6: Emotions: Languag

Chapter 6: Emotions

To picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay. In the

drama, words of wisdom may be spoken, and we may listen to the con-
versations with interest even if they have only intellectual and not emo-
tional character. But the actor whom we see on the screen can hold our
attention only by what he is doing, and his actions gain meaning and
unity for us through the feelings and emotions which control them.
More than in the drama, the persons in the photoplay are to us, first of
all, subjects of emotional experiences. Their joy and pain, their hope
and fear, their love and hate, their gratitude and envy, their sympathy
and malice, give meaning and value to the play. What are the chances of
the photoartist to bring these feelings to a convincing expression?
No doubt, an emotion which is deprived of its discharge by words
has lost a strong element, and yet gestures, actions, and facial play are
so interwoven with the psychical process of an intense emotion that
every shade can find its characteristic delivery. The face alone, with its
tensions around the mouth, with its play of the eye, with its cast of the
forehead, and even with the motions of the nostrils and the setting of
the jaw, may bring numberless shades into the feeling tone. Here again
the close-up can strongly heighten the impression. It is at the climax of
emotion on the stage that the theatergoer likes to use his opera glass
Copyright © 2001. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
in order not to overlook the subtle excitement of the lips and the pas-
sion of the eyeballs and the ghastly pupil and the quivering cheeks.
The enlargement by the close-up on the screen brings this emotional
action of the face to sharpest relief. Or it may show us, enlarged, a
play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender love or jealousy
speak in unmistakable languag~. In humorous scenes, even the flirt-
ing of amorous feet may in the close-up tell the story of their posses-
sors' hearts. Nevertheless there are narrow limits. Many emotional
symptoms like blushing or growing pale would be lost in the mere

99
Münsterberg, H 2001, Hugo Munsterberg on Film : The Photoplay: a Psychological Study and Other Writings, Taylor & Francis
Group, Florence. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [6 November 2022].
Created from soton-ebooks on 2022-11-06 13:21:23.
The Photoplay
photographic rendering, and, above all, these and many other signs of
feeling are not under voluntary control. The photoactors may carefully
go through the movements and imitate the contractions and relax-
ations of the muscles, and yet may be unable to produce those proc-
esses which are most essential for the true life emotion, namely those
in the glands, blood vessels, and involuntary muscles.
Certainly the going through the motions will shade consciousness
sufficiently so that some of these involuntary and instinctive responses
may set in. The actor really experiences something of the inner excite-
ment which he imitates, and with the excitement the automatic reac-
tions appear. Yet only a few can actually shed tears, however much
they move the muscles of the face into the semblance of crying. The
pupil of the eye is somewhat more obedient, as the involuntary mus-
cles of the iris respond to the cue which a strong imagination can give,
and the mimic presentation of terror or astonishment or hatred may
actually lead to the enlargement or contraction of the pupil, which the
close-up may show. Yet there remains too much which mere art can-
not render and which life alone produces, because the consciousness
of the unreality of the situation works as a psychological inhibition on
the automatic instinctive responses. The actor may artificially tremble,
or breathe heavily, but the strong pulsation of the carotid artery or the
moistness of the skin from perspiration will not come with an imitated
emotion. Of course, that is true of the actor on the stage, too. But the
content of the words and the modulation of the voice can help so
much that the shortcomings of the visual impression are forgotten.
To the actor of the moving pictures, on the other hand, the temp-
tation offers itself to overcome the deficiency by a heightening of the
gestures and of the facial play, with the result that the emotional ex-
pression becomes exaggerated. No friend of the photoplay can deny
that much of the photoart suffers from this almost unavoidable ten-
dency. The quick marchlike rhythm of the drama of the reel favors
this artificial overdoing, too. The rapid alternation of the scenes often
seems to demand a jumping from one emotional climax to another, or
100
Emotions
rather the appearance of such extreme expressions where the content

