Читать книгу The King Who was a King. The Book of a Film - H. G. Wells - Страница 5

If any existing work of art is directly available as a film synopsis upon these newer lines, it is surely Thomas Hardy's Dynasts. It is perhaps lucky for some great film corporation that I am not its director, for certainly I would at once set about realizing these marvellous stage directions, so impossible on any stage, so easy for the cinema producer with money to spend. Two I may quote by way of a sample:

"At first nothing—not even the river itself—seems to move in the panorama. But anon certain strange patches in the landscape, flexuous and riband-shaped, are discerned to be moving slowly. Only one movable object on earth is large enough to be conspicuous herefrom, and that is an army. The moving shapes are armies."

And again:

"The nether sky opens and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure."

But alas! I have no power over any big film studio, and my rôle hitherto has been to refuse to write sketches—"synopses" they call them—of films. Until at last some years ago a certain Mr. Godal came along to me with so entertaining a suggestion that I succumbed.

He had discovered a title that he considered marketable, The Peace of the World, and, going a little in advance of accomplished reality, he had advertised this as a film ready for booking. It was a title I had already used for some war-time newspaper articles, but that was a point I did not recall until later. The response to Mr. Godal's advertisements was so encouraging that he decided to fill up the complete void that remained after the title, and come to me with the proposal that I should write a synopsis to supply the material needed. Following several conversations and certain reassurances, for there was something about Mr. Godal that I found attractive, I sat down to sketch out that synopsis. It was very different from the present story. After reading various text-books professing to expound the whole art of writing scenarios for the films, and after an attentive study of contemporary "releases," and with these text-books still troubling my digestion, I produced a synopsis that seemed to satisfy Mr. Godal more than it did my secret judgment. For, from the very first I mistrusted those text-books. That synopsis is merely the nucleus of what follows. Expert advice assures me that in its original form it was a practicable scheme, and I am by no means sure that expert advice will extend the same toleration to my revised and expanded effort. But I have had two years and more to think over that first draft; I have watched film possibilities with a quickened interest; all sorts of things have happened on the business side; I am told there is ample financial backing now for any production I can invent, and when I ask if I may make my scenario as difficult and expensive as I like, I am told to go ahead. So here I go ahead.

I propose to describe the film very much as one would see it on the screen, and I shall even say something of the music that would have to be written to accompany it. In effect I am going to tell the reader about a film I have evoked in an imaginary cinema theatre, and having done so, I am going to leave it to my hopeful associates to turn it into a visible reality. But first I would like to discuss some of the distinctive problems of this film and how it has seemed best to solve them. And also, before getting down to the actual camera, I will deal briefly and more generally with the sort of film this is and the conditions it has to satisfy.

In the hasty and violent disputes and asseverations that constitute the bulk of literary, dramatic and cinema criticism, certain unavoidable classifications are continually in evidence. There is a pretension in one direction to be high and fine, in another to be easy and hearty, and in another to be broad and fruitful. The common nomenclature in these matters is insufficient; High-brow and Low-brow need to be supplemented by Broad-brow. The Broad-brow is as anxious not to be "arty" as the Low-brow and as terrified of the cheap and obvious as the High-brow. His rôle is neither to disdain the current thing nor accept it, but to learn by attempting the impossible and to be content with a partial success. A film which is to have for its subject the present drive towards World Peace is as likely to be abhorrent to the High-brow as to the Low. It has to give and sustain a view and a thesis; it has to reflect upon the political side of everyone; it has to show man making war, tortured and slain by war, threatened by war and perhaps and very uncertainly able to abolish war. The High-brow will call it a tract and the Low-brow a sermon, and they will blunder together towards the exit in a violent struggle to escape with these assertions intact. The High-brow has nothing to learn and the Low-brow will learn nothing; in effect they are the same thing. They are out of this attempt. After all, the High-brow is only the Low-brow plus pretentiousness. It is the same sort of brain stood up on end. The Broad-brow remains to struggle with his immense and exciting subject.

Now the "Peace of the World," when we come to think it over, is essentially a negative expression. In itself it means nothing except the absence of war. It is human life with war taken out of it. The substantial thing therefore that we have to deal with in this film is war, as an evil thing experienced, as an evil thing threatening to recur, as an evil thing conceivably made impossible. Peace, we repeat, is simply what life is and may become as this shadow lifts. Our subject, therefore, is life overcast, but with the possibility that it may cease to be overcast, and the development of the will and power to thrust back and dispel this cloud. So necessarily we have three main strands to supply the threads of interest in our film: first, the lovely and splendid possibilities of life, relieved of the restraints and destruction of war; next, the dark actualities that destroy life in warfare itself, and cripple and enslave it monstrously in the anticipation of war; and thirdly, the will to end war. This last is the heroic element. The story of the film must be the story of heroic service, of Hercules, if we are to carry the struggle to an imagined triumph; of Prometheus, if we are to go no further than a phase of revolt, initial defeat and the promise of a remoter victory. I have chosen for this experiment to take the simpler and more glorious path, because I believe that there can and will be an end of war. In this film the defeat of war by the will of man is to be shown in progress. Man's will here is to be cast as demi-god and not as Hamlet. The spectacle is to be this present age seen as the Age of War Drawing to an End, and the human beings in the foreground must embody the hopes, fears, effort and success of a struggle that approaches a triumphant close.

