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The art of filming depends solely on the camera. It is quite feasible to produce a film without actors, but a film without a camera is a sheer impossibility. So the history of the film is to some extent the history of the camera, for it is the camera which actually takes the photograph, arranges all the separate shots in sequence, and which evokes the illusion of a live picture, an illusion which depends on the imperfection of the human eye.

     While considering the capacities of this remarkable instrument, my thoughts turned to Dsia Vertov and his film The Man With the Camera. Like Vertov, when he takes his camera on motorcycles and railway engines, we too view the entire material world around us as it were through the lens of a camera: we are ourselves a kind of walking camera, though we do not actually hold the instrument in our hands and cannot adjust it to ‘full-shot’, ‘close-up’, and so forth. But all our impressions are absorbed as fleeting images into the mind where they are stored as memories. Past experiences all fuse into whirling images in our minds, and these constitute the film of our individual lives. With this ‘camera of the mind’ (which has found a technical counterpart in the film-camera) we all venture into the rich abundance of life, and every second of the day we are taking mental pictures of situations, people and things. At night, too, in the strange realm of dreams, a mass of images is released before the inner eye. Man has done this through the ages, and for that reason the film is really as old as mankind itself.

     Throughout his history man has collected these images with his organs of perception, his eyes and ears, his senses and feelings, and, impelled by an inner artistic desire, he has given expression to this vital superabundance of reflections in the plastic arts such as painting and drama. And with the discovery of the film these images were given visible and life-like form on the screen. Technical progress has led up to this new art form, but the rhythmical flow of images has always existed in us. We may therefore conclude that the history of the film goes back to the cave-drawings of the Stone Age, to the earliest artistic desire to give expression to and preserve temporal objects, simply by drawing them. The film then makes its way through the history of movement and rhythm, right up to the magic lantern and photography itself, from box-cameras to film-projectors, though it seems to me these are nothing more than a growing consciousness of the ‘inner camera’ with which we take the film of our individual lives.

     People took photographs long before Dsia Vertov’s time. Ever since artists have existed there has been the impulse to seize objects, as it were, to reproduce the forms in and around us. The deaf and blind have proved in their artistic creations that they too can see and hear in their own way, that they with their inner eye control a mental register which collects and stores impressions of the world about them. This ‘camera of the mind’ is more perfect than Vertov’s instrument when he depicts the chaotic life of big cities or photographs the miners underground. The ‘camera of the mind’ takes the confused images of our dreams or images which, like blind folk, we see with closed eyes, or which some brilliant tragic artist like Cocteau can perceive when doped by opium. We all possess the great uncut film of our own life, and it is this which has produced the film and the whole art of photography. Of course this life-film is quite independent of time and space, and the fascinating thing is that, far from being merely a collection of realistic images from the material world, it mingles reality and unreality in the most arresting way. Every picture taken by the camera of the mind’ is transformed in a few seconds into memories, fusing with new impressions of the outer world into thoughts and fantasies.

     The avant-garde directors were quick to recognize these facts. In their films we see the reproduction, not merely of the external pictures of the ‘camera of the mind’, but also of the inner images, which are more valuable and more interesting; for they are drawn from the world of dreams. The film, with its myriad pictures flickering on the screen, can unite the real and the dream-world and can link together the images to form the most potent associations, which is precisely what any thinking person is constantly developing out of his mass of mental images, so that anything which exists, however obscure, becomes part of the great mystery of life.

     Our ‘life-film’ is as defective and illusory as the human perceptive faculty itself. It is the film, in fact, that has made us conscious of the fragmentary nature of our perception. We must remember that the general impression of the film, one of constantly shifting pictures, depends solely on the imperfection of human vision, without which we could not appreciate the phenomenon of the moving image at all. And if it is the film which has opened our eyes to this, surely our pride in our knowledge of art and science should be somewhat dampened. However, the fact remains that we see in fragments, and with fragments the film works best of all.

