EugeneMcCreary_LouisDelluc

University of Texas Press

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and ProphetAuthor(s): Eugene C. McCrearyReviewed work(s):Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 14-35Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225447 .Accessed: 07/06/2012 05:26

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Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet Eugene C. McCreary

Louis Delluc died in 1924, not yet 34 years old. But in slightly more than a decade and a half of feverish activity, scarcely slowed by the war and a short period of military service, he left behind a considerable body of work. Publishing a prize-winning poem in 1905 while still in school, two

years later he had written two one-act comedies and had begun regularly writing drama criticism. In 1910 he began his journalistic career in earnest with the prestigious weekly devoted to the arts, Comoedia Illustre. Subse-

quently, and often simultaneously, while continuing as a poet and drama- tist, he exercised his skills as editor, novelist, short-story writer, film critic, screenwriter, film maker.1

This essay confines itself to Louis Delluc as film critic, a principal pre- occupation from 1917 through 1922. Delluc possessed all the qualities of the superb art critic. He was cultured, passionate, sensitive. He had great analytical capacity, an extraordinary sense of detail, an ability for striking verbal expression. And he had himself experienced the excitement and the burden of creation.

He was both less and more than a critic. He refused to consider himself one, preferring to think of himself as a spectator, an observer, someone who simply sought beauty. "I am not a critic and I consider myself neither

grave enough nor impotent enough to pretend to that role. I go to the movies as a spectator and when I leave, I am either satisfied or I am not."2 To assert the mistakes and shortcomings of a film required both an in- conscience and an adroitness he claimed not to have. Yet, 25 years after his death, the French association of film critics recognized him officially

1 For the details of Delluc's life see Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc (Paris, 1965), pp. 6-19. For his films, see: ibid., pp. 54-74; Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les Montagnes (Paris, 1959), pp. 158-164; Carl Vincent, Histoire de I'Art Cinematographique, 2nd. ed. (Brussels, n.d.), p. 18.

2 "Lettre francaise a Thos. H. Ince, Compositeur," Le Film, no. 119, June 24, 1918, p. 13. See also "Apres 'La Zone de la Mort,' Abel Gance," Le Film, no. 84, October 22, 1917, p. 7, and "La Mauvaise Etoile," Le Film, no. 80, September 24, 1917, p. 10. Many of Delluc's articles in Le Film were subsequently included, slightly rewritten, in Cinema & Cie. (Paris, 1919).

Cinema Journal / 15

as "the creator of film criticism."3 In 1918 he had become the first to write a regular column in a daily newspaper for a mass audience devoted to the serious and independent act of reviewing film, devoid both of the

advertising aspect which had hitherto surrounded newspaper coverage of film and the anecdotal which had so marked film reporting in the special- ized journals. Delluc separated criticism from advertising. In September, 1917, he had written of receiving letters denouncing him for being in the pay of the Americans, so consistently enthusiastic had been his reviews of American films. But by 1921 he could write of the imminent disappear- ance of "the critic for hire" paid by film producers to tout their films.4

A gifted critic, Delluc was more than that. He was a film theorist and a prophet. His criticism itself rested upon an acute and developing per- ception of the constituent elements of a film, while his judgments evi- denced a recognition of the necessity to treat the individual film as a whole, as an entity, as a unified "work." But it is as prophet that Delluc displayed his greatest passion. Not prophet in the sense of the clairvoyant, although he did risk an occasional prediction. Prophet in the sense of the Old Testa- ment: a gifted man, chosen, who for the love of his God and his people, calls with the poet's voice for a return to the true path. Delluc loved more than he hated, admired more eloquently than he scorned-qualities of the prophet, rare in the critic. He possessed an extraordinary capacity for picking out the superb detail or the noteworthy sequence submerged for most in the mass of idiocies that comprised so many feature films of the period. What he selected for discussion was almost never the story and even less frequently the "meaning" of the film. He picked out and ex- pounded upon a significant moment of the experience of viewing a film- a gesture, an attitude, a setting, the film's rhythm or form-never simply for its own sake but for the role it played (or could play) in the total effect of the film.

More concerned with what film could be than with what it was or what it had been, Delluc with the enthusiasm of the convert, tried to whip, implore, cajole a truly French cinema into being. He did not want French film simply to exist; he wanted it to achieve its full potential, to assume

completely its responsibilities. For at the base of his love and enthusiasm for film lay a profound grasp of its power and its creative promise.

What Is Film? Delluc's conception of film is quite complex and amazingly comprehen-

sive. No mere avant-garde aesthetician, he is able to perceive the tri-par- tite nature of film as a commercial and industrial object, a means of com- munication, and a work of art. Its first aspect interested Delluc the least,

3 Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le Cinema et la Presse (Paris, 1961), p. 54. 4 "Le Commerce du Cinema," Cin6a, no. 24, October 21, 1921, p. 10; "La Mauvaise

Etoile," p. 10.

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but he was conscious of its importance and even of its positive consequen- ces.

It was because films made money that they circulated throughout the world, and it was this worldwide circulation which gave them their po- tential power and humbling responsibility. He saw "this industry of ex- pression . . . tending toward the simultaneous perfection of art and trade."5 He did not condemn the power of Louis Gaumont and Charles Pathe as such, or their purely commercial interest in film. The former, however, he felt had shown an amazing lack even of commercial sense and the latter, although possessing everything required to make a worthy contribution to French cinema-capital, equipment, personnel, and an in- telligent start in the right direction-had disappointingly sunk into pro- ducing films of no interest.6 Producers explained the mediocrity of pro- duction by asserting "this is what the public wants," but Delluc insisted they did not know what the public wanted. They did not even know who their public was. They did not go to films.7 He urged that creators be given the means, and the freedom, to create not merely in the interest of art but in that of commerce. Are good books written for publishers, he asked? Did artists like Rodin or Cezanne sculpt and paint following the suggestions of the Bernheim brothers? Some of these films might turn out to be commercial failures, but this was not a certainty. Mallarm6, Verlaine, Rimbaud "returned only a profound glory, but Baudelaire one day 'began selling.' It happens that beauty 'earns money.' . . . Let a film be first and then sell it afterward if need be. But don't sell it out before- hand."8 Don't confuse what the public wants with what it is used to seeing, he urged distributors and theater owners. Pointing to the success of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari in Paris, he insisted that original films could achieve far greater commercial success than the pleasantly insigni- ficant films they termed "commercial." They should let the public know that a film was unique, and it would rush to it; it needed only to be told. They should advertise a film intelligently, pay attention to the quality of poster, assure that appropriate music accompanied a film, guarantee a comfortable theater, be conscious of the variety of potential audiences, and they would have and retain a public. Commercial the film must be, or it would not be at all, but, Delluc insisted, commerce intelligently under- taken and art went hand in hand.9 The commercial aspect of film was,

5 "Le Cinquieme Art," Le Film, no. 113, May 13, 1918, p. 7. 6 Cinema & Cie., pp. 252-259. 7 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 99, February 4, 1918, p. 13. Cf. also "Questions,"

Paris-Midi, July 27, 1918. Paris-Midi was the daily newspaper for which Delluc wrote on film.