In the opening survey of the material that presents itself, various methods of treatment had to be considered. Should we embody the forces at work in individualities and make the personal drama of some pacificist person or group our thread and chief sustaining interest, or should we make a film entirely spectacular, in which the onset and avoidance of war alike would be treated as mass phenomena, with waving flags, crowded streets, cheering multitudes, skirmishes, battles, war incidents, the hunting down and shooting of a protesting pacificist, the desolation of a home by a telegram, the recoil of young heroes from warfare, peace discussions, protests, mutinies, cabinet councils, international conferences and so forth, making together a vast heterogeneous procession from excitement to tragedy, fatigue and reaction? The latter of these two ways of treatment would be very much on the structural lines of that great unshot film, the Dynasts; the former would bring us much nearer the normal film story. It would be a normal film story with a relatively greatly enhanced and deepened spectacular background. The wall of the room would have to dissolve and show the world threatened by air, sea and land, but it would close again to resume the personal experience. The entirely spectacular way would certainly be nearer the truth, for the end of war is only possible through the convergent activities of thousands of different movements, propagandas, efforts and struggles. But it would make our film vie in scope and confusedness with the spectacle of life itself.

Little films must come before big ones and in the end it was decided to take the first of our two alternatives, and concentrate upon an individual figure in the foreground to unify all that we had to convey. The material would be too various, limitless and incoherent, unless there was this resort to a human being or a group of interacting human beings, responding to it all and trying to apprehend it all, as a bond of continuity. Undramatic entirely plotless spectacular films have, it is true, been made already and have proved enormously effective; that magnificent production, Berlin, for example. Some day again the great war of 1914-18 may be drawn together into one tremendous impersonal vision; but both these subjects possess an established organic integrity. The audience knows already that the parts belong to one another. Our subject, on the other hand, is an exploration and a synthesis that has to be established. What we have to present has not been established. To establish it and secure conviction in the audience, the manifest expedient is to show conviction arising in a sympathetic mind. A hero has to be invented to embody the will to abolish war in the audience, a hero who will concentrate the problem of what has to be done into a personal and understandable problem.

A hero here means an immense economy in statement. Art broadly conceived may be regarded as an attempt to simplify statement quite parallel to the attempt of science to do the same thing. But while science makes an intellectual synthesis and simplification, art's synthesis and simplification are æsthetic. Intellectual processes are generalized processes common to all; but æsthetic processes involve someone who feels, and the method of art therefore has been always towards personification and the appeal of art towards sympathy. But a casually selected individual will not serve for our personification here. He must be exceptionally representative. The forces making for war must converge upon him; he must be in a position to make effective decisions for or against war. The spectacle of war-possibilities can then be unfolded in relation to his thoughts and acts. New war devices can be brought to him, he can listen to war schemes and have peculiar opportunity to see war approaching and understand what it will be like; his mind must translate these intimations into terms of human apprehension, judgment and endeavour. He will think out and carry out a course of action which must be a typical course of action. So he can be at once himself, and crystallize that intelligent will against war which is diffused so widely throughout contemporary humanity.

In spite of the present world-wide trend towards republican forms, it is structurally very convenient that this hero should be a monarch. Manifestly he has to be a very idealized monarch, a kingly concentration of the kingly will in all of us rather than a normal king. He will not be the sort of king who takes refuge behind a dictator or accepts the position of a petted symbol; he will think and act as a responsible ruler. This means that he will have escaped the normal training of a modern royalty in tact and apt graciousness, and that he takes kingship in naive good faith. He is, in fact, to be the common intelligent man as king. He is to be the king in you and me.

The best way to contrive that seemed to be to make him the son of a prince of some royal house who has gone into exile in America—as princes have done—and to make the Great War and some sudden catastrophe kill off the intervening heirs and clear his way to a Crown. This is a fairly obvious way to our end. In America his father, we assume, has dropped his titles, and he himself, unencumbered by any court tutoring, has read and assimilated the most modern and progressive ideas. Then if the kingdom to which he is suddenly projected is one of those crucial minor states where Europe, Asia and American enterprise meet and the great economic interests and national policies of the world jostle against each other, we shall have brought to a focus all the main factors in our discussion in a very convenient form. The jostling, we may suppose, is drawing to a crisis at his accession.

What will this King Everyman, who is really a concentration of hundreds of committees, thousands of leaders and millions of mute followers, do about it? Just so far as he is man enough and king enough the problems of the Peace of the World and the problems of his personal adventure become one.

Manifestly this highly generalized man, our hero, must be a good-looking, able-bodied, thoughtful person, not so much the average man as the quintessential man. His individuality must lie in his ready understanding and his abnormal steadfastness of will. Impossible here to give him "character" as it is commonly understood, oddity or idiosyncrasy, wooden-leg, wig, glass eye or inferiority complex. These things belong to another type of story altogether, very moving and appealing, but far away from this one, the story of individual limitation and its comedy and tragedy. Our hero is to be a man without frustrations. He is to be yourself and myself as we would like to be, simplified, clear in his mind, unencumbered and going directly to his objective.