In the French figures on the screen today, those who best know how to portray human emotions, there is that curious mixture, practically unheard of in the American, of tenderness and brutality combined. The American can give us one or the other, both in a more extreme degree, but never the two combined in the one personality. Wallace Beery and Victor MacLaglen come closest to it, perhaps, but they are rather crude specimens, types rather than human beings. In Emil Jannings we had the closest approximation to this great French quality, but marred by a hidebound German theatricality. Only once, to my recollection, was Jannings above criticism, and that was in an early silent film which was called in English The Last Laugh. Here he almost reached Dostoievskian proportions. But to achieve it he had to rely on burlesque, of which the French are altogether ignorant. As I say, this quality of brutality and tenderness combined is the special characteristic of the French actor, and through it he reveals the meaning which the French give to the word “human.” It is something passionate, and not the expression of a blind, senseless activity, of reflex muscular rage. It is something slumbering and capable of infinite mutations, destructive and creative, always dramatic because always expressive of the inherent antagonism in things. In a film such as Geuele d’Amour even the atmosphere reflects this quality. The street scene, in Orange I believe it was, when night is coming on and there is just the flapping of the awning in the breeze, so much is contained in this moment that it is like an act of poetry. In a trifling touch a whole world of feeling is conveyed. So it is too with Gabin’s studied restraint, his abortive gestures, his muttering silences, his quick, dull look, which comes like a hammer-blow. Raimu and Jouvet also have this terrifying look at times; it is like a thick curtain of blood suddenly veiling the eye. They brood, they wait, they endure; but when they move, when they reach for their victim, it is like Fate itself striking, and nothing can hinder. In the American films murder is committed negligently, recklessly, unthinkingly: a button is touched and the sawed-off shot-guns squirt their fire. It matters little who gets in the way—women, children, priests, anybody who comes within range is mowed down. I remember the shock of a Parisian audience when in an American film a priest was shown as being struck down by a blow of the fist. But it might just as well have been a kick in the rear which he had received. Or he might have been boiled in oil. To the American, as their films well reveal, nothing is sacred, nothing taboo—except perhaps the act of going to bed with a woman. That is immoral, though it happens everywhere all the time, even in America. But it must never be openly shown—it must be imagined only. Thus, too, the dead are portrayed as drinking cocktails, something which is not altogether inconceivable, but which, if true, is only a minor virtue in the life of the dead.
But the real key to the American sense of grandeur lies in the glorification of catastrophes. Nature is the hero, not man! If it is not an earthquake it is a hurricane or a landslide or a flood, dramatic incidents which have their human counterpart in battle scenes, prison riots and so on. When it is really a grandiose theme, such as in Lost Horizon, for example, it is muffled with clowning and sensationalism. The Grand Lama spouts the Christian doctrine through the mouth of a Jewish actor. The French, who were as divided as the rest of the world about the merits of this film, reduced the theme to a comfortable bourgeois ideal with a little foreword containing some such clap-trap as this—“who has not dreamed of retiring some day to his little home in the country!’’ What rubbish! What a woeful depreciation of a grand theme! However . . . in the film based on that splendid human document, The Good Earth, the really important feature seems to have been the invasion of the locusts. In San Francisco it is the earthquake, an episode which requires about three minutes to render, and the rest of the film is sheer drivel, absolutely insupportable, especially Jeanette MacDonald. (The same is true for The Charge of the Light Brigade and Gunga Din; only the destructive scenes have value—the rest is hogwash.) Even when the film is a restoration film the street scenes are unconvincing. Whole corps of men and women are mobilized to study the history, costumes, architecture, furniture of a period—and yet the result is nil. The money spent on research, which is colossal, is sheer waste. The same for characters. In a Chinese film, when America of all countries is full of available types, Paul Muni, a Viennese Jew, is made a Chinese, and Luise Rainer, after her adorable portrayal of Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld, is converted into a Chinese peasant woman who speaks English with an Austrian accent. A Frenchman or a Hindu is always a caricature of the type. No country in the world has such a variety of racial types as America; no acting is required, because in the American film everybody is supposed “to be just himself.” Yet in their frantic attempts at realism, at producing a semblance of something life-like, something authentic, they will choose, as if blindfolded, the very man or woman most unlike the one they are attempting to portray. When it comes to reciting the Gettysburg address an Englishman is chosen, because he is undoubtedly the most expert in the use of the English language. Charles Laughton’s recital of the Gettysburg address was a memorable moment in the history of the cinema, but what a travesty of the homely diction Lincoln must have employed! When they admire good acting in a foreign film they choose an innocuous museum piece like La Kermesse Héroique or such a sham as La Grande Illusion, with that linguistic, physiognomic monstrosity, Eric von Stroheim, who is neither fish nor fowl. The French, in turn, are capable of applauding a fifth rate film such as Back Street, which was based upon the work of probably the worst writer in America, Fanny Hurst. They even fall so far, in their critical acumen, as to present it to the public through a little speech of pure asininity, by Henri Duvernois, one of their own bad writers. Of the two films which seem to be most frequently revived here—Million Dollar Legs and The Whole Town’s Talking—the one is a burlesque-fantasy and the other a study of the “double.” Robinson is a capable actor, in the old style, histrionic through and through. The film is excellent, and he is largely responsible for its excellence, but better films of this genre have been produced in Europe. As for Million Dollar Legs, with Jack Oakie, whom the French seem to adore, especially the intellectuals, it is hard to see what they so admire in this film which is put together in slapdash fashion and creaks with wheezy old gags that fill up the holes in a hollow scenario. The element of fantasy* in it perhaps appeals to the French, because they have none themselves, but the burlesque is shoddy and emasculated. What is called “burlesque” by French film fans is only the weak dregs, the coffee grounds, as it were, of a once strong brew. Real burlesque, as it was known in America before the Catholic Church intervened, would shock the French to death. The sexual element, which was its chief characteristic, has been eliminated; what remains is horse-play, wise-cracks, mountebank tricks of the carnival variety. This bastardized version of burlesque, which the American films now present, the French intelligentsia accept as a sort of American Surrealism, the spice of life in the great cultural desert. But they are mistaken. What is truly surrealistic the Americans understand nothing of, nor do the French themselves for that matter, excepting the pontificators and mystagogues.
