The word is the world of the legitimate stage. It rings out clear from the actor’s lips, forces its way through the spacious auditorium, and reaches the ear of the most remote spectator. The gesture is drowned out in this same space; it is the handmaid of the spoken word, to which it lends corroboration and the expression of will power.

The word is an enigmatic symbol of thought. What our ear receives is a fleeting fugitive sound, almost an indifferent sequence of sounds. What our mind receives is the meaning liberated from the sound. “Death!” The meaning is clear. Remove the meaning, the sense that lies hidden in this word, and there remains nothing but a null and void sound picture: D-e-a-t-h. Make a single, insignificant change in the sound, substitute “br” for “d,” and the meaning, the sense of it, is completely changed. The word is the instrument of the mind.

As Heinrich Laube has well said, we termed the stage, while it was still in its “first, naïve period,” a Schauspiel. The word means a “play that is seen.” But the stage is neither a Schauspiel nor a Hörspiel (“a play that is heard”), as in the case of music. It is a Gedankenspiel, or “thought play.”

Those values of the stage action which we perceive through the aid of our various senses are merely symbols and forms of expression for the intellectual or spiritual values. The word itself, as a matter of fact, loses its significance as a sensual sequence of sounds, as an acoustic phenomenon completely except for a slight fragment of beauty that lies in the word as such. The distinctive earmark of the stage action is the spiritual style. And since every art fashions the soul, stage art is the spiritual soul; it depicts feelings through thoughts.

Unintellectual, obtuse, dull people do not thrill us on the stage. Dramas whose characters are peasants and the lower classes of workmen have to be embellished and doctored-up with a goodly measure of strong theatrical devices in order to be really effective. We have but to think of the efforts that have been made to arouse interest in such plays as Schönherr’s Faith and Fireside and Hauptmann’s Teamster Henschel and The Weavers.

Consequently, it is never the dark, flat levels of purely impulsive life that are sought after by the great dramatists—whoever they may be and in whatever age they may live. The great “stage people” are characterized by an abundance of spiritual wealth. Heinrich Laube was right when he said, “Mind and thought are the drama’s weapons of attack.” They are also the weapons of attack of the grand characters that stalk across the stage. Wallenstein, Faust, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet—these are the characters that are sought after by the actor, for they all enjoy the very highest of spiritual wealth.

The stage, the most perfect counterpart or reflection of mankind, embraces the three realms of life—Sensuality, Soul, Intellect. All those glorious figures are choked and convulsed by sensuality. Their paths lead away from sensuality and back, if possible, to pure intellectuality. That course goes so far that one of the very wildest of them remarks at the close of his career:

It is not mere chance, nor is it a histrionic whim on the part of the poet, that Faust abandons Gretchen and seeks and finds Helena. On this account the sensual impulses of the stage characters are the paths of error which lead up to the intellect. The great stage personages are never men of mere impulse. Thoas is not a barbarian of the senses; Tell is not a rude, crude fellow just as nature made him; Romeo is not a mere sensual seducer but a psychic visionary.

The legitimate stage strives after great, free thoughts; and characters such as Faust represent the very strongest expression of its arts.

In this excess of excelsior, however, in this defection from the wishes of this earth, lies a real danger to which not merely the poetising dilettant is apt to succumb; indeed the very greatest of German poets have at times failed to escape its intriguing peculiarity. It is the danger of the too-high, of arctic clarity, of the exclusively intellectual. The soul glows through real art like a vestal fire, pure, mild, serene. Let the flight be too hardy and too upward, and the fire goes out, art ceases, and shrewd, shivering theatrical dialectics set in.

In the case of the motion picture, the opposite takes place. The word withdraws, becomes unessential, often directly adverse to art and the canons of art. Then it is that mimicry steps out and up and becomes the bearer of the action.

If humanity had been born deaf and dumb, it would long since have perfected its mimic apparatus so completely that it would be the tool and symbol of thought. What can the gesture mean to us? Feeling that is so familiar to us that it awakens sympathy on the slightest provocation. Only that which is from the very beginning impulse within us is sensuality. Mimicry is the symbol of sensual values. The sign, the prognostic, the distinctive mark of mimic action is the sensual style. And since this art signifies the expression of the soul, the motion picture is the sensual soul. It is feeling expressed through gesture.

