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Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) by Siegfried Kracauer

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Chapter I: General Characteristics — The Establishment of Physical Existence

The chase

"The chase," says Hitchcock, "seems to me the final expression of the motion picture medium."2 This complex of interrelated movements is motion at its extreme, one might almost say, motion as such—and of course it is immensely serviceable for establishing a continuity of suspenseful physical action. Hence the fascination the chase has held since the beginning of the century.3 The primitive French comedies availed themselves of it to frame their space-devouring adventures. Gendarmes pursued a dog who eventually turned the tables on them (Course des sergeants de ville); pumpkins gliding from a cart were chased by the grocer, his donkey, and passers-by through sewers and over roofs (La Course des potirons, 1907; English title: The Pumpkin Race). For any Keystone comedy to forgo the chase would have been an unpardonable crime. It was the climax of the whole, its orgiastic finale—a pandemonium, with onrushing trains telescoping into automobiles and narrow escapes down ropes that dangled above a lion's den.

But perhaps nothing reveals the cinematic significance of this reveling in speed more drastically than D. W. Griffith's determination to transfer, at the end of all his great films, the action from the ideological plane to that of his famous "last-minute rescue," which was a chase pure and simple. Or should one say, a race? In any case, the rescuers rush ahead to overwhelm the villains or free their victims at the very last moment, while simultaneously the inner emotion which the dramatic conflict has aroused yields to a state of acute physiological suspense called forth by exuberant physical motion and its immediate implications. Nor is a genuine Western imaginable without a pursuit or a race on horseback. As Flaherty put it, Westerns are popular "because people never get tired of seeing a horse gallop across the plains."4 Its gallop seems still to gain momentum by contrast with the immense tranquility of the faraway horizon.

Chapter II: Areas and Elements — Remarks on the Actor

Emphasis on being

Leonard Lyons reports the following studio incident in his newspaper column: Fredric March, the well-known screen and stage actor, was making a movie scene and the director interrupted him. "Sorry, I did it again," the star apologized. "I keep forgetting — this is a movie and I mustn't act."

If this is not the whole truth about film acting it is at least an essential part of it. Whenever old films are shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the spectators invariably feel exhilarated over expressions and poses which strike them as being theatrical. Their laughter indicates that they expect film characters to behave in a natural way. Audience sensibilities have long since been conditioned to the motion picture camera's preference for nature in the raw. And since the regular use of close-ups invites the spectator to look for minute changes of a character's appearance and bearing, the actor is all the more obliged to relinquish those "unnatural" surplus movements and stylizations he would need on the stage to externalize his impersonation. "The slightest exaggeration of gesture and manner of speaking," says René Clair, "is captured by the merciless mechanism and amplified by the projection of the film." What the actor tries to impart — the physical existence of a character — is overwhelmingly present on the screen. The camera really isolates a fleeting glance, an inadvertent shrug of the shoulder. This accounts for Hitchcock's insistence on "negative acting, the ability to express words by doing nothing." "I mustn't act," as Fredric March put it. To be more precise, the film actor must act as if he did not act at all but were a real-life person caught in the act by the camera. He must seem to be his character. He is in a sense a photographer's model.

Chapter II: Areas and Elements — Music

Integration

There has been no lack of successful attempts to integrate musical performances into otherwise realistic contexts. All of them have one thing in common: instead of isolating music in the interest of its purity, they remove it from the center of attention so that it comes as near as possible to being an element of film.

Part of the environment or an interlude

A perfect example is Hitchcock's 1956 version of his old thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The film culminates in a drawn-out sequence laid in London's Albert Hall during the performance of a cantata. Yet the performance itself serves only as a foil to the suspense-laden action. We know that arrangements have been made to murder the foreign diplomat in the audience at the very moment when the music reaches its climax; we watch the professional killer in his box train his gun on the prospective victim; and we tremble lest the heroine, who forces her way through the crowded house with its many staircases and corridors, might come too late to prevent the crime. Note that the murder is to coincide with a previously specified phase of the score — a clever trick which seems to bring the performance into focus; but since we listen to the music for a purpose alien to it, its intrinsic meanings are likely to be lost on us. Here you have a musical production number which conforms to the medium by functioning as part of the environment — a temporarily important requisite.