     Individual sequences show that we do not view life as an organic theatrical performance, but as an uncut film-reel, a disordered series of pictures. Imagine, for example, you are watching an old man walking towards you in the garden; one moment he is in the distance in your mind’s eye, then suddenly he appears right in front of you. You look into his face, a friendly sort of face, with clear, deep-set eyes — all you are conscious of is the eyes; then a clock on the mantelpiece rivets your attention; you gaze at it, watch the hands gradually moving round — then you hear a voice calling, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go now!’ For sights and sounds are intermingled in life as much as in the film. Another example: you are driving a car through the countryside. Your inner eye photographs the interior, various details you may be aware of, though you are not consciously thinking of the car at all. Or else a close friend has let you down; you brood over the incident, let it absorb all your attention. The inner camera records the friend’s image, enlarges it in the mind, making it a close-up in your life-film.

     Strindberg’s late mystical plays spring from this almost film-like feeling of the myriad disordered images in man’s mind. The same dream-like attitude to life, the depth-psychology view of man’s makeup, has produced the entire German expressionist drama as well as the psychoanalytical plays of Pirandello and O’Neill. The art of photography came into being in the age of the French impressionist painters, and of Munch and Strindberg, and evolved from the desire to give life to these inner images. The film has always been latent in man, waiting only for concrete expression.

     The film has become part of our lives. It has had a tremendous effect on mass audiences throughout the world — for better or for worse. Its raw material is only celluloid, but rhythm and movement, photography, acting, stage management and poetry are all essentials of the film. The flickering, intangible sequence of pictures, by their very transient nature, bear a close resemblance to the dream. For the film is a waking dream, a visible expression of man’s inner being in the age of impressionism, expressionism and surrealism. Because of its plastic nature it can never become completely naturalistic or realistic.

     Images from our dreams, pictures from reality combine to form a vast mosaic of life. The film, like a person in a dream, projects events in a new time and space of the mortal consciousness and, like that consciousness, can detach itself from time and space and be in several different places at once. Whereas, to preserve the continuity of events in reality, one must pass through a given number of occurrences, in a film the events can be shortened, as in a dream, or else only the highlights need be selected. But what do I mean by ‘highlights’, as far as the life-film of the individual is concerned? The highlights of thought and experience vary in every person, and in the film the subjective factor determines the selection and type of highlight — and this makes the film interesting or uninteresting. A first-rate film director does not cut his material down to the essentials; like a good author he can also expand. For example, he would not merely show a revolver being taken out of a pocket and being aimed at someone. He would want to illustrate the effect of this threat. To do this he needs more time than reality. Thus the film, by its very technique, has much in common with poetry, especially dramatic poetry. For poetry too, though it existed long before the film, springs from the ‘inner camera’. What are the works of Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe but an assemblage of thoughts and images which have been given literary form? Similarly, painting and sculpture originated in pictures of the artist’s life-film. Essential elements are emphasized through cutting and mounting, and the work is given a specific time and space. So the film is basically nothing new; the only difference between it and other arts is that it crystallizes the essence of man’s being in a different way. The novelty lies in the form of expression, and only when the camera finds its Rembrandt and its Shakespeare can we start talking about its intellectual revolution. At present the film is in its infancy, and depends largely on the plastic arts, literature and the theatre. Its dramaturgy, which must be considered as a montage, is in its early stages, for real montage is nothing other than a process in the artist’s mind.

     ‘Schreiben heisst wegschneiden können,’ says Stephan Zweig. (1) Similarly, the art of photography means piecing together and cutting away pictures, making one thing into another. Pudovkin understood the ‘cut’, the montage, to be the clue to film-making, and indeed he and Eisenstein astounded the twenties with a completely new technique of the rhythmic composition of images. For this rhythm also exists within us, a generation which has known world wars and revolutions. The Russian revolutionary films were not arbitrarily constructed, but grew out of experience. They were simply a reflection of the thoughts of rational, sensitive peoples in a dangerous time of unrest.