8 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 131, September 16, 1918, p. 13. 9 "Le Commerce du Cinema," pp. 9-10.

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in fact, beneficial. With so much money to be made in film, competition had begun even among nations. And since beauty knew no frontiers film makers of one nation could learn from film makers of another.

Film had already proven itself industrially and commercially by pro- ducing great profits. But to the perceptive Delluc it had another facet which had received less recognition: it was an extraordinary means of communication, extraordinary both in its power and in its universality. Few civilizations had possessed a vehicle as direct as this "mute and sure means of eloquence."'10 A gesture, an attitude, a posture could say so much more than a sentence, and could say it so much more quickly and directly. All could be made to speak in a film: an object, a landscape, the quality of light. A great admirer of Thomas Ince, Delluc compared him to Vuillard in his capacity to express the difference between a room really lived in and one which was little loved.11 Delluc perceived "one of the most miraculous aspects of film" to be its power to touch every one in an audience in the same way "without the cerebral preparation required by books or music."12 It was already being included in the baggage of of- ficials leaving for the colonies and making its own contribution to "peace- ful conquest."l3

Its public was universal within a society, and among nations as well. It was not a popular art in the sense of a folk art or an art simply of the masses. It was not confined to any single group within the society. Delluc compared it to the drama of classical Athens which summoned together the whole nation, all ranks and members of all professions. "The cinema is marvelous in that it speaks to the entire world. Its public is formed of the crowd, all the crowds. It returns to us that unanimous art buried since the Greek theater . . ." It is like the bullfight in that it brings together "not the masses, but the crowd. And the crowd includes everybody. The crowd comprises the world."l4 And film goes everywhere. "Think of the fame of Lyda Borelli or Gabrielle Robinne because they incarnated a few pathetic heroines. The illustrious Sarah Bernhardt, who transported dra- matic masterpieces by every conceivable means of locomotion, is almost less well-known than Francesca Bertini, the dusky Italian whose physiog- nomy has been carried to the four corners of the earth by a half dozen

10 "Le Cinquieme Art," pp. 7-8. 11 "Lettre frangaise a Thos. H. Ince, Compositeur," pp. 13-14; "D'Oreste a Rio Jim,"

Cin4a, no. 31, December 9, 1921, p. 14. 12"La Foule," Paris-Midi, August 24, 1918; cf. also Louis Delluc, Photogenie

(Paris, 1920), p. 114. He went on to suggest that this very directness explained why the French intellectual elite still did not love, or admit loving film. That somebody totally ignorant of classical studies could perceive "reality," what a revolution! "Why not dream of entering Polytechnique without an examination?"

13 "Le Cinquieme Art," p. 7. 14 "Primitifs," Paris-Midi, June 22, 1919; Photogenie, pp. 105-106.

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equally dusky dramas. As for Chaplin, . . . doesn't he have more admirers than Leopold II, Edward VII and Victor-Emmanuel combined? One year, six months, have sufficed to impose upon the inhabitants of the globe a name, a grimace, a smile."15

Delluc could not understand why governments had made such little use of film as a means of expression although it had "much greater effect on the international masses than a political discourse." The initial efforts at French film propaganda during the war he found appalling despite the fact that "propaganda could have no better ally than the cinema." He called on the film section of the army to put their newsreel footage, "doc- uments of the war," together into a meaningful film because he understood the psychological difference between reading and seeing a film. While re- peatedly reading the same patriotic messages became boring, "the ardor of the cinema spectator is always fresh. And even better, he admires with passion.'l6 Delluc understood film's power of expression so completely that he could be frightened by it and was aware that the day might come when it would be necessary "to guide this master of the crowd."17

Louis Delluc accepted film as a commercial object. He understood its power to communicate. But it was as art that he had begun to love it. "We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art. The only truly modem art perhaps, assured already of its place and one day of astonishing glory, because it is at one and the same time the child of technology and of human ideals." We can know it is an art "because we have heaped it with every conceivable affliction and it is avenging itself even now through the reflection of beauty."18

Certain key words recur again and again in his writings on film: sin- cere, true, authentic, natural, simple, alive, everyday, interior, modern, sober. Together they trace a conception of film that would emerge 25 years later as neo-realism, the seminal aesthetic current in post-World War II film production. "Since we discovered the possibility of beauty in film, we have done everything possible to complicate it and weigh it down instead of always striving to simplify. Our best films are some- times very ugly because of a laborious and artificial self-consciousness. How many times ... has the best part of an evening at the movies been the newsreels-an army on the march, herds of cattle in a field, the launch- ing of a battleship, a crowd at the beach, airplanes taking off, the life of monkeys or the death of flowers . ." Simple cameramen were seeking only to extract form from matter like the anonymous sculptors of the Middle

15 "Le Cinquieme Art," p. 8; "D'Oreste a Rio Jim," p. 15; "Et Lui Aussi il est Peintre! ...," Cinda, no. 30, December 2, 1921, p. 9.

16"Le Cinquieme Art," p. 7; "A la Frangaise," Paris-Midi, July 13, 1918; "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 95, January 7, 1918, p. 16.

17 Photogdnie, p. 119. 18 "Le Cinqui6me Art," p. 8.

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Ages. "It is in this way that the artisan finds the path to art."19 The first films made were in possession of this truth. They were simply of a train

coming into a station or of children ripping an eiderdown quilt and scat- tering the feathers. But then the idea that film was purely entertainment for the masses won out, and the inevitable result had been the intermin- able production of puerile buffooneries and gross melodramas.20 In 1917 he had written, "Scenarios today are pathetic. So you have nothing to say? Walk around, look about yourself, notice. The street, the subways, the streetcars, the shops, are filled with a thousand dramas, a thousand good and original comedies . . ."21 Four months later, in early 1918, reviewing the recent film of the famous naturalistic stage director Antoine, Les Tra- vailleurs de la Mer, Delluc acknowledged with gratitude the evidence of an amazingly pictorial eye. But he went on to ask, "Does not this sort of scenario . . . go against his nature, a romantic serial sufficient to itself and enjoying too direct a popularity for the director even to feel like add- ing or subtracting anything? . . . I want so much for him to have a story of his own, a scenario alive and new, modem..... Perhaps a story about workers or better, peasants. He would go to the country, to the real country, and capture life as it exists, in the very act of shooting the film. Maybe the heroes of his story would play themselves. Peasants should be played by peasants. Actors always seem to be actors when they want to play the common people."22

