The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (137 page)

Eisenstein found his inspiration in Griffith and made a conscious technique of what Griffith, with his intuitive practical sense for visual drama, had been practicing. For Eisenstein
Intolerance
seemed “a brilliant model of his method of montage.” This was a name for the distinctive feature of the new art, which the intellectual Eisenstein explained and demonstrated in his writing and his films. “Montage” (which did not come into the English language until 1929) from the French word for “assembly” meant bringing together film images not in chronological order but for their psychological and emotional stimulus. And it described the new role of the film editor. Eisenstein, with materialist bias, emphasized its origin in “engineering and electrical apparatus.” And he saw Griffith as the pioneer. “This was the montage whose foundation had been laid by American film-culture, but
whose full, completed, conscious use and world recognition was established by our [Soviet] films.”

In montage Eisenstein saw both the creation of the film art and a newly creative role for the spectator. He found a similarity to the Japanese ideogram that combined the character for “dog” with that for “mouth” to mean not “dog’s mouth” but “bark.” Similarly he noted that child + mouth = scream, bird + mouth = sing, water + eye = weep, etc. Thus, by juxtaposing concrete images in montage the moviemaker could lead the viewer to create his own abstractions. Eisenstein found montage similar to “the method of parallel action,” which Griffith had seen in Dickens. He too was amazed at “Dickens’s nearness to the characteristics of cinema in method, style, and especially in viewpoint and exposition.”

In his masterpiece
Battleship Potemkin
(1925), commissioned by the Communist Party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, Eisenstein gave classic form to his theory of montage. Minutely dissected and extravagantly praised, as late as 1958 it was acclaimed by an international poll of film critics as the best film ever made. A story of mutiny in the czarist navy against tyranny and filth, it produced the famous “Odessa steps sequence,” showing the massacre by imperial troops of innocent Russian civilians who had come to pay their respects to an assassinated leader of the mutiny. This became the classic textbook sequence of montage—a baby carriage rolling slowly down the steps over massacred bodies, past a pair of crushed eyeglasses, and blood-soaked arms and legs. Going far beyond Griffith in multiplying shots for montage, this film, which ran to only 86 minutes, contained 1,346 shots, while
The Birth of a Nation
, which ran 195 minutes, had only 1,375 shots. While it was predictably attacked by the Party as another example of bourgeois “formalism,” the film’s appeal was not confined to Russia. Its emotional antiestablishment message led it to be banned in some European countries and it had to be shown underground. “After seeing
Potemkin
” the famous theater director Max Reinhardt confessed that “the stage will have to give way to the cinema.”

The new public art of film, in curious ways, would reunite the community that millennia before had seen ritual transformed into drama on the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis. As the film art grew, it multiplied puzzling elements in the mystery of creation. It became more and more uncertain who was creating what, from what, and for whom. In Shakespeare’s London, drama required a theater, of which only six would be flourishing. The live drama needed a stage, but the new art was conveyed in a machine that could project its message anywhere. The extent of this mystery was dazzling.
By 1948
The Birth of a Nation
had been seen by 150 million people all over the world.

Cinema art became collaborative on a scale and in a manner never before imagined. Griffith observed that in
The Birth of a Nation
“from first to last we used from 30,000 to 35,000 people.” Producing a film resembled commanding and supplying an army more than any earlier kind of art. The set for
Intolerance
included a full-scale model of ancient Babylon rising three hundred feet aboveground on a scene that stretched across ten acres. With sixty principal players and eighteen thousand extras, it sometimes had a payroll of twenty thousand dollars a day. The commanders, besides Griffith, included eight assistant directors. The rough cut of the film ran for eight hours. There was a creating role, too, for the cinematographer and all who helped provide lighting, color, sound, and music. Reaching popular audiences never imagined for the opera, films provided vast audiences for composers and countless spectators for the dance, creating new forms of musical drama. When sound came to film in the late 1920s the movies could vie with opera as a union of the arts, ironically satisfying Wagner’s hope for a
Gesamtkunstwerk
.

To all its other charms, the movies, by the 1950s, added the intriguing question of who really was the “maker” of the hypnotic products of the new art. The brilliant French moviemaker and critic François Truffaut (1932–1984) insisted that the director was a new kind of “author” (
auteur
) in this modern audiovisual language. So, he said, the director (or
auteur
) really was the person who created the film, and so should be given the major credit. This plausible suggestion itself sparked a lively controversy over the “auteur” theory, which debated who if anyone should be considered the prime creator of the complex collaborative product.

Over the actors, too, there came a new ambiguity and a new aura. Griffith had boasted “raising motion-picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.” Now that all spectators could see the actor’s face close up, it removed the temptations to mug, and encouraged a subtler, “more restrained” style of acting. But there was a colossal irony in what the new art did to these “more restrained” actors in the new art. Biograph had at first banned the names of actors from credits in their films, and insisted on their anonymity. But film gave a vivid unique personality to every actor as a person who could not be denied and became a magnet for its audience. By 1919 “movie star” had entered our written language for this new human phenomenon of awesome dimensions. The celebrity of movie actors overshadowed even that of eminent statesmen, baseball heroes, and notorious criminals. Gargantuan film creations became only vehicles for a Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, or Marilyn Monroe, whose off-screen lives became news.

While movies gave actors a newly vivid role, they obscured the “author,” who often disappeared from the scene. Even while movie rights to books sold for astronomical sums, films “based on” them often had scant resemblance to the original. Some of the best authors, despairing at the scenes, the characters, and the ideas mangled out of their works, refused to participate in their “story conferences,” and became refugees from Hollywood.