of the play hardly suggests such heights and depths of emotion. The
soft lights are lost and the mental eye becomes adjusted to glaring
flashes. This undeniable defect is felt with the American actors still
more than with the European, especially with the French and Italian
ones with whom excited gestures and highly accentuated expressions
of the face are natural. A New England temperament forced into
Neapolitan expressions of hatred or jealousy or adoration too easily
appears a caricature. It is not by chance that so many strong actors of
the stage are such more or less decided failures on the screen. They
have been dragged into an art which is foreign to them, and their
achievement has not seldom remained far below that of the specializ-
ing photoactor. The habitual reliance on the magic of the voice de-
prives them of the natural means of expression when they are to
render emotions without words. They give too little or too much;
they are not expressive, or they become grotesque.
Of course, the photoartist profits from one advantage. He is not
obliged to find the most expressive gesture in one decisive moment of
the stage performance. He can not only rehearse, but he can repeat the
scene before the camera until exactly the right inspiration comes, and
the manager who takes the close-up visage may discard many a poor
pose before he strikes that one expression in which the whole content
of the feeling of the scene is concentrated. In one other respect the
producer of the photoplay has a technical advantage. More easily than
the stage manager of the real theater, he can choose actors whose
natural build and physiognomy fit the role and predispose them for
the desired expression. The drama depends upon professional actors;
the photoplay can pick players among any group of people for specific
roles. They need no art of speaking and no training in delivery. The
artificial make-up of the stage actors in order to give them special
character is therefore less needed for the screen. The expression of
the faces and the gestures must gain through such natural fitness of the
man for the particular role. If the photoplay needs a brutal boxer in a
101
The Photoplay
mmmg camp, the producer will not, like the stage manager, try to
transform a clean, neat, professional actor into a vulgar brute, but he
will sift the Bowery until he has found some creature who looks as if
he came from that mining camp and who has at least the prizefighter's
cauliflower ear which results from the smashing of the ear cartilage. If
he needs the fat bartender with his smug smile, or the humble Jewish
peddler, or the Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on wigs and
paint; he finds them all ready-made on the East Side. With the right
body and countenance, the emotion is distinctly more credible. The
emotional expression in the photoplays is therefore often more natural
in the small roles which the outsiders play than in the chief parts of the
professionals, who feel that they must outdo nature.
But our whole consideration so far has been one-sided and nar-
row. We have asked only about the means by which the photoactor
expresses his emotion, and we were naturally confined to the analysis
of his bodily reactions. But while the human individual in our sur-
roundings has hardly any other means than the bodily expressions to
show his emotions and moods, the photoplaywright is certainly not
bound by these limits. Yet, even in life, the emotional tone may radi-
ate beyond the body. A person expresses his mourning by his black
clothes and his joy by gay attire, or he may make the piano or violin
ring forth in happiness or moan in sadness. Even his whole room or
house may be penetrated by his spirit of welcoming cordiality or his
emotional setting of forbidding harshness. The feeling of the soul
emanates into the surroundings, and the impressions which we get of
our neighbor's emotional attitude may be derived from this external