Consequently, an impulse that is not in everybody is not felt by everybody. This explains the failure of quite a few works. The homosexual film, for example, Anders als die Andern (“Different From Other People”) was a source of disordered loathing to those “other people.” How can we expect a healthy individual to feel the excitement of an insane person, as in Dr. Caligari, or of a pathological vampire, as in The Vampyre? And how can we expect a human being with a strong constitution to sympathize with the demented antics of a nervous wreck and feel his feelings after him, as in Nerven (“Nerves”)?

With a certainty that is growing from year to year, the film writers of to-day choose their material from such domains of feeling as have a universal and altogether human appeal. They depict the impulses of the soul, but only up to that point where the healthy feelings terminate. It is one of the wonders of peace that these impulses are common to all the peoples of the earth. The intriguing writ of the Asiatic soul becomes, in this case, clear and simple. Even the barbarian nations, the Negro, the Eskimo, the Moroccan, rejoice at the sight of our films with the joy that spells appreciation.

It seems, however, that a great motion picture cannot be built up around peoples who are impulsive and that only. The characters of Hintertreppe were impulsive; those of Scherben were lethargic and animalistic. We were moved but not convulsed. The impulse in itself, and in its isolation, is uninteresting, for it is un-psychic. We sympathize with and feel the feelings after those who display them only when the impulse is raised to a passion. If we are to be captivated, carried off our feet as it were, the action has got to be strong; it must set forth not mere wish but will, too. Those elementary passions that spring forth from sensuality—that is, from the ensemble functioning of all our senses, constitute the field of mimic portrayal. The motion picture has as its goal the great and captive passions. And characters that are bound to earth, full of soul but in the plight of the unhappy Prometheus, make up the strongest expression of the art of the motion picture.

The bow of the passions is a mighty one, great in compass and more frequently taut than not. It rises from out of the primeval abysses of nature and takes in the tenderest tremblings of the soul. Anyone who has ever seen that wonderful Goldwyn film entitled Honor Thy Mother knows that by passions I mean, not merely what is ordinarily connoted by the term, but also that calm, melancholy faith of the heart which characterizes all reverential and respectful people. Every impulse that arises in a perfectly natural way, and which cannot be separated from the heart by any power on earth, is a passion.

Everything that is an initial, original, and uninfluenced impulse is stuff for the motion picture. But just as all art moves about a certain pole, about that basic impulse which flouts reason in the exercise of the drawing force that one man has for another, and that pulls them both along toward the inescapable judgment handed down by the senses, just so does the motion picture itself obey the urge, and that with unconscious docility, to move on to the fate that finds its basis in human love, and in so doing it moves on to the highest, unexhausted, and inexhaustible goal—its eventual formation and conformation.

To such love the coldly and exclusively intellectual is alien. There is no place for the blue-stocking Helena. A lover in a motion picture who would show himself superior to the simple, unaffected ways of love would cut a ridiculous figure. The love of the moving picture strikes but few strings, and these strings are gentle. This art is not wreathed about with the roseate play of lovely thoughts. Those poets whose hearts do not overflow with an abundance of visions paint, in the motion picture, nothing more than the tiring and monotonous picture of a colorless and brutal giving and taking. But just as the great Garrick could move his audience to tears through the mere recital of the alphabet, just so can a fiery soul fill the violin of the motion picture with more nearly inner and more truly intimate notes than a soul that is halt and blind can fill the entire orchestra of the stage.

Passion is pure; it is clean. Wherever the soul is moved, and whenever it moves with the action, there is purification. But just as the legitimate stage may lose itself in the frigid chill of unanimated intellectuality, so does the motion picture run at all times the danger—if its poet is a bellowing and garrulous individual—of sinking into the fiery swamp of unanimated sensuality. When this is the case, the unwholesome passion of mere sexual perversities becomes a play of social life that is poles removed from real art. In the foul seething and turgid vapor of such degeneracy, culture is stifled, purity is unable to raise its lovely head, and what might be the hills and high places of art are converted into waste places. This disgusting drama that poisons the people is the everlasting nuisance and eternal bugbear of those who have faith enough in them to feel that the time should come when the motion picture is a proud and pure art.