But Delluc did not confine to a single type this "complex, subtle, un- common, powerful and brusque art."23 It could and should range over the full continuum of human experience for its subject matter, finding it as well in the preliterary legends, tales, and myths of all peoples and all times, or in the marvelous and "what we call simply the unreal, as though the dream were less real than reality,"24 as in "modem poetry, the real poetry, that which you remark in the street, on a face, on a sign, in a color, everywhere and ceaselessly . . "25 But from whatever source it drew its inspiration, it had always to keep in view certain fundamental characteristics. Primordial was the realization that beauty in film was truth. And contributing to the achievement of this truth was the under- standing of film as an art of suggestion, of detail, of simplification, an art of movement and precision, and an art which realized itself only through

19 Photogenie, p. 8. 20 Cindma & Cie., p. 13. 21 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 89, October 26, 1917, p. 18. 22 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 102, February 25, 1918, p. 12. Cf. also "Notes

pour moi," Le Film, no. 122-123, July 18, 1918, p. 16, when he called for renting apartments instead of building sets.

23 Cindma & Cie., p. 13. 24 Photogenie, pp. 95, 97, 98, 100-102. 25 "Douglas Fairbanks," Paris-Midi, June 1, 1918.

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the harmonious unity, the internal consistency, of all its component ele- ments.

If beauty was truth, the film in all its parts had to be authentic. Delluc could appreciate the effort and the intention involved in Maurice de Fe- raudy's Le Clown but still reject it because that was not the way clowns actually lived or furnished their apartments.26 It was a mistake to work for beautiful photographs. One should only try to make them true, and beauty would result. Praising Ince's Civilization's Child, he wrote, "Noth- ing in the film betrays an intention of aestheticism. It is pure life."27

Film was an art of suggestion. "The animated image has so much power when it suggests. Is it not much better than saying everything?" For "the secret of the inexhaustible in expression" is never completely saying every- thing. Rhythm and light were not thought, but they incited to thought.28 Like the immobile face of Sessue Hayakawa which suggested unplumbed -and unplumable-depths, the Hindu dancer, Dourga, was praised for her "impassive beauty," grace, and supple line "so much more expressive than the most passionate Spanish frenzy."29 Delluc perceived in the Latin culture of France too great a love for "the ardent exteriorization of ardent sentiments. Reserve is welcome on condition that it disappear quickly, giving way to something else, larger, more opened, more sonorous."30 But exteriorization was the opposite of expression, and anathema to film art. It brought everything to the surface while expression led the spectator inside through suggesting the existence of a barely perceptible world.

Film was an art of detail. When Delluc referred to film as "living paint- ing," "animated painting," or "visual poetry," he was not simply employing elegant metaphors to establish film's pedigree among the muses. He was

invoking something quite specific-the creative act of isolating and styliz- ing the significant detail. "The great mistake of the Italians and of many Frenchmen is to want all of nature to collaborate with their works under the form of landscapes. You have seen and, I fear, will see again those dusky heroines with rapture in their eyes lying on a Florentine terrace in an evening gown at noon contemplating with powerful sighs the luminous horizons of the Italian hills. Oh! it is not so disagreeable to see. . . . But when you receive a beautiful post card from Naples or Taormina, you are enchanted, too. You admire, you savor, you relish such tempting scenery. Admit, however, that the post card in question has a good chance

26 "Films," Le Film, no. 81, October 1, 1917, p. 5. 27 "La Mauvaise Etoile," p. 7. 28"De Griffith," Cinea, no. 47, March 31, 1922, p. 8; "L'Expression et Charlie

Chaplin," Le Film, no. 106-107, April 2, 1918, p. 54. 29 "Soupcon Tragique," Paris-Midi, January 22, 1920; "Notes pour moi," Le Film,

no. 103, March 4, 1918, p. 13; "Douglas, Mousquetaire du Film," Cinra, no. 29, Novem- ber 25, 1921, p. 9; "Nazimova," Cin4a, no. 92, May 18, 1923, pp. 5-6.

30 "L'Expression et Charlie Chaplin," p. 53.

Cinema Journal / 21

of ending in the waste basket. A landscape by Corot or Courbet or Claude Monet will not end in the waste basket." And it was not just a question of commercial value. "Art has imposed itself [upon the subject matter]. The scene depicted by the post card is perhaps the same as that captured by the painter. But that of the painter has a sense, a meaning. It is not pho- tography. And film is not photography. Film is animated painting."31 A plant, an object, a piece of material, a gesture, a tear could set off in a new way the dramatic theme of the film.32

Selected details contributed primarily in two ways. Their accumulation, when true and consistent, could ultimately create atmosphere as de Baron- celli had succeeded in doing in Le Retour aux Champs. "All the poetry of night in the country, whose evocation begins with a roof filled with pig- eons and ends with a fountain in a farm courtyard, is attained with a joy- ous sincerity that illuminates his talent. Rarely have we dared in France to thus isolate mute things. Mute? Is the road which divides the screen like a bookmark, mute? Is a harvested plain mute? ... All that is dazzling, because alive."33 The second way led not outward but inward. Again, it was Ince whom Delluc acknowledged as master of employing "the simple, everyday detail so well to express the intimate nature of a personage." He more than anyone else could "render glimpses of a soul palpable through carefully selected details" which "are not visual notations placed beside psychological notations. The one and the other [are fused and] enlarged by an ardor which is poetry itself."34

Film was an art of simplification. Medieval art had shown the way. Its way of "stylizing and synthesizing correspond to that nakedness of line which one would like to see more frequently in our films."35 Max Linder had been the first, and for a while the only, film maker to approach the simplicity required by film. Then the Western had created out of this simplicity a genre through stylizing the hero into a type and his life into a myth. But it was Chaplin who had raised simplicity to its greatest degree. His face and costume were themselves stylizations. He limited himself, like the great clowns, to a very small number of themes, and everything extraneous was stripped away to concentrate on the single idea which was the source of the humor.36

31 "Et Lui Aussi, il est Peintre. . ..," p. 10. 32 "D'Oreste a Rio Jim," p. 14. 33"Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 116, June 3, 1918, p. 14. Cf. also PhotogEnie,

where Marcel L'Herbier's Rose-France is also praised for attaining atmosphere. 34 "Lettre frangaise a Thos. H. Ince, Compositeur," p. 11; "Griffith and Ince," Le

Film, no. 164, October 15, 1919, p. 66. 35 "Primitifs," Paris-Midi, June 22, 1919. 36 Cindma & Cie., p. 163; "D'Oreste a Rio Jim," p. 15; "L'Expression et Charlie

Chaplin," p. 52; Charlie Chaplin (Paris, 1921), pp. 15-16. This section of the book had already appeared in Cina, no. 9, July 1, 1921, pp. 9-11.