frame of the personality as much as from the gestures and the face.
This effect of the surrounding surely can and must be much
heightened in the artistic theater play. All the stage settings of the
scene ought to be in harmony with the fundamental emotions of the
play, and many an act owes its success to the unity of emotional
impression which results from the perfect painting of the background;
it reverberates to the passions of the mind. From the highest artistic
color and form effects of the stage in the Reinhardt style down to the
102
Emotions
cheapest melodrama with soft blue lights and tender music for the
closing scene, the stage arrangements tell the story of the intimate
emotion. But just this additional expression of the feeling through the
medium of the surrounding scene, through background and setting,
through lines and forms and movements, is very much more at the
disposal of the photoartist. He alone can change the background and
all the surroundings of the acting person from instant to instant. He is
not bound to one setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the
whole scene with every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater
can give us changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go
on at the slow pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in
nature pass. The photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more
than one sixteenth of a second is needed to carry us from one corner
of the globe to the other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene.
The whole keyboard of the imagination may be used to serve this
emotionalizing of nature.
There is a girl in her little room, and she opens a letter and reads
it. There is no need of showing us in a close-up the letter page with
the male handwriting and the words of love and the request for her
hand. We see it in her radiant visage, we read it from her fascinated
arms and hands; and yet how much more can the photoartist tell us
about the storm of emotions in her soul. The walls of her little room
fade away. Beautiful hedges of hawthorn blossom around her, rose
bushes in wonderful glory arise, and the whole ground is alive with
exotic flowers. Or the young artist sits in his attic playing his violin;
we see the bow moving over the strings but the dreamy face of the
player does not change with his music. Under the spell of his tones,
his features are immovable as if they were staring at a vision. They do
not speak of the changing emotions which his melodies awake. We
cannot hear those tones. And yet we do hear them: a lovely spring
landscape widens behind his head, we see the valleys of May and the
bubbling brooks and the young wild beeches. And slowly it changes
into the sadness of the autumn, the sere leaves are falling around the
player, heavy clouds hang low over his head. Suddenly at a sharp
103
The Photoplay
accent of his bow the storm breaks, we are carried to the wildness of
rugged rocks or to the raging sea; and again comes tranquillity over
the world, the little country village of his youth fills the background,
the harvest is brought from the fields, the sun sets upon a scene of
happiness, and while the bow slowly sinks, the walls and ceiling of his
attic close in again. No shade, no tint, no hue of his emotions has
escaped us; we followed them as if we had heard the rejoicing and the
sadness, the storm and the peace of his melodious tones. Such imagi-
native settings can be only the extreme; they would not be fit for the
routine play. But, however much weaker and fainter the echo of the
surroundings may be in the realistic pictures of the standard photo-
play, the chances are abundant everywhere, and no skillful playwright
will ever disregard them entirely. Not the portrait of the man but the
picture as a whole has to be filled with emotional exuberance.
Everything so far has referred to the emotions of the persons in
the play, but this cannot be sufficient. When we were interested in
attention and memory, we did not ask about the act of attention and
memory in the persons of the play, but in the spectator, and we rec-
ognized that these mental activities and excitements in the audience
were projected into the moving pictures. Just here was the center of
our interest, because it showed that uniqueness of the means with
which the photoplaywright can work. If we want to shape the ques-
tion now in the same way, we ought to ask how it is with the emo-
tions of the spectator. But then, two different groups of cases must be
distinguished. On the one side, we have those emotions in which the
feelings of the persons in the play are transmitted to our own soul.
On the other side, we find those feelings with which we respond to
the scenes in the play, feelings which may be entirely different, per-
haps exactly opposite to those which the figures in the play express.
The first group is by far the larger one. Our imitation of the emo-
tions which we see expressed brings vividness and affective tone into
our grasping of the play's action. We sympathize with the sufferer and
that means that the pain which he expresses becomes our own pain.
We share the joy of the happy lover and the grief of the despondent
104
Emotions
mourner, we feel the indignation of the betrayed wife and the fear of
the man in danger. The visual perception of the various forms of
expression of these emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious
awareness of the emotion expressed; we feel as if we were directly
seeing and observing the emotion itself. Moreover, the idea awakens
in us the appropriate reactions. The horror which we see makes us
really shrink, the happiness which we witness makes us relax, the pain
which we observe brings contractions in our muscles; and all the
resulting sensations from muscles, joints, tendons, from skin and vis-
cera, from blood circulation and breathing, give the color of living
experience to the emotional reflection in our mind. It is obvious that
for this leading group of emotions the relation of the pictures to the
feelings of the persons in the play and to the feelings of the spectator
is exactly the same. If we start from the emotions of the audience, we
can say that the pain and the joy which the spectator feels are really
projected to the screen, projected both into the portraits of the per-
sons and into the pictures of the scenery and background into which
the personal emotions radiate. The fundamental principle which we
recognized for all the other mental states is, accordingly, no less effi-
cient in the case of the spectator's emotions.
The analysis of the mind of the audience must lead, however, to
that second group of emotions, those in which the spectator responds
to the scenes on the film from the standpoint of his independent
affective life. We see an overbearing pompous person who is filled
with the emotion of solemnity, and yet he awakens in us the emotion
of humor. We answer by our ridicule. We see the scoundrel who in

the melodramatic photoplay is filled with fiendish malice, and yet, we
do not respond by imitating his emotion; we feel moral indignation
toward his personality. We see the laughing, rejoicing child who, while
he picks the berries from the edge of the precipice, is not aware that
he must fall down if the hero does not snatch him back at the last
moment. Of course, we feel the child's joy with him. Otherwise, we
should not even understand his behaviour, but we feel more strongly
the fear and the horror of which the child himself does not know
105
The Photoplay
anything. The photoplaywrights have, so far, hardly ventured to proj-

