The Stage and the Screen

BY PROF. BALDOON DHINGRA, M.A. (Cantab)

(Government College, Lahore.)

It has been averred historically that the theatre has its original home in India. This Herr Pischel, the German Sanskrit scholar, has tried to prove, for he discovered in our country the birth-place of the puppet show, which today Tandra Devi in Kashmir is trying strenuously to revive. The other theory traces the origin of the theatre to unstressed plastic movements and incantations. It is obvious that a marionette show can only evolve into a spectacle; ritual dances only into a pantomime. One can see in what respects our conventions differed from those of the Greeks, for there could not be in our drama any element of tragedy or tragic emphasis. The Sanskrit name for the stage director is Sutradhar, the manipulator of strings, thus connecting our classical art with marionette shows.

The Greek theatre grew out of Dionysian orgies, from riotous scenes culminating in triumphs. Its main theme was conflict, the conflict of man with fate, a battle against social values. The playwright has to transmit his ideas through the medium of living actors and to a collective audience whose members cannot turn to an earlier page if some point is not clear. The most essential quality of any play in all Western literature is conflict either between one character and another or, as in the case of Hamlet, between the qualities inside one man’s character, or between the antagonists represented in the actions of the different characters; and to present these the play-wright needs a wide and comprehensive view of society.

On the Indian stage the very element of conflict is eliminated, with a view to providing social harmony. The purpose has been to attain peace by not Jetting conflicts arise; that of the European stage, derived from the Greeks, has been of attaining peace by overpowering conflicts. There is nothing dramatic in Indian drama. Action, which the word drama implies, is the central feature of the Greek theatres; of the Indian stage the essentials are spectacle and song, in which the illusion of real life is absent. Proofs of this are clearly to be had by seeing modern Indian theatricals and films where unexpected outbursts of song and music in the midst of the most poignant dramatic situations is a common occurrence. It is generally believed by people acquainted only with the Western theatre that such methods are designed to pander to the ‘low-brow’ taste. But while admitting that the technique of the theatre ties the dramatist closely to his own age and type of people, we cannot doubt that our society has fewer dramatic conflicts that the European, and that our traditions do not permit us to indulge in emotional exhibitionism. Our stage or screen has hardly ever vigorously brought out the demands of the individual as against the claims of society. Until such a time as our society evolves differently, we should, like the only man who has truly understood the Indian stage, have in our plays colour, light, music, dancing, stylished posture, ballet, exquisite costumes and settings. And the man who has best succeeded in this is the great poet and dramatist, Rabindranath Tagore. This does not mean that the Indian producer should not make use of the mechanical devices of the Western stage: only, he should not be its slave but its master.

The drama in Europe has now lived for nearly two thousand five hundred years. During that course of time traditions have been established and achievement has been built upon achievement; time there has been for the appearance of those masters who have given to the stage its eminence among the arts. Only a bare thirty years have elapsed since the first narrative film made its humble and hesitant bow to the public; only a few years have passed by since the introduction of speech created a typical film product of the present. What has been achieved in this form, therefore, has been within a period which is but a fraction of the theatre’s scope of existence. Every pronouncement concerning the cinema ought clearly to be framed with full appreciation of this fact.

In the late sixteenth century the stage occupied a position by no means dissimilar to that taken in our own times by the cinema. The sixteenth century public was a motley one and the stage commercial, by its profits attracting to it many men in nowise talented dramatically or otherwise eager to serve the theatre’s cause. Amid such conditions were Shakespeare’s master-pieces produced, in circumstances which would have been likely to drive any modern playwright, distracted and in protest, to some other sphere of literary activity.

The first essential of film-making is finance. Money plays a comparatively unimportant role in the production of books, or paintings or music. But the cost of buying the necessary film apparatus and running it demands heavy financial ing. The cinema is a means of expression of powerful financial interests in the capitalist State. The world’s cinema audience is, according to John Grierson, 250 millions a week. The last Charlie Chaplin film was seen in England by 15 million people. Where the prizes of popularity are so gigantic, consideration of art and public service must, of course, be secondary. The film people are business-men; and, by all law of commerce, their spiritual researches are confined to those common factors of human appeal which ensure the rattle of twenty or fifty million silver coins through-out the world.

Many people fear that the cinema may kill the theatre. The theatre is not a thing easily to be destroyed. For these 2,500 years it has endured, endured in ages of indifference and in ages of hostility, even preserving latent vitality, which it has always shown ready to display whenever the time arrived for the period of blossoming. Over many years when the delight of the arena attracted all men’s eyes it retained its life-force; during periods when all thinking men condemned it utterly and sought its complete overthrow, it persisted in its clutch upon life. To assume that the mere advent of the cinema will prove its ruin and to weep anticipatory tears over its supposed corpse is to overlook the lessons of history: for worse rivals than the cinema have confronted the theatre in the past, and the theatre has preserved its vitality still.