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If Linder and Chaplin were models of simplicity, Abel Gance was the opposite. His major flaw was that he was not simple. "He garbs his most naked thoughts in the richest way." Disciplined, the flaw could become, Delluc felt, his major quality, and pointed out in his discussion of La Dixidme Symphonie the presence of both sides of Gance's artistic nature in a single scene. The suffering composer was playing his new symphony. "Severin-Mars at the piano, the piano, the hands of the composer, the score, the guests who listen, the women dreaming, the men in reflection, all this is admirable. . . . But at the same time, Emmy Lynn is listening, too. She is even listening very well. And during the first part of the scene, her inner immobility impresses us. But then . . .she opens her wings: effects of arms, veils, the great white bird, tunics in the breeze, that or something else. Gance saw a great vision there. And I did not see any- thing at all. Because the arrival of that poetic apparition, unnatural or at least transposed from literature, bothered me in a moment of truth. It might please the public. It is in fact very pleasant to see. But it is use- less, and to add to something beautiful something pretty which is not necessary is simply an error. Don't tell me, Gance, that the execution was not equal to the intention. No, no, you thought of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. I didn't. The Winged Victory of Samothrace suffices to herself. Let her alone.... In your film, seen and felt as she was, she is a stranger."37

Film was an art of movement. If it is like painting in its selection and heightening of details, it is animated painting. Delluc did not like the word "cin6matographe." He preferred the English "moving pictures" be- cause it "synthesized better all the tendencies of visual, moral, intellectual interpretation and the movement-interior as well as exterior-of life."38 And life is movement. The photograph can capture surprising things, but only film can record life because it alone can record movement. Move- ment in film is not only that of a subject within the frame, nor simply the evolution of the dramatic theme. It is also the movement, rhythmically structured, that exists between the shots and which makes film akin to music.

Film was an art of precision. This rhythm of the shots which provided the film with its structure, much of its cohesion, and a great deal of its emotional tone, was a matter of precise measurement and mathematical dosage. Comedy especially had to be regulated "with the precision of a clock," but even dramatic films required the application of a "musical algebra" to determine the length of the individual shots. Delluc admired the cadence of Cecil B. De Mille's Joan the Woman. "Everything is alive, and lives according to an imposed rhythm. Just as in a symphony each

37 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 99, February 4, 1918, pp. 13-14. Cf. also "Oeuv- res et Chef-d'Oeuvres," Le Film, no. 78, September 10, 1917, p. 9.

38 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 94, December 31, 1917, p. 16.

Cinema Journal / 23

note contributes its own vitality to the general line, each shot, each shadow moves, disintegrates or is reconstituted according to the require- ments of a powerful orchestration." Like music, film combined mystery and mathematics to achieve its art. In Intolerance, "a symphonic move- ment rolls, precipitates, unites, decomposes, transfigures without fault an uncommon luxury of details. This rhythm is exceptional and is what makes of Intolerance a work of art and of Griffith an artist."39

A particular film could be true. It could suggest more than it showed. Its details could be exquisitely selected. It could be a model of simplicity, full of movement, and mathematically regulated. But if it had not brought all its elements into harmonious unity, it had not become art. A single idea dominating the work alone could achieve this unity through the sub- ordination of the various elements to one central objective. It was again in Thos. H. Ince that Delluc saw the master. "His force ... is to start with an idea and not from a scenario laboriously pieced together.... And to realize this idea, he relies on precise, living, everyday details, intense be- cause they are so ordinary.... The idea dominates. The proof? Ince neg- lects facile effects. There are no post card settings of the Italian film, no illustrious actors, no sensational actresses. Each personage in the film is the same as a walk-on part, each landscape but an accessory to the whole. . .." Ince used his accessories so unobstrusively that it bordered on the insolent.40 The French and Italian film industries were making a mistake in seeing the success of the American film "as the triumph, the comp- lication and the perfection of the accessory." The accessory must derive from and not suggest the idea. "The moral, psychological, emotional ob- jectives-the only reasons for a work to exist"-rendered necessary certain accessories. "The accessory has no value in itself. Its value lies only in its expressive or psychological potential." It "should be neither insufficient nor sensational-it should be appropriate .... All the accessories, including the talent of an actor, are useless unless used truthfully" and are truly nec- essary.41

Ultimately, film was not an object that one contemplated, but an exper- ience. "One should not read a film. One should live it." Writing glowingly about Germaine Dulac's Ames de Fous, Delluc asserted that "the modernity

39 "Quelques Artistes qui .. ," Le Film, no. 76, August 27, 1917, p. 5; "Photogenie," Paris-Midi, July 26, 1920; "Les mauvais Frangais," Le Film, no. 83, October 15, 1917, p. 11; "Griffith and Ince," p. 66; "Les Cineastes. Cecil B. De Mille," Cinea, no. 63-64, July 21, 1922, p. 11.

40"Th. Ince," Le Film, no. 66, June 18, 1917, p. 16; "Lettre frangaise a Thos. H. Ince," p. 15.

41 "L'Expression et Charlie Chaplin," p. 48; "Accessoires," Le Film, no. 69, July 9, 1917, pp. 9-10. In Photogenie (p. 96) Delluc wrote, "They can encumber their films with telephones, revolvers, wild automobiles, panic stricken and panic inspiring subma- rines, mad elevators, falls, derailings and explosions-all this is pleasant to see, but if the author has nothing to say, it is not this scrap which will say anything."

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of the film is striking. The personages are of today, that today which still barely exists .... We have the impression of being received in the salons on the screen. This is rare in film and yet indispensable. The theater never succeeds in giving us the impression of being on the stage and not in the audience. At a film we must be and live in the setting of the drama as completely as the actors themselves."42

The Elements of Film Delluc was far from a mere global theorist, too interested in the whole

to pay attention to the parts. A worthy disciple of the man he admired so much, Thomas Ince, Delluc reviewed in the light of his definition of film every conceivable element which went into creating the film experience- from production, through distribution, to the actual viewing of the film. The range of his interests was prodigious. Nothing seemed to escape his attention. Conscious of being present at the very birth of a unique art, he saw that everything had to be examined, modifications suggested, prom- ising developments encouraged. He found the words then in use in the film

industry an abomination, not just "cinematographe," but "theatre de prises de vues" for studio, and "operateur de prises de vues" for camerman, and asked that new ones be suggested. He thought scenarios should be pub- lished as a rival branch of dramatic literature and saw it as an appropri- ate recourse in case of a conflict between director and screen writer. He wanted something done about the orgy of lighting, at the time so de 1ig- eur in shooting a film, but which was damaging the eyes of actors and actresses. He suggested that music be played while a film was being shot because it would increase the naturalness of the acting. He warned actors against speaking their lines while playing because spectators read lips, and awareness of language would destroy the universality of film. He wrote of the necessity for decent, comfortable studios and reasonable working conditions for all those collaborating in the making of a film. He proposed placing mirrors around the shooting stage so that actors could observe and judge the naturalness of their movements.