     Identification is valuable for the film artist concerned with the subtleties of human reactions, and is important for the whole art of filming. Bengtson talks of the so-called ‘subjective camera’. Robert Montgomery made an interesting experiment with the subjective camera, with identification, in his film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Lady in the Lake. Bengtson writes: ‘Montgomery places the objective eye of the camera on a plane with the eye of the detective, who in the film is seen only in reflections. A kiss or a blow aimed at Marlowe is directed at the camera, i.e. at the audience.’ In fact Montgomery works so subjectively that he forces the individual to identify what he sees through the camera with his own experience. This leads ultimately to an artistic onesidedness. Maybe art does arise from this subjectivity of the camera, as the avant-garde French and German cinema has demonstrated. But real value lies only in complete mastery of the fine balance between the subjective and the objective, as in all art. The effect of Montgomery’s experiment sagged because the main character was not a particularly attractive or dynamic personality. The film has no gripping conflict and therefore seems intentionally onesided.

     And here we come, as Bengtson points out, to a basic problem of the modern film: its effectiveness lies in its intellectual substance. For the camera alone, the montage or the sound, is not able to raise the film to the level of art. It takes an artist of fine perception to pin down the striking elements in a personality and make him the hero of an effective film. Montgomery’s detective, Philip Marlowe, was too insignificant to let the spectator view the whole film just through his eyes.

     I agree with Bengtson that the subjective camera is most effective when only partially used, for instance when portraying dreams. Duvivier, in Sous le Ciel de Paris, presented a masterly subjective use of sound in his portrayal of a wretched medical student who, already panic-stricken by his impending examination, is driven frantic by the constant ringing of a bell. Despite his high intelligence, the student fails. Through identification, all associations of fear are aroused in the spectator and he too is tormented by the monotonous striking of the clock which, in the candidate’s mind, grows ever louder and shriller. The actual examination is unimportant, but the tension and terror of existence are starkly communicated to us. Duvivier has produced great cinematic art, and has recognized the film’s psychological power as an expression of the inner camera.

     Light and shade, so nearly related to the dream, are also significant in the film. If we compare shots from American and French films we see that the French, especially Jean Cocteau, make great use of the art of pictorial contrast, while the Americans favour hard, sharp outlines, which actually diminish the artistic effect, for there is no scope for poetic nuances. The French have a subtler, more skilful ‘inner camera’, governed by a greater cultural tradition. The Americans’ ‘inner camera’ is cruder. The creative producer and the efficient cameraman both know that the very transparency and uncertainty of human existence can best be suggested and interpreted by veiled, misty pictures. They perceive the connection between the pictures on the screen and our mental images, and are influenced by the impressionist, expressionist and surrealist French painters. The Americans make no use of this shadowy effect and their pictures lack subtlety, far more so than the French with their depth-psychology who for a time went over to complete darkness, as in Clouzot’s sombre films.

     The coming of the colour film meant at first a severe setback in the art of rhythm and picture-composition, and for a long time the pictures on the screen were nothing but brightly coloured picture postcards of the most hideous and trashy nature. Balasz asserts that the colour film will open up a new world to us, and especially in close-ups the finest colour effects will be attained. But despite the progress made in the colour film, I think the time of perfection lies far in the future. Colour, with its similarities and contrasts, will be even more important than form in providing a connection between images, and it will not be merely ornamental. Balasz stresses the symbolic power of colour, which today is almost entirely ignored, and which can only be exploited when the colour-film is further developed. Photography has hardly made a start here, though in his Romeo and Juliet Renato Castellani did make cautious use of colour symbolism in the blood-red rose over Juliet’s body. The dramaturgy of symbols in the ancient Indian and oriental theatre has much to teach us here. The effect of colour is due to association and emotional suggestion as well as to man’s age-old love of symbolic associations, so it will one day be possible to talk of a ‘colour montage’. The American Toulouse-Lautrec film Moulin Rouge shows the first attempts to produce this effect; the Japanese film Gate of Hell is more successful and the dramaturgy of colour sometimes even reaches artistic level.