The truth is, of course, that although the cinema and the theatre have many things in common, they represent distinct and separate means of expression; and that, once we have passed by the period when the younger form has imitatively been forced to rely on the achievements of the elder, there will come a time when the two will settle down to pursuing their own independent paths. Novel and drama have similarly been confused in the past and we can easily see that several of the Elizabethan dramatists were not sure whether they were engaged in creating a play or merely in providing immediate living embodiment for some current tale. Those days, however, have passed; narrative fiction has found its own characteristic methods, and the play has ceased to be disturbed by too close identification with an art separate from itself. So it is almost certain to be–with the cinema. The novelty of that form, no doubt, has attracted many away from the theatre’s doors; and the drama, in its frantic efforts to regain its lost adherents, has caught at cinematic devices of various kinds, even as the screen, lacking courage, has filched many an idea from the stage. Future years will remedy these things. Already the cinema is beginning to realise its true functions; the theatre is losing its desire frenziedly to copy the novel devices; and audiences are coming to realise that what legitimately they may gain from a stage performance they will not get from attendance at the picture house. To say glibly that the presence of flesh-and-blood actors separates the stage from the screen is apt to prove confusing and surface-skimming; that does not provide us with the material we seek. The film is an established creation which remains immutable as a painting or a picture; the theatre presents an art-form which is never precisely to be determined in its outlines. Any theatrical performance is in the process of dying as it is born, and no two performances can ever be alike. On the theme that films should aim chiefly at pictorial art, the great dramatist, Pirandello, has something to say:

‘The cinema must free itself from literature, leaving narrative to novels and the theatre. It should steep itself in music, but it should leave opera to the opera-house and jazz to the music hall. Thus I would say pure music and pure image……cinematography; there is the new word for the true art revolution, the visible language of sound.’

I am concerned with the cinema as a popular art-form, akin to the theatre in that it achieves its fullest expression when its appeal is widest.

The first requirement in film and in play is that it should be suited for public appreciation. There is no need to introduce perplexing difficulties and confusions here. The commercial cinema obviously has often failed utterly to exploit the possibilities offered so generously to it or, if such exploitation is attempted, the path has frequently been pursued only half-heartedly and meretriciously; but this fact is not one that must lead inevitably towards a general condemnation. The theatre, too, possesses much that is unworthy; yet, when we speak of drama, not of these lesser forms of play-production do we think. We think in terms of Shakespeare and Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw, Chekhov and O’Neill. A play of Shakespeares soars far beyond a cheaply popular melodrama, but both have the same essential basis in that each has adapted itself to the requirements of the current theatre of its time.

On the stage the public has always demanded good strong stories, and the cinema is sufficiently akin to the theatre to require, normally, stories of a cognate sort. While, therefore, we may be prepared to recognise that the cinema can produce interesting forms in which a plot is almost entirely or even wholly absent, as in various documentary films, we are concerned with those manifestations of filmic art which capture the esteem of the greater mass of spectators. Between theatrical movement and cinematic, however, there is this essential distinction: that whereas the stage is limited to one single kind of movement, the movement of the actors upon the boards, the cinema introduces to us a whole series of moving forms undreamt of and unrealisable in the theatre. In a film we can look at an object from any angle, no matter how strange; we may be under a horse’s hoofs; we may suffer an automobile to pass right over us; we may see a man not only from front, or side, but also slanting-ways, from above, from beneath. In a hundred different respects the point of view can be altered. The Barretts of Wimpole Street in play and screen version, besides indicating how much in the latter is achieved by visual image, convinces us that, while for the one a straightforward development of narrative elements is essential, for the other the oblique shot of street, door, hall, staircase, window are clearly right and just. The ability of the camera to control space and magnitude obviously gives it a kind of magical power. By its means we are enabled to do things impossible in our ordinary terrestrial existence and to see things which could never be in actuality. To transform the size of human beings is witchcraft and to set lifeless objects into animate motion is dark with the wizard’s spell. The greater part of this magic is confined to the cartoon which, in Walt Disney’s hands, will display animals acting as humans, and witches, as in Snow-white and the Seven Dwarfs, perform witchcraft amid the surroundings of man-made civilization, and make furniture behave like sensible things and give thought and emotion to a musical note. The simple operation of slow motion and accelerated motion causes common phenomena to assume new and surprising appearances; by means of a simple camera-tricks a man may stride serenely across a cloud, rise wingless into the air. Reinhardt’s fairies in his version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream soared aloft like aeroplanes after a little run for a take-off; Rene Claire’s spirit in The Ghost Goes West was at will seemingly solid or transparent.

We moderns are much more deeply moved by visual symbols than by words: a sword is a gleaming sign of force, and a flower of charm. In the utilization of such visual imagery the theatre is manifestly restricted. Symbolic images may be presented there, but there is little opportunity for a regular flow of images calculated to excite and stimulate at once the attention and the understanding of the audience.

Although the cinema introduces improbabilities and things beyond nature at which any theatrical director would blench and murmur soft nothings to the air, the filmic material is treated by the audience with far greater respect than the material of the stage. Our conceptions of life in tragic Spain, Germany, Chicago or even in India are coloured by films we have seen. What we have witnessed on the screen becomes the ‘real’ for us. In moments of sanity we might say that we do not believe this or that, but under the spell we credit the truth of these pictures, even as, for all our professed superiority, we credit the truth of newspaper paragraphs.