We all know how matters stand: each individual has the dignity of mankind at his disposal, after all. It can never be the duty of the motion picture to use the magic song of love, such as all true poets have sung to their peoples, in order that it may drown out the vulgar street ditty with its lines of illicit passion and its refrain of indecency.

The real motion picture poet, however, the one in whose heart there vibrates and pulsates a culture that is natural to him and given him of the gods, will always be able to fill his figures with a noble and royal sensuality that shines out in bright effulgence over and beyond the flat, greedy, paralytic doings of the love that knows not inspiration and to which the staleness of everyday carrying-on is first and second nature. His soul, recruiting in the interests of human kind, will move like a storm across the hills; there will be love in its flight, and then it will settle down into calm serenity like the subdued tones of so many silvery bells.

The motion picture can delineate aristocratic characters; it can represent men and women of aristocratic souls. But when this is to be done, more must be done than to have the leading man and the leading woman don evening dress.

Those who accomplish this—the delineation of fine and fair souls—have to be great artists. Rubbish and art, discord and harmony, the inflated and the sterling, though their spheres are relatively near each other, are nevertheless separated by the wide, wide gulf that separates the dilettant from the genius. Those who are petty in the business can offer us only the empty, the hollow, the fatuous. Abundance they know not; harmony is not a part of them; they deal in deadening boredom.

Around about the love of the motion picture is stretched the bright-colored frame of the surrounding world. Its milieu is of diversified hues. It is not possible for even the legitimate stage to renounce entirely the world in which its action takes place—though Romeo and Juliet might be played to an audience recruited wholly from the slums and not lose either its fragrance or its charm. In the motion picture, the nature and the wish of the milieu signify the constant variation of the impure motive.

Let no man fancy that it would be possible to construct a great motion picture from an environment. There is, for example, the case of the French film entitled Columbus—the most abominable piece of work, incidentally, that has ever been done on the screen. The life of the great discoverer was mashed and squeezed into a mess of incoherent scenes. The one great, heart-shaking act, or action—the real experience of Columbus’s soul—was missing. In like manner, the film entitled August der Starke (“August the Strong”) went up in smoke between the baroque castles of Saxony around which the gala coaches moved in unending procession while the uniforms shone forth in all their kind of glory. In between all this revived and represented ostentation were six love scenes—a new one for each act—each of loathsome brutality—and in each of them the poet was the match-maker!

The surrounding world, the milieu, becomes the exclusive servant of the feelings. A historical film is a love action of times long since past, and never a treatise on the cultural history of that time. Schiller compressed the whole history of the Thirty Years’ War into his Wallenstein. In it Max and Thekla drift along as if on a small floating piece of ice. The legitimate stage can do that sort of thing, provided the individual that does it is a genius and has genius. But the most ingenious motion picture actor is the one whose hand forges the historical motives into a splendid yet unobtrusive frame, and places this frame about the action of the soul. He cannot count upon fidelity to history; he is lost if he endeavors to reproduce historical events. Whenever the great men of history appear in the motion picture, they have to feel great; they must display great emotions. The muse of the motion picture is anacreontic.

There is the case of Madame Recamier which was brilliantly staged by Delmont. In it Napoleon, Talma, Josephine Beauharnais, Juliette Recamier, and the people associated with them were bound together into a fate that was pure, shot through though it was with smoldering passions. We had a foreboding of the flaming forth of a dark and princely soul. Closely interwoven with the action, though detached from it for a few minutes, was a picture of Napoleon standing off on a flat elevation surrounded by a few officers. It could be seen only in the distance. A rider comes up, and then another, and then another. Each is in haste. In the valley below we catch sight of a fire; there is smoke. A certain fate that was an entity in itself, a strange and urgent fate, prevented the various pictures from becoming separated or allowed to stand out in isolated importance. The picture as a whole, the whole of the picture, cast its shadows over this scene. Napoleon, already long since made a part of the action, stood there as if to say: “Here I am. I am coming!”

The sensual motion picture knows no god. The poet of the spoken drama can convert a hut into a house, a cabin into a castle. The motion picture man builds up his houses and castles until they reach the very skies, but they remain formations of this earth. They are grand, perhaps they are beautiful; but they are never holy; they are never exalted. The divine services and mysteries of the motion picture are mere parades of brainlessness. That which is supposed to be holy leaves an unholy impression. Religiousness is dissipated into the merest emptiness. The boastful seeker after God remains a man in prayer; he gesticulates with his hands, and his hands are empty.