His attention to the commercial aspects of film has already been de- scribed. He recognized advertising to be important. But saw no reason for posters to be ugly. He commented on the comfort and decoration of movie theaters. He condemned the practice of smorgasbord programs: two dramas, two farces, news, and a documentary-the spectator went to see a Chaplin film and was forced to sit through "an episode of a serial and the inauguration of a cemetery by some minister without portfolio." Sometimes in anger, sometimes in disgust, sometimes in despair, he pointed out the betrayal of the original intention by the French translation of a

42 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 92-93, December 17, 24, 1917, p. 38; "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 100, February 11, 1918, pp. 13-14.

Cinema Journal / 25

foreign film title. He spoke approvingly of the development of music de- signed specifically to accompany a particular film because it was much more capable of "commenting upon and explaining scenes." But asked, why not use the "perfectly plastic" music of Debussy more, so apt for "the brilliant description of the most intense sentiment" and so capable of suggesting images of nature? He scornfully condemned the pretentious- ness or uselessness of the narrative intertitles of most films.43

All these particulars attracted his eye and his pen at one time or an- other, but he tended to concentrate his principal energies on what he per- ceived to be the major components of film: acting, setting, lighting, cos- tumes, photography, cadence, and the role of the director. The principles he had enunciated in answer to the question, what is film?, he applied to each of these domains.

Acting was essentially an art of expression, but an art that was different on the screen than it was on the stage. Much more in film than in theater physical type in and of itself was an expressive instrument. "A young girl in a film must be young. Logic desires it. The close-up demands it. Ever since the psychological movement of a film has come to depend upon . . . close-ups, all cheating is impossible."44 If French film continued to concentrate on producing societal dramas, then film makers were going to have to begin selecting elegant young men and women to play the roles they had been accustomed to giving those who resembled rather captains of industry, coachmen, or revolutionary arsonists.45

But to take the pretext of the need for elegance or "juvenile grace to confine oneself to the sweet nothings, simperings, and puerile smiles for candy boxes, is an absurdity. To banish character means to banish beauty. ... To the contrary, character must be sought in a face. And it must be accentuated! This is why the most eminent film actors have so vigorously affirmed their character through a sort of mask." This stylization of the face through simplifying and stressing its lines, however, could not create character. It could only emphasize that which the actor possessed. Nor was it always advisable. The procedure was inconsistent with shooting a film outdoors, because a road, trees, animals, could not be equally stylized.46

Physical type was only the beginning. The actor had then to express through gesture, look, and stance what his role called for. Few, even

43 "Notes pour moi," no. 92-93, December 17, 24, 1917, p. 38; no. 94, December 31, 1917, p. 12; no. 95, January 7, 1918, p. 16; no. 97, January 21, 1918, p. 14; no. 101, February 18, 1918, p. 13; no. 108-109, April 15, 1918, p. 25; no. 110-111, April 29, 1918, p. 30; Cinea, no. 24, October 21, 1921, p. 10; Cinema & Cie., pp. 78-79, 82, 107- 108, 228-229; Photogenie, pp. 30-49, 73-74.

44 "Photogenie," Paris-Midi, July 7, 1920. 45 "Photogenie," Paris-Midi, July 26, 1920; Cinema & Cie., p. 19. 46 "Photogenie," Paris-Midi, July 7, 1920. Cf. also "Visages Masques," Paris-Midi,

October 5, 1918.

26 / Cinema Journal

among the better actors, realized that here, too, they had to be different on the screen than on the stage. "Even worse, some accentuate their tics, their mannerisms, the meaning they want to project rather than reducing them to a minimum. The result is almost always a deformation akin to caricature."47 The expressive gesture must be above all natural. Less im- portant in light comedy or melodrama, "as soon as the film becomes psy- chological, artistic, or symbolic in intention, the value and meaning of gesture acquires an entirely new importance."48 Mirrors around the set and the playing of music during the shooting could contribute to attain- ing the required naturalness. But spontaneity was an essential source of authenticity in acting. The definitive, the perfect, in film was achieved as unselfconsciously as in music and poetry. How frequently did an actor attain it in rehearsal only to lose it at the time of shooting. The solution Delluc suggested was to shoot constantly, recording everything. In this way, the fleeting perfection of a gesture or attitude would be preserved, and the director would have only to select it from among the other takes when he edited the film.

Charlie Chaplin was "in and by himself the most complete and the most audacious means of expression." Completely visual, his personage stripped of every nonessential, every accessory having meaning only in relation to him and the theme of the film because he himself was "the essential accessory," a master of the perfect gesture, of timing, of move- ment, Chaplin was "a unique instrument of expression in that the com- poser, the instrumentalist and the instrument are all one and the same." Restraint and reserve only increased his power. "Never have so many things been expressed through a lack of expression. When after that I see our actors and the St. Vitus dance they take to be life!"49

The setting of a film should be more than a backdrop. It has itself an important expressive role to play. Consistent, authentic details can create an atmosphere which becomes one of the unifying factors in a film. And the setting could itself become almost a personage by the role it

played in the evolution of the drama. In a review of Henry Roussel's l'Ame de Bronze, after praising Harry Baur for his impassivity and the rest of the cast for so much naturalness that there were no "actors" in the film, Delluc went on, "The most exciting actor in the film is not a performer, it is a factory. Dazzling photos reveal the modem fairyland of metallurgy. . . Who will resist the rough seduction of these shots of factories? 'Pages'

47 "Quelques Artistes qui . .." p. 4. 48 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 94, December 31, 1917, p. 14. An example of

this Delluc saw in the acting of Mary Garden. "Naked or nearly naked . . . she need only make a gesture, the one we did not expect, but the one that had to be made, and everything is said. She evokes a soul, an act, a thing. It is characteristic of the unex- plainable artist to explain what we do not see." "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 112, May 6, 1918, p. 16. Cf. also "Nazimova," p. 6.

49 "L'Expression et Charlie Chaplin," pp. 51-54.