     Bela Balasz, who did not know even the first mediocre colour films, remarked that, in a film where colour determines the character of an object, a cut or fade-in suggested by the similarity or contrast of the form would often be out of place. Even today colour films are artistically unsatisfactory because the actors still look like painted Red Indians, even in Romeo and Juliet. It is not yet understood that colour must be used unnaturalistically, with conscious artistry, to produce suitable shade-effects for varying moods. Here too the camera of the future will be able to learn from the ‘inner camera’, for colour exists, not in objects, but in us, as the impressionist, expressionist and symbolist painters and oriental philosophers have discovered. Shade effects in Romeo and Juliet were used far more cautiously than in the black-and-white American thrillers, where every trick was used to stress the uncanny element of a situation, such as mysterious shadowy patterns over floors and walls. Orson Welles, the autocratic film-genius, creates a highly theatrical effect in his black-and-white Shakespeare films by using shadow and mysterious darkness; the effect is savage but brilliant, and better than artificial colour. Dramaturgy for Welles is identical with the dynamic and the theatrical. Shadow is indispensible on his screen. Like Käuter, Reed, Came, Cocteau, Dreyer, Bergman and Fellini he makes constant use of the ‘chiaroscuro’ technique. Even in realistic black-and-white films all these directors aim at a ghostly, mysterious effect, because that had been the essence of the film from the days of the wizard Mélié. The introduction of colour changed the dream-like, glossy atmosphere; we note this in Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann, also a ghostly film but in a different way from the black-and-white ones; in many of the fantastic scenes the colours, if not actually convincing, had a stimulating effect. So production, sound, shade and colour all form an artistic unity. In the film Red Shoes the ghostly element was lighter and subtler, and the colour was more effective in the ballet scenes than in the main action. The humour of Offenbach’s music caused the liberating effect in Tales of Hoffmann whereas the dark, shadowy scenes in Siodmak’s black-and-white film of 1945, The Spiral Staircase, show a different, more restrained and ghodemian stly technique. Waldekranz and Arpe have reproached the German-American Siodmak for over-emphasizing the destructive element, an effect produced because he works entirely without colour in the films criticized. His spiral staircase, in the alternation of light and shade, becomes itself a person, a weird demon of the action. The stairs and corridors of the house, as in Hesse’s novel Demian, turn into actors, but because of the absence of colour they seem so suggestively black that it sends shivers down the spectator’s spine. Siodmak knows as well as Carol Reed and Cocteau how to present mime and to evoke a ghostly atmosphere — for, as Henrik Ibsen remarked, ghosts also exist ‘within us’. Siodmak achieves his effect through shadow, Powell and Pressburger through colour. Their technique has a more fantastic effect, yet less uncanny and destructive than Siodmak’s unrelieved blackness. There is something constructive about colour, something which seems to lend ‘hope’.

     To revert to the life-film and the inner camera, we may ask whether we think in colour or in black-and-white. From experience I should say we do both. The black-and-white film is the first natural expression of our inner film, the colour film is the second and the three-dimensional film the third. Every stage has its starting-point and its justification, and its special dramaturgy, ‘within us’, just as every type of film, even any outstanding individual film, is one of countless variants of a common fundamental dramaturgy. The inner camera varies from one person to another, and takes the pictures of our various life-films in a completely different way. Whether this ‘thought-montage’ reaches the conscious or remains as memories in the subconscious mind (in which case one cannot talk of a ‘film-consciousness’ in the individual concerned) depends entirely on the person’s stage of development. Similarly, the production and photography of a film depend completely on the ability and intellectual level of the director. For in the subjective factor lies the final criterion of any form of art.