Priscilla Dean, whom we love very much in Germany, played in her film, The Beggar Woman of Stamboul, a charming scene of prayer. A lovely little girl knelt down and folded her hands. There was piety in the scene. But her action was a sweet, imitated, childlike gesture, while in her little head there was no room for the superhuman picture of the creator.

“But why nothing but sensuality?” you ask me. The answer is easy: it is utterly impossible to photograph an idea. One should never try to project the invisible land of dream or wish on the screen, for such a land is the creation of the brain. Experiments of this kind have been made often enough—naturally in Germany. But every single one was a failure, for the idea thus treated becomes even more cold and bloodless than on the legitimate stage. One cannot catch up an idea through the medium of faint and feeble symbols. Moreover, the road that affects to point to the place where ideas are translated to the hearts of men leads in reality to an infinity of texts, to a surrogate of the intellect. Let us be modest, for the domain of the film is rich enough as it is, and the man who creates exclusively from the abundance of things seen, from visions as it were, will never exhaust the fountainhead.

But there is a gap in this sphere of sensuality; there is an empty place in the field in question. Those silent heroes who have turned away from the world, and behind whom and back of whom there lie struggle and passion, step out from the world of sensuality, in which they have become and remained mute, into the realm of spirituality. This land is open to them to the uttermost end of its compass, indeed down to and up to the point where they see God; where they have forebodings and premonitions of God that are the equivalents of acquirement. No thought that is felt is foreign to them. But they do not speak of the visions they have had; every word from their lips would be profane; it would be a matter of desecration. The great, strange, lonely figures of the motion picture, back of whose brain the thought shines forth, are not to be understood through thought. They are to be felt, not thought. They are not to be conceived of as wise men and prophets; they are brooders and sufferers.

One would have to, and one might, write a Christus film that is apathetic and undramatic: Christus the man, making a pilgrimage over the Earth, a stranger, unapproachable, silent, immediate, unknown, not understood. Such a film could be made a vast deal more effective than a Christus drama on the spoken stage. For on the stage the Christus dare not remain silent. He would have to appear as a speaker. The humble carpenter’s son would have to pass before us, and on by the mute greatness of His own soul, engaged in an endless flow of words of wisdom and thoughts that lie too deep for men.

It was such a Christus nature as this, invisibly crucified, that our wonderful Bernhard Goetzke played in his Indisches Grabmal. Even under the slag of this adventuresome action there shone forth the pure glow of a passionately suffering heart. When Ramigani raised his hands we understood that before this gentle, imperative gesture the tigers of the fields slunk away in silence while lifeless things fell to pieces. It was the power of the superman that was revealed to us: a power that had been generated in the man himself, not given of God. When he prayed, it was a coming unto and into himself, not a disappearance in or a coming unto God. Buddha vanished in the background, a cold, chilly picture.

Such greatness is rare in a film. There is only one other film character whom I can recall having seen who bore the very stamp of immortal greatness on his brow—the Frenchman, G. Melchior, in Atlantide. His eyes had the effect of invisible arms which brushed the seductive passion of the woman in the case clean from his heart. His glance glided over men and things as if he were in an atmosphere of his own creation, far removed from what constitute the spoils of mortal man. But art of this sort stands in the background of the motion picture; it is suspected by but few. And in the foreground stands mottled, gaudy sensuality. It cannot be otherwise. For the motion picture is an art that is of the earth earthy; it revels and rolls in human feelings.

This defection on its part from intellect is necessary; it is not thus because its creators wish it so. Just as is the case with music, the motion picture will never be called upon to solve the problems of the human intellect or of man’s morality. The motion picture pedagogue works ahead in an ineffectual effort to put brains into the screen; he cannot do it. He fills the text with sententious remarks and moral observations. He clutters the whole business up with a mess of mushy wisdom that bears not the slightest relation to the sensory content of the action, which is mimic first, last and always.