Cinema Journal / 27

like that background of slender chimneys against which Baur in despair is silhouetted, like those gantries with bizarre antennas, like that fire, that gold, that ore in fusion with its reflections, its spatterings, and its magic chiaroscuro, all those lights, logical and scientific, have a mystery which far surpasses all the legends of the epoch of poetry."50

This logical, necessary basis for the lighting of a film Delluc found only too rarely. The practice of lighting from the left, then from the right, then from above or behind in the same sequence of shots bothered him. It could result in pretty photos and highlighted profiles, but it destroyed the naturalness of the scene and the authenticity of the space in which it was being played. If directors insisted on continuing this practice, Delluc suggested, they should place the action in a revolving lighthouse with windows all around. It would then be at least explicable.51 Lighting was a powerful tool, but it should remain a tool, subordinate to the purpose of the film, and not be a display of a studio's equipment or call attention to the technique of the director.

Costume was another tool. Used appropriately, it could enhance and express the physical characteristics of the actor or actress. The films of Pearl White, Delluc wrote, were idiotic, and worse, idiotically made. But the actress herself was cinematically perfect. "Her bearing, her move- ments, her minimum of expression-not due to impotence-and her sportive personality . . . make her absolutely precious to the screen. Young and pretty, she has a way of dressing which is pretty and young.... Very few actresses have understood the technique of dressing for the screen. The majority are distinguished by pretentiousness and awkwardness stem- ming from the desire to appear too charmingly attractive. Nobody in an action film has attained the quasi-synthetic, elegant silhouette of Pearl White."52

The languid Italian actresses perpetually dressed in evening gowns to bare their shoulders, in the morning and at noon as well as at night, in a ballroom, on a terrace, in an automobile, or in a canoe were a case in point. So, too, was the popular actress Gabrielle Robinne. But here the disaster was even greater. In her films, "that the scenario and the acting remind one of the Comedie-Fran9aise is distressing but not serious. But that her gowns evoke social occasions of Com6die-Fran9aise plays is the ultimate calamity. Yet how beautiful it would be to do this well and to dress the actress according to her character and not according to the tradition of the stage ingenue."53

50 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 98, January 28, 1918, p. 16. 51 Photogdnie, pp. 28-29; "Notes pour moi, Le Film, no. 89, November 26, 1917,

p. 18. 52 "Cin^-Romans," Paris-Midi, June 8, 1918. 53 "Films Robinne," Paris-Midi, May 20, 1918.

28 / Cinema Journal

What was a photogenic costume in film? The cut and colors of a man's suit were well-adapted to the black and white of films. A woman's cos- tume presented more of a problem. During the war a number of Ameri- can films, about five years old, in which women were dressed in Parisian styles five years older still, had been the cause for laughter. In reaction film directors had sought a sort of timelessness in costume, aided and abetted by the ubiquitous evening gown. This practice needed urgent re- consideration, Delluc felt. A costume should first of all be visual. It should reflect-and should express-not only the physical characteristics of the actress and the personage she incarnates, but the total atmosphere of the film. "... . [T]he day our films have the desired atmosphere, the dresses can and should date and will not jar the spectator any more than the fashions of the models of Monet, Renoir or Alfred Stevens. Atmosphere cannot be without beauty. Beauty cannot be without style."54

Beauty in film was visual. What the shot contained, its purpose, and how it was taken, determined the quality of the photography. The third element had to derive from the first two. 'The sense of schematic expres- sion of a Mae Marsh, a Mary Pickford, a Bessie Love, is achieved and enhanced by the sense of living light that their directors possess."55 Flesh was eminently photogenic as the Italian directors and Mack Sennett had been the first to realize. Faces, material, furniture, an interior, a land- scape, had the power to be so when they were authentic and necessary. "A locomotive, an ocean liner, an airplane, railroad tracks, by the very geometry of their structures, are photogenic."56 But like each of the other elements, photography had to be a subordinate part of the whole. When the photography became more important than the film, the film disap- peared. When the photography ran counter to the thrust of the film, the film died. Delluc denounced the use of black velvet backdrops by Louis Nalpas in shooting the close-ups for La Sultane de rAmour. "If you only knew what a disaster that was for movement, for expression, for life, for light. Don't you see that the rhythm is broken, the meaning raped, that the idea disappears with the appearance of these images dreary as carnival photos?"57

Just as the idea is intellectually, the director is materially the unifying force of a film. Delluc deplored the absence in France of good comic directors. Comic actors abounded. "But the most ingenious idea and the wildest comedian is nothing cinematically without the coordinating talent of the director." American comedies were dominated by directors with a precision and "a strict suppleness which indicates the presence of a juggler

54 Photogdnie, pp. 68-70. 55 Ibid., p. 80. 56"La Photoplastie au Cinema," Paris-Midi, July 6, 1918; Photogenie, p. 59; "Photo-

genie," Paris-Midi, July 7, 19, 1920. 57 Photogdnie, pp. 13, 62.

Cinema Journal / 29

as much as that of a strategist-or to frighten us less, a poet."58 The di- rector, keeping the central idea or purpose of the film always in view, subordinating each component to this single purpose, coordinating all the elements, and ultimately providing the film with rhythm and struc- ture, was alone the creator of that harmonious unity without which film could never become art.

The best example of this for Delluc was, of course, Ince. Ince did not need great actors. "He has too powerful a sense of detail, of color, of emotions, not to create out of almost nothing. ... Each personage is noth- ing but a means of expression, not of some cold scenario, but of the thought itself of Ince." In La Conquete de 'Or, "from the opening scenes we are carried, wildly and delightfully by a mad rhythm which transforms a rather classic scenario into a passionate drama."59

What Was Wrong with French Films? Delluc had hated and scorned the few French films he had been in-

duced to see by friends, actors, and actresses who wished to see them- selves on the screen. He preferred the circus, the music hall, the ballet. Then he saw De Mille's The Cheat and the films of Chaplin. "Delluc was struck as by lightning. He had caught a glimpse of the incommensurable possibilities of film and he consecrated himself to its service."60

With the zeal nearly of the missionary and with certainly that of the convert, Delluc undertook to promote the birth of a truly French cinema, as truly cinematic as it would be truly French. He had serious doubts that film was "in the blood" of the French. He concluded Cinema & Cie. with the assertion of this doubt. "All races do not love all the arts, do they? Well, France, which loves poetry, the novel, dance, painting, has no sense of music, does not love music, does not understand music .... I say, and we will see if the future does not confirm this, that France has as little sense of cinema as it does of music."61

Faint glimmers did exist for someone actively looking for reasons to hope. The first French films, short, naked records of simple events or ac- tivities, had struck him as a child. Chance, in the guise of a temporary provincial exile, had permitted him to see an old film by Camille de Morl- hon, Le Secret de 'Orpheline, whose qualities and promise impressed him. The company, Film d'Art, had made honorable efforts. "It is a proud title of glory to have been the first in France to see that film was, or would be, an art." The totality of their work he felt to be still unsurpassed. Already

58 Ibid., p. 82. 59 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 108-109, April 15, 1918. 60Eve Francis, Temps Heroiques, pp. 62-65, 170-175, 309-311, 327-330 (Delluc

and Eve Francis were married on January 16, 1918); Cindma & Cie., pp. 11-13. 61 Ibid., p. 283.