The film has the power of giving an impression of actuality and it can thrill us by its penetrating truth to life; but it may call into existence the strangest of visionary worlds and make these seem too real. The enchanted forest of A Mid-summer Night’s Dream will always on the stage prove a thing of canvas and paint; an enchanted forest on the film might seem haunted by a thousand fears and supernatural imaginings.

The way of the stage does not lie in merely servilely following the technique of the screen, and in general we must agree that the cinema can, because of its peculiar opportunities, wield this technique so much more effectively that its application on the stage seems thin, forced and artificial. The type of the play written to-day is largely the naturalistic play; the plays of Capek, Wasserman, Maeterlinck. It is only in the poetic drama of Eliot. Auden, Stephen Spender, that lasting work may be brought to the stage. The other seem destined to be forgotten or to be remembered merely as the landmarks in the progress of drama. Even the works of Ibsen, instinct with a greater imaginative power than many works of his contemporaries, do not now possess the same vital significance they held for audiences of the late nineteenth century. If we desire a theatre that is likely to survive many generations we must unquestionably decide that the naturalistic play is not calculated to fulfill our wishes. The film has such a hold over the world of reality, can achieve expression so vitally in terms of ordinary life, that the realistic play must surely come to seem trivial, false and inconsequential. The truth is, of course, that naturalism on the stage must always be limited and insincere. Pursuing this path, the theatre seems doomed to inevitable destruction.

Is then the theatre, as some have opined, truly dying? Must it succumb to the rivalry of the cinema? The answer to that question depends on what the theatre does within the next ten or twenty years. If it pursues naturalism further, unquestionably little hope will remain; but if it recognizes to the full the conditions of its own being and utilizes those qualities which it, and it alone, possesses, the very thought of rivalry will disappear. Quite clearly, the true hope of the theatre lies in a rediscovery of convention, in a deliberate throwing over of all thoughts concerning naturalistic illusion and in an embracing of that universalising power which so closely belongs to the dramatic form when rightly exercised. By doing these things the theatre has achieved greatness and distinction in the past. We admire the plays of Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England; in both a basis was found in frank acceptance of the stage spectacle as a thing of pretence, with no attempt made to reproduce the outer forms of everyday life. Conventionalism ruled in both, and consequently out of both could spring a vital expression, with manifestations capable of appealing not merely to the age in which they originated but to future generations also. Precisely because Aeschylus and Shakespeare did not try to copy life, because they presented their themes in highly conventional forms, their works have the quality of being independent of time and place. Their characters were more than photographic copies of known originals; their plots took no account of the terms of actuality; and their language soared on poetic wings. So long as the stage is bound by the fetters of realism, so long as we judge theatrical characters by reference to individuals with whom we are acquainted, there is no possibility of preparing dialogue which shall rise above the terms of common existence. No doubt many journeymen will continue to pen for the day and the hour alone, but of these there have always been legion; what we may desire is that the dramatists of higher effort do not follow the journeyman’s way. Already there is hope when we have Eliot’s ‘Rock’ ‘Murder in the Cathedral,’ Auden’s ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin,’ ‘The Ascent of F 6,’ and ‘On the Frontier,’ and some of Spender’s plays. Boldly must dramatists turn from efforts to delineate in subtle and intimate manner the psychological state of individual men and women, recognizing that in the wider sphere the drama has its genuine home. The cheap and ugly simian chatter of familiar conversation must give way to the ringing tones of poetic utterance not far removed from our comprehension, but bearing a manifest relationship to our current speech. Eliot, Spender, Auden and certain others are building up a dramatic poetry out of common expression. Although the poetic play lag behind for some time yet we have enough testimony by the success of the plays of Eliot and Auden that we have every hope that a new dramatic era may begin again.

For the films are reserved things essentially distinct. Possibility of confusion between the two has entered only because the play-house has not been true to itself. To the cinema is given a sphere where the subjective and objective approaches are combined, where individualisation takes the place of type-characterisation, where reality may faithfully be imitated and where the utterly fantastic is equally granted a home. Within this field lies the possibility of an artistic expression equally powerful as that of the stage, though essentially distinct from that. The distinction is determined by the audience’s reactions to the one and to the other. In the theatres the spectators are presented with characters which, if successfully delineated, always possess a quality which renders them greater than separate individuals. Its object is not to present the problems of an individual but of a whole class–in other words to express the mass as hero. If the theatre thus stands for mankind, the cinema, because of the willingness on the part of the spectators to accept as the image of truth the moving form cast on the screen, stands for the individual. Impressionistic and expressionistic settings may serve for the theatre–even plain curtains may be introduced without losing the interest of our audiences.

The film has become in Europe and America today an essential part of the peoples’ existence. If the world is to lose all its liberties one would say that the loss of the moving picture is a small element in that greater disaster. But one can turn with some comfort to the prediction of the great German art critic, now in exile, Dr. Erwin Panofsky. If all the lyrical poets, painters and sculptors now living were forced by law to stop writing poetry or producing art, a very small fraction of the general public should be aware of that, and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. But if the same thing should happen with the movies, there would be the most gruesome of revolutions within a week!