The task of the motion picture is quite similar to the task of music: to serve a generation that has strong feelings. Where music, however, excites and incites a general and indefinite feeling (whose compass reaches from the tortures of the ego to the all-embracing feeling of the godhead itself) through tones, the motion picture assembles its fullness on the earthly world of emotions.

The motion picture actor fails to reach his objective, he fails to fulfill his true mission, if he depends for success upon mere sexual titillation. He is lost to himself and the cause he serves if he works for the excitation of undisciplined and easily aroused pruriency. There is, indeed, no art that admits of such abysms of failure and misconduct as the motion picture. There lurks in every step the motion picture actor takes and makes the grave danger of sinking into the slime of unleashed sexuality. There is no well-constructed, marked, and planned road here that leads straight out, away, and over earthly love. And we do not wish to get sucked down into the mire. Sensuality and soul—that is the slogan.

A new world has been discovered for which there has been up to the present no adequate expression. We film voyagers hoist the sails and embark on a voyage of conquest and circumnavigation. But behold! it is a strange and yet a familiar route we have to pursue. It is not like the realm of tones, etherial and intangible. It is our lives that we have discovered, and which we are looking upon with our own eyes.

A mighty flood of pictures rushes by us. Which shall we choose? Shall we choose the spooks, the spooky visions, the dancing will-o’-the-wisps, the nocturnal spirits? We let them go on their way. They are not for us. For the film has at last taught us what everyday life had caused us to forget—or almost to forget. I mean by “us” the Europeans who have become filled with hate and poisoned with pugnacity. We had about forgotten that the world is beautiful.

Every nation has its own soul. But where the spirits of the various peoples stand in the presence of each other, and opposite each other, alien if not directly hostile, separated as it were from each other by “foreign” languages, the real souls of all the peoples have grown up from the brotherly roots of humanity.

Despite this brotherhood, however, no one should attempt to sink his own folk-soul into the soul of another people. That cannot be done. Let the German turn out the historical film, in which he sinks his soul into the world of feelings of the ancient Egyptians, or the English, or the Romance peoples just as much as he pleases. It is his business, and no one can stop him. But the fact remains that the historical film is always a somehow colorless creation in the popular sense. It is always somewhat affected if not a bit fraudulent, and in the case of any nation it is always touched up and retouched with the same artificial masks. The historical film is here and here to stay, however. There is a good reason: in those ages of violence and lawlessness film themes grew on the trees. There was a dazzling world full of adventure such as the film will never completely turn its back on.

I am of the distinct conviction, at the same time, that it is the modern film which most effectively discloses the real nature and aim of the film. It is the most popular; it alone is true. In it there are no masks; and there are very few big wigs and pasted mustachios. The people do not have to sink themselves into unknown deeds and inexperienced acts of gruesomeness. They stand before the camera of the world in which they live; it is their own feelings that the lens takes up into itself.

In the modern film each people goes its own way; it has its own feelings, its own heart projected on the screen. It obeys the inescapable and inevitable commands of its own public life. Every man does what he can; he acts on what he himself knows. And as Goethe once wisely remarked, “Life is interesting, it makes no difference where you take hold of it.”

The differences in peoples are wonderful—as the modern film shows. The American rejects any and every film that does not stand with both feet on the ground of actual life. The American takes his film themes from his own activity, and it is a gigantic one. He binds his people close to the world. He has them engage in the calling that is theirs. He is as little inclined to scorn the orphanage or the tent of the cowboy as he is to close his eyes to the elegant urban salon. Wherever he goes, he notes what he has seen with the hard pencil of the professional reporter. He eavesdrops, he listens-in on life in every form. With the “essential” he is but little concerned; he is out for the picture of his milieu, of his environment, of the world about him, and this world of his is bubbling over with life. He is objective, and his objectivity has not been distorted by any theory of art that confuses the issue when conditions change. He seizes the world wherever he finds it most interesting. He does not hesitate, once he has seized it, to place his people in this surrounding; and he endows his people, as it were, with the fates and the fancies of their new setting. The American film is always most effective when it takes its material from the checkered and chic fullness of the very present; when it depends for its inspiration upon reality. It aims at genuineness; it tries to be true. It seems, at least, that it never tries to depict a milieu which it does not know. The great city is the mother-earth of the American film. The minute it abandons the city and goes forth on voyages of discovery in nature it loses its vivacity, its effectiveness, its sense of reality, and goes over into watered makeshifts or highway romanticism.