30 / Cinema Journal

before the war, Pouctal's Instinct had created a taste for "mimed psychol- ogy," and his Monte Cristo deserved all sorts of praise. "No other film for the mass public, no other serial made here testifies to so much care, so much taste, so much obstinacy." And Film d'Art had introduced and en- couraged new talents like Abel Gance.62 Jacques de Baroncelli, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Henry Roussel, and a tiny handful of others had created works which merited praise and nourished hope. But the over- whelming majority of French films produced only the fear of seeing for- ever "the same sentimental inanities poorly constructed and melancholic- ally performed, miserable parodies of what we are accustomed to in the theater."63

Forced to make an effort by the amazing success of American films on the French market, French producers had scurried around looking for dramatic scenarios. They had found them-in the lowest form of serial stories inexpertly plagiarized by men without talent, "literary pimps to all the directors in Paris."64 All "these improbabilities, this spilled blood, these ingenious crimes, these desperate mysteries . . ." were a wrong road to travel for a culture with a perfected talent for the lightness and grace of gay comedy.65 That was one mistake.

Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian films, Delluc pointed out, often used naked walls as backdrops, and the result was to set off admirably the actresses and actors of the drama. While in France, "our eyes encounter only flourishes, embellishments, coils, and astragals, pretty residues of our centuries of the gallant and the courtesan."66 They did not provide relief. They did not concentrate attention. They dispersed it and they distracted. "... I have never seen a single French film completely beautiful photo- graphically. This is because we think to find beauty in complication, when in reality it is so naked."67 That was another mistake.

The subjective camera, "natural" vision, was anathema to the French film industry which wanted "good" pictures and immediately erected, into an unbreachable canon, rules and regulations for obtaining them. A film actor or actress should not have blue eyes. Delluc promptly named 16 famous blue-eyed American stars. "Our eye sometimes sees things blurred. The screen does not have the right to blurred images. Strange!" It was

62 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 135-136, October 21, 1918; Cinema & Cie., pp. 260, 262-263. Cf. also "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 99, February 4, 1918, p. 13.

63 "D'ou viennent et ou vont nos Metteurs en Scene?," Paris-Midi, August 10, 1918; "Huit Jours au Cinema," Paris-Midi, August 31, 1918; "Un An au Cinema," Paris-Midi, September 7, 1918; Cinema & Cie., "Oeuvres et Chef-d'Oeuvres," pp. 7-9.

64 "Accessoires," Le Film, no. 69, July 9, 1917, p. 9. 65 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 105, March 18, 1918, p. 10; "Quinson n'aime

pas le Cinema," Paris-Midi, June 22, 1918. 66 Photogenie, p. 63. 67 Ibid., p. 12.

Cinema Journal / 31

considered illogical for shots to be other than clear and distinct. An ab- surdity. Our eye could doubt a perspective or deform the outline of a distant object. Painters had used precisely this to create masterpieces. But such deformation was banned from the French screen. A man on the street seen from a tower looked as small as an ant-as Breughel had known. But the French film industry refused to acknowledge this.68 This was a third mistake.

Still another mistake was thinking too much in terms of the international market. The film industry had set up a commission. What was its major concern? Not the quality of the film but the moral codes of its potential, vast, and varied public! So, everybody had to bear constantly in mind that the Americans could not be shown adultery on the screen, and other subjects had to be avoided because of the sensitivities of the Italians or the Turks. The industry sought to please with the same film "the Kaffir, convicts, penguins, Jesuits, Ramses and Noah. It makes me think of those well-informed Madames who know the little idiosyncracies of each of their clients and arrange to satisfy them."69

These were serious mistakes which hindered the creation of consistently excellent French films. But there were as well three grave sins which made them well nigh impossible: a tendency to elevate a constituent ele- ment over the whole, destroying unity and balance; a widespread prac- tice of wholesale and ignorant copying; a penchant for the literary. Each was related to the other and all three derived from a lack of comprehension of what film was.

The destruction of unity through the predominance of one component could best be observed in the choice of actors and actresses, the use made of lighting, and the role accorded the accessory. ".. . [I]t is only of second- ary importance if the lighting is wrong, the cameraman hysterical, the director a wine merchant or an ammunitions worker, and the scenario written by a concierge or a member of the academy. Everything is held to be saved if the actors are photogenic." This initial error was compounded by the prevailing lack of understanding of the concept, photogenic. It had been totally misconstrued to mean "devoid of character." The pretty, the average, the physically mediocre filled the French screen. Delluc pointed out that the inevitable result was "profound monotony."70 He advised film makers to attend bullfights. The "immobile masks, full of tragedy" of a picador, an espada, a bull "are silent and speak so vigorously. After that it is painful to see our too young, sickly, and amorphous matinee idols."71

68 Ibid., p. 16. 69 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 131, September 16, 1918, p. 12. 70 Photogenie, p. 9. 71 Ibid., p. 106.

32 / Cinema Journal

The French director wanted his lighting to be above all beautiful no matter what the subject matter or occasion. Too few realized that truly beautiful lighting and the beautiful photographs which resulted were "pre- cisely those that do not seem artistic. Let everything be natural in cinema. Let everything be simple. The screen demands every refinement of idea and technique, but the spectator does not have to be conscious of what the effort cost. He has only to look at what is expressed and to receive it naked, or at least appearing to him to be so."72 The American method was to find lighting which was "true and appropriate. That is why our lighting is sometimes beautiful, but rarely true, and their lighting is always true and always beautiful."73

The "eccentric accessory" had begun to proliferate in French films. "... [H]orses, factory chimneys, demoniacal bridges, hysterical floors, and ex-

plosives. Ah! . . . let us never forget the explosives, the inexhaustible mir- acle of explosives."74 Yet none of this, no pretty face of a young and future star, no festival of beautiful or striking lighting, no accessory could satis- fy a spectator come to see a film, a balanced, complete, authentic work.