ect this second class of emotion, which the spectator superadds to the
events, into the show on the screen. Only tentative suggestions can
be found. The enthusiasm or the disapproval or indignation of the
spectator is sometimes released in the lights and shades and in the
setting of the landscape. There are still rich possibilities along this
line. The photoplay has hardly come to its own with regard to these
secondary emotions. Here, it has not emancipated itself sufficiently
from the model of the stage. Those emotions arise, of course, in the
audience of a theater too, but the dramatic stage cannot embody
them. In the opera, the orchestra may symbolize them. For the photo-
play, which is not bound to the physical succession of events but
gives us only the pictorial reflection, there is an unlimited field for the
expression of these attitudes in ourselves.
But the wide expansion of this field and of the whole manifoldness
of emotional possibilities in the moving pictures is not sufficiently
characterized as long as we think only of the optical representation in
the actual outer world. The camera men of the moving pictures have
photographed the happenings of the world and all its wonders, have
gone to the bottom of the sea and up to the clouds; they have sur-
prised the beasts in the jungles and in the Arctic ice; they have dwelt
with the lowest races and have captured the greatest men of our time;
and they are always haunted by the fear that the supply of new sensa-
tions may be exhausted. Curiously enough, they have so far ignored
the fact that an inexhaustible wealth of new impressions is at their dis-
posal, which has hardly been touched as yet. There is a material and a
formal side to the pictures which we see in their rapid succession. The
material side is controlled by the content of what is shown to us. But
the formal side depends upon the outer conditions under which this
content is exhibited. Even with ordinary photographs we are accus-
tomed to discriminate between those in which every detail is very
sharp and others, often much more artistic, in which everything looks
somewhat misty and blurring and in which sharp outlines are avoided.
We have this formal aspect, of course, still more prominently if we see
106
Emotions
the same landscape or the same person painted by a dozen different

artists. Each one has his own style. Or, to point to another elementary
factor, the same series of moving pictures may be given to us with a
very slow or with a rapid turning of the crank. It is the same street
scene, and yet in the one case everyone on the street seems leisurely to
saunter along, while in the other case there is a general rush and hurry.
Nothing is changed but the temporal form; and in going over from the
sharp image to the blurring one, nothing is changed but a certain spa-
tial form, the content remains the same.
As soon as we give any interest to this formal aspect of the pres-
entation, we must recognize that the photoplaywright has here possi-
bilities to which nothing corresponds in the world of the stage. Take
the case that we want to produce an effect of trembling. We might
use the pictures as the camera has taken them, sixteen in a second.
But in reproducing them on the screen we change their order. After
giving the first four pictures we go back to picture 3, then give 4, 5, 6,
and return to 5, then 6, 7, 8, and go back to 7, and so on.
Any other rhythm, of course, is equally possible. The effect is one
which never occurs in nature and which could not be produced on the
stage. The events for a moment go backward. A certain vibration goes
through the world like the tremolo of the orchestra. Or we demand
from our camera a still more complex service. We put the camera
itself on a slightly rocking support, and then every point must move
in strange curves and every motion takes an uncanny whirling charac-
ter. The content still remains the same as under normal conditions,
but the changes in the formal presentation give to the mind of the
spectator unusual sensations which produce a new shading of the emo-
tional background.
Of course, impressions which come to our eye at first awaken only
sensations, and a sensation is not an emotion. But it is well known
that, in the view of modern physiological psychology, our conscious-
ness of the emotion itself is shaped and marked by the sensations
which arise from our bodily organs. As soon as such abnormal visual
impressions stream into our consciousness, our whole background of
107
The Photoplay
fusing bodily sensations becomes altered, and new emotions seem to

take hold of us. If we see on the screen a man hypnotized in the doc-
tor's office, the patient himself may lie there with closed eyes, nothing
in his features expressing his emotional setting and nothing radiating
to us. But if now only the doctor and the patient remain unchanged
and steady, while everything in the whole room begins at first to trem-
ble and then to wave and to change its form more and more rapidly so
that a feeling of dizziness comes over us and an uncanny, ghastly
unnaturalness overcomes the whole surrounding of the hypnotized
person, we ourselves become seized by the strange emotion. It is not
worth while to go into further illustrations here, as this possibility of
the camera work still belongs entirely to the future. It could not be
otherwise as we remember that the whole moving picture play arose
from the slavish imitation of the drama and began only slowly to find
its own artistic methods. But there is no doubt that the formal changes
of the pictorial presentation will be legion as soon as the photoartists
give their attention to this neglected aspect.
The value of these formal changes for the expression of the emo-
tions may become remarkable. The characteristic features of many an
attitude and feeling which cannot be expressed without words today
will then be aroused in the mind of the spectator through the subtle
art of the camera.
108

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Chapter 6: Emotions

To picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay. In the

rather the appearance of such extreme expressions where the content

our neighbor's emotional attitude may be derived from this external

of humor. We answer by our ridicule. We see the scoundrel who in

anything. The photoplaywrights have, so far, hardly ventured to proj-

the same landscape or the same person painted by a dozen different

fusing bodily sensations becomes altered, and new emotions seem to

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