The American despises all heavy, tiresome, serious art; he depicts a highly-colored life, bubbles over with mad, or at least unexpected, ideas and notions, and has his spectator laugh and weep—an omniscient Lord knows that he never lets him do anything but laugh, or anything but weep. The more extravagant the thing is, on the heights and in the depths, the better. After all, life is beautiful. One laughs ten times as willingly as one weeps. And no sane man wishes to see this belief in the joy of life, and the eventual victory of happiness and strength, taken from us.

The American has not a shimmer of a conception of Dramatischer Aufbau; of dramatic composition he is innocent. The most he does is to indulge in a brief exposition, which he expresses in a few and none too labored words, in which he has something to say about the general significance of the people in whom he is momentarily interested—and then the thing starts. The American film is effective; and its effectiveness is to be explained on the ground of the American people themselves; they know precisely what they are after, and they proceed without delay; they are not hampered by inertia; they are intelligent; they are diligent.

The American’s creative action is sure and simple; it is not reflective, nor congested with too much brooding; and it certainly is not based on systematic philosophizing. His film is just as unsentimental as his life. The majority of his scenes are noted for an atmosphere of sobriety. This and that takes place, but if a catastrophe does not follow there is no use to get excited. In the few scenes in which the fate of one man rebounds against the fate of another, the will of one man stands face to face with the will of another. The American film is, so to speak, dramatic only in a secondary or subsidiary sense.

The hero of the American film is the man of deeds. In the first act his goal is set; in the last act he reaches it. Everything that intervenes between these two acts is a test of strength. The strongest wins, every time. The whole action revolves about this hero, and the “good ending” is more a matter of logic than of anything else; it is the judgment handed down as to who was the most powerful. There is no such thing as a weakling among American film heroes. “It is not interesting; it is not effective; therefore we don’t want it.” That is the history of American film making in so many words.

The basic principle of the American film is expediency. It is expediency, suitability, availability, that makes the American exercise great care in choosing the title of his film, in having the action grow in interest, and in using decoration that fits the case and represents, on the whole, a genuine and solid picturesqueness. It is expediency that prompts the American to avoid those diseased and unwholesome themes which would be understood only by the spectator who is likewise diseased and unwholesome. It is expediency that moves him to avoid purely and rigidly intellectual themes, such as are appropriate for private audiences only. It is expediency that suggests to him cheerful, vigorous, bright, and fanciful themes in which the world is made to shine and flash. It is expediency that causes him to fill even the gloomiest theme with a good measure of happiness. There are, indeed, many roads that lead to idealism.

The American does not seem to be at all familiar with the word “Art” when he takes and makes a motion picture. He uses, instead of art, the word “effect.” This may seem a bit primitive, even uninspired, but it gets desirable results. That is good which is effective; the ineffective is bad; whatever pleases is allowed. These seem to be his shibboleths. He has, for this very reason, been spared the humiliation attendant upon the film that would-be art, and which has brought bankruptcy to its champions and producers.

For the American the soul is merely a means toward an effect. He never overworks the soul; he does not splash it all over the individual scene. He uses it just in so far as it is necessary to make his hero a sympathetic creature and creation. In the middle, and the middle point, of his film activity stands, not the soul, but the joy in telling a story. For there is only one thing the American aims at: he wants to have a chat; he wants to indulge in a causerie. For him there is no artistic “problem to be solved.” He neither writes theoretical treatises on the film, nor does he read them.

In this somewhat rigid domain which the life and Weltanschauung of the American people themselves have staked off for the American film, there live, move, and have their being a great number of happily endowed and cautious talents. They avoid clever and ingenious dodges; they are not easily derailed. They try incessantly to raise the value of the work they are engaged in and on to an ever-increasing height of excellence.

The American film reflects the inmost nature of a people that is happy; of a people that has been accustomed to create without being loaded down with theory or chained to tradition. It is the film of a people that has preserved unto itself the riches of the centuries.