This tendency to allow a single element to predominate was matched

only by one to copy. French directors, according to Delluc, copied indis-

criminately the techniques, accessories, or incidents of successful Italian or American films, never comprehending that in the originals these things derived from an idea and were subordinate to an objective. Following the success of The Cheat, many French films took place in semi-obscurity, and few escaped including a scene in which a man violently laid bare the shoulder and breast of the heroine. A daring innovation, Delluc remarked, had a unique time and place and only at that time and in that place did it have a value.75 A step forward in technique became so rapidly a fad that Delluc wondered if such progress were not more dangerous than steps backward. The self-conscious chiaroscuro of hundreds of imitation French Cheats was followed by a superabundance of backlighting. "That these technical excesses reflect the caprice-or the genius-of a single director is acceptable, but not the snobbism of the entire corporation."76 Copying was worse than imitating; imitating was worse than being inspired by; and

being inspired by could never replace being original and creative.77 The identical lack of comprehension which underlay this indiscrimi-

nate copying tolerated the enormous influence of theater on film. Just as

72 Ibid., p. 18. 73 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 108-109, April 15, 1918, p. 24. 74 "Accessoires," p. 9. 75 Cinema & Cie., p. 13; "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 99, February 4, 1918, p.

13; Photogenie, p. 61. 76 Photogenie, pp. 18-19; "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 135-136, October 21,

1918, pp. 19-20; "Forfaiture," Paris-Midi, March 9, 1920; "Notes," Cinea, no. 4, May 27, 1921, p. 11, no. 12-13, July 22, 1921 p. 18.

77 "Photogenie," Paris-Midi, July 8, 1920.

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French directors copied the methods of foreigners and used them with little regard for the idea or material they had served, they did the same thing with theater. Many film directors, actors, and actresses came from the stage, and they brought with them the mannerisms and ways of the theater. It was not theater itself which Delluc attacked-he had begun as a drama critic-but theatricality, theatrical means and methods applied to film. The universes were different. The material was different and had to be treated differently. "Theater has attained a considerable position here which falsifies by its lustre everything which it touches. The greatest French artists of the stage are terribly marked by their experience. Truth in theater is impossible while in film it is indispensable. But it is quite difficult having spent a lifetime performing marvels with the illusion of life, to suddenly do something with life itself." The actor must give way to nature before film could be.78 It was theater-warped actors who bore most of the responsibility for the decade of marking time during which the French film industry had lost its preeminence and its dominant po- sition in the international market.79

Even sets and the arrangement of furniture smacked of theater.80 The scenarios? ". . .[L]aborious, decrepit, vulgar, wretched adaptations of worn- out vaudevillian horrors."81 But the prestige and influence of theater was itself largely the consequence of something else, the profoundly literary nature of French culture. Mention the need for poetry on the screen to a French director, and he would rush off to the academic poets Jean Aicard and Jean Richepin.82 The poetry of contemporary existence, of modern rhythms, of the visual was unknown to these idolators of the word. Just look at the intertitles of any French film, Delluc cried. They were invari- ably too long. A film should not be read. And their contents, full of ci- tations or with pretentions to be literature, fulfilled only one purpose: to establish the cultural credentials of the director. They reminded Delluc of those caramel wrappers one unrolled to read, "'France 0 beautiful land, O generous earth' (Casimir Delavigne) "83 This was not surprising, he wrote, in a culture of bureaucrats and people inordinately conscious of academic degrees who even before knowing how to read or write wanted to produce sublime and definitive literature. When would the desire suf- fice, he asked, "to say what one has seen and what one has felt . . .? The movement of life, and if possible, of the inner life-this is the goal of a

78 "'Illusion' et Illusions," Le Film, no. 67, June 25, 1917, p. 6; "D'Oreste a Rio Jim," p. 14.

79 Cinema & Cie., p. 261. 80 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 131, September 16, 1918, p. 12. 81 "L'Expression et Charlie Chaplin," p. 54. 82 "Douglas Fairbanks," Paris-Midi, June 1, 1918. 83 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 115, May 27, 1918, p. 14; "Sous-titres," Paris-

Midi, June 24, 1919.

34 / Cinema Journal

true and engaging art," not the sublime and the grand.84 As long as French directors continued to think novel or theater first and then film, they would be like those beginning language students who thought their sen- tences first in French and then spoke them in translation.85

The Role of Film If Louis Delluc spent the last part of his life investigating, writing

about, and ultimately creating films, if he expended so much energy urging French cinema to return to the true road, he did it because of the vision he had of what film could be, and the role film could play. In one of the first articles he wrote for Le Film he asserted, "I have known for a long time now that the cinema is destined to provide us with the impres- sions of fleeting and eternal beauty that only the spectacle of nature and sometimes of human activity can produce-impressions of grandeur, sim- plicity, distinctness that suddenly render art useless. Art would obviously be completely useless if everyone were capable of consciously enjoying the profound beauty of the passing moment. But the education of the crowd in sensitivity is too slow for it, still for centuries, to do without works of art, the lofty secrets of others' souls. The cinema is precisely a step toward this suppression of art, in that it surpasses art by being life."86 In a horrible little provincial movie theater, he had observed an audience of workers and their wives succumb to a delicate Japanese film, created out of gestures, flowers, and decorated paper. "The charm of the screen vigorously broadens the taste of the crowd so rebellious about letting it- self be cultivated by any other art."87 This was why he was so scornful of Louis Feuillade and his interminable serials. Feuillade understood pop- ular taste. He was himself an artist and a searcher. And he had both power and freedom to create. But he had refused the challenge these responsibil- ities entailed.88

The film obliged us to see. Fragments of gestures scarcely perceived in reality were captured, stylized, and delivered to us for our contemplation. The revelation of the elements of which the movement of trees, of water, of material, of animals were composed had a strange power to move us. "The cinema will teach us a lot of things about the world and about our- selves" because "the spectacle of real beauty reveals ourselves to ourselves." And it will force us to love truth. Already people had become impatient with theatrical artifice.89

84 "'Illusion' et Illusions," p. 5; "Thos. Ince," p. 16. 85 "Douglas Fairbanks," Paris-Midi, June 1, 1918. 86 "La Beaute du Cinema," Le Film, no. 73, August 6, 1917, p. 4. 87 Photogenie, p. 113. 88 "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 110-111, April 29, 1918, pp. 30-31. 89"Douglas Fairbanks," Paris-Midi, June 1, 1918; Photogenie, p. 5; "La Beaute du

Cinema," p. 5; "Lui Aussi, il est Peintre," p. 11; "Notes pour moi," Le Film, no. 100, February 11, 1918, p. 15; "Parmi les Fauves," Paris-Midi, January 29, 1919.

Cinema Journal / 35

Those who called themselves the elite were wrong not to perceive the importance of film. "An art truly of the people is appearing for us French who have never had one except in the peculiar, pompous, and imperious ostentation of the church." Like the bullfight which every week took ten or fifteen thousand individuals and fused them through "an hour of light, of color, of agile beauty-and of art," the film could take its audience and give it "a single voice, a single life, a single soul."

It was folly to miss this opportunity. It was criminal to refuse this re- sponsibility. French cinema had to respond.