What is truly American usually misses fire here, as I have noticed time and again. The really excellent things which America offers— in weak pills usually, I must confess—make no appeal to the French spirit. They fail to come within the scope of the Frenchman’s understanding of reality. (What is truly Irish is similarly misunderstood or ignored, I notice, despite the Celtic bond. Poetry, when it is lived, is simply another form of insanity to the French.) The films I have in mind, when I speak of representative American themes, have to do with a “message.” And this message has to do with the common man, with the great hope which Whitman gives sublime expression to throughout his works. This hope the American is blindly trying to give body to. It is something which the cultured European understands with his mind only; it never affects his behavior. But in America, despite the crass ignorance, despite the corruption in every walk of life, despite the seemingly permanent air
of unreality in which everybody bathes, even when “up against it,” as the saying goes, this message is nevertheless understood by the lowest man, is in his blood, so to speak. It marks the gulf between the New and the Old World, and all the blithe exchanges of fraternity and solidarity by the cunning politicians fail to hide it. The American is a different animal, and he is primarily a non-political, non-cultural animal. In his most Utopian dreams he is most truly himself. He is, despite all outward signs of practicality, a dreamer, one, unfortunately, who is capable of committing the most heinous crimes in his sleep.
In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town we have the American par excellence in the person of Gary Cooper who, interpreting in his own original way a thin story by a hack writer, permits the French to visualize the common man whose homely, shrewd common sense is very close to the wisdom of the cultured man. Between such a type as this and Raimu, who represents an ordinary man of the Midi, also a sound and solid type, though a “relapsed” one, there is a world of difference. Raimu symbolizes the tragedy of the common man of Europe who is forever being sacrificed to the political machinations of unscrupulous seekers after power. He is not a fool, but helpless, a pawn in a game which is beyond him. In Gary Cooper, as pure type of American, one feels that perhaps one day the common man will win out over the undeserving leaders, over the despots in every guise who lure him to death. Americans, though denying it in practice, have always clung to the belief in such a possibility. The European, on the other hand, does not believe, not deep down, even when he is a revolutionary. He is always thinking politically, strategically, ambitiously; he is animated more by envy and hatred than by any chimerical thought of real brotherhood. The peasant always wins out over the city man, and the peasant is at heart selfish and uninspired. The American is a born anarchist; he has no genuine concern with the ideals of the European. If, as an unwilling ally, he makes common cause with the European it is more out of a spirit of adventure, out of sheer love of fight, fight for its own sake. I speak of the man in the street, to be sure, and not those who “represent” America in official capacities by manipulating the passions of the mob.
When I see a character such as Raimu, I realize how solitary, how lonely, is the real man of Europe. In every gesture he makes Raimu enacts the tragedy of a life which has been imposed upon the common man of Europe and which, as an individual, he is powerless to alter because he cannot free himself from the mesh of national intrigues in which he is born and nurtured. But if this man has little or no hope, and it is that which I read in the faces of Europeans everywhere, he at least has grandeur and dignity, sometimes the noblesse which is born of sheer desperation. In all his roles, however, I have the feeling that it is not his own fight which I am witnessing; I feel that he has forfeited from birth the privilege of the pursuit of life and happiness which is theoretically, if not actually, supposed to be due every man. He lives on, as part of a group soul, a hero who is never recognized, except anonymously. The American, while moving with the herd, is instinctively a traitor—to group, country, race, tradition. He does not know clearly what he is striving for, but he does know that he wants a chance, and he means to grab that chance, when he can, even if it involves the destruction of the world. He is an unconscious Nihilist. Any real connection with the man of Europe is vague and tenuous, imagined rather than felt. He is far closer, in spirit, to the German and the Japanese than to the French. He is not democratic, not libertarian—he is a human bomb for the time being carefully wrapped like a mummy in swathes of idealistic bandages.