The American is genuine; the Swede is true. Other peoples fill their motion pictures with foaming and sometimes frantic melodies. The Swedish film is not rich; it is unostentatious, sometimes to the very point of scantiness. Its tone is that of the folk-song with its tones taken from and based on pictures. Its characters are close to the earth; they are rarely impulsive, and if so, the impulsiveness is of a gentle nature; they seem quite free from self-consciousness. They move their limbs after the fashion of dreamy giants. They play with their hearts somewhat as the children of Asa were wont to play with the golden discs. Their feelings have not been artificially translated into a milieu; they have not been composed into a new home. They grow quite naturally from the soil that begot them. In the case of the American, or the German, film, we have the conflict first; the milieu proceeds then from this conflict. The canon of the Swede reads: In the beginning was the earth.

On this soil, excessively aromatic or iridescent fruit does not thrive. The passions of the Swede are subdued; they whisper like waving grain swayed to and fro by a gentle breeze. Because of their lack of display they seem, to the eye and ear of the person accustomed to the bluster of an industrial life, a bit primitive and monotonous. The Swedish film is an æolian harp which is moved unconsciously; the few wonderful tones that lie as potential factors in its strings are melodies only. The reflective element of this film is remarkably impulsive in character. It sinks itself with burning fervor into the depths of the heart, never rises to the chilly clarity of abstract thought, and rarely loses itself in moral fustian.

The Swedish film retains its perfect naturalness even when it concerns itself with urban personages and chooses, perforce, its decoration and setting from the fashionable drawing-rooms. When it does this it is a matter of secret mask. These men in evening dress, these décolletée ladies, remain after all peasant children who wear their foreign garb with naïve gaiety. At times the Swede grafts an alien twig on the young wild tree of his motion picture art. When he does, it is German if subtle, French if erotic.

The Swede paints his picture with a fine brush, embellishes each on rather broad lines, and coats every picture with a shimmer of hearty intimacy which to a film connoisseur of another country seems altogether unobtrusive. The film action, the ebb and flow of pictures, seems to him a matter of indifference. He avoids excitement; he shuns the raging of man against man. Invented, and therefore affected, action, be it never so refined, leaves him cold. He loves to see things grow; the secrets of the inner life are precious to him. His heroes encircle the coveted goal without bodily moving out of their tracks. All of this is at once an advantage and a disadvantage.

It is rare that the manager of a Swedish picture strives for such brilliant effects, or for such a wealth of ideas, as characterizes the American and German film manager. Swedish film technique stands nearly still; if it moves at all, it is a cautious move. This is true, indeed, of Swedish film art as a whole—that art which came as a direct revelation to, though it left its imprint upon, the film art of other peoples, and especially upon that of the Germans. Swedish photography is not infrequently dull; it seems to have been lighted up from underneath; it makes no attempt to compete with the chiaroscuro for which American and German operators are noted.

The Swede creates for himself. He loves the figures of his native land; in them and through them he improvises; he rings changes on the same motives. Does he really wish to create art? Will the seed he has been sowing grow?

While the Swede was quietly engaged in his dreamy plays, the American and German—stimulated by him to a rather high degree—were chiseling from the stone blocks of their own folk souls stronger and more delusive pictures which, in their innermost nature, were no less true than the film of the Swede. Since the Swede makes no attempt to speak to the world, but only to a limited circle of intellectually inclined people, he is always threatened with an imminent exhaustion of means. Even to-day, on this account it seems, he is trying to effect a compromise between himself and the world, though it cannot be said that he is going into convulsions over his effort. He is not in a hurry. He is trying his skill at historical films which hardly become him either as a creative genius or a trained spectator. He is snatching his figures out of the earth and giving them, at the expense of verisimilitude, and following the bad example of the German social film, the rather rootless and precarious existence that attaches itself at all times to mondaine as distinguished from mundane life. It is a case of change from I to We which connotes a changed attitude toward the world in general; and it is a change which the film of Sweden has not entirely escaped. But it was to be expected: the Swede and his film are both much too strong and healthy either to avoid or neglect this transition.

The Swedish film is the reflection of a people that depends upon itself, that rests within itself, on whose shores the tempestuous waves of other nations break but gently: they have already been broken before reaching that point.

The German is the great experimenter. Fate has struck Germany many a telling blow in the last decade; much has been destroyed forever. But amid the débris there has remained a spirit of daring, a courage that makes an essay at the bold enticing. We experiment in the motion picture, though not so much from a mere love of the novel as from a settled conviction that in this field we still have a great deal to learn; we are still undecided about a great number of things.

