  Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 546. (Translated by Willard R. Trask.)
23.  Ibid. p. 552.
24.  Ibid. p. 551.
NOTES
337
25.  Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 340.
26.  Ibid. p. 343.
27.  Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 340.
28.  Ibid. p. 339.
29.  Quoted from Agel, "Du film en forme de chronicle," ih Astre, ed., Cinéma etroman, p. 155.
30.  Bachmann, "Federico Fellini: An Interview," in Hughes, ed., Firm: Booft l,p.l03.
31.  Dard, Valeur humaine du cinéma, p. 15.
32.  Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 552.
33.  Scheffauer, "The Vivifying of Space," The Freeman, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1920.
34.  Marcel, "Possibilités et limites de ľart cinématographique," Revue internationale de ßmologie, July-Dec. 1954, vol. V, nos. 18-19:164.
35.  See.<3raves, The GreekMyths, vol. I, pp. 127, 238-9.
36.  Balázs, Der Geist des Films, pp. 215-17.
37.  Dard, Valeur humaine du cinéma, p. 16.
38.  Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, Jan.-Feb. 1947, vol. 1, no. 3:27. See also Häuser, The Social History of Art, vol. II, p. 955.
39.  Sěve, "Cinéma et méthode," Revue internationale de ßmologie, July-Aug. 1947, vol. I, no. 1:46.
40.  Dekeukeleire, Le Cinéma et la pensée, p. 15. Cf. also L'Herbier, "Theatre et cinéma," in Ford, ed., Bréviaire du cinéma, p. 99.
41.  Balázs, op. cit. pp. 215-17.
42.  See, for instance, Faure, "Cinéma," in Le Role intellectual du cinéma, pp. 216-20; Hauser, op. cit, vol. II, pp. 946-8.
43.  Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary, passim.
44.  Cf. Bachmann, "Federico Fellini: An Interview," in Hughes, ed., Film: Book I, pp. 104-5.
45.  Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 552.
46.  Cf. Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes . . . , pp. 30,180-81.
47.  Laing, "Fine Fare," The New York Times, June 28, 1959. (A letter to the Screen Editor.)