At the same time, however, the concert continues to impress us as a performance attractive in its own right. Does this obstruct the effect of its subordination to real-life events? On the contrary, in the capacity of an autonomous performance the cantata works like any stage interlude: precisely because of its being a self-contained composition it strengthens the impact of accidental life about it, making the incidents appear as even more incidental. The cantata in the Hitchcock film may be conceived of as both part of the environment and a musical interlude. For the rest, no matter to what extent such interludes — flashes of a performing orchestra or a solo recital — are interwoven with their surroundings, they are enjoyable cinematically in as much as they enhance the reality character of the sequence that encompasses them.

Chapter III: Composition — Matters of Content

Hitchcock thrillers

Alfred Hitchcock, who called the chase "the final expression of the motion picture medium," has set a grand pattern for thrillers indulging in sleuthing. What distinguishes him from the rest of film directors is not primarily his superior know-how but, more, his unrivaled flair for psychophysical correspondences. Nobody is so completely at home in the dim border region where inner and outer events intermingle and fuse with each other. This implies, for one thing, a perfect command of the ways in which physical data may be induced to yield their possible meanings. Hitchcock literally thinks in terms of suggestive environmental material; in 1937 he declared that he would like to make travelogues with a personal element in them, or a documentary about the Derby, or a film composed around a fire at sea. By the same token, his preference for that borderland which marks the junction of corporeal and mental influences enables him to venture deep into the psychological dimension and there single out particulars apt to be thrust upon us by a gesture, a garment, an interior, a noise, or a silence. His chases are frequently psychological chases which are developed from a minimum of physical clues.

Undeniably, the typical Hitchcock plot is anything but significant. His films utilize emotions as stimulants, insert conflicts and problems for the sake of suspense, and on the whole either avoid touching on serious human concerns or fail to do justice to them. Much as the late James Agee admired Hitchcock, he found his Lifeboat inadequate and his Spellbound "disappointing"; of The Paradine Case Agee said that in it "Hitchcock uses a lot of skill over a lot of nothing."

This raises an intriguing question. Is it at all possible for Hitchcock to turn to meaningful narratives and yet continue to make the peculiar contributions which are the trade-mark of his thrillers? Does he perhaps prefer sleuthing, chases, and sensational effects out of a feeling that he would lose his essence if he met the requirements of really essential plots? (It is not necessary to repeat that such plots most certainly are susceptible to cinematic solutions.) In the case of the Hitchcock films I am tempted to assume that the very insignificance of their stories is inseparable from their impressive assets. Hitchcock himself once traced his habitual recourse to thrillers to his search for stories which will best "suit the film medium17

Thrillers have satisfied his demand in two ways. Their suspense-laden sleuthing processes cause a stir in the region of psychophysical correspondences and thus challenge him to indulge his uncanny sense of the interplay between moods and surroundings, inner excitation and the look of objects.

But, even more important, precisely because of their insignificance thrillers permit him to highlight these moments of photographable reality without any regard for the obligations which intrigues with substantive issues might impose upon him. He need not assign to the close-up of a wrist-watch a symbolic function nor insert, say, a casual encounter in a train for the purpose of complementing or bolstering some predetermined action which can be detached from the medium. Consider also Hitchcock's susceptibility to quaint people, such as you meet in public places or at a party. Thus, his films culminate in material things and occurrences which, besides being traces of a crime and offering clues to the identity of the criminal, are pregnant with both external and internal life. The creepy merry-go-round; "the red tip of a murderer's cigar glowing ominously in a darkened apartment"; the bit-players reminiscent of D. W. Griffith's street characters whom Eisenstein recalled twenty years after last having seen them — these poignant configurations of camera-life have an individuality and a glamour all their own; they spur our imagination, attuning it to the tales still half-enshrined in them. True, the Hitchcock thrillers lack deeper meaning, but they comprise a host of virtually significant, if embryonic, stories.

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