There is hardly a theme on earth or in the moon with which we have not concerned ourselves; we have conjured the things of the earth and the stars up before the film camera and had them remain there until their pictures were at our disposal. We have descended into the dusty tombs of prehistoric times; we have adapted the stories of foreign countries to the screen. Fairy tales—those of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow—have been tried. And when, at the close of the War, a sudden flood of ideas, notions, conceits, and utopias swept over our heads, we even tried to philosophize on the screen.

In all of this busy activity, in this feverish and unceasing search after new themes and new values, there has been one thing that we completely forgot; and this one thing has been passing by us in a thousand pictures: it was our own people. Of German films that introduce us to the whirling life of our country, particularly from the rural point of view, we have hardly an indication. A real beginning in this direction certainly has not been made. It is there, however, and there only where uniqueness of real character is conspicuous that one finds the type of originality that pleases in itself and defies competition of any kind. At present, forces are beginning to work, action has been begun which, if carried on and out, will project on the screen the land of Germany with all the beauty of its streams and forests, and which will show the German soul with all its dreams and wishes. This is the way the film entitled Explosion, which tells of miners and their lives, came into existence. This was the initial inspiration of Fritz Lang’s Nibelungs, that grandiose epic of the remote Germanic past. These are to be sure beginnings; but so long as they remain the sole examples, so long as the status quo in this matter is preserved, we Germans simply do not exist in the film; we have not yet arrived. And be it said once for all that the popular film is the one in which a film people can best show its real character.

Instead of studying this theme—our own people—and exploiting it day in and day out, the German has scoured the whole world for themes. His historical films have been prepared with marvelous accuracy; not a detail has been neglected which might add in even the slightest way to historical reality: loyalty to history has been preserved and observed with touching constancy. I have my very serious doubt, however, whether this has been wholly necessary, for such films are not shown exclusively to historical seminars in the universities.

The German is almost universally successful in digging up a theme of crushing weight and power. He is never at a loss to create an action of either gruesome or exalted greatness. We have but to think of Golem, Madame Dubarry, Dr. Mabuse, and Dr. Caligari. These are most powerful films. Another is the Nibelungs. So far so good. But it is rare indeed that the German succeeds in endowing such films as these with the light and easy, the inspiring and inspiriting wings of humor. For a time, indeed, there was only one type of film that was regarded as a success: the film with the tragic ending. The German so frequently forgets, or he at least overlooks, the fact that it is not the business of the motion picture to play into the hands of hard, rigid, classical art, and to follow the canons of such art in so doing. It is the business, rather, of the motion picture to amuse people, to cheer them up, and to stimulate them.

Latterly, the German has shown a marked tendency to turn away from the film based on the masses. He has not done this however voluntarily; the extreme cost of producing such films has made them prohibitive. Nor is this all: the German has not looked with favor recently on the film that has to do with huge crowds of human beings for spiritual reasons. At present there is decided preference for the film that depicts a strong fervor of some sort; for a film that is impressive from the point of view of individuals; for a film that delineates a logical development of the adventures of the soul. And it must be conceded that the best artists are gradually finding a way by which they can unite delicacy of soul with grace of experience and thereby create what all the world must regard as beauty.

For a long while, the German, like the Swede, neglected the real art of decoration and photography. Within recent years, however, our better ateliers have made remarkable progress in this direction. Some of our films that have been created since the making of this progress, such as Suvarin or The Stone Rider need not hesitate to stand comparison with the best of any country. The small film companies have been obliged to close owing to the unprecedented depreciation in German currency. This, however, is not a matter for profound regret, for their quality could never be said to be the outstanding feature of their creations. Nothing but quality can ever make the trouble that has to be taken a matter of eventual gain. In the art of motion picture, genius is its own reward, but pains are well paid.

The German film will come once the chaos that reigns supreme at present has been eradicated, and the situation becomes brighter all around and everywhere. To-day, Bolshevism raises its ugly head in the East; in the West, heavy artillery is in position while fleets of bombing planes whirr through the air. The atmosphere is thick; so thick, indeed, that it casts a heavy shadow over the country.