For me Raimu stands out as the symbol of the lone European who is doomed to disappear in the convulsions of internecine strife because he has never dared to believe in his destiny as an individual. He is the blood-brother whom the American left in the lurch in order to open up a New World.
* (P.S.) How explain the mysterious disappearance from the programs of the recent French attempt at fantasy—“Monsieur Coccinelle”? There is something louche about this!
THE COSMOLOGICAL EYE
MY FRIEND Reichel is just a pretext to enable me to talk about the world, the world of art and the world of men, and the confusion and eternal misunderstanding between the two. When I talk about Reichel I mean any good artist who finds himself alone, ignored, unappreciated. The Reichels of this world are being killed off like flies. It will always be so; the penalty for being different, for being an artist, is a cruel one.
Nothing will change this state of affairs. If you read carefully the history of our great and glorious civilization, if you read the biographies of the great, you will see that it has always been so; and if you read still more closely you will see that these exceptional men have themselves explained why it must be so, though often complaining bitterly of their lot.
Every artist is a human being as well as painter, writer or musician; and never more so than when he is trying to justify himself as artist. As a human being Reichel almost brings tears to my eyes. Not merely because he is unrecognized (while thousands of lesser men are wallowing in fame), but first of all because when you enter his room, which is in a cheap hotel where he does his work, the sanctity of the place breaks you down. It is not quite a hovel, his little den, but it is perilously close to being one. You cast your eye about the room and you see that the walls are covered with his paintings. The paintings themselves are holy. This is a man, you cannot help thinking, who has never done anything for gain. This man had to do these things or die. This is a man who is desperate, and at the same time full of love. He is trying desperately to embrace the world with this love which nobody appreciates. And, finding himself alone, always alone and unacknowledged, he is filled with a black sorrow.
He was trying to explain it to me the other day as we stood at a bar. It’s true, he was a little under the weather and so it was even more difficult to explain than normally. He was trying to say that what he felt was worse than sorrow, a sort of sub-human black pain which was in the spinal column and not in the heart or brain. This gnawing black pain, though he didn’t say so, I realized at once was the reverse of his great love: it was the black unending curtain against which his gleaming pictures stand out and glow with a holy phosphorescence. He says to me, standing in his little hotel room: “I want that the pictures should look back at me; if I look at them and they don’t look at me too then they are no good.” The remark came about because some one had observed that in all his pictures there was an eye, the cosmological eye, this person said. As I walked away from the hotel I was thinking that perhaps this ubiquitous eye was the vestigial organ of his love so deeply implanted into everything he looked at that it shone back at him out of the darkness of human insensitivity. More, that this eye had to be in everything he did or he would go mad. This eye had to be there in order to gnaw into men’s vitals, to get hold of them like a crab, and make them realize that Hans Reichel exists.
This cosmological eye is sunk deep within his body. Everything he looks at and seizes must be brought below the threshold of consciousness, brought deep into the entrails where there reigns an absolute night and where also the tender little mouths with which he absorbs his vision eat away until only the quintessence remains. Here, in the warm bowels, the metamorphosis takes place. In the absolute night, in the black pain hidden away in the backbone, the substance of things is dissolved until only the essence shines forth. The objects of his love, as they swim up to the light to arrange themselves on his canvases, marry one another in strange mystic unions which are indissoluble. But the real ceremony goes on below, in the dark, according to the inscrutable atomic laws of wedlock. There are no witnesses, no solemn oaths. Phenomenon weds phenomenon in the way that atomic elements marry to make the miraculous substance of living matter. There are polygamous marriages and polyandrous marriages, but no morganatic marriages. There are monstrous unions too, just as in nature, and they are as inviolable, as indissoluble as the others. Caprice rules, but it is the stern caprice of nature, and so divine.
There is a picture which he calls “T
he Stillborn Twins.” It is an ensemble of miniature panels in which there is not only the embryonic flavor but the hieroglyphic as well. If he likes you, Reichel will show you in one of the panels the little shirt which the mother of the stillborn twins was probably thinking of in her agony. He says it so simply and honestly that you feel like weeping. The little shirt embedded in a cold pre-natal green is indeed the sort of shirt which only a woman in travail could summon up. You feel that with the freezing torture of birth, at the moment when the mind seems ready to snap, the mother’s eye inwardly turning gropes frantically towards some tender, known object which will attach her, if only for a moment, to the world of human entities. In this quick, agonized clutch the mother sinks back, through worlds unknown to man, to planets long since disappeared, where perhaps there were no baby’s shirts but where there was the warmth, the tenderness, the mossy envelope of a love beyond love, of a love for the disparate elements which metamorphose through the mother, through her pain, through her death, so that life may go on. Each panel, if you read it with the cosmological eye, is a throw-back to an undecipherable script of life. The whole cosmos is moving back and forth through the sluice of time and the stillborn twins are embedded there in the cold pre-natal green with the shirt that was never worn.