An increasingly technological and industrial art, the movies gave technicians, lighting experts, and cinematographers crucial roles in making every film, just as the collaboration and enthusiasm of bankers, movie moguls, and executives were essential. By the 1920s there developed in Hollywood a “studio system,” with companies like Warner Bros., M-G-M, and Universal organized to focus vast investment and countless collaborators. How did the popular products emerge from this technological-industrial-artistic maelstrom? Some suggested that there was a Genius of the System, which, like the Muses of ancient Greece, somehow converged and balanced all the elusive elements. But by the 1950s the colossi of the studio system were themselves in decline, and “independent” producers were producing some of the most successful films. While this diffused the powers of movie creation, it did not dissolve the mystery.

The heart of the mysteries of this new art was the audience. While Dickens could await public response to one number of his novel before shaping the next, the moviemakers could not so easily test their costly product as it was being created. From the beginning there was a hint of mystery in the movie audience. Since stage drama required light, the early Elizabethan theaters were in the open air, and performances were limited by the climate and the season. The movie house required darkness, where spectators could hardly see one another. Still, the public had become the patron and had to be pleased.

And who was the public? Moviemakers had the box-office test of whether they were pleasing their audience. But every step in the rise and diffusion of film drama deepened the mystery of the audience, who became less and less dependent on a theater. Now anyplace could be a theater. In every living room, television viewers could choose the film to be played and replayed at their pleasure. The creators of the newest art were in bondage to a spectral master.

These notes will help the reader share my delight in the lives and works of the creators treated in this book. At the same time they will suggest my debts to other scholars. I have selected accessible works likely to be found in a good public library or the library of a college or university, omitting the more specialized works and the articles in learned journals. For each book the date of the most recent publication is noted, and I have tried to note works still in print and in paperback editions. Many of the books listed here contain helpful bibliographies. Where subjects in this volume overlap or touch on those in my companion book,
The Discoverers
, the reader can consult its Reference Notes. In treating literary works from languages other than English I have tried, where the quoted passage is lengthy and of literary interest, either in the text or in these Reference Notes to credit the translator, who is too seldom adequately rewarded and recognized. Of course there is no substitute for seeing the great works of art and architecture and hearing the great works of music. I would hope this book would encourage readers to see and hear for themselves.

There is a vast literature on “creativity” that tends to tell us more about the authors than about their subjects. It seeks simple explanations for the most elusive, complex, and mysterious of all human processes, and homogenizes the people and the works that interest us precisely because of their uniqueness. Among the general works on artists that I have found most interesting are William James,
Principles of Psychology
(2 vols., 1890), with brilliant observations on genius and imagination; Arthur Koestler,
The Act of Creation
(1964), with intriguing descriptions of “bisociative” thinking and the creative leaps; Milton C. Nahm,
The Artist as Creator
(1956), offering the creativity of the artist as a new ingredient of freedom introduced by the West; Rudolf and Margot Wittkower,
Born under Saturn
(1963), on sources of creativity in the personal miseries of artists. And on the artists’ products and their meanings: André Malraux,
The Voices of Silence: Man and His Art
(1953), a bold view of how modernity—the museum and photography—has created a “museum without walls” and the consequences; Joseph Alsop,
The Rare Art Traditions
(1982), an original history of art collecting and its linked phenomena.

As a devotee of reference books, I find no substitute for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. For individual creators there is nothing of the scope and quality of the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
(C. C. Gillispie, ed., 16 vols., 1970–80). General reference works that illuminate the subjects of this book include notably:
The Encyclopedia of Religion
(Mircea Eliade, ed., 16 vols., 1987);
Encyclopaedia of Religion
and Ethics
(James Hastings, ed., 12 vols., n.d.);
Dictionary of the History of Ideas
(Philip P. Wiener, ed., 4 vols., 1973). For American and British readers the inexhaustible treasure house of
The Oxford English Dictionary
(James A. H. Murray and others, eds., 13 vols., 1930; R. W. Burchfield, ed., 4 supplements, 1972–86) makes our language an avenue to the history of all our arts. For epochal works on print, see
Printing and the Mind of Man: The Impact of Print on Five Centuries of Western Civilization
(John Carter and Percy H. Muir, eds., 1967).

For the visual arts a delightful starting point, elementary in the best sense of the word, is E. H. Gombrich’s concise
The Story of Art
(3d ed., 1950). And for reference:
Encyclopedia of World Art
, McGraw-Hill (15 vols. 1959–1968; 2 vols. supp. 1983–1987), copiously illustrated, but with a heavy bias toward Italian scholarship. The most satisfactory textbook is H. W. Janson,
History of Art
(4th ed., rev. by Anthony F. Janson, 1991), bulky but brilliantly illustrated, with convenient aids and time charts. More compact is the Thames and Hudson
Encyclopaedia of the Arts
(Herbert Read, ed., 1966). On particular periods I have enjoyed
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
(2d ed., 1970; N.G.L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, eds.);
The Oxford History of the Classical World
(John Boardman et al., eds., 1986); the admirable
Dictionary of the Middle Ages
(Joseph R. Strayer, ed., 13 vols., 1982–86); the compendious and sensible
Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century
(Kenneth McLeish, ed., 1985). All these offer bibliographies.

An array of imaginative scholars in this century have opened paths from arts to all the rest of our history: the stimulating and original works of Sigfried Giedion,
Mechanization takes Command
(1948),
Space, Time and Architecture
(1949),
The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art
(1962); E. H. Gombrich,
Art and Illusion
(1972); Erwin Panofsky’s subtle
Meaning in the Visual Arts
(1955; 1982),
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
(1970); Heinrich Wolfflin,
Principles of Art History
(1932). Basic texts are conveniently collected in
Great Books of the Western World
(54 vols., 1952; rev. ed., 1990), a publication of Encyclopaedia Britannica.